Romanticism 1

1. After the Quadruple Alliance defeated Napoleon, the conservative, aristocratic monarchies moved towards peace. Austria was represented by Klemens von Metternich, Great Britain by Ro-bert Castlereagh, France by Charles Talleyrand, and Russia and other smaller European countries.

2. The measures the Alliance took to protect Europe from future French aggression was to restore the Bourbon dynasty and France’s 1792 borders, unite Belgium and Holland in order to oppose France more effectively, and give Prussia territory on France’s eastern border. However, after Napoleon came back and was defeated at Waterloo, France lost only a little territory, had to pay 700 million francs, and had to support a large occupational army for five years. The representatives saw the balance of power as an international equilibrium of political and military forces that would discourage aggression by any state or against any state. All the victors agreed that they should receive territory for their win over the French. Great Britain had won colonies and outposts; Austria gave up Belgium and territory in southern Germany in exchange for Venetia, Lombardy, Polish territory, and land on the Adriatic Sea; but Prussia and Russia argued over how much land each of them should receive. Tsar Alexander I wanted to restore Poland and rule it. Prussia agreed only if it could gain Saxony. Castlereagh and Metternich feared that would be too much, and turned to Talleyrand to sign a secret alliance against Russia and Prussia. The threat of war caused Russia to accept only a small Polish kingdom and Prussia to take only part of Saxony. Thus, the balance of power was assured and France regained its power status. The European congress system was begun to settle many international crises.

3. Under Metternich’s leadership, Austria, Prussia, and Russia fought to suppress the ideas and poli-tics of the dual revolution from 1815 to 1848. This began with the Holy Alliance that was formed between Austria, Prussia, and Russia in September 1815. After revolutionaries forced the mo-narchs of Spain and the Two Sicilies to grant liberal constitutions in 1820, Metternich called for a conference at Troppau, Austria to maintain all autocratic regimes under the principle of active in-tervention. Austrian forced marched into Naples in 1821 and restored Ferdinand I to the throne of the Two Sicilies, and French armies restored the Spanish throne. The German Confederation in-cluded thirty-eight independent states, with Prussia and Austria, and was where the Carlsbad De-crees were issued in 1819. They required all of the states to root out subversive ideas in their uni-versities and newspapers, and established a permanent committee of spies and informers to in-vestigate and punish any liberal or radical organization.

4. Metternich believed that liberalism had been responsible for the wars in America and France. Liberal demands for representative government and civil liberties had stirred up the middle class, who wanted to impose their beliefs on society and destroy the existing order. He viewed the mid-dle class as stirring up the lower classes. Liberalism was also dangerous because it went with na-tional aspirations. Liberals believed that each people had a right to establish its own independent government and fulfill its own destiny. National self-determinism threatened aristocracy and the empires of central Europe. In Austria, the strong Germans only accounted for one-fourth of the population, and the Magyars of Hungary were not populous in that area. The Czechs were con-centrated in Bohemia and Moravia and there were also Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Ruthenians, and Romanians. The different ethnic groups lived in the same provinc-es and sometimes in the same village, dividing the Austria Empire into areas of different languag-es, customs, and institutions. Napoleon and the French Revolution contributed to the rising na-tionalism that Metternich fought long to repress.

5. The new political ideas of the early 1800s were considered radical because they opposed the old, conservatism. Tradition, a hereditary monarchy, the aristocracy, and an official church were re-jected by radicals. After liberty and equality were achieved in the American Revolution and partly in the French Revolution, they continued to challenge conservatism. Liberalism demanded repre-sentative government and equality before the law. Liberty also included freedom of the press, speech, assembly, and from arbitrary arrest. Only France with Louis XVIII’s Constitutional Charter and Great Britain with its Parliament and historic rights had liberal programs in 1815. Around 1800, liberalism meant no government intervention in social and economic affairs, even if the need for action seemed great to social critics and reformers in what is known as classical liberal-ism. Later, in the modern American liberalism, it favored more government programs to meet social needs and to regulate the economy.

6. Classical liberalism, known as laissez faire, was debated against by the free market proponent, Adam Smith, in his The Wealth of Nations. He opposed mercantilism and regulation of trade and economic activity. He preferred free competition and the invisible hand of the self-regulating market. Competing private enterprises would benefit everyone and lead to general economic de-velopment. Britain relaxed or eliminated old trade restrictions in the early 1800s, leading to con-tinued economic growth in the Industrial Revolution. Businessman embraced these economic ideas and used them to defend their right to do what they wanted to do in their factories. Labor unions were outlawed due to this. Thomas Malthus argued that population would always tend to grow faster than the supply of food, leading to David Ricardo’s law of wages, which stated that because of the pressure of population growth, wages would be just high enough to keep workers from starving. They both viewed themselves as objective social scientists, but they ideas were used all over the Western world to justify opposing any government action to protect or improve the lot of workers.

7. In the early 1800s, liberals favored representative government, but generally wanted property requirements for people to vote. This was limited to only aristocratic landowners, rich business-men, and successful members of the professions. After 1815, some intellectuals and opponents of conservatism believed that liberalism did not go far enough and called for an end to property re-quirements for voting for males. Many people who believed in democracy believed in its republi-can form. They hated the power of the monarchy, the privileges of the aristocracy, and the great wealth of the upper middle class. Democrats want government to be in the people’s hands, re-publicans want government to be in elected representatives’ hands, and liberals want change for the government. Nationalism has three points to it. First is a real or imagined cultural unity from a common language, history, or territory. Then nationalists turn this cultural unity into political reality so that the territory of each people coincides with its state boundaries. Lastly, modern nationalism had its immediate origins in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, where the French had harnessed nationalism during the Reign of Terror to repel foreign invaders and other European nationalists had used to repel Napoleon. In central and eastern Europe, there were either too few states, as in Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, or too many, as in the Italian peninsula and the German Confederation. People were not adequately represented in the few, large states, and people were too weak in the many, small states.

8. Liberalism was almost always connected to nationalism because there was a common faith in the creativity and nobility of people and many believed that people were the ultimate source of all government. Self-government was possible only if the people were united by common traditions and loyalties and thus a common language. Most nationalists were liberals, but there were some cases where they were autocratic. Nationalists often stressed the differences among peoples by comparing and contrasting one people with another, developing a strong sense of “we” and “they” in early nationalism. “They” were normally the enemy and “we” were the oppressed people. In this outlook, nationalists added a sense of national mission and national superiority. Nationalism, while liberal and democratic, was egotistical.

9. Romanticism was a revolt against classicism’s set of artistic rules and standards and the Enligh-tenment’s belief in rationality, order, and restraint. Classicists believed that the ancient Greeks and Romans had discovered the eternal rules of beauty and that all artists should continue to fol-low them. The movement began around 1750, gaining strength until the 1840s. The movement advocated radical reconstruction in cultural and artistic life just like in the French Revolution.

10. Romanticism was characterized by a belief in emotional exuberance, unrestrained imagination, and spontaneity in art and life. Many romantics in the early 1800s lived lives of extreme emotion-al intensity; many committed suicide, dueled to the death, were mad, and had strange illnesses. They had long, uncombed hair and lived in cold garrets. They were not materialistic and wanted to escape to spiritual heights through their art. They believed that the full development of one’s unique human potential to be the purpose of life. They believed in an unlimited universe and yearned for the unattained, the unknown, and the unknowable. Romantics appreciated nature much more than classicists. Romantics saw the growth of modern industry as an attack on nature and sought to escape it. Romantics were interested in the color and diversity of history and wrote and studied it. History was evidence of change over time and not mechanical and static like the philosophes of the Enlightenment had believed. Studying history supported the development of national aspirations and encouraged peoples to find their special identities. William Wordsworth was the leader of the literary Romanticism and his followers were his sister Dorothy and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These writers defied classical rules and elaborate poetic convention and em-braced ordinary speech and simple subjects. They were simplistic and loved nature. They were Romantic because they broke the rules of classicism and emphasized feelings and nature.

11. The three major writers that led to the explosion of French literature in the 1800s were Germaine de Staël, Victor Hugo, and Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin or George Sand. The growth of their writing was inhibited by the strong classicism in France under Napoleon. Staël urged the French to leave classicism and to be spontaneous and enthusiastic. Hugo used rhythm, language, and image in his poetry, and his novels had fantastic characters, strange settings, and human emotions. His plays broke old rules by associating freedom in literature to liberty in politics and society. His shift from conservatism to radicalism was the opposite of Wordsworth’s shift. Sand wrote of romance and social themes as well as of sexual and personal freedom.

12. Literary romanticism and nationalism reinforced each other by seeking a unique greatness in every people to find their own histories and cultures. Romantics focused on peasant life and wrote folksongs, tales, and proverbs, all of which were ignored by the Enlightenment. In eastern Europe, romantics converted spoken peasant languages into modern written ones. Artists painted scenes of freedom and revolution, as in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.

13. Since the 1400s, the Greeks were under control of the Ottoman Turks. However, they were united by their language and Greek Orthodox religion. Nationalism grew, causing secret societies and then the 1821 revolt, led by Alexander Ypsilanti. Metternich and the Great Powers were opposed to all kinds of revolution, refused to back Ypsilanti, and instead supported the Ottomans because if revolutions occurred in Greece, they could occur in the mixed-race Austria, where the minori-ties were much more populous than the ruling people. However, educated Americans and Euro-pean loved the culture of classical Greece and Russians felt obliged to help their Orthodox follow-er. Writers and artists supported the cause. The Greeks fought amongst themselves and on against the Turks, and in 1827, Great Britain, France, and Russia, due to popular demand, forced Turkey to accept an armistice. The Turks refused, the navies of the three countries destroyed the Turkish fleet, and Russia invaded Turkish territory. Modern-day Romania was placed under a Rus-sian protectorate, Greece was declared independent in 1830, and a German prince was installed as king of Greece in 1832.

14. Due to the threat of the Irish potato famine reaching England, Tory prime minister Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 and allowed free imports of grain. The Irish famine occurred be-cause the Irish depended on potatoes for their food, potatoes famines could not be predicted, and potatoes could not be stored longer than a year. There was not a well-developed network of roads and trade capable of distributing other foods in time of disaster. Because of the famine, there were high food prices, suffering, and social upheaval. Widespread starvation and mass fever epidemics occurred. One million people immigrated, mostly to the United States and Great Brit-ain, and at least 1.5 million people died or were not born. The British government acted too little, too late, and they supported landowner demands with armed forces. Tenants were evicted when they could not pay and their homes were broken up or burned.

15. After Napoleon’s first defeat, Louis XVIII enacted the Constitutional Charter of 1814 that was a liberal constitution that allowed for the economic and social gains made by the middle class and peasantry in the French Revolution to be protected, intellectual and artistic freedom was permit-ted, and a parliament with upper and lower houses was created. After Napoleon’s second defeat, Louis maintained the social system and appointed moderate royalists as his ministers, who gained the support of a majority of the representatives elected to the lower Chamber of Deputies be-tween 1816 and 1824. Only about 100,000 of the wealthiest people of 30 million could vote for the deputies who, with the government, made the law. In 1824, Charles X was crowned king, and he wanted to return to the medieval kingdom. Increasingly blocked by the opposition of the dep-uties, he repudiated the Constitutional Charter in July 1830. He stripped much of the middle class of its voting rights and censored the press. Printers, other artisans, and small traders rebelled in Paris, and the government collapsed within three days. Charles fled and the upper middle class put Charles’s cousin, Louis Philippe, on the throne. Revolutionaries were disappointed with the outcome of the 1830 Revolution because they had believed that there was really a revolution but instead it was mostly a coup d'état.

16. Nationalism, social reform, and socialism destabilized the countries. Nationalism called for all peoples to have their own territory to govern. Social reform wanted voting rights to be extending to more people. Socialism called for economic equality by displacing capitalism. Louis Philippe created a bourgeois monarchy that lacked social legislation and was corrupt and selfish. He re-fused to consider electoral reform, and a revolt occurred in February 1848. On February 24, Louis Philippe had abdicated, leading to the proclamation of a provisional republic led by a ten-man ex-ecutive committee and certified by the revolutionary crowd. The revolutionaries wanted a truly popular and democratic republic to reform society. Suffrage was given to every adult male, all slaves were freed in French colonies, the death penalty was abolished, and the ten-hour workday for Paris was established.

17. In the French Revolution of 1848, there were moderate, liberal republicans of the middle class who desired universal male suffrage and opposed any further radical social measures. Then there were the radical republicans and hard-pressed artisans who desired a kind of socialism that advo-cated a combination of strong craft unions and worker-owned businesses. Louis Blanc wanted the recognition of a socialist right to work and for permanent government-sponsored cooperative workshops to be established for workers. The moderate republicans compromised the radicals with national workshops and a special commission under Blanc to study socialism. Thousands of French and even some other Europeans signed up.

18. The middle and upper classes and the peasants were afraid of the socialist revolution. The French peasants owned land, and socialism would take that land away from them. Peasants began to have a universal hatred of radical Paris; they supported the republic strongly and opposed the so-cialists and their artisan allies. After the elections, the clash of ideologies became a clash of classes and arms. The new executive committee dropped Blanc and thus the representative to the Parisian working class. Fearing that their socialist desires would be crushed, artisans and unskilled workers invaded the Constituent Assembly on May 15 and tried to proclaim a new revolutionary state. The middle-class National Guard was sent to stop the uprising, and due to the increasing radicalness of the workshops, disbanded them on June 22. Desperate people rose up in a sponta-neous and violent uprising and created barricades in the streets of Paris. In the three “June Days,” more than ten thousand people were dead or injured, but the republican army under General Louis Cavaignac had won over the working class. The Constituent Assembly made a constitution with a strong executive instead of a democratic republic. Louis Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, won in a landslide victory in December 1848, creating a semi-authoritarian regime.

19. In Europe, there was excitement and eventually revolution after the French Revolution of 1848. Liberals demanded written constitutions, representative government, and greater civil liberties and, when these were not given, revolted, causing monarchs to collapse and give in to the revolu-tionaries’ demands. The revolutionaries collapsed, and the old system was brought back, with most of the concessions surviving. In Hungary, nationalistic Hungarians demanded national au-tonomy, full civil liberties, and universal suffrage. The monarchy denied these, and Viennese stu-dents and workers rebelled in the streets, with peasants disorders breaking out in other parts of the empire. Habsburg emperor Ferdinand I promised reforms and a liberal constitution, with Metternich fleeing to London. On March 20, the monarchy abolished serfdom, causing the newly freed men and women to lose interest in politics. With the urban revolutionaries also breaking down, the artisan workers and the urban poor demanded socialist workshops and universal male suffrage. In March, the Hungarian revolutionaries established an extremely liberal constitution, but they also wanted to form the kingdom of Hungary into a unified, centralized state. The minor-ity groups that formed half the population did not go along and wanted their own political auton-omy and cultural independence. The monarchy played the minority groups into fighting with the new Hungarian government. The conservative aristocratic forces rallied around Ferdinand I, with the archduchess Sophia advocating for the abdication of Ferdinand and the crowning of her son, Francis Joseph. Powerful nobles in the government, army, and church organized around her and on June 17, bombarded Prague and crushed a working-class rebellion there. Other Austrian nobles led the minorities against the Hungarian regime and at the end of October, retook Vienna from the working-class radicals. Nicholas I of Russia sent 130,000 troops in on June 6, 1849, and subdued Hungary, allowing for Hungary to be ruled by the Habsburgs as a conquered territory.

20. Middle-class Prussian liberals wanted to transform Prussia into a liberal constitutional monarchy and lead the German Confederation into a liberal, unified nation desired by the liberals in the re-gion. In March, the artisans and factory workers in Berlin joined temporarily with the middle-class liberals to cause Frederick William IV, on March 21, to grant Prussia a liberal constitution and merge it with a new national German state. The workers also wanted a series of democratic and socialist demands that cause the middle-class and the conservatives to fight back. An elected Prussian Constituent Assembly met in Berlin to write a constitution for the Prussian state at the same time as a self-appointed committee of liberals from various German states established the National Assembly in Frankfurt in May. The assembly debated with Denmark over the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein, even though the provinces were German and Holstein was a member of the German Confederation. When Danish king Frederick VII tried to integrate both provinces into his state, the Germans in these provinces revolted, with the National Assembly calling on the Prussian army to oppose Denmark. Prussia responded and battled over the provinces. In March 1849, the National Assembly finished the liberal constitution and elected King Frederick William of Prussia emperor of the new German state, without Austria and Schleswig-Holstein. However, Frederick William reasserted his royal authority; disbanded the Prussian Constituent Assembly; granted a limited, conservative constitution; and was forced by Austria and Russia to end all at-tempts at unifying the Germans.

21. Mazzini means that certain governments are evil when they manipulate the work of God and try to subjugate people of different cultures against their will. Normally, cultures are separated by geographic boundaries, but some rulers change these by conquest, greedy, and jealousy. The governments are selfish. The characteristics of the true Country are uniform law where law is not restricted by castes, privileges, and inequality and no power or faculties of individuals are sup-pressed or dormant. The best form of government is a democracy where everyone has the ability to change laws so that it can express the general aspirations. Poor workingmen should have been interested in the political unification of Italy because they would be able to express their demands more strongly. A woman today might criticize Mazzini’s program as sexist because he does not in-clude women in the voting bloc. Mazzini would reply that he thinks that women are not capable of being able to understand politics.