Chapter 21
In This Chapter
• The Congress of Vienna
• The Concerts of Europe
• Nationalism and Liberalism
• The revolutions of 1830 and 1848
• The other movements of the nineteenth century
During the nineteenth century, two important ideologies, nationalism and liberalism, emerged to have a significant effect on Europe and the world. The Congress of Vienna and the Concerts of Europe were a conservative response to these ideas, which appeared to undermine European stability and the old conservative order. The conservative order ended in political infighting, and by the late nineteenth century, democracy influenced by nationalism and liberalism gained ground among a majority of the nations of Europe. In addition, other ideologies like Romanticism, realism, modernism,Marxism, and socialism reflected a shift in Western thought.
The Congress of Vienna
After the fall of Napoleon, most of the European nations wanted to restore things back to the old order. Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia met at the Congress of Vienna in September 1814, led by the Austrian foreign minister Prince Klemons von Metternich.
With Metternich’s guidance and direction, the Congress made several decisions. Monarchs were to be restored based on dynastic legitimacy. Additionally, nations, states, and territories were to be rearranged to create a balance of power among the European nations. Little attention was given to the different nationalities and ethnic groups within these territories. In other words, the emerging nationalist movement wasn’t considered at the Congress of Vienna.
The Congress of Vienna was a victory for conservatives against the ideas and forces of the French Revolution. To maintain this conservative balance in Europe, the nations of Europe held periodic meetings called the Concerts of Europe to discuss issues and problems. The Concerts also advocated military intervention to maintain the conservativeorder and put out the flames of revolution in any European nation. Of the nations of the Concert, Great Britain refused to accept this principle, believing that internal affairs of nations were best left alone. Regardless, the Concerts of Europe used military force to crush revolutions in Spain and Italy.
definition
Conservative designates policies that support tradition and stability. During the early nineteenth century, conservatives believed in obedience to political authority and organized religion. Generally, conservatives were unfriendly toward revolution, mostly because the demands of people who wanted individual rights and representative governmentswere a threat to conservatives’ property and influence.
Liberalism and Nationalism
Despite the Concerts of Europe’s efforts, the ideas of Enlightenment and revolution spread throughout the continent. Two intellectual movements that swept Europe especially caused the Concerts problems.
Liberalism was a philosophical movement based on the ideas of the Enlightenment asserting several loosely assembled tenets. First, people were to be as free as possible from government restraint. Government was to be used only to protect the civil libertiesof the people, especially with religious tolerance and the separation of church and state. Liberalism also put an emphasis on the use of representative assemblies in which voting and office should be limited to men of property and the rule of constitutions.
Nationalism was also based on the ideas of the Enlightenment and spread indirectly with the conquests of Napoleon. Most nationalists believed that a nation should be made of people who had a common language, traditions, religions, and customs, and each nationality should have its own government. As a result of this thinkingfor example, Germans wanted the rule of a single government and so did the Hungarians. Of course, conservatives of the Concerts of Europe wanted to suppress this type of thinking while followers of the tenets of liberalism supported it.
Revolution Reloaded
So the Concerts of Europe had their collective hands full. The movements of liberalismand nationalism fueled the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
The Revolutions of 1830 started with French liberals. They forcibly overthrew the French king, Charles X, who ruled like the kings of old, not realizing that times had changed. The liberals replaced the king with Louis-Philippe, the cousin of Charles X, and created a constitutional monarchy. During the same year, the Belgians instituted a nationalist rebellion against Dutch rule and became an independent nation. But rebellion and revolution did not work out well for everyone. Revolutions in Poland and Italy were crushed by the Russians and the Austrians, who remained loyal to the conservative perspective.
Just when it appeared that the fires of revolution had been put out, revolutionary movements broke out in France, Germany, and Austria in 1848. In France the seeds of revolution started with the economic problems of 1846. The lower middle class and working class were suffering. The landless middle class also wanted a right to vote, which the king refused. So in 1848, the monarchy was overthrown and a group of republicans created a provisional government, calling for an election based on universal male suffrage to create a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitutionfor France. By November 4, 1848, a new constitution was written that built the Second Republic. This new government was the most democratic form of governmentthat France had seen. It consisted of a single legislature and a president who was elected every four years. The first elections were held in December 1848, and Louis-Napoleon,the nephew of Napoleon, won by a huge margin.
In Germany, the cries for political change were just as loud as in France. The many different German princes and rulers responded with the promise of constitutions, free press, and jury trials. The German people also wanted the unification of Germany as a nation. As a result, a German parliament called the Frankfurt Assembly met in 1848 to prepare a constitution for a united Germany. But the political infighting was too much for the drafting process and unification was not achieved, to the disappointmentof the German people.
Austria, a truly multinational nation made of Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Poles, Croats, Serbians, and Italians also had a very hard time confining nationalistic tendencies and the problems associated with it. In March 1848, nationalist demonstrations took place in all of the major cities across Austria. Each nationality demanded self-rule. Quickly, the demonstrations got out of hand and revolutionary forces took control of Vienna, the capital, and demanded a liberal constitution. In response, the Austrian government gave Hungary its own legislature.Now with renewed Hungarian support, the Austrian government was able to crush the Czech and Viennese rebels. Additionally in 1849, Austria gained control of more territory including the Italian states of Lombardy and Venetia. So nationalism in Austria had suffered a setback.
Notable Quotable
"There will be no wars on questions of partition, domination,nationality and influence. No more weak and strong, oppressed and oppressors. Every country, free to enjoy its liberties and to live its own life, will hastento enjoy the life and liberty of all.”
—Etienne Garnier-Pagès, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848
The End of the Concert
After the Revolutions of 1848, the Concerts of Europe began to unravel. Their end created the right environment for the unification movements of Italy and Germany.
The Crimean War
The beginning of the end of the Concert started with the Crimean War. This war began as a conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over political control in the Balkan Peninsula. In 1853, Russia invaded the kingdoms of Moldavia and Walachia. In response, the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain, and France declared war on Russia for threatening the balance of power of Europe.
The war was poorly planned and fought by all of the nations. The technology of weapons had improved with the Industrial Revolution, but the strategies had not. At the end of the conflict, Russia lost and with the Treaty of Paris of 1856, Moldavia and Walachia were placed under the protective custody of the great European powers. (Russia was excluded from the club!)
With the end of the war came the end of the Concerts of Europe. The European nations who had tried to maintain a balance of power now reverted back to political games. Austria and Russia, which had previously worked together, became enemies because of their conflicts of interest in the Balkans (and because Austria refused to support Russia during the war). Russia, sulking after the loss of the war, withdrew from European political affairs. France and Great Britain also pulled back from European politics. With Austria politically weak and having no allies, the process of Italian and German reunification began.
Italian Unification
At first the Italian unification movement started with the Italian people. Eventually understanding the enormous task before them, the people looked to the north Italian state of Piedmont and King Victor Emmanuel II to provide leadership. Emmanuel II named Camillo di Cavour, a very able politician, prime minister and gave him the task of Italian unification. Cavour, being politically savvy, made a political alliance with France and then provoked the weak Austrians to invade Piedmont in 1859. Of course, the Cavour’s new French allies jumped at a chance to humble Austria. They invaded northern Italy and convinced other northern Italian states to overthrow their governments and unite with Piedmont before the Austrians were finally defeated.
What in the World
During the years of Italian unification, many Italians, unsure of political instability, immigrated to America. During a 50-year period, more than 5 million Italians came to America.
In southern Italy, a similar unification movement occurred. The Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi raised an army of volunteers called Red Shirts to fight for unification. The Red Shirts took over Sicily and Naples in 1860. Afterward, Garibaldi turned over the territories to the state of Piedmont. On March 17, 1861, the new kingdom of Italy was proclaimed by King Victor Emmanuel II. Later, Italian unification advanced with the acquisition of Venetia in 1866 during the Austro-Prussian War and in 1870 when the French withdrewfrom the Papal States during the Franco-Prussian War. On September 20, 1870, the unification of Italy was complete, with Rome as its capital.
German Unification
Like in Italy, the German unification movement really began in earnest in the mid-nineteenthcentury. The German people looked to the militaristic state of Prussia for leadership. The Prussian King William I appointed Otto von Bismarck as prime minister.Bismarck, far from being idealistic, used realpolitik, or the politics of reality, to guide his actions. (For example, from 1862 to 1866 he governed Prussia without the approval of Parliament but with the approval of the people!) Bismarck did well collectingtaxes and creating a better trained and equipped army. He also pursued an active and militaristic foreign policy, which helped to unite Germany.
In 1866, Austria and Prussia came to blows in the Austro-Prussian War. The well-equippedPrussian army won the war easily, with the pay-off that the German states north of the Main River were organized into the North German Confederation, one step closer to unification. Seeing war as a great gateway to unification,Bismarck pushed France into declaring war on Prussia on July 15, 1870, over the succession of the Spanish throne. In support, the southern German states joined Prussia to fight France. On September 2, 1870, after a few quick strikes, the Prussian and German armies captured Napoleon III and the entire French army at Paris.
What in the World
Bismarck used German-caused wars to unify Germany, but, ironically, another German-causedwar, World War II, divided the German nation. Germany wasn’t united again until 1990.
The dividends of the Franco-Prussian War were even better than those of the Austro-Prussian War. Now, the German states were unified under one government— the Second German empire. Additionally, France had to pay reparations to the tune of 5 billion francs and give up the territory of Alsace and Lorraine to the new unifiedGermany. And finally on January 18, 1871, William I of Prussia was proclaimed Kaiser. Germany was now the most powerful industrial and military power on continentalEurope.
Liberalism and Nationalism in Other Nations
The revolutions and unification movements inspired by the ideas of liberalism and nationalism affected the other nations of the West as well.
The Victorian Age in Great Britain
In Great Britain, the rise of the industrial middle class increased the participation of male voters. In order to keep up, politicians pursued social and political reforms to keep this group happy and maintain stability, aided by the economic growth from the Industrial Revolution.
So nationalism manifested itself with the British in a safer form—national pride. The focal point of that national pride was Queen Victoria, who sat on the throne from 1837 to 1901, the longest ruling British monarch. With the help of the queen, the British developed a sense of duty and moral responsibility toward their nation. This period in British history was known as the Victorian Age.
The Return of a Napoleon in France
In France, nationalism resulted in an authoritarian government. In the mid-nineteenth century, Louis-Napoleon entreated the French people to help him restore the glories of the empire. In response, an election was held in which 97 percent of the population voted to restore the empire and have Louis-Napoleon as emperor. On December 2, 1852, Napoleon III was crowned emperor of France.
Although nationalistic in origin, the Second empire of France did not follow the ideas of liberalism. It was extremely authoritarian, with Napoleon having complete control over military, civil, and police forces. In addition, despite the appearances presented by the representative assembly called the Legislative Corps, Napoleon was the only one who introduced legislation and declared war. He also curtailed civil liberties and placed heavy-handed controls on the French government.
Despite Napoleon III’s despotic rule, his first five years went well. Government-sponsoredpublic works projects rebuilt Paris and put the unemployed French back to work. But the surge was only temporary; economic hardships eventually returned, and so did unrest among the people and the legislative assembly. Just when things appeared to be on the verge of revolution, the Franco-Prussian War ended Napoleon III’s rule and the Second empire in 1870.
Austria
Nationalism also forced changes in the Austrian Empire. After the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Austria began to make concessions to different ethnic groups within the empire, the largest being the Compromise of 1867, which created a dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary. Each state had its own constitution, legislature, government bureaucracy, and capital. They did, however, share a common army, foreign policy, finances, and a single monarch, Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary.
Russia and the End of Serfdom
Russia was less influenced by nationalism and more influenced by liberalism. Generally considered a backward nation because of its continued reliance on the institution of serfdom, Czar Alexander II emancipated the serfs in 1861. Peasants were allowed to own property and marry as they chose. The Russian government also provided land to the peasants by buying it from their former landlords.
These liberalized policies were not initially successful. Peasants usually received the poorest lands from the landlords, and starvation and disease increased dramatically. As a consequence, a radical group assassinated Alexander II in 1881. The heir to the throne, Alexander III, subsequently turned against the liberal policies of reform and returned to old repressive ways.
The American Civil War
The United States was experiencing nationalist turmoil during this period as well. During the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865, the northern and southern states fought over the issues of slavery and state rule versus federal rule. Seven southernstates seceded from the Union in 1861 in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, believing he represented a threat to states’ rights, the institutionof slavery, and their way of life in general. Eventually 11 states created the Confederate States of America.
Notable Quotable
"I claim not to have controlledevents, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
—Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln sent federal armies into the Confederates states, ostensibly to reclaim federal facilities seized by the Confederates, but also to force the issue of the union of the United States. The Confederates, although outgunned and outmanned, successfully resisted through superior generalship, led by General Robert E. Lee, and the war stretched into a long and bloody four-year struggle. As the war progressed, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in the South. Eventually, Confederate forces were forced to surrenderon April 9, 1865. The federal government in the United States reestablished its authority, and the enslaved African American population gained its freedom.
Oh Canada!
Like many of the other Western nations, the nation of Canada had its origins associatedwith nationalism and liberalism. The British received the territory of Canada from the French in the Treaty of Paris at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. By 1840, it had become known as the United Provinces of Canada made up of Upper Canada, or Ontario, and Lower Canada, or Quebec.
Led by John MacDonald, the Conservative Party in Canada pushed Great Britain for independence. They received that independence in 1867 with the British North American Act, which established a Canadian nation, the Dominion of Canada. The nation drafted its own constitution based on the parliamentary system. John MacDonald was elected the dominion’s first prime minister. Although the Canadians had self rule on the domestic front, foreign affairs still remained in British hands. This did not bother the Canadians much, and to this day they extend that courtesy to Britain.
Other “Isms” of the Nineteenth Century
A whole host of other “isms” were very influential during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. They include romanticism, secularism, realism, anti-Semitism,Zionism, and modernism.
Romantics and Realists
The movement called Romanticism emerged in Europe during the end of the eighteenthcentury as a reaction against what some thought was the overuse of reason in the Enlightenment. It emphasized feelings, emotion, and imagination, valuing individualismor the uniqueness of the person. Within the movement, there was also a strong interest in the medieval past, which led to the revival of Gothic styles called neo-Gothic.
In literature, these sentiments were reflected in the stories and poems of Walter Scott, Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley, and William Wordsworth. Most of their works were viewed as direct expressions of the soul and exhibited a love of nature, criticism of science, and expressed the alienation of humans due to industrialization. In romantic art, there was an abandonment of classical reason for warmth and emotion with the use of exotic and passionate colors. Romantic art was also a reflection of the artist’s innermost feelings. Romanticism circulated through music, too. Ludwig van Beethoven served as the bridge between the classical and romantic periods of music; most of his early works reflected the classical, while later works like the Ninth Symphony showed his romantic inner feelings.
The realism movement that developed during the second half of the nineteenth century was a reaction against Romanticism. Writers and artists of this movement wanted to portray ordinary life as it was (keep it real!). They tried to avoid romantic settings and language and, in literature, preferred novels to poems. Charles Dickens represented realist literature with books like Oliver Twist that focused on the harsh realities of working and middle class life in Great Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
Darwin and Natural Selection
In contrast to Romanticism was the movement called secularism, which reflected a general growing faith in the sciences. Sometimes this faith undermined the religious traditions of the people. Secularism advocated the belief that truth was to be found in the sciences, not religion or the humanities.
Charles Darwin represented the secular movement at its peak. In 1859, he published the volume On the Origin of Species. In the text, Darwin posited the theory of the evolution of species from earlier, simpler species. According to Darwin, the evolved species were naturally selected, meaning that those species that adapted more readily to the environment survived.
If this idea caused a stir, Darwin’s next work, The Descent of Man, published in 1871, caused an explosion. Darwin stated that man was not exempt from natural selection, suggesting that man was related to other primates. All of this caused a controversy of ideas about the meaning and origin of life and religion.
Others like Herbert Spenser took Darwin’s concepts of survival of the fittest and applied them to human society. Spenser saw social progress coming from the struggle for survival. This application became the rationale for many movements and injusticesof the nineteenth and twentieth century, including imperialism, nationalism, capitalism, and racism.
Modernism
Modernism as a literary and artistic movement emerged as a reaction against realism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This movement saw art and literature as symbols that reflected the true reality of the human mind. Within this movement were impressionism, postimpressionism, cubism, abstract expressionism, and functionalism.
Impressionism developed during the 1870s in France. Artists rejected the studio and painted outdoors, finding inspiration in the interplay of light and subject. Claude Monet best represented this school. Postimpressionism naturally followed impressionismduring the 1880s with artists like Vincent van Gogh, who saw art as spiritual and painted as he felt. Cubism followed postimpressionism with Pablo Picasso and his use of geometric designs to recreate reality. Next came abstract expressionism, with Wassily Kandinsky, who used line and color to avoid visual reality and believed that art should speak directly to the soul. Later in architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright developed the idea of functionalism, designing useful buildings with no unnecessary ornamentation.
While modernism and its different creations progressed through the late nineteenth century, realism declined. In part this occurred because of the advent of photography. Artists came to the belief that they should not mirror reality but create one as an individual expression. This was the beginning of what most have considered modern art.
Anti-Semitism
Sadly, during the second half of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism reemerged in Europe. The Jewish people received the legal equalities of liberal reforms but still faced discrimination.
This was demonstrated in 1895 with the Richard Dreyfus Affair, when a French Jew was unjustly found guilty of selling military secrets and condemned to life in prison. His guilt was really based on him being Jewish. In 1899, the real criminal, a French aristocrat, was brought to justice and Dreyfus was pardoned, but the case still illuminated the depth of anti-Semitism in Europe.
definition
Anti-Semitism is prejudice, discrimination,and hostility toward the Jewish people.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain also proved the point. This German leader preached the unfounded belief that Germans were pure successors of the Aryan race and Jews were enemies who wanted to destroy the Aryans. Although his beliefs were only nominally accepted, they did influence others at a later time.
Zionism
Almost in response to the anti-Semitism in Europe, the Zionist movement developed. During the nineteenth century, Eastern Europe had a large Jewish population, but they faced many persecutions and pogroms, or organized massacres. So over 100,000 of these Eastern European Jews migrated to Palestine, although the Ottoman Turks opposed them stringently. This immigration to Palestine was the beginning of a nationalist movement to make the Jewish nation of Israel a reality in Palestine.
Spread of Democracy
The last movement of the nineteenth century was not an “ism” but just as important. Influenced by liberalism, democratic reforms spread across the West, with legislative assemblies and male and female suffrage. It advanced quicker in Great Britain and France, and slower in Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. Democracy did not catch on at all in Russia, where Czar Nicholas II believed in the absolute power of the czar, although the Revolution of 1905 forced him to create the Duma with some legislative powers. It also moved forward in the United States after the American Civil War, when suffrage was granted to African American males. Women in America had to wait until later in the early twentieth century to gain suffrage. So democracy made advances in the West, but other parts of the world would have to wait.
The Least You Need to Know
• After the fall of Napoleon, two important ideologies—nationalism and liberalism—emerged to make a significant impact on Europe and the West during the nineteenth century.
• The Congress of Vienna and the Concerts of Europe were a conservative response to the ideas of nationalism and liberalism aimed at maintaining European stability.
• The conservativism of the Concert of Europe came to an end with the Crimean War and the return of political infighting between the European powers.
• Other ideologies like Romanticism and realism reflected changes in Western culture.
• By the late nineteenth century, democracy started to gain ground among a majority of the nations of the West.