HIS 119.05 and .06: Modern Europe and U.S. II, 1815—present
Spring 2010
Professor McClymer (Founders 112; ext. 7278)
Office hours: M/W 8:30-11:30"I know histhry isn't thrue, Hinnessy, because it ain't like what I see ivry day in Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that'll show me th' people fightin', gettin' dhrunk, makin' love, gettin' married, owin' th' grocery man an' bein' without hard-coal, I'll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befure. — Finley Peter Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902)
Above is Berthe Morisot, "Young Girl Reading" — perhaps a volume of the sort of history Mr. Dooley didn't believe was true but more probably a novel. For more information on Morrisot, who exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition, and additional examples of her work, visit the Web Museum. For a virtual recreation of the First Impressionist Exhibition, courtesy of Mark Hardin's Artchive, click here.
Rationale: This course is designed to help you gain a PERSONAL understanding of some of the main currents in the history of the modern West. Unlike most such courses, it includes both the European and the American dimensions of that history.
Required Text: Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. In addition, the course web site will function an a kind of "untext," which you will read and explore.
Format: His 119 is divided into several topical units. Class meetings will include student reports, discussions of the secondary materials, and discussions of primary materials. (Secondary materials are writings produced by scholars and others who seek to understand the past. My introductory essays on this site are examples. Primary materials come from the period under study; they were produced by people who participated in or witnessed the events they deal with.) Links on this site will take you to a rich array of primary sources as well as to selected secondary accounts.
Discussions: For the appropriate class sessions you will submit, via email at least an hour in advance of the class meeting, notes you have prepared. I will edit and post your notes to the class website. The purpose of posting your notes is to organize class discussions. These will count towards your final grade, primarily as evidence of your preparation. I will call upon students in class to comment further on notes they have submitted. This means that, when I call upon you during the discussion, it is because I believe you have something to contribute.
Essays: You will write two brief essays (4-6 pages) over the course of the semester plus a final project of your own design. We will use each essay as a way of pulling together some of the central themes of the course. You may, if you wish, submit drafts for preliminary evaluation. The themes you will treat will be "major." The size of the essay will not be. We are going for quality, not quantity.
Oral reports will be a regular feature of this course. They should be 10-12 minutes long. They should be detailed. Usually the report will be a narrative, taking a "here's what happened" approach. You need not limit yourself to using the materials I provide on the topic. If you decide to use a search engine in your hunt for additional information, you should consult "Surfing and Searching On-line: Some Suggestions" You can do your reports as a PowerPoint presentations. Working Together: You are encouraged to collaborate with other students on any of the work assigned in this course. The benefits of classroom discussion can be greatly increased if you also discuss course materials outside class. On the other hand, you may not submit another student's work as your own OR permit another to use your work. This constitutes plagiarism, the use of someone else's work without crediting that person. It is a form of cheating. We will follow college policy in handling cases of suspected plagiarism.
Grades: Your final semester grade will be based on ALL of the work you do over the course of the semester. Submitted class notes will count for 40%; oral reports will count for 30%; the essays will count for 30%. This adds up to 110%. I will discount your lowest grade.
E! — Mistakes You Must Not Make
Disabilities: Any student with a learning or other disability that necessitates special treatment, e.g., extra time for completing assignments, should contact the instructor as soon as possible so that we can work out the necessary arrangements.
Outcomes: Students completing this course should:
- Be familiar with the individuals, events, and developments that created the contexts for modern European and American history
- Understand some of the principal ways that historians have attempted to analyze these individuals, events, and developments
- Demonstrate some familiarity with historical methodology
- Demonstrate some acquaintance with the variety of materials historians use
- Have begun to develop an interpretative framework for understanding modern European and American history; this requires some understanding of major interpretive approaches to that history
Musical Theme: "Living in the Past," from A Classic Case (1985); the London Symphony Orchestra, featuring Ian Anderson, plays the music of Jethro Tull — Jethro Tull is a British rock group whose biggest hit was "Aqualung." Jethro Tull has sold over 60 million albums and CDs over a 40+ year career. The band took its name from the English inventor (1674-1741) of the seed drill. Over the years they have played almost every sort of music. Your instructor's personal favorite is "Too Old to Rock 'n Roll, Too Young to Die." Here are the lyrics to "Living in the Past":
Happy and I'm smiling,
walk a mile to drink your water.
You know I'd love to love you,
and above you there's no other.
We'll go walking out
while others shout of war's disaster.
Oh, we won't give in,
let's go living in the past.Once I used to join in
every boy and girl was my friend.
Now there's revolution, but they don't know
what they're fighting.
Let us close out eyes;
outside their lives go on much faster.
Oh, we won't give in,
we'll keep living in the past.
Class Schedule:
Jan. 19: Introduction to course: the "urgent demands" of the age; we will begin, and end, the course with this passage:
Romanticism being relatively near to us, its internal divisions loom larger, more radical than those of the Renaissance. And if one asks why in the face of such divisions, one speaks of unity at all, the answer for all periods is that the ultimate unifying force of an age is its predicaments: the urgent demands, the obstacles to social peace or progress, . . . things that alert minds cannot ignore; every living thinker or artist works to fulfill these calls or deny them in some way. The ways differ but converge on the challenge. — Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 466-7
It is easy to state the "urgent demands" of the 19th century. They arose out of the liberal revolutions in France and America, on the one hand, and the social and economic transformations triggered by industrialization, on the other. What is difficult is making sense of the myriad ways people sought to "fulfill these calls or deny them in some way." That will be our challenge for the first half or so of this course.
The nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of the modern age in which we continue to live. Had Julius Caesar somehow found himself in Boston or Paris or London in 1815, he would have had comparatively little difficulty in adjusting to his new world. There would have been plenty of people, almost all of them men, who knew enough Latin for him to communicate. Indeed they would have learned Latin by studying his Gallic Wars. His knowledge of canal building and civil engineering would have guaranteed him lucrative employment. In fact, Caesar would have known more about these subjects than anyone he met. There were no chariots, but Caesar would have found driving a carriage sufficiently similar so that he probably would not have needed much practice. The republican government in the United States would have been most familiar. It was based, to some considerable extent, on the Roman Republic he had overthrown. Napoleon, recently defeated, had consciously modelled himself and his empire upon Caesar and the Roman Empire. He would have been pleased to note that the Austro-Hungarian and Russian emperors used his name (Kaiser, Tsar) as their official title. The British government would have been puzzling, a hybrid of monarchy and republic, but Caesar would have had enough familiarity with government in general to make sense of it. After all, he had maintained the form of the Republic even as he installed himself as emperor. The religion would have been strange, but he had often encountered new religions during his military campaigns. About the only really significant thing Caesar would not have understood immediately, aside from mechanical clocks and water-driven looms, was the steam engine. It was different from anything he had ever known, and better. But he wouldn't have seen any in Boston and perhaps not in Paris or London. The engines were used largely in the mines. The principal source of power until the railroad revolution was well underway was water. Caesar understood how that worked and, given his superior knowledge about building and sealing canals, could have improved upon most of the mill races he would have encountered.
Plunk Caesar down in 1914, and he would have been at a complete loss. There would still have been plenty of people who understood Latin, including lots of women. But nothing he knew how to do, from leading troops to building roads, would have been of any use in this new world. Chariot driving would have given him no insight into the automobile. He would have had no idea what an internal combustion engine was. Equally astonishing would have been the railroads and trolleys. People routinely travelled distances in hours that had taken him, and the people of 1815, weeks. And they communicated instantaneously over telegraph and telephone wires, utilizing some force he had never heard of, electricity, which was, it turns out, the same as lightning! There was also a brand new contraption called radio. And moving pictures. And the aeroplane. The people of 1914 had an infinitude of tools, or so it would have seemed. And they used them to create a seeming infinitude of new products, many of them creature comforts, which they manufactured in huge factories.
This imaginary exercise yields a simple — and profoundly important — fact: For the first time in human experience, change had become the norm. As it did, human expectations underwent a revolution of which we are the heirs. We no longer anticipate we will live lives just like those of our parents. Indeed we are quite sure that we will not.
It is this expectation of change and of our having some role in shaping that change that constitutes modernity.
Prologue: The French and Industrial Revolutions
Jacques-Louis David's heroic image of Napoleon
Ludvig von Beethoven shared in the initial adulation of Napoleon. The "Eroica" symphony, his Third, was originally dedicated to Napoleon who presented himself to reformers in other countries as a visionary and a liberator. Napoleon's decision to make himself Emperor disillusioned Beethoven. Beethoven himself created a new type of hero, the musical genius who insisted upon complete silence from his audience before he would consent to play. Previously audience members made no concessions to the performer but wandered about, talked and laughed, and in other ways manifested their indifference to the music. Not after Beethoven! He was a great transitional figure, a student of Haydn and Mozart (very briefly), who took the so-called Classical Style and transformed it into Romanticism. At the heart of the Classical Style was a commitment to formal perfection. One can listen to any piece by Mozart and be stuck by its symmetry and balance. There is great emotional depth, but it is, as Wordsworth said of poetry, "emotion recollected in tranquility." Beethoven sought to convey the immediacy of feeling. Hence he abandoned some of the Classical rules of composition, increased the volume of sound (by increasing the size of the orchestra, for example), heightened the contrasts between high and low notes and soft and loud ones. He also developed the notion that symphonies should end in great crescendos.
After Beethoven composers would come to regard writing a symphony as a towering achievement. Beethoven had written only nine. Few indeed would dare write a tenth! Brahms, for example, wrote four (although some musicologists argue that his two piano concertos are really symphonies in disguise). Mahler attempted to write a Tenth but died before completing it. Mozart, in contrast, wrote almost fifty and Haydn over a hundred. Click on the image of Beethoven at his piano to learn more.
Some Themes for this segment of the course:
As the nineteenth century began, two important sources of change were already under way: the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The first was political and social in nature and its influence spread to Europe generally. The second, which began in Great Britain, was economic in nature and would have a sweeping effect first on the western world and then the entire globe. We will examine the convergence of liberal political and economic institutions, championed by the French Revolutionaries and partially institutionalized by Napoleon, with the social and economic changes unleashed by industrialization.Both the pace and the scope of change was unprecedented and posed the sort of "urgent demands" of which Barzun writes. Societies had to adjust to rapid urbanization, to the movement of vast numbers in and out of cities and then countries, to the transformation of the nature of work, to a new sense of time, and to revolutions in transportation and communication.
Since these changes were both profound and unprecedented, the past provided no reliable guide. In addition, the ongoing process of SECULARIZATION continued to undermine popular respect for tradition and for religious institutions, especially established churches, i.e., those officially supported by the state.
Nation states found themselves addressing imperative problems, as a result, even as the supports for their legitimacy weakened. Tradition had been a support. So had been the church. Both could become liabilities in the face of the rise of new conditions and expectations. Among the most critical of the problems were demands by "the masses" to participate as equals in the political process. The demands rested upon the republican principles embedded in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Yet, those priniciples grew out of a view of the state as resting upon a "contract," the whole point of which was to secure property. Rights, in this scheme of things, are themselves forms of property. How can those without property possess rights?
The French Revolution involved not only the form of government (royal absolutism vs. constitutional monarchism vs. republicanism vs the Napoleonic Empire) but also the economic and social positions of various classes (aristocracy, middle class, workers, peasants). According to Alexis de Tocqueville's The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, the Revolution sought to overthrow privilege. It eliminated the aristocracy, made the Church subservient to the state, and took away the Church's historic rights and exemptions; it nullified feudal duties. It left private property intact, however, as that was the basis of liberal economics, aka capitalism. However, as Tocqueville observed, private property was itself the single greatest source of privilege. Thus the Revolution left unresolved, he maintained, the great question of the nineteenth century: Could civil equality coexist with private property? Tocqueville and the great majority of his contemporaries in Europe assumed that the answer was "No." Karl Marx and Prussian (later German) Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck thought the answer was "Yes." They had diametrically opposing reasons for that answer, however.
The French Revolution created intense opposition at home, which in turn led to widespread violence as various factions contended for control of the state. The Revolution was also strongly opposed by the monarchs and aristocrats who controlled the rest of Europe. The Catholic Church also turned into an enemy when the Revolution attacked its traditional role in France. These conflicts led to a series of military contests between 1792 and 18l5.In their nationalistic fervor, the Revolutionaries created a cult of the state which Napoleon later exploited to support his own goals, using authoritarian government to sponsor middle-class reforms where wealth and merit replaced birth (heredity) as the primary criteria for attaining power.
The defeat of Napoleon and the convening of the Congress of Vienna marked the end of the French Revolutionary movement and of the period of Napoleonic reforms, or so contemporaries believed. 1815 also signaled a wave of reaction that attempted to restore the monarchial and aristocratic principles of the Ancien Regime. Reaction would provoke new revolutionary movements; new revolutionary "moments" in 1830 and 1848 would provoke new waves of reaction. Another way of restating Tocqueville's question is: Could European states find a way out of this cycle of repression and revolution?We will start with Great Britain. It emerged from the Napoleonic Wars not just victorious but triumphant. Its empire was intact. Its economy was rapidly industrializing; no other country could make that claim. Its navy ruled the waves and its industries were poised to exploit the emerging global markets its maritime supremacy and vast empire made possible. Its banks and insurance companies, its merchants and manufacturers, were all ready to exploit the possibilities of peace after a quarter century of war. Where Britain led, other nations HAD to follow. Otherwise they would become grist for the British mill. This is another of those "urgent demands." Once Britain achieved a certain level of industrialization, it also attained levels of wealth and power that made it capable of imposing its will on other states and societies. They, in turn, faced the choice of copying Britain or falling under its sphere of influence. Some would be able to copy: France, the United States, a newly unified Germany in the latter half of the century, Japan. Others would seek to copy but fall short. Russia is a case in point. Still others would seek to reject "western" influences and models. The so-called SEPOY MUTINY (1857-58) in India and the "Boxer Rebellion" in China are examples. Responses to westernizing imperialists varied, but everyone everywhere HAD to face this imperative.
There is another reason for beginning with Britain. If, in addition to industrialization, the great engine of change was the impact of the French Revolution, Britain is a fascinating case in which to study that impact. Britain, after all, led the coalition to defeat France. Yet, no sooner had peace been achieved, than British workers began making demands couched in the language of the French Revolution. Their prophet was Tom Paine; their Bible was his The Rights of Man, written in defense of the French Revolution. Even in the country which did the most to defeat France, French revolutionary ideals burned brightly. They had emerged in pre-industrial America and France. Here then is another "urgent demand": How well would these democratic ideals "fit" the aspirations of industrial workers? The Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s thought that universal manhood suffrage would enable the working class to improve their living and working conditions. The revolutionaries in Paris in 1830 and again in 1848 thought so as well. So too did those, like Thomas Babington Macauley in England and Alexis de Tocqueville in France, who opposed universal suffrage. Karl Marx argued that workers had to move beyond Thomas Paine and The Rights of Man. Hence The Communist Manifesto, written in the revolutionary year of 1848.
The social consequences of the Industrial Revolution were considerable. There was a dramatic growth and shift in population to new urban centers that lacked the basic services such as water, sewers, police and fire protection, and adequate housing needed by the new hordes of people who instead crammed into slum dwellings. Crime and poverty proliferated. (For excerpts from an 1842 report on sanitary conditions in industrial Britain, from the "Victorian Web," click here.)
Industrial labor posed its own new hazards. Children of both sexes, for example, worked in mines. It would take generations for the practice to be outlawed and for other safety measures to become mandatory. (For excerpts from a Parliamentary investigation in 1842, also part of Brown University's "Victorian Web" site, click here.) Societies had to learn from experience how to cope with industrialization and its associated changes.
Hurriers, so-called because they were to move the coal to the top of the shaft as quickly as possible since miners were paid by the ton, typically were children. Often they were as young as six. The narrow shafts required small bodies. The weight of the coal, relative to the size of the children, led to the practice depicted here. One child in harness pulled; two or more behind the cart pushed.
What is the price of experience? This will be our question for the first half of this semester.
| William Blake, The Price of Experience (1797) What is the price of experience? do men buy it
for a song? It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's
sun It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,
Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten,
and the slave grinding at the mill, |
Industrialization enormously increased the amount of wealth in Britain and, by the end of the nineteenth century, permitted an improved standard of living for a substantial majority of its citizens. This was true of other industrializing countries as well. In the short to middle term, however, conditions may well have deteriorated for millions. Historians disagree over the impact of industrialization over the first several generations. This is the "standard of living" question. Several factors complicate the debate. One is the absence of adequate data, especially for the early period. Another is that some of the changes, such as impact of inadequate sanitation, do not lend themselves readily to quantitative analysis. One is left with very broad measures, such as number of deaths per thousand, which reflect many other factors. There is a good set of primary sources dealing with the conditions of 19th industrial workers and their families, 1815-1872, at Brown University's Victorian Web.
Industrialization altered the distribution as well as the amount of wealth. It created:
(1) a class of manufacturers, some of whom acquired fortunes rivalling or exceeding those of the greatest nobles;
(2) a much larger group of middle-class managers, accountants, engineers, and the like who commanded salaries that enabled them to live fairly comfortably. The measure of middle-class comfort was the ability to employ domestic servants. Below this middle class was
(3) a lower-middle-class army of clerks and other white-collar functionaries and their families who struggled just to maintain a "shabby gentility."
(4) Below them came the working class, led by the mechanics, blacksmiths, and other skilled workers and their families. The wages of skilled artisans were comparable to those earned by the clerks, but they lacked the opportunities for promotion that redeemed the clerk's position for some. They were also at the mercy of the business cycle to a greater degree than white-collar workers. Below the ranks of the skilled and semi-skilled were
(5) domestic servants, many of whom "lived in" with the families they served. On call at all hours, paid little, subject to sexual and other forms of harassment, servants nonetheless had the security of steady employment, plentiful food, and a warm bed. Near the bottom were
(6) the unskilled working families, both urban and rural, who constituted a majority of the whole population. Unable to make ends meet on the father's wages even in good times, they fell into real destitution when bad times or industrial accidents or some other misfortune reduced their income. Those without steady work formed the group Karl Marx referred to as the "industrial reserve army," available to take any unskilled job at any moment. This industrial reserve army was the "whip hand" of the bourgeoisie (capitalists), Marx maintained, since it enabled them to dispense with a worker without concern about finding a replacement.William Blake, the great poet and artist, wrote of this poorest class in his Songs of Experience. For more, visit The William Blake Archive sponsored by the Library of Congress at the University of Virginia. The illustration comes from the Blake Digital TextProject.
London
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hearHow the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier's sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace wallsBut most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearseAndrew Ure became a leading apologist for the new industrial order; you can read excerpts from his work, courtesy of Fordham's Modern History Source Book, here. Frederich Engels, later famous as Karl Marx's colleague and collaborator, wrote a deservedly acclaimed description of The Condition of the English Working Class, excerpted (also thanks to the Modern History Source Book) here.
How would Britain cope with all of these changes? In particular, how would its aristocrat-dominated government respond to political and economic challenges to the status quo? Initially, popular demonstrations and movements seeking relief from economic grievances were brutally suppressed by the new Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, aka the "Iron Duke," hero of the Napoleonic Wars.
British caricaturist and social critic George Cruikshank drew this nigthmarish image of "Social Reform" menacing the rich and powerful in 1819 to satirize conservative fears of change. It was a response to the Peterloo Massacre of that year in which the cavalry charged a peaceful workers' meeting at St. Peter's Fields in Manchester. "I'm coming! I'm coming! I shall have you!" the monster cries. "And though I'm at your heels now, I'll be at your heads presently." Readings and Resources:
The Factory Movement at The Peel Web
William Cobbett: Rural Rides,"Reigate, Thursday evening, 20 October 1825"
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859): Speech On The Reform Bill of 1832, March 2, 1831
The Reform Bill Crisis, The Swing Riots, The Poor Law "Reform," The Debate over the Corn Laws, The Factory Movement, and Chartism, all at The Peel Web created by Marjie BloyPrepare and submit one hour in advance of the class meeting notes: Using The Factory Movement at the Peel Web (look under "Popular Movements" and William Cobbett: Rural Rides Reigate, Thursday evening, 20 October 1825" as evidence, select two features of working-class life and two features of rural life that posed "urgent" challenges for Great Britain. Cite specific passages to document your choices.
Another cartoon by George Cruikshank, criticizing the Cabinet Ministers who suspended Habeas Corpus (the right to be confronted by the evidence against you) in 1817 and attempted to stifle the Radical Press after an attack on the Regent (the adult guardian of the juvenile monarch). In this drawing he used the image of a printing press, usually a symbol of free expression, but here changed into a scaffold where Liberty has been hanged.
Jan. 21: discussion of urban and rural "urgent demands"; introduction to "reform" in Britain.
Given the tendency of British conservatives to see every "reform" proposal as opening the floodgates of revolution on the French model, so strikingly illustrated by Cruikshank's 1819 cartoon, by Luddism, and by the Peterloo Massacre, we need to make sense of the ways in which important sectors of political leadership in Great Britain turned to "reform" to forestall revolution. Reform took several forms: a new Poor Law, legislation regulating conditions in factories and mines, and a Bill to "reform" Parliament to make it more representative in the American sense and to widen the franchise. Rural unrest (The Swing Riots), Factory Reform/now the Debate over Child Labor, and the new Poor Law will constitute the first set of oral reports.
Jan. 26: I learned over the weekend, thanks to Akil Hodge, that the Peel Web was down. As a result, I have had to improvise and find suitable materials. My apologies for the inconvenience. Oral reports on the Swing Riots (start here; then click on external links for Dorset, Burbage, and Berkshire; then look at the image results for Swing Riots on Google), Factory Reform/now the Debate over Child Labor, and the new Poor Law (read the Introduction; look through the primary sources; choose several primary sources for your report; read as much of the other materials as you need to in order to make some sense of the topic). Submit one hour in advance of the class meeting notes that you intend to use in making your report. These notes should include specific passages from specific primary materials. Notes should indicate what is interesting, informative, confusing about the evidence. You do NOT have to pretend that everything about your topic makes perfect sense to you. You are simply formulating some tentative guesses about the topic. Make sure to consult the instructions regarding oral reports above.
Introduction to the Reform Bill Crisis
Jan. 28: Discussion of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859): Speech On The Reform Bill of 1832, March 2, 1831:
. . . Is it possible that gentlemen long versed in high political affairs cannot read these signs? Is it possible that they can really believe that the representative system of England, such as it now is, will last till the year 1860? If not, for what would they have us wait? Would they have us wait merely that we may show to all the world how little we have profited by our own recent experience? Would they have us wait that we may once again hit the exact point where we can neither refuse with authority nor concede with grace? Would they have us wait that the numbers of the discontented party may become larger, its demands higher, its feelings more acrimonious, its organisation more complete? Would they have us wait till the whole tragi-comedy of 1827 has been acted over again — till they have been brought into office by a cry of "No Reform!" to be reformers, as they were once before brought into office by a cry of "No Popery!" to be emancipators? Have they obliterated from their minds — gladly, perhaps, would some among them obliterate from their minds — the transactions of that year? And have they forgotten all the transactions of the succeeding year? Have they forgotten how the spirit of liberty in Ireland, debarred from its natural outlet, found a vent by forbidden passages? Have they forgotten how we were forced to indulge the Catholics in all the license of rebels, merely because we chose to withhold from them the liberties of subjects? Do they wait for associations more formidable than that of the Corn Exchange, for contributions larger than the rent — for agitators more violent than those who, three years ago, divided, with the King and the Parliament, the sovereignty of Ireland? Do they wait for that last and most dreadful paroxysm of popular rage — for that last and most cruel test of military fidelity? Let them wait, if their past experience shall induce them to think that any high honour or any exquisite pleasure is to be obtained by a policy like this. Let them wait, if this strange and fearful infatuation be indeed upon them, that they should not see with their eyes, or hear with their ears, or understand with their heart.
So Macaulay said. The "tragi-comedy of 1827" is a reference to the Catholic Emancipation question. The Tories (the landed interests) carried the Parliamentary election on the promise that they would not give an inch on Catholic demands in Ireland. By refusing to make concessions, Macaulay argued, they put themselves in the position where they ultimately had no choice but to give in to the Catholic Irish. We have not examined Catholic emancipation; the Church had been outlawed in Ireland, Catholics could not own land or hold public office or attend university. In 1828 the English gave way on all of these and several other restrictions.
We will use this remark on "the price of experience" as a way of summing up this segment of the course. Use specific incidents from the materials you have been working with to annotate this passage. That is, choose two or three events, other than Catholic Emancipation, briefly describe what those events were, and then explain why Macaulay might see them as potentially culminating in revolution, "that last and most dreadful paroxysm of popular rage — . . . that last and most cruel test of military fidelity."
Introduction to Romanticism, Revolution, and Reform
The visionary young man at left is Hector Berlioz. He composed the "Symphonie Fantastique," one of the most controversial pieces of the Romantic Era. It is a musical setting to his dream/nightmare of falling in love with an English actress named Harriet Smithson whom he saw in the role of Ophelia. Berlioz, then aged twenty-four, had immediately proposed marriage upon being introduced. She declined. He went off, wrote the "Symphonie," and she relented and agreed to marry him. They did not, apparently, live happily ever after. For more, including the program notes Berlioz himself prepared for the premier performance, click on the portrait. What made the work so controversial, in addition to its confessional nature, were its total disregard for classical form -- there are five movements instead of the traditional four — and its incorporation of sacred themes, particularly the Dies Irae, into a "witches' Sabbath." Was this an act of desecration? Not a few of Berlioz's contemporaries thought it was.
One of the most interesting artists of the period was J.M.W. Turner. Above is his "Rain, Steam, and Speed" of 1844. As Jacques Barzun commented, he "occupied the ambiguous position of the strangely talented who fail to please current taste. . . .Turner's transmutation of actual scenes into sunbursts of pigment, grand designs of light and color, startled their viewers looking for hard outlines and human figures." (From Dawn to Decadence, pp. 512-13) Simon Wilson of the Tate Gallery in London, where many of Turner's paintings are on display, wrote:
In the sumptuous style that reached its height in the mid 1830s, the material of nature was translated into resounding chords of colour. Then . . . specific colour gradually dissolved into a general medium of vision, like a bright vapour - the hue of lucent air. There is rarely any doubt about the things represented, but they are formed out of a common elemental medium that washes over and through them.
. . . delicate films of oil paint float transparently over the white ground like washes of watercolour on paper, and the last traces of the eighteenth-century hierarchy of artistic values have been overthrown."
You can find more of Wilson's discussion along with numerous reproductions at Mark Harden's Artchive.
A floodtide of demands for reform and revolution was engulfing Europe by 1830. Early indications of such change had been seen when the Greeks sought their independence from the Turks in 1821, in the German student uprisings in 1817, and in the riots that led to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, England.
In France, which was the original European home of the liberal revolutionary tradition, politicians struggled throughout the nineteenth century to determine the meaning of the 1789 revolution. Indeed Tocqueville would write in the wake of the 1848 upheavals that the revolution had still not ended. The victorious powers in 1815 thought they had ended it. Then, in 1830, the bourgeoisie felt that, by installing Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King," they had ended it. And now, circa 1851, he continued, there were many who felt that Napoleon III had, with the Second Empire, brought the revolution to a end. Not so, Tocqueville argued — correctly as events would prove. Nineteenth-century French politics pivoted on the matter of the revolution. Some, including members of the old nobility and the Catholic Church, remained steadfastly opposed to anything associated with it. Others, including some members of these same groups along with the upper bourgeoisie, many civil servants, and substantial numbers of small farmers wanted a constitutional monarchy more or less like Great Britain's. Other Frenchmen, especially those in the urban working classes and the shopkeepers, favored a republic. These last would lead a popular uprising in July of 1830, then two more in 1848, and still another in 1871.
Above is Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" in the Revolution of 1830, a highly romantic depiction, despite the dead bodies. Delacroix painted himself in the top hat, determinedly fighting for liberty. The mix of hats was intended to show that the revolution was a rising of "the people" and not simply of a single class. This too is highly romantic.
In 1815, the Congress of Vienna, representing the victorious powers that defeated Napoleon (England, the Austrian Empire, Prussia, and Russia) restored a Bourbon, Louis XVIII, the grandson of the last king, Louis XVI, to the French throne. It did not take long for some of the French people to rebel against repressive rule. In the Revolution of 1830 the French repudiated Louis' successor, his brother the reactionary Charles X, who had refused to accept the results of a popular election and sought to further reduce the number of those eligible to vote. But the middle classes were not ready to resort to republicanism. Choosing a moderate course, they substituted the "Citizen King," Louis Philippe, a member of the House of Orleans, a rival to the Bourbon dynasty. Monarchy was retained, but it had a middle-class look about it.
It is instructive to compare Delacroix's painting with a contemporary drawing showing women at a barricade in Paris during the "June Days" of 1848. Is it a case of life imitating art? Or of art imitating art? For a discussion of Delacroix as well as a selection of his paintings, visit Mark Harden's Artchive.
Feb. 2: Read Jacques Barzun, "The Work of Mind-And-Heart" and "A BROTHERHOOD OF REALISM AND ROMANCE - THE PRE-RAPHAELITES" by Richard Moss and then visit The Pre-Raphaelites site where you can find larger images of the Brotherhood's work — we will create our own gallery of images. Choose two or three works you find especially striking and write a brief label for each, i.e., 100 words or so that will inform a visitor to our gallery the title, date, and artist + whatever other information you think relevant. Next, add one or two paragraphs on how reading Barzun deepened, complicated, and/or confused your understanding of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Feb. 4: Read Barzun, "Cross Section: The View from Paris Around 1830" and McClymer, "Creating an American Art." Submit responses to the following:
- What sorts of "urgent demands" did American writers and other artists think they were grappling with?
- Historians and other scholars routinely label them "romantics," although they had little or nothing in common with the Pre-Raphaelites. Do you find the label appropriate? misleading? irrelevant?
- How does Barzun's discussion deepen, complicate and.or confuse your understanding of pre-Civil War American art?
Feb. 9->: By the Reform Act of 1832 the British aristocracy decided to share political power with the propertied middle class. This tactic effectively split the middle classes away from the demands for universal manhood suffrage. For Charles Dickens' description of an election after the Reform, click here. A succession of other reforms — ranging from factory inspection to the repeal of the hated Corn Laws in 1846 — demonstrated that the British political system was flexible enough to cope with the social and economic challenges posed by industrialization. British reform did not extend to universal suffrage, despite the enormous size of the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, until 1867. Britain was nonetheless responsive enough, many historians argue, to working-class demands to spare Britain from the wave of revolutionary agitation that swept much of Europe in 1848. We can perhaps see this most clearly by contrasting the failure of Chartism with the success of the campaign to repeal the Corn Laws. We will divvy up the two sets of materials.
Annotate either the Chartism chronology or that for the Anti-Corn Law campaign. More specifically, choose 4 events that strike you as having unusual importance and briefly state your reasons in each case. Submit one hour in advance of the class meeting notes explaining your choices. Then choose relevant primary sources for each event, which seem to you most important for making sense of your topic. Briefly describe the source and explain why you think it so important.
Feb. 11: Submit detailed notes on either why Chartism did not succeed or why the Anti-Corn Law agitation did. Begin with the "predicaments: the urgent demands, the obstacles to social peace or progress, . . . things that alert minds cannot ignore" to which Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law agitation sought to respond. How did each movement define those predicaments? Do those differing definitions help explain their different strategies? Their success or lack thereof?
Introduction to Reform and Reaction in France and Germany, 1830-1848
Honoré Daumier's romantic "The Uprising," circa 1848, an idealization of the ongoing French revolutionary tradition that re-emerged in 1830, 1848, and 1871
Some Themes:
In Prussia and Austria moderate middle-class demands for a share in governance, partially accommodated in England and France by the early 1830s, were rejected. Freedom of the press, academic freedom in the universities, and political dissent were outlawed. Even more frightening to conservative princes than liberal reforms was the nationalist cry for ethnic unity and independence, which they correctly associated with the French Revolution and thus (incorrectly) with liberalism. The new notion, that each "people" had a right to form a state of their own, directly threatened multi-national empires such as Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Pressures for change increased down to 1848, with the demand for parliamentary institutions, the elimination of aristocratic privilege, and economic progress commingling with calls for ethnic unity and national independence.
By 1848 radical frustration with the "bourgeois" monarchy reached a climax in France. At left is a famous Daumier cartoon showing Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King" who took office as a result of the July 1830 uprising, metamorphosing into a pear. It nicely captured his loss of prestige in the years leading up to 1848. Daumier played a key role in this process. There is a major collection of his lithographs at Brandeis. Click on the Search feature and type in Louis Philippe. You will get over 150 lithographs. Choose two or three with the pear motif. As you will quickly see, Daumier found any number of ways of incorporating the pear motif.
Submit one hour in advance of the class meeting of February 16th notes explaining your choices. Make sure your notes refer to Barzun's "The Mother of Parliaments."
In 1848, in France and then elsewhere in Europe, revolutions broke out which briefly turned authoritarian regimes into republics or constitutional monarchies. Take a look at this chronology of revolution in France, the Austrian Empire, Germany, and Italy. You can find several useful, brief documents associated with the early days of the Second French Republic here. We will study the upheavals in France and Germany via Mass Politics and the Revolutions of 1848, a site created by John Breuilly. This is a very large site. We will use it selectively.
Why Germany and France? France, because events there shaped how Europeans and Americans understood questions of property, political rights, and revolution. Germany, because out of the failures of the 1848 revolution would come a German Empire which would quickly become the most powerful state on the continent and which would twice attempt to achieve continental domination in the twentieth century.
Readings/Resources:
Mass Politics and the Revolutions of 1848
Annotated and excerpted version of the Communist ManifestoFeb. 16: Discussion of Daumier lithographs; introduction to 1848 and the Mass Politics and the Revolutions of 1848 site. We will break into groups and determine how to divvy up responsibility for oral reports on the revolutions in France and Germany.
Feb. 18: Reports on the "February Days" in France and the rise of the Provisional Government; March in Berlin; the "June Days" in France. Submit one hour in advance of the class meeting notes that you intend to use in making your report.
Feb. 23: Reports on Louis Napoleon and the coup d'etat, counter-revolution and the triumph of conservatism. Submit one hour in advance of the class meeting notes that you intend to use in making your report.
