Download europe: 1760†1850: historical survey

EUROPE: 1760†1850: HISTORICAL SURVEY
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EUROPE: 1760†1850: HISTORICAL SURVEY
The period of European history between 1760 and 1850 was
dominated by two broad series of events, the French Revolution
and the Industrial Revolution, both of which oversaw the emergence and growth of Romanticism. These two phenomena contributed decisively to the most profound structural change of
this era: the transformation of Europe from a feudal to a bourgeois society. This transformation is best considered in terms of
the political, social, and economic causes and effects of the
French and Industrial Revolutions, the growth of nationalism,
the kinds of ideological and intellectual struggles emerging from
these phenomena, and the response of Romantic thought, much
of which was forged in the heat of those struggles. Accounts of
this era given by Eric Hobsbawm, Georges Lefebvre, Herbert
Marcuse, and others prove especially enlightening, as does the
historical material derived from some of the general histories
cited in the bibliography.
The French Revolution: Background and
Consequences
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the effects of the
French Revolution of 1789 are still with us. Historian Hobsbawm has suggested that most political struggles through the
nineteenth century up to the present moment have been for or
against the principles that were at stake in that revolution. The
effect of the revolution was to bring about the destruction of
the vast edifice of feudalism that had lasted for centuries. Feudalism had been characterized by a static and localized economy,
hereditary privilege, and concentration of power in the hands
of monarchy and nobility, together with vast church wealth and
influence. Each person was believed to have a fixed place in the
allegedly natural and divinely sanctioned order of things.
Essentially, the French Revolution, votes Lefebvre, along with
the numerous other revolutions that succeeded it, initiated the
displacement of the power of the king and nobility by the power
of the bourgeoisie or middle classes that comprised recently appointed nobles, financiers, businessmen, traders, and members
of the liberal professions. In addition to the political and economic changes incited by the French Revolution, there was a
fundamental change in the thinking of people. The feudal world
had been characterized by values of static hierarchy, loyalty, authority, religious faith, and monarchical or oligarchical exercise
of power; these values were increasingly displaced by bourgeois
ideology, much of which stemmed from Enlightenment
thought. Such ideology was predominantly secular, stressing reason, individual experience, efficiency, usefulness, and—above
all—political liberalism based on a free rational economy aided
by technology and science. Much Romanticism took its initial
impetus as a response to the new world created by these vast
structural transformations in the realms of politics, economy,
philosophy, and aesthetics.
The broad background of the French Revolution was colored
by a number of overarching circumstances. The first of these
was the rise of absolute monarchies everywhere in Europe during
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In England, absolute government was instituted by the Tudor monarchs and continued
by the Stuarts, James VI, and Charles I. Their inflated conceptions of monarchy and their attempts to undermine the Parliament eventually resulted in the English Civil War (1642–49)
between the supporters of the king and those of Parliament. The
latter, led by Oliver Cromwell, were victorious. Charles I was
beheaded in 1649 and England was ruled for a short spell by
Parliament. However, the so-called Restoration of 1660 placed
Charles II upon the throne. In the Glorious Revolution of 1688,
William and Mary of Orange were invited to rule England. This
series of events put an end to absolute monarchy in England in
favor of parliamentary government.
Central Europe and Spain were also under the rule of despots—some more enlightened, such as Frederick II the Great
of Prussia (1740–1786) and Joseph II of Austria (1780–90), and
others more repressive, such as Catherine the Great of Russia
(1762–96), who crushed a serf rebellion in 1773–74. In France,
however, the situation was dire. The Bourbon Kings Louis XIV,
Louis XV, and Louis XVI (1774–92) took to new extremes the
arrogation of power and the instruments of justice. Louis XIV
once declared that “l’etat c ’est moi” (“the state is me”), and both
of his successors professed the divine right of kings. Absolutism
as a political theory had been expressed by Jean Bodin (1530–
96), who had claimed that the monarch derives his authority
from God, as well as by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–
1679) and the Dutch writer Hugo Grotius (1583–1645).
Hence, the French Revolution was in part a reaction against
the excesses of absolute government that had grown both in
theory and practice since the fourteenth century. Another factor
was the economic transformation of society. The fourteenth
through the seventeenth centuries witnessed tendencies that
would later foster the growth of capitalism: the accumulation
of wealth that was invested for profit, the growth of banking
and credit facilities, regulated associations of companies and
joint-stock companies, the decline of the feudal manufacturing
guilds, the growth of new industries such as mining and wool,
and the revolutionizing of agricultural methods. These trends
were accompanied by economic nationalism, an ethic of competition, and imperialism. By the seventeenth century England,
France, Holland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, had become imperial powers; trade became a worldwide rather than national or
local, phenomenon. By the end of the seventeenth century the
bourgeoisie had achieved economic hegemony.
Against this background it can be noted that the more proximate causes of the French Revolution were economic, political,
and intellectual. The economic causes were perhaps the most
important. Though the middle classes had risen to a dominant
economic position, they were without correlative political
power; these classes were opposed to the age-old policies of mercantilism, which established monopolies and control of purchase, wages, and prices. Another economic cause was the survival of a feudal system of privileges, whereby the higher clergy
and certain classes of nobles monopolized government. Peasants
resented the fees and land taxes they were obliged to pay to their
lords; and the urban masses suffered greatly from high prices.
The political causes included a despotic monarchy and an unsystematic mode of government, finance, taxation, and law. Perhaps
the most direct causes were the costly Seven Years’ War (1756–
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1763) fought against England and Prussia, and the French involvement in the American War of Independence (1776), which
both contributed to the economic bankruptcy of the government.
The intellectual influences stemmed largely from the Enlightenment. The seminal figures of the Enlightenment were the
French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) and the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who variously promoted the view of a mechanical universe ordered by
laws that were scientifically ascertainable. Such a conception
eventually displaced the view of the universe as directed by divine
providence. In general, the major tendencies of Enlightenment
philosophy were toward rationalism, empiricism, pragmatism,
and utilitarianism; these tendencies formed the core of liberalbourgeois thought. Thinkers such as David Hume and John
Locke in Britain; Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Denis Diderot, and
Voltaire in France; and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Germany
encouraged more skeptical, rational, and tolerant approaches to
religion. The most common approach was deism, which saw
divine laws as natural and rational and dismissed all superstition,
miracles, and sacraments. The more specific influences on the
French Revolution included Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) which justified the new political system in England that prevailed after the 1688 revolution. Locke condemned
despotic monarchy and the absolute sovereignty of parliaments,
affirming that the people had a right to resist tyranny. Voltaire
advocated an enlightened monarchy or republic governed by the
bourgeois classes. Baron Charles-Louis de Secorclat Montesquieu also influenced the first stage of the French Revolution,
advancing a liberal theory based on a separation of executive,
legislative, and judicial powers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau exerted
a powerful impact on the second stage of the Revolution through
his theories of democracy, egalitarianism, and the evils of private
property, as advocated in his Social Contract and Discourse on
the Origin of Inequality. However, in some ways, Rousseau hardly
belongs to the main trends of rationalist Enlightenment thought.
Significantly, he is often hailed as the father of Romanticism on
account of his exaltation of the state of nature over civilization,
and of the emotions and instincts over reason and conventional
learning. A final intellectual factor in the background of the
revolution was the growth of bourgeois economics that undermined mercantilism, and advocated (with varying qualifications)
the doctrine of economic laissez-faire, and labor theories of value.
Many of the aforementioned circumstances came to a head
in 1788, a year that yielded poor harvests, government bankruptcy, as well as continued discontent with unpopular taxes
and high prices. The French Revolution began with aristocratic
unrest with the monarchy and the nobility demanding increase
of their privileges; but events were soon controlled by bourgeois
interests that shaped the essentially bourgeois nature of the revolution. In the first stage (1789–92) Louis XVI called a meeting
in 1789 of the Estates General, a parliamentary body that had
been convened only sporadically in the past. The three estates
represented there were the clergy, the nobility, and the common
people. The third estate, of which the richest and most capable
section was the bourgeoisie. This body, led by advocates of bourgeois reform such as Mirabeau and Abbé Sieyes, drafted a new
constitution by 1791 and initiated the rationalization of the
French economy. This first stage, in which the Bastille was
stormed, accomplished the destruction of many surviving feudal
privileges, and the secularization of the church through the
“Civil Constitution of the Clergy” which mandated that clergy
should be elected by the citizens and secularized much church
property. It also enacted a Declaration of the Rights of Man,
which proclaimed liberty, security, and property as natural
rights. The declaration opposed feudal privilege but was not
egalitarian in character. The structure of government was not a
democracy, but instead a constitutional monarchy in which a
propertied oligarchy would govern through a representative assembly. The document was also nationalistic, viewing the source
of authority as residing in the nation.
The second phase of the revolution began in August of 1792.
It was a more radical phase, involving the masses, whose leaders,
such as Georges Jacques Danton, Jean Paul Marat, and Maximilien de Robespierre, were devoted to the egalitarian doctrines of
Rousseau. A National Convention was elected, its purpose—
which was not achieved—being to draft a new democratic constiution which would include rights and provisions for the poor.
France became a republic. In January 1793 Louis XVI was
charged with treason and beheaded. France entered into war
with, and was defeated by, Austria and Prussia, whose rulers
feared the spread of revolutionary ideals. The so-called Reign of
Terror (1793–94) was instigated by the executive arm of the
National Convention, known as the Committee of Public Safety.
This period is usually remembered for its violence and thousands
of executions but, as Hobsbawm has pointed out, it was also a
period of remarkable achievements. These included the drafting
of the first genuinely democratic constitution produced by a
modern state (though this was not put into effect), the abolition
of all remaining feudal rights, the fixing of maximum prices on
grain, the division of large estates to be sold to poorer citizens,
the separation of church and state, the abolition of slavery in
the French colonies, the expulsion of the invading armies of
Prussia and Britain from France, and the relative stabilizing of
the French economy.
The National Covention contained a number of factions, the
most predominant of whom were the radical Jacobins, led in
turn by Danton, Marat, and Robespierre, and the more moderate Girondins who included in their ranks Thomas Paine and
the Marquis de Condorcet. Condorcet died after his imprisonment for opposing the violence of the Jacobins. Eventually, the
Jacobin leaders suffered the fate they had meted out to others:
Marat was assassinated and both Danton and Robespierre were
in turn executed.
Robespierre’s death in 1794 effectively marks the beginning
of the final stage of the revolution. The National convention
was now dominated by more moderate leaders who acted in
accordance with bourgeois interests. In 1795, the convention
drafted a new constitution that was founded on the security of
property and restricted voting to wealthy proprietors. Power was
vested in a five-man directory. This stage was characterized by
profiteering and a great deal of corruption, and the ensuing
inflation and economic chaos paved the way for the coup d’etat of
Napoleon Bonaparte on November 9 (the eighteenth Brumaire),
1799—the date that marks the end of the French Revolution.
The Era of Napoleon
Napoleon had been exalted to the status of a national hero
through his success in a French campain against Austria. Eventu-
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ally, his popularity and military power enabled him to overthrow
the French government in 1799 and to beome consul; he became
Emperor Napoleon I of France in 1804, and his autocratic rule
effectively put an end to the liberal ideals of the French Revolution. However, he confirmed and developed certain accomplishments of that revolution, centralizing the government, continuing tax reforms, maintaining the redistribution of vast estates
and the abolition of serfdom, and developing the reforms begun
by the Revolution in the spheres of education and criminal and
civil law (known in their revised form as the Code Napoleon).
Some of these legal developments were transported into the legal
structures of other countries such as Italy, Prussia, and Switzerland. However, Napoleon undid the revolution’s separation of
church and state, establishing a Concordat with Pope Pius VII
in 1801.
The young G. W. F. Hegel saw Napoleon as a “worldhistorical” figure. Beyond his administrative reforms, it was Napoleon’s military campaigns which ensured him a significant
place in effecting historical change. He inherited from revolutionary times a war against Austria, Britain, and Russia, defeating
the latter two powers and extending the frontiers of France to
encompass most of continental Europe, as well as placing his
brothers on the thrones of Naples, Holland, and Westphalia.
He had, however, lost to the British in the naval battle at Trafalgar (1805), and more setbacks were on their way. The Spanish
revolted in 1808 against his attempt to impose his brother’s rule
on them; in 1812, Napoleon began what would turn out to be
a disastrous campaign against Russia, resulting in the loss of
nearly 300,000 troops. This defeat inspired Austria and Prussia,
aided by Russia, to renew hostilities with him, and in 1813 he
was decisively defeated. The allied forces invaded France and
took Paris in the following year. Napoleon was pensioned and
sent to the island of Elba, while the allied forces arranged with
the French government to restore the Bourbon dynasty with
Louis XVIII as a constitutional monarch. Escaping from Elba
in 1815, Napoleon returned to France to be greeted once again
by loyal peasants and soldiers, many of whom feared a return
to the ancien regime. Louis XVIII fled before Napoleon took
Paris and formed another army. He fought the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium and was crushed by the combined forces of Britain, Holland, and Prussia under the command of the British
Duke of Wellington. He was exiled until his death in 1821.
The Congress of Vienna and the Metternich
System
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, ideological and political struggles between liberals and conservatives swept through
the rest of Europe. The heads or representatives of many powers,
including Austria, Britain, Prussia, and Russia, assembled at the
Congress of Vienna (1814–15) to decide the future of Europe.
The congress was dominated by Klemens von Metternich, the
Austrian minister of foreign affairs who had helped forge the
alliance that had defeated Napoleon. Metternich was a staunch
conservative, determined to return to the status quo before the
revolution of 1789. He engineered an agreement whereby the
dynasties that had held power in 1789 should be restored and
each country should possess again the territories it had held at
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that time. However, various exceptions were made to this principle, with some of the great powers, such as Britain and Austria,
being allowed to retain some of the provinces they had acquired
since then. Metternich also fathered a system of alliances (which
included Austria, Britain, Prussia, Russia, and subsequently
France) whose function was to suppress any violation of the
agreed territorial boundaries or any insurrection against the
agreed rulers. On two occasions, such suppression was actually
enforced, in the uprisings in Sicily and Spain. Liberal movements
challenged the conservatives in England, where the Reform Bill
of 1832 implemented electoral reforms, enfranchising and establishing the hegemony of the middle class. Bourgeois entrepreneurs also agitated against the Corn Laws, protective tariffs benefiting the landowners; these laws were eventually repealed in
1846. There were uprisings against the restored Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII of France, who was succeeded in 1824 by his
even more reactionary brother Charles X.
Intense ideological struggles shook Prussia and Russia also.
In response, Metternich enforced in the former a repressive program known as the Carlsbad Decrees (1819) that, in reaction
to student unrest, brought the entire university system and the
press under strict control and censorship. In Russia, Tsar Alexander I turned from his erstwhile Jacobinistic liberalism, and his
successor Nicholas crushed an 1825 revolt led by intellectuals
and army officers, imposing a stern regime enforced by secret
police.
However, the Metternich system of alliances began to crumble. Britain, primarily for economic motives, withdrew; and Russia violated the alliance’s ethic of restoring “legitimate” rulers
by supporting the Greek rebellion against Turkey and declaring
war on its sultan in 1828. Moreover, several revolutions erupted
in Europe in 1830. The first was the July Revolution in France,
where bourgeois leaders ousted Charles X and replaced him with
Louis- Philippe as head of a constitutional monarchy. The Belgian Netherlands revolted successfully against Dutch rule; and
in 1831 Poland’s rebellion against Russian rule was quelled severely by Tsar Nicholas I.
The Revolutions of 1848 and the Growth of
Nationalism
The French Revolution, whose catchwords were liberty, fraternity, and equality, had fostered not only the idea of individual
rights but also of nationalism, of the obligations of the individual
toward a whole society or nation, which was seen as having a
specific history, culture, and direction. The revolutions of 1848
were partly inspired by discontent among liberals with reactionary regimes, and were generally fueled by nationalistic sentiment
that had taken root everywhere since the French Revolution. In
1848 widespread dissatisfaction with the increasing despotism
of Louis-Philippe led to his deposition. France was made a republic and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808–1873), nephew of
Napoleon I, was elected president by an overwhelming majority.
His inherited name appealed to a widespread nationalistic sentiment. A plebiscite held in 1851 empowered him to draft a new
constitution, and in 1852 he took the title of Emperor Napoleon
III. This so-called second empire lasted until 1870, by which
time his popularity had declined, largely as a consequence of his
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foreign policies. He engaged in the disastrous Franco-Prussian
War and was badly defeated. His government was overthrown,
and by 1875 a National Assembly inaugurated in France the
so-called Third Republic.
Inspired by the 1848 events in France, revolutions also occurred in Austria and Hungary. In the former, Metternich was
forced to resign and the emperor obliged to accept a liberal
constitution. In 1849 rebels in Hungary formed a liberal government and affirmed the independence of their state. However,
these constitutional concessions in both countries were shortly
revoked, and the republic in Hungary was abolished. By 1867
an agreement was reached to establish a dual monarchy: while
the Austrian Emperor was also King of Hungary, each state was
relatively autonomous.
Nationalism was an especially potent force for change in Germany. In the 1848 revolution, liberals forced princes in several
German states to grant reforms, and the Frankfurt Assembly was
convened with a goal of producing a constitution for a united
Germany. The attempt failed, however, and Germany was not
united until the deeply conservative prime minister of Prussia,
Otto von Bismarck first united the northern German states, and
then succeeded through the Franco-Prussian war in rallying the
southern German states, to produce a united Germany. Bismarck became chancellor of the newly formed German Empire.
Before 1848, Italy had been similarly composed of a number
of small states including the Papal states; Sardinia; the two states
of Sicily, and Lombardy and Venetia, which were under Austrian
rule; and other territories under Hapsburg dominion. Nationalism in the form of risorgimento (the “resurrection” of Italian
greatness) played a crucial part here also. In 1848 revolts were
organized against Hapsburg rule and everywhere liberal reforms
were demanded. In 1858, Lombardy was freed from Austria by
a Sardinian army, and in 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi conquered
Sicily and Naples, turning these territories over to Sardinia. In
1861, Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed King of Italy; Rome
itself was annexed as part of the new kingdom in 1870, creating
a rift between the papacy and the state.
Nationalism in other parts of Europe arose somewhat later
and is beyond the scope of this study. But it may be stated
briefly that the Ottoman Empire began to crumble as a result
of nationalist uprisings, aided by Russia, in Greece and Serbia
(1829), as well as in subject territorities such as Bosnia, Bulgaria,
and Herzegovina. Further confrontations between Turkey and
European powers, as well as a movement for liberal and secular
reform in Turkey itself, paved the way for the collapse of the
Empire. Nationalism in Russia emerged much later in the century, as a Pan-Slavic movement.
The Industrial Revolutions
The Industrial Revolution, which was given its name by the
English and French socialists of the 1820s, is cited by Hobsbawm
as “probably the most important event in world history.” It is
usually divided into two phases, the first stretching from the
mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, and the second
phase continuing effectively to the present day. Large-scale industrialization first began in Britain on account of its wealth,
its encouragement of private profit, and economic system backed
by liberal policies that had ousted the feudal guild system, as
well as its colonies andeffective monopoly of the world market.
Industrialism spread rapidly, however: by the mid-nineteenth
century France and Belgium were engaged in mechanized production; by the end of the nineteenth century Germany had
been transformed from an agricultural economy to the greatest
industrial power; and industrialization reached Japan and Italy
toward the end of the century. The economic transformation
of Europe since the fourteenth century had witnessed several
technological innovations in many industries such as cotton and
iron, culminating in the invention of the steam engine and the
large-scale use of coal, along with the development of a factory
system using conveyor belts, assembly lines and other techniques
of mass production. Cotton manufacture became mechanized
through the invention of the spinning jenny in 1767, the power
loom in 1785, and the cotton gin in 1792.
The second phase of industrialization was marked by the use
of electricity and oil, the development of the iron and steel
industries, increased automation, division of labor, and an increasing harnessing of science by industry. The nineteenth century also saw vast improvements in travel with the establishment
of improved roads, the railway system, steamships, telecommunications, and cars. Agriculture also became rationally organized
and mechanized. More important, as stated earlier, the massively
increased wealth of the bourgeoisie sought more outlets for investment in markets that were expanding in both the countries
of Europe themselves as a result of increased population and also
in the colonies of the European powers. Capital was increasingly
dominated by investment, finance, and the formation of vast
monopolies, while economic liberalism was gradually displaced
by government control, subsidy, and protectionism. By this period, the bourgeois classes had established hegemony and, as
Hobsbawm notes the “gods and Kings of the past were powerless
before the businessmen and steam-engines of the present.”
Notwithstanding its promotion of prosperity and economic
expansion, industrialization was not without its social and economic problems, or its political crises. While wages increased,
there was large-scale unemployment, partly on account of the
use of women and children as cheap labor in factories. Extremely
poor working conditions, long hours, and disease increased the
misery of the working classes. These flaws in the capitalist economy helped precipitate the European Revolutions of 1848 and
the Chartist uprising in Britain (1838–48), which struggled for
the implementation of a people’s charter demanding universal
suffrage, a secret ballot, and salaries as opposed to property qualifications for members of the House of Commons. By the end
of the nineteenth century most of the population of Europe was
occupied in industrial rather than agricultural labor, embroiled
in a crowded, urban way of life. These and other factors gave
rise to a new political force, an industrial proletariat that became
the main opponent of the recently established hegemony of the
new bourgeoisie—the bankers, industrial magnates, and proprietors of factories, railroads, steel works, and mines.
The Struggle between Liberal and Conservative
Ideologies
The foregoing political struggles and economic transformations
were naturally accompanied by a struggle between liberal and
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conservative ideologies, between those who wished to advance
further the principles behind the French Revolution such as
rationalism, individualism, and limited government, and those
who wished to return to a prerevolutionary emphasis on tradition, faith, and authority. During the revolution itself, this struggle had expressed itself prominently in the debate between the
liberal stateman Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, one of the
moderate members of the National Convention. In his Reflections of the Revolution in France (1790) Burke’s attack on the
revolution was characterized by the usual elements of conservatism: an appeal to the authority of the past and the collective
wisdom of tradition as opposed to what he saw as the abstract
rationalism of the French Revolutionists; an advocacy of gradual
change; and a desire to conserve the essential economic and
political fabric of feudalism. Thomas Paine’s radicalism, as expressed in his widely influential Rights of Man (1791), embraced
the central thrust of the new bourgeois ideologies: freedom from
the past, from tradition, from convention, and a marked emphasis on the present; and the exaltation of rationalism and individual reasoning. Paine also stressed the natural and divinely sanctioned equality of human beings; finally, he insisted that political
authority is neither hereditary nor divinely bestowed, but derives
from the people.
This ideological struggle was played out in many spheres,
including those of religion, philosophy, literature, and art. Perhaps the most profound general ideological change was the secularization of thinking, consonant with the rationalist and materialist worldview of the bourgeoisie, which imposed its ideological
dispositions on society as a whole. The secularization of the
educated classes had dated back to the late seventeenth century,
what was new to the nineteenth century was the secularization
in outlook of the new proletariat. The political and social issues
generated by the French Revolution were argued in a secular
idiom. For much of the entire nineteenth century, religion was
engulfed in debates—with philosophy, science, and the modes
of thought generated by an entirely transformed way of life—
that often threatened its very foundations. There developed in
the 1830s in Germany a school of “higher criticism” devoted to
a study of the sources and methods used by the authors of the
Bible, often questioning the coherence and historical accuracy
of biblical texts. One of the prominent studies in this field was
David Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835). Later in the century, the
Church would face further threats from discoveries in science,
particularly those of Charles Darwin. These developments, together with the onslaught of many governments against the
wealth, property, legal rights, and temporal power of the church
made secularization an institutional as well as an ideological
phenomenon. In general, Protestantism fared better than Roman
Catholicism in its ability to survive within new social structures,
though the century was marked by religious revivals of many
types.
The formation of an organized proletariat in the nineteenth
century was accompanied and promoted by some important
political and economic theories. The liberal-bourgeois economic
theories of James Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith had
dominated much nineteenth-century thought and practice with
their notions of economic individualism, laissez-faire and free
competition; these were opposed by thinkers diposed toward
representing the interests of the laboring classes, such as the
utopian socialists Charles Fourier, who advocated collective
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ownership of the means of production, Robert Owen, who impugned the profit system as exploiting the labor of the worker,
and Claude Henri de Saint-Simon. The most important of the
socialist thinkers were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who
produced a powerful critique of capitalism, as well as a call for
political action in texts such as the Manifesto of the Communist
Party (1848) and Capital (1867). Influenced by the French socialists, English political economists, and the German idealist
philosophers such as Hegel, Marx and Engels developed a materialistic conception of history that saw capitalism as having
evolved from a long history of various modes of production,
from the ancient slave mode of production through the feudal
system, this progression being driven essentially by class conflict.
They argued that once technologically assisted capitalist accumulation and world expansion had led to a world of sharply contrasting wealth and poverty and the working classes became conscious of their historical role, capitalism itself would yield to a
communism that would do away with private property and base
itself on human need rather than the greed of a minority for
increasing profit.
It was in the fields of philosophy and literature that Romanticism—as a broad response to Enlightenment, neoclassical, and
French Revolutionary ideals—initially took root. In general, this
period can best be seen as one in which the major upheavals
such as the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolutions, the
revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and the growth of nationalism
impelled the bourgeois classes toward political, economic, cultural, and ideological hegemony. It was their worldview (broadly,
rationalist, empiricist, individualist, utilitarian, and economically liberal) that dominated the thought and practice of this
period and spawned various oppositional movements such as
socialism, anarchism, cults of irrationalism, and revivals of tradition and religion. Romanticism cannot be placed within any set
of these movements, since it effectively spanned them all. While
the various developments in Romanticism and its major exponents are treated elsewhere in this volume, a question that might
fruitfully be addressed here is the complex connection of Romanticism to the predominating bourgeois worldview.
As writers such as Eric Hobsbawm, Herbert Marcuse, and
Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov have pointed out, it is too
simplistic to view Romanticism in any of its expressions as a
straightforward reaction against the prevalent bourgeois
worldviews. Some of the Romantics, such as William Blake,
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, and William Wordsworth, initially saw the French Revolution as heralding the dawn
of a new era of individual and social liberation. Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller in
their own ways exalted the struggle for human freedom and
mastery of knowledge. Lord, Byron, Heinrich Heine, Victor
Hugo, George Sand, and Percy Bysshe Shelley were passionate
in their appeals for justice and liberation from oppressive social
conventions and political regimes. Underlying nearly all Romantic views of art was an intense individualism based on the authority of experience and—often—a broadly democratic orientation,
as well as an optimistic and sometimes utopian belief in progress.
In all these aspects, there was some continuity between Enlightenment and Romantic thought.
However, many of the Romantics, including Blake, Byron,
Shelley, and Wordsworth, reacted against certain central features
of the new bourgeois social and economic order. Appalled by
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the squalor; the mechanized, competitive routine of the cities;
and the moral mediocrity of a bourgeois world given over to
what Shelley called the principles of “utility” and “calculation,”
they turned for spiritual relief to mysticism; to nature; to Rousseauistic dreams of a simple, primitive, and uncorrupted lifestyle
that they sometimes located in an idealized period of history
such as the Middle Ages. Wordsworth held that the poet should
emulate the “language of real life”; he, Blake, and Coleridge
exalted the state of childhood and innocence of perception, untainted by conventional education; and many Romantic writers—in tune with growing nationalistic sentiments—revived
primitive forms such the folktale and the ballad. Nature, for the
Romantics, departed from the conception of it held by such
neoclassical writers as Alexander Pope, for whom the term signified an eternal unchangable and hierarchical order of the cosmos
as well as certain criteria for human thought and behavior. Pope’s
view had been influenced by notions deriving from Sir Isaac
Newton of the universe as a vast machine. For the Romantics,
nature was transfigured into a living force and held togther as
a unity by the breath of the divine spirit. It was infused with a
comprehensive symbolism resting on its profound moral and
emotional connection with human subjectivity.
Indeed, perhaps the most fundamental trait of all Romanticism was its shift of emphasis away from classical objectivity
toward subjectivity: in the wake of the philosophical systems of
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Willhelm Joseph von Schelling, and above all, of Hegel, the worlds of subject and object,
self and world, were viewed as mutually constructive processes,
human perception playing an active role rather than merely receiving impressions passively from the outside world. Such an
emphasis placed a high value on uniqueness, originality, novelty,
and exploration of ever-expanding horizons of experience. Moreover, the self that was exalted in Romanticism was a far cry
from the self as an atomistic (and economic) unit as premised
in bourgeois individualism. The Romantic self was a more
found, more authentic ego lying beneath the layers of social
convention, a self that attempted through principles such as
irony to integrate the increasingly fragmented elements of the
bourgeois world into a vision of unity; and it was primarily the
poet who could achieve such a vision.
The most crucial human faculty for such integration was the
imagination, which most Romantics saw as a unifying power—
one that could harmonize other strata of human perception, such
as sensation and reason. It should be noted that Romanticism is
often wrongly characterized as displacing Enlightenment “reason” with emotion, instinct, spontaneity, and imagination. To
understand this, it is necessary to recall that much Romantic
thought took Immanuel Kant’s philosophy (which itself was not
at all Romantic) as its starting point—notably, his distinction
between phenomena and noumena, his treatment of imagination, and his establishing of a relative autonomy for the category
of the aesthetic. Kant’s relation to Enlightenment thought was
indeed ambivalent inasmuch as he attempted to establish the
limitations of reason. Kant declared, however, that the categories
of the understanding applied throughout the phenomenal world;
his notion of the noumenon is merely a limiting concept, and
its actual existence is nothing more than a presupposition of
morality and free will. He had, moreover, viewed imagination
as a mediating principle that reconciled the deliverances of sensation with the catgeories of the understanding. The Romantics
not unlike Hegel (who himself was certainly no Romantic),
placed the noumenal realm within the reach of human apprehension and often exalted the function of imagination, viewing it
as a vehicle for the attainment of truths beyond the phenomenal
world and beyond the reach of reason alone. Hence, Coleridge
saw the secondary imagination, peculiar to the poet, as a unifying
power that could reconcile general and concrete, universal and
particular. Shelley even saw imagination as having a moral function, as a power enabling the self to situate itself within a larger
empathetic scheme, as opposed to reason which expressed the
selfish constraints of the liberal atomistic self. Hence the relation
between Romanticism and the mainstreams of bourgeois
thought, which had risen to hegemony on the waves of the
Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolutions, was deeply ambivalent. Our own era is profoundly pervaded by this ambivalent heritage.
RAFEY M. HABIB
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