Romanticism 2

1. Because of the dual revolution, French thinkers believed there had begun a transformation of society, beginning in 1815. They saw that liberal practices in politics and economics were leading to corruption, selfish individualism, and a split in the community. Early French social-ists believed that economic planning, such as those used in 1793 and 1794 in France, would allow for the government to rationally organize the economy and not depend on destructive competition to do the job. They also wanted to help the poor and protect them from the rich and that they should all be more equal economically. Socialists believe that private property should be regulated by the government or abolished and replaced by state or community ownership. Count Henri de Saint-Simon viewed the key to progress was proper social organi-zation. He wanted the court, aristocracy, lawyers, and churchmen to give way forever to the leading scientists, engineers, and industrialists. The doers would plan the economy and guide it forward by undertaking public works projects and establishing investment banks. He wanted every social institution to have its main goal to improve conditions for the poor. Charles Fourier desired a socialist utopia where there were 1,620 people living communally on 5,000 acres devoted to agriculture and industry. He also favored the total emancipation of women, as most marriages were a kind of prostitution where young single women were sold to their future husbands for dowries and other financial considerations. Because of his views, he wanted the abolition of marriage, free unions based only on love, and sexual freedom. Louis Blanc urged workers to demand universal voting right and take control of the state peacefully. He believed that the full power of the state should be directed at setting up gov-ernment-backed workshops and factories that guaranteed full employment. Pierre Joseph Proudhon saw property as profit stolen from the worker, who was the source of all wealth. He feared the power of the state and was considered an anarchist. The message of French utopian socialists gained a following with French urban workers. Skilled artisans, who were used to guilds, apprenticeships, and control of quality and wage rate, became violently op-posed to laissez-faire laws that denied workers the right to organize and promoted unre-strained competition. Workers began to see themselves as a class and favored collective ac-tion and government intervention in economic life. Thus, a strong socialist movement began in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s.

2. Karl Marx was the son of a Jewish lawyer who had converted to Christianity. He was an athe-ist who studied philosophy at the University of Berlin before going into journalism and eco-nomics. He was influence by French socialist thought, shared Fourier’s view of middle-class marriage as legalized prostitution, and wanted the emancipation of women and the abolition of the family. He argued that the interests of the middle class and of the industrial working class inevitably opposed each other. He believed that one class had always exploited the oth-er and this was occurring right now between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Marx pre-dicted that the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie in a violent revolution just as the bourgeoisie had down over the feudal aristocracy. The tiny minority who owned the means of production grew richer, while the ever-poorer proletariat was growing in size and unity. In this, the proletariat was aided by the rejected portions of the bourgeoisie. He united sociolo-gy, economics, and all human history together, synthesizing French utopian socialism with English classical economics and German philosophy. Marx argued that profits were really wages stolen from the workers.

3. German Georg Hegel was a philosopher who argued that history is ideas in motion where each age is characterized by a dominant set of ideas that produce opposing ideas and even-tually a new synthesis. Marx kept Hegel’s view of history as a dialectic process of change but made economic relationships between classes the driving force, explaining the change from agrarian feudalism to industrial capitalism. The bourgeoisie had produced grand productive forces but it was now turn to give way to revolutionary workers. Marx had pulled great ideas and insights together to create a great secular religion.


1. After 1871, most of Europe was organized into strong national states, with only Ireland, Rus-sia, Austria-Hungary, and the Balkans having subject peoples still striving for political unity and independence. Within the strong countries were the emergence of mass politics and growing mass loyalty to the state. By 1914, universal male suffrage was very common, and this made people feel that they counted and could influence the government. Women’s suf-frage had success in the western United States, and by 1913, women could vote in twelve states. In 1914, Norway gave the vote to most women. In other areas, women were militant for the vote, but failed before 1914; in the years after World War I, they would be successful. With more people voting, politicians and parties represented the people better. Governments passed laws to alleviate general problems, enhancing their image. However, governments found that they could manipulate national feeling to create a sense of unity and divert attention away from conflicts and to an antiliberal and militaristic direction after 1871.

2. Everyday business of government was conducted by the separate states, but there was a strong national government with a chancellor and the popularly elected lower house of the Reichstag. Until 1878, Bismarck relied on the National Liberals, who had rallied to him after 1866. They supported legislation for further economic and legal unification of the country. They supported Bismarck’s attack on the Catholic church, known as Kulturkampf. Both were angered by Pius IX’s declaration of papal infallibility in 1870 that asked German Catholics to put loyalty to the church above loyalty to the nation. The program had little success in Prot-estant Prussia, causing Bismarck to abandon his attack in 1878. Catholics mostly voted for the Catholic Center Party, which blocked passage of national laws hostile to the church, and after Bismarck’s attack, they entered an uneasy relationship that was also advantageous. After the worldwide financial bust in 1873, Catholic German peasants began to suffer, causing the Catholic Center party to advocate higher tariffs to protect the economic interests of its sup-porters. The Protestant Junkers, who owned large estates in eastern Germany, supported higher tariffs. Some of the iron and steel magnates of the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia were attracted. Bismarck happily initiated a protective tariff in 1879, giving him the supporter of the Catholic Center Party and the Conservative Party while maintaining the National Liberals. The rise of protectionism in the late-1800s was because of self-centered nationalism that would lead to international name-calling and trade wars. Bismarck tried to stop socialism’s growth because it was revolutionary and hurt the nation-state. In 1878, after William I was almost killed by radicals twice, Bismarck used a national outcry to push through a law that strictly controlled social meetings and publications and outlawed the Social Democratic party. Bismarck passed laws in 1883 and 1884 that established national sickness and accident insurance. His law of 1889 established old-age pensions and retirement benefits. This allowed workers to have some money securities.

3. After France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian War in January 1871, the national elections sent a large majority of conservatives and monarchists to the National Assembly and France’s new leaders were forced to cede Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. Parisians rose up in patri-otic frustration and proclaimed the Paris Commune in March 1871. The leaders of the Com-mune were somewhat radical and wanted to govern Paris without interference from the con-servative countryside. Led by Adolphe Thiers, the National Assembly ordered the army into Paris and crushed the Commune, with twenty thousand people dying. Until 1875, the monar-chists in the National Assembly had a majority but could not agree on a king. Thiers’s destruc-tion of the Commune and his other measures showed the provinces and the middle class that the Third Republic might be moderate and socially conservative. Léon Gambetta, a moderate republican, was instrumental in establishing absolute parliamentary supremacy between 1877 and 1879, when the deputies forced President Marshall MacMahon to resign. By 1879, the majority of members of both houses were republicans. The moderate republicans fully legalized trade unions and gained a colonial empire. Under Jules Ferry, the republicans passed a series of laws between 1879 and 1886 establishing free compulsory elementary education for girls and boys and expanded the state system of public tax-supported schools.

4. Under Jules Ferry, the moderate republicans passed a series of laws between 1879 and 1886 establishing free compulsory elementary education for girls and boys and expanded the state system of public tax-supported schools. The expansion of public education was used as a na-tion-building tool. The education was secular republican education, as the pledge of alle-giance and the national anthem replaced the catechism and the “Ave Maria.” Teachers car-ried the ideology of patriotic republicanism into their classes. France encouraged young fe-male teachers to marry and guaranteed that both partners would teach in the same place. They did this for three reasons. First, married teachers with their own children were a con-trast to nuns and priests who had for generations stood for most primary education in the popular mind. Second, the republican leaders believed that married men and women would better cope with the potential loneliness and social isolation of towns and villages. Third, French leaders worried about France’s low birthrate after 1870 and believed that women combining teaching careers and motherhood would provide the country with a good exam-ple. This was done as part of an effort to create a new culture and thus effect political change.

5. French Catholics were disturbed by the educational reforms but many of them rallied to the republic in the 1890s. Pope Leo XIII’s acceptance of the modern world eased tensions be-tween church and state. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the army, was falsely accused and convicted of treason. His family supported him and fought to reopen his case with the support of prominent republicans and intellectuals. In 1898 and 1899, France was split between the army, which had made up evidence against him, anti-Semites, and most Catholics verse civil libertarians and most of the more radical republicans. The case eventually proclaimed Dreyfus innocent and revived republican feeling against the church. Between 1901 and 1905, the government cut all ties between the state and the Catholic church. The salaries of priests and bishops were no longer paid by the government, all churches were given to local committees of lay Catholics, Catholic schools were put completely on their own financially which caused them to lose a third of their students, and the state school system’s power of indoctrination was strengthened.

6. In 1832, most middle-class males got the right to vote, causing opinion leaders and politicians to fight for support. In 1867, Benjamin Disraeli and the Conservatives extended the vote to all middle-class males and the wealthiest workers. The Third Reform Bill of 1884 gave suffrage to almost every adult male. Between 1901 and 1910, the House of Lords tried to reassert itself for aristocratic conservatism by ruling against labor unions twice and rejecting the Liberal party’s measures like the People’s Budget.

7. After the Lords capitulated when the kings threatened to create new peers to pass the bill, popular democracy overcame aristocratic conservatism. This resulted in many social welfare measures between 1906 and 1914. David Lloyd George led the Liberal party into raised taxes greatly on the rich in the People’s Budget. This allowed for the government to pay for nation-al health insurance, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, and other social measures. After the Irish famine, the English slowly granted concessions like the abolition of the privi-leges of the Anglican church and rights for Irish peasants. Prime Minister William Gladstone introduced bills in 1886 and 1893 to give Ireland self-government, but they failed. However, Irish nationalists in Parliament supported the Liberals for the People’s Budget and received a home-rule bill for Ireland. However, the Irish Protestants in the northern counties of Ulster did not want home-rule. By December 1913, the Ulsterites had raised 100,000 armed volun-teers and were supported by much of English public opinion. In 1914, the Liberals in the House of Lords introduced a compromise home-rule bill that did not apply to the northern counties, but that was rejected. In September, the original home-rule bill was passed but also suspended for the duration of World War I.

8. After Austria was defeated by Prussia in 1866, Austria was forced to compromise and estab-lish a dual monarchy. The empire was divided in two, and the nationalistic Magyars gained virtual independence for Hungary. The two states were joined only by a shared monarch and common ministries for finance, defense, and foreign affairs. The mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, Dr. Karl Lueger, combined anti-Semitic rhetoric with calls for Christian socialism and municipal ownership of basic services. The Magyar nobility in Hungary in 1867 restored the constitution of 1848 and used it to control the peasantry and minorities until 1914. Only the wealthiest one-fourth of adult males could vote. Laws promoting the Magyar language in schools and government were passed through. Magyar extremists demanded total separation from Austria while subject nationalities demanded independence from Hungary.

1. Socialism appealed to many workingmen and workingwomen in the late-1800s and many be-came part of socialist parties after 1871. By 1912, the German Social Democrats party had millions of followers and controlled the Reichstag. In 1883, Russian exiles in Switzerland created the Russian Social Democratic party, which grew rapidly after 1890. In France, social-ist parties reemerged in the 1880s after the Paris Commune and were united in 1905 in the Marxian party called the French Section of the Workers International. Belgium and Austria-Hungary had strong socialist parties. After the revolutions of 1848, Marx settled in London, where he lived off his earning as a journalist and the gifts of Friedrich Engels. Marx never stopped thinking of revolution and concluded that revolution follows economic crisis in his 1859 book Critique of Political Economy and in his 1867 book Capital. In 1864, he was instru-mental in founding the First International of socialists, the International Working Men’s Asso-ciation. After, he battled to control the organization and used its annual meetings to spread his views of inevitable socialist revolution. He embraced the Paris Commune and its conflict with the National Assembly as a great step toward socialist revolution, frightening many early supporters and causing the First International to collapse.

2. The general beliefs of mainstream socialists were militantly moderate, or radical rhetoric with sober action. Workers became less inclined to follow radical programs, as with the right to vote, they focuses more on elections than on revolutions. This increases as workers won more benefits. Many workers were patriotic and supported their country. Workers’ standard of living rose after 1850, as higher wages meant better lives. The quality of life also improved greatly in urban areas. Because of their gains, workers were less likely to fight but still de-manded gains, making them militantly moderate. In the early stages of industrialization, modern unions were mostly prohibited by law. In 1824 and 1825, Great Britain allowed un-ions the right to exist but mostly not the right to strike. After Robert Owen’s attempt at one big union failed in the 1830s, new and more practical kinds of unions appeared. Limited to skilled workers, the new unions avoided radical politics and costly strikes and focused on winning better wages and hours for their members through collective bargaining and com-promise. This led to the British law in the 1870s that gave unions the right to strike without being held legally liable for the financial damage on employers. After 1890, unions for un-skilled workers developed and were legally strengthened in Britain between 1901 and 1906.

3. Germany was the most industrialized, socialized, and unionized continental country by 1914. German unions were granted important rights after 1869 and the antisocial law was repealed in 1890, ending their harassment by the government. Socialist leaders were not very inter-ested in unions, believing in the iron law of low wages and the need for political revolution. Thus, by 1895, there were only 270,000 union members in a male industrial workforce of 8 million. With industrialization still going and almost all legal laws eliminated, union member-ship rose to 3 million in 1912. Increasingly, German unions focused on wages, hours, and working conditions rather than following socialist doctrine. The German Trade Union Con-gress officially recognized collective bargaining as desirable in 1899, and when bargaining did not work, strikes forced employers to change their minds. Between 1906 and 1913, successful collective bargaining became important in industrial relations, as in 1913, over ten thousand collective bargaining agreements affecting 1.25 million workers were signed.

4. German trade unions and their leaders were revisionists because they wanted to update Marxian doctrines to reflect the realities of the time. Socialist Edward Bernstein argued in his 1899 Evolutionary Socialism that Marx’s predictions of increasing poverty for workers and in-creasing concentration of wealth in increasingly fewer hands had been proved false. Bernstein suggested that socialists reform their doctrines and tactics and combine with other progressive forces to win gradual evolutionary gains for workers through legislation, union, and other economic development.

5. The German Social Democratic party and the Second International denounced Bernstein’s views, but the revisionist approach gradually gained the acceptance of many German social-ists. Socialist leader Jean Jaurès repudiated revisionist doctrines but remained gradually pro-gressive. Russian Marxists were split over the decision. Russians and socialists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were the most radical, while the German party talking about revolution and reformism. The French party talked revolution and tried to practice it, and the English so-cialist Labour party was committed to gradual reform. In Spain and Italy, Marxian socialism was very weak, but there was anarchism. Socialism was nationalized due to the idea of inter-national unity, explaining why in World War I, almost all socialist leaders supported their governments.

1. Popp described work in the factory as three hundred girls and fifty men working twelve hours a day, receiving little break times, and being paid little. She wrote that many women were sad and deprived. Because their wages were higher than the other factory, Popp and the other workers were envied. All were malnourished and scared of losing their job. She viewed herself as almost rich. Her socialist interpretation of factory life fit well into her job because everyone was exploited at the hands of his or her employers.

2. She was not democratically inclined and favored autocrats. She was nationalistic and sympa-thized with her country. She was sympathetic with the Anarchists and after the Social Demo-crats were accused of murder, she became sympathetic with them. After her brother’s friend explained how various social systems worked, she became a republican and a Social Demo-crat. She saw her suffered because of an unjust organization of society. Her account was like-ly to lead other working women to socialism because they were exploited by the bourgeoisie by not receiving enough wages, having terrible working hours, and experiencing deadly work-ing conditions.