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November 28, 2017 - July 11, 2019
Through most of the twentieth century, historians regarded the rise of nation states and the conflicts between them as the central features of European history in the nineteenth century. The triumph of nationalism forged new political and cultural entities and inspired revolts against large and, it seemed, outmoded multinational empires, revolts against oppression by other nationalities or ambitions to achieve dominance over them. This model of the nation state was exported across the globe in the twentieth century, making its emergence in Europe in the nineteenth seem even more important.
It used to be thought that the damage inflicted by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was relatively light compared to the devastation wrought by later conflicts. Yet altogether, in twenty-three years of more or less continuous warfare that had swept back and forth across Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, an estimated five million people had died; compared to Europe’s population as a whole, this was proportionately as many as, if not more than, those who died during the First World War. One in five Frenchmen born between 1790 and 1795 had perished during the conflicts.
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the Congress of Vienna, which met between 1814 and 1815, and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, witnessed only a small number of wars in Europe, and these were relatively limited in impact and duration and did not involve more than a handful of European states.
the secret societies were in some ways the first, halting, embryonic example of an international revolutionary movement, inspired by similar ideas and committed to similar methods, derived from the French Revolution and the rule of Napoleon, the feeble mirror image of the international conservatism propagated by Metternich and the Holy Alliance.
The events of 1830–1 inaugurated a long period of Russophobia in Britain. The House of Commons passed a unanimous vote of censure on the tsar. In Germany popular songs condemning the enslavement of Poland were in vogue for a time. The Russian poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837) responded with a diatribe against ‘the slanderers of Russia’, accusing critics abroad of feelings of envy because they had done less than the Russians to overthrow Napoleon. It was, he declared, a quarrel between Slavs. That was not the way it was seen in the rest of Europe, where anything up to 7,000 Poles
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the Ottoman Empire still controlled a large swathe of territory in south-eastern Europe, stretching from the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia across to Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, and down through Bulgaria and Albania to Greece and the islands of the Aegean. Also controlling Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, the Arabian peninsula, Egypt, and the north coast of Africa as far west as Tunis, the Ottoman Empire remained a force to be reckoned with in European politics. It was still not much more than a century since Ottoman armies had laid siege to Vienna (1683). However, the
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At first, this met with deep scepticism among the peasantry, who refused to take up his offer of free distribution of seed potatoes to anyone who would plant them. Trying a new tactic, Kapodistrias had the potatoes piled up on the waterfront at Nafplio and surrounded by armed guards. This convinced local people and visitors from the countryside that these new vegetables were precious objects, and thus worth stealing. Before long, as the guards turned a blind eye, virtually all the potatoes had been taken
inspired by ideals of liberty and national sovereignty, had taken the lead in movements of national liberation and liberal reform, refusing to accept the conservative and restorationist aspects of the 1815 settlement. They managed to win enough support to shake the edifice constructed at the Congress of Vienna to its very foundations in almost every part of Europe. On the other hand, it was clear that these men represented only a minority of the educated classes and lacked real popular support. Where ordinary people in town and country did rise up against established authority, it was usually
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just as had happened periodically for centuries, a poor harvest pushed up the price of grain, so that people in the countryside as well as in the towns had to use a greater part of their income to pay for bread and other foodstuffs, reducing demand for clothes, utensils and other manufactured goods. This caused a crisis in urban factories and workshops, which therefore had to lay off their workers, throwing them into destitution just at the moment when they most needed an income to survive.
During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Britain had forged ahead economically, leaving the European Continent far behind. Per capita industrial production in Britain in 1830 was almost twice that of Switzerland or Belgium, more than twice that of France, and three times that of the Habsburg Empire, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark or the Netherlands.
The growth of a new industrial economy in Britain after 1815 was not just the product of scientific or technological superiority, it was also the product of global empire.
A high proportion of the workers in the mills was female. In 1843 two physicians in Ghent commented that ‘the tendency to replace men with women and children exists here as in other manufacturing districts’ because of the mill-owners’ desire to ‘economise’. The more new machines were installed, the more women were employed.
masters and guildsmen either had to lower their prices to compete, or abandon their old methods and embrace the new technology of mass production. The crisis of the guilds was expressed in the breakdown of the promotion system. In 1816 there were 259,000 masters and 145,000 journeymen and apprentices in Prussia; by 1846 their numbers had increased to 457,000 and 385,000 respectively, signifying the growing difficulty of journeymen and apprentices in obtaining a mastership.
The more the numbers of guild artisans grew, the poorer they became, and the more the primary purpose of the guilds, to ensure a decent living for all their members, was undermined.
Some were able to make the transition: locksmiths, for example, found a new source of income in the machine-tool industry. A very small number succeeded in building an expanding business, but only by flouting the guild rules and becoming industrial producers themselves. For the vast majority, the choices were becoming increasingly stark: become a pauper and subsist off poor relief, or join the swelling ranks of the new factory proletariat.
Local unions began to form, but like the guilds on the Continent, they frequently aimed above all to restrict the influx of new workers into their trade. Many, too, used quasi-Masonic titles, rituals, regalia and language to underscore their links with older traditions, but they were soon bypassed by more modern organizations.
In English and French the terms ‘worker’ and ‘working class’ gradually came into use to describe the poor single master, the factory worker, the miner and the urban wage labourer, indeed all those who lacked property and were forced to live entirely off their own physical labour
The differences between guildsmen and wage labourers were being eroded, and a new social class was being born. In some areas and trades, indeed, there were signs of the formation of a hereditary working class.
François Guizot, a Protestant historian whose father had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror, managed to establish a stable ministry in 1840, which lasted until 1848. He became more conservative over time. ‘Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of a want of heart,’ he remarked: ‘to be one at 30 is proof of a want of head.’
No wonder that Balzac described the July Monarchy as an ‘insurance contract drawn up between the rich against the poor’.
Authoritarian governments were shaken out of their complacency and started to make concessions. Underpinning all this were the catastrophic crop failure and potato blight that plunged the European economy into depression from 1846 onwards. Starving and desperate people flocked to the towns in huge numbers. Artisans were thrown into destitution, their income slashed just as food prices were soaring. Compounding this disastrous situation was a massive increase in the number of university students, from 9,000 in Germany during the 1820s to around 16,000 in the 1840s; they too found themselves on
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These movements in turn were to have a major effect on the further development of the revolutions in Germany and Austria, opening up massive contradictions between liberalism and nationalism and giving conservatives and reactionaries the opportunity to recover the initiative. These contradictions were at their most obvious in Hungary, where Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, German-speaking Saxons and Romanians,