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C HAP TER
21
Ideologies and Upheavals
1815−1850
CHAPTER LEARNING
OBJECTIVES
After reading and studying this chapter, students
should be able to:
1. Explain how peace was restored and
maintained after 1815.
2. Discuss the new ideologies that emerged to
challenge conservatism.
3. Identify the characteristics of the romantic
movement.
4. Explain how and where conservatism was
challenged after 1815.
5. Analyze the main causes and results of the
revolutions of 1848.
ANNOTATED CHAPTER
OUTLINE
The following annotated chapter outline will help
you review the major topics covered in this chapter.
I.
The Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars
A. The European Balance of Power
1. In 1814 the Quadruple Alliance of Russia,
Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain finally
defeated France and agreed to meet at the
Congress of Vienna to fashion a general
peace settlement.
2. The first Treaty of Paris gave France the
boundaries it possessed in 1792, which
were larger than those of 1789, restored
the Bourbon dynasty, and did not require
France to pay war reparations.
3. The Quadruple Alliance combined
leniency toward France with strong
defensive measures that included uniting
the Low Countries under an expanded
Dutch monarchy and increasing Prussian
territory to act as a “sentinel on the
Rhine.”
4. Klemens von Metternich and Robert
Castlereagh, the foreign ministers of
Austria and Great Britain, respectively, as
well as their French counterpart, Charles
Talleyrand, were motivated by selfinterest and a balance-of-power ideology
in discouraging aggression by any
combination of states or the domination of
Europe by a single state.
5. The Great Powers agreed that each of
them should receive territory for their
victory against France: Great Britain
gained colonies and strategic outposts;
Austria took Venetia, Lombardy, and
some Polish possessions; Russia’s and
Prussia’s claims were disputed, and in the
end, Russia accepted a small Polish
kingdom and Prussia took part of Saxony.
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6. Napoleon escaped from Elba and reignited
his wars of expansion, but he was defeated
at Waterloo in 1815.
7. The second Treaty of Paris, concluded
after Napoleon’s final defeat, was still
relatively moderate toward France,
although this time France was required to
pay an indemnity and to support an army
of occupation for five years.
8. The Quadruple Alliance then agreed to
meet periodically to discuss common
interests and to consider measures for
maintaining peace in Europe.
9. This European “Congress System” lasted
long into the nineteenth century and
settled many international crises through
international conferences and balance-ofpower diplomacy.
B. Metternich and Conservatism
1. The political ideals of conservatism
dominated discussions at the Congress of
Vienna.
2. Determined defender of the monarchical
status quo, Prince Klemens von
Metternich (1773–1859) was an
internationally oriented aristocrat who
made a brilliant diplomatic career as
Austria’s foreign minister from 1809 to
1848.
3. Metternich’s pessimistic view of human
nature as prone to error, excess, and selfserving behavior was confirmed by the
disruptive events of the American and
French revolutions and the Napoleonic
wars, which he believed responsible for
twenty-five years of bloodshed and
suffering.
4. Metternich, like other conservatives,
blamed liberal middle-class
revolutionaries for stirring up the lower
classes.
5. He concluded that authoritarian
governments were necessary to protect
society from the baser elements of human
behavior, which were released in a
democratic system.
6. Metternich defended his class and its
rights and privileges with a clear
conscience, believing the church and
nobility were among Europe’s most
valuable institutions and bulwarks against
radical change.
7. Liberalism appeared doubly dangerous to
Metternich because it generally went with
national aspirations and a belief that each
people, each national group, had a right to
establish its own independent government
and fulfill its own destiny.
8. The idea of national self-determination
under constitutional government was
repellent to Metternich because it
threatened to destroy the Austrian Empire.
9. The vast Austrian Empire of the
Habsburgs included many peoples who
spoke at least eleven different languages,
observed vastly different customs, and
lived with a surprising variety of regional
civil and political institutions.
10. The multiethnic state Metternich served
had strengths and weaknesses: its large
population and vast territories gave the
Empire economic and military clout, but
its potentially dissatisfied nationalities
undermined political unity.
11. Metternich had to oppose liberalism and
nationalism because, if Austria was to
remain intact and powerful, it could not
accommodate ideologies that supported
national self-determination.
12. In his efforts to hold back liberalism and
nationalism, Metternich was supported by
Russia and, to a lesser extent, the Ottoman
Empire.
13. After 1815 both of these multinational
absolutist states also worked to preserve
their respective traditional conservative
orders.
C. Repressing the Revolutionary Spirit
1. In 1815 under Metternich’s leadership, the
conservative rulers of Austria, Prussia,
and Russia formed the Holy Alliance,
which worked to repress reformist and
C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND
347
U PHEAVALS
revolutionary movements and stifle
desires for national independence across
Europe.
2. In 1820 revolutionaries succeeded in
forcing the monarchs of Spain and the
southern Italian Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies to establish constitutional
monarchies with press freedoms and
universal male suffrage.
3. Metternich and Alexander I proclaimed
the principle of active intervention to
maintain all autocratic regimes whenever
they were threatened.
4. Austrian forces then restored the
autocratic Ferdinand I in the Two Sicilies
in 1821, while French armies restored
power to the king in 1823.
5. The Holy Alliance also limited reform in
the German Confederation.
6. In 1819, following calls for the national
unification of the German states, Austrian
and Prussian leaders used the
Confederation Diet to issue and enforce
the infamous Karlsbad Decrees, which
required the German states to outlaw
liberal political organizations, police their
universities, and establish a permanent
committee to clamp down on liberal or
radical reformers.
7. In Russia in 1825, a group of army
officers inspired by liberal ideals staged a
protest against the new tsar, Nicholas I,
which ended in the death, public hanging,
or exile of the movement’s leaders.
8. Through military might, secret police,
imprisonment, and execution,
conservative regimes in central Europe
used the powers of the state to repress
liberal reform wherever possible.
D. Limits to Conservative Power and Revolution
in South America
1. Metternich’s system proved quite
effective in central Europe, at least until
1848, but failed to stop dynastic change in
France in1830 or prevent Belgium from
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
gaining independence from the
Netherlands in 1831.
The most dramatic challenge to
conservative power occurred in the 1820s
in South America, where wealthy
“Creole” elites broke away from the
Spanish crown and established new
republics based initially on liberal,
Enlightenment ideals.
The well-established Creoles—about 5
percent of the population—resented the
political and economic control of the
“peninsulares,” people born in Spain who
lived in and ruled the colonies; the vast
majority of the population was comprised
of people of ethnically mixed heritage,
including enslaved and freed Africans and
indigenous peoples.
By the late 1700s, the Creoles had begun
to question Spanish policy and the
necessity of colonial rule; the Napoleonic
wars and France’s occupation of Spain
inspired them to act.
In the north, the general Simón Bolívar,
the “people’s liberator,” defeated Spanish
forces and established a “Gran Colombia,”
which lasted from 1819 to 1830.
In the south, José de San Martín, a liberalminded military commander, successfully
threw off Spanish control by 1825.
Dreams of South American federation and
unity proved difficult to implement,
however, and by 1830 the state established
by Bolívar had fractured.
Most of the smaller new states initially
had liberal constitutions, but in lands
where women and the great underclass of
non-Creoles did not receive the right to
vote, these were difficult to implement.
These liberal experiments soon gave way
to a system controlled by “caudillos,” or
strong men, who ruled territories on the
basis of military strength, family
patronage, and populist politics.
Although the South American revolutions
failed to establish lasting republics, they
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C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND U PHEAVALS
demonstrated the revolutionary potential
of liberal ideals and the limits on
conservative control.
II. The Spread of Radical Ideas
A. Liberalism and the Middle Class
1. Liberalism—based on the principal ideas
of liberty and equality—demanded
representative government as opposed to
autocratic monarchy, equality before the
law as opposed to legally separate classes,
and individual freedoms.
2. In Europe in 1815, only France and Great
Britain had realized much of the liberal
program, and even in those countries,
liberalism had only begun to succeed.
3. Despite conservative opposition,
liberalism had gained a group of powerful
adherents, including the new wealthy
industrial and commercial elite.
4. Liberal economic principles, the doctrine
of laissez faire, called for free trade,
unrestricted private enterprise, and no
government interference in the economy.
5. In early nineteenth-century Britain,
business elites enthusiastically embraced
laissez faire policies because they proved
immensely profitable, and they used
liberal ideas to defend their right to
conduct business as they wished.
6. Labor unions were outlawed because,
these elites argued, they restricted free
competition and the individual’s “right to
work.”
7. Early-nineteenth century liberals favored
representative government, although they
wanted property qualifications attached to
the right to vote; in practice, this meant
excluding workers, peasants, and women,
as well as middle-class people, who did
not meet the property requirement.
8. As liberalism increasingly became
identified with upper-class business
interests, some opponents of conservatism
felt that liberalism did not go nearly far
enough.
9. These radical republicans called for
universal voting rights, at least for males,
and for democracy, and they showed more
willingness than most liberals to endorse
violent upheaval to achieve their goals.
B. The Growing Appeal of Nationalism
1. Early nationalists found inspiration in the
vision of a people united by a common
language, common history and culture,
and common territory.
2. In German-speaking central Europe,
defeat by Napoleon’s armies had made the
vision of a national people united in
defense of their “fatherland” particularly
attractive.
3. In the early nineteenth century, such
cultural unity was more a dream than a
reality because a variety of ethnic groups
shared the territory of most states and
local dialects kept peasants from nearby
villages from understanding each other.
4. Nationalism nonetheless gathered force as
a political philosophy, facilitated by
higher literacy rates, a mass press, large
state bureaucracies, compulsory education
and conscription armies, which created a
common culture and encouraged people to
take pride in their national heritage.
5. In multiethnic states, nationalism also
promoted disintegration, as European
nationalists sought to turn the cultural
unity they desired into political reality.
6. They believed that every nation, like every
citizen, had the right to exist in freedom
and to develop its character and spirit.
7. Their political goal of making the territory
of each people coincide with well-defined
boundaries in an independent nation-state
made nationalism explosive in central and
eastern Europe, where different peoples
intermingled.
8. The refusal of the Austrian, Russian, and
Ottoman Empires to allow national
minorities independence fomented
discontent among nationalists; contrarily,
in Italy and the German Confederation,
C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND
349
U PHEAVALS
nationalists yearned for unification across
what they saw as divisive and obsolete
borders.
9. The rise of nationalism depended heavily
on the development of complex industrial
and urban societies, which required much
better communication between individuals
and groups.
10. Promoting the use of a standardized
national language through mass education
and the popular press created at least a
superficial cultural unity in many areas.
11. Many scholars argue that nation-states
emerged in the nineteenth century as
“imagined communities” that sought to
bind millions of strangers together around
the abstract concept of an all-embracing
national identity.
12. Between 1815 and 1850, most people who
believed in nationalism also believed in
either liberalism or radical republicanism.
13. Liberals and especially democrats saw the
people as the ultimate source of all
government, but they agreed with
nationalists that the benefits of selfgovernment would be possible only if the
people were united by common traditions
that transcended local interests and even
class differences.
14. Yet early nationalism developed a strong
sense of “us” versus “them,” to which
nationalists added two highly volatile
ingredients: a sense of national mission
and a sense of national superiority.
C. The Foundations of Modern Socialism
1. Early socialist thinkers believed the
political revolution in France,
industrialization in Britain, and the rise of
laissez faire fomented a selfish
individualism that encouraged inequality
and split the community into isolated
fragments.
2. With an intense desire to help the poor,
socialists preached economic equality and
advocated economic planning and the
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
regulation of private property by the
government, or its abolition and
replacement with state or community
ownership.
Count Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825)
optimistically proclaimed that the key to
progress was proper social organization in
which leading scientists, engineers, and
industrialists would carefully plan the
economy and guide it forward by
undertaking vast public works projects.
Charles Fourier (1772–1837) envisaged a
socialist utopia of mathematically precise,
self-sufficient communities and advocated
the total emancipation of women.
Robert Owen, an early proponent of labor
unions, also called for society to be
organized into model industrialagricultural communities.
Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, who
became known as “utopian socialists,” all
had followers who tried to implement
their ideas; their attempts collapsed by the
1850s, although they inspired future
reformers and revolutionaries.
In What Is Property? (1840), PierreJoseph Proudhon (1809–1865) argued that
property was profit that was stolen from
the worker, who was the source of all
wealth.
Louis Blanc (1811–1882) focused on
practical reforms, and in his Organization
of Work (1839), he urged workers to
agitate for universal voting rights and to
take control of the state peacefully.
As industrialization spread, the socialist
message was embraced by French urban
workers, who had become violently
opposed to laissez-faire laws that denied
workers the right to organize in guilds and
unions.
Thus, the aspirations of workers and
radical theorists reinforced each other,
giving rise to a socialist movement in
Paris in the 1830s and 1840s.
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C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND U PHEAVALS
D. The Birth of Marxist Socialism
1. The German intellectual Karl Marx
(1818–1883) wove the diffuse strands of
socialist thought into a distinctly modern
ideology, Marxist socialism—or Marxism.
2. Marx studied philosophy in Berlin before
turning to journalism, and then, forced to
flee Prussia in 1843, he traveled Europe to
promote socialism, often relying on his
friend and colleague Friedrich Engels for
financial support.
3. After the Revolutions of 1848, Marx
settled in London, where he spent the rest
of his life as an advocate of working-class
revolution.
4. Capital, his magnum opus, appeared in
1867.
5. Marx synthesized sociology, economics,
philosophy, and history, and he drew on
the ideas of utopian socialists, though he
criticized them for their fanciful utopian
schemes and claimed that his version of
“scientific” socialism was rooted in
historic law.
6. Building on the German philosophies of
idealism associated with Georg Hegel
(1770–1831), Marx came to believe that
history had patterns and purpose and
moved forward in stages toward an
ultimate goal.
7. Marx argued that class struggle over
economic wealth produced change in
human history; one class had always
exploited the other, and with the advent of
modern industry, society was split
between the upper class—the
bourgeoisie—and the working class—the
proletariat.
8. He further argued that the ever-growing,
ever-poorer proletariat would develop a
revolutionary class-consciousness that
would lead them to overthrow the
bourgeoisie in a violent revolution.
9. The result would be the end of class
struggle and the establishment of
communism, a system of radical equality.
10. Marx posited the idea of “surplus value,”
the difference between the value of goods
and the wages workers received to
produce them, which the bourgeoisie
pocketed in the form of profit.
11. To Marx, capitalism was immensely
productive but highly exploitative, as the
bourgeoisie, in a never-ending search for
profit, squeezed workers dry and
expanded across the globe.
12. When Marx and Engels published The
Communist Manifesto in 1848, the
Communist movement was in its infancy,
but by the time of Marx’s death in 1883,
Marxism had profoundly reshaped leftwing radicalism.
III. The Romantic Movement
A. The Tenets of Romanticism
1. Followers of the new romantic movement,
which reached its height from about 1790
to the 1840s, revolted against the
emphasis on rationality, order, and
restraint that characterized the
Enlightenment and the controlled style of
classicism.
2. Romantics championed emotional
exuberance, unrestrained imagination, and
spontaneity in both art and personal life;
in their works, they explored the power of
emotions such as love, desire, and despair.
3. Romantics valued intuition and nostalgia
for the past over the scientific method and
progress, sought the inspiration of
religious ecstasy instead of secularization,
and turned inward and delved into the
supernatural instead of engaging in public
life and civic affairs.
4. The romantics were enchanted by nature,
and most saw modern industry as an ugly,
brutal attack on their beloved nature and
venerable traditions.
5. Romantics sought escape and believed
that history held the key to a universe they
perceived to be organic and dynamic, not
mechanical and static as the
Enlightenment thinkers had believed.
U PHEAVALS
6. Historians influenced by romanticism,
such as Jules Michelet who wrote books
on the history of France, promoted the
growth of national aspirations and
encouraged the French people to search
the past for their special national destiny.
7. Romanticism was also a lifestyle, and
many early-nineteenth century romantics
lived lives of emotional intensity that
included obsessive love affairs, duels,
madness, illnesses, and suicide.
8. Great individualists, the romantics
believed that the full development of
one’s unique potential was the supreme
purpose in life.
B. Romantic Literature
1. Romanticism found its distinctive voice in
a group of English poets led by William
Wordsworth (1770–1850).
2. In 1798 Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (1772–1834) published their
Lyrical Ballads, which was written in the
language of ordinary speech and endowed
simple subjects with the loftiest majesty.
3. Classicism remained strong in France until
Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), in her
study On Germany (1810), extolled the
spontaneity and enthusiasm of German
writers and thinkers.
4. Between 1820 and 1850, the romantic
impulse broke through in the works of
Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo
(1802–1885), and George Sand
(pseudonym of the woman writer
Armandine-Aurore-Lucile Dudevant).
5. Hugo’s powerful novels, including The
Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831),
exemplified the romantic fascination with
fantastic characters, exotic historical
settings, and human emotions.
6. Renouncing his early conservatism, Hugo
equated freedom in literature with liberty
in politics and society, a political
evolution that was exactly the opposite of
Wordsworth’s.
C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND
351
7. In central and eastern Europe, literary
romanticism and early nationalism often
reinforced each other, as romantics
championed their own people’s histories,
culture, and unique greatness.
8. The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
were particularly successful at rescuing
German fairy tales from oblivion.
9. In the Slavic lands, romantics played a
decisive role in converting spoken peasant
languages into modern written languages.
10. In the vast Austrian, Russian, and
Ottoman Empires, the combination of
romanticism and nationalism was
particularly potent.
C. Romanticism in Art and Music
1. The great French painter Eugène
Delacroix (1798–1863) was a master of
dramatic, colorful scenes that stirred the
emotions.
2. German-speaking Casper David Friedrich
(1774–1840) painted somber landscapes
of ruined churches or remote arctic
shipwrecks, capturing the divine presence
in natural forces.
3. Notable romantic English painters
included Joseph M. W. Turner (1775–
1851), who often depicted nature’s power
and terror, and John Constable (1776–
1837), who painted humans living
peacefully amid rural landscapes.
4. Abandoning well-defined structures, the
great romantic composers used a wide
range of forms to create a thousand
musical landscapes and evoke a host of
powerful emotions.
5. The crashing chords evoking the surge of
the masses in Chopin’s Revolutionary
Etude and the bottomless despair of the
funeral march in Beethoven’s Third
Symphony plumbed the depths of human
feeling.
6. Music became a sublime end in itself,
expressing the endless yearning of the
soul, and made cultural heroes of romantic
composers such as Franz Liszt
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C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND U PHEAVALS
(1811–1886), whose performances evoked
great emotional responses.
7. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), the
most famous romantic composer, used
contrasting themes and tones to produce
dramatic conflict and inspiring
resolutions.
8. Even though Beethoven began to lose his
hearing at the peak of his fame and
eventually became completely deaf, he
continued to compose immortal music.
IV. Reforms and Revolutions Before 1848
A. National Liberation in Greece
1. Despite living under the domination of the
Ottoman Turks since the fifteenth century,
the Greeks had survived as a people,
united by their language and the Greek
Orthodox religion.
2. The rising nationalism of the early
nineteenth century led to the formation of
secret societies and then to revolt in 1821,
led by Alexander Ypsilanti, a Greek
patriot and a general in the Russian army.
3. At first, the Great Powers opposed the
revolution and refused to back Ypsilanti.
4. Yet many Europeans responded
enthusiastically to the Greek national
struggle, and as the Greeks battled on
against the Turks, they hoped for the
support of European governments.
5. In 1827 Great Britain, France, and Russia
yielded to popular demands at home and
directed Turkey to accept an armistice.
6. When the Turks refused, the navies of
these three powers trapped the Turkish
fleet at Navarino and destroyed it.
7. Great Britain, France, and Russia finally
declared Greece independent in 1830 and
installed a German prince as king of the
new country in 1832.
B. Liberal Reform in Great Britain
1. Eighteenth-century British society had
been both remarkably stable and
somewhat fluid.
2. Successful business and professional
people could join the landed aristocracy,
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
and the common people enjoyed limited
civil rights; yet only about 8 percent of the
population had the right to vote, and
government policies supported the
aristocracy and the new industrial
capitalists.
By the 1780s there was growing interest in
political reform, and by the time of the
Napoleonic wars, unions began to form;
however, the British aristocracy was
extremely hostile to attempts to change
the status quo.
Conflicts between the ruling class and
laborers were sparked in 1815 when the
aristocracy selfishly forced changes in the
Corn Laws, prohibiting the importation of
foreign grain unless the price at home rose
to improbable levels.
The revision of the Corn Laws during a
time of widespread unemployment and
postwar economic distress triggered
protests and demonstrations by urban
laborers, with the support of radical
intellectuals.
The Tory government, completely
controlled by the landed aristocracy,
responded by temporarily suspending the
traditional rights of peaceable assembly
and habeas corpus.
Two years later, Parliament passed the
infamous Six Acts, which placed controls
on a heavily taxed press and practically
eliminated all mass meetings.
These acts were followed by an enormous
but orderly protest at Saint Peter’s Fields
in Manchester, which was savagely
repressed by armed cavalry.
In response to calls for reform from the
new manufacturing and commercial elite,
in the 1820s the Tory government moved
in the direction of better urban
administration, greater economic
liberalism, civil equality for Catholics, and
limited importation of foreign grain.
These actions encouraged the new
business elite to press for reform of
U PHEAVALS
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
Parliament so they could have a larger say
in government.
The Whig Party had by tradition been
more responsive to middle-class
commercial and manufacturing interests
and sponsored the Reform Bill of 1832.
A surge of popular support propelled the
bill into law and moved politics in a more
democratic direction that allowed the
House of Commons to emerge as the allimportant legislative body, at the expense
of the aristocrat-dominated House of
Lords.
The new industrial areas of the country
gained representation in the Commons,
“rotten boroughs” were eliminated, and
the number of voters increased by 50
percent to include about 12 percent of
adult men; thus a major reform had been
achieved peacefully.
The “People’s Charter” of 1838 and the
Chartist movement, that demanded
universal male (but not female) suffrage,
pressed British elites for more radical
reform.
In addition to calling for universal male
suffrage, many working-class people
joined with middle-class manufacturers in
the Anti–Corn Law League, founded in
Manchester in 1839.
When Ireland’s potato crop failed in 1845
and famine prices for food seemed likely
in England, a few Tories joined with the
Whigs to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846
and allow free imports of grain.
From that point on, the liberal doctrine of
free trade became almost sacred dogma in
Great Britain.
The Tories passed the Ten Hours Act of
1847, which limited the workday for
women and young people in factories to
ten hours, and they continued to support
legislation regulating factory conditions.
This competition between a still-powerful
aristocracy and a strong middle class to
gain the support of the working class was
C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND
353
a crucial factor in Great Britain’s peaceful
evolution.
C. Ireland and the Great Famine
1. The people of Ireland did not benefit from
the political competition in Britain; the
great majority of the rural population,
Irish Catholic peasants, were trapped in an
exploitative tenant system under a tiny
minority of Church of England Protestant
landlords.
2. The condition of the Irish peasantry was
abominable, described by novelist Sir
Walter Scott as “the extreme verge of
human misery.”
3. Despite the terrible conditions, the
population of Ireland doubled, from 4
million in 1780 to 8 million by 1840, a
population explosion that was caused
primarily by the extensive cultivation of
the potato.
4. The decision to marry and have large
families made sense for peasants: rural
poverty was inescapable, but a couple
could better manage it, and children meant
extra hands in the field.
5. As population and potato dependency
grew, conditions became more precarious,
and potato crop failures in 1845, 1846,
1848, and 1851 resulted in the Great
Famine, a period of widespread sickness
and starvation.
6. The British government, committed to
free-trade ideology, was slow to act, and
when it did, its relief efforts were
tragically inadequate.
7. Moreover, the government continued to
collect taxes, landlords demanded their
rents, and tenants who could not pay were
evicted and their homes destroyed.
8. The Great Famine shattered the pattern of
Irish population growth: fully 1 million
emigrants fled the famine between 1845
and 1851, and up to 1.5 million died.
9. In contrast to other European countries,
Ireland experienced a declining population
in the second half of the nineteenth
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C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND U PHEAVALS
century, becoming a land of outmigration, early death, late marriage, and
widespread celibacy.
10. The Great Famine also intensified antiBritish feeling and promoted Irish
nationalism, leading to campaigns for land
reform, home rule, and, eventually, Irish
independence.
D. The Revolution of 1830 in France
1. Louis XVIII’s Constitutional Charter of
1814 was basically a liberal constitution
that protected the economic and social
gains of the middle class and the peasantry
in the French Revolution, permitted great
intellectual and artistic freedom, and
created a parliament with upper and lower
houses.
2. The moderate king refused to bow to the
wishes of aristocrats who wanted to sweep
away all revolutionary change, and he
appointed moderate royalists to serve as
his ministers.
3. Louis XVIII’s charter was liberal but not
democratic, however, allowing only about
100,000 of the wealthiest males out of a
total population of 30 million to vote for
representatives to the Chamber of
Deputies.
4. Nevertheless, the “notable people” who
did vote came from a variety of
backgrounds and included wealthy
businessmen, war profiteers, successful
professionals, ex-revolutionaries, large
landowners from the middle class and the
old aristocracy, Bourbons, and
Bonapartists.
5. Louis’s conservative successor, Charles X
(r. 1824–1830), wanted to re-establish the
old order in France but was blocked by the
opposition of the deputies, so in 1830 he
turned to military adventure in an effort to
rally French nationalism and gain popular
support.
6. In June 1830, in response to a longstanding dispute with Muslim Algeria, a
French force of 37,000 crossed the
Mediterranean and took the Algerian
capital city of Algiers in three weeks.
7. In 1831 Algerians in the interior revolted
and waged a fearsome war until 1847,
when French armies finally subdued the
country and expropriated large tracts of
Muslim land.
8. Emboldened by the good news from
Algeria, Charles repudiated the
Constitutional Charter in July 1830,
stripped much of the wealthy middle class
of its voting rights, and censored the press.
9. The immediate reaction was insurrection
in the capital, and three days of vicious
fighting brought down the government
and forced Charles to flee.
10. Then the upper middle class, which had
fomented the revolt, seated Charles’s
cousin, Louis Philippe, duke of Orléans,
on the vacant throne.
11. These events inspired people across
Europe: Belgian Catholics revolted
against the Dutch king and established
independence, and Swiss regional liberal
assemblies forced cantonal governments
to amend constitutions.
12. In partitioned Poland, an armed nationalist
rebellion against the Russian tsarist
government was crushed by the army.
13. Louis Philippe (r. 1830–1848) accepted
the Constitutional Charter of 1814 and
adopted the red, white, and blue flag of
the French Revolution.
14. The political situation in France remained
fundamentally unchanged, however—the
upper middle classes had brought about a
change in dynasty that maintained the
status quo—and popular demands for
reform went unanswered.
V. The Revolutions of 1848
A. A Democratic Republic in France
1. In the late 1840s, Europe entered a period
of tense political and economic crisis that
led to revolts and insurrections all across
Europe.
C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND
355
U PHEAVALS
2. Revolution in Europe was almost
universally expected, but it took events in
Paris—once again—to turn expectations
into realities.
3. For eighteen years Louis Philippe’s
“bourgeois monarchy,” characterized by
stubborn inaction and complacency, had
served the selfish interests of wealthy
elites and failed to enact social legislation
or electoral reform.
4. The government’s failures, combined with
a severe depression and crop failures in
1846–1847, united a diverse group of
opponents and eventually touched off a
popular revolt in Paris on February 22,
1848; workers and students, armed with
guns and dug in behind makeshift
fortresses, demanded a new government.
5. When Louis Philippe refused to call in the
army and then abdicated, the
revolutionaries proclaimed a provisional
republic, headed by a ten-man executive
committee, and immediately began
drafting a democratic, republican
constitution for France’s Second Republic.
6. They gave the right to vote to every adult
male, freed all slaves in French colonies,
abolished the death penalty, and
guaranteed workplace reforms.
7. Profound differences within the
revolutionary coalition reached a head in
1848 in the face of worsening depression
and rising unemployment.
8. Moderate liberal republicans, having
conceded to popular forces on the issue of
universal male suffrage, were opposed to
further radical social measures.
9. Radical republicans were committed to
some kind of socialism, while urban
artisans, who hated the unrestrained
competition of cutthroat capitalism,
advocated a combination of strong craft
unions and worker-owned businesses.
10. Louis Blanc pressed for recognition of a
socialist right to work, urging the creation
of permanent government-sponsored
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
cooperative workshops that would be an
alternative to capitalist employment and a
step toward a new, noncompetitive social
order.
Moderate republicans were willing to
provide only temporary relief, however,
and the resulting compromise set up
national workshops, which were soon to
become little more than a vast program of
pick-and-shovel public works that
satisfied no one.
As the economic crisis worsened, the
number enrolled in the workshops soared
from 10,000 in March to 120,000 by June,
with another 80,000 trying unsuccessfully
to join.
Meanwhile, voters elected to the new 900person Constituent Assembly 500
monarchists and conservatives, about 270
moderate republicans, and 80 radicals or
socialists.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), one
of the moderate republicans, observed that
the socialist movement in Paris aroused
the fierce hostility of France’s peasants,
who owned land, and of the middle and
upper classes.
The clash of ideologies—of liberal
moderation and radical socialism—
became a clash of classes and arms after
the elections.
Fearing that their socialist hopes were
about to be dashed, artisans and unskilled
workers invaded the Constituent
Assembly on May 15 and tried to
proclaim a new revolutionary state, but the
government put down the uprising.
As the workshops continued to fill and
grow more radical, the fearful but
powerful propertied classes in the
Assembly dissolved the national
workshops in Paris, giving the workers the
choice of joining the army or going to
workshops in the provinces.
The result was a spontaneous and violent
uprising; barricades sprang up again in the
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C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND U PHEAVALS
narrow streets of Paris, and a terrible class
war began.
19. After three terrible “June Days” of street
fighting and the death or injury of more
than ten thousand people, the republican
army under General Louis Cavaignac
stood triumphant in a sea of working-class
blood and hatred.
20. In place of a generous democratic
republic, the Constituent Assembly issued
a constitution featuring a strong executive.
21. Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon
Bonaparte, won the election of December
1848, fulfilling the desire of the propertied
classes for order at any cost and producing
a semi-authoritarian regime.
B. Revolution and Reaction in the Austrian
Empire
1. News of the upheaval in France evoked
excitement, as liberals demanded
constitutions, representative governments,
and greater civil liberties from
authoritarian regimes and then revolted
when governments hesitated.
2. Confronting a united front of urban
workers, students, middle-class liberals,
and peasants, monarchs quickly made
concessions, but soon traditional forces
reasserted their authority and revoked
many of the reforms when the
revolutionary coalition began to break
down.
3. The revolution in the Austrian Empire
began in Hungary in 1848, where
nationalistic Hungarians demanded
national autonomy, full civil liberties, and
universal suffrage.
4. When the monarchy in Vienna hesitated,
Viennese students and workers took to the
streets, while peasant disorders broke out
in parts of the empire.
5. The Habsburg emperor Ferdinand I
(r. 1835–1848) capitulated and promised
reforms and a liberal constitution, while
Metternich fled to London.
6. The coalition of revolutionaries was not
stable, however, and once the monarchy
abolished serfdom, the newly free
peasants lost interest in the political and
social questions agitating the cities.
7. Meanwhile, the coalition of urban
revolutionaries broke down along class
lines over the issue of socialist workshops
and universal voting rights for men.
8. In March the Hungarian revolutionary
leaders pushed through an extremely
liberal, almost democratic, constitution,
but they also sought to transform
Hungary’s multitude of provinces and
peoples into a unified and centralized
Hungarian nation.
9. To the minority groups that formed half of
the population—the Croats, Serbs, and
Romanians—unification was
unacceptable, as each group felt entitled to
political autonomy and cultural
independence.
10. Thus, desires for national autonomy
enabled the monarchy to play one ethnic
group against the other.
11. Finally, the conservative aristocratic
forces rallied under the leadership of the
archduchess Sophia, Ferdinand’s sister-inlaw, who insisted that Ferdinand abdicate
in favor of her son, Francis Joseph.
12. The first conservative breakthrough came
on June 17, when the army bombarded
Prague and savagely crushed a workingclass revolt.
13. At the end of October, the regular
Austrian army attacked the student and
working-class radicals barricaded in
Vienna and retook the city at the cost of
more than four thousand casualties.
14. After Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916) was
crowned emperor of Austria, Nicholas I of
Russia (r. 1825–1855) sent 130,000
Russian troops into Hungary on June 6,
1849, to subdue the country after bitter
fighting.
U PHEAVALS
15. For a number of years, the Habsburgs
ruled Hungary as a conquered territory.
C. Prussia, the German Confederation, and the
Frankfurt National Parliament
1. Since the Napoleonic wars, liberal
German reformers had sought to transform
absolutist Prussia into a constitutional
monarchy, hoping it would eventually
lead to a unified nation-state.
2. After Louis Philippe’s fall and several
years of crop failure and economic crisis,
liberals began to press their demands.
3. In 1848, when the artisans and factory
workers rioted in Berlin and temporarily
joined with middle-class liberals in the
struggle against the Prussian monarchy,
the autocratic yet compassionate Frederick
William IV (r. 1840–1861) vacillated and
finally caved in.
4. On March 21 he promised to grant Prussia
a liberal constitution and to merge Prussia
into a new national German state.
5. When the workers issued a series of
democratic and vaguely socialist demands
that troubled their middle-class allies, a
conservative clique gathered around the
king to urge counter-revolution.
6. In May, a national parliament convened in
Frankfurt to write a German federal
constitution; the middle-class elites who
were elected as deputies called for
constitutional monarchy, free speech,
religious tolerance, and abolition of
aristocratic privileges, but they ignored
calls for more radical action.
7. In October deputies proposed unification
around a “Greater Germany” that would
include the German-speaking lands of the
Austrian Empire, but the proposal
foundered on Austrian determination to
maintain its empire.
8. In March 1849 the national parliament
finally completed its draft liberal
constitution and elected King Frederick
William of Prussia emperor of a “lesser”
German national state (minus Austria).
C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND
357
9. Frederick William reasserted his royal
authority, disbanded the Prussian
Constituent Assembly, and refused to
accept the “crown from the gutter” offered
by the parliament in Frankfurt.
10. When Frederick William, who really
wanted to be emperor but only on his own
authoritarian terms, tried to get the small
monarchies of Germany to elect him
emperor, Austria balked.
11. Supported by Russia, Austria forced
Prussia to renounce all schemes of
unification in late 1850, and the German
Confederation was re-established.
12. In the various German states, reactionary
monarchs granted their subjects
conservative constitutions and weak
parliaments and stepped up surveillance,
as former revolutionaries fled into exile
and German liberals gave up demands for
national unification.
13. Attempts to unite the Germans—first in a
liberal national state and then in a
conservative Prussian empire—had failed
completely.
LECTURE STRATEGIES
Lecture 1: Pursuing Equilibrium: European
International Relations After 1815
War had punctuated Europe’s eighteenth century.
The nineteenth century was far more peaceful, at
least within the boundaries of Europe. After the
disasters of the Napoleonic wars, European states
moved from an international system based on the
principle of balance of power to one that emphasized
equilibrium. It was a remarkably successful
transformation, one that maintained European
political stability for nearly a century.
For students interested in international relations,
this lecture provides an opportunity for a short
tutorial on the history of diplomacy. Originating
around 1500 in the Italian city-states, international
diplomacy blossomed after the Treaty of Westphalia
(1648). By the eighteenth century, the guiding
European diplomatic principle was to maintain a
balance of power, which (some historians argue)
created a structure that promoted war rather than
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C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND U PHEAVALS
prevented it. Fiscal and military limitations, rather
than diplomacy, were the main reasons why more
wars did not occur in the eighteenth century.
But the Napoleonic wars began to forge a new
international system. Recap the impact of the French
Revolution and Napoleonic wars on Europe.
Napoleon’s armies transformed war into a total
affair, demanding the mobilization of whole
populations and aiming to destroy armies rather than
just occupy land. To ward off the French contagion,
European nations forged a series of coalitions,
including some unlikely alliances (e.g., Britain and
Russia) that paved the way for more coalition
building in the post-Napoleonic era. By 1813 the
coalition partners had shifted their goals from warmaking to peacemaking and their diplomatic
strategies from coercion to persuasion.
The Congress of Vienna was pivotal in forging
the new international system. Draw out the nuances
of the agreement: key provisions included the
congress system within the Concert of Europe; a
system of intermediate bodies as buffers and spheres
of influence; and the fencing off of Europe from
external conflicts (i.e., Europeans could penetrate the
rest of the world without having much effect on
intra-European politics). Of course, inherent
weaknesses continued: Britain tended toward
isolationism; Austria-Hungary was threatened by
nationalist movements; Prussia grew increasingly
ambitious; and Russia was increasingly rigid. But the
system held together relatively well, regardless.
Sources: Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of
European Politics, 1763–1848 (1994); F. R. Bridge
and Roger Bullen, The Great Powers and the
European States System, 1814–1914 (1980); T.
Chapman, The Congress of Vienna: Origins,
Processes, Results (1998).
Lecture 2: Competing for Legitimacy:
Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism
Political theory is not the most compelling topic for
history students, but this lecture can be enlivened
with references to vivid personalities and dramatic
events. Emphasize the enduring nature of the
questions raised in the post-1815 period: How best to
create political and economic stability? What should
be the balance between individual freedom and state
authority?
Begin with the conservative agenda. Claiming
“legitimacy,” conservatives believed the answers lay
in long-established political, economic, and cultural
systems: monarchy, aristocracy, and organized
religion (illustrate this principle by showing students
Heinrich Olivier’s The Holy Alliance [1815]). As a
case study, Metternich is a fascinating individual
who has left a vast correspondence revealing his
political convictions.
After explaining the conservative position,
explore the threats to Metternich’s vision. German
universities and student fraternities provide
interesting case studies in resistance, as do the
nationalist movements in Greece, Hungary, Italy, and
elsewhere. Help students see Metternich’s system
within a wider context of revolt and reform: in 1831–
1832, England was torn apart by riots in favor of the
Reform Bill; the election of President Andrew
Jackson in the United States signaled change; and
South America struggled for independence from
Spain. All of these events suggest that Metternich’s
system was flowing against the tide. But urge
students to resist the tyranny of hindsight and
recognize that Metternich’s system was not
necessarily doomed from the start, and not all
monarchists were evildoers.
Liberalism is perhaps the easiest of the three to
explain, as students find it the most familiar, but
make sure they have their definitions straight.
Nineteenth-century liberalism is not the same as the
“l-word” so readily tossed around by today’s
political pundits. The life and commitments of John
Stuart Mill, in partnership with his wife Harriet, can
serve as one case study of liberalism (and allow you
to include a discussion of feminism as one piece of
the liberal creed). The British response to the Irish
famine is another.
Finally, because socialism is so misunderstood,
it is important to explain it carefully and with enough
detail so that students can understand its appeal to so
many for such a long time. Show students that
socialism’s early versions differed considerably from
the Stalinist versions they might know. Marx, of
course, deserves ample time, but so do other early
socialists: Pierre Proudhon’s assertion that “Property
Is Theft” bears close examination, as does Robert
Owen’s experiments in social harmony. Norman
Davies’s Europe: A History (1998) contains a very
useful chart labeled “The Pedigree of Socialism,”
which highlights socialism’s many variants.
Sources: Albert S. Lindemann, A History of
European Socialism (1983); Robert Gildea,
Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800–1914 (1996);
Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored (1973); Paul
Johnson, The Birth of the Modern (1991).
U PHEAVALS
Lecture 3: The Bohemian Revolt
This topic is too good to skip. The artistic and
literary responses to the dual revolutions are a
delight to teach and often strangely relevant to
students’ worlds. Begin with the basics. Introduce
the broad historical context, exploring the birth of
bohemianism within Enlightenment thought (JeanJacques Rousseau) and its growth during the French
Revolution and Napoleonic wars. Lay out the
geography, pointing out that it was particularly
strong in Britain, France, and the Germany
confederation. Explore its social dynamics, noting
that its adherents included both men and women
from a variety of class backgrounds.
Then delve into the romantics’ key ideas and
attitudes: emotional exuberance, imagination,
spontaneity in art and personal life. One key idea
was their rejection of bourgeois values. Gustav
Flaubert signed his letters with the title
“Bourgeoisophobus” and claimed that hatred of the
bourgeoisie was “the beginning of all virtue.” The
romantics condemned the money-making
bourgeoisie as dull, crass, conformist, and, worst of
all, unheroic. They flocked to run-down
neighborhoods, lived in garrets, wore beards and
long hair, and adopted flamboyant dress. One might
argue they were the first purveyors of a “lifestyle.”
Give examples of how, in their art, poetry and
music, the romantics often strove to shock. Tell the
story of how poet Gérard de Nerval took a lobster on
a walk in the Tuileries gardens. The romantics wrote
about suicide and sometimes committed it. They
identified with the victims of the bourgeois order: the
poor, criminals, those struggling for nationhood.
Some elevated sex to an art form.
Of course, a critique is also necessary. Many of
the romantic artists were bourgeois themselves; they
were cultivated and sophisticated individuals who
were never as antimaterialist as their rhetoric
suggested. But they celebrated creativity, rebellion,
novelty, self-expression, anti-materialism, and
heroism nonetheless. Turn the lecture into a holistic
experience by sharing plenty of examples of the art,
poetry, and music of the movement. If slides are
available, the grandiose paintings of Theodore
Gericault (The Raft of the Medusa [1819]) and
Eugène Delacroix (Massacre at Chios [1824]) are
not to be missed.
Sources: Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism
(1999); Boris Ford, ed., The Romantic Age in Britain
(1992); Cwisfa Lim, Romanticism: Dawn of a New
Era (2002); Iain McCalman, An Oxford Companion
C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND
359
to the Romantic Age (1999; available online by
subscription).
COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS
AND DIFFICULT TOPICS
1. The Corn Laws
The objective of the 1815 revision of the Corn Laws,
which imposed tariffs on imported grain, was simply
to protect British agriculture (in British lingo, corn
refers to wheat, rye, and barley, not maize), but the
application and effects of the laws were more
complicated. The Corn Laws prevented the
importation of foreign-grown grain until
domestically grown grain reached a certain price
(initially £4 per quarter, with a quarter meaning a
unit of eight bushels). Perhaps more challenging for
students to understand is how the Corn Laws became
a tool of class warfare. They were designed to
protect large landowners, not the small tenant
farmers, and to keep the price of grain—and
therefore bread—high. In a defense of the Corn
Laws, Benjamin Disraeli argued that their repeal
would destroy the “territorial constitution” of Britain
by empowering commercial interests. The greatest
champion of repealing the Corn Laws, Prime
Minister Sir Robert Peel, saw it more as a way to
head off revolution than as an act of liberal economic
reform.
2. Early Nationalism
Given our familiarity with nationalism’s twentiethcentury versions, it is easy to misunderstand the
origins and nature of nationalism in the nineteenth
century. The roots of nationalism can be found in the
Enlightenment’s and the French Revolution’s
emphasis on liberal democracy and fundamental
human rights (i.e., nationalism as a doctrine of
“popular sovereignty”). The idea evolved into a
doctrine in Europe during the Napoleonic wars, as
nationalists asserted that humanity is naturally
divided into nations, and that nations should form the
bases of states and state power. Prior to this time, the
monarch had most often embodied the nation (e.g.,
Louis XIV’s “l’etat, c’est moi”). As time passed,
nationalism increasingly became a tool for denying
the right of national self-determination to Africans,
Asians, and revolutionary Europeans. Generally,
nationalism can take two different forms: (1)
nationalism as loyalty to an existing state
(patriotism), or (2) nationalism as liberation—the
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C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND U PHEAVALS
desire to create a new state based on identities,
whether religious, ethnic, cultural, or linguistic.
Sources: Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds.,
Becoming National: A Reader (1996); Eric
Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780
(1990); Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (1960).
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
Using Film and Television in the
Classroom
When it first appeared, Civilization: A Personal View
by Lord Clark (1969) was labeled by one critic as
“the definitive documentary series of the last fifty
years” and “eternally significant.” Though now
dated, it still offers gorgeous visuals and useful
insights into the history of Western art, architecture,
and philosophy. For the nineteenth century, try
episode eleven (“The Worship of Nature”) on the
glorification of nature as a creative force and spark
behind the romantic movement. Other documentaries
on the romantic movement include Simon Schama’s
The Power of Art: Turner—Painting Up a Storm
(2007, 50 min.) and the three-episode series The
Romantics (Films for the Humanities and Social
Sciences, 2006, 60 min. each), which uses creative
reenactments to explore the lives and works of
William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William
Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy and Mary
Shelley.
Many feature-length films on the romantic
movement seem to reflect the adage “don’t let the
facts stand in the way of a good story.” The premise
of the film Immortal Beloved (1994, 121 min.) is
speculative—that Beethoven’s enduring love interest
was his brother’s wife—and as one reviewer put it,
the whole question is “less a great mystery than a
minor curiosity.” But well-selected clips can help
introduce this temperamental genius and his music to
students. Look for the segment set against the Ninth
Symphony. Other films about Beethoven can be
found at http://www.lvbeethoven.com/Fictions
/FictionFilmsImmortalBeloved.html. Another option
is Impromptu (1991, 107 min.), about the romance
between Chopin and George Sand, but its
preoccupation with sexual promiscuity suffers from
historical anachronism and may disqualify it from
classroom viewing. Or check out the classic Chopin
biography, A Song to Remember (1945, 113 min.),
but keep an open eye for historical errors.
Paris continued to be at the center of the cultural
and political movements of the age. Paris: 1830
(1997, 14 min.) introduces students to the
monuments to France’s glory days (Arc de
Triomphe, the Pantheon, and the Place de Concorde),
as well as the romantic artists and musicians who
made Paris their home, while Victor Hugo: Les
Misérables (1975, 3 hrs. 48 min.) dramatizes Hugo’s
novel and provides a riveting social portrait of midcentury Paris. (Both films are available from Films
for the Humanities and Social Sciences.) Of course,
you also might show students portions of Les
Misérables (1998, 134 min.), which many
mistakenly believe to be set in 1789 but actually is
set against the backdrop of the antimonarchist Paris
uprising of June 1832.
With its intrinsic drama, the Great Famine in
Ireland is surprisingly unrepresented on screen. On
the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the potato
blight, the BBC produced a documentary The Great
Irish Famine (1996), but if you use it, ask students to
compare its tone and slant to that presented by other
historians, such as Christine Kinealy and Cormac Ó
Grada. Part one of the acclaimed PBS series The
Irish in America: Long Journey Home (1997, 86
min.) focuses on the emigration that resulted from
the potato blight.
Class Discussion Starters
1. What relationship does feminism have to
other mid-century “isms” and ideologies?
Modern feminism—a complex doctrine in itself—
emerged from within various ideological traditions.
While liberalism, with its emphasis on individual
rights, is often recognized as the main source of
feminism, socialist and nationalist movements also
brought women’s interests forward. Guide students
in a discussion of utopian socialists’ views of free
love or Friedrich Engels’s writings on the family.
Point out women’s involvement in the nationalist
movements of 1848 and another, often ignored “ism”
that also shaped early feminism: evangelicalism.
Sources: Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern
Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the
United States, 1780–1860 (1990); Bonnie Smith,
Changing Lives: Women in European History Since
1700 (1989); Sue Morgan and Jacqueline deVries,
eds., Women, Gender, and Religious Cultures in
Britain, 1800–1940 (1910).
U PHEAVALS
2. Why did the revolutions of 1848 fail?
No simple response will suffice. Generally, you can
point to divisions among the revolutionaries as the
reason for the downfall—for example, splits between
propertied liberals and the urban working classes—
but to answer the question well, students must
understand local variations. In Hungary, for example,
anti-Jewish riots sparked by the prospect of Jewish
enfranchisement, and Croatian opposition to
Hungarian rule, were significant factors. The
revolutions of 1848 demonstrated, once again, that it
is easier to bring down a regime than to build one up.
Historical Debates
The plight of the Irish during the Great Famine rarely
fails to capture the interest of students. Was the
disaster inevitable or avoidable? Should the British
have done more to relieve distress? If so, what could
have been done differently? How did prevailing
political and economic ideologies shape the
responses?
You might give students contrasting historical
assessments and have them decide which is more
convincing (F. S. L. Lyons, for example, called the
initial response “prompt and relatively successful,”
while others like historian Christine Kinealy are
more critical). However, a debate staged with
historical actors is more engaging, albeit timeconsuming, and can elicit nuances in the various
historical responses. As you prepare students for the
debate, urge them to remember the complexity of the
Irish situation in the 1840s. As William Thackeray
observed, “To have an opinion about Ireland, one
must begin by getting at the truth; and where is that
to be had in the country? Rather, there are two truths,
the Catholic truth and the Protestant truth….Belief is
a party business” (Irish Sketch Book,1842).
Students will quickly learn that there were, in
fact, more than two truths. For this debate to work,
students will need a thorough knowledge of AngloIrish politics and society. Among Irish landlords,
some behaved well (the Earl of Kingston spent half
his annual income relieving distress), while others
behaved badly (refusing to lower rents and evicting
tenants). Irish tenant farmers also responded
differently, depending on their region and relative
prosperity. Similarly, attitudes among the British
varied greatly, reflecting a range of perceptions and
prejudices. Sometimes ideology was to blame for the
ad hoc, haphazard, and ill-planned responses; at
C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND
361
other times it was basic incompetence. Make sure the
students draw out the ideological underpinnings
where applicable and address how the ideas of Adam
Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo played a
role. Students will have fun choosing parts: on the
British side, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, Lord
John Russell, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Lord Lieutenant
of Ireland, Queen Victoria, and some Quakers; on
the Irish side, Daniel O’Connell, John Mitchel
(“Young Ireland”), Lord Mayor of Dublin, some
landlords, and, of course, their tenant farmers.
Sources: Helen Litton, The Irish Famine: An
Illustrated History (2003); Christine Kinealy, A
Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in
Ireland (1997); Edward Lengel, The Irish Through
British Eyes: Perceptions of Ireland in the Famine
Era (2002); Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great
Hunger, 1945–49 (1991); various books by Cormac
Ó Gráda.
Using Primary Sources
Excerpts are always an option, but the full-length
versions of the era’s classics are well worth the
investment of time. Three that work well are Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus
(1818), Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in
America (1835), and Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). As
students encounter these texts, give them background
on the authors’ lives, views, and motivations.
Discuss the forms of the texts too. For example, both
Tocqueville and Marx were writing polemic works—
that is, writing to advocate causes. These texts were
not, nor were they intended to be, balanced scholarly
treatises. Polemic works usually promote an author’s
viewpoint and summarily dismiss opposing
arguments. Because of this, you might invite students
to “talk back” to these texts, making
counterarguments with historical evidence.
Cooperative Learning Activities
1. American Idol: The Romantics
Music is such a potent tool for teaching history that it
would be a shame not to engage students with the
masterpieces of romantic music. One alternative to
the “research and report” approach is a competition
in the format of American Idol. Ask students to come
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C HAPTER 21 • I DEOLOGIES AND U PHEAVALS
to class as their chosen personas, introduce
themselves (with some personal details), and then
play a five- to ten-minute selection for a panel of
“judges.” They might choose to be Frederic Chopin,
Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz,
Johannes Brahms, Edvard Grieg, Clara Schumann,
Pyotr Tchaikovsky, or another composer or
performer from the period. The panel of judges can
applaud, hiss, and ask questions about harmony,
form, tonality, or something more personal. A
student who comes as Chopin and plays an excerpt
from the “Revolutionary Étude” (op. 10 no. 12), for
example, should be prepared to explain that it was
inspired by the Polish revolution of 1831.
Source: Alex Zukas, “Different Drummers: Using
Music to Teach History,” Perspectives (September
1996).
2. Mapping the 1848 Revolutions
Like 1989, the year 1848 brought enormously
complex political changes. A series of liberal
revolutions exploded around Europe, in France and
Hungary, Milan and Sicily, and across the German
states. Some clamored for liberal constitutions,
others for nationhood, and still others for workers’
rights. But who can keep it all straight? Give
students a blank map of Europe and ask them to map
the revolts, indicating the central issues, key leaders,
and major turning points and outcomes.
Sources: Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution
(2009); Jonathan Sperber, The European
Revolutions, 1848–1851 (1994).
FILM AND AUDIO
• Civilization: A Personal View by Lord Clark,
Episode 11: “The Worship of Nature” (1969,
BBC, 50 min.)
• Simon Schama’s The Power of Art, Episode 5:
“Turner” (2006, BBC, 60 min.)
• The Romantics (2006, Films Media Group, 60
min. each)
• Immortal Beloved (1994, Icon Entertainment
International, 121 min.)
• Impromptu (1991, C.L.G. Films, 107 min.)
• A Song to Remember (1945, Columbia Pictures
Corporation, 113 min.)
• Paris: 1830 (1997, Films Media Group, 14
min.)
• Victor Hugo: Les Misérables (1975, Films
Media Group, 228 min.)
• Les Misérables (1998, Mandalay
Entertainment, 134 min.)
WEB RESOURCES
• Eugene Delacroix (http://www
.eugenedelacroix.org/)
• Edgar Allan Poe Museum (http://www
.poemuseum.org)
• Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions (http://www
.ohio.edu/chastain/)
• The History Place: Irish Potato Famine
(http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory
/famine/index.html)
• Interpreting the Irish Famine, 1846–1850
(http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/sadlier/irish
/Famine.htm)
• The Nationalism Project (http://www
.nationalismproject.org/)
• Utopian Socialism Archive (http://www
.marxists.org/subject/utopian)
• Victor Hugo Central (http://www.gavroche.org
/vhugo)
• The Walter Scott Digital Archive (http://www
.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk)
• William Wordsworth: The Complete Poetical
Works (http://www.bartleby.com/145)