AP European History
AP European History
In the wake of the French Revolution, the more conservative among the Great Powers were united in their feeling that future popular uprisings should be suppressed. In September 1815, just after the Congress of Vienna, the three most conservative Great Powers-Austria, Prussia, and Russia-formed what became known as the Holy Alliance. Leaders of these three nations agreed to assist one another in stamping out any attempt to threaten what they saw as the peace and stability of the new European map of 1815. As conservative monarchies, they viewed popular rebellions and insurrections as serious threats to political stability. As it turned out, the three nations would frequently have to send troops to put down such rebellions. Their superior military strength led them to success in most cases, but ultimately the tide of history was against them.
Officially founded in 1804 although it had existed as a monarchy for some time before that (see Chapter 12), the Austrian Empire found itself threatened by the forces of nationalism. The empire was not culturally homogeneous, but instead was made of several ethnic groups, each of which fought for independence and self-rule in the nineteenth century.
Hungarians and Italians both rebelled against the empire in 1848 and 1849. In each case, the goal was independence from the empire. Austria went so far as to grant Hungary a separate constitution, but then revoked it. When Hungary retaliated by declaring independence, Austria called on its Russian ally for military aid and defeated Hungary in 1849.
The Austrian army forcibly put down the Italian uprising in July of 1848. It also intervened to destroy the newly created Roman Republic, formed when the pope was forced into exile for political reasons. France, which agreed with Austria on the undesirability of Italian unification, marched into Rome and occupied it until 1870.
Britain began the nineteenth century much farther along the road toward republicanism than any continental European nation; it already had a constitutional monarchy and a powerful legislative assembly. However, there was plenty of discontent among the working class, as social reforms to date had not improved factory conditions. The Industrial Revolution had certainly provided employment for many, but such employment was little better than industrial serfdom.
Although Ireland was represented in Parliament, the Catholic Irish (the vast majority of the population) were barred from office by a law that restricted membership in Parliament to Anglicans. During the 1820s, the Tory majority in Parliament passed two major bills repealing religious restrictions on eligibility for office. These bills were by no means popular with the balance of Englishmen, and in the elections of 1830 the Whigs gained the majority. They passed the Reform Act of 1832, which adjusted the number of seats per borough, giving the larger populations in urban boroughs more representatives. The Whigs also passed labor laws that barred women and children from working in the extremely dangerous and unhealthy conditions in Britain’s coal mines. The liberals hoped that this would enable children to attend school and women to take care of their families.
England still had laws that restricted suffrage to men who owned a certain amount of property. In the 1830s, only about ninety thousand of England’s 6 million adult men could vote. In 1867, the Conservative (formerly Tory) leadership in Parliament passed a reform bill that extended suffrage to most homeowners and renters. This immediately doubled the number of eligible voters.
In 1849, Prime Minister Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws, which had maintained high import duties on grain.
Under Louis XVIII, who became king of France in 1814 upon the abdication of Napoleon, France made some progress toward becoming a constitutional monarchy, including the establishment of a legislative assembly similar to the British Parliament or the U.S. Congress. However, there were many political parties in France at this time, and all of them felt that Louis XVIII’s moderate policies did not concede enough in the proper direction. Everyone wanted to shift government from its centrist position, but none of the factions could agree. Republicans wanted to abolish the monarchy, while radicals wanted to establish full-blown socialism. On the opposite side, the royalists wanted a return to a seventeenth-century style of absolute monarchy. In other words, one group wanted the legislature to have control; one group wanted the people to have control; and one group wanted the monarch to have control.
In 1824, Charles X succeeded Louis XVIII. Charles was a conservative, with an old-fashioned belief in the monarch’s divine right to rule. When the 1828 elections shifted the balance of power in the legislature toward the liberals, Charles tried to come to terms with their very different philosophy of governing. However, he was unable to see himself as the constitutional monarch the liberals wanted him to be. In 1830, Charles dismissed the legislature, established censorship of the press, and revoked voting rights for certain categories of citizens.
The people reacted furiously. With the National Guard on their side, they started firing on the army in the streets of Paris, building barricades from sandbags and any sturdy objects they could find. Nearly nineteen hundred people died during these violent demonstrations. Charles, realizing that his people would never tolerate an absolute monarch, but unwilling to compromise, abdicated. He was the last hereditary monarch to rule France.
The legislature selected Louis Philippe as the new constitutional monarch; he was the great-great-grandson of the Duc d’Orleans, who had served as regent during the early years of the reign of Louis XV (see Chapter 9). Known as the “Citizen King,” Louis Philippe ruled as a moderate liberal until 1848. He restored freedom of the press and revoked Charles’s restrictions on voting rights.
During the two decades of Louis Philippe’s reign, discontent developed among the social and economic classes of the nation. The bourgeoisie prospered under the new regime, but little of the profits reached the pockets of the working class. Socialists and radical republicans seized on this discontent to arouse support for their cause. When they were barred from holding public meetings in 1848, they staged a repeat of the 1830 revolution; the people mounted the barricades in the streets and fired on the army. Once again, the people succeeded in forcing the king to abdicate.
However, the various factions could not agree on what kind of new government to establish. The liberals, radicals, and socialists had much in common but could not compromise on matters where they disagreed. The socialists favored a Marxist system in which the workers would own government-supervised factories and share equally in the profits. The liberals considered this system far too radical but agreed to implement some national workshops as a temporary measure to bring down the high unemployment. The workshops were highly successful with the laborers; more than 120,000 had joined by April, with more on the waiting list. However, the 1848 elections returned a National Assembly with a moderate-to-conservative majority. These deputies immediately closed the workshops, which resulted in a return to violent protests in the streets of Paris. More than three thousand people died during the June Days of 1848.
In the end, the National Assembly created a constitution for a new French republic. The constitution called for a strong president, a unicameral legislature, and voting rights for all adult men. When elections were held, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte became the first president of the Second Republic of France.
The prevailing sentiment in Prussia was conservative and anti-nationalist. However, Prussian liberals rebelled against the government, demanding one with greater representation. This time the liberal forces won a victory. In 1848, Frederick William IV was forced to summon a new legislative assembly, the National Parliament of the German Confederation, and agree to a new constitution.
This was a moment of triumph for the liberals, but internal disagreements weakened and divided them. The king soon disbanded the assembly and replaced the constitution with a more conservative version. In Prussia as elsewhere in Europe, the liberals and socialists, who should have been natural allies against the conservatives, could not agree on what they wanted. Their differences prevented German unification at this stage. When the liberals formed a parliament in Frankfurt and asked the king to rule a united Germany as a constitutional monarch, he refused. With no executive, and with parties that were constantly at odds, the parliament broke up in 1849.
Although Russian society had a liberal element, autocracy was far too firmly entrenched to give way to any notions of republicanism. Russia did not experience a genuine public uprising until 1905.
Events played out in the minor nations and states of Europe in much the same way as in the Great Powers.
Belgium had been made a part of the Netherlands in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna and was clearly discontented with this situation. As a nation that was becoming wealthy due to its participation in the Industrial Revolution, Belgium did not want to be a part of a larger empire. In 1830, Belgium rebelled against the Netherlands; with French and British support, it regained its independence in 1831.
Greece had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire since 1453. In 1821, the Greeks rebelled against the occupying Turkish forces. With aid from Russia, France, and Britain, the Greeks were able to drive the Turks out and declare independence in 1827. In this one case, the Holy Alliance aided the rebels because the occupying force was Turkish rather than European; European nations had always been willing to unite against invasions from the Ottoman Empire. Although Turkey had one foot in Europe, the Ottoman Empire was Muslim and Europeans had regarded it as a heathen, enemy culture since the days of the Crusades.
There were so many conflicting political factions in Greece that the Greeks agreed they were not ready for self-government; they accepted the proposal of the Great Powers to establish a monarchy. Seventeen-year-old Prince Otto of Bavaria agreed to accept the Greek throne, ruling as Otto I.
Otto I proved an unpopular ruler. First, he was a foreigner, and nationalism was strong in Greece; the people did not welcome a non-Greek ruler. Second, he was politically conservative, unwilling to accept the Greeks’ insistence on a written constitution. In 1843, the feelings against Otto finally boiled over in a coup d’etat. At this point the king conceded many of his subjects’ demands, and government in Greece became more liberal, including parliamentary elections.
Most of the Italian states had been divided among the Great Powers at the Congress of Vienna. In 1821, there were popular uprisings in Naples and Piedmont; however, troops of the Holy Alliance nations eventually crushed these attempts to establish constitutional government. Further rebellions took place in Parma and Modena in 1831. These also were unsuccessful, as was a rebellion in the Papal States, which was put down by French troops. Austrian troops occupied much of Italy until 1838. Italian unification would take place during the 1860s.
In 1830, it was not possible to find a nation called Poland on the European political map. Poland had been carved up and divided among Austria, Russia, and Prussia in the late 1700s. However, nationalism was strong among the ethnic Poles, and it was only a matter of time before they rose up against their foreign rulers.
Polish rebellion against Czar Nicholas I broke out in the Kingdom of Poland – a region centered around Warsaw-in 1830. The Poles won the first skirmishes and achieved a short-lived independence, which was crushed by the Russian troops in 1831. This was followed by a campaign of “Russification” under the czar, who revoked many Polish rights and privileges in an attempt to replace Polish language and customs with Russian ones. Despite further sporadic uprisings in Krakow, Warsaw, and elsewhere, Poland would not regain its independence until 1918.
Because Spain had always been the most conservative of all European nations, liberals and socialists had far less support there than elsewhere. The Spanish middle class, far less extensive and powerful than in other nations, did urge reform to the best of its limited ability. In 1820, the army led a rebellion against Ferdinand VII, forcing him to agree to Spain’s first written constitution. However, French troops eventually came to the king’s aid, suppressing the rebellion and murdering most of the rebels.