Chapter 21: Ideologies and Upheavals

The Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars

The eventual eruption of revolutionary political forces was by no means predictable as the Napoleonic era ended.
Other international questions remained unresolved.
Even before Napoleon’s final defeat, the allies had agreed to meet to fashion a general peace accord in 1814 at the Congress of Vienna, where they faced a great challenge: how could they construct a lasting settlement that would not sow the seeds of another war?

The European Balance of Power

The allied powers were concerned first and foremost with the defeated enemy, France.
Agreeing to the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, the allies offered France lenient terms after Napoleon’s abdication.
Representatives of the Quadruple Alliance (plus a representative of the restored Bourbon monarch of France) fashioned the peace at the Congress of Vienna from September 1814 to June 1815, with minor assistance from a host of delegates from the smaller European states.
Self-interest and traditional ideas about the balance of power motivated allied moderation toward France.
The Great Powers— Austria, Britain, Prussia, Russia, and France— used the balance of power to settle their own dangerous disputes at the Congress of Vienna.
Unfortunately for France, Napoleon suddenly escaped from his “comic kingdom” on the island of Elba and reignited his wars of expansion for a brief time.
France lost only a little territory, had to pay an indemnity of 700 million francs, and had to support a large army of occupation for five years.
This agreement marked the beginning of the European “Congress System,” which lasted long into the nineteenth century and settled many international crises peacefully, through international conferences or “congresses” and balance-of-power diplomacy.

Metternich and Conservatism

The political ideals of conservatism, often associated with Austrian foreign minister Prince Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859), dominated Great Power discussions at the Congress of Vienna.
Born into the middle ranks of the landed nobility of the Rhineland, Metternich was an internationally oriented aristocrat who made a brilliant diplomatic career.
Metternich firmly believed that liberalism, as embodied in revolutionary America and France, bore the responsibility for the untold bloodshed and suffering caused by twenty-five years of war.
Metternich defended his class and its rights and privileges with a clear conscience.
The threat of liberalism appeared doubly dangerous to Metternich because it generally went with aspirations for national independence.
After centuries of war, royal intermarriage, and territorial expansion, the vast Austrian Empire of the Habsburgs included many peoples within its borders.
The multiethnic state Metternich served had strengths and weaknesses.
A large population and vast territories gave the empire economic and military clout, but its potentially dissatisfied nationalities undermined political unity.
On Austria’s borders, Russia and, to a lesser extent, the Ottoman Empire supported and echoed Metternich’s efforts to hold back liberalism and nationalism.

Repressing the Revolutionary Spirit

Conservative political ideologies had important practical consequences. Under Metternich’s leadership, Austria, Prussia, and Russia embarked on a decadeslong crusade against the liberties and civil rights associated with the French and American Revolutions.
The first step was the formation in September 1815 of the Holy Alliance by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. First proposed by Russia’s Alexander I, the alliance worked to repress reformist and revolutionary movements and stifle desires for national independence across Europe.
The conservative restoration first brought its collective power to bear on southern Europe. In 1820 revolutionaries successfully forced the monarchs of Spain and the southern Italian Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to establish constitutional monarchies, with press freedoms, universal male suffrage, and other liberal reforms.
The conservative policies of Metternich and the Holy Alliance crushed reform not only in Austria and the Italian peninsula but also in the entire German Confederation, which the peace settlement of Vienna had called into being.
When liberal reformers and university students began to protest for the national unification of the German states, the Austrian and Prussian leadership used the diet to issue and enforce the infamous Karlsbad Decrees in 1819.
The forces of reaction squelched reform in Russia as well.
In St. Petersburg in December 1825, a group of about three thousand army officers inspired by liberal ideals staged a protest against the new tsar, Nicholas I.

Limits to Conservative Power and Revolution in South America

Metternich liked to call himself “the chief Minister of Police in Europe,” and in the following years, the members of the Holy Alliance continued to battle against liberal political change.
The most dramatic challenge to conservative power occurred not in Europe, but overseas in South America.
In the 1820s South American elites rose up and broke away from the Spanish crown and established a number of new republics based at first on liberal, Enlightenment ideals.
By the late 1700s the Creoles had begun to question Spanish policy and even the necessity of further colonial rule.
The South American revolutions thus began from below, with spontaneous uprisings by subordinated peoples of color.
Dreams of South American federation and unity proved difficult to implement.
By 1830 the large northern state established by Bolívar had fractured, and by 1840 the borders of the new nations looked much like the map of Latin America today.
The South American revolutions had failed to establish lasting constitutional republics, but they did demonstrate the revolutionary potential of liberal ideals and the limits on conservative control.

The Spread of Radical Ideas

Liberalism and the Middle Class

The principal ideas of liberalism— liberty and equality— were by no means defeated in 1815.
First realized successfully in the American Revolution and then achieved in part in the French Revolution, liberalism demanded representative government as opposed to autocratic monarchy, and equality before the law as opposed to legally separate classes.
Although conservatives still saw liberalism as a profound threat, it had gained a group of powerful adherents: the new upper classes made wealthy through growing industrialization and global commerce.
Liberal economic principles, the doctrine of laissez faire, called for free trade (including relaxation of import/export duties), unrestricted private enterprise, and no government interference in the economy.
Adam Smith posited the idea of free-market capitalism in 1776 in opposition to mercantilism and its attempt to regulate trade.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal political ideals became closely associated with narrow class interests.
Starting in the 1820s in Britain, business elites enthusiastically embraced laissez-faire policies because they proved immensely profitable, and used liberal ideas to defend their right to do as they wished in their factories.
As liberalism became increasingly identified with upper-class business interests, some opponents of conservatism felt that liberalism did not go nearly far enough.
Republicans were more radical than the liberals, and they were more willing than most liberals to endorse violent upheaval to achieve goals.
As a result, liberals and radical republicans could join forces against conservatives only up to a point

The Growing Appeal of Nationalism

Nationalism— an idea destined to have an enormous influence in the modern world— was another radical idea that gained popularity in the years after 1815.
In the early nineteenth century such national unity was more a dream than a reality as far as most ethnic groups or nationalities were concerned.
In multiethnic states, however, nationalism also promoted disintegration.
Recognizing the power of the “national idea,” European nationalists— generally educated, middle-class liberals and intellectuals— sought to turn the cultural unity that they desired into political reality.
This political goal made nationalism explosive, particularly in central and eastern Europe, where different peoples overlapped and intermingled.
In recent years scholars have tried to understand how the nationalist vision, often fitting so poorly with existing conditions and promising so much upheaval, was so successful in the long run.
Many scholars also argue that nations are recent creations, the product of a new, self-conscious nationalist ideology.
Between 1815 and 1850 most people who believed in nationalism also believed in either liberalism or radical republicanism.
Despite some confidence that a world system based on independent nations would promote global harmony, early nationalists eagerly emphasized the differences among peoples and developed a strong sense of “us” versus “them.”
As Europe entered an age of increased global interaction, these two underlying ideas would lead to aggression and conflict, as powerful nation-states backed by patriotic citizens competed with each other on the international stage.

The Foundations of Modern Socialism

More radical than liberalism or nationalism was socialism.
Early socialist thinkers were a diverse group with wide-ranging ideas.
Early socialists felt an intense desire to help the poor, and they preached that the rich and the poor should be more nearly equal economically.
One influential group of early socialist advocates became known as the “utopian socialists” because their grand schemes for social improvement ultimately proved unworkable.
The Frenchmen Count Henri de Saint-Simon(1760– 1825) and Charles Fourier(1772– 1837) and the British industrialist Robert Owen all founded movements intended to establish model communities that would usher in a new age of happiness and equality.
Saint-Simon also stressed in highly moralistic terms that every social institution ought to have as its main goal improved conditions for the poor.
After 1830 the utopian critique of capitalism became sharper.
Charles Fourier envisaged a socialist utopia of mathematically precise, self-sufficient communities called “phalanxes,” each made up of 1,620 people.
Some socialist thinkers embraced the even more radical ideas of anarchism.
In his 1840 pamphlet What Is Property? Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), a self-educated printer, famously argued that “property is theft!”
Other early socialists, like Louis Blanc (1811–1882), a sharp-eyed, intelligent journalist, focused on more practical reforms.
In his Organization of Work (1839), he urged workers to agitate for universal voting rights and to take control of the state peacefully.
As industrialization advanced in European cities, working people began to embrace the socialist message.
This happened first in France, where workers cherished the memory of the radical phase of the French Revolution and became violently opposed to laissez-faire laws that denied their right to organize in guilds and unions.

The Birth of Marxist Socialism

In the 1840s France was the center of socialism, but in the following decades the German intellectual Karl Marx (1818–1883) would weave the diffuse strands of socialist thought into a distinctly modern ideology.
Marxist socialism— or Marxism— would have a lasting impact on political thought and practice.
The son of a Jewish lawyer who had converted to Lutheranism, the young Marx was a brilliant student.
After the revolutions of 1848, Marx settled in London, where he spent the rest of his life as an advocate of working-class revolution.
Capital, his magnum opus, appeared in 1867.
Marx was a dedicated scholar, and his work united sociology, economics, philosophy, and history in an impressive synthesis.
Bringing these ideas together, Marx argued that class struggle over economic wealth was the great engine of human history.
In his view, one class had always exploited the other, and with the advent of modern industry, society was split more clearly than ever before: between the upper class— the bourgeoisie— and the working class— the proletariat.
Fascinated by the rapid expansion of modern capitalism, Marx based his revolutionary program on an insightful yet critical analysis of economic history.
Capitalism for Marx was immensely productive but highly exploitative.
When Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto on the eve of the revolutions of 1848, their opening claim that “a spectre is haunting Europe— the spectre of Communism” was highly exaggerated.

The Romantic Movement

The Tenets of Romanticism

Like other cultural movements, romanticism was characterized by intellectual diversity.
Nonetheless, common parameters stand out.
Artists inspired by romanticism repudiated the emphasis on reason associated with well-known Enlightenment philosophes like Voltaire or Montesquieu.
Where Enlightenment thinkers applied the scientific method to social issues and cast rosy predictions for future progress, romantics valued intuition and nostalgia for the past.
Nowhere was the break with Enlightenment classicism more apparent than in romanticism’s general conception of nature.
The study of history became a romantic obsession. History held the key to a universe now perceived to be organic and dynamic, not mechanical and static, as Enlightenment thinkers had believed.
Romanticism was a lifestyle as well as an intellectual movement.
Many early-nineteenth-century romantics lived lives of tremendous emotional intensity.
Great individualists, the romantics believed that the full development of one’s unique human potential was the supreme purpose in life.

Literature

Romanticism found its distinctive voice in poetry, as the Enlightenment had in prose.
A towering leader of English romanticism, William Wordsworth was deeply influenced by Rousseau and the spirit of the early French Revolution.
In France under Napoleon, classicism remained strong and at first inhibited the growth of romanticism. An early French champion of the new movement, Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) urged the French to throw away their worn-out classical models.
Between 1820 and 1850, the romantic impulse broke through in the poetry and prose of Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and George Sand (pseudonym of the woman writer Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dudevant).
Of these, Victor Hugo (1802–1885) became the most well known.
Son of a Napoleonic general, Hugo achieved an amazing range of rhythm, language, and image in his lyric poetry.
In central and eastern Europe, literary romanticism and early nationalism often reinforced one another.
Well-educated romantics championed their own people’s histories, cultures, and unique greatness.

Art and Music

Romantic concerns with nature, history, and the imagination extended well beyond literature into the realms of art and music.
France’s Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), one of romanticism’s greatest artists, painted dramatic, colorful scenes that stirred the emotions.
The famous German painter Casper David Friedrich (1774–1840) preferred somber landscapes of ruined churches or remote arctic shipwrecks, which captured the divine presence in natural forces.
In England the romantic painters Joseph M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837) were fascinated by nature, but their interpretations of it contrasted sharply, aptly symbolizing the tremendous emotional range of the romantic movement
Musicians and composers likewise explored the romantic sensibility.
Abandoning well-defined structures, the great romantic composers used a wide range of forms to create a thousand musical landscapes and evoke a host of powerful emotions.
This range and intensity gave music and musicians much greater prestige than in the past.
Music no longer simply complemented a church service or helped a nobleman digest his dinner.
The first great romantic composer is also the most famous today. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) used contrasting themes and tones to produce dramatic conflict and inspiring resolutions.
Beethoven continued to pour out immortal music, although his last years were silent, spent in total deafness.

Reforms and Revolutions Before 1848

National Liberation in Greece

Though conservative statesmen had maintained the autocratic status quo despite revolts in Spain and the Two Sicilies, a national revolution succeeded in Greece in the 1820s.
Since the fifteenth century the Greeks had lived under the domination of the Ottoman Turks.
At first, the Great Powers, particularly Metternich, opposed the revolution and refused to back Ypsilanti, primarily because they sought a stable Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russian interests in southeast Europe.
The Greeks, though often quarreling among themselves, battled the Ottomans while hoping for the support of European governments.
Despite this imposed regime, which left the Greek people restive, they had won their independence in a heroic war of liberation against a foreign empire.

Liberal Reform in Great Britain

Pressure from below also reshaped politics in Great Britain, but through a process of gradual reform rather than revolution.
Eighteenth-century Britain had been remarkably stable.
By the 1780s there was growing interest in some kind of political reform, and organized union activity began to emerge in force during the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1815 open conflict between the ruling class and laborers emerged when the aristocracy rammed far-reaching changes in the Corn Laws through Parliament.
The change in the Corn Laws, coming as it did at a time of widespread unemployment and postwar economic distress, triggered protests and demonstrations by urban laborers, who enjoyed the support of radical intellectuals.
Nicknamed the Battle of Peterloo, in scornful reference to the British victory at Waterloo, this incident demonstrated the government’s determination to repress dissenters.
Strengthened by ongoing industrial development, the new manufacturing and commercial groups insisted on a place for their new wealth alongside the landed wealth of the aristocracy in the framework of political power and social prestige.
The Whig Party, though led like the Tories by great aristocrats, had by tradition been more responsive to middle-class commercial and manufacturing interests.
In 1830 a Whig ministry introduced “an act to amend the representation of the people of England and Wales.”
After a series of setbacks, the Whigs’ Reform Bill of 1832 was propelled into law by a mighty surge of popular support.
Significantly, the bill moved British politics in a democratic direction and allowed the House of Commons to emerge as the all-important legislative body, at the expense of the aristocrat-dominated House of Lords.
The “People’s Charter” of 1838 and the Chartist movement it inspired pressed British elites for yet more radical reform
While calling for universal male suffrage, many working-class people joined with middle-class manufacturers in the Anti–Corn Law League, founded in Manchester in 1839.
The following year, the Tories passed a bill designed to help the working classes, but in a different way.
The Ten Hours Act of 1847 limited the workday for women and young people in factories to ten hours.
The working classes could make temporary alliances with either competitor to better their own conditions.

Ireland and the Great Famine

The people of Ireland did not benefit from the political competition in Britain.
In the mid-1800s Ireland was an agricultural nation, and the great majority of the rural population (outside of the northern counties of Ulster, which were partly Presbyterian) were Irish Catholics.
Trapped in an exploitative tenant system driven by a pernicious combination of religion and class, Irish peasants lived in abominable conditions.
Despite the terrible conditions, population growth sped upward, part of Europe’s general growth trend begun in the early eighteenth century.
A couple could manage rural poverty better than someone living alone, and children meant extra hands in the fields.
As population and potato dependency grew, however, conditions became more precarious.
From 1820 onward, deficiencies and diseases in the potato crop occurred with disturbing frequency.
Then in 1845 and 1846, and again in 1848 and 1851, the potato crop failed in Ireland.
Blight attacked the young plants, and leaves and tubers rotted.
Unmitigated disaster— the Great Famine— followed, as already impoverished peasants experienced widespread sickness and starvation.
The British government, committed to rigid freetrade ideology, reacted slowly. Relief efforts were tragically inadequate.
The Great Famine shattered the pattern of Irish population growth
The Great Famine intensified anti-British feeling and promoted Irish nationalism, for the bitter memory of starvation, exile, and British inaction burned deeply into the popular consciousness.

The Revolution of 1830 in France

The Constitutional Charter granted by Louis XVIII in the Bourbon restoration of 1814 was basically a liberal constitution.
Louis XVIII’s charter was liberal but hardly democratic.
Only about 100,000 of the wealthiest males out of a total population of 30 million had the right to vote for the deputies who, with the king and his ministers, made the laws of the nation.
Louis’s conservative successor, Charles X (r. 1824– 1830), a true reactionary, wanted to re-establish the old order in France.
In June 1830 a French force of thirty-seven thousand crossed the Mediterranean, landed to the west of Algiers, and took the capital city in three short weeks.
Emboldened by the initial good news from Algeria, Charles repudiated the Constitutional Charter in an attempted coup in July 1830.
Events in Paris reverberated across Europe. In the Netherlands, Belgian Catholics revolted against the Dutch king and established the independent kingdom of Belgium.
Despite the abdication of Charles X, in France the political situation remained fundamentally unchanged.
The new king, Louis Philippe (r. 1830–1848), did accept the Constitutional Charter of 1814 and adopted the red, white, and blue flag of the French Revolution.

The Revolutions of 1848

A Democratic Republic in France

By the late 1840s revolution in Europe was almost universally expected, but it took events in Paris— once again— to turn expectations into realities.
The government’s failures united a diverse group of opponents against the king.
Bourgeois merchants, opposition deputies, and liberal intellectuals shared a sense of outrage with middle-class shopkeepers, skilled artisans, and unskilled working people.
The revolutionaries immediately set about drafting a democratic, republican constitution for France’s Second Republic.
Yet there were profound differences within the revolutionary coalition.
On the one hand, the moderate liberal republicans of the middle class viewed universal male suffrage as the ultimate concession to dangerous popular forces, and they strongly opposed any further radical social measures.
Worsening depression and rising unemployment brought these conflicting goals to the fore in 1848.
The moderate republicans, willing to provide only temporary relief, wanted no such thing.
The resulting compromise set up national workshops— soon to become little more than a vast program of pick-and-shovel public works— and established a special commission under Blanc to “study the question.”
While the Paris workshops grew, the French people went to the election polls in late April.
One of the moderate republicans was the author of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), who had predicted the overthrow of Louis Philippe’s government.
This clash of ideologies— of liberal moderation and radical socialism— became a clash of classes and arms after the elections.
A spontaneous and violent uprising followed.
Frustrated in their thwarted attempt to create a socialist society, masses of desperate people were now losing even their life-sustaining relief.
The revolution in France thus ended in spectacular failure.
The February coalition of the middle and working classes had in four short months become locked in mortal combat.
This allowed Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, to win a landslide victory in the election of December 1848.

Revolution and Reaction in the Austrian Empire

The revolution in the Austrian Empire began in Hungary in March 1848, when nationalistic Hungarians demanded national autonomy, full civil liberties, and universal suffrage.
Yet the coalition of revolutionaries lacked stability.
When the monarchy abolished serfdom, with its degrading forced labor and feudal services, the newly free peasants lost interest in the political and social questions agitating the cities.
Conflicting national aspirations further weakened and ultimately destroyed the revolutionary coalition.
Finally, the conservative aristocratic forces rallied under the leadership of the archduchess Sophia, a Bavarian princess married to the emperor’s brother.
The first conservative breakthrough came when the army bombarded Prague and savagely crushed a working-class revolt there on June 17.
When Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916) was crowned emperor of Austria immediately after his eighteenth birthday in December 1848, only Hungary had yet to be brought under control.
Another determined conservative, Nicholas I of Russia (r. 1825–1855), obligingly lent his iron hand.
On June 6, 1849, 130,000 Russian troops poured into Hungary and subdued the country after bitter fighting.
For a number of years, the Habsburgs ruled Hungary as a conquered territory.

Prussia, the German Confederation, and the Frankfurt National Parliament

After Austria, Prussia was the largest and most influential kingdom in the German Confederation.
Since the Napoleonic Wars, liberal German reformers had sought to transform absolutist Prussia into a constitutional monarchy, hoping it would then lead the thirty-eight states of the German Confederation into a unified nation-state.
When artisans and factory workers rioted in Berlin, the capital of Prussia, and joined temporarily with the middle-class liberals in the struggle against the monarchy, the autocratic yet compassionate Prussian king, Frederick William IV (r. 1840–1861), vacillated and then caved in.
But urban workers wanted much more, and the Prussian aristocracy wanted much less than the moderate constitutional liberalism the king conceded.
At the same time, elections were held across the German Confederation for a national parliament, which convened to write a federal constitution that would lead to national unification.
In October 1848 the Frankfurt parliament turned to the question of national unification and borders.
At first, the deputies proposed unification around a Greater Germany that would include the German-speaking lands of the Austrian Empire in a national state— but not non-German territories in Italy and central Europe.
Despite Austrian intransigence, in March 1849 the national parliament finally completed its draft of a liberal constitution and elected Frederick William of Prussia emperor of a “lesser” German national state (minus Austria).
When Frederick William, who really wanted to be emperor but only on his own authoritarian terms, tried to get the small monarchies of Germany to elect him emperor, Austria balked.
Attempts to unite the Germans— first in a liberal national state and then in a conservative Prussian empire— had failed completely.