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Chapter

Third Edition

The West: A Narrative History

The West: A Narrative History, Third Edition Frankforter • Spellman

The Age of Ideology

Key Question: Challenging
Conventional Ideas

A wide range of ideological “isms” emerged on the European political scene during the early 19th century.
Spurred by the years of the French Revolution and Napoleon's imperial expansion, these new ideas would shape the attitudes and behaviors of many Europeans, especially those in the expanding middle class.

Key Question: Challenging
Conventional Ideas

How did ideological commitments fuel (and perhaps continue to fuel) political action?

Soldiers Firing on Civilians Revolution spread across Europe during the spring and summer of 1848, but in most cases the established authorities used force successfully to defeat their opponents. The revolutions were led by fragile coalitions between the middle and working classes. Ideological differences weakened the opposition in every country.

The Congress System and the Conservative Agenda

After Napoleon's fall, representatives of the victorious powers assembled in Vienna in September 1814 to adjust the political map of the continent.
Most were members of the old aristocracy—men who were suspicious of liberal political ideas, who viewed the middle class as troublesome upstarts, and who hoped to restore monarchs, especially reactionary ones, to their “legitimate” places of power.

The Congress System and the Conservative Agenda

The “Congress System” attempted a conservative revision of European politics, turning the clock back to a time before 1789 and avoiding the excesses of Revolution in the future.

Prince Clemens von Metternich The leading figure at the Congress of Vienna, Metternich would remain an important spokesperson for nineteenth-century conservatism until he fled from Vienna during the revolution of 1848.

Map 19–1 Europe in 1815 The delegates at the Congress of Vienna dismantled Napoleon's empire and made a wide array of territorial adjustments. The Holy Roman Empire was not restored; instead it was replaced by a new German confederation.

Ideological Ferment:
Conservatism and Liberalism

European conservatives argued that tradition, hierarchy, and corporate relationships were to be preserved and respected.
In their view, the state must be the arbiter of rights on a collective basis, and not for individuals.

Ideological Ferment:
Conservatism and Liberalism

Liberals, by contrast, believed that human beings were individuals who possess inherent rights.
As such, the power of the state should be restrained, but also committed to the development of the rational, self-directed citizen.

The Revolutions of 1830–1832

Liberalism appealed most directly to the aspiring middle class, who became increasingly incensed by the high-handed behavior of the monarchs that was imposed on them by the Congress of Vienna.

The Revolutions of 1830–1832

In a spontaneous uprising in Paris in 1830, clashes between citizens and soldiers resulted in the restored Bourbon king's abdication and the accession of a new monarch, Louis Philippe, who owed his position to the support of the wealthy bourgeoisie.

The Revolutions of 1830–1832

Uprisings elsewhere resulted in the creation of the Kingdom of Belgium, a valiant failed insurgency in Poland against Russian control, and nationalist revolts in Italy, which also failed.

Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People Eugene Delacroix's famed painting dramatized the French uprising of 1830. This painting helped to popularize the image of Marianne, who symbolizes the French nation and the republican values of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Eugene Delacroix (1798–1863), “Liberty Leading the People.” July 28, 1830. Painted 1830. Oil on canvas, 260 x325 cm. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski. Musee du Louvre/RMN Reunion des Musees Nationaux, France. SCALA/Art Resource, NY

The Revolutions of 1848

In the spring of 1848, another series of revolutions swept across the continent in dramatic fashion, threatening the restored regimes of Western Europe and featuring a radical dimension that questioned the legitimacy of all monarchs.
Famine conditions in the 1840s resulted in public demonstrations, violent clashes, and the abdication of Louis Philippe in France.

The Revolutions of 1848

The desperately poor of Paris continued to demand a new social order, and a nephew of Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, restored order with a Republic (which he later overthrew as the Emperor Napoleon III).

Map 19–2 The Revolutions of 1848 Revolution was widespread in 1848. As this map indicates, the call for political reform and the recourse to violence in order to secure reforms was concentrated in Italy, France, and Germany.

Nationalist Revolutions in 1848

In Germany, Austria, and Italy, liberal revolutions were often allied to ethnic or nationalist concerns.
Across Germany, liberal politicians worked to forge a pan-German national parliament under the leadership of a constitutional monarch, but the Prussian king refused to accept a title “from the gutter.”

Nationalist Revolutions in 1848

Polyglot Austria was wracked by internal convulsions along ethnic lines, and revolutionary and republican movements in Italy were suppressed by international intervention.

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) Seen here toward the end of his life serenely dressed in his trademark poncho (a mode of dress headopted in the 1830s and 1840s as a freedom fighter in South America), Garibaldi was a forceful and spiritual leader of the movement for Italian unification, which was achieved, after many conflicts, in 1861.

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) Seen here toward the end of his life serenely dressed in his trademark poncho (a mode of dress he adopted in the 1830s and 1840s as a freedom fighter in South America), Garibaldi was a forceful and spiritual leader of the movement for Italian unification, which was achieved, after many conflicts, in 1861.

Assessing the Revolutions
of 1848

The initial successes enjoyed by revolutionaries in 1848 were reversed by Europe's dynastic rulers once they realized that their liberal opponents did not enjoy broad-based popular support.
The fragile alliance of middle-class liberals, students, and urban workers was undermined by ideological splits.

Assessing the Revolutions
of 1848

Nevertheless, the core of the revolutionary agenda—written constitutions, freedoms of speech and the press, representative political institutions, military units under civilian control—were not extinguished by the failures of 1848.

A portrait of Giuseppe Mazzini, from about 1865

Britain and Reform

The only major European power that avoided revolution throughout the period was Great Britain, but that country also experienced a fundamental transformation of its politics, as the right to vote was extended to members of the commercial and industrial middle class.

Britain and Reform

With the Reform Bill of 1832, property-owning middle-class men achieved the right to vote in parliamentary elections, and the “franchise” would be further extended in 1867, and then to all adult men in 1918.

House of Commons With the passage of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, the membership of Britain's House of Commons began to include representatives drawn from new urban centers.

Key Political Developments in Europe, 1815-1848

The Chartist Movement A Chartist demonstration in 1842. The Chartists were the first large working-class organization in Britain. Their efforts to extend the right to vote and other political rights contributed to the birth of modern trade unionism and socialism in Europe.

The Romantic Movement

Artists reacted against Enlightenment attitudes and aesthetics in the early 19th century.
A concern with individual creativity anchored in the emotions, a stress on the unique and even spiritual nature of the creative process, and a celebration of spontaneity informed by the imagination were the hallmarks of a “Romantic” approach to the world.

The Romantic Movement

Poetry, music, painting, and novels reflected this personalized, passionate, and intuitive sensibility.

William Blake's Jerusalem The visionary poet and artist William Blake was a key figure in the Romantic movement. The Romantics did not share the Enlightenment's faith in reason, instead extolling emotion, spontaneity, and human instinct. Blake spent many years on his prophetic book, Jerusalem in which he created his own mythological world through etchings and symbolic prose.

The Marxist Challenge

The enfranchisement of the bourgeois factory owner, accountant, or lawyer seemed to be of little benefit to the uneducated and unskilled city dwellers who were experiencing the harsh labor conditions brought on by industrialization.

The Marxist Challenge

Utopian socialists believed that a society based on cooperation instead of competition could be secured in a peaceful manner, but Karl Marx (1818–1883) was less confident in the willingness of self-interested producers to ameliorate the plight of their less fortunate workers.

Karl Marx Marx was deeply affected by the human costs associated with the rise of industry, and his socialist philosophy provided comfort to those who looked forward to the end of capitalist economies.

The Communist Manifesto

Marx and Friedrich Engels collaborated in publishing a short tract in February 1848, coinciding with the outbreak of revolution across Europe, entitled The Communist Manifesto.
The work called upon the working class, i.e., the laborers in the new industrial economy, to overthrow the capitalist economic system by force.

The Communist Manifesto

Marx believed that, throughout the course of human history, class conflict stood at the center of material life.

The Impact of Marxism

A conflict between the owners of the means of production and the laborers who were exploited by them would, he believed, result in revolution and a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and that this would happen first in Britain, as it was the most industrialized country in Europe.

The Impact of Marxism

While the revolutions of 1848 failed to achieve their aims, Marx's theory of history was embraced by intellectuals and workers alike, as it seemed to possess the ring of scientific certainty.
His views would revolutionize intellectual life well after his death and would provide compelling explanations for how things worked in the industrialized world.

Key Question Revisited

The ideological struggles of the period 1815 to 1848, born in the French Revolution and its aftermath, would resonate in the conflicts of the late 19th and throughout the 20th centuries.
How did these ideologies come into conflict with each other, especially in their real-world applications?
Did the conflicts among them make them more compelling and more focused?