Transcript Reform, Reactions, and Revolutionary Ideas

The Revolution of 1848, Reform Efforts,
Suffrage, and New Cultural Currents
 The
great dividing point in nineteenth-century
European political history is the Revolution of 1848
 This was a massive disturbance that shook almost
every country of Europe to its political roots
 The events that set off the Revolution of 1848 took
place in France
 In the spring, the king, Louis-Philippe refused
demands for electoral reform
 Riots
began and by, the summer,
the king had been deposed
 Over the next few months, a
heated political struggle was
waged throughout France
 In the end, Napoleon Bonaparte’s
nephew, Louis Napoleon, became
France’s president
 In the meantime, revolution
spread from France to the rest of
Europe (referring to the contagious
nature of French revolutionary
sentiments, Metternich was fond of
commenting that every time
France sneezed, all of Europe
caught cold)
 The
only nations that remained immune during
1848 and 1849 were Britain, which was flexible and
liberal enough to keep its people from feeling the
need to revolt, and Russia, which punished liberals
and radicals so harshly that revolution was too
dangerous to consider
 In Prussia, Austria, most of the German states, and
a good number of Italian states (many of which
were under Austrian control), revolution broke out,
lasting sometime for months
 In areas ruled by Austria, such as Czech Bohemia,
Croatia, and Hungary, nationalist sentiment
combined with political activism to cause further
revolts
 In
the end, except in France, all of
the revolutions were crushed or faded
away
 By late 1848 or early 1849, rulers who
had been toppled briefly came back
to power
 One historian described 1848 as “the
turning point that did not quite turn”
 However, the revolutions of 1848 did
have their effects
 They compelled the king of Prussia
and the emperor of Austria to grant
certain constitutional reforms
 They demonstrated the increasing
importance of nationalism in
European politics
 They
laid the groundwork for the unifications
of Germany and Italy later in the century
 Most of all, the revolutions demonstrated
once and for all to rulers throughout Europe
that at least some of the political, economic,
and social demands of ordinary people had to
be met, or at least listened to and taken
seriously
 Popular
impatience with over three decades of
reactionary rule started by the Congress of
Vienna and Prince Metternich’s efforts to
restore the old regimes after the French
Revolution
 The social and economic effects of the
Industrial Revolution
 The growing sense of nationalism
 A long series of economic downturns and bad
harvests that caused much distress during the
1840s (the decade was popularly known as the
“Hungry Forties” – The Irish Potato Famine was
the best-known and most deadly)
 Most
European countries moved closer to
representative forms of government
during the second half of the century
 Part of this trend was due to the fact
that industrialization, modernization,
urbanization, and population growth had
made government too difficult a task for
one person or a small group of people to
manage
 Even in less democratic nations, political
power began to spread outward to larger
numbers of governmental advisers,
agencies, ministries, and institutions
 The
two major nations that developed
democratic forms of government – defined in
nineteenth-century terms as a meaningful
vote for all adult males – during these years
were Great Britain and France
 In Britain, during the reign of Queen Victoria,
the two major parties in Parliament – the
Conservatives, led by Benjamin Disraeli, and
the Liberals, led by William Gladstone –
became more willing to extend the vote to
the middle and lower classes
 This process took many years, and it was
accomplished by means of the Second (1867)
and Third (1885) Reform Acts
 As
a result of the latter, virtually all adult males
could vote in parliamentary elections
 The few remaining restrictions on male suffrage
were removed over the next two decades
 However, reform did not remove all problems from
British life
 The growing political clout of the lower classes was
demonstrated by the fact that, during the early
1900s, a new political party, Labour, displaced the
older, more middle-class Liberals as the primary
Conservative party
 Another problem that plagued Britain during the
late 1800s and early 1900s was the question of Irish
home rule: should Ireland be set free, and if so,
should the north bitterly divided between Catholic
and Protestant, remain in British or Irish hands
 France’s
progress toward democracy was
less consistent and less gentle than
Britain’s
 After the 1848 Revolution, France briefly
had a republic in which all adult males
could votes
 However, the president, Louis Napoleon,
was not satisfied with his office
 In 1851, he staged a coup and made
himself Napoleon III, emperor of France
 He was not as dictatorial as his more
famous uncle, and during his twenty-year
reign, he helped to industrialize and
modernize France
 Paris in its modern form took shape under
his rule
 Still,
Napoleon III did curtail civil
liberties and political rights
 In 1870 and 1871, after losing the
bitter Franco-Prussian War against
the neighboring Germans, Napoleon
III was deposed
 From 1871 onward, France was a
democratic republic, with universal
male suffrage
 As in Britain, democracy did not
solve all of France’s problems
 The Fourth Republic was rocked
many times by corruption and
financial scandal
 The
national controversy sparked by the
Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) – in which a
Jewish officer was wrongly accused of selling
military secrets to Germany – exposed not
only an ugly streak of anti-Semitism within
French society, but also deep divisions
between the left (which maintained Dreyfus’
innocence) and the right (which remained
convinced of his guilt)
 Among
the most dramatic developments of
late nineteenth-century politics were the
unification of Italy and the unification of
Germany, both during the 1860s and early
1870s
 Both were examples of the growing power
of the popular will, guided in this case by
nationalism rather than the desire for
greater democracy
 In both cases, unification was brought
about by a complicated combination of war
and diplomatic intrigue
 The
prime movers of Italian unification were
the statesman Camillo Cavour and the
general Giuseppe Garibaldi
 The country was partially united in 1861,
then fully united in 1870
 Under Victor Emmanuel II, Italy became a
constitutional monarchy
 Germany’s
unification was
spearheaded by Prussia,
which defeated Austria in
1864 in a war for leadership
of German states
 The mastermind of
unification was the Prussian
statesman Otto von Bismarck
 Germany joined together in
1871, following its decisive
victory over France in the
Franco-Prussian War
 Prussia’s king became Kaiser
(emperor) Wilhelm I, of the
new German Reich (empire)
 Austria,
a multinational empire, also
had to make certain concessions to the
dozens of ethnic minorities – Czechs,
Poles, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Italians,
Hungarians, and others – it ruled
 The pressures of nationalism were
particularly strong, and Austria had an
increasingly difficult time containing
the desire of many minorities for
greater autonomy, if not complete
freedom
 In 1867, the largest and most powerful
minority, the Hungarians, forced the
Austrian government to grant them
equal status within the empire
 The
Augsleich (“compromise”) turned Austria
into the Austro-Hungarian Empire
 And previously, though more conservative than
the west, the 1848 Revolution had driven out
the archconservative Metternich
 In 1861, the emperor, Franz Josef, agreed to the
creation of an elected parliament, with which
he shared power
 Even the German government, ruled by the
emperor and administered until 1890 by the
highly conservative Bismarck, had to make
concessions to its people
 As Germany became an industrial powerhouse,
its working class grew larger, and the appeal of
trade unionism and socialism grew stronger
 To
prevent ordinary Germans from becoming
attracted to left-wing ideologies, Bismarck allowed
all adult males to vote in elections to the German
parliament, or Reichstag (this universal male
suffrage, however, was compromised by the fact
that the voting system weighed the ballots of
upper-class voters more heavily than those of the
lower class)
 Bismarck also passed a generous set of laws that
granted workers many economic benefits:
unemployment insurance, disability insurance,
pensions, a shorter workday, and so on
 Ironically, for a time, workers in late nineteenthcentury Germany were better off than in more
liberal nations such as France, Britain, or the
United States
 Nonetheless,
the government, even after
Bismarck’s dismissal by Kaiser Wilhelm II in
1890, continued to be quite conservative
 But of all Europe’s major nations, Russia
remained the most autocratic
 It had no constitution, and until 1905, no
elected body with which the tsar shared
power
 But shocked by its embarrassing defeat in the
Crimean War (1853-1856), Tsar Alexander II,
a moderate liberal, attempted to modernize
Russia with a series of Great Reforms
 By far the most important was the
emancipation of serfs in 1861
 But
unfortunately, Alexander II was
assassinated in 1881 by radical terrorists
 The tsars that followed him, including
Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II (1894-1917),
were extremely conservative
 Not only did they abandon Alexander’s
reforms, they did their best to undo as
many of them as possible
 Yet a series uprising in 1905 forced
Nicholas II to create and share power
with an elected, semiparliamentary
body, the Duma
 But the Duma was weak, and the tsar
took every opportunity to avoid
cooperating with it
 Mary
Wollstonecraft, an English
writer, is consider the founder of
modern European feminism
 In her treatise A Vindication of the
Rights of Women (1792), she argued
that Enlightenment thinking took
account of the ideal that reason was
an innate feature of all human beings,
including women
 She maintained that women therefore
should be entitled to equal rights with
men in education, as well as political
and economic pursuits
 During
the French Revolution, Olympe de
Gouges, a female playwright, argued in
her Declaration of the Rights of Woman
and the Female Citizen that women be
granted the same rights as men
 The National Assembly, which had
approved the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and the Citizen, dismissed de
Gouges’s proposal
 The “woman question” was the term
used to describe the debate over the
status of women
 In nineteenth century society, women
continued to remain in an inferior
position to men inside and outside of the
family
 The
“cult of true womanhood,” anchored in the
middle classes of the Victorian era in England,
posited that the ideal woman reflected the
“virtues” of submissiveness, piety, domesticity,
modesty, and femininity
 Early feminists argued that women, like men,
were individuals who had different strengths
and abilities and should be permitted to develop
them without social restrictions
 The early women’s rights movement emerged in
the 1830s among groups of women in Europe
and the United States
 Early on, women focused on reforming family
and divorce laws to allow women to own
property and file for divorce
 By
the middle of the nineteenth
century, women began advocating equal
political rights, most notably, the right
to vote (suffrage)
 They saw suffrage as the initial step
toward political equality and full
citizenship
 As a general rule, women’s movements
in Europe and America were led by
women of the upper classes
 The women’s movement in Britain, led
by Emmeline Pankhurst, was most
vocal, although it suffered from
disagreement over tactics for achieving
equality
 In
1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, a group of
women met to organize the Women’s Rights
Convention
 They agreed there that, “We hold these truths
to be self-evident: that all men and women are
equal”
 Major figures in the U.S. movement were Susan
B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
 In the United States, suffragettes called for the
right to vote and better working conditions for
women in textile factories
 However, on the whole, women were not
granted the right to vote in high numbers in
Western countries until after World War I
 The exceptions included Norway, Finland, and a
handful of U.S. states
 If
cultural and intellectual life in
eighteenth-century Europe had for
decades been dominated by one
major movement, the
Enlightenment, nineteenth-century
Europe (and America) experienced
constant change and development
in this area
 One of the hallmarks of modern
culture in the West has been the
ever-increasing speed with which
artistic styles and scientific
theories shift and evolve
 The
principal cultural movement of the
late 1700s and early 1800s was
Romanticism
 Romanticism represented a backlash
against the logic- and reason-oriented
outlook of the Enlightenment
 Romanticism placed a premium on
emotion and passion, the self-realization
of the individual, heroism, and a love of
the natural world
 Among the many famous Romantics were
William Blake, Lord Byron, J.W. von
Goethe, Victor Hugo, J.M.W. Turner,
Eugene Delacroix, Ludwig van
Beethoven, Richard Wagner, and Pyotr
Tchaikovsky
 Although
Romanticism did not die out, it yielded its
place of prominence around the 1840s and 1850s
 Realism rejected Romanticism’s idealized, dramatic
outlook in favor of a more sober, critical view of
life
 Realists artists and writers concerned themselves
with the details of everyday existence
 They were interested in commenting on social
problems such as poverty, social hypocrisy, and
class injustice
 Well-known realists included Charles Dickens,
George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans),
Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, and
Fyodor Dostoevsky
 Realism peaked from the 1840s to 1870s
 The
culture of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries was characterized by
diversity and innovation
 Turning away from Realism, artists and writers
began to break the rules of traditional culture
and experiment with a dazzling array of new
styles: Symbolism, Impressionism, PostImpressions, Expressionism, Cubism, and even
abstraction