Political Developments, 1815 to 1848

This is Unit Ten of Western Civilization Two, part one of two: the ideologies of the years from Vienna to the revolutions, the exam's seventh band. Unit nine ended with the chain from coal to class to reform. This unit is the century's arguments about what should replace the order Napoleon shook, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is the anchor's contest of three against one: conservatism defending the rebuilt old order, and liberalism, nationalism and socialism agreeing only on the enemy. Part one lays out the four creeds, with Romanticism as the mood that fed one of them by accident, and follows the contest through its first rounds, from Spain and the Decembrists to July eighteen thirty and Britain's reforms. Part two is eighteen forty-eight and who won. By the end you will be able to describe conservatism and its founders. To explain how Romanticism fed nationalism. To state what liberals wanted. To describe socialism from the utopians to Marx. And to describe the contest's first rounds.

Five entries on the old order and its doctrine: what Napoleon left, conservatism's three words, Burke, Gobineau's wrong turn, and the field of four.

A thousand years shaken in a generation.

WC2 0901 After Napoleon: A Thousand-Year Order Shaken in a Generation

The Revolution frightened Europe's elites but stayed in France; Napoleon carried it everywhere his armies went, and Italians, Germans and Poles tasted status not defined by birth. After eighteen fifteen the elites could not undo the Revolution, so they rebuilt the old order with limited concessions. A thousand-year order gone in a generation, the anchor says: the century's start, not its story.

Peace, tradition, stability.

WC2 0902 Conservatism: De Maistre, Original Sin, and Peace, Tradition, Stability

Conservatism justified the old order by peace, tradition and stability: what had worked for centuries beat the forces of seventeen eighty-nine, whose rapid change had produced the Terror and twenty years of war. De Maistre added original sin: depraved human nature checked by monarchy, nobility and church. Careful reform acceptable; rapid change never. The anchor's verdict on conservatism in practice is attributed.

Liberties as an inheritance.

WC2 0903 Burke: The Constitution Is Not Arithmetic

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France of seventeen ninety held the social fabric complex and fragile, kept from chaos only by tradition, so that gradual reform beats rapid change. The anchor quotes him: a kingdom's constitution is not a problem of arithmetic. Liberties are an entailed inheritance from ancestors, in his own words. Part two reads him.

Hierarchy dressed as science.

WC2 0904 Gobineau: Hierarchy in the Language of Science

Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races of the eighteen fifties recast the nobility as a once-pure superior race diluted by mixing, in the language of science. The anchor calls it scientific nonsense and the bridge from traditional hierarchy to Social Darwinism, anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology; Hitler cited him, it notes. Anchor-only, and unit twelve takes up the pseudo-science.

Three against one.

WC2 0905 Four Ideologies, Three Against One

An ideology, in the anchor's definition, is a set of beliefs about government, law, justice, economics, religion and gender. Four dominated the century: conservatism, liberalism, nationalism and socialism, and for its first half the last three shared opposition to the first while disagreeing on what should replace it. Three against one until eighteen forty-eight; Romanticism is a mood that feeds one of them.

Six entries on Romanticism and nationalism: the arts movement, the folk collectors, the doctrine, the Revolution as model, the first movements and the first decrees, and the question no one answered.

Emotion above all.

WC2 0906 Romanticism: Awe, Nature, and the Artist as Genius

Romanticism was an arts movement of the late eighteenth century that came of age in the nineteenth: tribute to forces beyond reason, nature, the soul, death, a people's spirit; humankind small before nature; peasants closest to it; the artist an unteachable genius; emotion above all. The Enlightenment's opposite in temperament. Not political, the anchor says, yet it planted nationalism's seeds by accident.

A German soul before any Germany.

WC2 0907 The Folk Movement: The Grimms and Invented Traditions

Romantics went looking for national character among the common people, gathering folk songs and tales in the early nineteenth century. The Brothers Grimm, philologists and collectors, the witness's dictionary-makers, found a German soul in songs and language before any Germany existed. Tartans and the Kalevala: traditions invented for identity. The anchor says early eighteenth century; the Grimms published in eighteen twelve.

The state should match a people.

WC2 0908 Nationalism: The State Should Match a People

Nationalism holds that the state should correspond to a people, and its movements began in earnest after the Napoleonic wars; nearly all eventually succeeded, Poland and Ireland after a century. The vexing question, the anchor says, is who defines the people: language, place, religion, ancestry, four answers, none agreed. Success came late and by conservative hands, in unit eleven.

The model, and the reaction against it.

WC2 0909 The French Revolution as Model, and Nationalism as Reaction

The Revolution was nationalism's model: the whole nation represented, privilege erased, religion subordinated, the nation called to arms behind the Marseillaise, la patrie replacing king and church. The irony is that the invaded countries adopted nationalism against French universalism: Spain in eighteen-oh-eight, Prussia's liberation, Russia's resistance, British pride. Unit eight's reaction is this unit's ideology.

Students, a murder, decrees, and exiles.

WC2 0910 Wartburg 1817, Carlsbad 1819, and Young Italy 1831

German students gathered at the Wartburg in eighteen seventeen; after a nationalist murdered a conservative in nineteen, Metternich issued the Carlsbad Decrees, the witness's name, dissolving fraternities and gagging the press. Mazzini's Young Italy of eighteen thirty-one made the thirties the pivot: Young Germany and Young Ireland followed. A springtime of peoples, planned in exile. Carlsbad is the witness's; the rest the anchor's.

Who is the people?

WC2 0911 Who Is "the People"? Nationalism's Unanswered Question

The people, das Volk, le peuple, il popolo, meant those rooted in the soil. Who was German: by language, place, religion or ancestry? Prussia or Austria? What of Germans in Bohemia and Poland? The questions were postponed while the goals stayed out of reach, and nationalists believed nations would be the end of war. The postponed questions return in units eleven and fourteen.

Two entries on liberalism: the creed of the educated middle class, and the state it wanted, constitutional, parliamentary, and voted for by property.

Rights for every citizen.

WC2 0912 Liberalism: Equality Before the Law, and Rights as Universal

Liberalism, the word regular by eighteen thirty, was the creed of the educated middle class: freedom from despotism, privilege, economic interference, intolerance and censorship. Its core beliefs came from the two revolutions: equality before the law against the estates, and rights as universal privileges of citizenship, not of groups. Speech, press, religion, markets: rights for every citizen, and votes for fewer.

Liberal is not democratic.

WC2 0913 Constitutional Monarchy With a Property Franchise

Liberals wanted constitutional monarchy: a written constitution restricting the king, an elected parliament, and a property-restricted electorate for stability. They gained ground: France's restored monarchy with a parliament, Belgium's liberal monarchy of eighteen thirty, German reforms by the forties, Britain the model. Slowly and haltingly liberalized is the anchor's phrase for eighteen fifteen to forty-eight. The vote followed property.

Eight entries on socialism: a word coined in thirty-four, the utopians, the year that made it militant, Blanc and the anarchists, Marx's doctrine and mechanism, Marx after forty-eight, and the class that was winning.

A word against individualism.

WC2 0914 Socialism: A Word Coined Against Individualism, 1834

Socialism was born of the break with the society of orders and of industrial capitalism, and the word, French, dates from eighteen thirty-four, coined against individualism, the liberals' term, as moral decay. It was ethical before it was economic: goods in common, producers keeping the fruits of labor, community. An answer to unit nine's Manchester, and several movements under one word by mid-century.

Oceans of lemonade.

WC2 0915 Utopian Socialism: Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier

Before eighteen forty-eight socialism was optimistic, expecting conversion: the Saint-Simonians, engineers harnessing industry for all; Owen's New Lanark, the witness's model mill with schools and pensions, and his short-lived communities; Fourier's phalanxes of exactly sixteen hundred twenty people, with gender equality and oceans of lemonade. Utopian is Engels's later word, the anchor says. Competition was a moral problem, not a threat.

Three lessons of one year.

WC2 0916 Why 1848 Made Socialism Militant

Eighteen forty-eight taught socialists three lessons: democracy voted for priests and nobles, class collaboration was impossible, and peaceful change was doubtful when Russia could march into Hungary. Utopian hope gave way to militancy, and socialism split three ways. The one movement, the anchor says, that failed in eighteen forty-eight and turned militant. The split is the exam's: state, anarchist, Marxist.

Reform from above, or no state at all.

WC2 0917 Blanc's State Socialism and the Anarchists Proudhon and Bakunin

Louis Blanc wanted reform from above: universal suffrage electing a state that guaranteed work, his National Workshops of eighteen forty-eight. Anarchists rejected the state itself: Proudhon, property is theft, a federation of cooperatives without violence; Bakunin, apocalyptic revolution, loathing state and family alike, with followers in Italy and Spain by eighteen seventy. Anarchism rejects the state, not organization, the anchor stresses.

All history is class struggle.

WC2 0918 Marx: Class Struggle, Bourgeoisie, Proletariat, and the Means of Production

Marx, born eighteen eighteen, wrote the Communist Manifesto with Engels in eighteen forty-eight: all history is class struggle, simplified under capitalism to bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, against proletariat, who own only their labor, the commons enclosed and the artisan made obsolete. The witness: class struggle is Marxism's core. Philosophers have interpreted the world; the point is to change it.

Nothing to lose but their chains.

WC2 0919 Overproduction, Crisis, Revolution: Marx's Mechanism

The proletariat grows as bourgeois losers fall into it; workers cannot buy what they make, alienation; crises of overproduction recur until the system collapses and the proletariat seizes industrial wealth for all. To the young Marx the revolution was inevitable. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, the Manifesto ends. Doctrine stated as Marx's; the anchor's reading follows.

Analysis without a tactical guide.

WC2 0920 Marx After 1848: Capital Without a Tactical Guide

Elated then horrified by eighteen forty-eight, exiled to Britain, Marx turned from propaganda to analysis: Capital, eighteen sixty-seven, a study of English capitalism. The anchor's reading: he described capitalism before unions and state intervention tamed it, and left no tactical guide. A third of the world was nominally Marxist by the mid-twentieth century. The reading is the anchor's, attributed.

Top hats buying land.

WC2 0921 The Bourgeoisie and the Nobility: Money and Titles Blur

Marx was right, the anchor says, that the bourgeoisie were the agents of change: fifteen to twenty percent of central and western Europe by the early eighteen hundreds, self-made, hands clean, top-hatted, buying land because the vote was tied to it. Nobles, wary, married their money. Manhood suffrage in France dates from eighteen forty-eight; the anchor's seventy-one is corrected.

Five entries on the contest to eighteen forty-six: Spain and the Holy Alliance, the Decembrists, Greece, July eighteen thirty, and the country that reformed instead.

The Holy Alliance's first test.

WC2 0922 Spain 1820 and the Holy Alliance's First Intervention

Ferdinand the Seventh, restored, refused the liberal constitution of eighteen twelve; a liberal military coup in eighteen twenty forced it back on him. The Holy Alliance's first test: a French army, two hundred thousand by the anchor's count, restored him. The witness has the Congress of Verona and the march into Spain. The Monroe Doctrine, the anchor says, feared the same intervention.

Officers in the square, and a secret police.

WC2 0923 The Decembrists, 1825, and Nicholas I's Third Section

Officers who had seen the West in the Napoleonic campaigns conspired for a constitution and emancipation when Alexander the First died. In December eighteen twenty-five they stood in the square before the palace; loyal troops fired. Nicholas the First interrogated them himself, and founded the Third Section, Europe's first secret police: autocracy, orthodoxy, nationality. Russia's only liberal attempt before nineteen-oh-five, the anchor says.

Cultural bias beat conservative principle.

WC2 0924 Greek Independence and the Sick Man of Europe

Greeks rose against the Ottomans in eighteen twenty-one, and Europeans who would crush a revolt anywhere else flocked to Greece as Europe's birthplace; a British, French and Russian fleet sank the Ottoman fleet in eighteen twenty-seven. Greece was independent by eighteen thirty, the witness's date. Cultural bias beat conservative principle, the anchor says. Its eighteen thirty-three is recorded.

An accidental revolution.

WC2 0925 July 1830: Charles X Falls, the Citizen King, and Belgium

Charles the Tenth disenfranchised most voters and gagged the press in July eighteen thirty; Paris rose, the army sided with the crowd, and the last Bourbon fled. Louis-Philippe, the citizen king, widened the electorate and freed the press. Belgium won a liberal monarchy the same year. An accidental revolution, the anchor says; the July Monarchy governed for the rich, and unions stayed banned.

Reform instead of revolution.

WC2 0926 Britain Reforms Instead: 1832, 1833, 1834, 1846

Britain, liberal already but ruled by a gentry electorate, staved off revolution by reform: Catholics and dissenters admitted to office in twenty-eight and twenty-nine, the Reform Bill of thirty-two, slavery abolished in thirty-three, the Poor Law of thirty-four, the Corn Laws repealed in forty-six. Slow, steady liberalization, the anchor's phrase again. Unit nine has the detail; here they explain no forty-eight.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe the order Napoleon shook, conservatism's peace, tradition and stability, Burke's inheritance, Gobineau's wrong turn, and the field of four. You can explain how Romanticism's folk collecting fed nationalism, the Revolution as its model, Wartburg and Carlsbad, Young Italy, and the question of who the people are. You can state what liberals wanted: equality before the law, universal rights, a constitution, and a property franchise. You can describe socialism from a word in thirty-four through the utopians, the lessons of forty-eight, Blanc, Proudhon and Bakunin, and Marx's doctrine, mechanism and later analysis. And you can describe the contest's first rounds: Spain, the Decembrists, Greece, July, and Britain's reforms. Part two is eighteen forty-eight, from February in Paris to the coup, four procedures, and who won.