After adopting reforms in the 1830s and the early 1840s, Louis-Philippe of France rejected further change and thereby spurred new liberal agitation. Artisan concerns also had quickened, against their loss of status and shifts in work conditions following from rapid economic change; a major recession in 1846–47 added to popular unrest. Some socialist ideas spread among artisan leaders, who urged a regime in which workers could control their own small firms and labor in harmony and equality. A major propaganda campaign for wider suffrage and political reform brought police action in February 1848, which in turn prompted a classic street rising that chased the monarchy (never to return) and briefly established a republican regime based on universal manhood suffrage.
Revolt quickly spread to Austria, Prussia, Hungary, Bohemia, and various parts of Italy. These risings included most of the ingredients present in France, but also serious peasant grievances against manorial obligations and a strong nationalist current that sought national unification in Italy and Germany and Hungarian independence or Slavic autonomy in the Habsburg lands. New regimes were set up in many areas, while a national assembly convened in Frankfurt to discuss German unity.
The major rebellions were put down in 1849. Austrian revolutionaries were divided over nationalist issues, with German liberals opposed to minority nationalisms; this helped the Habsburg regime maintain control of its army and move against rebels in Bohemia, Italy, and Hungary (in the last case, aided by Russian troops). Parisian revolutionaries divided between those who sought only political change and artisans who wanted job protection and other gains from the state. In a bloody clash in June 1848, the artisans were put down and the republican regime moved steadily toward the right, ultimately electing a nephew of Napoleon I as president; he, in turn (true to family form), soon established a new empire, claiming the title Napoleon III. The Prussian monarch turned down a chance to head a liberal united Germany and instead used his army to chase the revolutionary governments, aided by divisions between liberals and working-class radicals (including the socialist Karl Marx, who had set up a newspaper in Cologne).
Despite the defeat of the revolutions, however, important changes resulted from the 1848 rising. Manorialism was permanently abolished throughout Germany and the Habsburg lands, giving peasants new rights. Democracy ruled in France, even under the new empire and despite considerable manipulation; universal manhood suffrage had been permanently installed. Prussia, again in conservative hands, nevertheless established a parliament, based on a limited vote, as a gesture to liberal opinion. The Habsburg monarchy installed a rationalized bureaucratic structure to replace localized landlord rule. A new generation of conservatives came to the fore—Metternich had been exiled by revolution—who were eager to compromise with and utilize new political forces rather than oppose them down the line. Finally, some new political currents had been sketched. Socialism, though wounded by the failure of the revolutions, was on Europe’s political agenda, and some feminist agitation had surfaced in France and Germany. The stage was set for rapid political evolution after 1850, in a process that made literal revolution increasingly difficult.
The years between 1815 and 1850 had not seen major diplomatic activity on the part of most European powers, Russia excepted. Exhaustion after the Napoleonic Wars combined with a desire to use diplomacy as a weapon of internal politics. Britain continued to expand its colonial hold, most notably introducing more direct control over its empire in India. France and Britain, though still wary of each other, joined in resisting Russian gains in the Middle East. France also began to acquire new colonial holdings, notably by invading Algeria in 1829. Seeds were being planted for more rapid colonial expansion after mid-century, but the period remained, on the surface, rather quiet, in marked contrast to the ferment of revolution and reaction during the same decades.
Romanticism and Realism
The legacy of the French Revolution
To make the story of 19th-century culture start in the year of the French Revolution is at once convenient and accurate, even though nothing in history “starts” at a precise moment. For although the revolution itself had its beginnings in ideas and conditions preceding that date, it is clear that the events of 1789 brought together and crystallized a multitude of hopes, fears, and desires into something visible, potent, and irreversible. To say that in 1789 reform becomes revolt is to record a positive change, a genuine starting point. One who lived through the change, the duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, was even sharper in his vision when (as the story goes) he answered Louis XVI, who had asked whether the tumult outside was a revolt: “No, sire, it is a revolution.” In cultural history as in political, significance is properly said to reside in events; that is, in the acts of certain men or the appearance of certain works that not only embody the feelings of the hour but also prevent other acts or works from having importance or effect. To list some examples: the year 1790 saw the appearance of Goethe’s Faust, a Fragment, of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In these works are found the Romanticist view of human destiny, of the state, of moral energy, and of aesthetics. The remainder of the decade goes on to show that it belongs to a new age; it gave the world Goya’s “Caprichos” and the portrait of the Duchess de Alba, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C Minor (Pathétique), Hölderlin’s Hyperion, the beginning of August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck’s translation of Shakespeare into German, Schelling’s Nature Philosophy, Herder’s Letters on the Progress of Mankind, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, Schiller’s Wallenstein, and Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. These are so many evidences of a new direction in thought and culture.
To say, then, that the cultural history of the later modern age—1789 to the present—begins with the French Revolution is to discuss that revolution’s ideas rather than the details of its onward march during its first 10 years. These ideas are the recognition of individual rights, the sovereignty of the people, and the universal applicability of this pair of propositions. In politics the powerful combination of all three brings about a permanent state of affairs: “the revolution” as defined here has not yet stopped. It continues to move the minds of men, in the West and beyond. The revolution is “dynamic” because it does not simply change rulers or codes of law but also arouses a demand and a hope in every individual and every people. When the daily paper tells of another new nation born by breaking away, violently or not, from some other group, the revolutionary doctrine of the sovereignty of the people may be observed still at work after two centuries.
