Chapter 23: Ideologies and Upheavals, 1815-1850

The Peace Settlement

• Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain had finally defeated France.
• The great challenge for political leaders in 1814 was to construct a settlement that
would last and not sow the seeds of another war.

The European Balance of Power

• The allied powers were concerned with the defeated enemy France.
• The first Peace of Paris gave to France the boundaries it possessed in 1792, which
were larger than those of 1789, and France did not have to pay any war reparations.
• The victorious powers did not foment a spirit of injustice and revenge in the defeated
country.
• When the four allies of the Quadruple Alliance met together at the Congress of
Vienna, they also agreed to raise a number of formidable barriers against renewed
French aggression.
• Prussia received considerably more territory in France’s eastern border, “sentinel on
the Rhine.”
• The allies were focused on balance of power.
• To Klemens von Metternich and Robert Castlereagh, the foreign ministers of
Austria and Great Britain, Charles Talleyrand, the balance of power meant an
international equilibrium of political and military forces that would discourage
aggression by any combination of states or the domination of Europe by any single
state.
• 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.
• Each should receive compensation in the form of territory for their successful
struggle against the French.
• Metternich’s Austria took the rich provinces of Venetia and Lombardy, Polish
possessions and east coast of the Adriatic.
• Tsar Alexander 1 of Russia wanted to restore the kingdom of Poland.
• These demands were too much for Castlereagh and Metternich, who feared an
unbalancing of power.
• They signed a secret of alliance directed against Russia and Prussia.
• Russia accepted a small polish kingdom, and Prussia took a part of Saxony.
• This help France gain its Great Power status.
• The second Peace of Paris concluded after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo,
was still relatively moderate toward France.
• Louis XVIII was restored to his throne for a second time.

Intervention and Repression

• In 1815 under Metternich’s leadership, Austria, Prussia, and Russia embarked on a

crusade against the ideas of the dual revolution.
• The Holy Alliance, formed by Austria, Prussia, and Russia in September 1815.
• First proposed by Russian’s Alexander I, the alliance soon became a symbol of the
repression of liberal and revolutionary movements all over Europe.
• Metternich was horrified: revolution was rising once again.
• He called a conference at Troppau in Austria under the provisions of the Quadruple
Alliance, he and Alexander I proclaimed the principle of active intervention to
maintain all autocratic regimes whenever they were threatened.
• Metternich battled against liberal political change.
• It was through Metternich’s domination over the entire German Confederation and
the cooperation they had, that the infamous Carlsbad Decrees was issued in 1819.
• These decrees required the thirty-eight German member states to root out
subversive ideas in their universities and newspapers.
• The decrees also established a permanent committee with spies and informers to
investigate and punish any liberal or radical organization.

Metternich and Conservation

• Metternich firmly believed that liberalism had been responsible for a generation of
war with untold bloodshed and suffering.
• Metternich blamed liberal middle-class revolutionaries for stirring up the lower
classes.
• National self- determination was repellent to Metternich.
• It threatened the primacy of the aristocracy but also threatened to destroy the
Austrian Empire and revolutionize central Europe.
• The Austrian Empire of the Habsburg was a dynastic state.
• Germans had long dominated the empire; Magyers dominated the kingdom of
Hungary.
• The Czechs were concentrated in Bohemia and Moravia.
• The multiethnic state Metternich served was strong because of its large population
and vast territories; it was weak because of its many potentially dissatisfied
nationalities.

Radical Ideas and Early Socialism

Liberalism

• The principle idea of liberalism—liberty and equality—were by no means defeated in

1815.
• This political and social philosophy continued to pose a radical challenge to revived
conservatism.
• Liberalism demanded representative government equality before the law as opposed
to legally separate classes.
• The idea of liberty also meant specific individual freedoms: freedom of the press,
speech. Assembly, and arbitrary arrest.
• In Europe only France with Louis XVIII’s Constitutional Charter and Great Britain with
its Parliament and historic rights of English men and women had realized much of the
liberal program in 1815.
• Liberalism faced more radical ideological competitors in the early 19th century.
• Opponents of liberalism especially criticized its economic principles, which called for
unrestricted private enterprise and no government interference in the economy.
• This philosophy was popularly known as the doctrine of laissez faire.
• The idea of a free economy had first been persuasively formulated by Scottish
philosophy professor Adam Smith.
• Smith was highly critical of 18th century mercantilism and it attempt to regulate trade
and economic activity.
• “Invisible Hand” which would give all citizens a fair and equal opportunity.
• Smith argued that freely competitive private enterprise would result in greater
income to everyone not just the rich.
• In Britain, businessman used the doctrine to defend their right to do as they wished
in their factories.
• Labor unions were outlawed.
• Early 19th century liberals favored representative government but they generally
wanted property qualifications attached to the right to vote.
• Workers and peasants did not own the necessary property and thus could not vote.

Nationalism

• Nationalism was a second radical idea in the years after 1815—an idea destined to
have an enormous influence in the modern world.
• European nationalists usually sought to turn the cultural unity that they perceived
into a political reality.
• They sought to make the territory of each people coincide with well-defined
boundaries in an independent nation-state.
• The rise of nationalism was the epoch-making development of complex industrial and
urban society, which required much better communication between individuals and
groups.
• This promoted the standardized national language within many countries.
• Many scholars also argued that nations are recent creations, the product of the new,
self-conscience nationalist ideology.
• “Imagined communities”- citizens together with emotionally charged symbols and
ceremonies.
• Historians also stress the character of nationalism.
• Between 1815 and 1850 most people who believed in nationalism also believed in
wither liberalism of radical, democratic republicanism.
• Liberals and democrats saw the people as the ultimate source of all government.
• Yet liberals and nationalists agreed that the benefits of self-government would be
possible only if the people were united by common traditions that transcended local
interests and class differences.
• Early nationalists believed that every nation, had the right to exist in freedom and to
develop its character and spirit.
• The liberty of the individual and the love of a free man overlapped greatly in the
early nineteenth century.
• To the “we-they” outlook, it was all too easy for nationalists to add two highly volatile
ingredients: a sense of national mission and a sense of national superiority.
• Under the real motifs of nationalism lurked ideas of national superiority and national
mission that could lead to aggression and conflict.

French Utopian Socialism

• Socialism, the new radical doctrine of 1815, began in France, despite the fact that
France lagged far behind Great Britain in developing modern industry.
• Early socialist thinkers were disturbed because they saw the new developments as
fomenting selfish individualism and splitting the community into isolated fragments.
• There was an urgent need for further reorganization of society to establish
cooperation and a new sense of community.
• Early French socialists believed in economic planning.
• They argued that the government should rationally organize the economy and not
depend on destructive competition to do the job.
• Early socialists also shared an intense desire to help the poor, and they preached
that the rich and the poor should be more nearly equal economically.
• Finally socialists believed that private property should be strictly regulated by
the government or that it should be abolished and replaced by state of community
ownership.
• Count Henri de Saint Simon (1760-1825): The key to progress was proper
organization.
• Such an arrangement of society required the parasites—the court, the aristocracy,
lawyers, and churchmen—to give way to the doers—scientists, engineers, and
industrialists.
• The doers would carefully plan the economy and guide it forward by undertaking
vast public works projects and establishing investment banks.
• Saint Simon also stressed that social institutions main goal should improve the
conditions of the poor.
• Charles Fourier (1772-1837); a man who envisaged a socialist utopia of
mathematically precise, self sufficient communities.
• Fourier was also an early proponent of the total emancipation of women.
• Fourier believed that most marriages were only another kind of prostitution.
• Fourier called for the abolition of marriage.
• Louis Blanc (1811-1882) focused on practical improvements.
• In his Organization of Work (1839), he urged workers to agitate for universal voting
rights and to take control of the state peacefully.
• Blanc believed that the state should set up government-backed workshops and
factories to guarantee full employment.
• Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) wrote What is Property? His answer was that
it was nothing but theft.
• Property was profit that was stolen from the worker who was the source of all
wealth.
• Workers cherished the memory of the radical phase of the French Revolution, and
they became violently opposed to the laissez-faire laws that denied workers the right
to organize.

The Birth of Marxian Socialism

• Karl Max (classical economists) (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

published The Communist Manifesto, which became the bible of socialism.
• Marx looked forward to the emancipation of women and the abolition of the family.
• Early French socialists often appealed to the middle class and the state to the help
the poor.
• Marx ridiculed such appeals as naïve.
• He argued that the interests of the middle class and those of the industrial working
class were inevitably opposed to each other.
• In Marx’s view, one class had always exploited the other, and so society was split
more clearly between the middle class (bourgeoisie) and the modern working class
(proletariat).
• Marx predicted that the proletariat would conquer the bourgeoisie in a violent
revolution.
• Marx ideas united sociology, economics, and all human history in a vast and imposing
edifice.
• He synthesized French Utopian schemes and English classical economics and German
philosophy.
• He argued that profits were really wages stolen from the workers.
• Marx’s theory of historical evolution was built on the philosophy of the German
Georg Hegel (1770-1831).
• Hegel believed that each age is characterized by a dominant set of ideas, which
produces opposing ideas and eventually a new syntheisis.
• Marx’s next idea was that it was the bourgeoisie’s turn to give way to the socialism
of revolutionary workers.

The Romantic Movement

• The Romantic Movement was in part a revolt against classicism and the
Enlightenment.

Romanticism’s Tenets

• Romanticism was characterized by a belief in emotional exuberance, unrestrained

imagination, and spontaneous art and personal life.
• In Germany early romantics of the 1770s and 1780s called themselves the Sturm
und Drang (“Storm and Stress”).
• Romantic artists typically led bohemian lives.
• They rejected materialism and sought to escape lofty spiritual heights through their
art.
• The romantics believed the full development of one’s unique potential to be the
supreme purpose in life.
• The romantics were enchanted by nature.
• It was awesome and tempestuous, while other saw it as a source of spiritual
inspiration.
• English landscape artist John Constable declared “Nature is Spirit visible.”
• The romantic imagination turned toward history with a passion.
• History was the art of change over time—the key to understand that was now
perceived to be organic and dynamic.

Literature

• Britain was the first country where romanticism flowered fully in poetry and prose,
and the Britain romantic writers were among the most prominent in Europe.
• Romanticism found its voice in poetry.
• William Wordsworth (1770-1850) published Lyrical Ballads with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (1772-1834), which abandoned flowery classical conventions for the
language of ordinary speech and endowed simple subjects with the loftiest majesty.
• Wordsworth’s conception of poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful
feeling recollected in tranquility.”
• Walter Scott (1771-1832) personified the romantic movement’s fascination with
history.
• He was influenced by German romanticism because of the immortal poet and
dramatist Johann Wolfgang won Goethe (1749-1832). (Gots von Berlichingen)
• Scott excelled in re-creating the spirit of bygone ages and great historical events.
• Germaine de Stael (1766-1817), urged the French to throw away their worn out
classical models.
• Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was the greatest in both poetry and prose.
• Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831).
• Hugo equated freedom in literature with politics and society.
• Hugo’s political evolution was thus exactly the opposite of Wordsworth’s, in whom
youthful radicalism gave way to middle-aged caution.
• Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin (1804-1876), pen name, George Sand, defied the
narrow conventions of her time in an unending search for self fulfillment.
• Her novel Lelia deeply delved into her torturous quest for sexual and personal
freedom.
• The greatest of all Russian poets, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), rejecting 18th
century attempts to force Russian poetry into a classical straitjacket, used his lyric
genius to mold the modern literary language.

Art and Music

• The greatest and most moving romantic painter in France was Eugene Delacroix
(1798-1863).
• He was a master of dramatic, colorful scenes that stirred the emotions.
• His masterpiece, Liberty Leading the People, celebrated the nobility of popular
revolution in general and revolution in France.
• In England the best romantic painters were Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and
John Constable (1776-1837).
• Turner depicted nature’s power and terror.
• Constable painted gentle Wordsworthian landscapes in which human beings were at
one with their environment.
• The great Romantic composers used a wide range of forms to create a thousand
musical landscapes and evoke a host of powerful emotions.
• Music no longer simply complemented a church service or helped a nobleman digest
his dinner.
• Music became a sublime end in itself, most perfectly realizing the endless yearning of
the soul.
• Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was the greatest pianist of his age.
• Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) extended and broke open classical forms.
• Beethoven used contrasting themes and tones to produce dramatic conflict and
inspiring resolutions.

Reforms and Revolutions

 National Liberation in Greece

• National, liberal revolution revolution, frustrated in Italy and Spain by conservative

statesmen, succeeded first after 1815 in Greece.
• A Desire for independence led to the formation of secret societies and then to revolt
in 1821, led by Alexander Ypsilanti.
• The Greek cause became a holy one.
• The Greeks battled on against the Turks and hoped for the eventual support of
European governments.
• Great Britain, France, and Russia directed Turkey to accept an armistice the Turks
refused.
• Russia declared another war against the Turks.
• This led to the establishment of a Russian protectorate over much of present day
Romania, which had also been under Turkish rule.
• Greece became independent in 1830.

Liberal reform in Great Britain

• Aristocracy defended its ruling position by repressing every kind of popular protest
after the outbreak of the French Revolution.
• The first step in this direction was the Corn Laws in 1815: regulated the foreign
grain trade, but they were not needed during a generation of war because they were
unable to import.
• The aristocracy worked hard to change the Corn Laws through Parliament.
• The new regulation prohibited the importation of foreign grain unless the price at
home rose to improbable levels.
• This cause a protest by urban laborers, who were supported by radical intellectuals.
• Parliament passed the Six Acts which placed controls on a heavily taxed press and
practically eliminated all mass meetings.
• These acts followed a protest at St. Peter’s Fields in Manchester that had been
savagely broken up (Battle of Peterloo).
• Calls for many reforms such as: town government, new police force, more rights for
Catholics and dissenters, and the Poor laws.
• The Tory Government moved in a direction of reform.
• The imports of foreign grain was replaced by a heavy tariff which encouraged middle
classes to press in for reform of Parliament so they could have a larger say in
government and repeal the Corn Laws.
• A new reform bill was made, The Reform Bill of 1832.
• “Rotten boroughs”—electoral districts that had very few voters and that the landed
aristocracy had bought and sold—were eliminated.
• The Reform Bill of 1832 caused the number of voters to increase about 50%.
• The Chartists’ core demand was universal male suffrage.
• They saw complete political democracy and rule by the common people as the
means to a good and just society.
• While calling for universal male suffrage, many working class people joined with
middle class manufacturers in the Anti-Corn Law League.
• They argued that lower food prices and more jobs in industry depended on repeal of
the Corn Laws.
• When Ireland’s potato crop failed in 1845, Tory prime minister Robert Peel
joined with the Whigs and a minority own party repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 and
allowed free imports of grain.
• The Tories passed a bill designed to help the working classed.
• The Ten Hours Act of 1847 limited the workday for women and young people in
factories to ten hours.
• Tory aristocrats were competing with the middle class for the support of the working
class.

Ireland and the Great Famine

• Poverty was abominable.

• Landlords lacked the improving zeal of their English counterparts and were content to
use their power to grab as much as possible.
• The population grew quickly because: extensive cultivation of the potato,
early marriage, and exploitation of peasants by landlords.
• Needing only a big potato patch to survive, Irish men and women married early.
• The young couple was embracing a life of extreme poverty.
• Rural poverty was inescapable and better shared with a spouse.
• As population and potato dependency grew, conditions became more precarious.
• In 1845, 1846, 1848 and 1851 the potato crop again failed in Ireland.
• The Great Famine occurred.
• Blight attacked the young plants, widespread starvation and mass fever epidemics
followed.
• It shattered the pattern of population growth.
• Ireland became a land of continuous out-migration, late marriage, and widespread
celibacy.
• The Great Famine also intensified anti-British feeling and promoted Irish nationalism.

Revolution of 1830 in France

• Louis XVIII’S Constitutional Charter of 1814—theoretically a gift from the king

but actually a response to political pressures—was basically a liberal constitution.
• The economic and social gains made by sections of the middle class and the
peasantry in the French revolution were fully protected, great intellectual and artistic
freedom was permitted, and a parliament with upper and lower houses was created.
• Louis XVIII’s charter was anything but democratic.
• Charles X was Louis’s successor.
• He was true reactionary.
• He wanted to re-establish the old order in France.
• Charles’s government turned in 1830 to military adventure in an effort to rally French
nationalism and gain popular support.
• Emboldened by the new from Algeria, which actually had limited impact in Paris,
Charles repudiated the Constitutional Charter in an attempt coup in July 1830.
• He issued decrees stripping much of the wealthy middle class of its voting rights, and
he censored the press.
• In “three glorious days” the government collapsed and Charles fled.
• Louis Philippe accepted the Constitutional Charter of 1814, “king of the French
people.”
• In spite of such symbolic acts, the situation in France remained unchanged,

The Revolution of 1848

• Louis Philippe’s “bourgeois monarchy: had been characterized by stubborn inaction

and complacency.
• The government’s stubborn refusal to consider electoral reform heightened a sense
of class injustice among middle-class shopkeepers, skilled artisans, and unskilled
working people, and it eventually touched off a popular revolt in Paris.
• People in arms would tolerate no more monarchy.
• This refusal led to the proclamation of a provisional republic, headed by a ten-man
executive committee and certified by cries of approval from the revolutionary crowd.
• The revolutionaries were firmly committed to a republic and they immediately set
about drafting a constitution for France’s Second Republic.
• Building such a republic meant giving the right to vote to every adult male.
• Revolutionary compassion and sympathy for freedom were expressed in the freeing
of all slaves in French colonies, the abolition of the death penalty, and the
establishment of a ten hour workday for Paris.
• Moderate, liberal republicans viewed universal male suffrage as the ultimate
concession to be made to popular forces.
• Radical republicans were committed to some kind of socialism.
• Louis Blanc and Albert represented the republican socialists in the provisional
government, pressed for recognition of a socialist right to work.
• Blanc asserted that permanent government- sponsored cooperative workshops
should be established for workers.
• Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), author of Democracy in America, socialism was
the most characteristic aspect of the revolution in Paris.
• The clash of ideologies—of liberal capitalism and socialism—became a clash of
classes and arms after the elections.
• Artisans and unskilled workers invaded the Constituent Assembly on May 15 and
tried to proclaim a new revolutionary state.
• As the workshops continued to fill and grow more radical, the fearful but powerful
propertied classes in the Assembly took the offensive.
• On June 22, the government dissolved the national workshops in Paris, giving the
workers the choice od joining the army or going to workshops in the provinces.
• The result was a violent uprising.
• Working people fought with the courage of utter desperation, but the government
had the army and the support of peasant France.
• After three terrible “June Days” and the death. Injured of more than ten thousand
people, the republican army under General Louis Cavaignac stood triumphant in a
sea of working class blood and hatred.
• The revolution in France ended in a failure.

The Austrian Empire in 1848

• Throughout central Europe, the first news of the upheaval in France evoked feverish
excitement and eventually revolution.
• The revolution in the Austrian Empire began in Hungary where nationalistic
Hungarians demanded national autonomy, full civil liberties, and universal suffrage.
• The Habsburg emperor Ferdinand I capitulated and promised reforms and a liberal
constitution.
• The monarchy abolished serfdom.
• The coalition of urban revolutionaries also broke down. In March the Hungarian
revolutionary leaders pushed through an extremely liberal constitution
• The Habsburg monarchy in Vienna exploited the fears of the minority groups.
• Czech nationalists based in Bohemia and the city of Prague came into conflict with
German nationalists.
• Conflicting national aspirations within the Austrian Empire enabled the monarchy to
play off one group against the other.
• The conservative aristocratic forces gathered around Emperor Ferdinand I regained
their nerve and reasserted their great strength.
• Sophia, a Bavarian planned for her son Francis Joseph to be the heir of Ferdinand’s
throne.
• Powerful nobles, the army and the church organized around Sophia in a secret
conspiracy to reverse and crush the rebellion.
• Their first breakthrough was when the army bombarded Prague and savagely
crushed a working class revolt there on June 17.
• They retook the city of Vienna.
• Francis Joseph was crowned emperor of Austria at the age 18.
• Nicholas I of Russia lent his iron hand.

Prussia and the Frankfurt Assembly

• When the artisans and factory workers in Berlin exploded in March and joined
temporarily with the middle class liberals in the struggle against the monarchy, the
autocratic yet paternalistic Frederick William IV vacillated and finally caved in.
• On March 21, he promised to grant Prussia a liberal constitution and to merge Prussia
into a new national German State that was to be created.
• Prussian Constituent Assembly met in Berlin to write a constitution for the
Prussian state, a self appointed committee of liberals from various German states
called for a national assembly to begin writing a federal constitution for a unified
German state.
• They met in Frankfurt in May.
• Convened to write a constitution, the learned body was soon absorbed in a battle
with Denmark over the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein.
• The National Assembly at Frankfurt debated ponderously and finally called on the
Prussian army to oppose Denmark in the name of the German nation.
• In March 1849, the national Assembly finally completed its drafting of a liberal
constitution and elected King Frederick William of Prussia emperor of the new
German national state.
• Frederick William disbanded the Prussian Constituent Assembly and granted a
limited conservative constitution.
• He ruled by divine right and he refused to accept the “crown from the gutter.”
• Supported by Russia, Austria forced Prussia to renounce all its schemes of unification
in late 1850.
• The German Confederation was re-established.