Chapter 22: Chapter Outline
The following annotated chapter outline will help you review the major topics covered in this chapter.
Instructions:Review the outline to recall events and their relationships as presented in the chapter. Return to skim any sections that seem unfamiliar.
I. / The Aftermath of the Napoleonic WarsA. The European Balance of Power
1. / In 1814 the Quadruple Alliance of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain finally defeated France and agreed to meet at the Congress of Viennato fashion a general peace settlement.
2. / The first Peace of Paris gave to France the boundaries it possessed in 1792, which were larger than those of 1789, and restored the Bourbon dynasty.
3. / The Quadruple Alliance combined leniency toward France with strong defensive measures that included uniting the Low Countries under an expanded Dutch monarchy and increasing Prussian territory to act as a “sentinel on the Rhine.”
4. / Klemens von Metternich and Robert Castlereagh, the foreign ministers of Austria and Great Britain, respectively, as well as their French counterpart, Charles Talleyrand, used a balance-of-power ideology to discourage aggression by any combination of states.
5. / Napoleon undid this agreement briefly when he escaped from Elba and reignited his wars of expansion, but he was defeated at Waterloo in 1815.
6. / The second Peace of Paris, concluded after Napoleon’s final defeat, was also lenient with France, although this time France was required to pay an indemnity and to support an army of occupation for five years.
7. / The Quadruple Alliance then agreed to meet periodically to discuss common interests and to guard the peace in Europe.
8. / This European “congress system” lasted long into the nineteenth century and settled many international crises through international conferences and balance-of-power diplomacy.
B. Repressing the Revolutionary Spirit
1. / Within their own countries, the leaders of the victorious states were much less flexible.
2. / In a crusade against the ideas and politics of the dual revolution, the conservative leaders of Austria, Prussia, and Russia formed the Holy Alliance, which became a symbol of the repression of liberal and revolutionary movements all over Europe.
3. / In 1820 revolutionaries succeeded in forcing the monarchs of Spain and the southern Italian kingdom of the Two Sicilies to grant liberal constitutions against their wills.
4. / Metternich and Alexander I proclaimed the principle of active intervention to maintain all autocratic regimes.
5. / Austrian forces then restored Ferdinand I to the throne of the Two Sicilies in 1821, while French armies in 1823 likewise restored the Spanish regime.
6. / Metternich continued to battle against liberal political change, and until 1848 his system proved quite effective in central Europe, where his power was the greatest.
7. / Metternich’s policies dominated the entire German Confederation, which comprised thirty-eight independent German states, including Prussia and Austria.
8. / In 1819 Metternich had the German Confederation issue the infamous Carlsbad Decrees,which required the thirty-eight German states to root out subversive ideas and which established a permanent committee to investigate and punish liberal or radical organizations.
C. Metternich and Conservatism
1. / Determined defender of the status quo, Prince Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859) was an internationally oriented aristocrat who made a brilliant diplomatic career as Austria’s foreign minister from 1809 to 1848.
2. / Metternich’s pessimistic view of human nature as prone to error, excess, and self-serving behavior led him to conclude that strong governments were necessary to protect society from the baser elements of human behavior.
3. / Metternich defended his class and its rights and privileges with a clear conscience and at the same time blamed liberal middle-class revolutionaries for stirring up the lower classes.
4. / Liberalism appeared doubly dangerous to Metternich because it generally went with national aspirations and a belief that each people, each national group, had a right to establish its own independent government and seek to fulfill its own destiny.
5. / The multiethnic state Metternich served was both strong and weak—strong because of its large population and vast territories and weak because of its many and potentially dissatisfied nationalities that included Italians, Romanians, and various Slavic peoples, who were politically dominated by a German and Magyar (Hungarian) minority.
6. / Metternich had to oppose liberalism and nationalism, for Austria was simply unable to accommodate these ideologies of the dual revolution.
7. / In his efforts to hold back liberalism and nationalism Metternich was supported by the Russian Empire and, to a lesser extent, by the Ottoman Empire.
8. / After 1815, both of these multinational absolutist states worked to preserve their respective traditional conservative orders.
II. / The Spread of Radical Ideas
A. Liberalism and the Middle Class
1. / In contrast to Metternich and conservatism, the new philosophies of liberalism, nationalism, and socialism started with an optimistic premise about human nature.
2. / Liberalism—whose principal ideas were liberty and equality—demanded representative government as opposed to autocratic monarchy, and equality before the law as opposed to legally separate classes.
3. / Opponents of liberalism criticized its economic principles, which called for unrestricted private enterprise and no government interference in the economy, a philosophy known as the doctrine of laissez faire.
4. / In early nineteenth-century Britain this economic liberalism was embraced most enthusiastically by business groups and thus became a doctrine associated with business interests.
5. / Labor unions were outlawed because they supposedly restricted free competition and the individual’s “right to work.”
6. / As liberalism became increasingly identified with the middle class after 1815, some intellectuals and foes of conservatism felt that liberalism did not go nearly far enough.
7. / These radicals called for universal voting rights, at least for males, and for democracy, and they were more willing than most liberals to endorse violent upheaval to achieve their goals.
B. The Growing Appeal of Nationalism
1. / Early advocates of nationalism were strongly influenced by Johann Gottfried von Herder, an eighteenth-century philosopher and historian who argued that each people had its own genius and its own cultural unity.
2. / In fact, in the early nineteenth century such cultural unity was more a dream than a reality, with an abundance of local dialects that kept peasants from nearby villages from understanding each other and historical memory that divided the inhabitants of various European states as much as it unified them.
3. / Despite these basic realities, sooner or later European nationalists usually sought to turn the cultural unity that they perceived into political reality.
4. / It was the political goal of making the territory of each people coincide with well-defined boundaries in an independent nation-state that made nationalism so explosive in central and eastern Europe after 1815.
5. / The rise of nationalism depended heavily on the development of complex industrial and urban society, which required much better communication between individuals and groups.
6. / Promoting the use of a standardized national language through mass education created at least a superficial cultural unity within many countries.
7. / Many scholars argue that nation-states emerged in the nineteenth century as “imagined communities” that sought to bind millions of strangers together around the abstract concept of an all-embracing national identity.
8. / Between 1815 and 1850 most people who believed in nationalism also believed in either liberalism or radical democratic republicanism.
9. / Liberals saw the people as the ultimate source of all government but agreed with nationalists that the benefits of self-government would be possible only if the people were united by common traditions that transcended local interests and even class differences.
10. / Early nationalists usually believed that every nation, like every citizen, had the right to exist in freedom and to develop its character and spirit.
11. / Yet early nationalism developed a strong sense of “we” and “they,” to which nationalists added two highly volatile ingredients: a sense of national mission and a sense of national superiority.
C. French Utopian Socialism
1. / Early French socialist thinkers saw the political revolution in France, the rise of laissez faire, and the emergence of modern industry as fomenting selfish individualism and splitting the community into isolated fragments.
2. / They believed in economic planning and argued that the government should rationally organize the economy and not depend on destructive competition to do the job.
3. / With an intense desire to help the poor, socialists preached economic equality among people and believed that private property should be strictly regulated by the government.
4. / Count Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) optimistically proclaimed that the key to progress was proper social organization in which leading scientists, engineers, and industrialists would carefully plan the economy and guide it forward by undertaking vast public works projects.
5. / Charles Fourier (1772–1837) envisaged a socialist utopia of self-sufficient communities and advocated the total emancipation of women.
6. / Louis Blanc (1811–1882) focused on practical improvements, and in hisOrganization of Work(1839) he urged workers to agitate for universal voting rights and to take control of the state peacefully.
7. / InWhat Is Property?(1840) Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) argued that property was profit that was stolen from the worker, who was the source of all wealth.
8. / The message of French utopian socialists interacted with the experiences of French urban workers, who became violently opposed to laissez-faire laws that denied workers the right to organize in guilds and unions.
D. The Birth of Marxian Socialism
1. / In 1848 Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) publishedThe Communist Manifesto,which became the bible of socialism.
2. / The atheistic young Marx had studied philosophy at the University of Berlin before turning to journalism and economics, and he had read extensively in French socialist thought before developing his own socialist ideas.
3. / The interests of the middle class (the bourgeoisie) and those of the industrial working class (the proletariat) were inevitably opposed to each other, according to Marx.
4. / Marx predicted that the ever-poorer proletariat, which was constantly growing in size and in class-consciousness, would conquer the bourgeoisie in a violent revolution.
5. / Marx’s socialist ideas synthesized not only French utopian schemes but also English classical economics and German philosophy—the major intellectual currents of his day.
6. / Marx’s theory of historical evolution was built on the philosophy of the German Georg Hegel (1770–1831), who believed that each age is characterized by a dominant set of ideas that produces opposing ideas and eventually a new synthesis.
7. / Marx used this dialectic to explain the decline of agrarian feudalism and the rise of industrial capitalism while asserting that it was now the bourgeoisie’s turn to give way to the socialism of revolutionary workers.
8. / Thus Marx pulled together powerful ideas and created one of the great secular religions out of the intellectual ferment of the early nineteenth century.
III. / The Romantic Movement
A. Romanticism’s Tenets
1. / The artistic change known as the romantic movement was in part a revolt against the emphasis on rationality, order, and restraint that characterized the Enlightenment and the controlled style of classicism.
2. / Romanticismwas characterized by a belief in emotional exuberance, unrestrained imagination, and spontaneity in both art and personal life.
3. / Great individualists, the romantics believed the full development of one’s unique human potential to be the supreme purpose in life.
4. / The romantics were enchanted by nature, and most saw modern industry as an ugly, brutal attack on their beloved nature and on the human personality.
5. / In romanticism, the study of history was the key to a universe that was now perceived to be organic and dynamic, not mechanical and static as the Enlightenment thinkers had believed.
6. / Historians such as Jules Michelet, who focused on the development of societies and human institutions, promoted the growth of national aspirations.
B. Literature
1. / Romanticism found its distinctive voice in a group of British poets led by William Wordsworth (1770–1850).
2. / In 1798 Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) published theirLyrical Ballads,which was written in the language of ordinary speech and endowed simple subjects with the loftiest majesty.
3. / Classicism remained strong in France until Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), in her studyOn Germany(1810), extolled the spontaneity and enthusiasm of German writers and thinkers.
4. / Between 1820 and 1850, the romantic impulse broke through in the works of Lamartine, de Vigny, Dumas, George Sand, and Victor Hugo (1802–1885).
5. / Hugo’s powerful novels, includingHunchback of Notre Dame(1831), exemplified the romantic fascination with fantastic characters, exotic historical settings, and human emotions.
6. / Renouncing his early conservatism, Hugo equated freedom in literature with liberty in politics and society, a political evolution that was exactly the opposite of Wordsworth’s.
7. / Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin (1804–1876), generally known by her pen name, George Sand, defied the narrow conventions of her time both by wearing men’s clothing and by writing on shockingly modern social themes.
8. / In central and eastern Europe, literary romanticism and early nationalism often reinforced each other: The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were particularly successful at rescuing German fairy tales from oblivion.
9. / In the Slavic lands, romantics advanced the process of converting spoken peasant languages into modern written languages.
10. / Aleksander Pushkin (1799–1837), the most influential of all Russian poets, used his lyric genius to mold the modern literary language.
C. Art and Music
1. / The great French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was a master of dramatic, colorful scenes that stirred the emotions.
2. / Notable romantic English painters included Joseph M. W. Turner (1775–1851), who often depicted nature’s power and terror, and John Constable (1776–1837), whose paintings depicted humans amid gentle Wordsworthian landscapes.
3. / Abandoning well-defined structures, the great romantic composers used a wide range of forms to create a thousand musical landscapes and evoke a host of powerful emotions.
4. / The crashing chords evoking the surge of the masses in Chopin’sRevolutionary Etudeand the bottomless despair of the funeral march in Beethoven’sThird Symphonyplumbed the depths of human feeling.