The Early Modern EraThe Early Modern era (1500-1789)
The Age of RevolutionsUnit 16: The Age of Revolutions (1789-1848)
FC108Revolution and Reaction in Europe (1815-1848)
The Congress of Vienna
Despite his defeat, Napoleon had several important effects on Europe. For one thing, he had spread the idea of liberalism, especially in Western and Central Europe. By the same token, he had also spread the idea of nationalism in East and Central Europe. Finally, his defeat prompted the victors to meet at the Congress of Vienna with the goal of turning back the clock to restore the Europe that had existed before the French Revolution. This was especially the goal of the brilliant Austrian minister, Metternich who led much of the deliberations at Vienna.
The most pressing issue was what to do about France: punish it for causing all this trouble, or restore it to its former position as one of the great powers. Realizing that breaking up France would upset the balance of power, destabilize Europe, and lead to more revolutions, the allies restored it to its old position, punishing it with only a mild indemnity and short military occupation. However, the new king, Louis XVIII, was a constitutional, not an absolute monarch. Even in defeat, the French Revolution had made progress.
There were other changes in the political map of Europe and the world. Britain took South Africa from the Dutch to secure its sea route to India. In compensation, the Dutch got the Austrian Netherlands from Austria, which in turn received control of Northern Italy. The Grand Duchy of Warsaw formed by Napoleon, continued to exist as the Kingdom of Poland, although its king also happened to be the Czar of Russia. And Germany, thanks largely to Napoleon's administrative work, was consolidated into 38 states. These last three changes would all contribute to nationalist revolts in succeeding years.
For the time being, the Congress of Vienna did restore the old order and a period of relative international peace known as the Concert of Europe, since it saw the major powers working largely together for several years to guard the common peace and old order. However, the ideas born in the French Revolution and spread by Napoleon had not been eliminated. The seeds of revolution had taken root and were spreading rapidly across the face of Europe. Like it or not, the age of kings was in its twilight and a new age of democratic and nationalistic reforms and upheavals was dawning.
The pattern of revolts
The period 1815-48 saw periods of apparent tranquility broken by recurring waves of revolution. In two of three cases (1830 and 1848), these revolutionary movements started in France and inspired similar outbreaks all over Europe. Generally, revolutions in Western Europe focused on liberal reforms, since, with the exception of Belgium, nation states with a strong middle class were already established there. Eastern Europe, with its multi-national empires, saw more nationalist uprisings as various ethnic groups wanted independence from the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires. Germany and Italy, in the middle of Europe, were especially turbulent since they were striving for both national unification and liberal civil rights.
A basic pattern of events emerged during this period. Authorities would think they had crushed the ideas of liberalism and nationalism. However, they had merely driven these ideas underground where they would continue to spread and revolutions would flare up again. While most of them would be suppressed, one or two would succeed and might prompt more liberal reforms in countries where the uprisings had been put down. Rulers would again think they had suppressed the revolutionary ideas, and the cycle would repeat. There were three major waves of revolutions: in the 1820's, 1830's, and 1848.
In 1820 the revolutions started in Spain and spread to Greece, South America, and Germany. Most of these were put down, but Greece and the South American colonies did win their independence, with a constitutional monarchy established in Greece and republics in South America. The next wave of revolutions would start in France in 1830 and spread to Poland, Belgium, Italy, and Germany. While the uprisings in Germany, Italy, and Poland were crushed, France won a slightly more liberal constitutional monarchy, Belgium won its freedom, and more liberal reforms were peacefully passed in Britain.
The final, and biggest, wave of revolutions occurred in 1848, with some fifty uprisings taking place across Europe. The French this time established a republic, only to have it taken over by a dictator, Napoleon III, and turned into the Second Empire. Elsewhere, other revolutions collapsed, but they did lead to some reforms. Serfdom was abolished in the Hapsburg Empire while a weak constitutional monarchy was established in Prussia. Despite apparent failure, nationalist reformers would learn from their mistakes and set more realistic goals and strategies toward attaining national unity in Germany and Italy by 1871.
Revolutions in the 1820's
It took only five years before a new wave of revolutions threatened the old order recently reestablished by Metternich and the Congress of Vienna. Ironically, it was one of the more backward countries of Western Europe, Spain, that led the way. A number of liberal army officers, apparently influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution, rebelled against the corrupt and repressive rule of the Bourbon king, Ferdinand VII. As if on cue, riots and revolts broke out all over: in Italy, Germany, Russia (1825), the Spanish American colonies, and Romania and Greece in the Ottoman Empire. In most cases these revolts were put down. Austria suppressed the revolts in Italy and unrest in Germany. France, despite some protests from Britain, put down the revolution in Spain. The new czar, Nicholas I, had no trouble crushing the Decembrist Revolution led by liberal army officers (many of whom thought that their battle cry, "Constantine and Constitution", referred to their liberal candidate for the throne, Constantine, and his wife. Likewise, the Ottoman Turks put down the Romanian uprising.
However, in two cases on the fringes of European power, Greece and the Spanish American colonies, revolutions succeeded for reasons peculiar to each situation. In the case of the Greek revolt, it was largely a romantic sentiment for ancient Greece, home of democracy and Western Civilization that sparked popular support for the Greeks. The fact that the Greek rebels were descendants of Slavic invaders of the early middle ages, not the Greeks from the time of Pericles and Socrates, made little impact on the European public. In fact, many of them, including the Romantic poet, Byron, went there as freedom fighters. In the end, the European powers, having little regard for the non-Christian Turks and fearing Russian aggression that might threaten the balance of power in southeastern Europe, pressured the Ottomans to grant Greece its freedom. In the style of the day, the Greeks established a constitutional, not absolute, monarchy in 1832. It was the first major break in the old order since the Congress of Vienna.
Latin America
The Spanish American colonies had taken advantage of the revolution in Spain to throw off the yoke of Spanish rule. Much of their inspiration came from the newly formed republic to the north, the United States. It was the United States that also stood up to protect the Americas from foreign intervention in the famous Monroe Doctrine in 1823. More important than the fledgling American republic's stand was Britain, which supported the revolutions so it could break Spain's mercantilist monopoly on trade and open new markets for British merchants to exploit. Spain could ignore the Monroe Doctrine, but it could not ignore the power of the British navy, so its American colonies went free.
However, independence brought two sources of instability to Latin America (covered in FC.108A). For one thing, most Spanish bureaucrats fled back to Spain, leaving few trained bureaucrats to handle government business. As a result, the armies that won the revolutions were often the only means of keeping matters under control. Second, with Latin American markets now open for free trade, Britain and other European countries encouraged the production of one type of commodity in each nation, such as beef in Argentina or copper in Chile. This made each new nation too dependent on international markets for its one product. Therefore, if the market for their product fell, their economy would have nothing else to fall back upon. This happened to El Salvador in the late 1800's when cheaper industrially produced dyes destroyed the need for its indigo dye, thus wrecking its economy. Together, these factors led to unstable economic and political structures in Latin America encouraging rule by military dictatorships. Misrule and poor economic conditions would lead to more military coups and revolutions, that would further destabilize the economy and the new government, leading to more revolutions and so on.
Revolutionary fever spreads: the 1830's
By the mid 1820's, most of Europe was pacified once again. However, the ideas of nationalism and liberalism, still simmering under the surface, broke loose again in 1830. Once again, the trouble started in France. The government of the restored king, Louis XVIII (1815-24), was a conservative constitutional monarchy with a legislature elected by a narrow electorate of 100,000 property owners. Louis realized that, after a quarter century of revolution, he had to treat the French people with care. His brother and successor, Charles X (1824-30) was not so wise. He censored the press, restored the clergy's position in the schools and politics, tried to bring back feudalism, gave pensions to nobles who had lost lands and rights from the Revolution, and dissolved the legislature.
In 1830, the Parisians revolted and barricaded Paris' narrow streets. The army refused to fire on the crowd, and Charles fled to England (a common habit for deposed kings back then). Now the question was: what type of government to set up. Students, intellectuals, and the Parisians wanted a republic. However, the middle class, probably with the backing of the more conservative peasantry, prevailed in its desire for a constitutional monarchy. The new king, Louis Philippe, known as the "Citizen King", was a man with little to commend him except that he was both a Bourbon and a former revolutionary, thus a compromise candidtate who satisfied no one. Admittedly, his constitution was a bit more liberal than the previous one, with 200,000 property owners given the right to elect the legislature. Things did settle down in France for a few years, but not before revolutionary turmoil flared up all over Europe.
Word of events in France triggered revolts in Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Poland, plus giving further impetus to a reform movement in Britain. Austria put down the uprisings in Germany and Italy, while Czar Nicholas I easily crushed the Polish rebellion against Russia. The one successful revolution was in Belgium where religious and linguistic differences with the ruling Dutch caused deep resentment that erupted into open rebellion in 1830. Austria and Prussia wanted to put this revolt down, but France and Britain supported the Belgian cause, largely to keep the other two powers from meddling so close to their shores. Since Austria and Prussia were also preoccupied with the Polish revolt, France and Britain could pressure Holland to recognize Belgian freedom in 1831. As was becoming the norm, a constitutional monarchy was established.
Although Britain did not experience revolution, it did see a strong reform movement that liberalized the criminal code and culminated in the Reform Bill of 1832. Electoral representation was redistributed to reflect the shift in population to the rapidly industrializing northern counties. The vote was extended to about 20% of British men (twice of what it was before). The Reform Bill of 1832 also opened the door for more liberal reforms as the century progressed: extending the vote to urban workers (1867) and miners (1884) and also instituting the secret ballot. Finally, after a long struggle, even women would get the vote in 1917. Although Britain remained technically a constitutional monarchy, by the early part of this century it was essentially a modern democracy.
The Revolutions of 1848
The success of revolutionary and reform movements in Western, Europe and frustration at the failure of other similar movements in Central and Eastern Europe led to the spread of liberal and nationalist ideas in the 1830's and 1840's. Economic forces also played a role in spreading discontent. A series of bad harvests in the 1840's caused starvation (with one million people dying in Ireland from a severe potato famine), which led in turn to higher food prices, bankruptcies, unemployment and urban unrest. Once again, events in France sparked a new wave of revolutions.
The government of the "Citizen King", Louis Philippe, had proven to be conservative, corrupt and unpopular, and in 1848 revolution broke out in Paris. Just like in 1830, the barricades went up in Paris' narrow streets, many soldiers refused to fire on the crowd, and the king fled to Britain. And just like before, revolutionary fever spread all over Europe, with close to 50 revolutions erupting in the German states, Italian states, and Hapsburg Empire.
The suddenness and scale of the uprisings caught rulers completely by surprise. In Germany, they agreed to more liberal constitutions, while a convention was held at Frankfurt to establish a national parliament for all of Germany. In Italy, the Austrians were driven out of Milan and Venice, while rulers in Naples, Tuscany, and Piedmont agreed to liberal reforms. In the Hapsburg Empire, a Hungarian revolt triggered similar revolts by Czechs, Croats, Galicians, and Transylvanians living under Hapsburg rule. Metternich, the conservative prime minister and architect of the Congress of Vienna, was forced to resign, and the emperor fled to Innsbruck. It seemed like the old regime was about to collapse all over Europe. But just as events in France had set off these revolutions, events there led the way in suppressing them.
This time, the French established a republic where all Frenchmen could vote for delegates to a convention to draw up a new constitution. However, it reflected the more conservative views of French peasants and middle class, which touched off riots by the urban masses suffering from lack of food and shelter in the recent economic troubles. The army met the crowd's cry of "Bread or Lead" with a hail of lead from artillery fire, killing 10,000 demonstrators. This was a turning point in suppressing radicals both in France and across Europe.
In France, the establishment of the Second Republic led to the election of Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Napoleon III, who, like his uncle, used a military coup to extend his presidency and then make himself emperor of the Second Empire (1852-70). Victor Hugo, in his The History of a Crime, described this coup in grim terms that probably would apply to such events at any time:
"Suddenly, at a given signal, a...shower of bullets poured upon the crowd....Eleven pieces of cannon wrecked the Sallandrouze carpet warehouse. The shot tore completely through twenty-eight houses. The baths of Jouvence were riddled. There was a massacre at Tortoni's [cafe]. A whole quarter of Paris was filled with an immense flying mass, and with a terrible cry....
"Adde, a bookseller of 17, Boulevard Possonniere, is standing before his door; they kill him. At the same moment, for the field of murder is vast, at a considerable distance from there, at 5, Rue de Lancry, M. Thirion de Montauban, owner of the house, is at his door; they kill him. In the Rue Tiquetonne, a child of seven years, named Boursier, is passing by; they kill him. Mlle. Soulac, 196, Rue du Temple, opens her window; they kill her...
"New Year's Day was not far off, some shops were full of New Years' gifts. In the Passage du Saumon, a child of thirteen, flying before the platoon firing, hid himself in one of these shops, beneath a heap of toys. He was captured and killed. Those who killed him laughingly widened his wounds with their swords. A woman told me, 'The cries of the poor little fellow could be heard all through the passage.' Four men were shot before the same shop....
"At the corner of the Rue du Sentier an officer of Spahis, with his sword raised, cried out, '...Fire on the women.' A woman was fleeing, she was with child, she falls, they deliver her by the means of the butt-ends of their muskets. Another, perfectly distracted, was turning the corner of a street. She was carrying a child. Two soldiers aimed at her. One said, 'At the woman!' And he brought down the woman. The child rolled on the pavement. The other soldier said, 'At the child!' And he killed the child....
"In the Rue Mandar, there was, stated an eyewitness, 'a rosary of corpses,' reaching as far as the Rue Neuve Sainte-Eustache. Before the house of Odier twenty-six corpses, thirty before the Hotel Montmorency. Fifty-two before the Varietes, of whom eleven were women. In the Rue Grange-Bateliere there were three naked corpses. No. 19, Fauborg Montmartre, was full of dead and wounded. A woman, flying and maddened with dishevelled hair and her arms raised aloft, ran along the Rue Poissoniere, crying, 'They kill! they kill! they kill! they kill! they kill!'"
Despite its violent beginning, Napoleon III's rule was much more peaceful than that of his uncle. France's prosperity rapidly grew as he promoted the building of industries and a centralized railroad network. He also put Paris through an extensive urban renewal project, providing the city with wide boulevards that critics were quick to point out could not be barricaded so easily in the event of revolution. Napoleon's reign would come to an end in 1870 after a disastrous war against Prussia in its final stage of unifying Germany. In his wake came the Third Republic of France. With the exception of Nazi rule in the 1940's, democracy has prevailed in France ever since.
Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe, the defeat of the more radical elements in France gave heart to other kings and princes reeling from the current wave of revolutions. Uprisings in Italy, Germany, and the Hapsburg Empire, were crushed as quickly as they had erupted and nearly overthrown established governments. By the end of 1848, the old regimes were back on top, and nothing seemed to have been gained.
Even in failure, the revolutions of 1848 did have positive results. For one thing, several reforms, such as the abolition of serfdom in the Hapsburg Empire and the granting of at least nominal constitutions in the German states signaled some progress. The spirit of reform extended even further east to Russia where serfdom was abolished in 1861. Second, despite their failure, the revolutions spread the popularity of liberal and nationalist causes. Failure also taught reformers to be more realistic in trying to attain more liberal reforms or national unification. Two such men in particular, Camillo Cavour in Italy and Otto von Bismarck in Germany, clearly recognized these lessons and skillfully put them to work in building nations forged, as Bismarck would put it, from "blood and iron".
FC108AThe Vicious Cycle Affecting Latin American History
FC104The Roots of the French Revolution
“Walking up a long hill to ease my mare, I was joined by a poor woman, who complained of the times, and that it was a sad country. Demanding her reasons, she said her husband had but a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet they had a franchar (42 pounds) of wheat and three chickens to pay as a quitrent to one seigneur; and four franchar of oats, one chicken, and one franc to pay to another, besides very heavy tailles (income tax) and other taxes. She had seven children and the cow's milk helped to make the soup. 'But why, instead of a horse, do not you keep another cow?' Oh, her husband could not carry his produce so well without a horse; and donkeys are little use in the country. It was said, at present, that something was to be done by some great folks for such poor ones, but she did not know who nor how, but God send us better, 'car les tailles et les droits nous ecrasent' (for the taxes are crushing us).
“This woman, at no great distance, might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent and her face so furrowed and hardened by labor, but she said she was only twenty-eight. An Englishman who has not traveled cannot imagine the figure made by infinitely the greater part of the countrywomen in France; it speaks, at the first sight, hard and severe labor. I am inclined to think that they work harder than the men, and this, united with the more miserable labor of bringing a new race of slaves into the world, destroys absolutely all symmetry of person and every feminine appearance.”— Arthur Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789
The French Revolution, along with the Industrial Revolution, has probably done more than any other revolution to shape the modern world. Not only did it transform Europe politically, but also, thanks to Europe's industries and overseas empires, the French Revolution's ideas of liberalism and nationalism have permeated nearly every revolution across the globe since 1945. In addition to the intense human suffering as described above, its origins have deep historic and geographic roots, providing the need, means, and justification for building the absolute monarchy of the Bourbon Dynasty which eventually helped trigger the revolution.
The need for absolute monarchy came partly from France's continental position in the midst of hostile powers. The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) and then the series of wars with the Hapsburg powers to the south, east, and north (c.1500-1659) provided a powerful impetus to build a strong centralized state. Likewise, the French wars of Religion (1562-98) underscored the need for a strong monarchy to safeguard the public peace. The means for building a monarchy largely came from the rise of towns and a rich middle class. They provided French kings with the funds to maintain professional armies and bureaucracies that could establish tighter control over France. Justification for absolute monarchy was based on the medieval custom of anointing new kings with oil to signify God's favor. This was the basis for the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings. In the late 1600's, all these factors contributed to the rise of absolutism in France.
Louis XIV (1643-1715) is especially associated with the absolute monarchy, and he did make France the most emulated and feared state in Europe, but at a price. Louis' wars and extravagant court at Versailles bled France white and left it heavily in debt. Louis' successors, Louis XV (1715-74) and Louis XVI (1774-89), were weak disinterested rulers who merely added to France's problems through their neglect. Their reigns saw rising corruption and three ruinously expensive wars that plunged France further into debt and ruined its reputation. Along with debt, the monarchy's weakened condition led to two other problems: the spread of revolutionary ideas and the resurgence of the power of the nobles.
Although the French kings were supposedly absolute rulers, they rarely had the will to censor the philosophes' new ideas on liberty and democracy. Besides, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, they were supposedly "enlightened despots" who should tolerate, if not actually believe, the philosophes' ideas. As a result, the ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu on liberty and democracy spread through educated society.
Second, France saw a resurgence of the power of the nobles who still held the top offices and were trying to revive and expand old feudal privileges. By this time most French peasants were free and as many as 30% owned their own land, but they still owed such feudal dues and services as the corvee (forced labor on local roads and bridges) and captaineries (the right of nobles to hunt in the peasants' fields, regardless of the damage they did to the crops). Naturally, these infuriated the peasants. The middle class likewise resented their inferior social position, but were also jealous of the nobles and eagerly bought noble titles from the king who was always in need of quick cash. This diverted money from the business sector to much less productive pursuits and contributed to economic stagnation.
Besides the Royal debt, France also had economic problems emanating from two main sources. First of all, while the French middle class was sinking its money into empty noble titles, the English middle class was investing in new business and technology. For example, by the French Revolution, England had 200 waterframes, an advanced kind of waterwheel. France, with three times the population of England, had only eight. The result was the Industrial Revolution in England, which flooded French markets with cheap British goods, causing business failures and unemployment in France. Second, a combination of the unfair tax load on the peasants (which stifled initiative to produce more), outdated agricultural techniques, and bad weather led to a series of famines and food shortages in the 1780's.
All these factors (intellectual dissent, an outdated and unjust feudal social order, and a stagnant economy) created growing dissent and reached a breaking point in 1789. It was then that Louis XVI called the Estates General for the first time since 1614. What he wanted was more taxes. What he got was revolution.
FC105Analyzing the French Revolution and Revolutions in General
Introduction
When analyzing the French revolution and revolutions in general, there are several recurring aspects we should keep in mind. For one thing, revolutions tend to develop like a fever that starts mildly, but worsens progressively until it reaches "fever pitch" and then breaks. This cycle may recur several times before matters finally are resolved. A second theory is that revolutions start out rebelling against an absolutist or arbitrary power and end up setting up another arbitrary power in its place. The French Revolution certainly fits into both of these patterns. Finally, the revolutions that succeed do so because the ruling regimes are too weak willed to crush the opposition early before matters get out of hand. That was the case with England in the 1640's, Russia in 1917, and certainly with France in 1789. However, even a corrupt and decaying government, is if it acts decisively at the start, can usually crush a revolution before it can spread and grow.
The French Revolution
All this makes sense when one considers that a revolution is against an order that people have come to depend on over a long time. Most people, however dissatisfied, are still reluctant to get rid of that "security blanket" and take their chances with something new and untried. Therefore, successful revolutions, like fevers, start off small and moderate. This has its good and bad points. For one thing, their moderation makes them seem safer to more people and does not invite a severe crackdown by the authorities. In fact, at this early stage, a revolution may seem more like a reform movement than a revolution. That was largely the case with the very moderate National Assembly that took power in 1789.
However, the very moderation that makes a new regime such as the National Assembly so widely acceptable also creates problems in a couple ways. First of all, in order to seem legitimate, the government feels it must hang onto many of the very policies and symbols that had triggered the revolution in the first place. In the National Assembly's case, it was keeping the king as a figurehead and honoring his debt. In the Russian Revolution it was keeping Russia in the First World War. In both cases, these policies, while making the new governments look more legitimate, also severely undercut their power. Second, the new regime's moderate policies keep it from taking the drastic measures necessary to solve the problems that led to revolution in the first place, since that would seem to betray the principles of the revolution. Despite these shortcomings, the new regime leads to high expectations that it will solve the nation's problems.
However, a major problem the new regime faces is that the transition to a new government will cause a good deal more confusion and turmoil before it starts turning things around. The new regime's failure to solve the nation's problems quickly just adds to the frustration of people who expect a quick fix to the country's problems and do not understand that solutions to such deeply rooted problems take time. This leads to a vicious cycle that will drive the revolution to a crisis stage.
First of all, more radical elements will exploit the government's problems and weaknesses in order to seize power. In France those "radicals" were the Girondins, who were still relatively moderate. They in turn found themselves faced with many of the same problems the original National Assembly had as well as high expectations that they would solve them. Unfortunately, the more radical the revolution gets, the more alarmed neighboring countries become about the prospects of the revolution spreading. Also the more turbulent the revolution, the more tempting it might be for outside powers to intervene for their own greedy purposes. This results in the other countries ganging up against the revolutionary country, as happened to France in 1792. Naturally, internal anarchy makes the revolutionary regime ill prepared for war and it starts losing. This creates more internal turmoil, giving a new group of radicals the opportunity to gain support and seize control, which is what the Jacobins did in France. This feeds back into alarming foreign powers who increase outside pressure on the revolution, thus triggering more confusion and turmoil, and so on.
At some point, this mounting feedback between internal anarchy and military defeat leads to three things. First of all, the revolution reaches a crisis stage where someone has to take firm control of affairs if the nation and revolution are going to survive. In the French Revolution, the Jacobins organized France into what was in essence a police state under the "reign of terror". However these measures, including a universal draft that led to huge armies by the standards of the day, did provide the internal order and productivity necessary to support France's armies.
However, the revolution has also unleashed two other factors that will help save it. One of these consists of new ideas and symbols, in particular nationalism, which inspired the French people to fight, sometimes with inspired fury, for a nation they now saw as their own, not the king's. Finally, the revolution freed the French to think in innovative ways, especially in the form of new military tactics introduced by a new generation of officers who had taken the place of the departed nobles. This combination of nationalism, new military tactics, and police state measures saved France in the crisis of 1793-94. But the revolution was not finished yet.
As stated above revolutions tend to go from arbitrary power to arbitrary power. This happened with Cromwell's military dictatorship in the English Revolution and with Lenin's dictatorship in Russia. It also happened in France.With the passing of the crisis of 1793-94 there was a backlash against the radical Jacobins and their reign of terror. A more moderate government, the Directory, took over and found many of the old problems (e.g., food shortages and inflation) re-emerging. It also found a new coalition of foreign enemies ranged against it, even more scared of the revolution after its recent, nearly miraculous comeback. In such a situation, the solution lay with the army, much as it did with Cromwell's New Model Army in England and Lenin's Red Army in Russia. Likewise, in France, it was an ambitious young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized power and established a military dictatorship.
On the surface, it may seem that Napoleon killed the French Revolution and that nothing had been gained. However, one should keep in mind it was powerful revolutionary forces that brought him to the top and gave his army the power to march across and dominate Europe. Napoleon may have tamed the revolution's more chaotic aspects and stifled its more radical innovations (especially in the way of democracy), but he also consolidated it. He kept and expanded its administrative and economic reforms. He codified into law its principles of social and legal equality for all men. And he shamelessly used the concept of nationalism to inspire his armies in battle. He also provided the stability necessary for economic growth and the further rise of the middle class. And it was the combination of repressing parts of the revolution and fostering others that gave Napoleon and France the power to conquer or dominate nearly all Europe by 1807.
Whether or not he meant to, Napoleon also spread the revolutionary ideals of liberalism and nationalism across Europe where they took root and grew into a force largely responsible for his eventual defeat. Foreign powers armed the masses and invoked the power of their own nationalism to defeat Napoleon by 1815. Long after Napoleon the ideas of the revolution imbedded in the law codes he had imposed upon Europe continued to take root and grow, first in Europe, and then by way of Europe's colonial empires, across the globe. Then it was the turn of non-Europeans to use the powerful ideas of the French Revolution to overthrow European rule in much the same way that Europeans had used those same ideas to overthrow Napoleon. When put into that kind of perspective, one can see what a powerful force the French Revolution has been in modern history.
FC105AThe Start of the French Revolution (July, 1789- July, 1790)
Hopes ran high for widespread reforms when Louis XVI called the Estates General to Versailles in the spring of 1789. While Louis' main concern was to get more taxes to cover France's mounting debts, the delegates from the Third Estate (mostly middle class lawyers and businessmen) came with notes ( cahiers) from their constituents urging such reforms as taxing the clergy and nobles to even the tax burden. However, before these issues could be addressed, a more basic problem arose: voting procedure.
The First and Second Estates (clergy and nobles respectively) wanted bloc voting where each estate's votes collectively counted as one vote. This would give the nobles and clergy two votes to one for the Third Estate (representing the middle and lower classes who comprised 98% of France's population). Therefore, the Third Estate, whose delegates equaled the combined number of noble and clergy delegates, wanted one vote per delegate. Since a number of liberal clergy and nobles would probably vote with the Third Estate, this would give the Third Estate an effective majority of votes.
The decision belonged to Louis, whose weak and indecisive nature let matters get out of control. On June 17, the Third Estate, seeing the king's indecision, put pressure on him by withdrawing along with many poor delegates from the clergy and declared themselves the National Assembly with the exclusive right to grant taxes. When Louis locked them out of the Assembly Chamber, they withdrew to an indoor tennis court and took what became known as the Tennis Court Oath, vowing never to separate until they had formed a constitution. Somehow, a meeting about taxes had turned into a movement to form a new government. On June 27, Louis gave in and ordered the First and Second Estates to merge with the National Assembly. The Revolution had begun.
Two weeks later, on July 10, Louis, under pressure this time from the nobles, ordered troops to surround Paris and Versailles. The next day he fired a popular finance minister, Neckar, who had advocated taxing the nobles. These acts, plus continued food shortages triggered demonstrations in Paris that culminated in the storming of the Bastille (7/14/1789), an old prison with so little value that Louis himself had plans for tearing it down. Despite this, the Bastille was a symbol of oppression and its storming has been celebrated ever since as France's Independence Day.
All across France the Bastille's fall touched off the Great Fear, waves of violence in which armed bands of peasants killed nobles and royal officials, burned chateaus, and destroyed records of feudal obligations. This created several effects. First, concerned property owners in cities throughout France took the lead from Paris and formed their own National Guard units to protect themselves and their property. As a result, France now had two armies: the king's royal army and the revolution's National Guard. Also, the mounting violence and chaos started a wave of nobles emigrating to other countries. Successive waves of emigration would bring stories of ever mounting turmoil in France that would stir up foreign fears, hostility, and eventually full scale military attempts to overthrow the revolution. The resulting wars would rage across Europe for a quarter century.
Finally, fear of violence also seems to have affected the National Assembly. On the night of August 4, 1789, nobles and clergy surrendered their feudal rights and privileges in a remarkable show of generosity (or fear). In one fell swoop, feudalism had been abolished in France, although the final draft of the document did give compensation to the nobles and clergy and delayed dismantling the feudal order.
In much the same spirit, the National Assembly issued the "Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen" (8/27/1789). This remarkable document declared for all men, not just Frenchmen, the basic ideals of the revolution: liberalism (the belief in civil and political rights and liberties for all men) and nationalism (the belief that a people united by a common language and culture should control its own destiny). These two principles have proven to be two of the most powerful ideas in modern history.
Center stage now moved back to the Paris mob of laborers and small shopkeepers, known popularly as the sans culottes from their wearing long pants rather than the more fashionable short breeches (culottes) of the upper class. Partly inspired by the Great Fear and the acts of the National Assembly, but even more by continued food shortages, they marched on Versailles and brought the king and National Assembly back to Paris to ensure they would relieve the suffering of the urban poor. From this point on, the sans culottes would exact an ever more powerful and radical influence on the French Revolution, a power and influence far out of proportion to their numbers.
However, the Revolution at this point was still a fairly mild and civilized affair controlled by moderate middle class delegates. It was the enlightened ideas of such philosophes as Rousseau and Voltaire plus the growing need for reforms, not pressure from the sans culottes, that mainly influenced the constitutional monarchy they established in July, 1790. Power mostly resided in the National Assembly, with the king having only a weak temporary veto on its actions. In order to weaken old feudal loyalties, France was broken up into 83 new provinces known as departements, the basis of France's administration to this day. Jury trials were established, torture was outlawed, and a more humane form of execution, the guillotine, was introduced. Internal tolls were abolished, and a standard system of weights and measures, the metric system, came into use. The new constitution definitely had a narrow middle class bias, as seen by its measures to improve trade plus its property qualifications for voting that shut out all but 4,000,000 Frenchmen from full citizenship. It was a combination of the new government's more progressive measures and shortcomings that would lead to more radical reforms.
One problem the National Assembly did not solve was the huge royal debt that had started the revolution in the first place. Since the king was kept as constitutional figurehead of the government in order to make it look legitimate, the National Assembly could not repudiate the royal debt and still seem credible. Therefore, it came up with one of the more innovative policies of the revolution: confiscation of Church lands, the value of which would back up government bonds called assignats. The National Assembly originally sold 400,000,000 francs worth of assignats to pay off its most urgent debts.
Unfortunately, many people saw the assignats as money and used them rather than hard cash to pay their taxes. As a result, the Government, finding itself still in need of cash, issued more assignats and the cycle started all over. There were two main results of the government's Church policies. First of all, the flood of assignats triggered an inflationary cycle that destabilized the French economy and political structure. By the end of the revolution, the assignats were only worth 1% of their face value. Second, many people were angry over the state's control of the Church that extended to electing priests and making them swear a loyalty oath to France. Both of these would combine to unleash forces making the revolution more radical and violent.
FC105BThe Revolution Heats Up (July, 1790-- Sept., 1792)
At the first annual celebration of the revolution 50,000 National Guardsmen from all over France and 300,000 Parisians witnessed the king taking an oath of loyalty to the new constitution. However, Louis was not loyal to the revolution since it severely restricted his power and even prevented him from leaving Paris to attend Mass in the country. On June 20, 1791, the king tried to escape to the Austrian Netherlands and seek refuge with the Hapsburgs. Unfortunately for Louis, everything went wrong. Detachments of royal troops failed to meet him in time. Then, despite Louis' disguise as a German servant, a postmaster at Varennes recognized him from his portrait on the assignats. The postmaster called out the National Guard who captured Louis and escorted him back to Paris. Whatever faith most people may have had in their king before was now shattered by his attempted betrayal of the revolution.
Louis' foiled flight was a turning point in the revolution. First, it further alarmed foreign royalty about the mounting revolutionary threat in France. Second, it widened the rift between the radicals who wanted a republic (democracy without a king) and the bourgeoisie (upper middle class) who wanted to keep the king as figurehead to maintain the moderate respectable image of the revolution. To protect Louis and their position, they claimed the king had not fled but had been kidnapped. At the same time they suspended Louis' powers. But the damage had been done. In July, a demonstration of 50,000 Parisians demanding Louis's abdication turned violent and the National Guard killed 50 demonstrators. The revolution was starting to fragment.
On September 30, 1791 the National Assembly dissolved itself after over two years of leading the revolution. One of its last acts was to exclude its members from re-election to the new National Assembly, thus bringing in new blood, but also eliminating many experienced leaders from participation as well.
The elections of 1791 showed how fragmented the revolution was becoming. On the left wing (sitting to the left of the speaker's platform in the assembly) were the radicals led by the Jacobins who wanted a more strongly centralized republic. Next to them and controlling the most votes were the Girondins who also favored a republic, but with more provincial freedom from central control in Paris. Just to the right of them were moderates who were happy with their gains from the revolution and resisted further change. To the far right were the monarchists who wanted to restore the feudal order and the king's power. These were not so much organized political parties as they were loosely organized networks of political clubs united by a common political philosophy.
While the Girondins had been able to exploit the moderates' problems in order to gain power, they soon found themselves faced with the old issues of food shortages, inflation, and debt. A new problem was also surfacing that would soon overshadow the rest: war. Ironically, this was the one issue most people agreed on, but for widely different reasons. Louis and the monarchists saw war as a chance for Austria and Prussia to crush the revolution and restore the king to power. The Girondins saw it as an opportunity to discredit Louis and spread the revolution across Europe. War could also divert attention from France's internal problems. Many Frenchmen saw war as a means of preventing nobles from returning to reclaim their lands and feudal rights. Austria and Prussia wanted war to prevent the revolution from spreading outside of France. With everyone in such agreement, France declared war on Austria and Prussia (4/20/1792). This triggered a series of wars between France and the rest of Europe that would last, with few breaks, for 23 years.
The government was optimistic about the war. It should have known better. The combination of old and new debts plus inflation triggered by the assignats had left the treasury in shambles. Likewise, the incomplete transition from the royalist army to a national one had left the army in disarray. Royalist and National Guard units operated separately from one another. Noble officers had either fled or were of suspect loyalty. And the troops, while enthusiastic, were poorly trained, supplied, and led.
The result was a total fiasco as French troops fled at the first sight of the enemy. Charges of treason flew everywhere, especially against Louis, who probably was plotting with the enemy. An ultimatum ordering the French not to harm the king seemed to confirm suspicions of his guilt. On August 10, 1792, 9000 Parisians and National Guard troops stormed Louis' palace of the Tuileries. Louis, hating the sight of his own people's blood being shed, ordered his Swiss Guards to cease-fire. The mob massacred the guard, looted the palace, and turned Louis over to the Paris Commune who threw him into jail. The National Assembly, under heavy pressure from the sans culottes, agreed to new elections for a convention to form a new constitution. The monarchy was abolished and replaced by The First Republic, which would see the revolution through its trial by fire.
FC105CTerror and Reaction (Sept, 1792-Oct., 1795)
Growing chaos
Symbolic of the switch from monarchy to republic was a new calendar of twelve months with three 10-day weeks each. It started with Day I, Year I (9/22/1792) and stayed in effect for ten years. This new calendar was largely an attack on the Church and symbolized the revolution's complete break with the past. However, it was quite unpopular with the mass of French people who remained devout Catholics, showing how out of touch with the feelings of most French people the radicals in Paris were becoming.
Another break with the past came with the execution of Louis, whose fate hinged on the growing struggle between the Girondins, who wanted to limit Paris' influence on the revolution, and the radical Jacobins, who supported the sans culottes and used them in turn for support and intimidation. The Jacobins' call for putting Louis on trial forced the Girondins into the impossible choice of either giving in to radical pressure to try him or seeming like they were defending a very unpopular king. Louis' correspondence with the enemy sealed his fate as all the delegates voted him guilty of treason, and a narrow majority voted for execution. On January 21, 1793, Louis was executed and over 1200 years of French monarchy came to an end. In the process, the Girondins were quickly losing support to the Jacobins. Mounting problems of war, inflation, and food shortages would finish them off.
On September 20, 1792, the French Revolutionary armies won their first battle of the war at Valmy against a Prussian army largely preoccupied with the Second Partition of Poland and also ill from eating too many grapes. Inspired by this rather lackluster victory, French armies moved forward and overran Savoy, Nice, the Austrian Netherlands, and Holland. This prompted the National Convention to declare a revolutionary struggle to liberate all people from the tyranny of kings. Naturally, this alarmed kings across Europe and united them in The First Coalition to stop the French radicals. What had been a somewhat half-hearted fight of France against Austria and Prussia, now escalated into total war against practically all of Europe.
The tide of events once again quickly turned against France. Allied armies defeated the French, whose top general, Demouriez, and minister of war defected to the enemy. Meanwhile, western France was rocked by a major revolt of peasants protesting the revolution's church policies and military draft. As enemy armies closed in on France, the economy nearly collapsed. Inflation was rampant and the assignats fell to 50% of their face value. The resulting grain shortages triggered food riots in Paris by the sans culottes and the Jacobins, who called for strong price controls. Events were spinning out of control, and with each bit of bad news, the Girondins' position became more dangerous. Finally, on June 2, 1793, a crowd of 80,000 armed sans culottes and National Guardsmen overthrew the Girondins. The Jacobins took control and established a dictatorship under the Committee of Public Safety, a group of nine men whose most famous member, Robespierre, symbolized the reign of terror about to unfold.
Jacobin Rule
The government took control of vital resources and production of munitions to ensure adequate military supplies for its armies. Paris alone was producing 1000 muskets a day. Strict wage and price controls were imposed to stifle inflation. Massive forced loans helped finance the effort. Newspapers were strictly controlled to maintain morale. People wore wooden shoes to save leather for French soldiers' shoes. Even scientific research was directed toward the war effort as the famous chemist Lavoisier found a better formula for gunpowder.
A military revolution
However, the Revolution also freed and inspired the French to create powerful new symbols and ideas, in particular nationalism. For the first time in history a people sharing the same language, culture, and government had found a unifying spirit to inspire them in the common defense of their homeland. For this was the France of the French people, not the French king, and that fact motivated the French soldiers to fight with a spirit totally lacking in mercenaries serving merely for money. Nationalism was what allowed these much larger French armies to forage, because desertion was less of a problem or threat to generals who knew their men had a cause to fight for. This, in turn, freed French armies from cumbersome supply lines, making them more mobile despite their numbers.
The Revolution also freed French generals from the traditional thinking of the old regime, allowing them to come up with innovative new tactics and formations. Many of these new generals had been junior officers who rose through the ranks to command positions left vacant when noble officers had fled France. In order to take advantage of the large numbers of recruits, they used massed firepower and charging in blocks or columns of men through strategic points of the enemy line. Together, the mobility, new tactics, and spirit of nationalism saved Fance from the armies of the First Coalition.
The Reign of Terror and Thermidorean Reaction
By the summer of 1794, the Committee of Public Safety's drastic measures had accomplished their purpose. They had suppressed the revolts, stabilized the economy, and secured France's borders. To many, the end of the crisis should have signaled the end of the government's repressive measures. But the Jacobins were caught up in their own cycle of repression and paranoia that merely intensified the Reign of Terror. Nearly 1400 people fell victim to the guillotine in Paris alone between June and July 1794. The Jacobins, increasingly out of touch with the feelings of most French people outside of Paris, shut down churches or turned them into "temples of reason" for their new Deistic style religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being. Growing fear and dissatisfaction with the Committee of Public Safety's Republic of Virtue finally led to a conspiracy known as the Thermidorean Reaction, which ousted Robespierre and his colleagues (7/28/1794).
The revolution now started to wind down, but its effects did not. The results of the French Revolution can be summarized by the revolutionary motto: "liberty, equality, and brotherhood." Briefly put, liberty referred to the right of all men to live freely with certain guaranteed rights such as free speech and religion. Equality referred to the equality of all men before the law as opposed to the inequities of the old feudal system that the revolution had swept away. Brotherhood (nationalism) referred to the right of a people united by a common language and culture to be autonomous and live under its own laws and government.
In October 1795, a new constitution and government, the Directory, took over, but not without incident. An uprising against the new government threatened it before it even took over. A young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, was called in to save the day. With his famous "whiff of grapeshot," he saved the new government and launched his own career, which would spread French power across the continent. French power would not last, but the seeds of the revolution's liberal and nationalist ideals that were planted in the process would take root and transform the face of Europe and eventually the world.
FC105DThe French Revolution's Impact on Military Tactics
FC105EThe Results of the French Revolution
Although it would take until 1871 for the French Revolution to play out, it was triggering profound effects in France and the rest of Europe as early as 1789. One touchstone by which to analyze the Revolution’s results is its motto: “Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood. The power of these three ideas would quickly spread to the rest of Europe, especially after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, and eventually across the globe.
Liberty refers to the basic civil rights we often take for granted as being the natural rights of people everywhere, such as speech, press, assembly, religion, and voting for officials and laws, etc. The last of these, voting, was typically among the last to be extended to all members of society, in particular women.
Equality meant that everyone should be equal before the law, rather than face unjust double standards. At times, some of the more subtle effects of such an idea can magnify across history. This was especially the case with inheritance law in France. Since all men were seen as equal before the law, primogeniture was outlawed, giving all sons equal shares of an inheritance, and even daughters a portion, although less than the sons got. The problem with splitting up family lands into several smaller plots was that repeatedly dividing it into ever-smaller plots would make it impossible for all the heirs to support their families. Therefore, French peasants in the 1800s had a lower birthrate to avoid splitting family lands. This, however, reverberated over the following century in several ways. For one thing, few French people emigrated to places like the Americas compared to other European peoples. Likewise, there were fewer people available for factory work, which slowed France’s rate of industrialization. Also, the unification of Germany in 1870 prompted rapid industrialization and population growth that rapidly passed up France in both categories. By 1900 this would generate mounting worries in France about the growing threat of Germany that would help lead to World War I.
Brotherhood (AKA nationalism) was the idea that a people united by a common language; history, culture and geography should have the sovereign right to choose their own destiny. This would also prove a mixed blessing. On the plus side, nationalism included everyone sharing the traits just mentioned, bringing them into both a larger and more cohesive group. However, it also tended to exclude people not sharing the same nationalistic traits.
Another good news/bad news aspect of nationalism was the competition of the nation state with older institutions, in particular the family and religion, for the loyalty of its citizens. While some argued legalizing divorce and implementing civil marriages and mandatory public education helped nations get past some of the more regressive attitudes and narrow loyalties of the family and religion, the state has had difficulty adequately replacing those institutions in terms of moral and ethical education, social stability, and providing social services that used to be the task of church and family.
Nationalism, by weakening the bonds and influence of family religion, has often been blamed for both domestic and foreign problems. Domestically, many would say the nation state has contributed to rising crime rates and social misbehavior. In foreign affairs, nationalism’s exclusive nature has helped create, especially through public education, a sense of superiority over other nations, who reciprocate with their own feelings of superiority. By 1914 such attitudes would raise international tensions in Europe to levels that would trigger two disastrous world wars in the twentieth century.
FC106Napoleon and his Impact (1799-1815)
Few men have dominated an age so thoroughly as Napoleon Bonaparte dominated his. In many ways he was like Adolph Hitler: charismatic, a master psychologist and politician, and ambitious to the point of self-destruction. Both started wars that led to vast destruction and a new political order. Both men shaped their times, but both were also products of their times who went with the currents of their respective histories and adeptly diverted those currents to suit their own needs. And ultimately, both were dismal failures.
To a large extent, Napoleon's career resulted from the military and political forces he inherited from the Revolution and exploited for his own purposes. In military affairs, he was lucky to inherit the military innovations of the French Revolution, such as mass conscription which made possible the use of block tactics in order to attack in column and eliminated the need for supply lines, thus making French armies much more mobile. Therefore, the two characteristics of Napoleonic warfare, massed firepower and mobility were already present when he started his career. However, it was Napoleon's genius that knew how to use them effectively in his first Italian campaign against the Austrians.
Politically, France had suffered a full decade of revolutionary turmoil by 1799, making the government unstable and corrupt. Church policies were unpopular, especially since they had triggered rampant inflation. People were sick of this turmoil and longed for a more stable government that would make their lives more secure. Therefore, the interplay of military innovations that made Napoleon a national hero and the longing for a strong, secure government that Napoleon promised led to his seizure of power in 1799. Further military victories, once again against the Austrians in Italy allowed Napoleon to consolidate his hold on power and declare himself emperor of France in 1804.
While we mainly think of Napoleon as a general, he was also a very active administrator, and his internal reforms did a great deal as far as both consolidating some accomplishments of the French Revolution and suppressing others. One way to assess his government of France is to see how it conformed to the revolutionary motto: "Liberty, fraternity (i.e., nationalism), and equality". As far as political and civil liberties were concerned, Napoleon largely suppressed them with strict censorship and the establishment of a virtual police state in order to protect his power.
However, Napoleon saw equality as a politically useful concept that he could maintain with little threat to his position. After all, everyone, at least all men, were equally under his power. One of his main accomplishments as a ruler was the establishment of the Napoleonic Civil Law Codes, which made all men equal under the law while maintaining their legal power over women. Therefore, any hopes women may have had of the Revolution improving their legal position were thwarted by Napoleon.
Napoleon saw nationalism as indispensable to maintaining the loyalty of the French people to his regime. After all, it was the spirit of nationalism that had inspired its armies in a remarkable series of victories that had especially benefited Napoleon and allowed his rise to power. The trick was for Napoleon to build a personality cult around himself so that the French people would identify him with France itself and therefore make loyalty to him equivalent to loyalty to France. However, by identifying national loyalty with one man, Napoleon inadvertently weakened the inspirational force of nationalism and thus his own power.
Overall, Napoleon's internal policies strengthened France and allowed it to dominate most of Europe after a series of successful military campaigns (1805-7). Naturally, he established his style of rule in the countries he overran. However, he mistakenly thought that the administrative and legal reforms of the revolution he carried to the rest of Europe could be separated from the ideas of Nationalism and Liberalism (liberty and equality) that had given those reforms life and substance. Therefore, Napoleon's imperial rule inadvertently spread these ideas of Nationalism and Liberalism.
This had three effects, all of which combined to overthrow Napoleon. First of all, the empire's non-French subjects picked up the ideas of Nationalism and Liberalism and used them to overthrow, not support, French rule. Second, subject rulers adopted many of the very military and administrative reforms that had made France so strong. Once again, this was not to support French rule, but rather to overthrow it.
Finally, Napoleon's power and success up until 1808 apparently blinded him to his own limitations. Therefore, he got involved in a long drawn out war in Spain (1808-14) and launched a disastrous invasion of Russia (1812). This led to the formation of a new coalition that finally defeated and overthrew him in 1815. The victors met at the Congress of Vienna, hoping to restore the old order as it had existed before the Revolution.
However, despite his intentions, Napoleon had effectively planted the seeds of Nationalism and Liberalism across Europe, and these ideas would spread in new waves of revolution by mid-century. Europeans would take these ideas, along with the powerful new technologies unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, to establish colonies across the globe by 1900. Ironically, these European powers, like Napoleon, would fall victim to the force of these ideas when their subjects would use them in their own wars of liberation after World War II.
FC106AThe Rise of Napoleon (1795-1808)
Napoleon's rise to power
Napoleon's career largely resulted from the military innovations he inherited from the French Revolution, such as mass conscription which made possible the use of block tactics in order to attack in column and eliminated the need for supply lines, thus making French armies much more mobile. The Revolution also provided him with young officers who had largely developed these new tactics and were willing and able to successfully implement them on the battlefield. Therefore, the two characteristics of Napoleonic warfare, massed firepower and mobility were already present when he started his career.
Napoleon Bonaparte himself was barely French, his homeland Corsica having just become part of France two years before his birth in 1769. He attended a French military school and, while not a great student, picked things up quickly and finished a three-year program in one year. His Corsican accent and wild appearance set him apart from his classmates. Although sociable, he liked to be alone a lot. At an early age he exhibited the qualities that would earn him and France an empire: remarkable intellect, puritanical self discipline, a virtually inexhaustible energy level, and a willingness to plan things out in such detail as to leave nothing to chance. He admired Caesar, Alexander and Charlemagne and, like them, exhibited the quick decisive manner that made them all great leaders.
At age sixteen, Napoleon became a second lieutenant in the royal artillery, but his non-noble and Corsican origins left him little chance of promotion. All that changed with the French Revolution. In 1789, he went back to Corsica to fight for its independence. After quarrelling with the leader of the revolt, he returned to France and joined the Jacobins. In 1793, the young Bonaparte became a national hero by leading the recapture of the French port of Toulon from the British. The next year Napoleon's ties with the Jacobins and their fall in the Thermidorean Reaction landed him in jail for several months.
It was in 1795 that Napoleon got his big break when his famous "whiff of grapeshot" mowed down rebels in the streets of Paris and saved the new government, the Directory, from counter-revolution. This event catapulted Napoleon into the command of the Army of Italy, a ragtag army without enough shoes or even pants for its men. Nevertheless, he led this army against the Austrians in a lightning campaign that showed all the hallmarks of Napoleonic generalship: rapid movement, the ability to outnumber the enemy at strategic points with men and massed firepower, and a knack for doing the unexpected to keep his enemy constantly off balance. Napoleon drove with characteristic speed through northern Italy and then into Austria, forcing it to sign the Treaty of Campo Formio. However, this victory and the prospect of renewed French offensives alarmed kings all over Europe who formed the Second Coalition of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia against France.
Napoleon saw Britain as his main enemy, because it funded France's other enemies and also had a powerful navy protecting its coasts. As a result, Napoleon came up with a bold, if ill conceived, plan: conquer Egypt and use it as a stepping-stone to invade British-held India. At first, all went well. Napoleon's fleet eluded the great British admiral, Lord Nelson and landed in Egypt in 1798. The French decisively beat the Mamluke army and soon ruled Egypt. Then things fell apart. Lord Nelson found the French fleet and demolished it in the Battle of the Nile, thus stranding the French army in Egypt. Napoleon tried a daring march to Istanbul by way of Syria, but his artillery was captured and he had to return to Egypt with his sick and demoralized army. While the French languished in Egypt, Napoleon got word of political turmoil in France. He thereby abandoned his army (which later surrendered to the British) and slipped across to France. He then took part in a daring plot to overthrow the government. The conspiracy succeeded and Napoleon became First Consul of France in 1799.
Consolidating his power
The government that Napoleon and his allies set up, the Consulate, was a mockery of democracy and aptly reflected the above quotation. People elected delegates who chose other delegates who chose other delegates from whom were appointed legislators who had no power anyway. So much for the legislature. As for Napoleon's fellow conspirators, Ducos and Sieyes, they were shoved into the background and forgotten within a month, leaving Napoleon firmly in charge of France. However, his position was far from secure, because France was still ringed by the Second Coalition.
Napoleon first attacked Austrian forces in northern Italy, which he barely defeated at the Battle of Marengo (1800). This victory allowed Napoleon to return to France in triumph and further consolidate his position there. Meanwhile, his generals finished up the war against Austria, taking the Austrian Netherlands, northern Italy, and the left bank of the Rhine for France.
That left Britain to face France. Since Britain's navy and France's army were virtually unbeatable by the other side, and several neutral nations including the United States and Sweden had armed themselves against both Britain and France, the two big powers made peace in 1802. Prussia and Russia soon followed suit. Peace settled over Europe, at least temporarily.
Napoleon next turned his attention to Germany in order to settle a number of land disputes. Germany was still a patchwork of secular principalities, free cities, and church states. Since the Church tended to favor Catholic Austria against revolutionary France, Napoleon eliminated all but one church state and 44 out of 50 free cities, giving their lands to various German princes who now saw Napoleon as their benefactor.
Having fought his enemies to a standstill and made France the most feared and respected power in Europe, Napoleon could now pursue his next goal: becoming emperor of France. This was a tricky situation, since the French people might not take kindly to getting a new king so soon after getting rid of the old one. Using the title of emperor rather than king would partly ease people's misgiving and also give them a sense of France's imperial superiority over the rest of Europe. Napoleon approached the title in stages, first getting himself elected consul for ten years, then for life, and then, after a fake assassination plot to make people realize how much they loved him, emperor.
The coronation in 1804 was a splendid affair with even the pope coming to crown Napoleon. (Napoleon actually decided to crown himself and just let the pope watch.) The next day the emperor gave bronze eagles to his regiments as standards reminiscent of the Roman Empire. He even created a new nobility of dukes and counts from his officers in order to make a court that rivaled the splendor of other European courts.
The rest of Europe saw Napoleon's imperial crown as part of a plan to rule all of Europe. This triggered the war of the Third Coalition of Austria, Britain, and Russia against France and Spain (1803-1807). Once again, Napoleon was faced with his old nemesis, Britain, that "nation of shopkeepers" (to quote Adam Smith) whose navy shielded them from his military might. If only the British navy could be removed, Napoleon could slip across the Channel with his army and bring Britain to its knees. His plan for removing the British fleet was to lure it to the West Indies with the combined French and Spanish fleets. This would leave the Channel open for the French to cross. However, the British commander, Nelson, guessed this plan and managed to blockade the French and Spanish fleets in the Spanish port of Cadiz. When they tried to break out, the British crushed them in the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Britain remained safe as its navy still ruled the waves.
Seeing his failure at sea, Napoleon marched his army eastward where he met the much larger combined armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz. Concentrating his forces in the center, he drove through and split the Russian and Austrian armies, winning possibly the most brilliant victory of his career (1805).
Austerlitz gave Napoleon the power to declare the Holy Roman Empire defunct, making him the heir apparent of Rome's imperial grandeur. He also used this opportunity to form the Confederation of the Rhine from the German princes grateful to him for the lands he had given them before. The Confederation consisted of about half of Germany and formed a large buffer zone on France's eastern border. This upset Prussia who had been sitting on the sidelines, but now decided to join the war. However as quickly as Prussia entered the war, its forces were shattered by Napoleon's blitzkrieg (1806).
Finally, there was Russia. After a bloody indecisive battle in the snow at Eylau, Napoleon won a decisive victory at Friedland. Now he could impose his kind of peace on Europe. Negotiations between Napoleon and Czar Alexander I were conducted on a raft in the middle of the Nieman River while Frederick William III of Prussia had to await his fate along the shore. The settlement for Prussia was not kind, taking nearly half of its land and population to help carve out the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a revived Poland that owed its existence and lasting loyalty to Napoleon. France and Russia recognized each other's spheres of influence, but France certainly emerged as the dominant power in Europe. Besides France, Napoleon directly ruled Belgium, Holland, the West Bank of the Rhine, the Papal States, and Venice. Then there were the states that were nominally free but lived under French law, administration, and usually French rulers who happened to be Napoleon's relatives: the kingdom of Naples, the Kingdom of Italy, Switzerland, the Confederation of the Rhine, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and Spain (after 1808). Finally, there were Napoleon's allies who had to follow him in war: Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Only Hitler ever came this close to ruling all of Europe.
The Napoleonic state
While Napoleon is mainly remembered for his military campaigns and conquests, much of his importance lies in his government of France and how it consolidated the gains of the Revolution. For one thing, he kept the Revolution's administrative reform of dividing France into 83 departements whose governors ( prefects) he appointed centrally. He centralized the tax system (still used today) and established the Bank of France to stabilize the economy of France. The Revolution's system of free but mandatory education was kept and expanded with military uniforms and discipline being imposed. Napoleon also consolidated many of the Revolution's social and legal advances into five law codes. His civil code maintained the equality of all men before the law, but reasserted the power of the husband over the wife, thus negating some of the influence women had exerted during the Revolution.
Although not a religious man, Napoleon recognized the attachment of most French people to the Catholic Church and how the Revolution's policies against the Church had caused discontent and revolts. Therefore, in 1801 he made peace with the Church, recognizing it as the religion of the majority of Frenchmen and giving the clergy the right to practice their religion within the "police regulations" of France. Those regulations kept confiscated Church lands for the state and still paid the clergy their salaries. Regardless of that, Napoleon gained a great deal of popularity through his Church policy without giving up anything of essence.
Napoleon may have consolidated some gains of the Revolution, but he repressed others, for his "police regulations" in many ways amounted to a police state. Such civil rights as freedom of speech and press were now things of the past as 62 of 73 newspapers were repressed, and all plays, posters, and public conversations had to meet strict standards of what Napoleon thought was proper. Enforcing all this was Napoleon's minister of police, Joseph Fouche, formerly one of the Jacobins' representatives on mission during the Terror. He was a slippery character who had survived the Thermidorean Reaction and attached his fortunes to those of Napoleon. Fouche's spy network (one of four in France) kept him informed on just about everyone of importance in France (including Napoleon's own personal life). Fouche himself claimed that wherever three or more people were talking, one of them was reporting to him. By 1814 he had an estimated 2500 political prisoners locked away. Napoleonic rule certainly had its darker side.
By 1808, Napoleon was at the pinnacle of power. He controlled most of Europe to some degree or other. France was tightly under control and efficiently run. But forces were converging that would bring the Napoleonic regime crashing down in ruins.
FC106BNapoleon's Years of Triumph and Fall (1800-1815)
Clear policy consists of making nations believe they are free.— Napoleon
The government that Napoleon and his allies set up, the Consulate, was a mockery of democracy and aptly reflected the above quotation. People elected delegates who chose other delegates who chose other delegates from whom were appointed legislators who had no power anyway. So much for the legislature. As for Napoleon's fellow conspirators, Ducos and Sieyes, they were shoved into the background and forgotten within a month, leaving Napoleon firmly in charge of France. However, his position was far from secure, because France was still ringed by the Second Coalition.
Napoleon first attacked Austrian forces in northern Italy, which he barely defeated at the Battle of Marengo (1800). This victory allowed Napoleon to return to France in triumph and further consolidate his position there. Meanwhile, his generals finished up the war against Austria, taking the Austrian Netherlands, northern Italy, and the left bank of the Rhine for France.
That left Britain to face France. Since Britain's navy and France's army were virtually unbeatable by the other side, and several neutral nations including the United States and Sweden had armed themselves against both Britain and France, the two big powers made peace in 1802. Prussia and Russia soon followed suit. Peace settled over Europe, at least temporarily.
Napoleon next turned his attention to Germany in order to settle a number of land disputes. Germany was still a patchwork of secular principalities, free cities, and church states. Since the Church tended to favor Catholic Austria against revolutionary France, Napoleon eliminated all but one church state and 44 out of 50 free cities, giving their lands to various German princes who now saw Napoleon as their benefactor.
Having fought his enemies to a standstill and made France the most feared and respected power in Europe, Napoleon could now pursue his next goal: becoming emperor of France. This was a tricky situation, since the French people might not take kindly to getting a new king so soon after getting rid of the old one. Using the title of emperor rather than king would partly ease people's misgiving and also give them a sense of France's imperial superiority over the rest of Europe. Napoleon approached the title in stages, first getting himself elected consul for ten years, then for life, and then, after a fake assassination plot to make people realize how much they loved him, emperor.
The coronation in 1804 was a splendid affair with even the pope coming to crown Napoleon. (Napoleon actually decided to crown himself and just let the pope watch.) The next day the emperor gave bronze eagles to his regiments as standards reminiscent of the Roman Empire. He even created a new nobility of dukes and counts from his officers in order to make a court that rivaled the splendor of other European courts.
The rest of Europe saw Napoleon's imperial crown as part of a plan to rule all of Europe. This triggered the war of the Third Coalition of Austria, Britain, and Russia against France and Spain (1803-1807). Once again, Napoleon was faced with his old nemesis, Britain, that "nation of shopkeepers" (to quote Adam Smith) whose navy shielded them from his military might. If only the British navy could be removed, Napoleon could slip across the Channel with his army and bring Britain to its knees. His plan for removing the British fleet was to lure it to the West Indies with the combined French and Spanish fleets. This would leave the Channel open for the French to cross. However, the British commander, Nelson, guessed this plan and managed to blockade the French and Spanish fleets in the Spanish port of Cadiz. When they tried to break out, the British crushed them in the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Britain remained safe as its navy still ruled the waves.
Seeing his failure at sea, Napoleon marched his army eastward where he met the much larger combined armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz. Concentrating his forces in the center, he drove through and split the Russian and Austrian armies, winning possibly the most brilliant victory of his career (1805).
Austerlitz gave Napoleon the power to declare the Holy Roman Empire defunct, making him the heir apparent of Rome's imperial grandeur. He also used this opportunity to form the Confederation of the Rhine from the German princes grateful to him for the lands he had given them before. The Confederation consisted of about half of Germany and formed a large buffer zone on France's eastern border. This upset Prussia who had been sitting on the sidelines, but now decided to join the war. However as quickly as Prussia entered the war, its forces were shattered by Napoleon's blitzkrieg (1806).
Finally, there was Russia. After a bloody indecisive battle in the snow at Eylau, Napoleon won a decisive victory at Friedland. Now he could impose his kind of peace on Europe. Negotiations between Napoleon and Czar Alexander I were conducted on a raft in the middle of the Nieman River while Frederick William III of Prussia had to await his fate along the shore. The settlement for Prussia was not kind, taking nearly half of its land and population to help carve out the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a revived Poland that owed its existence and lasting loyalty to Napoleon. France and Russia recognized each other's spheres of influence, but France certainly emerged as the dominant power in Europe. Besides France, Napoleon directly ruled Belgium, Holland, the West Bank of the Rhine, the Papal States, and Venice. Then there were the states that were nominally free but lived under French law, administration, and usually French rulers who happened to be Napoleon's relatives: the kingdom of Naples, the Kingdom of Italy, Switzerland, the Confederation of the Rhine, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and Spain (after 1808). Finally, there were Napoleon's allies who had to follow him in war: Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Only Hitler ever came this close to ruling all of Europe.
While Napoleon is mainly remembered for his military campaigns and conquests, much of his importance lies in his government of France and how it consolidated the gains of the Revolution. For one thing, he kept the Revolution's administrative reform of dividing France into 83 departements whose governors ( prefects) he appointed centrally. He centralized the tax system (still used today) and established the Bank of France to stabilize the economy of France. The Revolution's system of free but mandatory education was kept and expanded with military uniforms and discipline being imposed. Napoleon also consolidated many of the Revolution's social and legal advances into five law codes. His civil code maintained the equality of all men before the law, but reasserted the power of the husband over the wife, thus negating some of the influence women had exerted during the Revolution.
Although not a religious man, Napoleon recognized the attachment of most French people to the Catholic Church and how the Revolution's policies against the Church had caused discontent and revolts. Therefore, in 1801 he made peace with the Church, recognizing it as the religion of the majority of Frenchmen and giving the clergy the right to practice their religion within the "police regulations" of France. Those regulations kept confiscated Church lands for the state and still paid the clergy their salaries. Regardless of that, Napoleon gained a great deal of popularity through his Church policy without giving up anything of essence.
Napoleon may have consolidated some gains of the Revolution, but he repressed others, for his "police regulations" in many ways amounted to a police state. Such civil rights as freedom of speech and press were now things of the past as 62 of 73 newspapers were repressed, and all plays, posters, and public conversations had to meet strict standards of what Napoleon thought was proper. Enforcing all this was Napoleon's minister of police, Joseph Fouche, formerly one of the Jacobins' representatives on mission during the Terror. He was a slippery character who had survived the Thermidorean Reaction and attached his fortunes to those of Napoleon. Fouche's spy network (one of four in France) kept him informed on just about everyone of importance in France (including Napoleon's own personal life). Fouche himself claimed that wherever three or more people were talking, one of them was reporting to him. By 1814 he had an estimated 2500 political prisoners locked away. Napoleonic rule certainly had its darker side.
By 1808, Napoleon was at the pinnacle of power. He controlled most of Europe to some degree or other. France was tightly under control and efficiently run. But forces were converging that would bring the Napoleonic regime crashing down in ruins.
The Continental System and Spanish Ulcer
One power Napoleon could not reach was Britain, whose navy safely sheltered it against any continental invasion. The ill-fated invasion of Egypt and the Battle of Trafalgar both bore this out. But Napoleon was determined to bring Britain to its knees, and this time decided to strike the "nation of shopkeepers" where it would hurt the worst: the wallet. With most of Europe under his control, Napoleon imposed the Continental System to stop all European trade with Britain. Hopefully, this would strangle Britain economically and force it to come to terms. And while it did hurt Britain, it also hurt the rest of Europe wanting to trade for Britain's cheaper industrial goods. By a combination of bribing officials, forging documents to mask the British identity of merchant ships, and outright smuggling, the Continental System leaked like a sieve. Even Napoleon secretly bought British goods.
One big leak in the system was Portugal, which refused to join the embargo against Britain. Napoleon decided to plug this leak by taking over Portugal, which he did in several months. However, in order to reach Portugal, French troops had to cross Spain. Therefore, Napoleon decided to replace the Bourbon dynasty ruling Spain with a French regime led by his brother, Joseph, figuring the Spanish people would prefer French rule to that of the corrupt monarchy. However, Napoleon had completely misread the spirit of Spain.
On May 2, 1808, a popular revolt in Madrid and the severe French repression following it triggered a general uprising that spread like wildfire across Spain. What Napoleon had figured to be a simple operation turned into a full-scale war that dragged on for five years. The Spanish revolt was the first example of another country's nationalism being turned against France, although it was led largely by priests and nobles who stood for the conservative values of the old regime.
The Spanish method of fighting was ill suited to Napoleon's style of warfare. Instead of meeting the French in large pitched battles on Napoleon's terms, the Spanish launched hit and run raids to cut enemy communications and supply lines and ambush stragglers and foragers. Such warfare (called guerilla, meaning "little war") tied down some 360,000 French troops in Spain and Portugal. The desperate fighting for the town of Saragossa alone cost the French 60,000 casualties. Even a simple messenger going to France required an escort of several hundred cavalry. This war came to be called the "Spanish Ulcer" since it slowly bled the life out of the French army. Napoleon himself said the invasion of Spain was the worst mistake of his career.
Making matters worse for the French was British help led by Sir Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) and Sir John Moore. Wellesley in particular was a capable commander who knew how to use the stark Spanish landscape against the French, tying them down to long supply lines that were vulnerable to guerilla raids. Bit by bit, the French forces were worn down and driven back. In 1813 the last French army in Spain was defeated and driven out, leaving behind Joseph's silver chamber pot as a victory trophy to commemorate the "Spanish Ulcer".
Another shock came to Napoleon in 1809 when Austria, apparently inspired by the Spanish revolt, declared war on France again. Napoleon won the war quickly, but not before Austrian forces, showing their own nationalist spirit, inflicted a sharp defeat on the French. In the ensuing peace, Austria lost still more land and population as the price of daring to fight France. Napoleon also claimed an Austrian princess, Marie Louise, as his bride, hoping she would provide him with a legitimate heir to his throne as well as give him ties to established royalty.
This short war against Austria should have indicated to Napoleon that the tide of revolution was starting to favor France's enemies. Both Austria and Prussia were adopting French innovations such as drafting subjects into their armies, while Prussia went so far as to abolish serfdom. Speeches by such men as Johannes Fichte urged the unification of a strong Germany against France and showed a strong undercurrent of nationalism developing there. However, it was events further east that would be Napoleon's real undoing.
Napoleon's invasion of Russia
There were several reasons for Napoleon's decision to invade Russia in 1812. Czar Alexander I felt snubbed by Napoleon's marriage to an Austrian princess (even though Napoleon had first asked the Czar for a Russian princess and been snubbed). Mutual jealously between the two rulers, and Russian resentment of Napoleon's revival of Poland (as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw) and the Continental System, which was costing it valuable trade with Britain, also contributed to war.
Whatever the reasons, Napoleon was determined to crush Russia. Instead of relying on the typical Napoleonic blitzkrieg, he decided to use the weight of numbers, some 600,000 men drawn from all over his empire, to crush his foe. In June 1812, the Grand Army of France entered Russia.
While most people hearing of Napoleon's Russian campaign think of the horrible Russian winter and march out of Russia, the march going in was rough too, with summer heat, flies, and dust plaguing the French and their allies all along. The Russian scorched earth policy of burning anything of use to the French before they could get it also wore them out. Garrison duty, desertions, and even suicides from despair over the endless march reduced the French army to 125,000 men by September when the Russian General Kutozov was finally forced to make a stand at the village of Borodino some 70 miles west of Moscow. What ensued was the fiercest, bloodiest, and most horrible day of fighting in the Napoleonic era, and possibly in history up till then. Once again Napoleon discovered that nationalist fervor was not something that could be confined to the French people. After a full day of hammering mercilessly at each other, 40,000 Russians and 20,000 French were lost, including 39 French Generals who were killed or seriously wounded. Even though the Russians eventually retreated, with those sorts of losses, nobody could really claim a victory.
The Russians left Moscow to the French, but little else in the way of food and other supplies. Soon after its occupation, Moscow mysteriously went up in flames, thus denying the French any shelter as well. Napoleon, hoping the Czar would come to terms, waited until October 19 to evacuate Moscow and head home. By then it was too late. The Russian winter was quickly setting in.
By Russian standards it was not such a bad winter. But for an army that had brought mosquito nets for continuing its campaign into India, it was a disaster. Men froze from exposure to the elements and starved as supply lines broke down and the surrounding scorched earth yielded little or no food. Many of the French horses died simply because Napoleon had refused to let them be shod for ice. With each day, the situation became more desperate and the retreat degenerated into a rout. At the Berezhina River, total chaos ruled as the mob of French soldiers crowded frantically onto two bridges to escape oncoming Russian forces. One of the bridges broke under the weight of the crowd and thousands drowned or were crushed in the ensuing panic. An island that formed over the pile of bodies still stands as a grim reminder of the French disaster in Russia. Of 600,000 men who invaded Russia, only 55,000 made it back. Napoleon's message to the French people upon returning from this disaster was: "His majesty's health has never been better."
The end of the Napoleonic Empire
Napoleon's defeat in Russia was a signal to the rest of Europe to rise up against French rule, and Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Britain formed a new coalition to liberate the continent. Napoleon still had some fight left in him and raised new armies to defend his empire. However, the emperor was not as sharp as he used to be and he wasted men on needless marches and countermarches. The year 1813 saw heavy fighting as the allies pushed the French back across Germany. The decisive battle came at Leipzig in the "Battle of the Nations" where 300,000 allies and 190,000 French desperately fought for three days. When France's Saxon allies turned on them in mid battle, the French were forced to retreat through Leipzig. Unfortunately, the one bridge providing an avenue of escape was prematurely blown up, and thousands of French soldiers either surrendered or were drowned. The remaining French forces quickly retreated across Germany while the rest of Napoleon's empire in Holland, Italy, and Spain threw off the yoke of French rule. In fifteen months of disastrous campaigning, Napoleon had lost one million men.
Yet he refused to accept a settlement that would leave him with France. Maybe he hoped for an upsurge of nationalist fervor such as had happened during the crisis of the Revolution in 1793. In this he was sadly disappointed, because France was worn out by nearly a quarter century of warfare. The ranks were now filled with the "Marie Louise Boys", called that since they were too young to shave, but not too young to die for their emperor. While Napoleon showed flashes of his old brilliance in hurling one invading army after another back from French soil, it was still too little too late. On April 13, 1814, Napoleon was forced to abdicate. The man who just recently had ruled most of Europe now had to leave France in disguise to save himself from mobs of French people bitter over having suffered so much from his wars.
However, Napoleon was not quite through. The allies had generously given him the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba to rule, even with an army of 900 men. In 1815 he escaped to France, seized control of the government, and fought one last battle against the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian armies near the Belgian village of Waterloo. It was a poorly run battle on Napoleon's part and ended in total defeat for the French. This time Napoleon was exiled to the island of St. Helena off the southern tip of Africa. He died there in 1821.
FC107Prussian Reforms in the Napoleonic Era and Their Impact
Prussia provides possibly the best example of how Napoleon's success inspired other countries to copy many of his reforms in order to break free of French rule. Napoleon was especially severe with Prussia joining his enemies in 1806, taking nearly half of its lands while exacting an indemnity equal to 140% of its annual government revenue before it had lost those lands. In addition its army was limited to 42,000 men. This humiliating settlement brought home to Prussia's rulers the need to copy the reforms that had obviously given France so much dynamic power and vitality during the revolutionary period. These reforms came in two ways: those imposed by the government from above in order to prevent the need for revolution from below, and those suggested by intellectuals, notably Johannes Fichte, in regard to education.
There were three main parts to the reforms imposed by the government. The most sweeping of these was the Edict of Emancipation in 1807, which ended serfdom, feudal privileges, and all class distinctions. Even Jews were given full civil rights by this document, a rarity in Europe at that time. Along with this came a land reform in 1811 that gave the peasants two-thirds of the land they had worked for the nobles while leaving those nobles the other third of land in compensation for their loss. Finally, there were major military reforms, such as promotion by merit and banning foreign recruits, which hopefully would instill some of the same high morale and efficiency into the Prussian army that had made the French army so effective in recent years.
Later in the century, Otto von Bismarck would unify Germany under Prussian rule and institute similar social reforms in order to remove any need for revolution. In each case, there were few political reforms giving the German people any real power in their government. However, these two waves of reforms in the 1800's would make Germans more willing to accept without question the policies of a government they saw as benevolent and ruling in their interests. This would influence many ideas on the modern welfare state, but also, along with the educational reforms discussed below, make the German people prone to fall victim of political groups posing as their benefactors while just using this facade to get power for their own purposes.
The major figure in Prussia' educational reforms was Johannes Fichte. In his "Addresses to the German Nation", he tackled two issues: creating a German national spirit and instilling it into the German people. First of all, Fichte blamed Prussia's and the German people's recent humiliations on a lack of national spirit, which gave, rise to moral failure and complacency. From the English philosopher, Edmund Burke, he borrowed the idea that the nation is the only enduring thing on earth, and thus the living expression of divine immortality. However, while France and England had strong national traditions and institutions to bind them together, the German people had virtually none and thus must find or create them. For Fichte, the best candidates for such German traditions were the Germanic tribes that had conquered the Roman Empire. It was here that one would find the simple and noble virtues that had made those people great and would make Germans great once again. He also saw the Holy Roman Empire, the so-called First Reich, as a unifying institution that Germans could look back to for inspiration.
As far as instilling these traditions in the German people, Fichte saw the public schools as the place where this could be done. While Prussian schools had been and remained places for technical education, this new agenda of instilling nationalist spirit into its children also became an essential element in public education for many modern nations in addition to Prussia and later Germany.
Just as the government's social reforms made the German people somewhat complacent about their rulers, these nationalist ideas had a similar effect on Germany's intellectuals. Fichte's educational proposals would translate intellectual ideas into action on a national scale and give the intellectual community a major role in implementing these reforms. However, it also made the intellectuals a part of and subordinate to a system that valued action over contemplation. This put pressure on them to affirm government policies with absolute conviction rather than questioning them in the spirit of skepticism needed to keep an intellectual climate fresh and vibrant. Therefore, the intellectuals, along with the German people in general, were prone to falling under the sway of people who would use their power for less then benevolent purposes. The most notable example of this was the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, which led to World War II. Ironically, Fichte, who proposed many of the reforms that would eventually lead to this disaster, was himself an idealistic liberal, the sort of person that Hitler would work so hard to eradicate.
The Industrial RevolutionUnit 17: The Industrial Revolution
FC117AA Brief History of Surgery
It started with the discovery of the anesthetic properties of ether and chloroform in the 1840s, thus making surgeries painless, although there was plenty of pain after the anesthetics wore off. Still, the number of people willing to undergo surgery rapidly multiplied. However this led to another problem: infections from surgery killing patients after presumably successful surgeries. Previously, with so few people willing to undergo surgery, and so many of them dying on the operating table, infections from surgery itself were relatively rare, and their causes (i.e., unclean surgical instruments and operating conditions) remained a mystery. Then came the answer: germs.
When people such as Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister first linked microbes to disease and infection, they were met by widespread skepticism from people who refused to believe disease and infection could come from things so small we can’t see them without a microscope. However, when Pasteur came up with a vaccine against rabies based on his theory, people took notice. Lister applied this theory to surgery by spraying a fine mist of carbolic acid on patients during surgery to kill any germs. As a result, deaths from infections after surgery dropped dramatically.
Unfortunately, some patients and medical staff reacted badly to the carbolic acid. This had two results. First, experiments showed that patients’ infections had the same germs as those on surgeons’ hands. Secondly, to protect his trusted head nurse’s sensitive hands, Lister had the Goodyear Rubber Company make some rubber gloves. Out of these two things came aseptic procedure, where everything in the operating room was sterilized, thus eliminating the need for the annoying carbolic acid. Ironically, the rubber gloves first developed to protect the hands of Lister’s head nurse (whom he later married) were now used to protect the patient from germs on the medical staff’s hands.
Aseptic procedure drastically reduced the number of infections from surgery and dramatically increased the number of surgeries being performed. This brought up another problem: blood loss. At first, doctors tried random blood transfusions from other people, saving some patients but killing others. This led to new research and the discovery of blood types. Now blood donors’ blood could be accurately matched with that of patients.
Then came World War I and the need for blood donors drastically increased. However, donors’ blood clotted soon after being taken, preventing its storage or transport long distances to field hospitals where it was needed. Then someone discovered that sodium citrate kept blood from clotting, thereby saving thousands of lives.
In spite of all these advances, invasive procedures like surgery were still a shock to the system and quite painful during recuperation. Fortunately, one more discovery during World War II helped reduce the need for surgeries: penicillin and other antibiotics that could cure infections without the patient having to go under the knife.
Since World War II a staggering number of advances in surgery have taken place. At the same time germs have mutated quickly, so our arsenal of antibiotics is becoming less and less effective. The battle goes on.
FC109The Agricultural Background to the Industrial Revolution
Introduction
No other event or series of events in history has had nearly the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Most likely, people living in the 1700's could more easily relate to the lifestyle of ancestors 2000 years earlier than to our lifestyle a mere 200 years later. Our life expectancies are more than double that of our ancestors. We travel thousands of miles much more easily, quickly, and comfortably than they could travel 20 or 30 miles. We are in much closer touch with events on the other side of the globe than they were with events in the next village. And the price we pay for our medical care, balanced diet, rapid transportation, and mass communication involves much less effort than what they spent for their more primitive comforts and necessities.
Although industrialization happened rapidly, one can see a long steady build-up toward it in Western Europe over many centuries. The extensive use of water wheels, windmills, and other labor saving devices all put the European mentality in touch with exploiting natural forces and laws to increase productivity. The invention of the clock changed Europeans' attitudes toward time, disciplining and regulating their lives to a degree of precision necessary for industrialization. And the Enlightenment's scientific discoveries laid the foundations for the dramatic industrial and scientific advances of the 1800's. All of these developments took place in Western Europe because of a complex variety of forces that fed back on one another to intensify their effects.
A new agricultural revolution
Just as various forces combined to make Western Europe the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, several factors combined to focus on Great Britain as the specific area of Europe where industrialization would first take root. One of these was a rapid growth in agricultural production and the labor force that started with the agricultural revolution in the Middle Ages. This led to three lines of development that would later converge to create a new agricultural revolution in the 1700's.
First of all, the three-field system developed in the Middle Ages required nearly all the farmland for growing grain crops. This left little land for grazing cattle, which, in turn, produced little manure for fertilizer. As a result, crop yields were down, forcing peasants to use most of the land for grain crops, and so on. This made the agriculture fairly stagnant and created the need for a better way of feeding Britain's population.
Another medieval innovation, the heavy plow, also generated a vicious cycle. Since peasants were typically too poor to own enough oxen to pull a plow, they had to share plow teams. As a result, they broke their fields into strips in order to ensure that everyone got at least some of his land plowed. This left everyone's lands interlocked in scattered strips of farmland. Because of that, there was little incentive or opportunity to try new agricultural techniques, since all the peasants had to agree on any changes and switch all of the village's lands to the new system. Getting everyone to agree to any such changes was extremely difficult. As with the three field system, this also made agriculture fairly stagnant, keeping individual peasants too poor to farm independently, forcing them to continue sharing plow teams, and so on. This also created the need for better agricultural techniques.
However, another result of the medieval agricultural revolution, the rise of towns in the High Middle Ages, unleashed forces that pushed for change in two ways. First of all, by the early modern era, the rising middle class had bought up much of the farmland in their ambitions for secure investments and noble titles. These landowners were more open to new farming techniques that could earn them more profits. Second, the Enlightenment was discovering new ways to grow better crops. These two factors led to the four-field system that used all four fields rather than leaving one fallow. This had three advantages. First, it made previously useless and marginal land useful, thus expanding the amount of land under cultivation. Second, it used clover and turnips in the fourth field to maintain the soil’s fertility. Finally, with the fourth field now in use, it was using all of the land every year rather than having to keep part of it fallow. These factors led to better crop production so that peasants could afford feed for livestock, leading to more meat and protein in the common people's diet. Unfortunately, this new and more efficient agriculture required large open tracts of land.
In the 1700's, the need for better agriculture and the need for large tracts of land for this new type of agriculture led to the Enclosure Movement, whereby wealthy landowners enclosed the common lands so they could practice the four-field system. This created two effects that helped lead to the Industrial Revolution. First of all, the Enclosure Movement drove many people off their lands, forcing them to flock to the cities in search of homes and jobs. Also, this new kind of agriculture doubled food production, thus leading to dramatic population growth in England in the 1700's. The combination of population growth in the cities created the labor supply for Britain's textile mills when the Industrial Revolution began.
FC110The Technological Background to the Industrial Revolution
The medieval roots of the Industrial Revolution
If new agricultural developments provided the backbone for supporting the Industrial Revolution, various technological innovations were its heart and soul. And the roots of those innovations and the cultural attitudes so vital for their formation go all the way back to the Middle Ages and the Cistercian monks. What triggered all this was the Cistercians' desire to get away from the evils of the world. This led them to found their monasteries in the wilderness away from civilization, but also away from any outside labor supply upon which they might rely. Being thrown back on their own resources, they rediscovered, probably in an old Latin or Greek text they were copying, the principles of applying water power with a waterwheel. The ancient Greeks had come up with this invention, along with the principles of steam power. However, the abundance of cheap human labor meant there was no real need for water or steam power in the ancient world. As a result, these principles lay largely unused until this time.
However, the Cistercians did need such principles and started experimenting with labor saving waterwheels, first applying them to the milling of grain into flour. Two later inventions dramatically expanded its uses. First, there was the cam, which was a piece of wood set on the drive shaft that struck anything in its way, such as a bellows or trip hammer, with each revolution of the waterwheel. Second, there was the crank that could convert the circular motion of the waterwheel into oscillating motion. These two developments led to applying waterpower to a multitude of tasks: They could drive ripsaws, bellows, and water pumps. They were connected to grinding stones for sharpening and polishing tools, weapons and armor. And they could power trip hammers for fulling cloth, crushing sugarcane, and pounding hemp and rags for rope and paper.
The number of mills that sprang up was astounding. William the Conqueror's census in 1089, the Domesday Book, listed no fewer than 5624 watermills in England alone. That was one mill for every 50 families and is estimated to have saved the average peasant wife two to three hours of work per day once the tedious task of milling grain was mechanized. The main branch of the Seine River going through Paris had 68 mills. Another sixteen-kilometer stretch of stream had 30 such mills. Wherever rivers were slow, people built dams to increase the waterpower and floating mills to use that power. And where there were no rivers at all, they applied these mechanical principles to harnessing other types of energy, building tidal mills along the ocean and windmills (originally a Persian invention) on flat open land. By 1600, some 40 different types of industries were wholly or partially dependent on water or wind power, mechanizing such tasks as spinning silk, boring the barrels from cannons and muskets, and making gunpowder. In 1694, Louis XIV's main military engineer, the Marquis de Vauban, estimated that France had 80,000 flourmills, 15,000 industrial mills, and 500 iron mills.
As waterwheel technology spread across Western Europe, so did a growing awareness of how to exploit mechanical principles in general. In addition to harnessing the power of the tides and winds, Europeans were also developing better clocks (originally a Chinese invention). In fact, the clock would become the symbol of Europe's increasingly mechanistic view of the universe. However, while Europeans were harnessing time and parceling it out in discrete units of hours, minutes, and seconds, the clock was also more tightly structuring how Europeans lived their lives. This would be another important aspect of the Industrial Revolution as far as conditioning factory workers to the time clock and creating a more precise society.
It was Europeans' rising ability of how to exploit mechanical principles that led to three lines of technological development that together would culminate in possibly the most critical invention of the Industrial Revolution: the steam engine. Those lines of development had to do with mechanical ripsaws, larger bellows, and innovations in the textile industry.
The textile industry in Britain
Britain in the 1700's was the perfect example of the idea that necessity is the mother of invention. The triumph of the mercantile middle class in the English Revolution of the 1600's and the growth of European colonial empires, especially that of Britain, had created global trade links such as had never been seen before. However, opening up such new vistas often creates problems, and that was the case with European textile production. Europe's higher standard of living made its goods and labor more expensive, which led to an influx of cheaper textiles from India that could undersell European, and particularly British, goods. In order to compete more successfully, British textile producers needed a cheaper and faster way to produce cloth.
The answer came with the invention of the more mechanized handloom (1733) which had a "flying shuttle" that quickly wove the weft thread in between the warp threads This could double the speed of production, except for one other problem. The spinning wheel used to spin the thread for the loom was too slow. The solution came with two more inventions in the 1760's: the spinning jenny, which could spin seven threads at a time, and the water frame which could use water power to increase the speed of spinning and weaving even more. This series of inventions gave the British textile industry a tremendous boost, and soon textile mills were springing up on just about every available bit of river front property. Unfortunately, the amount of such property was limited, and soon profit hungry businessmen were looking for a new power source to drive their looms and spinning jenny's. Luckily, all this while a new power source had been emerging. That was the steam engine
Ripsaws and bellows, coal and iron
As mentioned above, one important application of the waterwheel was to drive larger bellows. What this made possible was hotter fires with which metal smiths could finally smelt iron. And that provided purer iron for building stronger boilers and steam engines.
Another important development was the water-powered ripsaw. This was a much more efficient way to cut timber, so efficient in fact that, by 1600, most of Britain was effectively deforested. Therefore, the English, largely without their primary heat source, wood (and charcoal processed from wood), had to find something else to burn. They found it in Britain's plentiful coal deposits.
One problem with coal is that it burns much less cleanly than charcoal, making it harder to come up with good iron. This was until 1709 when someone discovered a way to process coal into a cleaner and hotter burning substance known as coke. However, it was not until 1783 that a smelting technique, known as rolling and puddling, was invented which worked the impurities out of iron and made it strong and cheap enough for widespread industrial use. With stronger and cleaner iron, people could make boilers able to withstand the higher steam pressures needed for more powerful steam engines. This of course was only relevant once the steam engine had been invented, which brings us to another problem with coal.
Unfortunately, most of Britain's coal was buried in deposits that required the construction of deep shaft mines. Eventually coal miners ran into that curse of all deep mines: water seepage. It was here that a crude steam pump was devised to give steam its first practical job. Unfortunately, this early pump was inefficient and burned nearly as much coal as was being mined. More efficient models were designed, notably that of Thomas Newcomen. But a truly efficient design did not come along until 1769 when James Watt introduced a practical two-chamber steam engine that made steam power economical to use in the mines.
Not only was steam power practical for the mines. It also found applications in the textile mills for those businessmen not lucky enough to have waterfront property and the free power that went with it. As a result, British textile production jumped by a factor of 30 times. With each passing year, the hissing, churning, and pumping of the steam engines rang louder in Britain's cities while the black smoke from burning coal steadily darkened its skies. The Industrial Revolution had been born.
FC111The Start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain (c.1750-1800)
Although the four-field system and steam engine provided the basic foundations for the Industrial Revolution, it took other factors combined with these to create this phenomenon. As it happened, Britain in the 1700's was the place where all these factors converged to make it the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
Much of Britain's favored position came from the English Revolution of the 1600's and the triumph of a wealthy middle class with both the money and willingness to invest in new ventures. This created five basic lines of development that together would trigger the Industrial Revolution. The first of was the new steam and textile technology. Second, there was the new agriculture and population growth crating both the labor force for the new industrial factories and the markets to buy their manufactured goods. The third factor was Britain's colonial empire, which provided raw materials for the factories as well as more markets for their goods.
Fourth was the development of a superior transportation system for getting raw materials to the factories and finished products to markets. Britain was especially favored in this respect, being an island with navigable inland rivers further enhanced by a well-developed system of canals. This, along with its colonial empire, prompted the British to build an excellent merchant marine for transporting its goods. Also, as the nineteenth century progressed, a new form of technology, the steam locomotive traveling on steel rails, would make overland transport increasingly economical and efficient for the first time in history.
The fifth and final factor was a large surplus of capital along with the willingness to spend it on new machines and technology. Central to this was the Bank of England, which encouraged investment, stability, and economic growth in both the public and private sectors. Consequently, when the machines and opportunities to exploit them came along, British businessmen were in by far the best position to take advantage of the situation, making Britain the banker of the world for the next century.
Two other factors also helped Britain. One was its excellent position as an island, which not only helped its trade, but also insulated it from continental wars. Also, Britain was blessed with extensive coal and iron deposits. By 1850, one-half of the world's iron and a full two-thirds of its coal production would come from British mines. Along with providing the resources for producing steam power and heavy industrial machinery, it also triggered a dramatic migration from the more agricultural south to the industrial north where the coal and iron fields lay. In addition to coal and iron, Britain also had access to plentiful supplies of Scottish wool for its textile mills.
Later, Britain would rely on cotton from America. Once Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin (1793) solved the problem of cleaning the seeds out of the fiber, the southern United States became a primary cotton producer for British factories. However, the cotton gin had unforeseen and far-reaching consequences since it prolonged the life of slavery in the United States, making it a red-hot issue in American politics and a major factor leading to the American Civil War.
All these various factors (the new steam and textile technology, a large labor force, extensive markets at home and in its colonies, a superior transportation system, plenty of capital, extensive raw materials, and an excellent position for trade) combined to create a textile industry that could produce, transport, and sell vast quantities of cheap cloth by the late 1700's.
The result of all this was an industrial revolution of vast importance in a number of ways. For one thing, it would spawn the steam powered locomotive and railroads which would revolutionize land transportation and tie the interiors of continents together to a degree never before imagined. It would trigger massive changes in people's living and working conditions as well as the structures of family and society. And its momentum would generate a rapid-fire chain reaction of new technologies, a process that is still accelerating today and shows no signs of slowing down. Nor would these dramatic changes be confined to Europe. Rather, their power would spread across the globe to change the way the entire human species lives, for better or worse.
FC112Railroads and Their Impact (c.1825-1900)
No invention of the 1800's played a more vital role in the Industrial Revolution than the steam locomotive and railroad, triggering the biggest leap in transportation technology in history. The technology central to railroads, the steam engine, needed two major improvements. First of all, a way had to be found to convert the oscillating motion of the steam engine to rotary motion so it could drive the locomotive's wheels. The solution came with James Watt's Sun and Planet gear, which connected the piston to the wheels somewhat off center to drive it forward. Secondly there was a need for stronger iron so boilers could create and withstand the pressure needed to drive steam locomotives. In 1783, the rolling and puddling process was invented, eliminating impurities in the iron and making it much stronger. In addition to creating much stronger boilers, it also led to stronger and cheaper iron rails on which the locomotives could ride.
Another catalyst for the invention of the locomotive was the loss of so many horses during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. This, along with the rolling and puddling method and Watt's Sun and Planet gear, sparked experiments leading to the first steam locomotive in 1804. However, it was not until the 1820's, when a properly running locomotive had been designed and the rolling and puddling technique had advanced and become widespread enough to make good cheap rails possible, that the first railroads were born.
In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railroad carried the first commercial freight of any railroad in history. Five years later, the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad opened operations carrying passengers as well as freight. This quickly sparked a virtual mania for building railroads in Europe and the United States after 1830. The 1800s saw incredible growth in the miles of track being laid. In 1830, Britain had only 95 miles of track. That figure had grown to 1500 miles by 1840 and 6600 miles by 1850. By contrast, Europe in 1850 had only 8000 miles of track. However, after 1850 Europe and the United States rapidly gained to Britain. By 1890, Britain had 20,000 miles of track, while Germany had 26,000 miles and the United States had 167,000 miles. Even Russia had 48,000 miles of track by 1900, although that was spread out over a vast area.
Such rapid expansion had both political and economic effects. Politically, the power of the state grew considerably. For one thing railroads were expensive to build, leading governments to finance them directly or through massive land grants. Also, everyone wanted railroads to pass through and benefit their regions. At first, this was impractical, and governments often had to step in and decide where the main trunk lines should be laid before less profitable branch lines could be developed. Finally, standard gauges (track sizes) and safety standards had to be set so that different railroads could easily link up and run their trains on other companies' tracks without crashing into one another. Naturally, each railroad wanted to avoid the expense of adapting its own gauge to another company's standard, making it necessary for the government to step in and impose a standard gauge and safety practices. Therefore, as railroads unified their nations economically, the governments directing their development unified their nations politically and increased their own power.
Railroads cut travel time by 90% and dramatically reduced freight costs with three important economic results. First, they made possible the settlement and development of continental interiors. For example, in 1869 the first transcontinental railroad across North America was completed, transforming an arduous and dangerous journey of months into an easy trip of a few days. This linked the countryside more tightly to the cities, production areas to markets and raw materials, and continental interiors to coastlines and waterways. Second, farmers switched from raising subsistence crops to cash crops better suited for their local soils, thus increasing crop yields dramatically. They could then sell the crops, buy the food needed to feed themselves, and still have money for buying consumer goods. Finally, areas previously isolated during famines could now be supplied, leading to fewer deaths from hunger and starvation and corresponding increases in population.
With factories more closely connected to markets and the larger population of potential consumers, many more people could afford consumer goods. This stimulated sales, providing more jobs, increased production, and lower prices. With business booming, companies developed new products, triggering a virtual explosion of new technological advances, inventions, and consumer products in the latter 1800's. All these advances led to a higher standard of living, which further increased the consumer market, starting the process all over again.
By 1900, railroads had virtually revolutionized overland transportation and travel, pulling whole continents tightly together (both economically and politically), helping create a higher standard of living, the modern consumer society, and a proliferation of new technologies. Although airplanes and automobiles would continue this revolution, it was the railroad that paved the way.
FC113The Social Impact of Industrialization
"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face over which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next...
"You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there-- as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done-- they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.... All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end. Amen." —From Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Today we see the Industrial Revolution as being responsible for the higher standard of living we enjoy. This, of course, is true, but there was a great and, at times, appalling, price paid in human suffering to attain this standard of living. From the start, industrialization meant the transformation of countries' populations from being predominantly rural to being predominantly urban. In England, this involved the migration of millions from the agricultural south to the cities springing up near the coal and iron fields in the north. The population of Manchester, England grew from 25,000 in l772 to 303,000 by l850. Liverpool's population rose from 80,000 to 397,000 in the first half of the nineteenth century. Other cities told similar stories of incredible growth. Overall in Britain, the number of cities with populations of 50,000 or more rose from 3 in l785 to 3l in l860. By l850, Britain had become the first nation in history to have a larger urban than rural population. Other countries would soon follow suit.
These early industrial cities created problems in three areas: living conditions, working conditions, and the social structure. First of all, cities built so rapidly were also built shoddily. Tenement houses were crammed together along narrow streets, poorly built, and incredibly crowded. Whole families were packed into attics, cellars, or single rooms, with one house holding 63 people in 7 rooms. Sanitation was virtually non-existent, making clean water a luxury reserved for the rich. Open sewers ran down streets carrying water fouled with industrial and human waste. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid, typhus, and tuberculosis often reached epidemic proportions. Add to these problems air pollution and malnutrition, and one gets a picture of incomparable human misery. Alcoholism, drug abuse, crime, and prostitution were natural outcomes of having to endure these conditions.
Away from home, working conditions were even worse. Depending on the hours of sunlight, the workday could extend up to l9 hours a day, six days a week. The work itself was hard, boring, and tedious. Conditions around the steam engines and in the mines were hot and at times extremely dangerous. In the absence of safety devices, machines often tore off fingers, hands, and even arms. Mine shafts would occasionally explode or cave in, trapping and killing hundreds of workers deep within the earth.
Despite all this, there were often long lines of the unemployed waiting for any available jobs. This surplus of labor kept wages excessively low. As a result, families had to send their women and even their children to work in the factories just to make ends meet. In fact, women and children were preferred as workers because they could be paid less while being worked harder. Occasional depressions in the economy could lead to whole industries shutting down. This left thousands of families with no jobs and no public welfare to see them through such hard times. Even medieval serfs had been assured some rights to a living off their lands, which was more than these people could often enjoy.
The Industrial Revolution also upset old social patterns of life and family. Under the old domestic system of cottage industries, peasants worked in their own homes, produced at their own rates, and were paid accordingly. Under the new factory system, laborers worked in the factories owned by bosses whom they rarely, if ever, saw. They had to be at work precisely on time and work at the much faster pace of the machines. Nevertheless, they were paid by the hour, not according to their productivity, since that was cheaper for the owner.
Previously, the farm, home and the workplace were one and the same, with men and women sharing in many of the same tasks. In the industrial city, there was a separation of home and workplace and a correspondingly greater separation of the roles men and women played. In middle class families, men went to work while women stayed home with the children. In working class families, men, women, and children all went to work, but usually to separate places. For both middle and working class families, these were added strains that pulled the family apart.
Although the nuclear family had generally replaced the extended family in European society since the Black Death (largely in order to keep from splitting up family lands), there was still a network of close friends and relatives in the villages providing each other mutual support. However, as individual families moved to the city, they left behind the support network of the villages, often living in isolation and having little or no support from their neighbors.
The growing numbers of people left helpless and destitute by the rapid changes of industrialization did not go unnoticed, and reform movements arose from three directions. Some reformers were genuinely concerned industrialists such as Robert Owen and W. H. Lever, who built model communities in which their workers could live and work. Other reformers were liberal politicians trying to alleviate the sufferings of the masses or conservative politicians trying to avert social revolution caused by such misery. Together such politicians enacted legislation that gradually eased the plight of the working class, such as the Factory Act of l833, which limited the use of child labor, and the Factory Act of l850, which limited women and children to workdays of ten and a half hours.
However, many workers felt that for real progress to be made, they would have to work for it themselves. That involved organizing into trade unions, the very existence of which was illegal until l824. Even then, they could only exist as mutual aid societies to provide their members with insurance against sickness and injury. Not until l87l could British unions represent their members' grievances and actively work for reforms. The struggle for those reforms was a long, hard, and often violent one. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, trade unions had made substantial progress toward improving the living and working conditions that industrial workers had to endure.
The standard of living for workers in the early Industrial Revolution was certainly horrible, but it did improve in the course of the nineteenth century. Two types of statistics tell us this. First of all, the overall population of Europe rose dramatically from some l87,000,000 in l800 to 466,000,000 by l9l4. Add to that another 60,000,000 who emigrated to other continents, and one gets the distinct impression that the overall standard of living in Europe was getting better.
Another figure telling a similar story of progress is the average life expectancy of Europeans during this time. In l800, most people could expect to live around 30 years or less, depending on their social class. By l900, the average life expectancy had risen about fifty per cent to 45 years. Better living conditions and nutrition, public sanitation, and great advances in medical science were all responsible for this jump. However, the price those early generations of factory workers paid for this progress and our own comfortable life styles was a terrible one indeed.
FC114The Rising Status of Women in the Late 1800's
One of the most dramatic and unexpected consequences of the Industrial Revolution was the rising status of women by the end of the nineteenth century. Two aspects of industrialization in particular moved society in this direction. First of all, there was the separation of home and the workplace, which led to men often competing with women for factory jobs. Men disliked this, especially since women were often preferred by factory owners who could more easily overwork and underpay them. Therefore, working class men did what they could to push women out of what they saw as "male" occupations in order to keep their jobs.
This, along with the growth of new technologies and the emerging consumer society, had two effects. For one thing, more affluent middle class women especially tended to stay home in what became associated with the "housewife" role. This gave many women more leisure time, which they often used to get involved in political and social issues. Oftentimes, this would start through participation in church activities that typically were concerned with such causes. At the same time, since many middle class women were spending time at home and doing the shopping, they were seen as important aspects of the emerging consumer society. Therefore, the advertising industry targeted many of its campaigns specifically toward women. As a result, women's status in society started rising in the last half of the nineteenth century.
By the same token this rising status opened up new avenues of activity and expression for women. More women pursued secondary and university educations. Many of them also found their way into the workplace in what would eventually come to be seen as "female" occupations as nurses, teachers, and secretaries. In their leisure time, women took part in casual social dancing and sports. At first these were "feminine" sports such as croquet, bicycling, and horseback riding using the more "feminine" (and dangerous) sidesaddle. Even women's fashions in the early twentieth century reflected their social mobility by becoming increasingly less confining. More adventurous women were also taking part in mixed swimming and tennis. Only six years after the inauguration of men's singles at Wimbledon, women had their own singles tournament. Not only did women's rising status allow them to take part in these activities, but these activities gave women more visibility in society and increased their status, thus opening them more doors, and so on.
All this encouraged many women to work for suffrage (the right to vote). Serious discussion of this topic largely started with the French Revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft's book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, argued that women were neither mentally or physically inferior to men and that different standards for women were stifling to both sexes. This gained further support, including from such men as the political philosopher, John Stuart Mill. In Britain, demonstrations to gain the vote occasionally met with harsh reactions from men. When several women were jailed after a demonstration in 1905, newspapers finally broke their silence on the suffrage issue. This gave more publicity and support for women's suffrage, which sparked more demonstrations, reactions, publicity and sympathy, and so on. Although some women, frustrated at their treatment, turned to more destructive and even violent actions (vandalism, bombs in mailboxes, and one woman even throwing herself in front of a racehorse), most kept to more moderate tactics and continued to gain support.
Two things accelerated this process. First of all, women became especially vital to the workplace during World War I when so many men were gone and women were needed to fill their jobs. Secondly, there was the philosophy of Liberalism, which was originally intended to apply just to men. However, it could just as easily apply to women and became the philosophical basis for the women's suffrage movement. In 1918, women over 30 won the vote (thus keeping male voters in the majority until 1927 when women over 21 could also vote). Women in other industrial countries soon gained suffrage: Finland (1906), Norway (1913), Russia (1917), and the United States (1919), along with Germany, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands. France, Italy, Switzerland and eventually most other countries around the globe would grant the vote later in the century. However, many barriers to equality remained and the struggle to attain equal status continues today.
FC115Socialism and the Marxist View of History
Religion is the opiate of the masses.— Karl Marx
One of the most powerful and influential philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been socialism, a doctrine believing the means of production should belong to the workers. This contrasts sharply with capitalism which has a small but very rich class of capitalists owning the means of production and an underclass of workers with little or no say in company policies. Socialism was a response to the horrible working and living conditions of the early industrial revolution. It was highly idealistic, drawing inspiration from a tradition of early Christian communal societies. In fact, it was often too idealistic and democratic, which doomed many early socialist communal experiments, such as one in New Harmony, Indiana, to failure.
Much more radical was Marxism, named after its founder, Karl Marx, who published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. While early socialists tried to build a new order within the existing one, Marx believed the present order must first be destroyed by revolution before a truly socialist society could evolve. However, Marxism is more than just a revolutionary call to arms for the working class. It is an entire system of thought with its own all encompassing view of society, economics, and history.
To start with, Marx believed in economic determinism, the idea that how a society produces and distributes its wealth will determine its social and political structure, laws, and even religion. Therefore, he saw history as a series of class struggles as humanity evolved through five basic stages of society:
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Primitive hunting and gathering societies which had no extra wealth and therefore no private property, social classes, class struggles, or even the need for government;
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Slave societies with a rich ruling class opposed by an oppressed underclass of slaves;
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Feudal society with a noble class of landowning lords opposed by an oppressed class of serfs;
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Capitalist society with a rich class of factory owners (bourgeoisie) opposed by an oppressed class of factory workers (the proletariat); and finally
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Socialist society run by the workers with no private property, and thus no social classes, or class conflicts.
Marx saw each type of society as a necessary stage in the evolution toward the socialist society. Likewise, he saw the capitalist society of his own time as self destructive and moving inevitably toward socialist revolution. This largely hinged on his labor theory of value. This stated that any product was only worth as much the workers were paid to make it. Anything a capitalist charged beyond this amount was called surplus value. And it was here that Marx saw the beginning of the fatal cycle that would destroy capitalism.
If capitalists charged more for a product than their workers were paid to make it, not everyone could sell their goods because, among other things, the workers would not be paid enough to buy them. This would drive some owners out of business and create a smaller business class, although individually they each would be richer. However, to stay competitive, they would have to invest in more efficient, and expensive, machinery, thus laying off workers in the process. Since they would still overcharge for their products and there were now even fewer workers to buy them, more owners would be driven from business and the cycle would repeat.
However, this cycle could not continue indefinitely, since each time around there would be a growing gap between the fabulously rich and desperately poor. Eventually, this would trigger a revolution that would destroy the capitalist order. The triumphant workers would then build a society where people as a whole owned everything in common. Private property would disappear, and with it social classes, conflict over property, and any need for government, family, and religion, which were all seen as instruments of bourgeois oppression. There would be no rich or poor, thus allowing each individual to find true fulfillment. However, for all of this to happen, an intermediate stage of government would be necessary to guide the revolution to this workers' utopia.
Marxism had both its good points and its problems. First of all, it was valuable for pointing out the importance of economics and class struggle in history. On the other hand, it failed to account for the role of individual genius, stupidity, and especially greed in human affairs, assuming that everyone would voluntarily give up all individual possessions for the common good. Also, Marx assumed his socialist revolution would take place in industrialized countries, when in fact it actually occurred in pre-industrial societies such as Russia, China, and Cuba. This was largely because, by Marx's death in 1883, conditions for industrial workers were starting to improve, thus undercutting any appeal socialist revolution might have for them. However, many subsequent social reforms, both in countries that hated and feared Marxism as well as ones that followed it, could trace their existence back to Karl Marx.
FC116The Spread of Industrialization Beyond Britain (c.1850-1900)
By 1850, Britain had become the first industrialized country in the world, with over half of its people living in cities. It controlled ninety per cent of Europe's steam shipping along with half of the world's iron and two-thirds of its coal production. However, outside of Britain, industrial factories were few and far between. There were several reasons for this. For one thing, the competition of cheaper British goods drained the capital needed for investment in industry from other countries and toward Britain. Internal tolls and political disunity prevented the integration of national economies needed to industrialize. Coal and iron deposits were usually far from each other, making it hard to concentrate the resources needed for industrialization. Britain itself actively worked to keep its technical knowledge from leaking beyond its shores. Finally, there was widespread resistance to industrialization in other countries, as people were reluctant to give up their traditional ways, feared the loss of jobs to machines, and saw the pollution and squalor of Britain's cities at that time.
Being so far ahead of the rest of the world, Britain decided to hold a magnificent trade fair, The Great Exhibition, in 1851 to show off its technological achievements. Other countries also contributed exhibits, but Britain's were the centerpiece of the show. Among these was the exhibit hall itself, the Crystal Palace, a magnificent structure of iron and glass covering 19 acres and even enclosing the trees of Hyde Park. The Great Exhibition and Crystal Palace symbolized the completion of Britain's industrialization and the beginning of the spread of industry to other parts of Europe and the world. After 1850, the most spectacular industrial advances would take place in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan.
Despite the edge Britain was showing off in the Great Exhibition, there were five main factors pushing even harder for Western Europe and the United States to industrialize. First, British competition forced these countries to industrialize in order to survive. Secondly, British businesses found ready and cheaper opportunities for building railroads and industries in foreign countries, thus helping them industrialize. Along these lines, Europe and America shared a common cultural heritage with Britain, including an aptitude for machines extending all the way back to the clocks and waterwheels of the Middle Ages. Along these lines, Britain was geographically close to the rest of Europe (and even the United States thanks to much faster steamships). Finally, constant contact with Britain meant that its knowledge could not be kept secret. Designs for steam engines and locomotives were bound to leak out, and they did with incredible impact. The first step most countries took to industrialize was to build railroads to link coal to iron deposits and factories to markets. Once a transportation system was in place, factory building and production could proceed.
Belgium was the first country after Britain to industrialize, largely because, being small and compact, its coal and iron deposits were near each other. Its government also established a national railroad in 1834 to tie the nation closer together. In France, as well, railroad construction, directed by Napoleon III and largely backed by British capital, led the way. By 1870, an extensive railway network radiated from Paris linking the agricultural south with the industrial centers in the north. Some said France did not experience an industrial revolution since it happened gradually and did not affect most Frenchmen who remained farmers. However, by 1900 France was a major industrial power following much the same pattern as other countries. Germany did not seriously start industrializing until after unification in 1871 when it could marshal all its resources in a concerted industrial effort. However, once unified, Germany saw a meteoric rise in its industrial might. Steel production doubled every decade from 1870 to 1900, passing even Great Britain in the 1890's. Its railroad mileage increased from 3500 in 1850 to 26,000 by 1900.
The United States saw even more dramatic industrial growth during this period because of its sheer size and plentiful resources. Railroads (also largely financed by British banks) had developed the interior east of the Mississippi by 1860. The completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 symbolized the opening up of the vast interior west of the Mississippi, with its vast agricultural and mineral resources. Northern factories intensified production during the American Civil War of the 1860's and never let up. In 1870, Europe produced 60% of the world's manufactured goods. By 19l4, it had fallen to 40%, that drop being mainly caused by growing American industries.
One non-Western country, Japan, had also industrialized by 1900. Ironically, Japan had shut itself off from Western influences since the 1600's. But, in 1854 the United States forced Japan to trade with the West, and it decided to beat the West at its own game by industrializing. Few paid serious attention to this until 1903 when tiny Japan took on Russian in a war and shocked the world by tearing its army and navy to pieces with its own largely mechanized forces. Japan had arrived as an industrial power, showing that the West's days as the undisputed masters of the globe were numbered.
FC116AThe Cycle of Foreign Investment and the Spread of Industrialization
We can see three major waves of this cycle happening, although it has been a continuous process with occasional breaks (such as the two world wars) interrupting it. The first wave came after 1850, when industrialization spread to Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. The next wave came after World War II, at first rebuilding the war ravaged industries of Western Europe and Japan. Along with this came the development of the so-called “mini-dragons in East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore). The early development by smaller states can be seen as analogous to the early development of the North Italian city-states in the High Middle Ages, while it took larger nation states longer to organize their resources.
The most recent, and still ongoing, wave since the early 1990s has seen the emergence of China and India as new industrial giants in the twenty-first century. Likewise, factories and jobs are being outsourced to South and South-East Asian nations such as Vietnam and Bangladesh.
FC117The Quickening Pace of Technological Change (c.1850-1900)
Throughout history, the slow pace of progress and the large gaps of time between new advances have generally made technological progress hard to perceive. However, since the mid-nineteenth century, one could hardly miss seeing the rapid evolution of technology at work. The key to this development was the fusion of science and technology in research laboratories resulting from three lines of development.
First of all, as the standard of living of the common people improved, they had money to buy goods. Sales and profits led to more production and jobs for more people, who also now had money to spend. This further improved the standard of living, leading to more sales, production, jobs, and so on, all of which generated the incentive to create new products to sell this growing consumer market.
The second and third lines of development were the parallel, but separate evolutions of science and technology. On the one hand, the Enlightenment spawned new discoveries and ideas in the fields of physics, biology, and chemistry. At the same time, Europeans' growing proficiency in machines produced the power loom, spinning jenny, steam engine, and locomotive in the late 1700s and early 1800s. However, until the 1800's, scientific and technological developments had rarely touched one another. But as technology became more sophisticated, it became increasingly obvious that further progress would depend on fusing it with the more abstract scientific knowledge that had been developing in the universities and labs.
Because of the more complex science and technology and the growing opportunities afforded by a growing consumer market, private companies and governments set up research laboratories where scientists could develop new inventions. No longer would technological progress rely on the random findings of brilliant but isolated inventors with little or no background in scientific knowledge. From this point on, science and technology were fused together into one of the most dynamic partnerships in history, triggering a cycle of new inventions generating more ideas and needs that led to more new inventions and so on. The result has been an incredible outpouring of new inventions and discoveries at an ever-accelerating pace, which continues to the present day. All this progress bred a new optimism and faith in the ability of science and technology to solve our problems. Some historians have even dubbed the period from 1870 to 19l4 as the Age of Progress.
One could hardly give an exhaustive list of the new inventions and discoveries of the later 1800's, but just looking at some of the highlights shows the dramatic technological and scientific progress of this period. In transportation, we have already seen the impact of the railroads. Other developments further accelerated the pace at which the planet was being tied together. Steam powered ships reduced travel time at sea much as the steam locomotives did on land since ships were no longer dependent on tail winds for smooth sailing. By 1900, the automobile, powered by the internal combustion engine, was ushering in an age of fast personal travel that took individuals wherever and whenever they wanted independently of train schedules. In 1903, the internal combustion engine also allowed human beings to achieve their dream of powered flight. The sky was now the limit, and even that would not hold up, as the latter twentieth century would see flights to the moon and beyond.
Developments in communications were even more startling, led by the telegraph, which allowed messages to travel at the speed of electricity rather than the speed of a horse. When transoceanic cables were laid, the time it took to get a message from one side of the planet to the other was literally reduced from months to minutes. The invention of the telephone in 1876 made such communication more personal and accessible to the individual. Twenty years later, Marconi's invention of the wireless radio allowed a message to be broadcast to millions of people simultaneously without having to be directly linked by wire to each receiver. The world was effectively becoming a much smaller place.
Fuelling these new developments were new sources of energy. Petroleum powered the automobile, while natural gas was used extensively for lighting street lamps. Possibly most important of all was electricity, which could be transmitted over long distances and whose voltage could be adapted for use by small household appliances. Among these was Thomas Edison's lightbulb, providing homes with cheaper, brighter, and more constant light than the candle ever could provide.
Medical advances may have had the most significant impact of all on people's lives in the 1800's. Possibly the greatest single breakthrough in medical history was the nearly simultaneous discovery by the Frenchman Louis Pasteur and the Prussian Robert Koch of germ theory, the idea that microbes or germs cause disease. This led to advances in three ways. First, it gave doctors a direction in which to focus their searches for the causes of various diseases. One by one, vaccines and treatments were found for such deadly sicknesses as malaria, tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, bubonic plague, and typhoid.
Secondly, it spawned a public health movement that provided covered sewers, clean water, and an overall more sanitary urban environment. Finally, it led to aseptic procedure, where surgeons practiced their art in a sterile environment, dramatically reducing the chances of a patient contracting further infection on the operating table. Add to this the use of ether as an anesthetic since the 1840's and transfusions and blood typing to compensate for blood loss during surgery, and patients had an excellent chance of survival. No wonder the average life expectancy rose by an unprecedented 15 years or more during the nineteenth century.
Agricultural production skyrocketed thanks to mechanical reapers and combines, steam tractors, hybrid crop strains, and chemical fertilizers. Growing knowledge in chemistry led to a thriving chemical industry, which produced soaps, alkalis, bleaches, dyes, vegetable oils, and a vast number of other products. New building materials were used. The formula for concrete, lost since the time of the Roman Empire, was rediscovered, while the Bessemer Process, which worked iron at much higher temperatures, leading to the production of high-grade steel. Together they made possible the architectural monument that best symbolized the modern age, the skyscraper. In addition, there were numerous other inventions to make life easier or more interesting: refrigeration, cameras, movies, and record players, to name a few.
This rapid and wide range of technological advances had profound economic, political, and even philosophical effects on Western Civilization and eventually the entire human race. Economically, we have become globally interdependent, since industries rely heavily on raw materials found only outside of their countries' borders while less industrialized nations rely on the goods those industrialized nations produce. Global interdependence in the 1800's led to a common worldwide gold standard to smooth over the complications of international trade. Although that gold standard has since been abandoned, the various national economies still operate as one integrated global economy. This has certain dangers as well, since the collapse of one nation's economy can trigger the collapse of others across the globe. The best-known example of this is the Great Depression of the 1930's, starting with the collapse of the United States' economy and then spreading worldwide.
The need for an integrated national economy with common railroad gauges and safety procedures and the elimination of internal tolls and other hindrances to trade has helped create the modern industrial state. New technologies, such as sophisticated and expensive modern weaponry that only governments can afford, faster communication to keep closer track of its citizens, and faster transport for moving its forces quickly to quell any civil disturbances have radically increased the modern industrial state's power over its population. Public education has been another outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution, teaching a nation's population a common body of knowledge and values, such as patriotism and living precisely according to the clock.
The Industrial Revolution has spawned new beliefs and weakened old ones. Longer life spans and the enticements of a higher standard of living have reduced the proportion of people deeply involved in religion. Instead, many people have chosen a more materialistic way of life. In fact, the philosophies of Materialism and Positivism emerged in the late 1800's, showing a growing faith in the potentials and values of material prosperity and modern science respectively. At the same time, Darwin's theory of evolution has emerged, seen by many as a threat to religion. Another powerful idea to emerge was Marxism, an economic and political philosophy that became a major force in the twentieth century.
Technology is certainly a double edged sword that has also created new problems such as pollution, overpopulation, the greenhouse effect, depletion of the ozone layer, and the threat of extinction from nuclear war. It has also been used to give us prosperity our ancestors could never have dreamed about. Whether it is ultimately used for our benefit or destruction is up to us and remains in the balance.
Nationalism & imperialismUnit 18: Nationalism and imperialism in the Late Nineteenth Century
FC118Disease and the Decline of the Hapsburg Empire in the Late 1800's
While the multi-ethnic nature of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires is often cited as the primary reason for their declines in the nineteenth century, other factors also entered into the equation. One factor that seems to have played a major role in determining the nature of Hapsburg rule and society as well as its decline was disease. In order to understand this we need to look at German expansion into Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages.
As the German people expanded into Central and Eastern Europe and established themselves and the ruling class in such areas as Bohemia, they tended to settle and concentrate in towns and cities from which they could rule the countryside. However, both the crowded and unsanitary conditions in cities then led to serious problems with disease. As a result, the ruling German class could rarely sustain its own population, let alone expand its numbers. Fortunately, there was a gradual influx of native Slavic migrants to the cities to replenish their populations. Since this migration was gradual, the ruling German classes could maintain their dominance until these newcomers had absorbed German culture and values, even adopted German names, and been accepted into the ruling classes. For centuries this pattern of gradual absorption of Slavic migrants served to maintain German cultural and political, if not ethnic, dominance of the cities and power in the empire.
However, two things upset this delicate balance in the later 1800's. One was a cholera epidemic that severely depleted the Germanized populations in Hapsburg cities. The other was industrialization, which created a need for a large factory work force. Together these triggered a huge influx of Slavic migrants into the cities. This much larger Slavic population in the cities proved too much for the Germanized ruling classes to absorb as they had before. It also generated a fear that Slavic culture would overwhelm German culture. This created a growing conservative backlash against the Slavs. That in turn led to growing resistance by Slavic nationalist groups against the Germanized ruling classes which merely caused more conservative reactions and so on.
As this cycle repeated itself, Hapsburg society became progressively polarized between the growing restiveness of its Slavic nationalities and ethnic groups on the one hand and the siege mentality of its increasingly isolated and reactionary ruling classes on the other. Therefore, by the early twentieth century, the Hapsburg Empire was on the verge of collapse. World War I would push it over the edge.
FC119Nationalism and its Impact in Europe (1848-1914)
Introduction
As we have seen, the French Revolution and Napoleon spread the ideas of liberalism and nationalism across Europe. These ideas took root and gave rise to several outbreaks of revolution in the 1820's, 1830's, and 1840's, the most severe being the revolutions of 1848. Although most of these revolutions failed, they continued the spread of liberal & nationalist ideas and also gave reformers a more realistic appreciation of what it would take to achieve their goals. The revolutions of 1848 especially influenced the peoples of Eastern Europe under Hapsburg and Ottoman rule as well as the peoples of Italy and Germany in Central Europe.
Eastern Europe
, especially the Balkans in the southeast, saw national independence from foreign rule, rather than national unity, as the critical issue. The spread of nationalist ideas among the various Slavic peoples there after the revolutions of 1848 combined with the steady decay of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires to create a particularly volatile situation. These generated growing nationalist movements that destabilized the already crumbling Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. To complicate matters even further, Russia became increasingly involved in Balkan politics, posing as the champion of Slavic liberties and nationalism against the Slavs' Turkish and Austrian masters. This heightened tensions between Austria, Turkey, and Russia and would provide the spark to set off World War I.Central Europe
, Germany and Italy in particular, had been broken into numerous states, a situation which had invited centuries of foreign intervention, conquests, and wars in both countries. Here also, the revolutions of 1848 combined with German and Italian frustration over this situation to generate strong sentiments for national unification in both countries. The middle classes in Italy and Germany especially supported national unification by strong governments that could end internal tolls, build national railroads, and support new industries.Both Italy and Germany were lucky to have brilliant prime ministers to lead them through unification: Camillo Cavour for the Italian state of Sardinia and Otto von Bismarck for the German state of Prussia. Both men skillfully combined strong internal developments of their respective states with opportunistic diplomacy and warfare to unify Italy and Germany by 1871. Both nations would also strive to industrialize in the latter 1800's. Germany proved especially successful in this endeavor. However, the presence of two unified nations in place of a multitude of little states, especially that of a strongly industrialized Germany, seriously upset the balance of power in Europe, which would also lead to World War I.
FC120The Unification of Italy (1848-1871)
Italy
had last been unified under the Byzantine emperor, Justinian, some 1300 years before. Since then it had been a patchwork of states under Byzantine, Lombard, Norman, German, French, Spanish, and Austrian rulers. Political fragmentation brought economic and cultural fragmentation as well. Without standard gauges, railroads did not cross state boundaries, while numerous tolls and dialects also hindered trade.Italy's reunification, or Risorgimento (literally meaning resurrection), was largely the work of Camillo Cavour, prime minister of the north Italian state of Sardinia (also known as Piedmont). Although not a fiery or charismatic revolutionary leader, he was a cool and clear-headed diplomat and brilliant organizer, one of those realistic politicians who emerged from the failed revolutions of 1848. Cavour skillfully gathered popular support throughout the peninsula by exploiting Sardinia's position as one of the few native ruled states in Italy.
He also saw that Sardinia must be developed internally before it could make any moves against the Austrians, who controlled most of northern Italy, and the Bourbons, who ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. To that end he reorganized Sardinia's treasury, tax system, and bank system, and then got foreign loans, especially from Britain, in order to build railroads and industries. Careful management of these loans allowed him to turn a profit and pay off the loans, thus expanding Sardinia's credit for larger loans to further develop the economy and so on. By the mid 1850's Sardinia was the most highly developed state in Italy.
Cavour was now ready for the diplomatic offensive to unify Italy. His main opponent was Hapsburg Austria, against whom he realized he needed outside help. Oddly enough, in order to get this, he attacked Russia. This was during the Crimean War (1854-56), one of the more senseless and futile conflicts in history. It mainly involved French and British efforts to stop Russian aggression to the south against the Ottoman Turks. The fighting centered in the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea where the British and French fleets could supply armies by sea better than Russia could supply its troops by land. It was a bloody and diseased affair, but it played into Cavour's hands, because Austria had angered France and Britain by refusing to help them against Russia. By sending Sardinian troops to help the French and British, Cavour won Napoleon III's friendship and the promise of French aid if he could make Austria appear the aggressor in a war.
Cavour had no trouble in stirring up rebellions against Austria and drawing it into attacking Sardinia. In the resulting War of 1859, Napoleon III sent 120,000 French troops to Italy by railroad, the first mass movement of soldiers by rail in history. The French won two battles, but suffered such heavy casualties that Napoleon III quickly pulled out, leaving Sardinia in the lurch. Despite this betrayal, the north and central Italian states of Tuscany, Parma, Modena, and Romagna rebelled against their rulers and unified with Sardinia, giving it about half of Italy's population. Events now moved quickly toward unifying the rest of Italy.
The price of Napoleon's aid against Austria was the transfer of Savoy and Nice to French control. This infuriated Giuseppe Garibaldi, a long time revolutionary leader who was as fiery and impulsive as Cavour was cool and calculating. Garibaldi had led the defense of the Republic of Rome in 1848 against French troops who still occupied it. Now the French were taking over Garibaldi's birthplace of Nice, and he intended to attack them there. But Cavour, still needing French diplomatic support, managed to divert Garibaldi and his army of 1000 "Red Shirts" to Sicily in order to overthrow the Bourbon dynasty. Garibaldi's tiny army met with incredible success and swept the Bourbons from Sicily in six weeks. They then crossed to southern Italy and swept the Bourbons from there as well. Practically overnight, southern Italy and Sicily had been liberated, but the question was for whom: Sardinia, who had sent Garibaldi, or Garibaldi himself who bore the title of dictator of southern Italy and Sicily while still wearing a Sardinian uniform?
Between Sardinia and Garibaldi lay the Papal States and Rome, the spiritual capital of Italy and still under French troops. Napoleon III, much preferring Cavour to Garibaldi, told the Sardinians to take the Papal states before Garibaldi got there, but to leave Rome to the French. Sardinia's king, Victor Emmanuel, did this and moved south to meet Garibaldi. In a dramatic meeting on October 26, 1860, Garibaldi turned his conquests over to Victor Emmanuel. The Kingdom of Italy was born.
Two important pieces of the puzzle remained to complete Italy's unification: Venice and Rome, held by Austria and France respectively. In each case, Italy's alliance with Prussia, then in the process of unifying Germany, proved to be valuable. In 1866, Italy won Venice by helping Prussia against Austria in the Austro-Prussian War. Likewise, Italian help in the Franco-Prussian War earned it Rome (except for the Vatican which remained an independent state inside of Rome). By 1871, Italy was unified.
But, as one politician put it, "Italy is made. We still have to make the Italians." After centuries of disunion huge cultural, political, and economic differences existed in this nation of 22 million people. The biggest gap was between the urban north and agricultural south. The Bourbons in southern Italy and Mafia in Sicily fanned discontent into revolts and violence exceeding that seen in the actual process of unification.
The new government did three things to pull Italy together. It built a national railroad system to physically links its parts. It established a national educational system to give its people a similar cultural outlook and loyalty. And it formed a national army to enforce its policies and also unify men from all over Italy in a common cause. However, 1300 years of disunity were a lot to overcome in a few years, and Italy's efforts at forging a nation met with limited success. Despite this, a patchwork of little Italian states had been unified into a new nation, a nation with ambitions to become a great power. Such ambitions would help lead to World War I.
FC121The Unification of Germany (1848-1871)
Not by speeches and majority resolutions are the great questions of the day decided—that was the mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.— Otto von Bismarck
Germany had been fragmented into as many as 300 separate states ever since the Investiture Struggle in the Middle Ages had wrecked the power of the German emperors. In the following centuries, it had suffered repeatedly from foreign wars and aggression, most recently Napoleon's rule. However, Napoleon had inadvertently done Germany two favors in the process of his rule. Besides instilling a sense of nationalism in its people, he had also consolidated Germany into 38 states, a giant step toward unification. Since Napoleon's defeat two states had competed for leadership of Germany: Austria and Prussia. Most people would have expected Austria, with its longer imperial tradition and larger territory to dominate. But it was Prussia, with its better organization and more progressive reforms (e.g., its customs union known as the Zollverein), which was destined to unify Germany.
The man who would lead Prussia in Germany's unification was its chancellor (prime minister), Otto von Bismarck (1815-94). He was a man of massive size and strength, brilliant mind, and iron will. Childhood stories of Germany's heroes had inspired him with a sense of German nationalism, while stories of foreign conquerors, especially Napoleon, angered him and instilled in him a desire for a unified nation. Bismarck's early career was rather undistinguished, although he did see foreign diplomatic service, which gave him experience in that field. He also witnessed Austrian arrogance toward Prussia in the German Diet (parliament), which set his mind to earn his country respect both inside Germany and outside of it. In 1862, he got his chance.
In 1858, Wilhelm I had succeeded Frederick William IV. The new king wanted to build up and reform the Prussian army. But one obstacle stood in the way: the Prussian Reichstag (parliament), formed as a result of the revolutions of 1848, refused to grant Wilhelm the needed money. In 1862, Wilhelm, on the verge of abdicating, appointed Bismarck as his chancellor.
Bismarck, among other things, was no lover of democracy, including the Prussian Reichstag, which he said bogged itself down in speeches and resolutions. He believed only clear-sighted decisive policies of "blood and iron" could build a German nation. He figured that once the nation was successfully built, German liberals, inspired by the reality of the long sought for German nation, would come around to his way of thinking. Therefore, he simply ruled without parliament and rammed through his own reforms. Prussia got its army and Bismarck could now turn to unifying Germany. Bismarck was an excellent diplomat who brilliantly manipulated alliances and played different powers off against one another. He was also a master of limited objectives, using each diplomatic step to set up the next one. He started with a revolt in Poland.
The Polish revolt against Russia in 1863 gained a great deal of popular support in Europe. But Bismarck was more interested in power than popular support (unless it was a means to gaining power). He clearly saw that the Czar would put down the revolt, and therefore helped Russia in crushing the rebels. This secured his eastern flank and gained an ally against Austria who had refused to help Russia in the Crimean War even after Russia had helped the Hapsburgs suppress their uprisings in 1848.
With his eastern border secure, Bismarck next championed the liberties of Germans in Schleswig and Holstein, whose Danish ruler was incorporating them more tightly into the Danish state. The resulting Danish War (1864) accomplished three things for Bismarck. First of all, it won him useful popular support among the Germans since he appeared to be defending German liberties. Secondly, it gave the reformed Prussian army valuable combat experience. Finally, it dragged Austria into the war on Prussia's side, since it could not afford to let Prussia be the sole champion of German liberties. This served Bismarck's purpose, since it got Prussia and Austria hopelessly entangled by their joint occupation of Schleswig and Holstein and helped set up a showdown between the two powers: the Austro-Prussian War (1866)
Bismarck laid the diplomatic groundwork for this war with typical thoroughness. Russia, already Prussia's friend and still mad at Austria, was effectively neutral, which suited Bismarck fine. Bismarck kept France out of the war by making vague promises of Rhineland territories if he won. And Italy, wanting to get Venice into its fold, allied against the common Austrian enemy. Prussia's military preparations were equally thorough. The Prussian army was better trained, organized and equipped than the Austrian army. A new breech loading rifle, the "needle gun", gave Prussian soldiers four times the firepower of their Austrian counterparts. A combination of using Prussia's railroad system for rapid movement of its armies with the telegraph to coordinate those movements allowed the Prussians to converge at the point of attack with unprecedented precision and overwhelming force. As a result, the Seven Weeks War, as this was also known, was a rapid and total victory for Prussia, in stark contrast to the drawn out conflict of the Seven Years War a century earlier
Bismarck's settlement looked forward to the eventual unification of Germany. His treatment of Austria was fairly lenient, taking only Venice and giving it, as promised, to Italy. But he also excluded Austria from German affairs, thus clearing the way for Prussian dominance. For Prussia itself, he took Schleswig and Holstein as well as the lands dividing Prussia from its holdings along the Rhine in the West. Bismarck also unified the north German states into a confederation under Prussian leadership, while expecting the south German states to follow Prussia's leadership in war. The confederation was organized along democratic lines to gain popular support, but the real power rested with the Prussian king and chancellor.
Bismarck's next move was to galvanize German support against a common enemy. He found that cause by going to war with France. Napoleon III of France had his motives for war as well. Sagging popularity at home and concern over Prussia's growing power helped drive him on a collision course with Bismarck that erupted into the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1). Once again, Bismarck had laid firm diplomatic foundations. Russia was still Prussia's friend. Italy allied with Prussia in order to get Rome out of French hands. Austria, still licking its wounds from its recent struggle with Prussia, was neutralized. The one big question mark was: what would Britain do? Bismarck took care of that by taking out a full-page ad in the London Times claiming France wanted to annex Belgium. Public opinion was outraged and Britain left France to its fate.
Few people then would have given Prussia any chance to beat the French, anyway, since France was still considered the foremost military power in Europe. The Franco-Prussian War proved that assumption wrong. Prussian training, equipment, leadership, and organization quickly smashed French armies in rapid succession. Within six weeks the Prussians had surrounded Napoleon III’s army at Sedan. After a day of desperate but suicidal assaults against the Prussian positions, Napoleon III was forced to surrender along with 120,000 men. The French mounted sporadic local resistance, especially in Paris whose besieged inhabitants survived on elephant meat from the zoo. In the end, it was too little too late and France had to ask for terms.
The Prussian victory had two main results. First of all, Prussia annexed Alsace and Lorraine, a bone of contention between the two countries since the Treaty of Verdun in 843 A.D. This alone was enough to spark French bitterness. Secondly, Bismarck officially unified Germany by declaring the Second Reich (German Empire) and crowning Wilhelm as Kaiser (literally Caesar or emperor). Not only that, he did this at Versailles, for 200 years the symbol of French power and now the symbol of its humiliation. This newly unified Germany would become an economic superpower by rapidly industrializing. For example, German steel production doubled every decade between 1870 and 1910, even passing British steel production after 1900. Both Prussia's treatment of France and its unification and industrialization of Germany would upset the balance of power and trigger a system of interlocking alliances that kept Europe on a knife-edge of readiness for a war that nearly everyone expected to break out. That war, World War I, would be the beginning of the end of European supremacy.
Internally, Germany between 1870 and 1914 presented a picture of seemingly incompatible contrasts. While its economy forged ahead to make it the most advanced nation in Europe, its political structure resisted any liberalizing trends and remained conservative and autocratic. Likewise, it maintained an increasingly obsolete social structure of rich landowners who had mechanized their farms at the expense of the peasants and even richer capitalists making profits at the expense of a downtrodden working class and shrinking class of small shopkeepers and craftsmen. As the social and political systems lagged behind economic progress, tensions in the form of growing opposition parties (including socialists), protests, and strikes emerged more and more. Discontent was partially diverted away from the government by being focused against such groups as Catholics, socialists, and especially Jews. This and World War I only put off resolving these tensions. Unfortunately, the banner of discontent would be picked up by Adolph Hitler and the Nazis whose terrorist programs would plunge both Germany and the world into a much worse nightmare than even World War I proved to be.
FC122European Imperial Expansion in Africa (c.1870-1914)
Whatever happens we have got/The Maxim gun and they have not.— 19th century European poem
Introduction
Ever since the rise of a capitalist economy and strong nation states armed with efficient military machines (c.1500), Europe had steadily extended its power across the globe. By 1800, European and European derived colonies had extended the dominance of European culture over 35% of the globe. Up until this point, the usual explanation for European expansion was the "three G's": God, gold, and glory. Colonies in South America provided gold and silver. Those in the Caribbean produced sugar, a virtual "white gold", for European markets. West African colonies provided slaves for the Caribbean sugar plantations. And the North American colonies and India provided their governments with markets and raw materials.
In the nineteenth century the nature and motives for colonial imperialism changed dramatically. As with the Industrial Revolution, Britain also led the way in the late nineteenth century in a new wave of expansion (known as neo-imperialism) that would put European civilization in control of 85% of the globe. The classic argument explaining this phenomenon has focused on the Industrial Revolution's growing need for new resources and markets. However, this oversimplifies the case. If one looks at where European colonies expanded, in particular in Africa, one sees little economic sense in doing so. Instead, there were three interrelated causes driving Europeans to go out and virtually conquer the globe: growing economic competition as the industrial revolution spread, internal political stresses caused by industrialization, and rising international rivalries.
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Economic causes. The 1860's were an economically unsettled time that came to a head with a depression in 1873. While all industrial countries were hurt, Britain especially was feeling the pinch. Its reliance on raw materials was damaging its balance of trade. And it was facing growing competition from newly industrializing nations, especially Germany, who had newer factories and cheaper labor.
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Internal political stresses. Economic changes have always caused political problems, and Europe in the late 1800's was no exception. Britain in particular was seeing a transformation of the relatively unified political party system of the pre-industrial era into a more fragmented patchwork of special interest groups: labor unions, land owners, bankers, industrialists, etc. Politicians were desperate for some new cause or ideology to unify the voters behind them.
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International tensions. In 1871 the fragile balance of power in Europe had been radically altered by the emergence of a strongly unified Germany and Italy, the equally destabilizing process of the rapid disintegration of Ottoman power in southeastern Europe and the Middle East, and the growing rebelliousness in Ireland against British rule. The British public was especially upset by these challenges to the stability of the world they had known and by Britain's apparent inability to act effectively.
Therefore, Benjamin Disraeli, British prime minister in the 1870's, first pushed the idea of renewed imperial expansion as a way to protect vital British overseas markets, resources and jobs, enhance Britain's national prestige, and give it an edge against other European countries without colonies. Never mind the fact that these arguments were grossly exaggerated if not downright false. The lure of new markets was especially misleading since there were often few consumers in Africa and Asia who could even afford European goods. Granted, as Europe's industries diversified in the late 1800's, there was a growing need for certain resources not found in Europe, such as oil, rubber, and non-ferrous metal. However, many of the resources sought by Europeans were unnecessary luxury or consumer items like bananas, coffee, and African palm oil for soap. Despite that, Disraeli had found one issue he could exploit in order to unify the British voters behind him. The British public and even Queen Victoria (who was also Empress of India) came to believe in the need for colonies.
Of course, opposing politicians could not let Disraeli monopolize the imperialism issue and leave them in his dust. Conservatives and liberals alike also pushed for imperial expansion. Justifying these wholesale conquests was easy enough. Britons saw themselves as bringing the benefits of Christianity and European civilization to less developed peoples. The new ideas of Darwinism, in particular "survival of the fittest", were adapted, or distorted, into Social Darwinism. This claimed that human societies, just like some animals, are better adapted to survive than others. Therefore, it was the "white man's burden" to bring his superior civilization to the inferior cultures of Africa and Asia. Social Darwinism was really little more than a polite or pseudo-scientific term for racism.
The "Dark Continent"
Before 1870 Europeans had made little headway into Africa, either as conquerors or explorers, mainly because of their lack of resistance to the area's tropical diseases. This left Africa in a shroud of mystery that earned it the title of the "Dark Continent". After 1870, Europeans made rapid inroads into Africa thanks to the industrial revolution which gave them two new weapons: vaccines for combating the diseases and rifles and machine guns for combating the African natives.
Three lines of development got Europeans interested in Africa and triggered a virtual land rush there. First of all was a highly publicized expedition by the journalist, Henry Stanley to find the explorer David Livingston who had been missing for some time. Stanley's best selling account, mostly remembered for the quotation, "Dr. Livingston, I presume", especially interested King Leopold of Belgium who ruthlessly conquered and exploited the Congo (modern Zaire).
The other two lines of development concerned British expansion into Egypt and South Africa. In Egypt, the ruler's lavish lifestyle led to a growing debt and the eventual takeover of his shares of the Suez Canal by British bankers. The loss of revenue from the canal further disrupted Egypt's stability. Therefore, in order to protect the Suez Canal from native revolution, the British government took over Egypt in the 1880's. Control of Egypt led to near hysteria over the outlandish possibility that the government in Sudan could cut off the source of the Nile and turn Egypt into a desert. As a result, the British also conquered Sudan.
Britain had taken over South Africa from the Dutch in 1815 to secure their route to India. The Dutch settlers (known as Boers) were unhappy with Britain's abolition of slavery in 1832 and trekked inland to settle the Orange Free State and Transvaal. The Boers were left alone until the discovery of diamonds and gold prompted a rush of British prospectors into the Boer territories. Growing friction between the Boers and these newcomers eventually caused the British to take over the Boer Republic of Transvaal in order to protect British business interests there. This got the British into hostilities with various native peoples, most notably the Zulus. After some hard fighting, including the massacre of one British army by the Zulus and a desperately fought guerrilla war against the Dutch Boers at the turn of the century, the British successfully occupied the area.
In each case, one can see how involvement in one area led to involvement in other areas and so on. Even more important was that growing British colonial power alarmed other industrializing nations who wanted their own colonies so they could keep up with Britain. Therefore, Disraeli's strategy to mobilize British public opinion also dragged other European countries with economic and political problems similar to Britain's into imperial expansion. The result was a virtual scramble for colonies in Africa and Asia.
The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, held the Congress of Berlin in 1884 to establish the ground rules for all the imperialist powers involved in this land rush. (No Africans or Asians were invited.) The participants agreed to give prior notice before claiming a new colony. However, mutual distrust between the European powers often led them to be more secretive and sneaky in claiming new colonies.
As stated above, largely the same forces drove the other powers in their grab for colonies as drove Britain: a feeling of economic vulnerability that colonies would magically cure, a fear that other powers would get a head start in claiming colonies, and a need to unify the voters behind a common cause. Each country also had its own particular set of circumstances to drive it along.
In Germany, Bismarck saw colonies as more of a nuisance and drain of resources. However, the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, fired Bismarck in 1890 and pursued an aggressive policy of building an empire (and navy to protect it) in order to claim "Germany's place in the sun. There was also concern about the emigration of Germans to non-German areas, especially America. German colonies would provide homes for emigrants and enclaves of German culture across the globe. France felt the need for a unifying cause after the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the unsettling economic conditions brought on by depression and huge war indemnities to Germany. Colonies would enhance its national prestige and also give it some leverage for future revenge against Germany. Italy, also newly unified in 1871, was still much more politically fragmented and economically undeveloped than Germany. Colonies would provide some focus for national pride and unity.
The partitioning of Africa was one of history's more brutal and insensitive episodes. Europeans came in and carved up Africa along arbitrary boundaries that split some tribes up and threw others together. Europeans legitimized this by having the Africans sign treaties that they did not understand the meaning of. They also used forced labor to build railroads, etc., killing thousands in the process. By 1914, practically all of Africa had fallen prey to European aggression.
The impact of neo-imperialism
was generally negative. For one thing, European colonial boundaries often cut across old tribal boundaries or combined peoples of different (and hostile) tribes. Even after liberation from European rule, the old colonial boundaries remained to further disrupt traditional patterns of life. This mess is still being sorted out today, a continuing legacy of European rule. There was also the humiliation and suffering colonial peoples were subjected to. While Europeans did work to abolish slavery, they still killed thousands through forced labor (slavery by another name) in order to complete their building projects and bring the "benefits" of European civilization to Africa.There was also the issue of imposing European culture upon native peoples because it was supposedly superior. For example, Europeans would impose their agricultural techniques on Africans and, in the process, ruined the soil, which was better suited for the traditional slash and burn agriculture. They would teach African school children poems about daffodils, even though there were no daffodils in Africa. In the end, this cultural policy backfired against Europeans. Many colonial subjects went to Europe to get college educations and brought back the dangerous ideas of liberalism, nationalism, and Marxism. That, combined with the fact that many colonials served in European armies and had picked up on European firearms technology, helped lead to the ultimate downfall of the European colonial empires.
Even for the European powers, colonies were often more of a liability than an asset. For one thing, many colonies cost more to rule than they brought back in revenues and resources. Second, as the number of available places to take over decreased by 1900, tensions rose between the European powers wanting to take those places. True, by 1914, European or European derived powers controlled 85% of the globe and were definitely sitting on top of the world. But the beginning of the end was near as the specter of the First World War loomed on the horizon.
FC123British Rule in India (c.1600-1947)
Introduction
It has been said that the British Empire was picked up in a "fit of absence of mind." Nowhere was this more true than in the case of India which gradually came under British rule, not by the efforts of Britain's government, but by those of the British East Indies Company, founded in 1599 by a group of merchants in search of nothing more than "quiet trade." However, circumstances would thwart these peaceful intentions, and over the next 250 years the British would find themselves more and more in the role of conquerors and governors than traders. Not only would the British have a profound effect on India's history, but the "crown jewel of the British Empire" would also affect Western Civilization. This is reflected in such English words as bungalow, verandah, punch, dungarees, and pajamas, such customs as smoking cigars, playing polo, and taking showers, as well as more profound influences in the realms of religion and philosophy.
Company expansion (1601-1773)
Two main lines of development worked to bring the British East Indies Company to India and make it a power there. For one thing, by 1600, Portugal was losing control of the East Asian Spice trade. Therefore, in 1601, the British East Indies Company started sending ships to the Spice Islands to gain a share of this trade. At this point, there was no intention of even going to India, let alone of conquering it, since the Mughal Dynasty had a firm grip on the subcontinent. However, the Dutch also had designs on the spice trade and rebuffed any British efforts to take part in it. As a result, the British East Indies Company gained the right to set up trading posts along the coast of India. Later, some of these trading posts would grow into major cities such as Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta.
The other factor pushing the British East Indies Company toward conquest had to do with the Mughal Empire. This dynasty had ruled most of India peacefully and tolerantly for a century since the 1500's. However, during the reign of Aurangzeb (1658-1707) all that changed as he started persecuting Hindus. Not only did this trigger centuries of religious strife that still continues, it also began the decline of the Mughal Empire, which suffered from weak and corrupt government from this time on. The resulting turmoil forced the British East Indies Company to defend its trading posts against local princes, brigands, and a new European intruder, France.
The French, to compensate for the lack of European manpower so far from home, initiated the strategy of training and arming native recruits ( sepoys) like European armies. Such forces were so effective that local princes would trade large tracts of land for French trained sepoys, thus giving the French control over much of Southern India. In response to this new threat, the British responded in kind by training their own sepoys. By the end of the Seven Years War (1756-63), British naval superiority and sepoys under the leadership of Robert Clive had virtually ended French involvement in India. Clive dramatically demonstrated the effectiveness of European trained sepoys at the battle of Plassey (1757) when his army of 2800 British soldiers and sepoys routed a Bengali army of 100,000 men. Clive's victories over the Bengalis and French made the British East Indies Company a major power in India, able to install its own candidate on the Mughal throne and claim the wealthy province of Bengal for itself. British dominance resulting from these victories had three main effects.
First, British power, plus the fact that their "honorable masters" in England were 7000 miles and nine months travel away, left India wide open to exploitation by the company and its employees. Many British took full advantage of the opportunity to "shake the pagoda tree", as they called the collection of "gifts" from grateful local princes ( nawabs). While a noble in Britain could live well on £800 a year, even minor company employees were making huge fortunes. One merchant was given a profitable saltworks with 13,000 employees while another was given his own mint. A certain Mr. Watts was awarded £117,000 for bravery at the battle of Plassey. And Clive himself received £211,500 for installing one nawab and another £27,000 a year from another grant. Such opportunities for making quick fortunes unleashed a flood of applicants back home for service in India, some applications being accompanied with bribes of up to £2000. Newcomers from England were often shocked when first encountering their colleagues already in India, since they typically mixed freely with the natives and had adopted their customs, food, and clothing. Service in India had its risks for the British, mainly tropical heat and diseases. As one local proverb put it, "Two monsoons is the age of a man," indicating that few Europeans survived conditions in India more than two years. Bombay was known as "the burying ground of the British".
Growing parliamentary control and rising tensions (1778-1857)
However, while company employees who survived service in India were making their fortunes, the company's loose management was costing it a fortune, forcing it to apply to the Bank of England for a loan in 1773 in order to avoid bankruptcy. As a result, Parliament exercised increasing control over the company, establishing governors-general to oversee its activities. This led to a succession of governors with different attitudes and policies. While some governors, such as Warren Hastings (ruled 1778-88) were known for their tolerance of and willingness to learn about the native languages and cultures and to give Indians posts in their government. However, other governors, such as Lord Cornwallis (1788-98), reversed many of these tolerant policies and dismissed most native Indians from higher posts in the administration. Getting into the nineteenth century, tensions grew between two factions: one advocating tolerance and respect for Indian culture and another claiming the superiority of European civilization over that of India. This created a growing gap between the British and Indians that also fostered growing discontent.
Two other developments in the 1800s led to growing unrest among Indians. One was the growing number of Christian missionaries coming to India to preach Christianity, which clashed with the more flexible beliefs of the Hindu majority and the strong beliefs of Indian Muslims. Secondly, the British were bringing in modern technology (especially railroads) and business methods, which disrupted the traditional, slower paced culture and economy of India.
Things came to a head with the Great India Mutiny in 1857. Sparking it was a misunderstanding about what kind of grease was used on the bullets for the sepoys' new Enfield rifles. Muslim troops thought pig grease, which they abhor, was being used, while Hindu troops thought the British were using grease from cows, which they hold sacred. The resulting mutiny developed into a serious rebellion that the British finally managed to put down. However, this was the final straw as far as the British government was concerned, assuming direct control over India in 1858 and eventually dissolving the British East Indies Company. Just as one British queen, Elizabeth I had signed the charter forming the British East Indies Company some 260 years earlier, so another queen, Victoria, signed it into extinction. Ironically, its career had started with a group of merchants in search of nothing more than "quiet trade." For the next ninety years, direct British rule would prevail in India.
From the British Raj to independence (1858-1947)
Britain ruled about 60% of Indian directly and the other 40% indirectly through native princes who followed British policies. During their time in India, the British developed tea and cotton agriculture and coal and iron industries. In fact, by 1940, the Tata Iron Works was the world's largest Iron factory. Likewise, the British continued developing India's infrastructure with more railroads and telegraph lines, so that by 1900 India had the longest railroad in Asia. British administration and bureaucracy were efficient, as was the British style education system Britain established.
However, even these developments contained the seeds of problems for British rule. As before, the new industries, railroads, and telegraphs, however progressive they may have seemed to the British, disrupted the traditional culture and economy of India. By the same token, however efficient the bureaucracy was, there were large gaps between the higher ranking British and lower ranking Indians that carried over to society in general. Increasingly, Indians were getting tired of their second-class status and worked increasingly for independence.
The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, led the independence movement. At first, its goal was to gain more rights for Indians and more say in the British administration. However, as its power grew in the twentieth century, it agitated increasingly for complete independence. This led to a parallel, but somewhat separate independence movement of Muslims in India who feared being a minority in a Hindu-dominated state. Therefore, they wanted a separate independent Muslim state in the northwest.
World War I (1914-18) and World War II (1939-45) further catalyzed India’s push for independence, since Britain had to rely heavily on Indian recruits to fill its ranks. In return, Britain promised more political concessions, thus weakening its hold on India, encouraging more demand by Indians, and so on.
In 1920, a new leader, Mohandas Gandhi emerged as the voice of the Indian National Congress. Educated in both traditional Indian culture and British schools, Gandhi developed very effective non-violent tactics of resistance while protesting British policies. The British, not wanting to risk the bad publicity a violent reaction could generate, had to give in to Gandhi time after time. Therefore, at the end of World War II, Britain promised independence for India. Unfortunately, this revived the issue of whether there would be one large Hindu-dominated state or a separate Muslim state in the North, leading to violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims broke out. Finally, in 1947 Britain the region between Hindu India in the South and Muslim Pakistan in the Northwest that also controlled a separate territory, Bangla Desh, in the Northeast. Despite heroic efforts to keep the peace by Gandhi (who was killed by one of his Hindu followers in 1947), tensions between Hindus and Muslims have continued to the present day and still threaten the peace and stability of South Asia.
FC124The Decline of Imperial China (c.1800-1911)
Introduction
The 1800's were not kind to China. Whereas geographic and technological limitations had once kept China fairly isolated from the rest of the world, other forces, in particular the Industrial Revolution then sweeping Europe and America, were closing in to wrench China out of its self-imposed isolation. As in India, the British East Indies Company would lead this intrusion on China's privacy.
The Opium War and its aftermath (1839-64)
In the early 1800's, China, by its own design, was still largely cut off from trade with the outside world. All trade with Europe was channeled through one port, Canton. Even there, Europeans could only trade through specially designated Chinese agents known as co-hong. Several Chinese products, such as silk and porcelain, were in high demand in Europe, but the most popular trade item in the early 1800's was tea, consumption of which increased by a factor of 30 times between 1720 and 1830. Unfortunately, the tea trade led to a serious drain of silver from Britain. The British East India Company, desperate for something to offset this trade imbalance, found such a commodity in opium, which not only upset China's balance of trade, but the stability of its whole society.
Two other factors revolving around the differing philosophical outlooks of these two cultures added to the growing tensions. First of all, they had two very different attitudes toward trade. On the one hand, the Chinese government viewed trade as a monopoly controlled through its agents, in this case the co-hong. Up until the 1800's, this was not such a problem, since most Europeans traded under the mercantilist system that also exercised strong government controls. However, by the 1830's, the British were leading the way in the Industrial Revolution and were pushing for a free trade system known as laissez faire ("hands off") that would give their manufactured goods an edge against the more expensive handmade goods their foreign competition was producing. Secondly, there was the relative status of the two nations. The Chinese traditionally saw themselves as the Middle Kingdom and all other peoples as inferior barbarians. Any goods brought as gifts to the Chinese court were interpreted as tribute that they may or may not graciously acknowledge. By contrast, the British had a strong democratic tradition that refused to recognize another nation's superiority.
All these economic and philosophical tensions came to a head when the Chinese government had 20,000 chests of the British East India Company's opium burned. This threatened the tea trade, in which the British government had a vested interest, since it charged a 100% customs toll on tea coming into Britain. The result was the First Opium War (1839-42) between Britain and China. The British navy, with its modern weaponry, quickly and easily won a decisive victory. The resulting Treaty of Nanjing (1842) gave the British access to trade through five ports, control of Hong Kong, a huge indemnity from the Chinese government to cover the cost of the war, and abolition of the co-hong (merchant guild) system. It also forced China to accept other countries on equal terms, which was a terrible blow to its pride. Finally, the Chinese gentry now assumed the task of quelling any rebellions, which led to the buildup of regional warlords who would be a serious problem in years to come.
Britain's privileged status triggered a rush by other nations such as France, Russia, Germany and Japan to force China to grant similar treaties that gave three main concessions. First of all, they wanted most favored nation status, which automatically gave them all privileges that any other nation had from China. Second, they wanted extraterritoriality, which allowed their citizens to live under their own laws even when in China, thus making them virtually immune from Chinese justice. In fact, any cases involving a European and a Chinese person were to be tried under the European system. Finally, Europeans could recover any debts that the Chinese government owed them by collecting China's customs dues and other taxes if the customs dues were not enough.
The First Opium War and its aftermath unleashed a vicious cycle that would eventually lead to the fall of the monarchy. China's decline would invite either a disastrous war or intervention in a revolt to push or preserve foreign interests. This would cause many Chinese to wake up to the need for reform. However, the Chinese hatred for foreign barbarian ways would trigger a conservative reaction against the reforms, leading to further decay, and so on. This cycle would repeat itself three times, being triggered by the Taiping Rebellion, war with Japan, and the Boxer Rebellion.
Two other factors would aggravate this cycle even further. For one thing, the introduction of new crops from the Americas and a well-regulated agriculture under the Ming Dynasty had caused China's population to expand to 400,000,000, putting a tremendous strain on China's ability to support itself. Secondly there was the government's recent failure to maintain the flood control projects, which had unleashed terrible floods and food shortages on China.
All of these factors triggered the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), a peasant revolt started by a frustrated scholar, Hong Xiuchuan who claimed he was the brother of Jesus Christ. Hong inspired his followers with a revolutionary fervor that banned alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, held property in common, and called for the equality of all, including women. His movement swept over much of China before the government finally crushed it with foreign help. The Taiping rebellion was typical of any number of peasant revolts throughout Chinese history in its revolutionary and religious vision of a new world. It was also terribly destructive, probably killing even more people than World War I. Adding to China's misery during this chaos was the Second Opium War (1858-60). This war, fought with Britain and France for the flimsiest of reasons, saw the brutal sack of the Summer Palace in Peking by British colonial troops from India. It is from this event that the Bengali word "loot" entered our language.
Faced with these overwhelming problems from both within and without, a two-fold program of reform emerged. On the one hand, Chinese scholars tried to revive and stress the old Confucian virtues. However, they also tried to adapt Western technology in order to control the Western "barbarians". This sparked serious debates about how feasible it was for China to be able to adapt Western technology while maintaining the purity of Chinese culture, for the Chinese still despised Western ways as barbaric. Whatever their doubts, reformers set up several factories producing such things as weapons, ammunition, steamships, and textiles. They built railroads and telegraph lines which peasants often tore down since they disrupted the natural harmony of the countryside. The Chinese government even bought one railroad and tore it up for such a reason.
However, several factors seriously limited the extent of China's modernization. In contrast to Japan, which was successfully industrializing in the late 1800's, there was no real central direction to coordinate these efforts. Rather, provincial officials on a local level did them. Also, the influx of Western "barbarians" created a good deal of bitterness against the West and a reluctance to conform to its ways. At the same time, they plunged China further into debt making it more difficult for the Chinese to fund any modernization programs.
Therefore, China saw little progress toward modernization, especially after the rise to power of the dowager empress, Cixi, who ran China's policies for her weak son and nephew (1875-1908). Cixi especially resisted foreign influence and modernization, preferring to spend money on her palace and lavish lifestyle. As a result, by the 1890's, China was more vulnerable than ever to foreign powers carving out spheres of influence. Under this system, the dominant power in that sphere controlled the economy through such things as collecting taxes and constructing railroads and telegraph wires, while still leaving administrative duties and expenses to local Chinese officials. This allowed the various powers to drain China of money without having to assume the more burdensome responsibilities of government.
However, what really shook China out of its lethargy was a war with Japan, which had successfully modernized in reaction to the West over the past 40 years. This clash, known as the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) was fought over control of Korea. To everyone's shock, the Japanese navy soundly defeated the Chinese navy and claimed Korea, Taiwan, and a huge indemnity as the price of victory.
Such a humiliating defeat sparked a new movement among Chinese scholars for widespread reforms. This movement was popularly referred to as the Hundred Days Reform because the dowager empress, Cixi, quickly squelched it. As a result, China's problems continued mounting until they triggered another revolt, the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900). The rebels, fighting under the banner of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, believed they had magical powers to resist enemy bullets. While their revolt was initially aimed against the government, the empress skillfully turned it against foreign influence. The result was a siege of the foreign embassies in Beijing that was finally broken up by an international force led by the Japanese. Such intervention was not without its price, as China was forced to pay a heavy indemnity for all the recent troubles to the foreign powers.
The renewed humiliation caused by the Boxer Rebellion revived calls for reforms, this time with more success. Between 1900 and 1910, more modern ministries were formed, the old Confucian based civil service exams were abolished, provincial assemblies with the semblance of democracy were established, and a new law code was introduced. More modern schools were set up, while many young Chinese students studied abroad in the West, both of which spread the Western ideas of democracy and nationalism among Chinese intellectuals. Unfortunately, such reforms only raised expectations of more reforms, and a revolution in 1911 overthrew the monarchy and established a republic in its place. However, China's problems were far from over. Almost from the start, the new republic was doomed by the lack of a healthy economy and educated middle class, elements necessary to sustain any strong democracy. As a result, the next 40 years would see China embroiled in two world wars, civil war, and revolution.
FC125The Emergence of Modern Japan (1868-1937)
Decline of the Tokugawa Shogunate
In the early 1800's the peace and stability of Tokugawa rule came unraveled, leading to a period of turmoil and then restructuring from which a modernized and revitalized Japan would emerge. Several forces combined to generate these changes. First, 200 years of peace and being disarmed by the Tokugawa government undermined the power and even the reason for the existence of the Samurai. Second, the encroachment of the British into China and the ensuing Opium Wars led many Japanese to worry about the threat of encroachment on their shores and the ability of the Shogunate to deal with it. Finally, a series of bad harvests in the 1830's triggered inflation, disease, and unrest in Japan. The result of these various forces was a struggle between traditional isolationists who wanted to keep Japan cut off from the outside world and reformers who wanted to open it to the West and institute reforms to shore up the declining shogunate.
However, before Japan could come to a firm policy one way or another, the West intervened to decide the issue. The United States, by taking California in the Mexican War (1846-8), had become a Pacific power practically overnight. In 1853, a flotilla of American warships commanded by Commodore Perry delivered a conciliatory letter from the president to the Japanese head of state and a more belligerent letter written by Perry himself. The gist of Perry's message was that Japan had better open its doors to the West or the United States would kick down those doors and force Japan to trade.
The Tokugawa Shogunate, seeing Japan was no match for the United States, capitulated when Perry returned the next year. The immediate results for Japan, and especially its government, were disastrous. With the Americans came an influx of Mexican silver, which triggered more inflation. A cholera epidemic also hit at this time. These, plus the humiliation this situation brought to the Tokugawa Shogunate, caused its fall in 1868.
The Meiji Restoration (1868-c.1890)
Replacing the shogunate was the restored imperial court under the emperor Matsuhito, called Meiji ("enlightened rule"). The Meiji regime would oversee the transformation of Japan from a largely feudal and agrarian state into a powerful industrial nation. This is often seen as a reaction to and imitation of industrial state building in Western Europe, in particular that of Germany. While this is partially true, Japan during the Tokugawa period had developed in ways that prepared it for the Meiji reforms. For one thing, the Tokugawa Shogunate had maintained a unified Japan for over 200 years, thus helping create a Japanese nation. Also, during this time a strong middle class had evolved along with the financial techniques needed to adapt to industrial capitalism.
As a result, Japan was able to make the transition to an industrial nation state while maintaining its own unique Japanese values of loyalty to the group and the emperor. For example, the Japanese corporation that evolved during this period can largely be seen as an updated version of the paternalistic feudal state, where the workers (peasants) owe lifelong loyalty and service to the company (lord) in return for its protection of their welfare. Japan's transformation into a major power can be seen as taking place in three successive stages: political and social reforms, industrial and military reforms, and early expansion.
Japan went through several Western-style political and social reforms to create the conditions conducive to industrial and military modernization while maintaining a distinctive Japanese character. In order to destroy Japan's feudal structure, the Meiji government replaced Japan's old provinces with seventy-two modern districts. As in the West, all class distinctions were abolished. This especially hurt the Samurai who now were even forbidden to wear their swords or distinctive hairdos. Public education became mandatory for all boys and girls in order to create an educated work force and instill a spirit of nationalism in them. A European style parliament was formed, but like its German model, it had little real power. The emperor kept his exalted position while Shinto was made the state religion, both of these providing points of focus for Japanese national loyalty.
With the political and social reforms in place, the Meiji government proceeded to industrialize Japan, concentrating on heavy and strategic industries: railroads, the merchant marine, mining, modern agricultural techniques, munitions, and the navy. However, Japan had no large-scale capitalists. Therefore, the government, in keeping with Japan's paternalistic tradition, paid for these industries and then sold them at low cost to a few private investors. These new capitalists, called the Zaibatsu ("money clique"), would come to control 70% of Japan's bank deposits and heavily influence government policies, much as the daimyo (feudal lords) had done in previous times. Thus began the long-time alliance of government and big business, which is still a predominant feature of Japan today. One other reform was that of the military. In 1873 the government began universal conscription, which deprived the Samurai of their privileged position as the warrior class. This triggered a Samurai revolt. Surprisingly, the conscripts fought well and crushed the revolt, thus destroying the samurai's aura of invincibility.
Japan's quest for empire
By 1890, Japan had largely industrialized and was ready to look outward to protect what it saw as its interests. In a series of three conflicts, the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I, Japan emerged as a major power. Its first concern was Korea, the closest part of the Asian mainland to Japan and which Japan had claimed since the 1500's. The other primary contender for control of Korea was China to the north. In the ensuing war, known as the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5), Japan's modernized army made short work of the outdated Chinese forces, taking Taiwan and establishing its influence over Korea. In addition, this further weakened China's government and helped lead to a revolution in 1911 and eventually to the Communist revolution and victory in 1949.
More shocking was Japan's unlikely victory over the Russian army and navy in the Russo-Japanese War (1903-5). This gave Japan the Liaotang Peninsula and even tighter influence over Korea, which it finally annexed in 1910. It also triggered a revolution in Russia, which, although unsuccessful, helped lead to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the triumph of the Communists there.
During World War I Japan declared war on Germany, easily taking its possessions in East Asia. However, China, also on the allied side in the war, had claims over those territories. Japan emerged the winner in this dispute, so that by 1919 it had control of Korea, Taiwan, and the Liaotung Peninsula. Not surprisingly, relations with China continued to deteriorate.
In the 1930's two things made those relations much worse. One was Japan's burgeoning population that forced it to import food. The other was the Great Depression, which cut Japan's trade and its ability to pay for that imported food. This led to growing military influence, violence, and instability in the Japanese government. In 1931, Japan seized control of Manchuria from China. The Western powers, mired in their problems with the Depression, were unable to help China. Throughout the 1930's, military control of the Japanese government tightened. In 1937, that military government invaded China, thus starting World War II in Asia.