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Hum 104, Lecture notes 2014, class IV

Chapter 18, Revolution, Reaction, and Cultural Response 1760-1830

There were 3 major revolutions between 1760 and 1830. The first and longest lasting was the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the 18th century, small farm plots were consolidated and enclosed by the wealthy land owners. This made farming more productive. Advances in methods and technology allowed a decrease in the number of workers, so many farmers began moving toward towns. By the middle of the century, conditions pushed England toward industrialization. Population growth created workers and markets. The era of peace and good financial management freed money for investment. Colonies provided raw materials and markets. The biggest changes in moving from an agricultural and cottage industry based economy to industrialization were the replacing of people with machines of production; replacing people and animals as sources of power with water and steam power; and the introduction of new and abundant raw materials such as better coal and iron ore. Cottage industry was basically eliminated. Furniture building, weaving, etc. moved from workers’ homes to factories. Workers moved near the factories and lived in squalor as capitalists had little regard for their needs. Capitalists and workers were at extreme ends of the new social order and relations were strained.

Adam Smith, the Scottish economist, advocated for the laissez-faire (hands-off) system of capitalism. This classical economic system was also advocated by Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo who said that a free market system based on private property would automatically regulate prices and profits to the benefit of all. Smith based his Wealth of Nations on an agriculture and commerce model, but business in the industrial era saw it verifying their activities. Smith argued that the entrepreneurs, because of enlightened self-interest, would get rich but would also raise everyone’s standard of living if government stayed out of business.

Malthus foresaw a world burdened by misery if population continued to grow. Population grows geometrically while he saw food availability growing arithmetically. Hence, war, plague and other disasters were necessary to limit population. His writing persuaded many in the middle classes that laborers couldn’t be helped, because they were responsible for their own thoughtless habits and deeds.

Ricardo wrote in his “iron law of wages” that laborers’ wages would always hover around the subsistence level, and that the workers would never be able to improve their standard of living beyond that. Malthus and Ricardo argued that the working class was inevitably mired in poverty.

The American Revolution saw its first skirmish between British soldiers and colonials, who were upset with taxation without representation, in 1775. The next year saw the Declaration of Independence spell out what the colonials believed a nation should look like. The war ended in favor of the colonies in 1783. The first form of government for the now independent colonies was a confederation. It proved unsatisfactory, and a representative democracy in republic form was instituted by written Constitution and Bill of Rights beginning in 1789. It featured the balance of power first advocated by John Locke (1690) and Montesquieu (1748), and though it applied only to free men, it was the first successful democracy since 5th century BCE Greece.

The French Revolution began in 1789. It was much more a class war than was its American precursor. The peasants, who had no say in their relationships with the aristocracy, revolted. The most violent period of time was 1792-1795 with 1793-1794 known as the Reign of Terror. The Guillotine got much of its fearsome reputation during those years. A moderate republic was formed in 1795, but it didn’t have power enough to overcome the problems of unrest, a moribund economy, etc., so they asked for help from the army. This resulted in the republic’s overthrow by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. In 1804 he became emperor and remained so until 1815. Domestically, he created a code of legal principles. He also invaded other nations initiating the Napoleonic Wars. This upset Europe’s balance of power, and caused other nations to ally against him. His failed attempt to invade Russia in 1812, from which Hitler learned nothing, signaled the beginning of the end. He was defeated at Waterloo in 1815. England’s Duke of Wellington won the land battle 10 years after Horatio Nelson’s English fleet defeated the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar. Nelson was killed during the battle that restricted Napoleon to the continent.

Islam and the West

After 1699s Treaty of Karlowitz, Ottoman rule over most Christians in the Balkans ended. Ottomans were divided between wanting to westernize or to stay true to the Qur’an and Islamic teachings. Sultans struggled to keep the peace at home and fought borderland wars against Russia who was sometimes joined by Austria. Ottoman Crimea was lost to Russia in the late 18th century. Seeing the Ottomans as weakened, Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. It came under French influence and gave them a stage for their successful 20 year effort to take control of Algeria. Greece gained its independence from the Ottomans in 1830 after a brutal 9 year war.

Socially, Neoclassicism ended and Romanticism began. Romantics thought Neoclassicism was cold and artificial. They glorified an unruly nature, unrestrained feelings, and mysteries of the soul. Their art was emotionally unbounded and untamed.

In music Beethoven was the best known composer. He used the classical forms of sonata, symphony, stringed quartets, but made them longer to show feeling.

Chapter 19, Triumph of the Bourgeoisie 1830-1871

The Bourgeoisie were the well-to-do non-aristocrats. The Proletariat were blue collar and under employed citizens, and the two classes would repeatedly clash during the era. Socially and artistically, Romanticism faded and was replaced by Realism. Stories and paintings were about real people and their everyday struggles. Politically, Liberalism promoted guaranteed free speech, but mostly the rules allowed bourgeoisie to be free of the aristocrats. They promoted laissez-faire and the rich got richer while tightening control over the workers.

Repressive policies imposed on France by the Congress Of Vienna in 1815 after Napoleon’s defeat lead to revolt in 1830 (no one learned much from this come 1918). The revolt tossed the last Bourbon king, but the new government became a tool of the rich. Only male property owners could vote. In February of 1848, little revolutions began in Paris that overthrew rulers in many European nations. But armies, aristocrats, and the church rallied together to defeat usually disorganized rebels. Many former rulers returned to power. After the failed revolutions, the idealism of liberals, reformers, and nationalists gave way to the unsentimental vision of politics backed by force known as Realpolitik or power politics. Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon I, ruled with the help of the well-to-do middle class and provided social services and subsidies to the poor.

Otto von Bismarck, Prime Minister of Prussia and future architect of a unified Germany, said that only power could rule.

Britain, reached its apex. A liberal coalition extended voting rights to many more, but it was still required to own some property.

German states tended to reject liberalism and to embrace militant nationalism. There was a real competition between Austria and Prussia for control of central Europe. William I became King of Prussia in 1861 and Bismarck was appointed Prime Minister. In 1866 he united the German states and principalities around Prussia at the expense of France and Austria. Bismarck started a crisis that forced France to declare war. Prussia won and in 1871 the first Treaty of Versailles proclaimed the German Empire and sowed the seeds for World War I.

Industrialization and technology began to shrink the world. Railroads and steam boats connected people physically and telegraph did the same verbally. Advances allowed raw materials and factories to be located far apart. In 1866 a telegraph cable crossed the Atlantic. National postal services started. Steam ships shrunk the oceans, and the Suez Canal opened making trips around the Horn of Africa unnecessary, further shrinking the globe.

Class struggles continued as the rich again got richer and the poor got slums. More white men got to vote, but not all could, and only aristocrats were able to get some government posts. Liberalism advocated for all individuals to have freedom from external controls. People should have written guarantee to freedom of speech and religion. Suffrage and laissez-faire economics were the rule in England, France, and Belgium. They were not the norm in Italy, Central and Eastern Europe, and in tsarist Russia. Liberalism supported bourgeois values, but socialism seemed the way of the future to many workers and intellectuals. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels became authors of the Communist Manifesto which became the bible of socialists. Marx foresaw a revolt by the proletariat and their initiation of a classless society.

Mainstream religions became evangelical. Protestant evangelical movements affected all of the US traditions except Lutheran and Episcopalian. In England Methodists were at the core. All evangelicals focused on being reborn and on sanctification, the redeeming of sinners by the Holy Spirit. The movement became holiness which stressed living right after being reborn. The YMCA, YWCA, and the Salvation Army got their starts then as non-sectarian, self-help programs.

German Christians started to see that the Bible was written by humans and was therefore capable of error and open to some interpretation.

Science also seemed to assail the church teachings. The story of creation in 6 days was more an interpretation than an error. Darwinism was harder to reconcile. Louis Pasteur’s science improved health by honoring the germ theory. He introduced the importance of sanitation and using sterile technique to prevent most infection and much disease. Art moved from neoclassic to romantic to Realism. Bourgeois were not really enlightened, so the liked less refined art. France created the Royal Academy of Painting that certified whether a work met their rules.

In writing Realism began to appear in the 1840s. It focused on ordinary people without idealizing them. Art became a truth instead of cold like Neoclassicism or exaggerated like Romanticism. Hugo wrote of Jean Val jean in Les Miserables. The Bronte sisters wrote Wurthering Heights (Emily) and Jane Eyre (Charlotte). Transcendentalism, which was critical of formal religion, rose in the US. Its adherents felt that the divinity is accessible without it as the Divine Spirit is everywhere in everything. Henry David Thoreau’s most influential work, Walden, is the virtual bible of the green movement. In Russia the Realists, Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Fydor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamozov, were the literary elite. In the US the slave narrative, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas by Douglas broke new ground. A new art form appeared, and it was called photography.