IB-2 19-century package(the most essential incidents)The text is taken from fsmitha.com and has been slightly reconstructed by me.
Conservative Order and National Independence
In 1814, the victors over Napoleon gathered at Vienna to create a balance of power in Europe to their favor. The gathering was called the Congress of Vienna. Alexander I, the tsar of Russia, of the Orthodox faith, also wanted an international order based on Christianity, and he talked the emperor of Prussia , a Protestant, and the emperor of Austria, a Roman Catholic, into joining him in what was called a Holy Alliance. Austria and Prussia did not want to offend Alexander, so they joined their kingdoms to Alexander's creation, agreeing with Alexander that the "sublime truths" of Christianity ought to guide relations between nations and guide the domestic affairs of nations. Strong religious conviction, they held, was necessary for maintaining upright and loyal subjects. The rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia agreed that challenges to their authoritarian rule by liberalism and revolution ought to remain suppressed.
Britain, the most liberal of the powers, did not join the Holy Alliance. Viscount Castlereagh, foreign minister of Britain -- the most scientific and liberal of the four powers - dismissed the Holy Alliance as mystical nonsense and thought Alexander to be unbalanced.
The Congress of Vienna was the response to the Napoleonic wars, and for conservatives a response to the godless French Revolution. According to Austria's foreign minister, Prince Metternich, the people of Europe wanted peace rather than liberty. And peace was what Metternich wished to provide them, within a context of what he saw as legitimate rule. Prevailing at the Congress of Vienna was the conservative view of what was legitimate.
Authoritarian monarchies were legitimate. Metternich wanted to restore to the continent the old aristocratic and monarchical order, and empire.(i.e Bourbon and Habsburg)
Asserting what they believed to be their authority, the men at the Congress of Vienna redrew the map of Europe. Belgium was taken from Napoleonic France and combined with the United Netherlands. Austria was given authority in Germany again, except for areas taken from France and given to Prussia -- a junior partner in the new coalition at the Congress. Genoa, Sardinia, Piedmont and Savoy were to be ruled by the House of Savoy, as was the city of Nice. Lombardy (around Milan) and Venetia, in northern Italy, were given to Austria. To compensate Austria for its loss of Polish territory, it was given Slavic territory along the Dalmatian Coast (along the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea, formerly possessed by Venice).
The four powers that met at the Congress of Vienna gave the defeated power, France, a generous settlement of the war. They occupied France until 1818 and restored the monarchy in France -- in the person of Louis XVIII of the royal Bourbon family. Then, in 1818, France joined the victorious nations over Napoleon, making the alliance of four an alliance of five.
In 1815, people across Europe were sick of war and longing for peace. Disdain for upheaval put conservatism in fashion, and people were reviving their religious devotions.
But conservatism was not extensive enough to eliminate disturbances. Subversive liberalism remained on the minds of many. The United States was a nation of liberal repute, and various peoples -- Italians, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Poles, Romanians and others -- dreamed of independence of their own, and freedom from rule by foreigners(which led to nationalistic movements) .
Metternich, the primary architect of the Vienna Accords, realized the threat to his conservative order, and he believed that repression was necessary to hold the enemies of his order in check. He viewed editors, newspapermen and university teachers with suspicion and students with hostility. "Liberty of the press" he described as a scourge.
Relatively liberal Britain also felt pressures. In the city of Manchester people were working fifteen hours a day. There, in 1819, when 60,000 gathered in St. Peter's Fields, listening to a call for universal suffrage, a local magistrate sent a force to arrest the main speaker, Henry Hunt. A melee followed in which eleven of the crowd were killed and others injured. And, in the wake of this, the movement for reform gathered strength.
Reform and Revolution in Europe to 1850
Revolt and Reaction, to the 1830s
In 1823, Austria, Russia and Prussia authorized French troops to enter Spain to re-establish conservatism there. France's king, Louis XVIII, sent an army of 100,000 into Spain and put Ferdinand VII back on his throne. Britain was concerned because it was benefiting from the independence movement in Latin America, and Britain hinted that war would follow if France invaded Portugal or if it became involved in Latin America.
By 1825, Tsar Alexander's religious sentiments had intensified. He left his Polish mistress of thirteen years and returned to his wife, Elizabeth. In August he took Elizabeth to southern Russia for her health and better weather, with the nation believing that he was going south to put himself at the head of the Russian forces gathered at the border of the Ottoman Empire. Elizabeth would die in 1826, outliving Alexander, who died in December, 1825, at the age of forty-eight, followed by a persistent rumor that the victor over Napoleon was just tired of being tsar and was living as a hermit.
In Russia, the old problem of succession reappeared. Officers who had been with the Russian forces occupying France had been exposed to the Enlightenment, and they had hated what they had found when returning to Russia:corruption, censorship, rigid control over higher education, and serfdom. They disliked the military's resort to gross brutality in attempting to instill military discipline among soldiers. They asked themselves whether all this why they had liberated Europe. Around three thousand of them joined together in St. Petersburg's main square, hoping to replace authoritarian rule with a representative democracy. They took no control of anything strategic and were supported by no general rising. Their naiveté became known as the Decembrist Rising, and they were crushed by forces loyal to Alexander's twenty-nine year-old brother, Nicholas.
Fear of contact by Russian officers in contact with the liberal West was to reappear again with Joseph Stalin. Meanwhile, Nicholas I was hardened in his conservatism by the Decembrist Rising. He feared the masses, the nobility and intellectuals. He extended the use of secret police, and, in Russia, fear of informers, arrest and arbitrary police procedures increased.
Revolutions of 1848
By the early 1840s, industrialization in Great Britain was almost three times what it had been in 1800. Industrial production during this period had doubled in Belgium, while remaining half that of Britain. France's industrial output had increased 77 percent in this period, with its per capita industrialization about 35 percent that of Great Britain. Industry in Germany (still only a geographical expression) was beginning to grow faster than it was in France, but per capita production was only one quarter that of Britain and Ireland combined. The Austrian Empire was growing slower industrially than Germany, while railways had just begun to connect a few points within the empire -- Prague, Budapest and Trieste - and Austria's steamships were plying the Danube River. And Italy and Russia lagged behind Austria.
Then progress in mechanization was accompanied by a disaster in agriculture. The faster shipment of potatoes from the Americas, across the Atlantic to Europe, allowed the survival of mold arriving with the potatoes. In the mid-forties, drought, bad harvests and a potato blight in Europe caused food shortages and higher prices. Ireland was especially hard hit, with typhus coming on the heels of the potato blight. Ireland had a population of 8.5 million in 1845; six years later its population would be 6.5 million. In 1845, the number of people leaving Europe for the United States began rising, Germans looking for land to farm, English artisans looking for work in their crafts and the Irish running from hunger -- thousands of Irish dying on the ships taking them to the United States.
People hurt by the harder times rioted in Krakow and the surrounding countryside. Polish peasants armed with scythes and flails killed or mutilated nearly 1,500 noblemen before Austria's troops arrived. In April 1847, people in Berlin were angry over the price of food, and for four days they rioted, plundering stores and markets and erecting barricades against attacks by the kings' military.
In June 1847, Britain's parliament passed the "Ten Hours Bill," which limited the hours of work per week for women and children to sixty-three. Later that year in London, delegates from Britain's Working Men's Association gathered with delegates of German workers -- and international conference of workers initiated by Karl Marx, now twenty-nine, with a Doctorate in Philosophy and a devotion to radical politics in the interest of those who labored in workshops. Most of those at the conference advocated brotherhood. Marx preached class warfare. A "Communist League" was created, with Marx and his associate, Friedrich Engels, commissioned to write, as they did from December to January 1848, what became known as the Communist Manifesto. Marx called himself a communist to distinguish himself from socialists whose politics differed from his. He identified Communists with the interests of working people in general, claiming:"The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement." He claimed that the aim of Communists was the "overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy [and] conquest of power by the proletariat." "The distinguishing feature of Communism," he wrote, "was not the abolition of property in general, but the abolition of bourgeois property." In his manifesto, Marx wrote of communism as a specter haunting Europe, and "all the powers of old Europe," he wrote, had "entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter." In reality, Marx and his communism, were still little known, and the group for whom he wrote the manifesto was tiny.
The Early Risings of 1848(also known as the crazy year)
In January 1848, sixty-one people were killed in Milan protesting against a rise in taxes by their Austrian rulers. And that month in Palermo, Sicily, people rioted. There, people were interested in a liberal constitution and an end to the despotic rule of Ferdinand II (1830-59), king of Naples-Sicily.
The Swiss, in January, were having a civil war. They were divided by language and religion. Regions of Switzerland (cantons) that were predominately Catholic were more conservative and opposed to a politically unified Switzerland. They had joined together into a military alliance called the Sonderbund, which was supported by the Foreign Minister Metternich of Austria and other European conservatives. Others in Switzerland were inspired by the national unity of France and by the United States, and they were interested in national unity and more democracy.
In February, people demonstrated in Paris. Until the 1840s, France had enjoyed a so-called Golden Age under King Louis-Philippe, but hard times had returned. Government feared radicals and made political meetings illegal. The government's refusal to allow a "banquet" to discuss reforms brought workers and students into the streets. They clashed with police and built their barricades with roadway pavement blocks. A demonstrator shoved a burning torch into a soldier's face and violence followed in which demonstrators were shot, and around forty died. Rather than try to crush what became a more intense rebellion, Louis-Philippe abdicated in favor of his nine-year-old grandson and headed for exile in Britain. Parisians invaded the Chamber of Deputies and demanded a republic. The Deputies created a provisional government that was mostly of moderates but with a few radicals, and they declared a republic -- France's Second Republic.
Rebellion in Germany
It took days for news of the rising in Paris to reach cities outside of France, and the news inspired copy-cat risings. Thirty-thousand peasants marched on the seat of the Duchy of Nassau, Wiesbaden, thirty miles west of Frankfurt. For sometime these peasants had been upset about others having been freed from serfdom but not them, and they forced Duke Adolf of Nassau to abolish serfdom. A rising against serfdom came also in Baden and Wüerttemburg, where ruling families had been ignoring the growing resentment of their serfs. The serfs were violent in a way that had not been seen in Germany since the 1500s. The Grand Duke of Baden fled, and in Baden a revolutionary government was founded.
In the eastern part of Prussia's Westphalia, violence erupted among free peasants and the landless, who were angry about the economy, which seemed to them to favor the well-to-do. The violence spread into Saxony, Thuringia and Silesia, where more castle burnings took place. Disturbances erupted also in the cities of Hamburg, Cologne, Brunswick, Munich, and Mannheim, to name a few. There were demands for constitutional government. -- and some admiration for the United States Constitution. There were demands for a people's army (national guard), trial by jury, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship and equitable taxation. In Bavaria, King Ludwig decreed freedom of the press. Tens days later, to appease his subjects, who were angry over his affair with Lola Montez, Ludwig (not quite sixty-two) abdicated in favor of his son Maximilian.
In Prussia's capital city, Berlin, soldiers and demonstrators clashed, and the emperor, Wilhelm IV, withdrew his soldiers to avoid more bloodshed. A great crowd gathered at Wilhelm's palace and demanded that he join them in paying respect to the 303 who lay dead at the barricades. Wilhelm went, and the crowd shouted hat's off, and Wilhelm removed his hat. The crowd then sang an old German hymn, "Jesus is my refuge," after which Wilhelm withdrew. Pressure from the Berliners continued and Wilhelm was compelled to order the release of all of the political prisoners in Berlin jails, and to greet each of those leaving the prison.
One of the hopes among German liberals was a united Germany as opposed to a lot of states run by dukes or petty kings, and a few days later Wilhelm proclaimed himself head of the whole of the German fatherland. By the end of March the desire for unity among Germans was expressed by 600 delegates from across Germany gathering in Frankfurt for the purpose of creating a constitution for a united Germany.
Germany's few industrialists tended to have mixed feelings about the risings. They distrusted the passions of poor people, but they had also been unhappy working under a government bureaucracy that to them seemed out of touch with modern times. They were looking forward to reforms that worked in their favor, while some landowning aristocrats, Otto von Bismarck among them, with their traditional rural values looked down upon the industrialists. Capitalism, complained Bismarck, was enriching individuals but creating a lot of poorly nourished proletarians. Bismarck joined other conservatives around Emperor Wilhelm in urging a counter revolution.
Liberal intellectuals were also attacking capitalism, complaining that machines should be freeing men from animal servitude rather than fashioning workers "to a terrible bondage." They advocated government enforced reductions in work hours, the banning of child labor, subsidizing decent housing for workers, sickness and disability programs for workers and public education.
Rising in Vienna
In Vienna,10,000 factory workers had recently been laid off. Students there favored democracy and civil liberties, and they joined forces with the unemployed workers. On March 12, 1848, a crowd of demonstrating workers and students was fired upon, and this unleashed a popular rising. Barricades went up, and the municipal guard went over to the side of the rebellion. Austria had been ruled largely a State Council, consisting of Metternich and four others. It was against Metternich, the State Council and the police that the rebels voiced their wrath -- not their Habsburg king, Ferdinand I. Workers and students stormed through the imperial palace, and a terrified and scornful Metternich, not quite seventy-five, went into exile in England.
King Ferdinand accommodated the rebels. On March 15, his proclamation read:
We, Ferdinand the First, by the grace of God, Emperor of Austria, king of Hungary and Bohemia ... have adopted such measures as we have recognized as necessary to fulfill the wishes of our loyal people.
King Ferdinand promised to provide his subjects with a constitution, and people spoke of the coming constitution with joy. People were delighted by the thought of an end to police intimidation and censorship. Professors were enthusiastic about an end to restrictions and police spying. For a few days people danced, sang, wined and paraded in the streets. It was as if the Viennese were one happy family, including the city's Jews. Princess Sophia was outraged at the weakness of her father-in-law, the king, and outraged at what she called the "liberal stupidities" of king Wilhelm in Berlin.