AP European History

Barron’s

Reaction and Revolutions

Overview

The period from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the Revolutions of 1848 is often referred to by historians as the “Age of Metternich.” Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859) personified the spirit of reaction that followed a quarter-century of revolution and war. Chancellor of Habsburg Austria and one of the chief participants at the Congress of Vienna, Metternich and others who shared his desire to preserve monarchy and the status quo, designed a Continental balance of power all over Europe that would for the most part preserve the peace for a century (until the First World War) but was challenged in 1848 and seemed it would burst at the seams. Metternich was a tall, handsome man whose charm worked equally well on his fellow diplomats and on the elegant ladies of Vienna. He was the prototype of conservatism in leadership style for European ministers. He spoke five languages fluently, thought of himself as a European, not as a citizen of any single country, and once said “Europe has for a long time held for me the significance of a fatherland.” Early in his career, Metternich linked himself to the Habsburgs and became Austria’s foreign minister, an office he held for 39 years. Because of his immense influence on European politics, these years are often called the Age of Metternich. He felt liberals were imposing their views on society, mostly motivated by their nationalist self-determination ideals-a position that threatened Austria because of its diverse and large population.

During the Age of Metternich, two great nations developed the basis for modern constitutional democracy. Britain continued its democratization through the perpetuation of the unique and stabilizing evolutionary process that represented the interests in government of more and more of its populace. France, on the other hand, experienced destabilizing seesaw battles between reaction and radicalism. Volatile business cycles in the last quarter of the nineteenth century led corporations and governments to try to manage the market through monopolies, banking practices,· and tariffs. The processes continued through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth until the British and the Germans,· (along with brave examples set by the Scandinavian nations) had established the foundations for modern welfare states by the 1930s.

Three nations that played important roles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Germany, Austria, and Russia-suppressed the democratic urges of significant elements of their populations. In Germany, the move toward unification of the varied and independent states fell out of the hands of the constitutionalists and into those of Prussian militarists. In Austria, the Germanic Habsburg rulers continued to suppress the move toward autonomy of the polyglot nationalities that made up the empire. In Russia, sporadic attempts at reform and modernization were consumed by the ruling class’s obsession with Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism.”

The Growth of Democracy

Britain

The ideals and promises of the French Revolution and a growing but poverty-stricken working class shook the foundations of stability in Europe’s greatest emerging democracy. Parliament, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, represented the interests of aristocrats and the wealthy.

• • The Corn Laws of 1815 effectively raised prices at a time when Europe was war tom because importation of foreign grain was prohibited until the price rose above 80 shillings per quarter-ton, benefitting the land owners who ran Parliament.
  • ○ This resulted in many riots and political unrest as food prices rose for the poor.
  • ○ The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846 in large part because of the actions of the Anti-Com Law League, which convinced Prime Minister Robert Peel and some of his Tory party (the conservative party) members to do what was “right for Britain rather than their personal interests.” Free import of grain was again allowed.
  • ○ By the 1820s, though, new and younger leaders of the Tories implemented reforms such as restructuring the penal code, providing for a modem police force, allowing membership in labor unions, and granting Catholics basic civil rights.
• • By 1830, when abortive revolutions had broken out all over the Continent, the House of Commons, the lower chamber of Parliament, had not been reapportioned since 1688.
  • ○ Many of the boroughs that elected representatives to Parliament in fact no longer existed, while large and growing industrial cities had no representation at all.
  • ○ The Great Reform Bill, 1832, abolished the rotten boroughs, expanded the electorate, and empowered the industrial middle class.
• • The Chartist movement, representing demands by radical working-class activists, sought an array of reforms from 1838 into the late 1840s.
  • ○ It advocated universal male suffrage, a secret voting ballot, “one man, one vote” representation in Parliament, abolition of property qualifications for public office, and public education for all classes.
  • ○ Although its program failed during the decade of its existence, all of its features were eventually incorporated into British society.
• • When the discontent of the working class on the Continent exploded during the Revolutions of 1848, the British proletariat was able to trust in its government’s capacity to make gradual reforms.

France

During the Age of Metternich (the period of reaction after the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which ended with the Continent-wide Revolutions of 1848), France was ruled by Bourbon reactionaries and a “bourgeois” king whose watered-down constitutions excluded the expanding proletariat from representation. After the upheavals of 1848, a self-styled emperor, a relative of Napoleon, took the French throne.

• • When Bourbon Louis XVIII (r. 1814-1824), a brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, was restored to the throne in 1814, he issued a constitution but gave power to only a small class of landowners and rich bourgeois.
• • Absolutist pretenses were continued with his successor and younger brother, Charles X (r. 1824-1830), whose repressive measures led to rioting in Paris and the abdication of Charles in the summer of 1830, a year when abortive insurrections broke out all over Europe.
  • ○ Charles’s abdication caused a rift between radicals, who ~anted to establish a republic, and bourgeoisie, who wanted the stability of a monarchy.
  • ○ Through the intercession of the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution, Louis Phillipe (r. 1830-1848), an aristocrat, became the “bourgeoisie king” by agreeing to honor the Constitution of 1814. His reign empowered the bourgeoisie but left the proletariat unrepresented.
  • ○ Known as the July Revolution, this insurrection in 1830 included the Three Glorious Days of July 27-29 in which students were massacred and the bourgeois king was placed upon the throne, resulting in no gains for the movement. This vain revolution was glorified in great French works such as Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.
• • Rampant corruption in the government of Louis Phillipe incited republican and socialist protests, which erupted in violence and led to his abdication in February 1848, another year that saw mostly abortive insurrections all over Europe.
  • ○ The Chamber o/Deputies, the lower house of the two-chamber French legislature that was created in 1814 by Louis XVIII’s constitution, was pressured by Parisian mobs to proclaim a republic and to name a provisional government that would rule temporarily until a Constituent Assembly could be elected to draft a new constitution.
  • ○ When the provinces-the countryside outside the large cities-elected a largely conservative Constituent Assembly, conflicts between the government and socialist and radical workers erupted into bloody class battles on the streets of Paris by early summer 1848.
• • The June Days Uprising was an uprising staged by the workers of France in response to plans to close the National Workshops, created by the Second Republic to provide work and a source, of income for the unemployed. The National Guard, led by General Louis Eugene Cavaignac, was called out to quell the protests and over 10,000 people were either killed or injured, while 4,000 more were deported to Algeria.
  • ○ Frightened by the threat of a radical takeover, the Constituent Assembly brutally suppressed the riots, then established the single-chambered Legislative Assembly and a strong president, both to be elected by universal male suffrage.
• • Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (r. 1848-1870), Napoleon’s nephew, was elected president of the Second Republic (The First Republic had been established in 1792, during the French Revolution).
  • ○ He dedicated his presidency to law and order, to the eradication of socialism and radicalism, and to the interests of the conservative classes: the Church, the army, property-owners, and business.
  • ○ Through a political ploy, he was able to discredit many members of the Legislative Assembly, win a landslide re-election, and proclaim himself in 1852 as Emperor Napoleon III of the Second French Empire. (His uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, had crowned himself emperor in 1804.)
  • ○ While the Second Empire was not an absolutist government, it was an autocracy.
  • ○ Napoleon III controlled finances and initiated legislation.
  • ○ He was immensely popular in the early years of his reign because of his internal improvements, highway, canal, and railroad construction, and because of his subsidies to industry and his stimulation of the economy.
  • ○ The bourgeoisie was grateful for the general prosperity; the proletariat was appreciative of employment and the right to organize unions.
  • ○ During the Liberal Empire (1860-1870), he eased censorship and granted amnesty to political prisoners.
  • ○ Foreign affairs were his downfall.

By the early part of the twentieth century, Britain and France had evolved into two of the world’s three most powerful democracies, the United States being the third. The old liberalism of laissez-faire government had been replaced by a new liberalism that supported the extension of suffrage and the improvement of living conditions for all citizens.

The Suppression of Democracy

Germany Through the Age of Metternich (1815-1848)

The Congress of Vienna had set up a Germanic Confederation of the 39 independent German states that existed after the fall of Napoleon, which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire once and for all.

• • Radical student organizations, Burschenschafts, which were dedicated to the creation of a unified Germany that would be governed by constitutional principles, organized a national convention in 1817 and, in 1819, attempted the assassination of reactionary politicians.
• • In 1819, Metternich issued the infamous Carlsbad Decrees, which were anti-subversive laws designed to get the liberals out of Austria, its press, and the universities.
  • ○ He had a state secret police and attempted to control what was published and what was discussed at universities. The Carlsbad Diet drove liberalism and nationalism underground.
• • Although the reactionary forces in Germany quickly put down the Revolutions of 1830, Prussia set up an economic union of 17 German states, the Zollverein, which eliminated internal tariffs and set the tone for greater union.

The Age of Metternich Ended in the Revolutions of 1848

• • Every nation in Europe save the most advanced, Britain, and the least advanced, Russia, experienced revolutions.
• • This year saw Metternich flee Austria during the Continent-wide uprisings.
• • Proved what Mary Wollstonecraft had said in reference to the oppression of women: “The bow that is bent twice as far snaps back twice as hard.”
• • The revolutions ended in failure for the most part because the political conditions after the revolutions were unchanged from what they had been before the revolutions for the most part.
• • The Prussian king, Frederick William IV (r. 1840-1861), reacted to the Revolutions of 1848 by calling a nominal legislative assembly rather than using military force.
  • ○ In 1850, he granted a constitution that established a House of Representatives elected by universal male suffrage but controlled by the wealthiest classes.
  • ○ The Frankfurt Assembly, an extralegal convention not to be confused with the king’s Legislative Assembly, met from May 1848 to May 1849 and established the nature of the future union of Germany.
  • ○ Advocates of a Greater Germany (Grossdeutsch) wanted to include Austria and to have a Habsburg emperor rule over the union.
  • ○ Supporters of a Lesser Germany (Kleindeutsch) wanted to exclude Austria and to have Prussia lead the union.
• • The debate was resolved when Austria backed away from the proposed union. When the Frankfurt Assembly offered Frederick William the crown of a united Germany with Austria excluded, he declined by saying that he would accept it only from the German princes themselves.
• • The failure of the Frankfurt Assembly to implement its design for a democratic union (it had framed a kind of bill of rights) left the job of German unification to Prussian militarism and Bismarck’s policy of “Blood and Iron.” (German politics until the First World War will be considered in a later chapter.) ‘

The Revolutions of 1848

France

German States

Habsburg Empire

Hungary

Italian States

Poland

Austria from the Age of Metternich to the First World War (1815-1914)

The Revolutions of 1830 hardly touched the reactionary government of Austria under Metternich. However, the ethnic mix that made up the Austrian Empire: Germans, Hungarian, Slavs, Czechs, Italians, Serbs, Croats, and many others helped bring about revolution in 1848.

• • When Paris erupted in rebellion in March of 1848, Louis Kossuth, a Hungarian nationalist, aroused separatist sentiment in the Hungarian Diet (a national assembly legal in the empire).
  • ○ Rioting broke out in Vienna
  • ○ Prince Metternich, then chancellor, fled the country, and the Hungarians, the Czechs, and three Northern Italian provinces of the empire declared autonomy. The empire collapsed temporarily.
  • ○ The Prague Conference, called by the Czechs in response to the all-German Frankfurt Conference.
• • Developed the notion of Austroslavism, by which the Slavic groups within the empire would remain part of the empire.
• • Set up autonomous national governments in ethnic regions.
  • ○ Before the idea could be adopted, a series of victories by Austrian armies restored Habsburg authority over the various nationalities that had declared independence.
• • Franz Joseph (r. 1848-1916) replaced Emperor Ferdinand I, and conservative forces within the government centralized power and suppressed all opposition.
  • ○ The Revolutions of 1848 failed in Austria largely because the empire’s ethnic minorities squabbled among themselves rather than make a united front against imperial Habsburg forces.

Russia from the End of the Napoleonic Wars to the First World War (1815-1914)

Alexander I (r. 1801-1825) began his reign by extending the reforms of Catherine the Great, by modernizing the functioning of his government, and by offering greater freedom to Jews within his empire. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 turned this disposition about until, by 1820, Alexander had ordered statewide censorship and the adherence of all his subjects to the Rus!iian Orthodox Church.

• • When Alexander died, a confusion of succession, (his two brothers, Constantine and Nicholas, were in line), led to the Decembrist Revolt of army officers in December 1825, in the capital of St. Petersburg.
  • ○ They supported the candidacy of Constantine, who they believed would modernize the nation and offer a constitution.
• • Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855) attained the throne after crushing the revolt, and his reign continued Alexander’s autocratic policies.
  • ○ He was creator of the infamous Third Section, the secret police who prevented the spread of revolutionary or Western ideas. “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” was the rallying cry of his reaction.
  • ○ Intellectuals in Russia developed two opposing camps during this period:
    • • Slavophiles, who believed that Russian village (the mir) culture was superior to that of the West; and
    • • Westernizers, who wanted to extend the “genius of Russian culture” by industrializing and setting up a constitutional government.