4 The Seedtime of Ideology

• By the second half of the century, there were so many new ideological terms that even a bare listing of them would fill a page.
• "worldview" was another way of referring to the same idea.

• The purpose of these terms, or why they appeared in such profusion, is not clear.
• The first thing they said to various elements of the population was uncertain.

• The generalizing content of the new isms was not new at all, and can be traced back to the time of Plato and Aristotle.
• Not all the new isms are full-blown worldviews.
• The early nineteenth century saw a taste for wide-ranging ideological rumination, associated with the growing consensus that a new, threatening world was emerging in Europe.
• The spread of these new isms to the four corners of the earth is a sign of Europe's rising prestige and influence.
• Many are still with us even though they have different meanings.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• There was some arbitrariness to how an issue became widely recognized as a formal "Question" with a capital letter, but the following were among the most important: the Social Question and the Woman Question.

• Most of these questions had obvious roots in the past, but there was now a significant novelty to them: People in Europe had begun to believe that there were reasonable, proximate, and definitive solutions to these questions, whereas in the past the tendency had been to regard poverty as an issue.
• The growing belief in the possibility of solutions was associated with a rising respect for the power of reason and the scientific method.
• Society could be incomparably more productive, more just, and more free than it had ever been because of a growing confidence in Europe's superiority to the rest of the world.

• There were substantial and lasting objections to this expanding belief in progress and human perfection.
• The horrors of the French Revolution were not far away, and industrialization was still viewed negatively by many.
• The legend of Faust, a tragic figure who, in a bargain with the Devil, gave up his soul for god-like knowledge and eternal youth, fascinated Europe's educated population in the 19th century.
• Prometheus, who had revealed the secret of fire to mortals and was punished by Zeus by being chained to a rock, was one of the ancient tales that found renewed interest.

• The isms were assumed to be a result of an intricate process of ideological debate, and are best approached not as isolated or entirely coherent entities, but as initially diffuse and inchoate, taking form in dynamic interplay with one another over time.
• The ideologists of the left were challenged by those of the right, who distrusted reason and harbored no hopes for ultimate human perfection.
• Competing ideologists borrowed elements from one another and used them in different ways.
• Few on the right actually announced that they were against liberty or justice, but what they meant in using such terms was different from what those on the left understood.
• The meanings of various isms have changed remarkably by the twenty-first century, making it all the more difficult to understand what they were meant to mean.

• There is a broadly felt need for new words.
• In the case of the isms, it seems obvious that while powerful new forces and disruptive developments were everywhere in evidence, their ultimate meaning for the future was uncertain.
• The need to coin words for these developments was done as part of an effort to come to grips with them.
• It also meant demystifying them.

• The critical work of twentieth-century scholars has helped to undermine assumptions about the appeal of these ideologies.
• Marx and many other nineteenth-century philosophers considered axiomatic are no longer seen as correlations of social class and ideology.
• In the 19th century, it was obvious that the poor would be attracted to ideologies that promised them a better life.
• Entrepreneurs would have been attracted to an ideology that promised to liberate them from governmental restrictions.

• Complicated factors, such as the difficulty of defining, or even understanding, what a given person's self-interest actually is, have been found to be an important factor in ideological preferences.
• The earlier assumption that most individuals would be able to arrive at informed decisions about their true interests must be considered seriously flawed because people define their interests in subtle, unpredictable, and even self-destructive ways.

• Class identity is an imperfect guide to why ideologies were embraced in the 19th century because of the additional difficulty of defining social class.
• The powerful supra-class appeals of the revolutionary mystique, as discussed in Chapter 1, were felt by people from all classes, as well as the emotionally unstable and those who were hungry for power.
• Rational calculations of self-interest or the interests of one's class were often worked against by religious beliefs.

• We need to be alert to the dangers of oversimplification, related to the mysteries of the human psyche, because we can certainly make useful generalizations about the ideological identities that Europeans were assuming.

• By the early twenty-first century, most of the isms that existed in the early 19th century have evolved to the point that they still have their original meanings.
• Conservatism, liberalism, and socialism are the three most significant histories.
• Conservatives rule by conservatives in the first half of the century.

• Liberalism reached its zenith in the two to three decades following 1848 as conservatives were challenged with growing boldness.
• socialism remained a fringe ideology until the last decades of the 19th century, despite the fact that there were highly diverse strands of socialist theory.

• In the 19th century, the three ideologies were constantly modified and the lines that divided them were not always clear.
• The overview gives an impression of greater clarity and coherence than was obvious to contemporary observers.
• Each of the three had their own visions of the Highest Good and the Enemy of the day.

• The most characteristic ideology of the 19th century is liberalism.
• Human beings are best off when they are free, according to the liberals.
• The liberals' Highest Good was freedom for the individual.
• The face of the Enemy could be seen in those who tried to suppress freedom.

• Conservatives harbored large reservations about the effects of individual liberty; they believed that human beings, especially the lower orders, are best off when guided and sheltered by religion, authority, and tradition; without such guidance, liberty was positively dangerous and "free" people inevitably stumbled.
• The conservatives' highest good had to do with order.
• They believed that free individuals were fatally inclined to sin and that traditional political authority was divinely sanctioned.
• Those who harbored naive, dangerous hopes about what freedom could accomplish were the enemy for conservatives.

• Both liberals and conservatives were attacked by the socialists.
• Most socialists believed that human beings are best off when they are bound together in a harmonious union, which is only possible in the context of social and economic equality.
• Their Highest Good was harmony and cooperation, and they defined the Enemy as those who violated or disrupted fraternal feelings, either by using freedom or abusing authority, as they believed the liberals did.

• Conservatism might be the most fundamental of the three, the ideology with the strongest claims to a long and distinguished lineage.
• Most human societies up to modern times have been conservative.
• The European rural lower orders revered tradition more than the nobility, royalty, and Church authorities did.

• Conservatives in power, such as Metternich, believed that social stability required the application of physical force by ruling authorities.
• Joseph de Maistre believed that fear of the hangman was the foundation of a properly functioning society.

• The more extreme conservatives, such as the Ultras in Restoration France, were often termed "reactionaries," another new word, first used to describe those reacting against the violent excesses of the Terror in 1794.
• The Ultras in France wanted to overturn the reforms of the Revolution.
• A return to an idealized past was what many in their ranks wanted.
• Metternich's liberal opponents used to call him a reactionary, but since he accepted that at least some of the recent past had to be preserved, he was simply conservative.

• Conservatism's most influential theoretical expression was dated to a quarter-century before the term gained currency.
• His writings attracted special attention because of the penetrating way he described a rationalism gone wild in France - the belief by revolutionaries that they could simply abolish, within the span of a year, institutions laboriously built up over hundreds and thousands of years.
• Their ideas were often catastrophically so.
• Burke's defense of the social utility of privilege and tradition was characterized by an unusual sophistication that continued to impress generation after generation of conservatives.

• Even if they heaped praise on him.
• Burke was sympathetic to the revolutionaries in Britain's American colonies and his record up to 1790 might have been considered liberal, at least in the respect he showed for the traditional liberties of the upper orders in opposition to royal power.
• His description of state and society as similar to a complex living organisms was not original, but he made the case with unusual delicacy.
• He identified the enemy of conservatives as the terrible simplifiers who were away from their natural leaders.

• He said that corruption, inefficiency, and cruelty, not wisdom and social responsibility, were the main products of tradition and privilege.
• The clarity and effectiveness of his prose, linked to his preexisting fame by the early 1790s, was the main reason for his importance.
• He was one of the most effective defenders of the American Revolution, along with Burke.

• Mary Wollstonecraft became an icon for feminists because of her anti-Burkean point of view.
• She traveled to France to observe the revolution with her own eyes because she was so enthusiastic about it.
• The rights of man to liberty and legal equality were denied to women by the French revolutionaries.
• She and other women who were associated with the Jacobins would die in the reaction to the Terror.

• During their lifetimes, Wollstonecraft and de Gouges only attracted a small following, but their ideas continued to spread in the following centuries.
• The early feminists posed fundamental questions about the human condition, and did so in ways that exposed serious problems with all three main isms.
• Many if not most liberals, in spite of their assumed universalism, were in fact speaking only about "man" and not all of humanity when proclaiming the value of liberty.
• The fitness of women for civil equality and modern freedom was doubted by the majority of early liberals.
• It was thought that women should be dependent on men for protection and guidance because of their inherent weaknesses.
• It would be wrong to grant them the same freedom as men.
• Women who embraced feminist ideas moved from an initial interest in individualism to socialism due to the fact that feminism found at least a somewhat sympathetic hearing.

• At this point in time, socialist activists and theorists differed, but they all agreed with early feminists.
• Early socialists and early feminists defined themselves in opposition to liberalism because of their hypocrisies and egoistic individualism.
• The liberals left out the majority of the adult male population as well as all females when they defined freedom and equality.
• The socialist critique of elitism focused on the implications of the distribution of private property.
• Extreme inequality of wealth and property ownership corrupted the human spirit by subverting the sense of human solidarity and legitimizing exploitation was a common theme in socialist literature.

• One of the most influential of the early socialists in France declared himself a radical feminist.
• He rejected patriarchy and the bourgeois family.
• He said that the position of women in the society around him was better than that of slaves.
• The equality he defended had to do with human rights and dignity, not physical or intellectual abilities.
• He said that women were profoundly different in their emotional and spiritual natures.
• He argued that women could only be free if their characters were allowed to be expressed without the restrictions of traditional Christian morality.

• By the 1830s, liberal theory had developed into a more sophisticated and integrated body of thought than feminism or socialism, but it still had a variety of different positions.
• The liberals focused on political reform in opposition to the post-1815 reaction.
• Liberal ideas took on more explicitly antisocialist dimensions as socialism began to gain greater following by mid-century.
• Most members of the middle class were shocked by Fourier's ideas and his belief that private property and the free-market economy should be abolished.

• There were significant overlaps with socialism on the left fringe of liberalism.

• Disillusioned radicals collaborated with various kinds of socialists in their quest for what seemed to them to be more consistent, less hypocritical forms of liberty, equality, and Fraternity, but their emphasis remained more individualistic and more attached to private ownership.

• Britain's long and bitter conflict with France made it difficult for the Philosophical Radicals to identify with the French Revolution.
• The ideas of the Philosophical Radicals were based on Enlightened principles, British rather than French in flavor, but still with a parallel respect for the ability of human reason to reform society in far-reaching ways.
• Jeremy Bentham, a prolific author who advocated for radical reforms in all branches of British life, was their most influential guide.

• The British government was thought to be in the hands of a parasitical aristocracy and that cruelly disproportionate punishments were often prescribed for trivial crimes, such as the death penalty for pickpockets.
• The "wisdom of the ages" should not be evaluated on how long a law had existed, but on how efficiently and fairly it served society.
• He found that many of Britain's laws did a poor job.

• Classical Liberalism was born out of a critique of Britain's existing state, society, and economy by Bentham.
• Since Britain by the second half of the century was the country where liberalism was the most successful, a model for liberals on the Continent, the prominence of British thinkers in formulating liberal theory was only natural.

• Mill was associated with the Utilitarians before the publication of that work.
• His father, James Mill, had written an influential volume on "political economy" in 1819.
• The study of political economy was published by John Stuart, who was said to be able to read classic Greek and Latin texts as a child.
• By the early to mid decades of the nineteenth century, liberalism had acquired a set of political, economic, and cultural-intellectual dimensions thanks to the publications of such men as James Mill and John Stuart Mill.

• Mill deviated from the original ideas of the Utilitarians.
• The middle and upper classes were associated with the word "democrat" throughout the 19th century.
• They were worried that a popular majority would move to redistribute wealth.

• "Constitutionalism," one of the many isms that appeared but then faded in popularity, might have been more precise in application to Mill's synthesis, since in defining liberty he stressed the importance of the rule of law, due process, and constitutional limits on both executive power and popular Mill was worried about the threats of democracy to liberty.

• Britain's mature liberalism was an ideology of freedom but with a lot of qualifications having to do with freedom's potential excesses.

• It was aware of the destructive role of emotions in human affairs.
• The liberal state was to be strong in protecting property, but weak in regulating the economy.
• Being assertive in matters such as establishing a sound currency or accurate weights and measures is important.
• In Britain, attending to national defense meant a strong navy, but in all countries, such a recognition worked to rationalize growing state power.

• The deputies to Parliament were still to be men of property, education, and high social standing, not ordinary manual laborers, even though the conception of freedom involved parliamentary government and open pub lic debate on matters of state.
• In the more abstractly intellectual realm, artists and intellectuals under liberal governments were to be allowed a lot of creative freedom, but in practice their freedom remained significantly restricted compared to later understandings of it.
• Intellectual and artistic freedom was of primary concern to educated elites, not the mass of ordinary citizens.

• As he grew older, John Stuart Mill became more concerned about issues of social equality, finally agreeing with left-wing critics of Classical Liberalism that formal political equality, when associated with extreme economic inequality, was illusory and would tend to self-destruct.
• He concluded that there had to be a way to bridge the yawning gap between rich and poor in order to open up a more genuine equality of opportunity for those born poor.
• A number of moderate socialist critics of laissez-faire capitalism received a sympathetic hearing from him.

• The inclinations of liberals toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th were similar to those of him in the 1860s.

• After his death, Mill's sympathetic attention to the issue of equal rights for women presaged another direction in which liberalism would develop.
• His close association with Mrs. Taylor influenced his early feminism.
• They collaborated on a number of works that criticized the indignities that women faced in Britain and elsewhere.
• Mill was aware of the influence that Taylor had on him.
• They argued that equal and free participation by women in society would be useful to all of society and that the current debased situation of women was irrational and violated the principle of justice.

• "human equality" did not mean that humans of the same sex were the same; men and women were different in many aspects.
• They were thought to be different in a number of ways.
• Their equality had to be thought of in moral terms, having to do with equality of legal rights and related issues of individual human dignity or worth.

• The concept of equal worth of the human soul, male and female, before God is related to this definition of equality.
• It wasn't possible to prove equality by scientific measurement.
• Mary Wollstonecraft, for all her admiration of the application of a liberating reason by the French Revolution, was also moved by a fervent Christian faith.

• Feminism maintained that women were equal to men in physical and intellectual capabilities, or at least close to it.
• It was argued that women could assume most roles in the public sphere that had traditionally been closed to them because of their physical infirmities.
• In popular discourse, these various kinds of arguments were not often distinguished from one another.
• Women should be eligible for combat duty in the nation's wars if they can take on the heavier types of manual labor that men did, or if they have the strength to do it.

• The concept of women's equality of rights suggested a larger agenda.
• Equal education for women, equal inheritance and property rights, legal equality in marriage, and responsibility in child-rearing were some of the rights that were granted.
• There was not much of a chance of laws guaranteeing female equality being enacted in the early 19th century due to the opinion of females as well as males that these ideas were impractical, dangerous, or immoral.
• The period of regression in women's rights in the 19th century was considered by some scholars to be a time of a more confident assertion of female superiority.
• In this regard, what passed as science in the 19th century seems to have played a role in the same way as it did in regards to the issue of equality in the racial realm, since leading scientists claimed to have discovered irrefutable scientific evidence for inequality in both the sexes and the races.

• Some of what passed for scientific inquiry in the 19th century was by modern standards not scientific, and it offered confirmation of existing prejudgments that women were physically, mentally, and morally inferior to men, just as the blacks of Africa and other non-European races were.
• Christian leaders of the day were among the most ardent in opposing "scientific" racism, which was used to justify the enslavement of Africans.

• Christian leaders were resistant to science because of the way it threatened biblical certainties and other religious dogmas, but it is not true that their religious dogmatism prevented them from moving in "humanistic" or universalistic directions.
• Christian dogma rarely made male religious leaders in favor of feminists since biblical texts explicitly mandated a role for women.

• Marx's critique of early socialism's utopian tendencies and his claim to have formulated a scientific version influenced feminist or socialist ideas to appeal to both the intelligentsia and the working class.
• Marx's socialist vision was an easy target for him because he claimed to be guided by reason and science.
• In the 1960s, his vision resembled what would be called a "non-repressive society," which would allow for unimpeded instinctual gratification and be characterized by many fewer negative sanctions than had existed in the past.
• The term "phalanx" was one of the many terms he came up with.

• The Utilitarians and the proponents of laissez-faire economics were contemptuous of what other theorists had claimed to discover in their use of reason.
• He did not see industrialization as a liberating phenomenon.
• It was a violation of human needs and human nature.
• The increased productivity that might arise from specialized, repetitive tasks was not worth the price that was paid.
• He was disgusted by the corrupt financiers that he saw in the late 1790s.

• In his treatment of the idea of equality, he stressed the physical and psychic differences of the people, even though he accepted the moral equality or equal worth of human beings.
• Both sexes need to be aware of their differences to find genuine fulfillment.
• In his system, the patriarchal family would cease to exist because Fourier was against the subordination of women to men.

• Each day, he waited in his office for the millionaire who would finance his projects.
• He waited in vain.
• There were colonies in France and the New World that were only partial efforts to establish what he had in mind.
• The system can be considered a monument to the imagination, a thought- provoking departure from an emerging capitalist society.
• Marx used the term "utopian" for any early socialist.
• The lack of realistic means to put his ideas into practice was what they found lacking in Fourier.

• Robert Owen was a man of action and success.
• He was 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217

• He was a benevolent factory owner who made a nice profit by introducing such measures as a shorter working day, safer factory conditions, and more pleasant factory conditions.

• Thousands of people visited Owen's factory in the opening years of the 19th century.
• Owen's criticisms of the greed and social irresponsibility of the country's emerging capitalists made him a favorite of Britain's conservative classes.
• Owen revealed himself to be a man of the Enlightenment as he developed his own ideas.
• His attacks on Christianity as well as his belief in large-scale social engineering became unpopular with conservatives.

• Owen believed that people's natures were formed by their environment, while Fourier believed that human nature was fixed at birth.
• Owen wanted to change Britain's destructively competitive environment in order to reform or improve the nature of its inhabitants.
• In order to make it harmonious with unchanging human passions, Fourier wanted to introduce a new yet still rational environment.
• Owen was interested in improving and humanizing but not abolishing industrialization.
• He was more aware of the promise of increased productivity of labor through modern industrial techniques than he was.
• His initial steps in a socialist direction had nothing to do with modern techniques of production.
• He proposed a way to remedy unemployment by establishing self-contained agricultural communities.
• Owen sailed for America in 1824 to launch a more radical utopian-socialist project in Indiana because he couldn't get the government or wealthy donors to support his plans.

• The first Owenite settlement in the United States was New Harmony.

• The factory at New Lanark did not qualify as socialist in many ways.
• Efforts were made to establish common ownership and popular rule for both men and women.
• These were mostly self-contained agricultural communities, not factories with labor-saving machinery.
• Middle-class idealists who first signed up for these communities were forced to give up the kind of labor that might have allowed them to survive.
• There were a number of problems that arose before there were disagreements and hostile groups.
• Owen was nearly bankrupt because of his financial support for these communities.
• The labor movement in Britain had begun to associate itself with his ideas.

• The idea of isolated agricultural communities as a way to introduce a new cooperative world of socialism was viewed with skepticism because they were not adequately aware of the challenges of the new industrial world.
• Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon's writings attracted attention.
• He has been included among the early socialists because of his admirers taking his ideas in socialist directions, but he is best described as a prophet of modernity in ways that did not fit into either socialist or liberal categories.
• Saint-Simon was more aware of the long-range implications of industrialization than the early socialists.
• He looked to a time when new elites would rule society on principles of rationality, creativity, efficiency, and productivity.

• Owen and other socialists linked their ideas with the emerging demands of the lower classes, but Saint-Simon was an unabashed elitist, one who saw no reason to consider the common people capable of informed opinions and enlightened rule.
• He supported the idea of "careers open to talent" for unusual individuals from the lower orders.

• Saint-Simon distrusted liberty as it tended to foster a socially destructive competitiveness, even though he dismissed social equality as a sterile, confined notion.
• The exclusive responsibility of a new elite would be to make sure the general welfare of society is maintained.

• The more practical Saint-Simonians went on to become successful financiers and entrepreneurs.
• Saint-Simonians believed in giving the state more regulatory power than the proponents of laissez-faire economics did.
• The left-wing or more socialistic of the Saint-Simonians proposed an economic system in which the state would, upon the death of wealthy citizens, redistribute their property to other citizens on principles of merit, thus abolishing the "privilege" of inherited property.

• The Saint-Simonian idea that increasing productivity through industrialization was the only realistic solution to the Social Question was the only realistic idea that repelled property owners.
• "Communist" socialists believed that there was a fixed amount of wealth in society.
• Appropriating the wealth of the upper classes would be involved in aid to the poor.
• Since the wealthy could be expected to resist, primitive socialism implied violence.

• The more primitive form associated with Babeuf was different from the communism of Marx and Engels.

• It's fame is almost entirely retrospective, since at the time its young authors were obscure activists and their pamphlet had an insignificant impact on the major events of 1848-50.
• It is an initial sketch of the ponderous tomes Marx would labor in the following decades.
• There was a paean to the achievements of modern industry in the pamphlet.

• In their dismissal of the dreams and utopian experiments of previous socialists, Marx and Engels worked in their own trenchant predictions about how a future socialist state would be achieved through violent revolution by the organized working class.
• "Proletariat" was a new word created by Blanqui and was previously used by Babeuf.

• The notion was used with key refinements.
• The emphasis on class conflict and violent revolution in Marx and Engels' vision of a liberated human condition was very different from the tradition of Babeuf and Blanqui.

• The assertion that a repressive capitalist stage was necessary before establishing socialism is confident.

• Marx and Engels later claimed to be hard-headed realists, strictly scientific in their analysis, but their ideas were influenced by early nineteenth-century romanticism, a highly unscientific frame of mind.
• The spirit of the age is often described as Romanticism.
• Although the term was initially used to describe cultural and artistic trends, all three of the major political ideologies in their early stages have been termed Romantic.
• Romantic tendencies began to appear in response to the "cold" rationalism of the Enlightenment in the late 18th century.
• Romantics were fascinated by the wild and untamed, both in the world of nature and in the human personality.

• Romantic love is considered to be the most destructive emotion of all time and may be considered the most wild and incomprehensible.

• Even more than was the case with the proponents of the three political ideologies, various Romantics used the same words to mean remarkably different things.
• There are connections to the thought of Edmund Burke.

• The main thinkers of the Enlightenment were aware of the importance of emotion.

• Smith wanted to put greed to use in the free market.
• What Romantics meant by "emotion" was not always clear.

• There are differences between the emotional emphases of romanticism and the rational emphases of classicism.
• Classicism is controlled, balanced, and formal, whereas romanticism is dreamy, heated, and passionate.

• Matters were not as clear in terms of political ideology.
• On the one hand, Burke's liberalism of tradition was Romantic in tendency, but on the other, romanticism and liberty were natural allies in their desire for liberation.
• The liberals who wanted freedom were different from the liberals who wanted a stable society of property, family, and free enterprise.

• The chivalry of the Middle Ages and the heroic virtues of the Crusaders were glamorized by some conservatives.
• Napoleon was seen by many Romantics as Satan's spawn.
• Feminism was linked with the rationalist left, but some of its theorists tended to elevate feminine emotions as superior to male rationality.
• The justification of rebellion through emotions has historically settled on the right and left, a point that was particularly evident in the twentieth century, since both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis considered themselves revolutionaries who spoke for the people.
• The bomb-throwers of the late nineteenth century and the Islamic fanatics of the early twenty-first century were both termed Romantics because of the way their ideas attracted selfish idealists, on the one hand, and powerhungry fanatics, on the other.

• The second part covers from the late 1820s to the early 1870s.
• The years have seen a transformation from romanticism to realism in visual art, music, and literature.
• By the late 1840s, Metternich's efforts to smother left-wing and nationalist movements had run their course, with revolutions rapidly spreading throughout most of the Continent between 1848 and 1850, unparalleled in their initial spontaneity - but also remarkable in their ignominious collapse.
• The next two decades began again with a period of restriction but ended with dramatic developments such as the unification of Italy and Germany.

• Napoleon III played a key role in this period as France made renewed claims to European leadership.
• In his initial support of Italian unification in 1859-60, he encouraged the national idea and took Russia and Austria down a notch.
• By the end of the 1860s, it had become clear that the French leader had overplayed his hand, and by the early 1870s, the relationships of Europe's states had been transformed, most potently in the humiliation of France in 1870-1 by Prussia.
• The new nation promised to become Europe's most dynamic, threatening its neighbors, changing the balance of power, and causing major shifts in alliances of the major powers.

• Germany's industrialization was especially noteworthy, even before unification, because of the profound changes in Europe's economies and societies.
• The military might of the great powers grew apace as Europe witnessed unprecedented population growth.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• The country's elites were able to refashion their institutions to manage the growth of the economy, and Britain was the first to do so.
• Legislation was passed in the 1830s and 1840s that smoothed Britain's move into its celebrated "classic" liberal period of the 1850s and 1860s.
• France's decline relative to Britain was due to the fact that its leaders were less flexible and far-sighted than those of Britain.
• The country's political differences continued to plague it.
• A revolution in 1830 put a more liberal king into power after a number of failed uprisings.
• The revolution of 1848 established a republic that became the new empire of the Napoleonics.
• The third republic was formed in 1871 and lasted until World War II.

• The concern bordering on paranoia of Russia's rulers and their sense of vulnerability to the west was paralleled by the rise of the Germans and British.
• Alexander II undertook modernizing reforms after the death of Nicholas I.
• These measures were flawed and failed to satisfy many of his subjects, leading to Alexander's assassination.
• The internal reforms of the Habsburg Empire resulted in the creation of the more centralized and modernized dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867.
• The leaders continued to suffer from a sense of economic backwardness and a growing threat from the nations to their west.

• The period from the 1820s through the 1860s is often described as one in which liberal values triumphed over conservative ones, but the failures of the revolutions of 1848-50 are also often described as marking a failure of liberalism.
• The many dimensions of liberalism are one of the reasons for the seeming contradiction.
• In achieving national unification in central Europe, liberalism's failure in 1848-50 was the most significant.
• Liberal values prevailed.
• Britain's borders and national institutions were relatively secure and there was nothing like the Continental failure of liberal nationalism.
• It became known as a success story.

• The term liberal or bearer of liberal values is a stretch, but he did some "liberating" things, including freeing the serfs and introducing more freedoms into the life of a population that had had relatively little experience of them.
• There were many intermediate countries between Britain and Russia.
• France did not face issues of national unification, but the years 1848-50 represented another kind of liberal failure.

• Napoleon's authoritarian empire violated political and intellectual aspects of the full liberal program, but moderate liberals in France rallied to him because he remained modern and antimonarchist, favoring the growth of modern industry.
• Prussia had a stronger executive and a weaker parliament than the British model, but the institutional and legal framework for rapid industrialization existed in Prussia.
• It is possible to make similar remarks for the Habsburg Empire.
• The center of gravity of liberalism shifted to the right, shying away from notions of republican, radical democracy and allying with the forces of order, monarchies, and militaries that liberals had previously opposed, but that was not a complete failure.

• The formation of the British Liberal and Conservative parties was one of the more mature forms of isms introduced in Chapter 4.
• In most other countries, political parties formed that identified themselves with one or more of the new political isms.

• Before World War I, Socialist parties did not become a major force, but they began to form in Germany by the 1860s.

• Marx's ideas began to reach a larger audience than they had in the middle years of the century.
• In the mid-century, nationalism took on central importance, an importance that would only grow as the century went on.

• Metternich's vigilance on the Continent was effective from the 1820s to the mid-1840s, but many of his successors suffered from a sense of sitting on a volcano.
• The ideological issue of the period was the search for stability in the face of seemingly inexorable forces for change.
• By the 1840s, the ranks of the lowest orders of society were growing at an unprecedented pace.
• The expansion of the middle classes in the city contributed to the restiveness.
• For most of those urban classes living in central and eastern Europe, nationalist aspiration mixed with concerns for social reform and modernization, though the terms meant different things to different people.

• It would have taken a near-superhuman genius to assure peace and tranquility in the context of these forces for change.
• In these years, many political leaders must be characterized as ideological rigid or simply incompetent - resorting to brutal, self-defeating repressions of those clamoring for reform.
• Hopes for a bright future were clouded by the Hungry Forties.
• The years suggested to many observers the likelihood of a long-term decline rather than progress in material welfare.

• In comparison to France, where gradual reforms of great future significance were undertaken peacefully, at least in comparison to Britain, there was much popular unrest.
• Britain's evolution had at least one terrible dark side.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• Over a million Irish died as a result of it.
• Ireland's population fell from around 8 million in the early 1840s to around 3 million a decade or so later because of the crop failure.
• The grim reaper continued to haunt the imaginations of most European countries.

• By the mid-1820s France was "sneezing" again, and concerns about future revolutionary disturbances still tended to focus on France.
• The Count of Artois assumed the throne when his brother died in 1824.
• This was bad news for those who were working for tranquility, since Charles and his Ultra team had introduced measures that could only be described as provocative.
• The law establishing the death penalty for sacrilege to a Church building was one of the measures.

• The compensation for those who lost property during the Revolution was projected to be 30 million Swiss Francs a year.

• Charles's ceremony was symbolic of his reactionary intent.
• God gave him the right to rule and he had no respect for popular sovereignty.
• After more than five years of mounting tension, a series of hastily announced ordinances in July 1830 further restricted representation to the Chamber of Deputies and other ways limiting the constitutional freedoms of France's citizens.

• The three days that appeared to participants did not result in a victory that satisfied all of Charles's opponents.
• No victory could have been possible.
• The republicans who had mounted the barricades felt betrayed.

• Conservatives in Europe were uneasy about developments after the July revolution.
• The principle of legitimacy throughout Europe was dealt a blow by Charles's defeat.
• Revolutionaries replaced a legitimate monarch with a new king with questionable legitimacy and political intentions.
• The former Duke of Orleans is now called Louis Philippe.
• He was distantly related to the Bourbons, but in personal beliefs, habits, and even dress he was a different kind of king.
• He served in France's republican army rather than joining the royalist emigres.
• The July Monarchy is the name of the French state.
• The vote was extended from 100,000 to 200,000 because the constitution resembled the Charter of 1814, but a number of liberalizing adjustments were made to it.

• One in thirty adult males now have the vote, and most contemporary observers think that the new regime represents a significant advance for previously underrepresented middle-class interests.
• The highest ranks of the bourgeoisie were composed of wealthy financiers and bankers.
• It was found out that those elected to the Chamber of Deputies were mostly large land owners with few connections to the world of modern industry.
• The new ruling elite was not as sympathetic to the urban poor as Charles X's group.

• The settlement of 1815 was put into question by the repercussions of the French revolution of July 1830.
• After the Congress of Vienna joined the Protestant north, residents of the Catholic south of the Netherlands retained their Belgian identity.
• The Belgians were incorporated into metropolitan France from 1797 to 1816, and now some of them want to return.
• Adding a prosperous and industrially advanced area of over 4 million people is not something the French nationalists want to do.
• The Belgians whose native tongue was French bristled under regulations that required them to use the Dutch language because of the heavy hand of the Protestant Dutch king.
• In August 1830, violent riots erupted in the Belgian capital, with demands for independence for the Belgian south escalating.

• The three glorious days of declaring their inde pendence from Russia inspired Polish nationalists.
• Nicholas I, tsar of Russia and king of Poland from 1824 to 1830, was a brutal autocrat.
• He called on the powers of the world to respond quickly to the unrest in the Netherlands and Poland.
• He sent his armies into Poland to destroy the Polish revolt.
• Thousands of Polish rebels were sentenced to exile in Siberia after he terminated Poland's status as a separate kingdom.
• Thousands more fled west, becoming prominent in the ranks of the Romantic exiles and revolutionaries who settled in Europe's capital cities, Paris most of all.

• The unrest of the Belgians was dealt with in a less violent way.
• The Belgian national assembly called upon the son of Louis Philippe to be their king in the early 19th century.
• The French were urging an aggressive foreign policy on the new monarch.
• The policy of non-intervention in Belgium was announced by Louis Philippe, who was impressed with the precariousness of his own situation.
• He arranged for a minor German prince to serve as Belgium's king, becoming Leopold I, the nephew of the future Queen Victoria.

• The new Belgian kingdom was seen as being more bourgeois than that of Louis Philippe.
• Belgians were stereotyped as a dull version of their French and Dutch former rulers.
• Belgium, with its mixed Walloon and Flemish population, seemed to be an anachronism in the coming decades of rising nationalism.
• After 1945, the capital city of the country would play a key role in the unification of Europe.

• The revolution of 1830 in France spurred on reformers in Britain, even though they had been building in Britain for some time.
• Robert Owen returned from the United States in 1828 to lend his name to a working-class movement that was characterized by experiments in establishing cooperative retail stores and organizing trade unions.
• By 1830, several hundred such cooperative had been established, linked in various ways to the trade unions.

• In support of broad electoral reform in Britain, more center-stage but related to working-class militancy, had increased by the late 1820s.
• The policies followed by British conservatives made for revealing contrasts with those of the Ultras in France, as the reactionary panic responsible for the Peterloo massacre had begun to subside.
• While Charles X's regime was reverting to a medieval Catholicism, in Britain the ruling conservatives oversaw the passage of a series of laws that allowed full civil equality for Catholics and Dissenters.
• The Combination Acts, which had been passed in response to the French Revolution, were repealed in 1824, setting the stage for a surge in working-class activism in the late 1820s and early 1830s.

• British conservatives had definite limits to what they would support.

• Civil equality for Jews would have to wait.
• Conservatives continued to resist the idea of changing the archaic procedures by which members of Parliament were elected.
• They were opposed to repeal the Corn Laws because they wanted to protect the price of grain from open- market competition.
• Liberal thought that the violation of the principles of free trade was the reason for the artificially high grain prices.
• Since large landholding interests depended on the electoral laws to keep them in power, the prospect of electing members of Parliament who would repeal the Corn Laws seemed remote.
• The leaders of the working class in Britain were incensed by the high grain prices that caused high food and labor costs.

• The House of Commons had never been so unrepresentative of the general population.
• In the past, areas in the north had been less densely populated than the south.
• By the 1820s, many of the burgeoning factory towns were underrepresented in Parliament, whereas other areas with static or even declining populations retained the same representation they had had for centuries.
• Large landowners were called a class of parasites, living in indolent splendor but not contributing much to national wealth.

• The three glorious days in France in 1830 suggested how easily a regime that refused to recognize changing realities could be overthrown.
• Mass demonstrations, milling crowds, and acts of mob violence characterized late 1830 and much of the following year, paralleled by convoluted political maneuvering in Parliament.

• The Reform Bill of 1832 passed both houses of Parliament, which is considered to be a decisive juncture in modern British history.

• The Reform Bill made it possible for newer business interests to assume a role in running the country.
• The bill contributed to a realignment of Britain's political parties.
• The Liberal Party was formed after the Whigs joined forces with business leaders and a few Conservatives.
• The main body of the Tories, joined by a few Whigs and other minor factions, gradually formed the Conservative Party.
• The two-party system characterized British politics for the next century.

• It is true that Britain's monarch and traditional ruling orders were more flexible than their counterparts in France, but there was still a die-hard reactionary group in Britain.
• The Reform Bill was pushed to the wall by popular unrest.
• According to historians, the revolution was closer in the year 1831-2 than in any other period of British history.
• It seems that British institutions were respected more by a larger part of the population than they were in France, and that respect would grow to something close to reverence in the course of the nineteenth century.
• The older ruling orders of Britain were characterized by a growing respect for commercial values and interests.
• To deny parliamentary recognition to Britain's middle class and urban population was more difficult than in France.

• The ways in which "freedom" was implemented was revealed by some of the legislation that followed the Reform Bill.
• Slavery was abolished in the British Empire.
• The New Poor Law may be seen as an example of how freedom from one perspective could look like slavery from another.
• Business interests were dissatisfied with the old poor law because it did not encourage the unemployed to move out of their homes in order to find work.
• The workers were reluctant to accept the unfamiliar labor that was common in the new factories.
• The New Poor Law sought to remedy the perceived defects of the old law by establishing workhouses for the unemployed, in which conditions were distinctly less agreeable than in the factories in the open market.
• A man consigned to a workhouse was separated from his wife and children in order that he not be able to continue enjoying while out of work.

• The goal of the new law was to make Britain's labor force more mobile, more flexible, and more productive.
• A mobile workforce was desirable from the standpoint of the employer, and also from the standpoint of the overall productivity of the economy in the long run, but many unemployed workers saw things in a different light.

• After the Reform Bill was passed, working-class leaders expressed disappointment that the majority of the population still didn't vote.
• Although there had been redistribution of political representation by region and class, the total number of voters rose from around half-million to only 800,000, and the new voters came mostly from the comfortable middle class.
• The reform in Britain could be seen as significant, but it was not enough to satisfy all.

• Following the passage of the Reform Bill, a lot of other reform legislation was passed.
• The ban on the employment of children under the age of nine in the textile mills was supported by a wide range of people.
• Some employers protested this interference in their freedom as entrepreneurs, but there seemed to be a fairly wide recognition that freedom to exploit the labor of children under nine years of age should not be included in an acceptable definition of British liberty.
• Legislative limitations on the labor of children and women followed in the course of the century.

• The repeal of the Corn Laws was a major item on the agenda of Britain's liberal reformers.
• The Corn Laws' defenders were still formidable after the Reform Bill was passed.
• The case was made because of their political experience, but also because of some issues that came to be central to political debates in nearly every country of Europe for the next two centuries.
• Britain's historic aristocracy, the upper part of society that had purportedly retained a broad sense of responsibility toward society as a whole, was argued to be vital to the survival of the Corn Laws.
• It was claimed that Britain's aristocracy had gained valuable political experience over the centuries.
• The Corn Laws' defenders argued that it was in Britain's national interest to maintain a balance between agriculture and industry in order to not become dependent on the importation of food in a future war.

• The Anti-Corn Law League firmly rejected these arguments.
• The story of the repeal of the Corn Laws is part of the prevailing narrative of British political and economic history, marking a broader victory of liberal principles and the rise of Britain to world eminence.
• The Anti-Corn Law League was well-funded and well-run, and drew its arguments from the classical economists.
• Many of the techniques of persuasion that came to describe modern political parties were used by the league.
• The central argument was that high food prices would cripple industrial development.
• If tariffs were to fall, Britain would benefit and all other countries would be free to concentrate on what they do best.
• Britain's cool, rainy climate was not ideal for grain production, whereas the country's factories could produce textiles, railroad equipment, and various other tools of industrialization more efficiently than any other.

• There were reservations about the league's argument.
• Critics continued to doubt the wisdom of allowing Britain to become dependent on imported agricultural products to feed its rapidly growing population despite concerns about the negative impact of free trade in grain on Britain's political elite.
• To be sure, if the future of Europe was certain to be one of peace and cooperation between nations, the vision of a Europe composed of sovereign states without tariffs appeared to be a highly appealing one.

• Liberal principles were rising in general esteem, but their precise application in various realms was still being hammered out, and would continue to shift in emphasis throughout the following centuries.
• The idea of the balance of power was based on the idea that Europe's states were not always friendly.
• British observers believed that a powerful navy was crucial to the welfare of their country.
• British prosperity through trade required secure markets in the rest of the world, not only in Europe.
• The British Empire suggested some awkward contradictions for liberals because they believed in the freedom and equality of all people, rather than freeing them.

• The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1847 came in the context of profoundly troubled times in Ireland, which suggested some other long-standing uncertainties about the implications of freedom in modern times.

• The Irish pointed a finger of accusation at British officials who favored letting market forces solve economic problems in the long run.
• The Irish counternarrative that viewed the British as cruel, arrogant, and exploitative was fiercely challenged by the growing self-congratulation of British liberals.

• The reaction of Britain's rulers to the Great Hunger in Ireland was the subject of a rancorous literature.
• The Irish people and their rulers in London had a history of bitter relations that would last for another century and a half.

• The Irish Question had a number of strange aspects.
• The Irish rural population of these years was like other poor populations of the day, such as the Jews of eastern Europe and the southern Italians.
• The Irish population grew from 2.6 million in the 17th century to 8 million by the beginning of the 1840s, as Europe's population grew as never before.
• The population of Scotland grew from 1.2 to 2.6 million and that of Portugal from 2.2 to 3.4 million.

• The introduction of the potato to Ireland was one of the reasons for the spurt in population.
• In Ireland, the root became a staple food of the poor in other areas of Europe.
• The Irish lower classes were encouraged to marry earlier and have more children because a small plot of land for growing potatoes could support a family.
• The Irish poor did not own the land they worked and therefore did not share the same incentives as land-owning peasants in France, who tended to restrict births in order to avoid dividing their land among their children.

• The landlords of the English agricultural revolution were not like the Protestant landlords of Catholic Ireland.
• They were notorious for their indiscretion, irresponsibility, and relationship with those who worked their lands.
• 2 million Irish left for the Americas before the mass exodus of the late 1840s and 1850s, fleeing what seemed to be a hopeless situation in the land of their birth.

• The impact on the poor part of the Irish population was catastrophic when the potato was stricken with a devastating disease.
• Observers wrote about how the dead and dying littered the roads and how families silently starve to death in their huts.
• Children and old people were attacked by rampant disease.
• A.J.P.
• looked back over a century later.
• In the late 1840s, Taylor described Ireland as a large death camp.
• Unlike the Holocaust, nature's work was more devastating and long-term in its effects than any earthquake or flood experienced by Europeans in modern times.

• British officials would no doubt have helped to mitigate the horrors of the Great Hunger, but they weren't prepared for it.
• Some of them were inclined to blame the Irish for what happened to them.
• Irish nationalist historians have accused British officials of criminalNegligence over the Irish tragedy.

• The officials were all-too-typical of their age and class, and in partial defense of them, it could be observed that they were not criminal in the normal sense.
• One of the officials in charge of dealing with the Irish situation became a target of Irish nationalists.
• He was not quite the monster of genocidal descriptions, but he did suggest that the famine was ordered by divine Providence and was to be understood in the light of economic laws that he could not counter.

• One of the unavoidable suffering for the lower orders in the 19th century was the belief in unending progress that was accompanied by a parallel darker vision.
• Thomas Malthus formulated that vision in the late 18th century.
• He said that if material conditions did improve, the lower orders would counteract the positive effect by producing too many children since agricultural production could not possibly keep up.

• Malthus's book became one of the most discussed and influential of the day, despite the fact that his facts appear unreliable and his reasoning questionable.
• The lowest ranks of society were doomed to poverty and destitution because of powerful economic laws, according to his dark vision.
• Efforts by governing authorities to alleviate the condition of the poor were useless.

• Those who wanted to pay their workers as little as possible used "science" of that sort.
• It was difficult to reconcile the capitalist ethic with Christian morality.
• There was a belief in nineteenth-century Europe that strife was inevitable and that there was a connection between destruction and creation.
• Malthus, a Christian minister, was able to give the poor advice about postponing marriage and avoiding a "too active" sex life.
• Malthus's name eventually became associated with contraception, even though he himself firmly rejected any birth-control measures, aside from abstention from sexample, and he suggested that taking cold showers and praying might be of use.
• Malthus and others claimed that it caused blindness and mental retardation.

• Malthus' critics were those who believed in the moral obligation of the state to remedy the Social Question and those who could not accept the iron laws of the political economists.
• The Great Hunger of the Hungry Forties on the Continent was not as bad as most areas of Europe would have you believe.
• Again, eyes were on Paris, a city to which emigres and malcontents of every stripe from nearly every European country were drawn, to say nothing of the throngs of unemployed from the French provinces.

• Paris is an especially powerful magnet for artists, painters, nationalist exiles, and revolutionaries because of its large population.
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formed their friendship in Paris.

• The French economy was less affected by industrialization and population growth than was the case in Britain, but it was still difficult to walk the streets of Paris without being aware of the Social Question.
• There was no obvious remedy for part of the population.
• Intellectuals and common people had contacts.
• In France and Britain, the spread of antiliberal, antiradical, and antisocialist ideologies was well developed by the 1840s.
• The failures of the extreme left over the reforms of the July Monarchy turned into rancorous by the 1840s, as a series of scandals revealed corruption in the government.
• The ministers came to epitomize a particularly galling mindset.

• Guizot's quip became a potent symbol for antiliberal, antibourgeois forces for the rest of the century because of its supercilious attitudes.
• The virtues of self-reliance and enterprise claimed by members of the bourgeoisie were little more than masks.
• The Enemy were the key element of identity formation and ideological preference in these years.

• The Chartist movement was the most famous of the reformers who wanted a popular rule in Britain after the Reform Bill was passed.
• The movement's name was derived from the People's Charter, first drawn up in 1838 and then repeatedly presented to Parliament, with millions of signatures, and each time disdainfully rejected.
• The Charter presented a six-point program of political reform, but the final intent of most Chartists was more than that.
• Once the Chartist program was accepted, there would be far reaching economic and social legislation in a leveling or even socialist direction.
• The points included the vote for all adult males, an end to property requirements for members of the House of Commons, annual parliamentary elections, secret ballots, and more equitably divided electoral districts.
• Proponents of Chartism talked of a general strike by the working class to force members of Parliament to accept the Charter, as a result of the repeated rejections of the Charter by Parliament.
• Riots resulted from physical force Chartists used.

• The Chartist movement was revived in the spring of 1848, as revolutions were spreading on the Continent, but again it was firmly rejected, and is considered one of history's great failures.
• The passage of the Ten Hours Act of 1847, which alleviated some of the worst conditions faced by the working class, was aided by the pressure of the Chartist movement.

• There were many surprises in the revolutions that spread across Continental Europe.
• Historians pondered the origins of the upheavals for a century.
• Expectations were followed by disappointment and despondency.

• French armies wouldn't be invading the rest of Europe and the radical left wouldn't have much support outside of Paris.
• In a matter of months, the forces of reaction triumphed in France.
• Antirevolutionary forces were often back in power within a year after the older rulers fled.
• The conservatives who reclaimed power did so on new terms that recognized changing economic and social realities.
• Although a comprehensive liberal program was blocked almost everywhere on the Continent, in a more vague sense liberal ideals continued to spread and sink in.

• The revolution of 1830 in France was not as big as the one in 1848.
• There were three glorious days in February of 1848, in which the king left and a new government was formed.
• Louis Philippe didn't appreciate how much support he had lost among the common people, as well asLIBERAL STRUGGLES, VICTORIES, DILEMMAS, DEFEATS among various elements of the wealthier classes.
• For a number of years before February 1848, Louis Philippe and his ministers seemed oblivious to the changing reality around them.

• The poorer districts of the city exploded in outrage when a crowd of protesters was fired upon by the forces of order, killing twenty people and wounding many more.
• Protesters went up in the poorer districts and revolutionaries invaded the Chamber ofDeputies and declared a republic.

• These were to be state-sponsored but worker-controlled units of production that would use modern industrial techniques to channel profit to the workers, not to private owners.
• Intellectuals had much to say about such ideas, but they were only beginning to spread among the lower classes.

• The conspiratorial elite of revolutionaries in France were similar to the physical force contingent of the Chartists in Britain.
• Blanc's hopes for a democratically elected social republic, one that he believed would be able to harmonize the interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, were profoundly shaken by his experiences in the provisional government.
• He realized that there was no popular majority in France for a social republic.
• He favored postponing elections until his ideas had a chance to prove themselves.
• He was overwhelmed by events.

• These were supposed to be inspired by Blanc's ideas, but in practice they became little more than makework unemployment relief.
• In the past monarchs have taken similar measures during times of economic crisis.
• The national workshops became a serious drain on the economy and a source of resentment for taxpayers after they were established on a larger scale.
• The elections to the assembly on the basis of universal male suffragist revealed how weak the support for the left was outside of Paris.
• There were no radical republicans or socialists in the executive body that was appointed by the new assembly.

• The abolition of the death penalty and the end of slavery in the colonies were some of the important liberal reforms that the new republic introduced.

• In Paris there was a series of confrontations between those who believed in a social republic and those who did not.
• The property-owning part of the population became more concerned about the designs of the poor on pocket books and the property of taxpayers.
• The declaration of martial law was made after the alarm became panic, and there was street fighting between workers and the regular army.
• In the poorer districts of Paris, there was a labyrinth of barricades that had been erected by both sides.
• The death toll rose to over 10,000, with 11,000 prisoners deported to distant penal colonies.

• The events in Paris were watched by the rest of Europe.
• The defeat of the Chartists in Britain was reported in the newspapers.
• The revolutions that spread across the Continent in March had a lot of local quirks.
• The trend was similar, with a rapid shift from euphoria to fear followed by a conservative rebound.
• Many moderates who had initially supported the revolutionaries turned to the conservatives out of fear of the unpredictable genie of revolution, because the early enthusiasms and projects to aid the poor tended to provoke determined resistance from the propertied.

• The "terrible misunderstandings" in these areas had more to do with the competing and incompatible nationalist ambitions within their populations.
• The dramatic initial developments in some of the capital cities in March, especially Vienna and Berlin, served as inspiration, comparable to Paris to some degree in providing national focus to revolutionary activity, but there were a great many other focal points.
• Issues of foreign rule sparked the first revolutionary uprisings of the year in January, in the Italian states.
• The events in France in February helped others, but the collapse of authority throughout central Europe in the spring of 1848 was not an imitation of the French model.
• Aspirations of different types were encouraged.

• The second most populous state in Europe was the multinational Empire.
• Revolution had different implications depending on whether it broke out in the empire's western or eastern areas.
• In the west, revolutionaries looked to refining an already developed liberalism to benefit an educated, relatively affluent urban population.
• In the east, liberalism was more about freeing serfs in areas where most of the population was poor.
• The invasion of the royal palace in the second week of March was so shocking that Metternich resigned and fled the country.
• The March Laws were passed by the long restive Magyars in their Diet.
• There were challenges to Habsburg rule in other parts of the empire.
• The Austrian military garrison was driven out of Milan, the largest city of northern Italy and capital of Lombardy.
• A republic was proclaimed in Venice.

• Rioting in Berlin prompted the king of Prussia to promise a constitution.
• By the end of the month, the leaders of the smaller German states, facing similar unrest, had agreed to call an assembly that would represent all German states, with the understanding that a more centralized and unified state form would emerge.
• The assembly was formed on the basis of a democratic vote and met in May of 1848.
• The hopes of German nationalists for about a year came to symbolize the failures of German liberalism.

• The king of Piedmont-Sardinia, the major independent state in the north of Italy, ordered an invasion of Lombardy, hoping to increase his holdings and create a powerful northern Italian state.
• He was alarmed by the fact that troops from Tuscany, as far south as Naples, began to march to the north to help drive out the Austrians.
• The men were united by vague visions of a unified Italy, but there was little consensus about the form a unified Italian state would assume.
• Despite Italy's clear natural frontiers, most Italians north of Rome had little enthusiasm for an immediate union with the backward areas south of Rome.
• Local and regional fidelities in Italy remained strong into the twentieth century.

• The March uprisings are considered to be the most widespread wave of revolution in European history.
• Socialists, radicals, and moderate republicans differed on too many fundamental points to work effectively together in France.
• Most of them did not have political experience.
• They couldn't assemble a reliable military power.
• In France and the rest of Europe, the left did not enjoy broad or reliable popular support.
• There was no match for trained and disciplined troops in the initial surge of support.
• In the rest of the Continent, the left was more divided and inexperienced than it was in Paris.
• In France, its moderate elements became alarmed by the agenda of the more radical ones, and the various revolutionary groups, liberal, socialist, or nationalist, proved unsympathetic to each other's agendas.

• Middle-class, educated, and respectable people were not willing to risk their lives on the barricades during the early stages of the revolution in central Europe and northern Italy.
• In the regular armies, the officers were mostly of noble origin and the common soldiers from the countryside; neither had much enthusiasm for (or understanding of) leftist programs, and for many ordinary soldiers the leftists were simply the Devil's spawn.
• After their initial surprise and alarm in early 1848, conservative leaders found that all they needed to do was wait, letting the divisions of the left grow, and then call in the regular army.

• It was not easy in every area, and revolutionary hopes continued to burn bright for a year or so in a few.
• Piedmont-Sardinia and the other Italian states that had risen up against Austrian rule were finally defeated by the Habsburg armies.
• The initial revolutionary model of the republic was destroyed in June 1849 by troops sent from France, not by Papal or Austrian forces, but by the new authoritarian, antirevolutionary leader, Louis Napoleon III.

• The "errors" were nationalism and liberalism, but they mostly encompassed modern trends in general.
• The longest-reigning pope in modern history was the reactionary Pius.

• After successfully fighting off Habsburg forces, the revolutionary nationalists were crushed in August of 1849.

• The reactionary Russian tsar wanted no revolutionaries on his borders and at any rate received appeals for help from the Habsburg emperor, who had committed themselves to offer mutual assistance in case there arose a danger to peace.

• The defeat for liberal nationalism was the same in many small German states as it was in Hungary, Prague, Rome, or Venice.
• Prussia had a left-wing assembly that supported Polish national ambitions in the neighboring areas of Russia and Austria, despite the disapproval of the king and the nobility.
• The Frankfurt Assembly 90 LIBERAL STRUGGLES, VICTORIES, DILEMMAS, DEFEATS distanced itself from the more radical Prussian assembly.
• The delegates applauded when the military of Prussia came to the aid of German-speakers in Posen.
• When the Habsburg forces crushed the Czech revolutionaries in Prague, the Assembly approved.

• The relationship of Prussia to the Assembly is heavy with symbolism.
• During its first full year, the Assembly debated many issues, but decided on a unified Germany that would exclude the German speakers of Habsburg lands.
• The crown of the new state was offered to the king of Prussia, Frederick William IV.

• Prussia was the largest of the German states, aside from Austria.
• The military of the country of Prussia was also considered.
• The assembly was obliged to appeal to the king to send in his army to put down the uprising because it had no armed forces of its own.

• Most of the members of the Assembly admitted defeat and went home.
• The people were easily put down by the radical activists who tried to rally them.

• In terms of Maoist, power comes from the point of a gun.
• The conclusion was that revolutionaries needed to get their act together and realize that student idealists, lawyers, and intellectuals are not enough to make a revolution.
• Conservatives who don't lose their cool and have a reliable army can be difficult to oust from power.

• C.B.
• has been the classic account of the Irish Potato Famine.

• There are many essays in R.J.W.

• E.E.Y.
• is an older biography that explores both the life and times of Pope Pius IX.