Summary
At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic
Era, Europe's leaders worked to reorganize
Europe and create a stable balance of power. After that Congress, The Austrian
diplomat Metternich would call several more congresses to try and preserve
European stability: the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), the Congress
of Troppau (1820), and the Congress of Verona (1822). The Congress System
that Metternich established was Reactionary, that is, its goal was to
preserve the power of the old, monarchical regimes in Europe.
Revolution was brewing, however. In Britain, the Industrial Revolution
continued to accelerate, causing economic transformations that had serious
political and social implications. All across Europe, and especially in France
and Britain, the rising Bourgeoisie class challenged the old monarchical
Reactionaries with their Liberal ideology. "Isms" abounded. Ideologies
such as Radicalism, Republicanism, and Socialism rounded into
coherent form. In response to events like the 1819 Peterloo Massacre,
worker consciousness of a class struggle between Proletariat and
Bourgeoisie began to emerge. The Bourgeoisie was clearly the ascendant class
between 1815 and 1848; the Proletariat began to gain a sense of similar
unification.
Another "Ism" coming into its own at this time was Romanticism, the
intellectual response to the French Enlightenment rationalism and emphasis on
Reason. At the same time, Romantic thinkers, artists, and writers posed
powerful challenge to the Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism and reason.
Such artists and philosophers as Herder,
Hegel, Schiller, Schinckel, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary
Shelley, John Keats, William
Wordsworth, and Delacroix, to name a few, achieved
remarkable intellectual and artistic heights and gained a wide following
throughout Europe, particularly in Germany, Prussia, England, and to a lesser
extent France.
Of all the "Isms" competing in this period, perhaps the greatest was
Nationalism, an ideology, like Romanticism, which reacted against the
universalist claims of French enlightenment thought. Whereas Romanticism often
focused on intellectual and artistic matters, Nationalism, which proclaimed the
unique character of ethnic and linguistic groups, was more overtly political.
The Nationalist movements in Germany and Italy, which involved an effort at
national unification, and those in the Austrian Empire, which involved efforts
to carve the Austrian Empire into ethnically or linguistically defined states,
created a great amount of instability in Europe.
In 1830, the various ideological beliefs resulted in a round of revolutions.
These revolutions began when the Paris Mob, manipulated by the interests of the
Bourgeoisie, deposed the Bourbon monarchy of Charles X and replaced him
with Louis Philippe. In the rest of Europe, the French example touched off
various nationalist revolts; all were successfully quelled by conservative
forces.
Britain notably escaped any outbreak of violence, but it by no means escaped
change: the battle between the formerly dominant landed aristocracy and the
newly ascendant manufacturers led to the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832,
which partially remedied the Rotten Boroughs and gave the manufactures an
increased amount of Parliamentary representation. The working class benefited
from the growing class rivalry between aristocracy and middle-class. Often the
aristocrats would ally with the working class to act against the manufacturers,
forcing the manufacturers, in turn, to ally with the workers against the
aristocrats. Although the working class did not yet have the vote in England,
they were pushing for universal adult male suffrage in the late 1830s and early
1840s via the Chartist Movement. While this movement failed in the short-
term, its demands were eventually adopted.
In the rest of Europe, political change would not happen so peacefully. In 1848,
the February Revolution broke out in Paris, toppling Louis Philippe and
granting universal suffrage to adult French men, who elected Louis Napoleon
Bonaparte (Napoleon III) solely on name-recognition. Europe once again took
its cue from Paris, and revolutions broke out nearly everywhere in Europe during
1848. Rebellion in Germany led to the establishment of the Frankfurt
Assembly, which was plagued by internal squabbling and was unable to unify
Germany. In the Austrian Empire, the various ethnicities revolted, and the
Magyar nationalists led by Louis Kossuth pushed for an independent
Hungary. Rioting in Vienna frightened Metternich so much he fled the city. All
of the Eastern European rebellions were ultimately put down, a triumph for the
reactionaries. However, the events of 1848 frightened the rulers of Europe out
of their complacency and forced them to realize that gradually, they would have
to change the nature of their governments or face future revolutions.
