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Period 3: Age of Revolutions to World War I: (1815–1914)
Check this flashcard review of all the important dates in Period 3.
3.1: Restoration and Revolution
No institution had suffered as much from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as the Church.
In 1799, Novalis wrote, “Catholicism is almost played out. The old papacy is laid in the tomb, and Rome for the second time has become a ruin.”
The Restoration period saw a remarkable recovery for European churches, both Catholic and Protestant.
States viewed religion as a useful tool to aid in repression.
In England, the Anglican clergy worked in the House of Lords to block parliamentary measures such as the bill in favor of Catholic emancipation and the Great Reform Bill.
In Russia, the Orthodox clergy remained a bulwark of the reactionary policies of the state.
In Spain, the Inquisition was once again allowed to operate following its disappearance during the Napoleonic domination of Spain.
3.2: An Age of Competing Ideologies
Restoration period: A highly ideological period in which ideas inspired either from support or commendation of the French Revolution played a role in whether one was committed to the restored order that emerged after 1815.
This era is also known as the “age of -isms.”
Conservatism
Modern conservatism is rooted in the writings of Edmund Burke whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was widely read throughout Europe.
Two components of Burke’s work were extremely popular in the Restoration period:
His attack on the principle of the rights of man and natural law as fundamentally dangerous to the social order.
His emphasis on the role of tradition as the basic underpinning for the rights of those in positions of authority.
Reactionary conservatism appeared in the writings of such men as Joseph de Maistre.
He’s an émigré during the French Revolution.
De Maistre advocated that monarchs should be extremely stern with those who advocated even the slightest degree of political reform and that the “first servant of the crown should be the executioner.”
Nationalism
Nationalism: It is based on the idea that all people’s identities are defined by their connection with a nation and that it is to this nation that they owe their primary loyalty as opposed to their king or local lord.
Developments like national conscription, the calling of all young men for military service, helped create the idea of a citizen whose primary loyalty lies not to a village or province but to the nation instead.
In the German and Italian states, the desire to rid their lands of French soldiers created a unifying purpose that helped establish a national identity.
Writers such as the Grimm brothers recorded old German folk tales to reveal a traditional German national spirit that was part of a common past, whether one lived in Bavaria, Saxony, or any of the other German states.
Early 19th-century nationalism was tied to liberalism because many nationalists wanted political equality and human freedom to serve as the bedrock for the new state.
Liberalism
The foundation of liberalism can be found in the writings of the philosophers of the Enlightenment:
With their emphasis on the individual’s natural rights;
Support for limits on political authorities through the writing of constitutions; and
The formation of parliamentary bodies.
Liberalism is connected to the events of the early stages of the French Revolution:
With the establishment of the constitutional monarchy; and
Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man serves as a basic foundational document.
Liberals hoped to protect the rights of individuals by limiting the power of the state and by emphasizing the individual’s right to enjoy religious freedom, freedom of the press, and equality under the law.
Classical School
Formed by the early liberal economists.
Adam Smith published his most important work — An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).
Mercantilism: Held that nations’ wealth could be measured only in gold reserves and that foreign trade would necessarily hurt one side or the other.
Smith realized that the true wealth of one’s nation is the labor of the citizens.
Smith presented two revolutionary ideas:
Specialists have natural skills and can produce their specialties better and faster than others. Trade could enrich everyone.
Government price-fixing was unnecessary and counterproductive. They should follow a laissez-faire policy and let individual businesses set their own prices and production levels.
This is the basis of free-market capitalism.
Economics is sometimes referred to as “the dismal science.”
Thomas Maltus argued in his Essay on Population that the population was growing at a rate that would eventually outstrip the food supply.
Factory owners were pleased to read in Malthus a justification for the payment of miserable wages to their workers.
If workers were better compensated, they would produce more children — leading to only more misery as increasing numbers of workers competed for fewer jobs and less food.
David Ricardo asserted that the only way for factory owners to gain a competitive advantage was to offer lower wages, resulting in a steady downward spiral in their earnings — the Iron Law of Wages.
This pleased factory owners because their thriftiness could be presented as if it were actually essential for the public good.
Some writers also began to question certain classical, liberal orthodoxies on the workings of the economy and the role of the state.
John Stuart Mill: He began as a disciple of Jeremy Bentham — who had provided a justification for an expanded role of government by suggesting that governments should seek to provide “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”
Bentham’s utilitarian views were taken further by Mill, who wrote in his Principles of Political Economy that it may be necessary for the state to intervene and help workers achieve economic justice.
Mill’s most famous work, On Liberty, was a clarion call for personal freedom.
Mill was greatly influenced by the feminist thought of his wife, Harriet Taylor.
Inspired by her, he wrote The Subjection of Women, arguing in favor of granting full equality to women.
Socialism
A number of radical Jacobins took the idea of political equality for all and moved it to the next step: economic equality for all through the common ownership of all property.
Utopian Socialists: A phrase coined by Karl Marx — he viewed and felt they offered non-scientific, unrealistic solutions to the problems of modern society.
They believed that expansive possibilities were available to mankind and that poor environments corrupted human nature.
They also believed that capitalism overemphasized production, underemphasized distribution, and possessed other serious flaws.
Early Socialists
Henri de Saint-Simon
He argued that society needed to be organized on a scientific basis.
He argued for the creation of a hierarchical society led by an intellectual class that improved society and a lot of those on the bottom of the social ladder.
Charles Fourier
He created a blueprint for a cooperative community.
It consisted of a self-contained group of precisely 1,620 people living oa 5,000 acres of land.
He hoped to make the workday more satisfying by rotating tasks so that everyone would do the boring tasks but not exclusively.
He thought that because children liked to play with dirt, they should take care of the community’s garbage.
Robert Owen
He blamed the environment for man’s corruption.
In response built New Lanark, a mill town in Scotland, where workers were housed decently and children received an education.
3.3: Political Restoration and Reform
France
Restoration: Refers to the events in France when the Bourbons were restored to the throne following the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.
Charter of 1814: A hastily written constitution—that contained many of the freedoms from the revolutionary period.
It contained no notion of popular sovereignty.
This angered many royalists by confirming land purchases made from nationalized Church property.
Politically, it allowed for a constitutional monarchy with a chamber of peers and a chamber of deputies made up of a very restricted franchise.
In 1820, the son of the younger brother of Louis, Duke de Berry, was assassinated.
Ultra Loyalists: People who wanted to see the revival of absolute monarchy.
They used the assassination to pressure the king to clamp down on the press and to give more rights to the aristocracy.
In 1824, political repression increased after the death of Louis XVIII.
Louis’s younger brother, Charles X, came to the throne.
Charles felt more bitter about the Revolution than his brother Louis had.
He introduced a Law of Sacrilege, which ruled the death as the penalty for any attack on the Church.
In 1829, Charles appointed the Prince of Polignac as his chief minister, who was disliked for being an ultra-royalist.
Polignac issued July Ordinances, which dissolved the newly elected assembly, took away the right to vote from the upper bourgeoisie, and imposed rigid censorship.
July Revolution (1830): It sparked revolutions throughout Europe, and ended with the crowning of Louis Phillipe and the creation of the bourgeois, or July monarchy.
Revolutionary Movements
Spain
King Ferdinand VII had been restored to the throne following the collapse of French control in 1814.
He is restored to honor the liberal constitution of 1812 drawn up by the Cortés — the Spanish Parliament.
Once restored to his throne, Ferdinand dissolved the Cortés and persecuted those liberals who had drawn up the constitution.
In 1820, a rebellion began among army divisions that were about to be sent to South America to put down the rebellions against the Spanish empire.
Austria, France, Prussia, and Russia wanted to intervene to stem the tide of the revolt.
The British refused to directly intervene.
Two years later, a French army acted unilaterally and restored Ferdinand to absolute power.
Italy
A more serious revolt broke out in Naples, a revolt that Metternich labeled as the “greatest crisis” of his career.
Neapolitan army officers, perhaps inspired by French ideas, joined with members of the bourgeoisie and began, with the assistance of secret nationalistic societies.
The revolt led to nationalistic stirrings throughout Italy and to another revolt in the Kingdom of Sardinia, which ultimately came to nothing
Troppau Protocol: Stated that the great European powers had the right to intervene in revolutionary situations.
The rebellion in Naples was put down with the help of Austrian troops.
Greece
Western European liberals looked to the Greek revolt of 1821 to free the “birthplace of democracy” from “Eastern despotism.”
Lord Byron: He sent his own money to refit the Greek fleet and died amidst the struggle in Greece.
By 1827, Britain, France, and Russia organized a merged naval force to engage on the side of the Greek revolutionaries, and the Russians attacked the Ottomans on land the following year.
By 1832, Greece declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire—and became a monarchy with an imported Bavarian prince.
The Greek revolt was also tied to what became known as the “Eastern Question” — what should be done about the increasingly weak Ottoman Empire; the Sick Man of Europe.
As the Greeks were breaking away from the Ottoman Empire, so were the Serbians, who had established effective independence by 1830.
The New Serbia was a small kingdom the size of South Carolina, located north of Greece on the Austro-Hungarian Empire's southern border.
The independent Serbian state strongly promoted nationalism in the Balkan regions of Austria, which ultimately led to the ethnic conflicts and revolutionary movements that started World War I.
Russia
Alexander I had ruled Russia and at various times had toyed with the idea of political reform.
Alexander’s death in 1825 produced confusion as to the succession;
Constantine, the older of his two surviving brothers, turned down the throne.
Nicholas I decided to sat on the throne.
“Decembrist” revolt: It broke out because they wanted to support Constantine.
This was eventually put down with great brutality.
Nicholas I ruled with an iron fist, making certain to stamp out any additional reform movements within his vast empire.
Great Britain
Such fears were realized in a catastrophe in 1819 when a large crowd of 60,000 people gathered in St. Peter’s Field in Manchester to demand fundamental political changes.
Peterloo Massacre: Soldiers on hand shot 11 members of the crowd during the meeting.
Six Acts: Passed by the Parliament which banned demonstrations and imposed censorship.
Combination Acts: They banned union activity.
In 1829, restrictions dating back to the 17th century on the rights of Catholics to hold political office and government posts were lifted.
In 1832, the Great Reform Bill was passed.
It expanded the electorate to include those who had become wealthy.
However, only one in five males in Great Britain could vote.
It reduced the number of so-called rotten boroughs, which were sparsely populated electoral districts.
Poor Law of 1834: It forced the destitute to enter into workhouses where conditions were purposefully miserable to discourage people from seeking assistance.
In 1833, slavery was banned in the British Empire.
Factory Act of 1833: It reduced the number of hours that children could work in factories and established government inspectors to ensure adequate working conditions.
The 1846 elimination of the Corn Laws — which had imposed high tariffs on imported grain to support domestic growers.
3.4: The Revolutions of 1848
On January 12, 1848, there was a rebellion in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies against King Ferdinand II.
The first of approximately 50 revolts convulsed Europe in the first four months of that year.
Emperor Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916)
He relied heavily on military force to subdue all forms of liberalism and nationalism.
Magyars, Slavs, Italians, and Germans would have to wait to see nationalist reforms realized.
Hungry Forties: The terrible decade for agriculture during the 1840s.
The Irish experienced the most terrible conditions, with the Irish potato famine of 1846 leading to the death of one million individuals and the emigration of an additional million out of Ireland.
France
In 1848, a rebellion in France created the spark for revolution throughout Europe.
The wealthy bourgeoisie dominated the July Monarchy. The workers felt they only received little for their efforts.
François Guizot
Louis Phillipe’s chief minister.
He believed that France had evolved politically as far as it should and that everyone who resented their lack of political rights should simply “get rich.”
Louis Blanc
A socialist journalist that led the radicals.
He spoke of the need for fundamental social and economic change.
His supporters successfully pressured the provisional government to set up national workshops to provide jobs for the unemployed.
Outside of Paris, the nation was more conservative, as seen by the national assembly election held on April 23 — elected an assembly made up primarily of moderate republicans.
The election created a government run by a five-man executive committee comprised of moderates.
In May, anger over the election results led to a workers’ revolt in Paris that was quickly put down.
June Days: The termination of the workshops wherein a violent class struggle in the streets of Paris in which 10,000 people died.
It strengthened the hands of the moderate republicans.
In November, felt confident enough to create the French Second Republic, headed by a president who would be elected by a universal adult-male body of voters and who would not be responsible to the legislature.
Louis Napoleon
The first elected president from the election in December, a nephew of the Emperor.
He was able to capitalize on the appeal of his name and made vague promises to aid the embittered workers.
He created a rather conservative government.
In 1851, he assumed dictatorial powers.
In 1852, he made himself Emperor Napoleon III.
The German States
In Prussia, Frederick William IV (r. 1840–1861) had promised to promote moderate reform for many years, but he never implemented any changes.
In March 1848, disturbances erupted in the streets of Berlin — two shots rang out and struck two people.
Frederick became horrified and ordered his army to leave the city — leaving him no defense.
In December 1848, the king did draw up his own constitution, which was rather close to what the assembly had planned.
It allowed for personal rights such as freedom of the press.
It created a two-house legislature with adult-male universal suffrage for the lower house.
This provision was watered down by giving weighted votes to those who paid more taxes.
In Hungary, Lajos Kossuth demanded a constitution that would provide for responsible government for Hungary.
In Prague, a similar revolt called for the creation of a semi-autonomous Czech homeland.
In Vienna, it was under the control of students and workers who demanded freedom of the press, an end to censorship, and also the removal from office of the hated Metternich.
By June, the revolt in Prague was put down by military force.
In November, the emperor was firmly in control in Vienna.
A dispute also emerged over the question of where to draw the borders of the new Germany.
Those who favored the Grossedeutsch plan wanted to see all German lands, united under German rule.
Kleindeutsch supporters felt that the more realistic solution would be to include only Prussia and the smaller German states.
The delegates settled on the Kleindeutsch, and they offered the German Imperial throne to William IV, the King of Prussia.
He did not want a “crown picked up from the gutter” and declined the offer.
This became a lost opportunity to build a German nation under liberal parliament rather than a militaristic Prussian state.
Frankfurt Parliament
On May 18, elected representatives from all the German states gathered in Frankfurt to participate in what they thought was going to be the birth of a nation.
It was hampered by the political inexperience of its participants and by conflicting aims; while all wanted to see a unified German nation.
The Italian States
The revolt that first broke out in Sicily led Ferdinand II to grant a liberal constitution.
Revolts broke out next in Tuscany and Sardinia.
The Papal States even granted a liberal constitution when they saw the revolts.
In the north of Italy, revolts broke out in the Austrian-dominated provinces of Lombardy and Venetia.
This led to a call by Italian liberals for a war of unification.
Charles Albert, the ruler of the Kingdom of Sardinia, took up the banner of Italian nationalists and bombarded Lombardy, only to be defeated by the Austrians.
For Italy, the lesson for the future was that unification would not take place under the auspices of the papacy.
The possibility of the Kingdom of Sardinia serving as the foundation for a unified state improved
Only Sardinia remained constitutional monarchical after 1848.
A final important lesson had future ramifications: The Italians could not eject Austria from its possessions within Italy without the aid of another European power.
Russia and Great Britain
Two nations avoided the turmoil of revolution in 1848: Russia and Great Britain.
Repression in Russia was so complete under the reign of Nicholas I.
In Great Britain (1848), marked the peak year for Chartism.
Chartism: Centered on the belief that the problems of the working class could be corrected by changes in the political organization of the country.
The People’s Charter of 1838, from which the movement received its name, contained six points:
Universal adult-male suffrage;
The secret ballot;
Abolition of property requirements for Members of Parliament;
Payment to Members of Parliament;
Equal electoral districts; and
Annual parliament6s with yearly elections.
In April 1848, a mass meeting was scheduled in London for the presentation of the Charter to the House of Commons.
If the petition were once again rejected by Parliament, the Chartist Convention planned to transform itself into a National Assembly that would take over the government of the country.
In London, there were preparations for a violent conflict, and Queen Victoria was sent out of London for safety.
On April 10, the day of the mass meeting, the situation was tense as 200,000 individuals gathered to sign the petition.
The petition was presented to the House of Commons, but the House refused to even debate the clauses contained in the petition.
Reform did eventually come about in incremental stages; by the early 20th century, five of the six acts of the Charter were established parts of the British Constitution.
3.5: The Industrial Revolution
Historians had formerly placed the beginning of the Industrial Revolution at 1760, when a group of new inventors appeared from nowhere and began to develop factories, bringing an end to the domestic system of production that had guided manufacturing since the early modern period.
Great Britain’s Industrial Lead
Great Britain was the first European nation to begin the process of industrialization.
After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain achieved political stability that encouraged economic investment.
Great Britain permitted a much greater degree of religious toleration.
Britain’s increased population size produced not only a large body of potential low-wage workers for the factories but also a steady supply of consumers.
The Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century, initiated by men such as Jethro Tull — introduced scientific farming to Great Britain.
Crop rotation increased crop yield and boosted turnips and beets, which could feed more animals in the winter.
As a result of the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of cottage industries, England was already involved in manufacturing industries.
Enclosure Acts of the late 18th and early 19th centuries:
It forced small-scale farmers into urban areas, making larger farms more efficient and providing low-paid factory labor.
The increased prosperity of English farms led to an increase in capital that could be used to invest in new industries.
Great Britain also had a central bank that encouraged the flow of money in the economy
The 18th century witnessed a significant increase in Great Britain’s overseas trade.
It provided the nation with the world’s largest merchant marine.
The 18th century also witnessed the height of the Atlantic slave trade.
Transportation within Great Britain was enhanced by the fact that the entire nation lies within close proximity to the sea.
A network of navigable rivers and the creation of canals made water transport efficient.
Turnpike trusts built new roads in Great Britain on a scale not seen since the end of Roman rule.
Great Britain’s two critical natural resources of the Early Industrial Revolution: coal and iron.
The first 18th-century technological advances occurred in cotton manufacturing.
In 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which increased the speed at which weavers could make cloth.
This invention created a problem: cloth could be made so rapidly that it outstripped the supply of thread.
By 1765, James Hargreaves, solved Kay’s problem, by inventing the spinning jenny.
A machine that initially spun 16 spindles of thread at one time.
Improvements allowed it to spin as many as 120 spindles at once.
Richard Arkwright’s invention of the water frame marked the development of the Industrial revolution.
It is a huge apparatus that combined spindles and rollers to create a spinning machine to spin cloth.
By 1770, Arkwright employed 200 individuals under one roof in what is known to be the first modern factory, making a half-million-pound fortune for himself.
Labor-saving was useful because British cloth manufacturing was constrained by labor supply.
Huge thanks to cotton imports and increased wool supply, labor savings actually resulted in more cloth to sell.
Colonization and slavery made cotton imports possible, fueling the Industrial Revolution.
The first factories were built along streams and rivers to harness energy for machinery.
Steam engines made it possible for factories to work on these locations.
James Watt studied the steam pump and adapted it for use in industry.
His invention was the first true steam engine.
He also invented an engine that turned a wheel. This made factories independent of waterpower.
Smelting iron is one of the greatest factors that contributed to the Industrial Revolution.
Iron was smelted traditionally in extremely hot ovens fueled by charcoals.
Abraham Darby discovered a means of smelting iron using coal.
Another important invention in the 19th century Industrial revolution is the railroad.
The first passenger railroad traveled between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830.
By the middle of the century, Britain was crisscrossed with railroad tracks.
that carried passengers and goods throughout the land.
Some of the machines and structures associated with railroads included engines, tracks, stations, tunnels, and hotels for travelers.
Belgium was the first to industrialize, it had a plentiful supply of coal and iron.
The German states were hampered by numerous tolls and tariffs, making the transportation of goods extremely expensive.
To aid in the spread of trade and manufacturing, Prussia in 1834 took the lead by creating the Zollverein.
A customs union that abolished tariffs between the German states.
The Impact of Industrialization
Industrialization replaced the putting-out (or domestic) system, where peasants received raw materials and merchants collected and sold finished products.
Great Britain became the first nation to have more people living in the cities than in the countryside.
The cities that grew from the ground up tended to be awful places for the working poor.
Urban residents had higher mortality rates than rural residents due to poor ventilation and sanitation.
Cholera killed tens of thousands in early 19th-century cities because animal and human feces contaminated the water supply.
Industrialization also affected the family structure.
The family no longer worked together under one roof.
Great Britain’s Sadler Committee exposed that children were being beaten in the factories.
The House of Commons passed the Factory Act (1833), which mandated:
that children younger than 9 could not work in textile mills,
that children younger than 12 could work no more than 9 hours per day, and
that children younger than 18 couldn’t work more than 12 hours each day.
Working-Class Responses to Industrialization
Workers’ traditional way of life was threatened by machinery.
Some of them tried to destroy the machines.
Ned Laud: The workers’ fictional leader.
Luddite: Termed for those who refuse to embrace new technologies.
Machinery also caused hardship for many laborers on the farms.
Captain Swing: The farmers’ imaginary character who righted the wrongs imposed on hardworking individuals by the advent of technology.
Workers sought to create cooperative societies, small associations within a given trade that provided funeral benefits and other services for their members.
Friendly societies were organized as well in the late 19th century which eventually evolved into full-blown unions once the ban on such activities was lifted in 1824.
In the 1860s, unions were allowed to freely operate in France and in Prussia.
Great Britain also took the lead in establishing the first unions that represented more than a single industry.
In 1834, Robert Owen helped form the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, which later evolved into the Trade Union Congress, pulling together workers from disparate industries.
By the end of the 19th century, unions were being formed by dockworkers and other non-skilled workers.
Socialism and Karl Marx
Scientific Socialism: The most significant strand in socialist thought — offered by Karl Marx.
Marx was born in the German city of Trier and eventually received a university education at Jena.
He became the editor of a Cologne newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, but he soon found that his political views were considered too radical by the authorities.
This led Marx to seek the freer intellectual climate of Paris.
The French quickly grew tired of Marx, so he left Paris for London where he spent the remainder of his life.
Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels organized a Communist League to link the far-flung German Socialists who were living in exile.
In 1848, they teamed up to write “The Communist Manifesto.”
It viewed all the history from the beginning of time, an idea that was labeled as historical materialism.
The origin of this idea can be found in the writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
The development of capitalism led to the creation proletariat — a working class.
In what Marx admitted would be a violent struggle by the workers, the state would dominate, but it would wither away when all other classes were eliminated.
Das Kapital: An enormous treatise on capitalism that explains the mechanics by which capitalists extract profit from labor.
First International (1864): Marx founded it to "afford a central medium of communication and cooperation" for organizations seeking "protection, advancement, and complete emancipation of the working classes."
Trade Unionists, Mazzini Republicans, Marxists, and Anarchists were all members of the First International.
Internal conflicts eventually led the First International to dissolve in 1876.
After Marx’s death, Engels helped organize the Second International, a loose federation of the world’s socialist parties heavily influenced by Marxism that met for the first time on July 14, 1889.
3.6: The Age of National Unification
Metternich once remarked that Italy was “a mere geographical expression.”
He could have said the same for Germany, as both countries had several independent territories until the second half of the 19th century, a disunity that dated back to the Middle Ages.
In the late Middle Ages (c. 1100–1500) and the early modern period (c. 1500–1789), the rulers of France, Spain, and Great Britain successfully expanded their authority.
In France, this expansion led to the monarchy annexing Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine.
By the early 19th century, Germans and Italians wanted to create a nation-state to unite all Italians or Germans under one political banner because they shared a culture, language, or fear of foreign dominance.
The Crimean War (1854–1856)
A dispute over who would control access to Jerusalem's Christian holy sites sparked the war.
British and French officials worried that Ottoman weakness was encouraging Russian adventurism in the Balkans and that the Russians could occupy Istanbul and gain access to the Mediterranean.
After the Ottomans' naval defeat, France and Great Britain declared war on the Russians.
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) revolutionized nursing after most of the half-million casualties died from disease in filthy field hospitals.
The war came to an ignominious end after the fall of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol, Russia’s chief port in the northern Black Sea and nearest access to the Mediterranean.
The Russians were reluctant to quit, but the Austrians threatened to join the British and French if Russia didn't accept the peace terms. Russia had to cede Danube River territories and accept a Black Sea warship ban.
Without power in the Black Sea or along the Danube, the Russian navy was trapped in Baltic ports, subject to Swedish and Danish tolls.
The real cost of war was that the Concert of Europe, the idea that the great powers should work together—a concept that emerged from the Congress of Vienna —was finally shattered.
During the Crimean War, the Germans and other Europeans had no sense of unity on such questions.
The Crimean crisis horrified the British public, making them more isolationist toward Europe.
The Unification of Italy
In 1848, Italian liberals made an aborted attempt to create an Italian state.
After regaining power in Rome, Pope Pius IX promoted reactionary policies.
Liberals no longer believed in a pope-led Italian federation.
Risorgimento: The true architect of Italian unification — Count Camillo di Cavour, Victor Emmanuel’s chief minister.
Cavour was more practical and focused on boosting Sardinian power.
He cleverly entered the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in the Crimean War on France and Great Britain's side, earning Napoleon III's gratitude.
Napoleon III also wanted to help the Sardinians because Austria was a French enemy.
Napoleon III also sought foreign military adventures to live up to his famous namesake, which ultimately doomed him.
The war began in April 1859. After defeating the Austrians in several battles, Napoleon decided to end the war before expelling them from Italy.
He was horrified by the conflict's high casualties and threatened by Prussia's Rhine troop buildup to aid the Austrians.
Cavour resigned as prime minister after Napoleon's aborted war and betrayal of the Sardinia treaty, but he returned a year later.
Napoleon and Cavour wanted to unite northern Italy. Napoleon feared a unified Italy would threaten France.
Giuseppe Garibaldi: One of the most intriguing characters in Italian history.
He was a Young Italy member of Mazzini's romantic Italian nationalism.
Garibaldi was horrified by the treaty between Sardinia and France, which required Italy to cede Savoy and Nice to France.
He initially threatened to attack France.
Instead, Cavour advised Garibaldi to invade the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, believing it would be suicidal.
Garibaldi's 1,000 "red shirts" overthrew the Bourbons' incompetent rule in southern Italy.
Cavour was appalled at the prospect of Garibaldi unifying Italy under his charismatic leadership rather than Piedmont's.
Cavour sent troops to Naples to halt Garibaldi.
He wanted the papal lands, so he waited for a popular revolt and then sent Sardinian troops into all of the pope's lands except Rome to restore order.
This was followed by the declaration of Victor Emmanuel as the first king of Italy on March 17, 1861.
Only Venetia and Rome were not under Italian rule after the papal invasion.
Italy took Venetia in 1866 after Prussia defeated Austria.
After the Franco-Prussian War, Italy added Rome as its capital in 1870.
The industrialized north of Italy and the impoverished south remain economically divided.
The Catholic Church's hostility, which banned Catholics from voting in national elections despite widespread defiance, was a major issue for the new state.
The Church did not reconcile with Italy until 1929, when Mussolini returned Vatican City's sovereignty to the papacy.
German Unification
The military and economic power of a unified Germany in 1871 changed Europe's power balance.
The story of German unification is rooted in the Napoleonic era.
Napoleon's rule over large parts of Germany unified Germany and increased German patriots' desire for unification.
Frederick William refused the crown from the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, delaying German unification until the Prussians found a better way.
Prussia's Zollverein gave it economic dominance over the other member states, while Austria was specifically excluded.
Prussia had industrialized while Austria remained agricultural by mid-century.
Prussia was German-dominated, while the Austrian Empire was multilingual.
Prussia enjoyed the services of one of the most remarkable statesmen of the 19th century, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898).
One of the 19th century's greatest statesmen, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), served Prussia.
William fought parliament over military reforms to challenge Austrian supremacy in the German Confederation.
He gave the Prussian army modern weapons to unify Germany.
This plan began in 1864 with an alliance with Austria against Denmark over Schleswig and Holstein.
Schleswig was ruled by Prussia and Holstein by the Austrians after Prussia was easily defeated the Danes in the Danish war.
By 1866, Prussia had allied with Italy and secured a French promise of nonparticipation.
Prussia, under Bismarck's orders, declared war on Austria over a minor dispute over Holstein's governance.
The Seven Weeks' War saw the Prussian army defeat Austria in seven weeks after modernizing.
Bismarck wisely treated Austria with courtesy to keep her out of the next stage of his plan—a war with France.
After the defeat of the Austrians, Bismarck annexed those small German states in the north that had supported Austria in the conflict.
Prussia convinced northern German states to join the North German Confederation.
The states of southern Germany, while remaining independent, concluded a military alliance with Prussia in case of French aggression.
In 1870, Bismarck started the Franco-Prussian War, completing his plan.
Bismarck, who desired war, rewrote the "Ems dispatch," a telegram sent by the Prussian king to Bismarck informing him of his conversation with the French ambassador, to make it seem like the king had insulted France.
On January 18, 1871, William I was proclaimed in the palace of Versailles as German emperor.
The creation of the German Empire completely changed the direction of European history.
France lost Alsace and Lorraine and paid a huge indemnity to the new German state for starting the war.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, this new German state's economic power strained relations with Great Britain and spurred colonial expansion.
Bismarck encouraged the French to build an African empire to distract from Alsace-Lorraine.
All European nations wanted overseas empires.
It advanced their political and economic interests in Europe adjusting to a powerful German state.
Bismarck launched the "Kulturkampf" to control all church appointments and Catholic education, fearing that Catholics were more loyal to the church than to Germany.
In 1878, Bismarck petitioned the Reichstag to ban Socialists' right to assemble and publish.
He also established old-age pensions and other social benefits for all Germans to reduce the Socialists' appeal.
Bismarck ruled at the pleasure of the king, not the people, and his poor relations with Wilhelm II led to less able leaders taking his place, risking his fragile peace with Russia and sacrificing German stability for German glory.
France
The Third French Republic (1870–1940) brought stability, but it had to deal with a divided public.
Louis Napoleon was the only president of the short-lived Second Republic after winning the December 1848 election.
In 1851, after a constitutional dispute with the legislature, he held a plebiscite on whether to grant him dictatorial powers for 10 years.
France prospered greatly during the first 10 years of the reign of Napoleon III.
Government-subsidized credit spurred economic growth during this time.
Georges Haussmann cleared many of Paris's slums and built its wide avenues, transforming the city from medieval to modern.
In 1860, Napoleon made concessions due to the unpopularity of his Crimean and Italian wars.
His liberalization backfired, causing the people to openly disapprove of his rule.
In 1859, Napoleon declared a "liberal empire", making his state a constitutional monarchy.
After the Second Empire fell, France established the Third Republic.
The Republic had to suppress a Parisian uprising that led to the Paris Commune.
Paris Commune: A radical government formed from Franco-Prussian War anarchy.
After killing 25,000 Parisians, the republican government restored order in Paris.
By 1875, the republic had a two-house parliament with a chamber of deputies elected by all male voters and a senate elected indirectly.
Boulanger Affair severely weakened the monarchist movement.
Great Britain
Great Exhibition of 1851: Boasted more than 13,000 exhibitors displaying the variety of British goods that were now available as a result of industrialization.
John Paxton constructed a building with the greatest area of glass to date, which became known as the Crystal Palace.
The Crystal Palace revealed “the aesthetic bloom of its practical character, and of the practical tendency of the English nation.”
The Great Reform Bill of 1832 was only the first in a number of steps that were taken to expand the franchise.
In 1867, under the direction of prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, one of the most remarkable men to ever hold that post, the Second Reform Bill passed, which extended the vote to urban heads of households.
In 1884, during the Prime Ministership of Disraeli’s great rival, William Gladstone (1809–1898), the vote was further extended to heads of households in the countryside.
The rivalry between Disraeli and Gladstone was emblematic of another important aspect of Victorian politics—the evolution of a political system dominated by two political parties, in this case, Disraeli’s Tory or Conservative party and Gladstone’s Liberal party
The long reign of Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901) saw a continuing deterioration in the political power of the monarchy, resulting in the crown’s inability to play a significant role in the selection of a prime minister.
Russia
Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) recognized serfdom as Russia's biggest issue, but Nicholas I was too reactionary to consider reform.
In 1861, he freed the serfs, but they had to pay for their freedom over 50 years.
Alexander established zemstvos, or district assemblies, to handle local issues like education and social services.
Some Russian reformers saw the zemstvos as a chance for greater political freedom, but they were dominated by the local gentry.
Alexander revised the legal system, but he remained an autocrat and saw no need to introduce a written constitution or parliamentary bodies.
His inflexibility on these issues fueled revolutionary groups like the People's Will, which assassinated Alexander in 1881.
His reactionary son Alexander III (r. 1881–1894) took the throne and repressed even the modest reforms of Alexander II.
Austria
The 19th century was not kind to the Austrian Empire, a multinational empire in an age of growing nationalist sentiment.
By 1866, the Habsburgs had lost all their territories in Italy, and their shattering defeat by the Prussians at the Battle of Sadowa made Austria no longer a factor in German affairs.
In 1867, the government in Vienna found it necessary to sign an agreement with the Magyars in Hungary, creating a dual Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Each state was to be independent but united under the mutual leadership of Francis Joseph, who became Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary.
The Magyars, having achieved a measure of independence, turned around and did their best to ensure that the Croats, Serbs, Romanians, and other nationalities located within Hungary were denied any form of self-rule.
The Ottoman Empire
This is most commonly know as “the sick old man of Europe.”
Under Sultan Abdul Mejid (r. 1839–1861), the Tanzimat reform initiative sought to modernize the Ottoman economy and introduce Western ideas like equality before the law and religious freedom.
Western education helped create the liberal "Young Turks."
In 1876, the Young Turks helped establish the Ottoman state as a constitutional monarchy.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909) abolished the constitution to subjugate non-Muslims in his empire.
His policies led to the deaths of thousands of Armenians.
His policies also led to general repression throughout the state.
Ottoman weakness continued to plague the empire up until it sided with the Central Powers in the First World War.
3.7: The Second Industrial Revolution
Steel
Henry Bessemer invented the Bessemer Process in 1856 to produce more steel at lower cost.
William Siemens, a German, developed a better steel-making method that produced a higher-quality product at lower cost.
Steel revolutionized architecture and shipbuilding due to its strength and durability.
Electricity
In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lamp.
In 1881, the first electrical power station was built in Great Britain.
In late 19th-century London and Paris, where public opera houses and theaters grew, electric lights made cities safer and increased nighttime activities.
Transportation
Europe's rail network grew to over 100,000 miles by the end of the century.
In 1869. the French built the Suez Canal.
In 1875, the British took control of a waterway that halved travel time from Great Britain to India.
Steamships replaced clipper ships, which set Atlantic Ocean crossing records.
Trains and steamships using ice-making machines from the 1870s could transport perishables around the world, making the US, Australia, and Argentina major European suppliers.
In 1885, Karl Benz invented a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine.
Until 1908, only the rich could afford cars when Henry Ford introduced Model T.
In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright, bicycle builders, launched the first successful airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Communication and Education Advances
Britain was the first European nation to establish a national postal system, offering penny letters to almost everyone.
Universal public education also encouraged writing.
By 1844, Europe had telegraph lines.
By 1900, Germans made 700 million calls per year after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876.
Some of those calls may have been to arrange social events around new entertainment options like motion pictures, which debuted in the 1890s.
In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph that was perfect for homebodies.
Other developments
The introduction of synthetic dyes revolutionized the textile industry.
The invention of man-made fertilizers led to increased crop yields.
Alfred Nobel's invention of dynamite allowed him to blast tunnels through rock and remove nature's inconvenient hills.
Michael Faraday pioneered electromagnetism and electricity.
James Joule defined many of the laws of thermodynamics.
Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table by arranging known elements by atomic weight and leaving spaces for predicted but undiscovered elements.
In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen made an accidental discovery of X-rays.
Antoine Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity.
The Curies, Marie and Pierre, spent their lives studying radioactivity.
In 1910, Marie Curie isolated radium.
Ernest Rutherford demonstrated that atomic particles had a nucleus.
In 1901, Max Planck proposed that energy was delivered in discrete units, or quanta.
His quantum physics ended Newtonian mechanistic physics.
Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, in which time, space, and movement are relative to the observer.
Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche: Began to question and even to reject the ideas of the 18th-century Enlightenment.
In his most influential work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche famously declared that "God is dead" to break free from traditional morality.
He had to "kill" God because religion was the foundation of Western civilization, which he hated.
Nietzsche hated Bismarck's Germany and wanted the artist-warrior superman.
After his 1900 death, his pro-Nazi sister edited his writings to support Hitler's extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud: The founder of psychoanalysis.
He proposed a talking cure for mental illness by exploring the subconscious.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud believed dreams revealed the subconscious and created a list of Freudian symbols—items or events that appear in dreams that represent unconscious memories.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud questioned the idea of human progress and instead proposed that violence is at the core of our being.
Advances in Medicine
In 1846, surgery changed William Morton introduced ether anesthesia, followed by chloroform a few years later.
Louis Pasteur discovered that microbes—small, invisible organisms—caused diseases.
Pasteur also explained how smallpox vaccines stimulated the immune system to produce antibodies after contact with a weak form of the bacilli.
After Pasteur's discoveries, Joseph Lister used carbolic acid as a surgical disinfectant.
Ignaz Semmelweis, made childbirth much safer for women.
He showed that doctors and nurses who thoroughly washed their hands before delivery could significantly reduce "childbed fever" deaths.
Darwin
Charles Darwin: An English naturalist who traveled on the H.M.S. Beagle to the Galápagos Islands off the coast of South America.
Charles Lyell: Claimed that geological evidence proved that the Earth was much older than the biblical age of approximately 6,000 years.
Herbert Spencer: He first used the phrase “survival of the fittest.”
Social Darwinism: It was used to justify the racist idea that Europeans were superior to Africans and Asians and therefore should dominate them.
Darwin explained change before anyone else.
Darwin believed some members of a species may inherit traits that help them survive.
Darwin called this "natural selection" in On the Origin of Species (1859).
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin argued that humans evolved from simpler life forms.
Social Class in the Second Industrial Revolution
The French Revolution established meritocracy, eliminating birth privileges.
In Great Britain, refrigerated railcars allowed cheaper agricultural imports from the US, Argentina, and Australia.
Competitive civil service and military exams reduced the aristocracy's role in government administration and military command.
"Age of the Middle Class" describes the second half of the 19th century.
During the Renaissance, a different "middle class" transformed society.
That middle class was made up of wealthy, city-dwelling merchants who fell between medieval society's three "estates"—the peasants, the priesthood, and the nobility.
Merchants' money and secular interests advanced Renaissance intellectualism.
In the late 19th century, the middle class was growing.
New and wealthy professions joined the merchants.
They were "middle class" because they were outside the old class system.
Middle-class families had one servant, while wealthy families had large staffs.
In the 18th century, a "Grand Tour" of Europe's capitals was part of a young gentleman's education. Only the wealthy could afford it.
Thomas Cook popularized travel among the middle class by organizing day trips to London's Great Exhibition.
Eduard Bernstein challenged some of Marx’s basic ideas in Evolutionary Socialism (1898).
He and his "revisionist" followers claimed capitalism would not collapse as Marx predicted.
Joseph Proudhon is often considered to be the founder of anarchism.
Proudhon, who coined the term "anarchist," believed that society's true laws came from its nature, not authority.
Anarchism advocated exposing these laws as society's ultimate goal.
Karl Kautsky defended Marx's "laws" and called revisionists heretics.
He said the proletarian revolution would be peaceful.
3.8: Social and Cultural Developments
Religion
After 1815, organized religion recovered from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic era.
After the 1848 revolutions, secular rulers supported religion as a social order fortifier.
Catholicism
Spain declared Catholicism the only religion of the Spanish people in 1851, while Austria repealed Joseph II's late 18th-century reforms of the Catholic Church.
In Rome, a revolution forced Pope Pius IX to flee.
After French troops restored him to power, he issued the encyclical Syllabus of Errors**,** which listed liberalism as a modern error.
In 1870, Pius introduced the controversial doctrine of "papal infallibility," which held that the pope could not err in matters of faith.
Bismarck believed Catholicism could divide Germany because Catholics were loyal to a supranational institution.
Bismarck and German liberals seized Catholic schools and bishops to fight the Kulturkampf (cultural war) against Catholic institutions.
In 1878, Bismarck stopped this harassment because it wasn't working.
In the late 19th century, Catholic and Protestant clergy felt religion should address social issues.
Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) issued Rerum Novarum in 1891, reaffirming private property and condemning socialism but stating that Christians and the Church had a duty to the poor.
In Catholic countries like France and Italy, this message inspired the Catholic Social Movement, while Protestant churches increased their work for the poor.
The Bible as History
In the early 19th century, German theologians studied the Bible as history to find the "historical" Jesus.
In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
Strauss believed the Bible was a collection of early Christian myths that produced a "Christ of faith, rather than the Jesus of history."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Eliot translated Strauss's Life and Ludwig Feuerbach's (1804–1872) Essence of Christianity, which argued that God was a man-made device that reflected our inner divine.
Religion for the Working Class and Peasants
In 1851, a British religious census found that church attendance was much lower than expected and that the working class had little religious affiliation.
In 1858, a French peasant girl named Bernadette claimed she saw the Virgin Mary 18 times.
The Lourdes grotto waters, where she saw the vision, became a religious shrine.
Judaism, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism
In 1858, Great Britain allowed Jews into the House of Commons, and in the following decade, Austria-Hungary and Germany granted Jews full political rights.
Jews were blamed for modern economic trends like the department store, which drove small shopkeepers out of business.
Prejudice rose during the decade-long economic depression of 1873.
Economic resentment was mixed with a new form of anti-Semitism based on Social Darwinist views of Jews as a race rather than a religion.
Germany had anti-Semitic political parties, and the Dreyfus Affair helped create Action Française, a monarchist group that was anti-Semitic.
Hitler lived in Vienna under anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger.
Theodore Herzl appalled by the Dreyfus Affair's anti-Semitism, advocated Zionism.
He founded the First Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897 to achieve his goal of a Jewish state in The Jewish State.
The Rights and Role of Women
This Victorian idealization of the household and women's role in it led to the "cult of domesticity."
Women were supposed to make the home a paradise.
Women were expected to be submissive, pure, and religious because they were in charge of the family's religion.
Books were written to help women manage their households and raise their children.
Working-class women worked as hard as men in factories, homes, and as servants.
Many worked multiple jobs and had little time or energy to read books on raising children.
Middle-class women would visit the working class to teach them home economics.
Mary Mayson Beeton: She wrote the most famous advice book for women during this period.
Her Book of Household Management was second in sales in Great Britain only to the Bible.
Limits to Women’s Education and Work
Women began attending the University of Zurich in 1865 and the University of London in 1878.
Professional societies in medicine and law generally excluded women, creating another barrier for women.
Frances Power Cobbe was one of the first women to work as a journalist and later campaigned against medical vivisection.
Josephine Butler broke a Victorian law by publicly discussing sex.
In 1869, Butler founded the Ladies National Association, an all-female organization that opposed the Contagious Diseases Act, which allowed women suspected of having STDs to be dragged off the street for testing while men were left alone.
Women’s Struggles for Increased Rights
Feminists formed organizations to effect change.
In conservative Greece, a feminist newspaper with 20,000 readers advocated for professional and civil rights for over 20 years.
There was transatlantic cooperation between feminist groups and US feminists.
Clara Zetkin in Germany believed socialism was the only way to free women.
Suffragists, women who peacefully campaigned for the vote, were sometimes overshadowed by members of Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union.
With her daughter Christabel, Emmeline and her Suffragettes heckled political speakers, broke church windows, and set fires.
Suffragettes were arrested and beaten for their threat to society. They were force-fed after a prison hunger strike.
In 1918, women in Great Britain finally achieved the right to vote.
There is an ongoing historical debate over whether the suffragettes or suffragists deserve credit for this monumental achievement.
Cultural Changes
Maria Montessori exemplifies this new woman in Europe at the turn of the century.
Her teaching methods made her a famous doctor and educator.
Birth control, education, and career opportunities opened new doors for women.
In an essay, British novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote that women were now "pointed and they want everything."
Emergence of the Social Sciences
History
Barthold Niebuhr pioneered the use of primary sources in classical history.
His Roman History influenced Leopold von Ranke, who challenged the idea that history revealed a grand design, whether it was God's or secular.
Like Niebuhr, Ranke believed that historical texts were unreliable and that original sources were needed.
Anthropology
The new imperialism led to the sudden expansion of European dominance over large parts of the world.
National anthropological societies were founded across Europe, but due to "scientific" racism of the time, they often studied the "inferiority" of non-Europeans.
Sociology
Sociology, the study of human social behavior, was inspired by governments' growing interest in citizen statistics.
Émile Durkheim held the first chair in sociology at the University of Bordeaux, an appointment that was met with skepticism by the more traditional faculty.
Archaeology
In the 19th century, amateur archaeologists like Heinrich Schlieman, a German businessman who searched for Troy, and Sir Arthur Evans, an Englishman who excavated the Minoan culture of Crete, used scientific methods.
The Arts
Romanticism in Literature
In Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a natural education for a young man.
Romantics praised nature's beauty and mystery. The supernatural also fascinated them.
Folklore and traditional peasant life were romanticized because country people lived closer to nature.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected classical poetic forms by ignoring punctuation in their Lyrical Ballads.
Wolfgang von Goethe
In his epistolary novel Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther commits suicide when his love for a woman is rejected.
Goethe dominated the Sturm und Drang generation of German Romantic writers of the 1770s and 1780s.
Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo's novels like Ivanhoe and The Hunchback of Notre Dame popularized the Middle Ages.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, an English Romantic poet, rebelled against the conservative values found in his country.
In Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama, the mythical protagonist challenges the established order by stealing fire from the gods.
Mask of Anarchy was written as a political protest after the Peterloo massacre.
Lord Byron rebelled against the Ottoman Turks in Greece and died.
Amandine-Aurore Dupin, writing as George Sand, challenged women's oppression. Sand had a famous affair with Frédéric Chopin, who told his family,
In Indiana, a desperate woman is abused by her husband and a self-centered lover.
Sand's pen name, cigar smoking, masculine dress, and affairs with married men defied stereotypes.
John Wesley, an Anglican preacher, traveled across Great Britain and Ireland, preaching to villages, organizing small religious societies, and appointing leaders to continue social change after his departure.
Methodism: A Romantic religion—emerged from this revival movement.
Music
Ludwig von Beethoven changed classical forms by lengthening his compositions and adding a vocal soloist to the last movement.
Beethoven was the first composer to earn enough from compositions and performances to avoid aristocratic or religious patrons.
Franz Schubert invented the lied, or art song, with a solo voice singing a melody to piano accompaniment.
Hector Berlioz set Goethe's Faust to music, which was the first attempt to tell a story without singers or a text.
Frederic Chopin was influenced by the music of the peasants of his native Poland.
Franz Liszt wrote music based on traditional Romani music.
In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev's ballet The Rite of Spring seemed to reject classical ballet with its bizarre costumes, strange dancing, and Igor Stravinsky's discordant music.
Art
Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People captures the stirring events of the revolution in the streets of Paris
Photography was a new art form and a major influence on painting by mid-century.
In 1835, Louis Daguerre accidentally created an image by placing an exposed plate in a chemical cupboard with mercury vapor.
He developed the daguerreotype process to fix the image after several years.
Photography would enter into the mainstream with the introduction of celluloid film.
In the 1880s, George Eastman introduced flexible film and the first box camera, making photography affordable for everyone.
Realists: Those who sought to paint the world around them without any illusions.
Gustave Courbet painted works like The Stone-Breakers that rejected romanticism and depicted peasant life in all its grimness.
Jean-François Millet's The Sowers depicts impoverished peasants who appear to be growing from the ground.
Honoré Daumier is best known for his July Monarchy cartoons that exposed corrupt politicians and legal systems.
The Third Class Carriage: It depicts a group of French peasants, their faces creased from hardship, sitting in an obviously uncomfortable railcar.
Realism in Literature
Charles Dickens used his brief experience in a blacking factory to criticize industrialized society.
In Hard Times, noble workingman Stephen Blackpool fights forces beyond his control.
Mary Ann Evans wrote under the name George Eliot.
In Middlemarch, her most important work, Eliot deals with English provincial life on the eve of the Great Reform Bill.
Her main character, Dorothea Brooke, despite her own beauty, marries an unattractive older cleric named Casaubon in the failed hope that his scholarly ways will broaden her world.
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary marries a mediocre village doctor and discovers that marriage is not as romantic as she thought.
Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina features another beautiful but bored woman who has a disastrous affair.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent 10 years in Siberia after almost being executed for his involvement in an illegal political group.
He wrote Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Émile Zola found himself applying the social sciences to the novel.
He wrote a series of "naturalistic" novels about a family over several generations, showing how environment and heredity caused their moral and physical degeneration.
In his L'Aurore front-page letter "J'accuse," Zola defended Alfred Dreyfus from treason charges.
Post-Realist Art: The Impressionists and Expressionists
Édouard Manet was inspired by the realists, they wished to push their techniques in new directions.
His Luncheon on the Grass shows a rather peculiar picnic, with two fully clothed males and a nude female.
When they were denied entry to the 1863 Salon, Paris's annual public exhibition, Manet and other innovative artists were embroiled in a controversy.
Napoleon III created the Salon des Refusés, or "exhibition of the rejected," after the public protested the hanging committee's refusal to show these paintings.
Impressionism
After Claude Monet's Impression: Sunrise was criticized in 1874, the term "impressionist" was used to deride artists who copied Manet's style.
Impressionists were the first to use outdoor easels to capture light's shimmering effects.
Monet would paint a haystack or Rouen Cathedral at different times of day or seasons to show how light changed it.
Auguste Renoir captured couples flirting in a dance hall.
Edgar Degas painted many ballet backstage scenes.
Paul Cézanne challenged composition, color, and perspective.
His work influenced 20th-century artists, earning him the title "father of modern art."
Cézanne wanted to make impressionism "solid and durable, like the art of the museums."
Expressionism
20th-century Expressionists were influenced by Vincent Van Gogh.
His 10-year career was cut short by suicide.
His style changed after a trip to Paris, where he met several leading artists through his brother Theo's gallery.
The Potato Eaters show his deep sensitivity to the economically struggling.
He painted his most famous sunflower and cypress tree landscapes in Arles, southern France, using bright colors and broad brush strokes to convey deep emotion.
Pablo Picasso, whose nearly abstract Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) broke with Western art's single-point perspective since the Italian Renaissance.
The Scream by Edvard Munch revealed emotions rather than appearances.
Gustav Klimt rejected mass society's values and shocked viewers with vibrant colors or unfamiliar classical images.
The New Imperialism: Colonization of Africa and Asia
The New Imperialism: It is used to distinguish the period from earlier overseas conquests, such as the Spanish conquest of Central and South America, and to describe how European rule changed life in those regions.
Breech-loading rifles, which allowed prone firing, were superior to muzzle loaders used by African gun owners.
Steamships crossed oceans quickly without wind power, and smaller steam-driven riverboats allowed Europeans to penetrate Africa.
The Telegraph reduced communication between India and London to a day from two years at the start of the century.
In 1820, quinine, made from cinchona tree bark, was discovered to treat malaria, a tropical disease.
The new imperialism was built on technological advances. They relied on technology, but it would have failed without the various factors that drove Europeans to conquer other countries.
In the last quarter of the century, Europe raised tariffs, prompting nations to consider colonies as free trade zones.
People traveled to Africa for palm oil, gold, and silver.
Social imperialists saw imperialism as a way to solve domestic issues like overpopulation.
Nationalism also played a major role in empire-building.
European states believed that was the only way to matter globally.
France built an overseas empire to prove it still mattered after its 1870 defeat by Prussia.
Christian missionaries were the first Europeans to enter central Africa.
Balance-of-power politics was the main reason for buying unprofitable land.
Nations sought colonies to deny others.
Cecil Rhodes sought colonial advantage from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo.
Social Darwinism influenced new imperialism. White people believed they would rule Asia and Africa.
"The White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling states that Europeans must "bind your sons to exile/To serve your captives' need," exemplifying noblesse oblige.
At the Berlin Conference, called to discuss Congo control, imperialist nations pledged "to care for the improvement of the conditions of their (the Africans') moral and material well-being and to help in suppressing slavery, and especially the slave trade."
Europeans drew new borders that ignored tribal and cultural differences with imperial territories in the "mad scramble" for colonies.
The Berlin conference regulated colonization.
Bismarck organized nations to prove they had enough authority in a territory to protect rights like trade and transit.
This started the mad dash that left every square inch of Africa divided among the European powers.
Ethiopia repelled an Italian invasion in 1896. Liberia repulsed on the west coast, which remained independent due to its unique historical link to the United States.
After the French left India after the Seven Years' War, Britain took over them.
In 1849, Punjab became British territory.
After the "Indian Mutiny" or "Sepoy Rebellion" of 1857, an administrative structure replaced the British East India Company, centralizing colonial control.
By 1877, Prime Minister Disraeli made Queen Victoria the Empress of India, flattering her and sending a message to Europe about Great Britain's importance to India.
Great Britain was the first European state to practice "informal empire" in China, where a state has significant influence over another nation's economy without territorial or political control.
China gave European states sovereignty over a series of "treaty ports" along the coast after losing several wars with European powers.
Despite Thailand's independence, the French took Indochina and its vital rubber plantations.
The Dutch ruled Indonesia and the US took the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.
After the Russo-Japanese War, Japan took control of Korea in 1910, following Britain and Germany's colonial expansion.
Colonialist Violence
Carl Peters, whom Hitler admired, founded a German colony in East Africa and was known as the "man with blood on his hands" by the locals.
The Belgian Congo was the worst colonial exploitation.
King Leopold II (r. 1876–1909), a pioneer in the scramble for Africa, founded this massive colony many times the size of Belgium and expected to profit from it. Profiteering enslaved, maimed, and killed millions.
After an international outcry, including Mark Twain's sarcastic King Leopold's Soliloquy, the king gave control to the Belgian government, which corrected some of the worst abuses.
Views and Consequences of the New Imperialism
Britain's pro-imperial Primrose League had over a million members, and Germany, Italy, and France had similar organizations with far fewer members.
The Boer War (1899–1902) may have reduced public support for empire in Great Britain, but the working class across Europe seemed uninterested.
In 1882, Britain established a protectorate over Egypt and the Suez Canal to ensure its dominance over India due to European rivalries.
British control over Afghanistan's worthless territory threatened Russia's recent Central Asian expansion and India's security.
In 1898, Britain and France nearly went to war over Fashoda in Sudan.
In 1905 and 1911, France and Germany nearly went to war over Morocco.
Leading German political and military figures felt their country lacked a colonial empire befitting its position in Europe, which contributed to the First World War.
Bismarck once pointed to a map of Europe and said, "This is my Africa," revealing his true interest.
The Society for German Colonization (1884) opposed Bismarck's apathy.
Kaiser Wilhelm II forced Bismarck into retirement in 1890 due to his lack of interest in colonies, which he couldn't stand.
Western-educated colonized people led resistance groups against the colonizers.
The Indian Congress Party, founded in 1885, was the main force behind Indian independence from the British Empire.
Other nationalist movements of the time included the Zulu resistance to the British in southern Africa, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Meiji Restoration in Japan.