A History of Modern Europe

From 1815 to the Present

Albert S. Lindemann

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118321577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XIX

A History of Modern Europe surveys European history from the defeat of Napoleon to the twenty-first century, presenting major historical themes in an authoritative and compelling narrative.

• Concise, readable single volume covering Europe from the early nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century
• Vigorous interpretation of events reflects a fresh, concise perspective on European history
• Clear and thought-provoking treatment of major historical themes
• Lively narrative reflects complexity of modern European history, but remains accessible to those unfamiliar with the field

Part I Romanticism and Revolt

The Seedtime of Modern Ideologies, 1815–40

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The chapters of Part I are somewhat shorter, more general, and less chronological than the chapters of the following four parts of this volume. Chapter 1 takes a bird’s-eye view of the generation before 1815, a quarter-century of war and revolution that deeply imprinted itself on the identity of Europeans, giving rise to “the mystique of revolution” and its associated trinity of liberty, equality, fraternity (major organizational themes of this volume). Chapter 2 takes a much more focused look at the decisions made in one year, 1815, in the efforts to bring order and stability back to Europe, at the Congress of Vienna. Those decisions were contested for the rest of the century (another organizing theme). Chapter 3 introduces additional revolutionary themes, grouped under the notion of “engines of change,” but especially scrutinizes the significance of industrialization and rapid population growth in European history. Chapter 4, the longest chapter, takes up the many formal ideologies or “isms” that appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, two of which, liberalism and socialism, attempted to give more precise or coherent form to the revolutionary trinity mentioned above, in contrast to conservatism, which sought to expose it as fallacious and dangerous. In roughly the same years, a series of “questions” or problems were recognized, which contemporaries believed would be solved in the new world of progress and reason that was dawning. These questions, too, provide organizing themes for European history of the past two centuries, to be given a ­comprehensive assessment in the final chapter (Chapter 27).

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1 The Legacy of the French Revolution

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Europe in the last two hundred years, but especially in the first part of the nineteenth century, lived in the shadow of the French Revolution. That upheaval’s remarkable accomplishments, as well as its destructiveness and shocking cruelties, influenced every European country and left many unfinished agendas: on the left, altruistic hopes and dreams; on the right, bitter resentments and fears.

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France’s Preeminence

In the century before 1789, France had already exercised a pervasive influence over the rest of Europe. The ruling orders of many countries spoke French in preference to their native tongues, and French literature, art, and fashions were in demand everywhere. France was la grande nation (the large/great nation), with the largest population in Europe, around 26 million by the eve of the Revolution. Prussia’s population at that time was under 4 million, Britain’s around 8 million, the Habsburg Empire’s around 11 million, and Russia’s perhaps 20 million. Paris was widely understood to be the cultural and intellectual capital of Europe.

Any development in such an influential nation was bound to have important ­repercussions for the rest of Europe. As the Habsburg statesman Metternich once quipped, “When France sneezes, Europe catches a cold.” In the summer of 1789, France sneezed mightily. Thereafter, it overthrew its existing institutions with astonishing resolve, executing its king and queen, and perhaps 40,000 others, with the new guillotine. It launched a series of military campaigns that before long routed the armies of Europe’s leading powers. In the process, France annexed sizeable stretches of neighboring ­territory and created French-dominated states along those much-expanded frontiers. Although forced back in 1815 into borders roughly similar to those existing before the Revolution, France had by then ruled for about two decades over a large percentage of Europe’s population. Even those not formally annexed into the French Empire were obliged to adjust to laws and institutions fashioned in the French Revolution. The legacy of the Revolution in that sense was particularly enduring. Even in those areas that never experienced direct French rule, the revolutionary legacy was significant, in part because the leaders of most countries found it necessary to copy at least some French institutions in order to survive.

The Changes Made by the Revolution

Politically, the revolutionary period, 1789–1815, is one of daunting complexity, with sudden, violent shifts in revolutionary leadership. By 1795 three succeeding constitutions had already been adopted and then found wanting. Beginning in 1789, a massive, often chao­tic shift in the relative power of various elements of France’s population occurred, away from the monarch and the privileged orders toward the common people (the Third Estate, which constituted about 95 percent of the total population; the First Estate was the Church, the Second Estate the nobility). By late 1791, revolutionaries had introduced a new constitution as well as a ringing revolutionary statement of the “Rights of Man and the Citizen.”

Much confusion and uncertainty marked these first years, but the beginnings of a long-lasting administrative system were being put into place, one that sought to rationalize and centralize the tottering maze of the Old Regime’s administration. The agenda of reform included a new system of weights and measures (the metric system), a new calendar with ten-day weeks, new national holidays, and a new monetary system. Not all of these innovations survived, and most took some time to be implemented. The new calendar was especially confusing, and it turned out to be more than the general population could absorb – so unpopular that it was abandoned after a few years. Today the names of the new months are remembered primarily in the way that the events of the Revolution have been recorded. For example, what is now known as Thermidor, the “hot” month corresponding to July/August 1794, was when the Revolution began a rightward swing, in reaction to the excesses of the Terror. The modern political terms “right,” “left,” “reactionary,” and “thermidorean” all originated in this period.

The Revolutionary Mystique

What is usually meant by the legacy of the French Revolution includes less palpable ­matters: ideals, goals, visions – and nightmares. The revolutionary mystique gripped a significant part of the intellectual elite of Europe with an intoxicating intensity. The shining vision of a transformed human condition affected some Europeans in ways that recall the messianic dreams – and the religious fanaticism – of past centuries. The selfless, heroic revolutionary became a model for significant parts of the restless youth of Europe, in para­doxical ways replicating the idealized Christian saint or crusading knight. The words of the late nineteenth-century anarchist revolutionary Alexander Kropotkin had obvious parallels to Christian symbolism: “The blood shed [in the French Revolution] was shed for the whole human race.” Even those less profoundly affected by revolutionary ardor tended to venerate the Revolution; many believed that its undeniable failures would be rectified in revolutions to come. The usage of the term “revolution” became, again, reminiscent of so many religious terms, oddly nebulous and inclusive, referring not only to measurable political events but also to a vast historical process, beginning in 1789 and marching ever onward. Much of the political life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came down to the question “the Revolution, for or against?” (For a guide to the pronunciation of ­foreign names, such as Péguy, and ­foreign-language terms, see their index entries, as well as the opening note to the index. One of many organizing themes of this volume is the way that European political life may be seen as alternating between what French author Charles Péguy in the early twentieth century famously termed mystique and politique: ­selfless and courageous idealism vs. disabused political calculation and ­cynical careerism, the one following the other inexorably. Péguy is further discussed in Chapter 11.)

Revolutionary reforms played a role in rendering European institutions more efficient and in making the lives of Europe’s common people freer and materially more secure – at least eventually, though not immediately. However, the mystique of revolution turned out to have a ghastly dark side. Political revolutions repeatedly awakened not only benevolent reasonableness but also the vilest instincts of the human heart, both in ­revolutionaries and in their opponents. Political revolutions have produced, from the guillotine of the French Revolution to the concentration camps of the Soviet Union, oceans of blood and unimaginable human suffering.

There was something eerily kindred, in both positive and negative ways, about the mystique of revolution and the mystique of religion. And what an irony – that the carnage of the wars of religion in the seventeenth century turned many, especially among the educated elites, away from religious faith and toward a belief in the power of reason, a belief that seemed to bear fruit, by the early twentieth century, in even more horrific brutalities than religious passion had produced in the seventeenth.

Whatever its similarities to a religious phenomenon, the French Revolution turned against organized religion, the Catholic Church in particular, and against most Christian dogma. Revolutionaries sought to replace the bigotry and superstition of the Church with more tolerant and rational beliefs. They also took the fateful step of expropriating the lands owned by the Church and using the sale of them to help finance the Revolution. That step further alienated elements of an already deeply divided general population, a large part of which held on to its Christian faith and remained firmly attached to traditional ways of doing things.

The Opening Stages of the Revolution

Each year of revolution brought dramatic, unanticipated developments, but the explicit goals of all revolutionaries were to put into practice the ideals of the Enlightenment, which in turn meant abolishing the privileged or “feudal” estates, considered corrupt, unjust, and inefficient. A general guide or motto for revolutionaries was the ­revolutionary trinity: liberty, equality, fraternity. Each was full of promise – and endless ambiguity. Initially, what rallied a significant part of the French people in 1789 was a thirst for “liberty” against “royal despotism.” Yet that goal proved vague and the unity associated with it fragile, based on hopelessly contradictory and self-serving definitions of liberty among the various ranks of the French population. Still, no one expected, let alone planned, what actually happened once the king’s will had been successfully challenged and he had agreed to call the Estates General (a legislative assembly of France’s “estates” or branches of feudal society) for the first time since 1614. The Revolution (a term only later used) emerged haltingly out of a series of poorly coordinated and contradictory protests against the king’s efforts to reform taxation before 1789.

Once the Estates General had met in the early summer of 1789, a process resembling a chain reaction began. Expectations were awakened and various interest groups energized, all facilitated by the king’s indecisiveness and incompetence. A potent mix of angry urban mobs, panic in the countryside, and intellectuals intoxicated by Enlightened ideals – soon intensified by the fear of invasion by foreign powers – produced a series of changes that, even in retrospect, are astonishing in their scope and ambition.

The Causes of the Revolution: Precedents

In the following century, a number of observers, among them Karl Marx, argued that, behind the fog and flurry of events, the Revolution had been the expression of conflict between social classes, with an emerging class of bourgeois capitalists vanquishing the feudal nobility, in the process establishing a new legal order that would allow capitalism to grow unimpeded. Recent historians have substantially qualified or flatly rejected the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, in part because the Marxist concept of social class tends to fall apart under rigorous analysis. However, providing a more satisfactory general theory to explain just how and why it all happened has proven a continuing challenge. Unquestionably, profound shifts in opinion in France had occurred over the past several centuries; practices and beliefs that had been acceptable in 1614 were widely considered unjust and irrational by 1789. One notion in particular had spread into large parts of the population: Sovereignty, or the right to rule, properly derived from the consent of the people rather than from God’s will expressed through anointed kings. In a related way, the intricate network of special rights and corporate privileges characteristic of the Old Regime was losing much of the popular acceptance or veneration it had once enjoyed.

These inchoate feelings about political sovereignty, justice, and rationality had found focus and a model of a sort in the preceding American Revolution, which had evoked much discussion in France and Europe as a whole. The British colonies in North America had successfully fought for liberty against what they denounced as British tyranny. The Declaration of Independence was an eloquent expression of the ideals of the Enlightenment. The Americans, moreover, had adopted a constitution that put those ideals into action. The revolutionaries in America seemed to have demonstrated that a constitutional republic based on popular sovereignty and the protection of individual rights was feasible, in stark opposition to the prevailing belief in Europe that the republican form of government was possible only in a city-state or very small country. Even what came to be termed “the right to revolution,” the legitimacy of violent opposition to tyranny, gained increasing support, though that notion had roots in Christian political philosophy, itself looking back to the thought of the Greeks and Romans.

However, the extent to which the American precedent was relevant for France remained open to question. The British colonies in North America were a remote ­outpost, with a small if rapidly growing population (about 2 million by the last years of the eighteenth century) that was culturally and linguistically homogeneous (excluding its slaves and the native Indian population). La grande nation was ten times as populous as the British colonies, and it faced a range of historically rooted problems that the ­colonists did not, prominent among them what to do about feudal privileges. Feudalism violated not only individual liberty but also the second element of the revolutionary trinity: equality, a word that meant remarkably different things to different people, although the meaning that seemed most widely agreed upon in 1789 was civil equality, or the equality of the individual citizen under a single legal system. That notion was fundamentally different from the Old Regime’s recognition, and sanctification, of legal or civil inequality, according to membership in a hierarchy of corporate entities, ­involving often great differences in material wealth, social prestige, and political power.

The Ambiguous Ideal of Equality

The Old Regime, buttressed as it was by Christian universalism, did recognize equality in one major regard – that is, equality before God, or the equal worth of the human soul in God’s eyes – even if such equality found only the faintest expression in the legal rights of the lowest orders. The universalism of the Enlightenment was perhaps most famously expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s “all men are created equal,” although that, too, must be considered a somewhat cryptic pronouncement, one that stressed a metaphysical equality in “creation” but definitely was not meant to imply a belief in the desirability of social or economic equality. For Jefferson, a wealthy slaveholder, “equality” also did not mean physical or intellectual equality, since he harbored substantial doubts about the equality of those members of the human family coming from Africa.

The civil equality introduced by the French Revolution, for all its seeming radicalism at the time, also had definite and revealing limits. The constitution of 1791, while establishing one law for all adult male citizens, introduced the significant qualification of “active” and “passive” citizenship, with wealth determining who was eligible for active citizenship. Only a small percentage of the male population was finally given the vote. An even smaller percentage were to enjoy the right to hold public office. Ironically, the electoral procedures of the Old Regime in practice engaged a wider part of the population than did the first revolutionary constitution.

Even when the Revolution moved in a more egalitarian direction, as reflected in the constitution of 1793, which introduced universal manhood suffrage, few revolutionaries contemplated measures designed to encourage economic or social equality. Price controls were introduced for a brief period, under the duress of war, as a way to protect the poor, but when François Babeuf, in his notorious Conspiracy of the Equals (August 1796), plotted to seize power and introduce a regime that would actively pursue ­economic equality by distributing private wealth to aid the poor, he was imprisoned and sentenced to death. The notion of giving equal rights to women also found very few defenders during the years of the Revolution. The ideal of equality, then, even more than that of liberty, remained uncertain in meaning and application, an unfulfilled legacy for the following years, one that radical leftists believed “the Revolution” would ultimately clarify in the direction of greater social and economic equality.

It would be anachronistic to speak of the ideal of racial equality in the 1790s; the meaning of the word “race” was still vague compared to the highly charged connotations it would later acquire, but nonetheless most revolutionaries, imbued as they were with Enlightened ideals, professed a belief in human equality, in the sense of the equal worth of humanity’s many varieties or “races.” However, this metaphysical faith did not typically involve a belief in the equal mental and physical abilities of all peoples. Attitudes closely resembling what would later be termed racism unquestionably existed among even the most radical of revolutionaries, but nonetheless the Revolution’s benevolent and optimistic universalism stood out: The “Rights of Man and the Citizen” were proclaimed during the Revolution, not simply the rights of French citizens (or of the French race). Revolutionaries generally opposed the enslavement of black Africans, and non-Europeans born in France could at least in principle become citizens.

Civil Equality for Jews?

There was one non-European group or “race,” the Jews, that might be considered an exception, and the issue of its status attracted much attention. Jews constituted only around 0.1...