{"id":82,"date":"2023-03-24T05:26:53","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T09:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/chapter\/chapter-10-the-politics-of-the-nineteenth-century\/"},"modified":"2025-06-29T21:30:35","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T01:30:35","slug":"chapter-10-the-politics-of-the-nineteenth-century","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/chapter\/chapter-10-the-politics-of-the-nineteenth-century\/","title":{"raw":"Chapter 10: Political Ideologies and Movements","rendered":"Chapter 10: Political Ideologies and Movements"},"content":{"raw":"<h2 id=\"h.3fwokq0\" class=\"c24\"><span class=\"c22\">10.1 After the Revolution<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars profoundly shook Europe. \u00a0The French Revolution was seen by the European great powers as both threatening and, as it progressed and radicalized, morally repulsive, but at least it had largely stayed confined to France. From the perspective of elites, Napoleon's conquests were even worse because everywhere the French armies went the traditional order of society was overturned. \u00a0France may have been the greatest economic beneficiary, but Napoleon's Italian, German, and Polish subjects (among others) also had their first taste of a society in which one's status was not defined by birth. The kings and nobles of Europe had good cause to fear that the way of life they presided over, a social order that had lasted for roughly 1,000 years, was disintegrating in the course of a generation.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">Thus, after Napoleon's defeat, there had to be a reckoning. \u00a0Only the most stubborn monarch or noble thought it possible to completely undo the Revolution and its effects, but there was a shared desire among the traditional elites to re-establish stability and order based on the political system that had worked in the past. \u00a0They knew that there would have to be <span class=\"c4\">some<\/span><span class=\"c3\">\u00a0concessions to a generation of people who had lived with equality under the law, but they worked to reinforce traditional political structures while only granting limited compromises.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--examples\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Terms for Identification<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">Conservatism<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Suffrage<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Joseph de Maistre<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Arthur de Gobineau<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">Racial Hierarchy <\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Brothers Grimm<\/li>\r\n \t<li>\"Inventing Traditions\"<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">Romantic nationalism<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>National identity<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">Romanticism<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">Liberalism<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Socialism vs Individualism<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Utopian Socialism<\/li>\r\n \t<li>State Socialism<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">Anarchist Socialism<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Karl Marx<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c4\">The Communist Manifesto<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Bourgeoisie<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Proletariat<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2 id=\"h.1v1yuxt\" class=\"c24\"><span class=\"c22\">10.2 Conservatism<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">That being noted, how did elites understand their own role in society? \u00a0How did they justify the power of kings and nobles over the majority of the population? \u00a0This was not just about wealth, after all, since there were many non-noble merchants who were as rich, or richer, than many nobles. \u00a0Nor was it viable for most nobles to claim that their rights were logically derived from their mastery of warfare, since only a small percentage of noblemen served in royal armies (and those that did were not necessarily very good officers!). \u00a0Instead, European elites at the time explained their own social role in terms of peace, tradition, and stability. \u00a0Their ideology came to be called conservatism: the idea that what had worked for centuries was inherently better at keeping the peace both within and between kingdoms than were the forces unleashed by the French Revolution.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\"><strong>Conservatism<\/strong> held that the old traditions of rule were the best and most desirable principles of government, having proven themselves relatively stable and successful over the course of 1,000 years of European history. It was totally opposed to the idea of universal legal equality, let alone of <strong>suffrage<\/strong> (i.e. voting rights), and it basically amounted to an attempt to maintain a legal political hierarchy to go along with the existing social and economic hierarchy of European society.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">The fundamental argument of conservatism was that the French Revolution and Napoleon had already proved that too much change and innovation in politics was <span class=\"c4\">inherently <\/span>destructive. \u00a0According to conservatives, the French Revolution had started out, in its moderate phase, by arguing for the primacy of the common people, but it quickly and inevitably spun out of control. During the Terror, the king and queen were beheaded, French society was riven with bloody conflict, tens of thousands were guillotined, and the revolutionary government launched a blasphemous crusade against the church. \u00a0Napoleon's takeover - itself a symptom of the anarchy unleashed by the Revolution - led to almost twenty years of war and turmoil across the map of Europe. \u00a0These events <span class=\"c4\">proved<\/span><span class=\"c3\">\u00a0to conservatives that while careful reform might be acceptable, rapid change was not.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"436\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/image68.jpg\" alt=\"Illustration of French revolutionaries with severed heads on the ends of spears.\" width=\"436\" height=\"488\" \/> Images like the above (from the French Revolution) were used by conservatives to illustrate the violence and bloodshed they claimed were an intrinsic part of revolutionary change.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Many conservatives believed that human nature is basically bad, evil, and depraved. The clearest statement of this idea in the early nineteenth century came from <strong>Joseph de Maistre<\/strong>, a conservative French nobleman. De Maistre argued that human beings are not enlightened, not least because (as a staunch Catholic), he believed that all human souls are tainted by original sin. Left unchecked, humans with too much freedom would always indulge in depravity. \u00a0Only the allied forces of a strong monarchy, a strong nobility, and a strong church could hold that inherent evil in check. \u00a0It is worth noting that De Maistre wrote outside of France itself during the revolutionary period, first in the small Italian kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (he was a noble in both France and Piedmont) and then in Russia. \u00a0His message resonated strongly with the arch-conservative Russian Tsar Alexander I in particular.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">A more pragmatic conservative take was exemplified by a British lord, Edmund Burke. He argued that, given the complexity and fragility of the social fabric, only the force of tradition could prevent political chaos. As the French Revolution had demonstrated, gradual reforms had the effect of unleashing a tidal wave of pent-up anger and, more to the point, foolish decisions by people who had no experience of making political decisions. \u00a0In his famous pamphlet <em><span class=\"c4\">Reflections On The Revolution in France<\/span><\/em><span class=\"c3\">, he wrote \"It is said that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand. True; if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic.\" \u00a0To Burke, the common people were a mob of uneducated, inexperienced would-be political decision-makers and had no business trying to influence politics. \u00a0Instead, it was far wiser to keep things in the basic form that had survived for centuries, with minor accommodations as needed. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Burke was an eminently practical, pragmatic political critic. De Maistre\u2019s ideas may have looked back to the social and political thought of past centuries, but Burke was a very grounded and realistic thinker. He simply believed that \u201cthe masses\u201d were the last people one wanted running a government, because they were an uneducated, uncultivated, uncivilized rabble. Meanwhile, the European nobility had been raised for centuries to rule and had developed both cultural traditions and systems of education and training to form leaders. It was a given that not all of them were very good at it, but according to Burke there was simply no comparison between the class of nobles and the class of the mob \u2013 to let the latter rule was to invite disaster. And, of course, conservatives had all of their suspicions confirmed during the Terror, when the whole social order of France was turned upside down in the name of a perfect society (Burke himself was particularly aggrieved by the execution of the French Queen Marie Antoinette, whom he saw as a perfectly innocent victim).<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Early nineteenth-century conservatism at its best was a coherent critique of the violence, warfare, and instability that had accompanied the Revolution and Napoleonic wars. \u00a0In practice, however, conservatism all too often degenerated into the stubborn defense of corrupt, incompetent, or oppressive regimes. \u00a0In turn, despite the practical impossibility of doing so in most cases, there were real attempts on the part of many conservative regimes after the defeat of Napoleon to completely turn back the clock, to try to sweep the reforms of the revolutionary era under the collective rug.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">One additional conservative figure who lived a generation later than Burke and De Maistre deserves particular attention: the French aristocrat <strong>Arthur de Gobineau<\/strong> (1816 - 1882). \u00a0By the time Gobineau was an adult, the earlier versions of conservatism seemed increasingly outdated, especially De Maistre\u2019s theological claims regarding original sin. \u00a0Gobineau chose instead to adopt the language of the prevailing form of intellectual authority of the later nineteenth century: science. From 1853 to 1855 he published a series of volumes collectively entitled <span class=\"c4\">Essay on <em>the Inequality of the Human Races<\/em><\/span><em>.<\/em> \u00a0The <span class=\"c4\">Essay <\/span><span class=\"c3\">claimed that the European nobility had once been an unsullied \u201cpure\u201d example of a superior race rightfully ruling over social inferiors who were born of lesser racial stock. \u00a0Over time, however, the nobility had foolishly mixed with those inferiors, diluting the precious racial characteristics that had sustained noble rule. \u00a0Likewise, by conquering the Americas and parts of Africa and Asia, Europeans as a whole undermined their \u201cpurity\u201d and hence their superiority to non-Europeans.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">The <span class=\"c4\">Essay<\/span><span class=\"c3\">\u2019s power to persuade was in large part because Gobineau claimed that his arguments were \u201cscientific.\u201d \u00a0In debates with his friend and patron Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the major intellectual voices of liberalism, Gobineau asserted that he was merely describing reality by pointing out that some people were racially superior to others. \u00a0Needless to say, Gobineau\u2019s claims were nonsense in terms of actual scientific reality, but by using the language of science Gobineau\u2019s grandiose celebration of <strong>racial hierarchy<\/strong> served to support the authority and wealth of those already in power behind a facade of a \u201cneutral\u201d analysis.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Gobineau\u2019s work was enormously influential over time. \u00a0It would inspire Social Darwinism, a movement that arose later in the nineteenth century that claimed that the lower classes were biologically inferior to the upper classes. \u00a0It would be eagerly taken up by anti-Semites who claimed that Jews were a \u201crace\u201d with inherent, destructive characteristics. \u00a0In the twentieth century it would directly inspire Nazi ideology as well: Hitler himself cited Gobineau in his own musings on racial hierarchy. \u00a0Thus, Gobineau represents a transition in nineteenth-century conservatism, away from the theological and tradition-bound justifications for social hierarchy of a De Maistre or Burke and towards pseudo-scientific claims about the supposed biological superiority of some people over others.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>Who are the main conservative thinkers discussed in this section and what are the similarities and differences between their beliefs?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How is the French Revolution tied to the rise of Conservatism?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What are some of the negative outcomes of the work of Gobineau and why is he significant to later historical developments?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h1 id=\"h.4f1mdlm\" class=\"c62\"><span class=\"c22\">10.3 Ideologies<\/span><\/h1>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Following Napoleon\u2019s final defeat in 1815, conservatives faced the daunting task of not just creating a new political order but in holding in check the political ideologies unleashed during the revolutionary era: liberalism, nationalism, and socialism. \u00a0Enlightenment thinkers had first proposed the ideas of social and legal equality that came to fruition in the American and French Revolutions. \u00a0Likewise, the course of those revolutions along with the work of thinkers, writers, and artists helped create a new concept of <strong>national identity<\/strong> that was poised to take European politics by storm. \u00a0Finally, the political, social, and economic chaos of the turn of the nineteenth century (very much including the Industrial Revolution) created the context out of which socialism emerged.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">An \"ideology\" is a set of beliefs, often having to do with politics. \u00a0What is the purpose of government? \u00a0Who decides the laws? What is just and unjust? \u00a0How should economics function? \u00a0What should be the role of religion in governance? \u00a0What is the legal and social status of men and women? \u00a0All of these kinds of questions have been answered differently from culture to culture since the earliest civilizations. \u00a0In the nineteenth century in Europe, a handful of ideologies came to predominate: conservatism, nationalism, liberalism, and socialism. \u00a0In turn, briefly put, three of those ideologies had one thing in common: they opposed the fourth. \u00a0For the first half of the nineteenth century, socialists, nationalists, and liberals all agreed that the conservative order had to be disrupted or even dismantled entirely, although they disagreed on how that should be accomplished and, more importantly, what should replace it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 id=\"h.3tbugp1\" class=\"c20\"><span class=\"c22\">10.4 Romanticism<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Even before the era of the French Revolution, the seeds of nationalism were planted in the hearts and minds of many Europeans as an aspect of the Romantic movement. \u00a0<strong>Romanticism<\/strong> was not a political movement \u2013 it was a movement of the arts. \u00a0It emerged in the late eighteenth century and came of age in the nineteenth. \u00a0Its central tenet was the idea that there were great, sometimes terrible, and literally \u201cawesome\u201d forces in the universe that exceeded humankind\u2019s rational ability to understand. \u00a0Instead, all that a human being could do was attempt to pay tribute to those forces \u2013 nature, the spirit or soul, the spirit of a people or culture, or even death \u2013 through art.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The central themes of romantic art were, first, a profound reverence for nature. \u00a0To romantics, nature was a vast, overwhelming presence, against which humankind's activities were ultimately insignificant. \u00a0At the same time, romantics celebrated the organic connection between humanity and nature. \u00a0They very often identified peasants as being the people who were \"closest\" to nature. \u00a0In turn, it was the job of the artist (whether a writer, painter, or musician) to somehow gesture at the profound truths of nature and the human spirit. \u00a0 A \"true\" artist was someone who possessed the real spark of creative genius, something that could not be predicted or duplicated through training or education. \u00a0The point of art was to let that genius emanate from the work of art, and the result should be a profound emotional experience for the viewer or listener.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Quite by accident, Romanticism helped plant the seeds of nationalism, thanks to its ties to the folk movement. \u00a0The central idea of the folk movement was that the essential truths of national character had survived among the common people despite the harmful influence of so-called civilization. \u00a0Those folk traditions, from folk songs to fairytales to the remnants of pre-Christian pagan practices, were the \u201ctrue\u201d expression of a national spirit that had, supposedly, laid dormant for centuries. \u00a0By the early eighteenth century, educated elites attracted to Romanticism set out to gather those traditions and preserve them in service to an imagined national identity. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The iconic examples of this phenomenon were the <strong>Brothers Grimm<\/strong>, Jacob and Wilhelm, who were both expert philologists and avid collectors of German folk tales. \u00a0The Brothers Grimm collected dozens of folk (\u201cfairy\u201d) tales and published them in the first definitive collection in German. \u00a0Many of those tales, from Sleeping Beauty to Cinderella, are best known in American culture thanks to their adaptation as animated films by Walt Disney in the twentieth century, but they were famous already by the mid-nineteenth. \u00a0The Brothers Grimm also undertook an enormous project to compile a comprehensive German dictionary, not only containing every German word but detailed etymologies (they did not live to see its completion; the third volume E \u2013 Forsche was published shortly before Jacob\u2019s death).<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Grimm brothers were the quintessential Romantic nationalists. \u00a0Many Romantics like them believed that nations had spirits, which were invested with the core identity of their \u201cpeople.\u201d \u00a0The point of the Grimm brothers' work was reaching back into the remote past to grasp the \"essence\" of what it meant to be \"German.\" \u00a0At the time, there was no country called Germany, and yet romantic nationalists like the Grimms believed that there was a kind of German soul that lived in old folk songs, the German language, and German traditions. \u00a0They worked to preserve those things before they were further \"corrupted\" by the modern world.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">\u00a0In many cases, romantic nationalists did something that historians later called \"<strong>inventing traditions<\/strong>.\" \u00a0One iconic example is the Scottish kilt. \u00a0Scots had worn kilts since the sixteenth century, but there was no such thing as a specific color and pattern of plaid (a \"tartan\") for each family or clan. \u00a0The British government ultimately assigned tartans to a new class of soldier recruited from Scotland: the Highland Regiments, with the wider identification of tartan and clan only emerging in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. \u00a0The point was instilling a nationalist pride in a specific group of military recruits, not celebrating an \u201cauthentic\u201d Scottish tradition. \u00a0Likewise, in some cases folk tales and stories were simply made up in the name of nationalism. \u00a0The great epic story of Finland, the <span class=\"c4\">Kalevala<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, was written by a Finnish intellectual in 1827; it was based on actual Finnish legends, but it had never existed as one long story before.<\/span><\/p>\r\nThe point is not, however, to emphasize the falseness of the folk movement or invented traditions, but to consider <span class=\"c4\">why<\/span><span class=\"c3\">\u00a0people were so intent on discovering (and, if necessary, inventing) them. \u00a0Romanticism was, among other things, the search for stable points of identity in a changing world. \u00a0Likewise, folk traditions - even those that were at least in part invented or adapted - became a way for early nationalists to identify with the culture they now connotated with the nation. \u00a0It is no coincidence that the vogue for kilts in Scotland, ones now identified with clan identity, emerged for the first time in the 1820s rather than earlier. <\/span>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"402\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image70.jpg\" alt=\"Two Scottish highland soldiers in plaid kilts.\" width=\"402\" height=\"600\" \/> British soldiers of the Highland Regiments in government-issued kilts in 1744.[\/caption]\r\n<h2 id=\"h.28h4qwu\" class=\"c53\"><span class=\"c22\">10.5 Nationalism<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\"><strong>Romantic nationalism<\/strong> was an integral part of actual nationalist political movements, movements that emerged in earnest in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. \u00a0Those movements would ultimately succeed in seeing their goals realized almost without exception, although that process took over a century in some cases (as in Poland and Ireland). \u00a0Central to nationalist movements was the concept that the state should correspond to the identity of a \u201cpeople,\u201d although who or what defines the identity of \u201cthe people\u201d proved a vexing issue on many occasions.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">The discussion of nationalism starts with the French Revolution, because more than any other event, it provided the model for all subsequent nationalisms. \u00a0The French revolutionaries declared from the outset that they represented the whole \"nation,\" not just a certain part of it. \u00a0They erased the legal privileges of some (the nobles) over others, they made religion subservient to a secular government, and when threatened by the conservative powers of Europe, they called the whole \"nation\" to arms. \u00a0The revolutionary armies sang a national anthem, the <span class=\"c4\">Marseillaise<\/span>, whose lyrics are as warlike as the American equivalent. \u00a0Central to French national identity in the revolutionary period was fighting for <span class=\"c4\">la patrie<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, the fatherland, in place of the old allegiance to king and church.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The irony of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, however, was that the countries invaded by the French eventually adopted their own nationalist beliefs. The invaded countries turned the democratic French principle of self-determination into a sacred right to defend their own national identities, shaped by their own particular histories, against the universalist pretensions of the French. \u00a0That was reflected in the Spanish revolt that began in 1808, the revival of Austria and Prussia and their struggles of \"liberation\" against Napoleon, Russia's leadership of the anti-Napoleonic coalition that followed, and fierce British pride in their defiance to French military pretensions.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h3 id=\"h.nmf14n\" class=\"c66\"><span class=\"c7\">Nationalisms Across Europe<\/span><\/h3>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">As the Napoleonic wars drew to a close for the first time in 1814, the great powers of Europe convened a gathering of monarchs and diplomats known as the Congress of Vienna, discussed in detail in the next chapter, to deal with the aftermath. \u00a0That meeting lasted months, thanks in part to Napoleon\u2019s inconvenient return from Elba and last stand at Waterloo, but in 1815 it concluded, having rewarded the victorious kingdoms with territorial gains and restored conservative monarchs to the thrones of states like Spain and France itself. \u00a0Nothing could have mattered less to the diplomatic representatives present at the Congress of Vienna than the \u201cnational identity\u201d of the people who lived in the territories that were carved up and distributed like pieces of cake to the victors - the inhabitants of northeastern Italy were now subjects of the Austrian king, the entirety of Poland was divided between Russia and Prussia, and Great Britain remained secure not only in its growing global empire, but in its possession of the entirety of Ireland. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Thus, many of Europe's peoples found themselves without states of their own or in states squeezed between the dominant powers of the time. \u00a0Among the notable examples are the Italians and the Poles. \u00a0Italy had suffered from the domination of one great power or another since the Renaissance; after 1815 it was the Austrians who were in control of much of northern Italy. \u00a0Poland had been partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia in the eighteenth century, simply vanishing from the map in the process. \u00a0Germany, of course, was not united; Prussia and Austria vied with each other for dominance of the German lands, but both were fundamentally conservative powers uninterested in \u201cGerman\u201d unification until later in the century.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">What had changed, however, was that the language of nationalism and the idea of national identity had come into its own by the late Napoleonic period. \u00a0For example, German nationalism was powerful and popular after the Napoleonic wars; in 1817, just two years after the end of the Congress of Vienna, German nationalists gathered in Wartburg where Martin Luther had first translated the Bible into German, waving the black, red, and gold tricolor flag that would (over a century later) become the official flag of the German nation. \u00a0Two years later, a nationalist poet murdered a conservative one, and the Austrian Empire passed laws that severely limited freedom of speech, specifically to contain and restrict the spread of nationalism. \u00a0Despite this effort, and the Austrian secret police, nationalism continued to spread, culminating in a large and self-consciously nationalistic movement seeking German unity.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">The 1830s were a pivotal decade in the spread of nationalism. \u00a0The Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini founded Young Italy in 1831, calling for a \u201cspringtime of peoples\u201d in which the people of each \u201cnation\u201d of Europe would topple conservative monarchs and assert their sovereignty and independence. \u00a0That movement would quickly spread beyond Italy: \"young\" became the rallying word and idea of nationalism. \u00a0In addition to Young Italy, there was a Young Germany and a Young Ireland, among others - the idea was that <span class=\"c4\">all <\/span><span class=\"c3\">people should and would eventually inhabit nations, and that this new \"youthful\" manner of politics would lead to peace and prosperity for everyone. The old, outdated borders abandoned, everyone would live where they were supposed to: in nations governed by their own people. \u00a0Nationalists argued that war itself could be rendered obsolete. \u00a0After all, if each \u201cpeople\u201d lived in \u201ctheir\u201d nation, what would be the point of territorial conflict? \u00a0To the nationalists at the time, the emergence of nations was synonymous with a more perfect future for all.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">Central to the very concept of nationalism in this early, optimistic phase was the identity of \u201cthe people,\u201d a term with powerful political resonance in just about every European language: <span class=\"c4\">das Volk, le peuple, il popolo, <\/span>etc. \u00a0In every case, \"the people\" was thought to be something more important than just \"those people who happen to live here.\" \u00a0Instead, the people were those tied to the soil, with roots reaching back centuries, and who deserve their own government. \u00a0This was a profoundly romantic idea because it spoke to an essentially <span class=\"c4\">emotional <\/span><span class=\"c3\">sense of national identity - a sense of camaraderie and solidarity with individuals with whom a given person might not actually share much in common. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">When scrutinized, the \u201creal\u201d identity of a given \u201cpeople\u201d became more difficult to discern. \u00a0For example, were the Germans people who speak German, or who lived in Central Europe, or who were Lutheran, or Catholic, or who think that their ancestors were from the same area in which they themselves were born? \u00a0If united in a German nation, who would lead it - were the Prussians or the Austrians more authentically German? \u00a0What of those \u201cGermans\u201d who lived in places like Bohemia (i.e. the Czech lands) and Poland, with their own growing sense of national identity? \u00a0The nationalist movements of the first half of the nineteenth century did not need to concern themselves overmuch with these conundrums because their goals of liberation and unification were not yet achievable. \u00a0When national revolutions of various kinds did occur, however, they proved difficult to overcome.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>How are Romanticism and Nationalism connected and what was the impact of these ideologies on political developments in 19th-century Europe?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>In what ways were national identities \"natural\" and in what ways were they constructed during this era?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Define the concept of \"the people\" to romantics and nationalists and explain how this idea brings them into conflict with the conservatism discussed earlier in the chapter.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2 id=\"h.1mrcu09\" class=\"c20\"><span class=\"c22\">10.6 Liberalism<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Nationalism\u2019s supporters tended to be members of the middle classes, including everyone from artisans to the new professional class associated with commerce and industry in the nineteenth century. \u00a0Many of the same people supported another doctrine that had been spread by the Napoleonic wars: <strong>liberalism<\/strong>. \u00a0The ideas of liberalism were based on the Enlightenment concepts of reason, rationality, and progress from the eighteenth century, but as a movement liberalism came of age in the post-Napoleonic period; the word itself was in regular use by 1830.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Nineteenth-century liberals were usually educated men and women, including the elites of industry, trade, and the professions as well as the middle classes. \u00a0They shared the conviction that freedom in all its forms\u2014freedom from the despotic rule of kings, from the obsolete privilege of nobles, from economic interference and religious intolerance, from occupational restrictions and limitations of speech and assembly\u2014could only improve the quality of society and the well-being of its members. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In something of a contrast to the abstract nature of national identity among nationalists, liberalism had straightforward beliefs, all of them reflecting not just abstract theories but the concrete examples of the liberal American and French Revolutions of the prior century. \u00a0Perhaps liberalism\u2019s most fundamental belief was that there should be equality before the law, in stark contrast to the old \u201cfeudal\u201d (almost a slur to liberals) order of legally-defined social estates. \u00a0From that starting point of equality, the very purpose of law to liberals was to protect the rights of each and every citizen rather than enshrine the privileges of a minority.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Whereas \u201crights\u201d had meant the traditional privileges enjoyed by a given social group or estate in the past, from the king\u2019s exclusive right to hunt game in his forests to the peasants\u2019 right to access the common lands, rights now came to mean a fundamental and universal privilege that was concomitant with citizenship itself. \u00a0Liberals argued that freedom of speech, of a press free from censorship, and of religious expression were \u201crights\u201d that should be enjoyed by all. \u00a0Likewise, most liberals favored the abolition of archaic economic interference from the state, including legal monopolies on trade (e.g. in shipping between colonies) and the monopolies enjoyed by those craft guilds that remained - the \u201cright\u201d to engage in market exchange unhindered by outdated laws was part of the liberal paradigm as well.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Just as had the French revolutionaries in the early phase of the revolution, most liberals early nineteenth-century liberals looked to constitutional monarchy as the most reasonable and stable form of government. \u00a0Constitutions should be written to guarantee the fundamental rights of the citizenry and to define, and restrict the power of the king (thus staving off the threat of tyranny). \u00a0Liberals also believed in the desirability of an elected parliament, albeit one with a restricted electorate: almost universally, liberals at the time thought that voting should be restricted to those who owned significant amounts of property, thereby (they thought) guaranteeing social stability.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c3\">Unlike nationalists, liberals saw at least some of their goals realized in post-Napoleonic Europe. \u00a0While its Bourbon monarchy was restored in France, there was now an elected parliament, religious tolerance, and relaxed censorship. \u00a0Britain remained the most \u201cliberal\u201d power in Europe, having long stood as the model of constitutional monarchy. \u00a0A liberal monarchy emerged as a result of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, and by the 1840s limited liberal reforms had been introduced in many of the smaller German states as well. \u00a0Thus, despite the opposition of conservatives, much of Europe slowly liberalized in the period between 1815 and 1848. <\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>How are the terms liberal\/liberalism or socialist\/socialism used differently in the 19th century, at their origins, then they are today?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Why did constitutional monarchy appeal to most liberals as the most reasonable and stable form of government?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How did the ideas of liberalism evolve from the Enlightenment concepts of reason, rationality, and progress?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2 id=\"h.46r0co2\" class=\"c20\"><span class=\"c22\">10.7 Socialism<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The third and last of the new political ideologies and movements of the early nineteenth century was socialism. \u00a0<strong>Socialism<\/strong> was a specific historical phenomenon born out of two related factors: first, the ideological rupture with the society of orders that occurred with the French Revolution, and second, the growth of industrial capitalism. \u00a0It sought to address both the economic repercussions of the industrial revolution, especially in terms of the living conditions of workers, and to provide a new moral order for modern society.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The term itself is French. \u00a0It was created in 1834 to contrast with <strong>individualism<\/strong>, a favourite term among liberals but one that early socialists saw as a symptom of moral decay. \u00a0Right from its inception, socialism was contrasted with individualism and egoism, of the selfish and self-centered pursuit of wealth and power. \u00a0Socialism proposed a new and better moral order, one in which the members of a society would care not only for themselves, but for one another. \u00a0For the first decades of its existence socialism was less a movement with economic foundations than with ethical ones. \u00a0It had economic arguments to make, of course, but those arguments were based on moral or ethical claims.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">By the middle of the nineteenth century, the word socialism came to be used more widely to describe several different movements than had hitherto been considered in isolation from one another. \u00a0Their common factor was the idea that material goods should be held in common and that producers should keep the fruits of their labor, all in the name of a better, happier, more healthy community and, perhaps, nation. \u00a0The abiding concern of early socialists was to address what they saw as the moral and social disintegration of European civilization in the modern era, as well as to repair the rifts and ameliorate the suffering of workers in the midst of early industrial capitalism.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">There was a major shift in socialism that occurred over the course of the century: until 1848, socialism consisted of a movement that shared a concern with the plight of working people and the regrowth of organic social bonds. \u00a0This kind of socialism was fundamentally <span class=\"c4\">optimistic <\/span>\u2013 early socialists thought that almost everyone in European society would eventually become a socialist once they realized its potential. \u00a0Following the later work of Friedrich Engels, one of the major socialist thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century, this kind of socialism is often referred to as \"<strong>utopian socialism<\/strong>.\" \u00a0In turn, after 1848, socialism was increasingly <span class=\"c4\">militant<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> because socialists realized that a major restructuring of society could not happen peacefully, given the strength of both conservative and liberal opposition. \u00a0The most important militant socialism was Marxism, named after its creator <strong>Karl Marx.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Three early socialist movements stand out as exemplary of so-called \"<strong>utopian<\/strong>\" socialism: the Saint-Simonians, the Owenites, and the Fourierists. \u00a0Each was named after its respective founder and visionary. \u00a0The binding theme of these three early socialist thinkers was not only radical proposals for the reorganization of work, but the idea that economic competition was a moral problem, that competition itself is in no way natural and instead implies social disorder. \u00a0The Saint-Simonians called egoism, the selfish pursuit of individual wealth, \u201cthe deepest wound of modern society.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In that, they found a surprisingly sympathetic audience among some aristocratic conservatives who were also afraid of social disorder and were nostalgic for the idea of a reciprocal set of obligations that had existed in pre-revolutionary Europe between the common people and the nobility. \u00a0In turn, the early socialists believed that there was nothing inherent in their ideas threatening to the rich \u2013 many socialists expected that the privileged classes would recognize the validity of their ideas and that socialism would be a way to bridge the class divide, not widen it.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">The Saint-Simonians, named after their founder Henri de Saint-Simon, were mostly highly educated young elites in France, many from privileged backgrounds, and many also graduates of the <span class=\"c4\">\u00c9cole Polytechnique<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, the most elite technical school in France founded by Napoleon. \u00a0Their ideology, based on Saint-Simon's writings, envisaged a society in which industrialism was harnessed to make a kind of heaven on earth, with the fruits of technology going to feed, clothe, and house, potentially, everyone. \u00a0They were, in a word, the first \"technocrats,\" people who believe that technology can solve any problem. \u00a0The Saint-Simonians did not inspire a popular movement, but individual members of the movement went on to achieve influential roles in the French industry, and helped lay the intellectual foundations of such ventures as the creation of the Suez Canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Owenites were initially the employees of Robert Owen, a British factory owner. \u00a0He built a community for his workers in New Lanark, Scotland that provided health care, education, pensions, communal stores, and housing. \u00a0He believed that productivity was tied to happiness, and his initial experiments met with success, with the New Lanark textile mill realizing consistent profits. \u00a0He and his followers created a number of cooperative, communalist \u201cutopian\u201d communities (many in the United States), but those tended to fail in fairly short order. \u00a0 Instead, the lasting influence of Owenism was in workers organization, with the Owenites helping to organize a number of influential early trade unions, culminating in the London Working Men's Association in 1836.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">The Fourierists were part of a very peculiar movement, because their founder Charles Fourier was a <span class=\"c4\">very <\/span><span class=\"c3\">peculiar man. \u00a0Fourier, who may have been at least partially insane, believed that he had unlocked a \"science of the passions.\" \u00a0According to Fourier, the reason that most people detested what they did to survive was that they were not doing the right kind of work. \u00a0There were 810 specific kinds of personalities in the world, each of which was naturally inclined toward a certain kind of work. \u00a0Thus, if 1,620 people (one man and one woman of each type) were to come together in a community, and each did the kind of work they \"should\" do, perfect happiness became possible. \u00a0For example, according to Fourier, murderers were just people who should have been butchers, and children should be trash collectors, because they loved to play in the dirt. \u00a0These planned communities would be called \"Phalanxes,\" after the fighting formations of ancient Greece.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"713\"]<img class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image73.jpg\" alt=\"Illustration of a large building - the phalanx itself - described as a palace of humanity.\" width=\"713\" height=\"335\" \/> Illustration of a Fouriest phalanx. \u00a0The heading simply reads \u201cThe Future.\u201d[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">Fourier was far more radical than most other self-understood socialists. \u00a0For one, he advocated complete gender equality and even sexual liberation - he was very hostile to monogamy, which he believed to be unnatural. \u00a0Regarding marriage as an outdated custom, he imagined that in his phalanxes children would be raised in common rather than lorded over by their parents. \u00a0Above and beyond forward-thinking ideas about gender, some of his concepts were a bit more puzzling. \u00a0Among other things, he claimed that planets mated and gave birth to baby planets, and that once all of humanity lived in phalanxes the oceans would turn into lemonade.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Practically speaking, the importance of the fourierists is that many phalanxes were actually founded, including several in the United States. \u00a0While the more oddball ideas were conveniently set aside, they were still among the first real experiments in planned, communal living. \u00a0Likewise, many important early feminists began their intellectual careers as Fourierists. \u00a0For instance, Flora Tristan was a French socialist and feminist who emerged from Fourierism to do important early work on tying the idea of social progress to female equality. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In general, the broad \u201cUtopian\u201d socialism of the 1840s was quite widespread leading up to 1848, it was peaceful in orientation, it was democratic, it believed in the \u201cright\u201d to work, and its followers hoped that the higher orders might join it. \u00a0These early movements also tended to cross over with liberal and nationalist movements, sharing a vision of more just and equitable laws and a more humane social order in contrast to the repression all three movements identified with conservatism. \u00a0Few socialists in this period believed that violence would be necessary in transforming society.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Considered in detail in the next chapter, there was an enormous revolutionary explosion all over Europe in 1848. \u00a0From Paris to Vienna to Prague, Europeans rose up and, temporarily as it turned out, overthrew their monarchs. \u00a0In the end, however, the revolutions collapsed. \u00a0The awkward coalitions of socialists and other rebels that had spearheaded them soon fell to infighting, and kings (and in France, a new emperor) eventually reasserted control. \u00a0Socialists made important realizations following 1848. \u00a0Democracy did not lead inevitably to social and political progress, as majorities typically voted for established community leaders (often priests or nobles). \u00a0Class collaboration was not a possibility, as the wealthier bourgeoisie and the nobility recognized in socialism their shared enemy. \u00a0Peaceful change might not be possible, given the forces of order's willingness to employ violence to achieve their ends. \u00a0Russia, for instance, invaded Hungary to ensure the continued rule of (Russia\u2019s ally at the time) Habsburg Austria. \u00a0After 1848 socialism was increasingly militant, focused on the necessity of confrontational tactics, even outright violence, to achieve a better society. \u00a0 Two post-Utopian and rival forms of socialist theory matured in this period: state socialism and anarchist socialism. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The first, <strong>state socialism<\/strong>, is represented by the French thinker and agitator Louis Blanc. \u00a0Blanc believed that social reform had to come from above. \u00a0It was, he argued, unrealistic to imagine that groups could somehow spontaneously organize themselves into self-sustaining, harmonious units. \u00a0He believed that universal manhood suffrage should and would lead to a government capable of implementing necessary economic changes, primarily by guaranteeing work for all citizens. \u00a0He actually saw this happen in the French revolution of 1848, when he briefly served in the revolutionary government. \u00a0There, he pushed through the creation of National Workshops for workers, which provided paid work for the urban poor. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In stark contrast was <strong>anarchist socialism<\/strong>. \u00a0A semantic point: anarchism means the rejection of the state, not the rejection of all forms of social organization or even hierarchy (i.e. it is perfectly consistent for there to be an organized anarchist movement, even one with leaders). \u00a0In the case of nineteenth-century anarchist socialism, there were two major thinkers: the French Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Russian Mikhail Bakunin.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Proudhon was the author of a book entitled \u201cWhat Is Property?\u201d in which he answered unequivocally that \u201cproperty is theft.\u201d \u00a0The very idea of ownership was vacuous and false to Proudhon, a conceit that ensured that the wealthy maintained their hold on political and legal power. \u00a0Unlike his rival Louis Blanc, Proudhon was skeptical of the state's ability to effect meaningful reform, and after the failure of the French revolution of 1848 he came to believe that all state power was inherently oppressive. \u00a0Instead of a state, Proudhon advocated local cooperatives of workers in a kind of \u201ceconomic federalism\u201d in which cooperatives would exchange goods and services between one another, and each cooperative would reward work with the fruits of that work. \u00a0Simply put, workers themselves would keep all profit. \u00a0He believed that the workers would have to emancipate themselves through some kind of revolution, but he was not an advocate of violence. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The other prominent anarchist socialist was Mikhail Bakunin, a contemporary, sometimes friend, and sometimes rival of Proudhon. \u00a0Briefly, Bakunin believed in the necessity of an apocalyptic, violent revolution to wipe the slate clean for a new society of free collectives. \u00a0He loathed the state and detested the traditional family structure, seeing it as a useless holdover from the past. \u00a0Bakunin thought that if his contemporary society was destroyed, the social instincts inherent to humanity would flower and people would \u201cnaturally\u201d build a better society. \u00a0He was also the great champion of the outcasts, the bandits, and the urban poor. He was deeply skeptical about both the industrial working class, who he noted all wished could be middle class, and of western Europe, which was shot-through with individualism, egoism, and the obsession with wealth. \u00a0He ended up organizing large anarchist movements in Europe's \u201cperiphery,\u201d especially in Italy and Spain. \u00a0By about 1870 both countries had large anarchist movements.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In the end, the most influential socialist was a German: Karl Marx. \u00a0Marx was born in 1818 in the Rhineland, the son of Jewish parents who had converted to Lutheranism (out of necessity - Marx\u2019s father was a lawyer in conservative, staunchly Lutheran Prussia). \u00a0He was a passionate and brilliant student of philosophy who came to believe that philosophy was only important if it led to practical change \u2013 he wrote \u201cphilosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. \u00a0The point, however, is to change it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"473\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image75.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of Marx in maturity with his trademark bushy beard.\" width=\"473\" height=\"599\" \/> The best-known portrait of Marx, dating from 1875.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1 c9\">A journalist as a young man, Marx became an avowed socialist by the 1840s and penned (along with his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels) the nineteenth century\u2019s most famous and influential socialist work, <strong><span class=\"c4\">The Communist Manifesto<\/span><\/strong>. \u00a0Exiled to Great Britain in the aftermath of the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, Marx devoted himself to a detailed analysis of the endogenous tendencies of capitalist economics, ultimately producing three enormous volumes entitled, simply,<span class=\"c4\">Capital<\/span><span class=\"c3\">. \u00a0The first was published in 1867, with the other two edited from notes and published by Engels after Marx\u2019s death. \u00a0It is worthwhile to consider Marx\u2019s theories in detail because of their profound influence: by the middle of the twentieth century, fully a third of the world was governed by communist states that were at least nominally \u201cMarxist\u201d in their political and economic policies.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">All of history, according to Marx, is the history of class struggle. \u00a0From ancient pharaohs to feudal kings and their nobles, classes of the rich and powerful had always abused and exploited classes of the poor and weak. \u00a0The world had moved on into a new phase following the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, however, one that (to Marx) simplified that ongoing struggle from many competing classes to just two: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. \u00a0The bourgeoisie were the rising middle classes, the owners of factories and businesses, the bankers, and all of those with direct control over industrial production. \u00a0The <strong>proletariat<\/strong> was the industrial working class.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Before this, the classes of workers in the pre-modern era generally had direct access to their livelihood: a small parcel of land, access to the common lands, the tools of their trade in the case of artisans. They had, in Marx\u2019s language, some kind of protected access to \"the means of production,\" which could mean anything from some land, a plow, and an ox to a workshop stocked with a carpenter's tools. \u00a0In the modern era, however, those rights and those tools were systematically taken away. The common lands were closed off and replaced with commercial farms. \u00a0Artisans were rendered obsolete by the growth of industry. Peasants were pushed off the land or owned plots so small their children had to look for work in the cities. The net effect was, generally, that the class of workers who had \"nothing to sell but their labor,\" the proletariat, grew.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">At the same time, the people who did own property, \"the bourgeoisie,\" were under pressure themselves. In the climate of the new capitalism, of unregulated markets and cutthroat competition, it was terribly easy to fall behind and go out of business. Thus, former members of the bourgeoisie lost out and became proletarians themselves. The net effect was that the proletariat grew and every other conceivable class (including peasants, the owners of small shops, etc.) shrank.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Meanwhile, industry produced more and more products. \u00a0Every year saw improvements in efficiency and economy in production, arriving at a terrific glut of products available for purchase. \u00a0Eventually, there was simply too much out there and not enough people who could afford to buy it, as one of the things about the proletariat, one of their forms of \"alienation,\" was their inability to buy the very things they made. This resulted in a \"crisis of overproduction\" and a massive economic collapse. \u00a0This would be unthinkable in a pre-modern economy, where the essential problem a society faced was the scarcity of goods. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, however, products need consumers more than consumers need products.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">In the midst of one of these collapses, Marx wrote, the members of the proletariat <span class=\"c4\">could <\/span>realize their common interests in seizing the unprecedented wealth that industrialism had made possible and using it for the common good. Instead of a handful of super-rich expropriators, <span class=\"c4\">everyone <\/span>could share in material comfort and freedom from scarcity, something that had never been possible before. \u00a0That vision of revolution was very powerful to the young Marx, who wrote that, given the inherent tendencies of capitalism, revolution was inevitable.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In turn, revolutions did happen, most spectacularly in 1848, which Marx initially greeted with elation only to watch in horror as the revolutionary momentum ebbed and conservatives regained the initiative. \u00a0Subsequently, as he devoted himself to the analysis of capitalism\u2019s inherent characteristics rather than revolutionary propaganda, Marx became more circumspect. \u00a0With staggering erudition, he tried to make sense of an economic system that somehow repeatedly destroyed itself and yet regrew stronger, faster, and more violent with every business cycle. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">In historical hindsight, Marx was really writing about what would happen if capitalism was allowed to run <span class=\"c4\">completely rampant<\/span>, as it did in the first century of the Industrial Revolution. \u00a0The hellish mills, the starving workers, and the destitution and anguish of the factory towns were all part of nineteenth-century European capitalism. Everything that could contain those factors, primarily in the form of concessions to workers and state intervention in the economy, had not happened on a large scale when Marx was writing - trade unions themselves were outlawed in most states until the middle of the century. \u00a0In turn, none of the factors that might mitigate capitalism\u2019s destructive tendencies were financially beneficial to any <span class=\"c4\">individual<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> capitalist, so Marx saw no reason that they would ever come about on a large scale in states controlled by moneyed interests. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">To Marx, revolution seemed not only possible but probable in the 1840s, when he was first writing about philosophy and economics. \u00a0After the revolutions of 1848 failed, however, he shifted his attention away from revolution and towards the inner workings of capitalism itself. \u00a0In fact, he rarely wrote about revolution at all after 1850; his great work<span class=\"c4\">Capital<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> is instead a vast and incredibly detailed study of how England\u2019s capitalist economy worked and what it did to the people \u201cwithin\u201d it.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">To boil it down to a very simple level, Marx never described in adequate detail when the material conditions for a socialist revolution were possible. \u00a0Across the vast breadth of his books and correspondence, Marx (and his collaborator Friedrich Engels) argued that each nation would have to reach a critical threshold in which industrialism was mature, the proletariat was large and self-aware, and the bourgeoisie was using increasingly harsh political tactics to try to keep the proletariat in check. \u00a0There would have to be, and according to Marxism there always would be, a major economic crisis caused by overproduction. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">At that point, somehow, the proletariat could rise up and take over. \u00a0In some of his writings, Marx indicated that the proletariat would revolt spontaneously, without guidance from anyone else. \u00a0Sometimes, such as in the second section of his early work <span class=\"c4\">The Communist Manifesto<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, Marx alluded to the existence of a political party, the communists, who would work to help coordinate and aid the proletariat in the revolutionary process. \u00a0The bottom line is, however, that Marx was very good at critiquing the internal laws of the free market in capitalism, and in pointing out many of its problems, but he had no tactical guide to revolutionary politics. \u00a0And, finally, toward the end of his life, Marx himself was increasingly worried that socialists, including self-styled Marxists, would try to stage a revolution \u201ctoo early\u201d and it would fail or result in disaster. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">In sum, Marx did not leave a clear picture of what socialists were supposed to do, politically, nor did he describe how a socialist state would work if a revolution was successful. \u00a0This only mattered historically because socialist revolutions <span class=\"c4\">were <\/span><span class=\"c3\">successful, and those nations had to try to figure out how to govern in a socialistic way.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>What were the different movements under the umbrella of socialism and what did they have in common? What problems or situations in society were they trying to address?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What were the main differences between socialist movements and how did these differences affect their effectiveness?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What was Karl Marx's contribution to socialism and what was the impact of his ideas? How influential has Marxist thought been on later generations and what was its strengths and weaknesses?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2 id=\"h.2lwamvv\" class=\"c20\"><span class=\"c22\">10.8 Social Classes<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">How much did European society resemble the sociological description provided by Marx? \u00a0At first sight, nineteenth-century Europe seems more similar to how it was in earlier centuries than it does radically new \u2013 most people were still farmers, every country but Britain was still mostly rural, and the Industrial Revolution took decades to spread beyond its British heartland. \u00a0That being said, European society <span class=\"c4\">was <\/span><span class=\"c3\">undergoing significant changes, and Marx was right in identifying the new professional middle class, the bourgeoisie, as the agents of much of that change.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The term \"<strong>bourgeoisie<\/strong>\" is French for \"business class.\" \u00a0The term originally meant, simply, \"townspeople,\" but over time it acquired the connotation of someone who made money from commerce, banking, or administration but did not have a noble title. \u00a0The bourgeoisie made up between 15% and 20% of the population of central and western Europe by the early 1800s. \u00a0The male members of the bourgeoisie were factory owners, clerks, commercial and state bureaucrats, journalists, doctors, lawyers, and everyone else who fell into that ambiguous class of \u201cbusinessmen.\u201d \u00a0They were increasingly proud of their identity as \u201cself-made\u201d men, men whose financial success was based on intelligence, education, and competence instead of noble privilege and inheritance. \u00a0Many regarded the old order as an archaic throwback, something that was both limiting their own ability to make money and society\u2019s possibilities of further progress. \u00a0At the same time, they were defined by the fact that they did not work with their hands to make a living; they were neither farmers, nor artisans, nor industrial workers.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The growth of the bourgeoisie arose from the explosion of urbanization that took place due to both industrialism and the breakdown of the old social order that started with the French Revolution. \u00a0Cities, some of which grew almost 1000% in the course of the century, concentrated groups of educated professionals. \u00a0It was the middle class that reaped the benefits of a growing, and increasingly complex, economy centered in the cities.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">While the bourgeoisie was proud of its self-understood sobriety and work ethic, in contrast to the foppery and frivolity of the nobility, successful members of the middle class often eagerly bought as much land as they could, both in emulation of the nobles and because the right to vote in most of western Europe was tied for decades to land-ownership. \u00a0In turn, nobles were wary of the middle class, especially because so many bourgeois were attracted to potentially disruptive ideologies like liberalism and, increasingly, nationalism, but over the course of the century the two classes tended to mix based on wealth. \u00a0Old families of nobles may have despised the \u201cnouveau riche,\u201d but they still married them if they needed the money.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">The bourgeoisie had certain <span class=\"c4\">visible<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> things that defined them as a class, literal \u201cstatus symbols.\u201d \u00a0They did not perform manual labor of any kind, and insisted on the highest standards of cleanliness and tidiness in their appearance and their homes. In turn, all but the most marginal bourgeois families employed at least one full-time servant (recruited from the working class and always paid a pittance) to maintain those standards of hygiene. \u00a0If possible, bourgeois women did no paid work at all, serving instead as keepers of the home and the maintainers of the rituals of visiting and hosting that maintained their social network. \u00a0Finally, the bourgeoisie socialized in private places: private clubs, the new department stores that opened in for the first time in the mid-nineteenth century, and the foyers of private homes. \u00a0The working classes met in taverns (\u201cpublic houses\u201d or just \u201cpubs\u201d in Britain), while bourgeois men and women stayed safely inside.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"686\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image77.jpg\" alt=\"Bourgeois men in top hats.\" width=\"686\" height=\"600\" \/> Clothing among the bourgeoisie came to resemble a specific \u201cuniform\u201d of respectability in the nineteenth century - the top hat in particular was an iconic mark of class identity by the middle of the century.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1 c9\">In addition, the members of the bourgeoisie were supposed to live by certain codes of behavior. \u00a0In contrast to the sexual libertinage of the old nobility, bourgeois men and women were expected to avoid extra-marital affairs (although, practically speaking, bourgeois men regularly took advantage of prostitutes). \u00a0A bourgeois man was to live up to high standards of honesty and business ethics. \u00a0What these concepts shared was the fear of\r\n<span class=\"c4\">shame<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> \u2013 the literature of the time describing this social class is filled with references to the failure of a bourgeois to live up to these standards and being exposed to vast public humiliation.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">What about the nobility? \u00a0The legal structures that sustained their identity slowly but surely weakened over the course of the nineteenth century. \u00a0Even more threatening than the loss of legal monopolies over land-owning, the officer corps of the army, and political status was the enormous shift in the generation of wealth away from land to commerce and industry. \u00a0Relatively few noblemen had been involved in the early Industrial Revolution, thanks in large part to their traditional disdain for commerce, but by the middle of the century it was apparent that industry, banking, and commerce were eclipsing land-ownership as the major sources of wealth. \u00a0Likewise, the one thing that the bourgeoisie and the working class had in common was a belief in the desirability of voting rights; by the end of the century universal manhood suffrage was on the horizon (or had already come to pass, as it did in France in 1871) in almost every country in Europe.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Thus, the long-term pattern of the nobility was that it came to culturally resemble the bourgeoisie. \u00a0While stubbornly clinging to its titles and its claims to authority, the nobility grudgingly entered into the economic fields of the bourgeoisie and adopted the bourgeoisie\u2019s social habits as well. \u00a0The lines between the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie and the bulk of the nobility were very blurry by the end of the century, as bourgeois money funded old noble houses that still had access to the social prestige of a title.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>How were social classes and their relationships with one another changing over the course of the 19th century?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What forces were most influential in causing these changes?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How did the new ideologies that developed in this era reflect these changes or try to respond to them?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How does the chapter characterize the emergence of political ideologies, such as conservatism, liberalism and socialism?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How do these 19th century political ideological clash or converge?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3 class=\"c17\"><em><span class=\"c8 c4\">Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\r\n<p class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Heads_on_pikes.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960719000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3R_rLaU8lLe8p9TvxSd63E\">Heads on Pikes<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Public Domain<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c10\"><a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/History_of_the_kilt%23mediaviewer\/File%253aHighland_soldier_1744.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960719000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3RsY2YSFDGa7MZP4FmGAyd\">Highland Soldiers<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\">- Public Domain<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c10\"><a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Karl_Marx_001.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960720000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2ti8V7vO5kT3gGmEsOZzsk\">Marx<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Public Domain<\/span><\/p>\r\n<span class=\"c10\"><a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel_preparing_the_launch_of_%2527The_Great_Eastern_by_Robert_Howlett_crop.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960721000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0aAMpyaJoKRe4VHsgignPR\">Top Hats<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Public Domain<\/span>\r\n<h3><em>For Further Reference:<\/em><\/h3>\r\n\"The Romantics\" by Stephanie Forward, <em>The British Library<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bl.uk\/romantics-and-victorians\/articles\/the-romantics\">https:\/\/www.bl.uk\/romantics-and-victorians\/articles\/the-romantics<\/a>\r\n\r\nEurope: 19th century Romanticism,\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/europe-19th-century\/romanticism\/\">https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/europe-19th-century\/romanticism\/<\/a>\r\n\r\n\"Introduction to 19th-Century Socialism by Professor Paul Brians, Washington State University, <a href=\"https:\/\/brians.wsu.edu\/2016\/10\/12\/introduction-to-19th-century-socialism\/\">https:\/\/brians.wsu.edu\/2016\/10\/12\/introduction-to-19th-century-socialism\/<\/a>\r\n\r\n\"Victorian Socialism: An Introduction\" Dr Andrzej Diniejko, D. Litt.; Contributing Editor, Poland,\r\non <em>The Victorian Web, <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/victorianweb.org\/victorian\/history\/socialism\/socialism.html\">https:\/\/victorianweb.org\/victorian\/history\/socialism\/socialism.html<\/a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<div class=\"textbox shaded\">\r\n\r\nThis chapter contains a remix of text from the following:\r\n\r\nThe main text is taken from Christopher Brooks, \"Chapter 3: Political Ideologies and Movements\" in\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.nscc.ca\/worldhistory\" rel=\"cc:attributionURL\">Western Civilization: A Concise History<\/a> <\/em>Volume 3, licensed under a <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>.\r\n\r\nOriginal material in the text boxes and the inclusion of a \"For Further References\" section by Nicole V. Jobin, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\"><img style=\"border-width: 0\" src=\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/80x15.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" \/><\/a>\r\n\r\nOriginal material in the section \"Questions for Discussion\" and the addition of terms for identification in the dialog boxes by Meghan K. Bowe, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\"><img style=\"border-width: 0\" src=\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/80x15.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" \/><\/a>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div><\/div>","rendered":"<h2 id=\"h.3fwokq0\" class=\"c24\"><span class=\"c22\">10.1 After the Revolution<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars profoundly shook Europe. \u00a0The French Revolution was seen by the European great powers as both threatening and, as it progressed and radicalized, morally repulsive, but at least it had largely stayed confined to France. From the perspective of elites, Napoleon&#8217;s conquests were even worse because everywhere the French armies went the traditional order of society was overturned. \u00a0France may have been the greatest economic beneficiary, but Napoleon&#8217;s Italian, German, and Polish subjects (among others) also had their first taste of a society in which one&#8217;s status was not defined by birth. The kings and nobles of Europe had good cause to fear that the way of life they presided over, a social order that had lasted for roughly 1,000 years, was disintegrating in the course of a generation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">Thus, after Napoleon&#8217;s defeat, there had to be a reckoning. \u00a0Only the most stubborn monarch or noble thought it possible to completely undo the Revolution and its effects, but there was a shared desire among the traditional elites to re-establish stability and order based on the political system that had worked in the past. \u00a0They knew that there would have to be <span class=\"c4\">some<\/span><span class=\"c3\">\u00a0concessions to a generation of people who had lived with equality under the law, but they worked to reinforce traditional political structures while only granting limited compromises.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--examples\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Terms for Identification<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ul>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">Conservatism<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Suffrage<\/li>\n<li>Joseph de Maistre<\/li>\n<li>Arthur de Gobineau<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">Racial Hierarchy <\/span><\/li>\n<li>Brothers Grimm<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Inventing Traditions&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">Romantic nationalism<\/span><\/li>\n<li>National identity<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">Romanticism<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">Liberalism<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Socialism vs Individualism<\/li>\n<li>Utopian Socialism<\/li>\n<li>State Socialism<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">Anarchist Socialism<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Karl Marx<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c4\">The Communist Manifesto<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Bourgeoisie<\/li>\n<li>Proletariat<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 id=\"h.1v1yuxt\" class=\"c24\"><span class=\"c22\">10.2 Conservatism<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">That being noted, how did elites understand their own role in society? \u00a0How did they justify the power of kings and nobles over the majority of the population? \u00a0This was not just about wealth, after all, since there were many non-noble merchants who were as rich, or richer, than many nobles. \u00a0Nor was it viable for most nobles to claim that their rights were logically derived from their mastery of warfare, since only a small percentage of noblemen served in royal armies (and those that did were not necessarily very good officers!). \u00a0Instead, European elites at the time explained their own social role in terms of peace, tradition, and stability. \u00a0Their ideology came to be called conservatism: the idea that what had worked for centuries was inherently better at keeping the peace both within and between kingdoms than were the forces unleashed by the French Revolution.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\"><strong>Conservatism<\/strong> held that the old traditions of rule were the best and most desirable principles of government, having proven themselves relatively stable and successful over the course of 1,000 years of European history. It was totally opposed to the idea of universal legal equality, let alone of <strong>suffrage<\/strong> (i.e. voting rights), and it basically amounted to an attempt to maintain a legal political hierarchy to go along with the existing social and economic hierarchy of European society.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">The fundamental argument of conservatism was that the French Revolution and Napoleon had already proved that too much change and innovation in politics was <span class=\"c4\">inherently <\/span>destructive. \u00a0According to conservatives, the French Revolution had started out, in its moderate phase, by arguing for the primacy of the common people, but it quickly and inevitably spun out of control. During the Terror, the king and queen were beheaded, French society was riven with bloody conflict, tens of thousands were guillotined, and the revolutionary government launched a blasphemous crusade against the church. \u00a0Napoleon&#8217;s takeover &#8211; itself a symptom of the anarchy unleashed by the Revolution &#8211; led to almost twenty years of war and turmoil across the map of Europe. \u00a0These events <span class=\"c4\">proved<\/span><span class=\"c3\">\u00a0to conservatives that while careful reform might be acceptable, rapid change was not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 436px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/image68.jpg\" alt=\"Illustration of French revolutionaries with severed heads on the ends of spears.\" width=\"436\" height=\"488\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Images like the above (from the French Revolution) were used by conservatives to illustrate the violence and bloodshed they claimed were an intrinsic part of revolutionary change.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Many conservatives believed that human nature is basically bad, evil, and depraved. The clearest statement of this idea in the early nineteenth century came from <strong>Joseph de Maistre<\/strong>, a conservative French nobleman. De Maistre argued that human beings are not enlightened, not least because (as a staunch Catholic), he believed that all human souls are tainted by original sin. Left unchecked, humans with too much freedom would always indulge in depravity. \u00a0Only the allied forces of a strong monarchy, a strong nobility, and a strong church could hold that inherent evil in check. \u00a0It is worth noting that De Maistre wrote outside of France itself during the revolutionary period, first in the small Italian kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (he was a noble in both France and Piedmont) and then in Russia. \u00a0His message resonated strongly with the arch-conservative Russian Tsar Alexander I in particular.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">A more pragmatic conservative take was exemplified by a British lord, Edmund Burke. He argued that, given the complexity and fragility of the social fabric, only the force of tradition could prevent political chaos. As the French Revolution had demonstrated, gradual reforms had the effect of unleashing a tidal wave of pent-up anger and, more to the point, foolish decisions by people who had no experience of making political decisions. \u00a0In his famous pamphlet <em><span class=\"c4\">Reflections On The Revolution in France<\/span><\/em><span class=\"c3\">, he wrote &#8220;It is said that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand. True; if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic.&#8221; \u00a0To Burke, the common people were a mob of uneducated, inexperienced would-be political decision-makers and had no business trying to influence politics. \u00a0Instead, it was far wiser to keep things in the basic form that had survived for centuries, with minor accommodations as needed. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Burke was an eminently practical, pragmatic political critic. De Maistre\u2019s ideas may have looked back to the social and political thought of past centuries, but Burke was a very grounded and realistic thinker. He simply believed that \u201cthe masses\u201d were the last people one wanted running a government, because they were an uneducated, uncultivated, uncivilized rabble. Meanwhile, the European nobility had been raised for centuries to rule and had developed both cultural traditions and systems of education and training to form leaders. It was a given that not all of them were very good at it, but according to Burke there was simply no comparison between the class of nobles and the class of the mob \u2013 to let the latter rule was to invite disaster. And, of course, conservatives had all of their suspicions confirmed during the Terror, when the whole social order of France was turned upside down in the name of a perfect society (Burke himself was particularly aggrieved by the execution of the French Queen Marie Antoinette, whom he saw as a perfectly innocent victim).<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Early nineteenth-century conservatism at its best was a coherent critique of the violence, warfare, and instability that had accompanied the Revolution and Napoleonic wars. \u00a0In practice, however, conservatism all too often degenerated into the stubborn defense of corrupt, incompetent, or oppressive regimes. \u00a0In turn, despite the practical impossibility of doing so in most cases, there were real attempts on the part of many conservative regimes after the defeat of Napoleon to completely turn back the clock, to try to sweep the reforms of the revolutionary era under the collective rug.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">One additional conservative figure who lived a generation later than Burke and De Maistre deserves particular attention: the French aristocrat <strong>Arthur de Gobineau<\/strong> (1816 &#8211; 1882). \u00a0By the time Gobineau was an adult, the earlier versions of conservatism seemed increasingly outdated, especially De Maistre\u2019s theological claims regarding original sin. \u00a0Gobineau chose instead to adopt the language of the prevailing form of intellectual authority of the later nineteenth century: science. From 1853 to 1855 he published a series of volumes collectively entitled <span class=\"c4\">Essay on <em>the Inequality of the Human Races<\/em><\/span><em>.<\/em> \u00a0The <span class=\"c4\">Essay <\/span><span class=\"c3\">claimed that the European nobility had once been an unsullied \u201cpure\u201d example of a superior race rightfully ruling over social inferiors who were born of lesser racial stock. \u00a0Over time, however, the nobility had foolishly mixed with those inferiors, diluting the precious racial characteristics that had sustained noble rule. \u00a0Likewise, by conquering the Americas and parts of Africa and Asia, Europeans as a whole undermined their \u201cpurity\u201d and hence their superiority to non-Europeans.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">The <span class=\"c4\">Essay<\/span><span class=\"c3\">\u2019s power to persuade was in large part because Gobineau claimed that his arguments were \u201cscientific.\u201d \u00a0In debates with his friend and patron Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the major intellectual voices of liberalism, Gobineau asserted that he was merely describing reality by pointing out that some people were racially superior to others. \u00a0Needless to say, Gobineau\u2019s claims were nonsense in terms of actual scientific reality, but by using the language of science Gobineau\u2019s grandiose celebration of <strong>racial hierarchy<\/strong> served to support the authority and wealth of those already in power behind a facade of a \u201cneutral\u201d analysis.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Gobineau\u2019s work was enormously influential over time. \u00a0It would inspire Social Darwinism, a movement that arose later in the nineteenth century that claimed that the lower classes were biologically inferior to the upper classes. \u00a0It would be eagerly taken up by anti-Semites who claimed that Jews were a \u201crace\u201d with inherent, destructive characteristics. \u00a0In the twentieth century it would directly inspire Nazi ideology as well: Hitler himself cited Gobineau in his own musings on racial hierarchy. \u00a0Thus, Gobineau represents a transition in nineteenth-century conservatism, away from the theological and tradition-bound justifications for social hierarchy of a De Maistre or Burke and towards pseudo-scientific claims about the supposed biological superiority of some people over others.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ol>\n<li>Who are the main conservative thinkers discussed in this section and what are the similarities and differences between their beliefs?<\/li>\n<li>How is the French Revolution tied to the rise of Conservatism?<\/li>\n<li>What are some of the negative outcomes of the work of Gobineau and why is he significant to later historical developments?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h1 id=\"h.4f1mdlm\" class=\"c62\"><span class=\"c22\">10.3 Ideologies<\/span><\/h1>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Following Napoleon\u2019s final defeat in 1815, conservatives faced the daunting task of not just creating a new political order but in holding in check the political ideologies unleashed during the revolutionary era: liberalism, nationalism, and socialism. \u00a0Enlightenment thinkers had first proposed the ideas of social and legal equality that came to fruition in the American and French Revolutions. \u00a0Likewise, the course of those revolutions along with the work of thinkers, writers, and artists helped create a new concept of <strong>national identity<\/strong> that was poised to take European politics by storm. \u00a0Finally, the political, social, and economic chaos of the turn of the nineteenth century (very much including the Industrial Revolution) created the context out of which socialism emerged.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">An &#8220;ideology&#8221; is a set of beliefs, often having to do with politics. \u00a0What is the purpose of government? \u00a0Who decides the laws? What is just and unjust? \u00a0How should economics function? \u00a0What should be the role of religion in governance? \u00a0What is the legal and social status of men and women? \u00a0All of these kinds of questions have been answered differently from culture to culture since the earliest civilizations. \u00a0In the nineteenth century in Europe, a handful of ideologies came to predominate: conservatism, nationalism, liberalism, and socialism. \u00a0In turn, briefly put, three of those ideologies had one thing in common: they opposed the fourth. \u00a0For the first half of the nineteenth century, socialists, nationalists, and liberals all agreed that the conservative order had to be disrupted or even dismantled entirely, although they disagreed on how that should be accomplished and, more importantly, what should replace it.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"h.3tbugp1\" class=\"c20\"><span class=\"c22\">10.4 Romanticism<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Even before the era of the French Revolution, the seeds of nationalism were planted in the hearts and minds of many Europeans as an aspect of the Romantic movement. \u00a0<strong>Romanticism<\/strong> was not a political movement \u2013 it was a movement of the arts. \u00a0It emerged in the late eighteenth century and came of age in the nineteenth. \u00a0Its central tenet was the idea that there were great, sometimes terrible, and literally \u201cawesome\u201d forces in the universe that exceeded humankind\u2019s rational ability to understand. \u00a0Instead, all that a human being could do was attempt to pay tribute to those forces \u2013 nature, the spirit or soul, the spirit of a people or culture, or even death \u2013 through art.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The central themes of romantic art were, first, a profound reverence for nature. \u00a0To romantics, nature was a vast, overwhelming presence, against which humankind&#8217;s activities were ultimately insignificant. \u00a0At the same time, romantics celebrated the organic connection between humanity and nature. \u00a0They very often identified peasants as being the people who were &#8220;closest&#8221; to nature. \u00a0In turn, it was the job of the artist (whether a writer, painter, or musician) to somehow gesture at the profound truths of nature and the human spirit. \u00a0 A &#8220;true&#8221; artist was someone who possessed the real spark of creative genius, something that could not be predicted or duplicated through training or education. \u00a0The point of art was to let that genius emanate from the work of art, and the result should be a profound emotional experience for the viewer or listener.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Quite by accident, Romanticism helped plant the seeds of nationalism, thanks to its ties to the folk movement. \u00a0The central idea of the folk movement was that the essential truths of national character had survived among the common people despite the harmful influence of so-called civilization. \u00a0Those folk traditions, from folk songs to fairytales to the remnants of pre-Christian pagan practices, were the \u201ctrue\u201d expression of a national spirit that had, supposedly, laid dormant for centuries. \u00a0By the early eighteenth century, educated elites attracted to Romanticism set out to gather those traditions and preserve them in service to an imagined national identity. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The iconic examples of this phenomenon were the <strong>Brothers Grimm<\/strong>, Jacob and Wilhelm, who were both expert philologists and avid collectors of German folk tales. \u00a0The Brothers Grimm collected dozens of folk (\u201cfairy\u201d) tales and published them in the first definitive collection in German. \u00a0Many of those tales, from Sleeping Beauty to Cinderella, are best known in American culture thanks to their adaptation as animated films by Walt Disney in the twentieth century, but they were famous already by the mid-nineteenth. \u00a0The Brothers Grimm also undertook an enormous project to compile a comprehensive German dictionary, not only containing every German word but detailed etymologies (they did not live to see its completion; the third volume E \u2013 Forsche was published shortly before Jacob\u2019s death).<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Grimm brothers were the quintessential Romantic nationalists. \u00a0Many Romantics like them believed that nations had spirits, which were invested with the core identity of their \u201cpeople.\u201d \u00a0The point of the Grimm brothers&#8217; work was reaching back into the remote past to grasp the &#8220;essence&#8221; of what it meant to be &#8220;German.&#8221; \u00a0At the time, there was no country called Germany, and yet romantic nationalists like the Grimms believed that there was a kind of German soul that lived in old folk songs, the German language, and German traditions. \u00a0They worked to preserve those things before they were further &#8220;corrupted&#8221; by the modern world.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">\u00a0In many cases, romantic nationalists did something that historians later called &#8220;<strong>inventing traditions<\/strong>.&#8221; \u00a0One iconic example is the Scottish kilt. \u00a0Scots had worn kilts since the sixteenth century, but there was no such thing as a specific color and pattern of plaid (a &#8220;tartan&#8221;) for each family or clan. \u00a0The British government ultimately assigned tartans to a new class of soldier recruited from Scotland: the Highland Regiments, with the wider identification of tartan and clan only emerging in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. \u00a0The point was instilling a nationalist pride in a specific group of military recruits, not celebrating an \u201cauthentic\u201d Scottish tradition. \u00a0Likewise, in some cases folk tales and stories were simply made up in the name of nationalism. \u00a0The great epic story of Finland, the <span class=\"c4\">Kalevala<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, was written by a Finnish intellectual in 1827; it was based on actual Finnish legends, but it had never existed as one long story before.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The point is not, however, to emphasize the falseness of the folk movement or invented traditions, but to consider <span class=\"c4\">why<\/span><span class=\"c3\">\u00a0people were so intent on discovering (and, if necessary, inventing) them. \u00a0Romanticism was, among other things, the search for stable points of identity in a changing world. \u00a0Likewise, folk traditions &#8211; even those that were at least in part invented or adapted &#8211; became a way for early nationalists to identify with the culture they now connotated with the nation. \u00a0It is no coincidence that the vogue for kilts in Scotland, ones now identified with clan identity, emerged for the first time in the 1820s rather than earlier. <\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 402px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image70.jpg\" alt=\"Two Scottish highland soldiers in plaid kilts.\" width=\"402\" height=\"600\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">British soldiers of the Highland Regiments in government-issued kilts in 1744.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2 id=\"h.28h4qwu\" class=\"c53\"><span class=\"c22\">10.5 Nationalism<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\"><strong>Romantic nationalism<\/strong> was an integral part of actual nationalist political movements, movements that emerged in earnest in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. \u00a0Those movements would ultimately succeed in seeing their goals realized almost without exception, although that process took over a century in some cases (as in Poland and Ireland). \u00a0Central to nationalist movements was the concept that the state should correspond to the identity of a \u201cpeople,\u201d although who or what defines the identity of \u201cthe people\u201d proved a vexing issue on many occasions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">The discussion of nationalism starts with the French Revolution, because more than any other event, it provided the model for all subsequent nationalisms. \u00a0The French revolutionaries declared from the outset that they represented the whole &#8220;nation,&#8221; not just a certain part of it. \u00a0They erased the legal privileges of some (the nobles) over others, they made religion subservient to a secular government, and when threatened by the conservative powers of Europe, they called the whole &#8220;nation&#8221; to arms. \u00a0The revolutionary armies sang a national anthem, the <span class=\"c4\">Marseillaise<\/span>, whose lyrics are as warlike as the American equivalent. \u00a0Central to French national identity in the revolutionary period was fighting for <span class=\"c4\">la patrie<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, the fatherland, in place of the old allegiance to king and church.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The irony of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, however, was that the countries invaded by the French eventually adopted their own nationalist beliefs. The invaded countries turned the democratic French principle of self-determination into a sacred right to defend their own national identities, shaped by their own particular histories, against the universalist pretensions of the French. \u00a0That was reflected in the Spanish revolt that began in 1808, the revival of Austria and Prussia and their struggles of &#8220;liberation&#8221; against Napoleon, Russia&#8217;s leadership of the anti-Napoleonic coalition that followed, and fierce British pride in their defiance to French military pretensions.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3 id=\"h.nmf14n\" class=\"c66\"><span class=\"c7\">Nationalisms Across Europe<\/span><\/h3>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">As the Napoleonic wars drew to a close for the first time in 1814, the great powers of Europe convened a gathering of monarchs and diplomats known as the Congress of Vienna, discussed in detail in the next chapter, to deal with the aftermath. \u00a0That meeting lasted months, thanks in part to Napoleon\u2019s inconvenient return from Elba and last stand at Waterloo, but in 1815 it concluded, having rewarded the victorious kingdoms with territorial gains and restored conservative monarchs to the thrones of states like Spain and France itself. \u00a0Nothing could have mattered less to the diplomatic representatives present at the Congress of Vienna than the \u201cnational identity\u201d of the people who lived in the territories that were carved up and distributed like pieces of cake to the victors &#8211; the inhabitants of northeastern Italy were now subjects of the Austrian king, the entirety of Poland was divided between Russia and Prussia, and Great Britain remained secure not only in its growing global empire, but in its possession of the entirety of Ireland. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Thus, many of Europe&#8217;s peoples found themselves without states of their own or in states squeezed between the dominant powers of the time. \u00a0Among the notable examples are the Italians and the Poles. \u00a0Italy had suffered from the domination of one great power or another since the Renaissance; after 1815 it was the Austrians who were in control of much of northern Italy. \u00a0Poland had been partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia in the eighteenth century, simply vanishing from the map in the process. \u00a0Germany, of course, was not united; Prussia and Austria vied with each other for dominance of the German lands, but both were fundamentally conservative powers uninterested in \u201cGerman\u201d unification until later in the century.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">What had changed, however, was that the language of nationalism and the idea of national identity had come into its own by the late Napoleonic period. \u00a0For example, German nationalism was powerful and popular after the Napoleonic wars; in 1817, just two years after the end of the Congress of Vienna, German nationalists gathered in Wartburg where Martin Luther had first translated the Bible into German, waving the black, red, and gold tricolor flag that would (over a century later) become the official flag of the German nation. \u00a0Two years later, a nationalist poet murdered a conservative one, and the Austrian Empire passed laws that severely limited freedom of speech, specifically to contain and restrict the spread of nationalism. \u00a0Despite this effort, and the Austrian secret police, nationalism continued to spread, culminating in a large and self-consciously nationalistic movement seeking German unity.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">The 1830s were a pivotal decade in the spread of nationalism. \u00a0The Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini founded Young Italy in 1831, calling for a \u201cspringtime of peoples\u201d in which the people of each \u201cnation\u201d of Europe would topple conservative monarchs and assert their sovereignty and independence. \u00a0That movement would quickly spread beyond Italy: &#8220;young&#8221; became the rallying word and idea of nationalism. \u00a0In addition to Young Italy, there was a Young Germany and a Young Ireland, among others &#8211; the idea was that <span class=\"c4\">all <\/span><span class=\"c3\">people should and would eventually inhabit nations, and that this new &#8220;youthful&#8221; manner of politics would lead to peace and prosperity for everyone. The old, outdated borders abandoned, everyone would live where they were supposed to: in nations governed by their own people. \u00a0Nationalists argued that war itself could be rendered obsolete. \u00a0After all, if each \u201cpeople\u201d lived in \u201ctheir\u201d nation, what would be the point of territorial conflict? \u00a0To the nationalists at the time, the emergence of nations was synonymous with a more perfect future for all.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">Central to the very concept of nationalism in this early, optimistic phase was the identity of \u201cthe people,\u201d a term with powerful political resonance in just about every European language: <span class=\"c4\">das Volk, le peuple, il popolo, <\/span>etc. \u00a0In every case, &#8220;the people&#8221; was thought to be something more important than just &#8220;those people who happen to live here.&#8221; \u00a0Instead, the people were those tied to the soil, with roots reaching back centuries, and who deserve their own government. \u00a0This was a profoundly romantic idea because it spoke to an essentially <span class=\"c4\">emotional <\/span><span class=\"c3\">sense of national identity &#8211; a sense of camaraderie and solidarity with individuals with whom a given person might not actually share much in common. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">When scrutinized, the \u201creal\u201d identity of a given \u201cpeople\u201d became more difficult to discern. \u00a0For example, were the Germans people who speak German, or who lived in Central Europe, or who were Lutheran, or Catholic, or who think that their ancestors were from the same area in which they themselves were born? \u00a0If united in a German nation, who would lead it &#8211; were the Prussians or the Austrians more authentically German? \u00a0What of those \u201cGermans\u201d who lived in places like Bohemia (i.e. the Czech lands) and Poland, with their own growing sense of national identity? \u00a0The nationalist movements of the first half of the nineteenth century did not need to concern themselves overmuch with these conundrums because their goals of liberation and unification were not yet achievable. \u00a0When national revolutions of various kinds did occur, however, they proved difficult to overcome.<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ol>\n<li>How are Romanticism and Nationalism connected and what was the impact of these ideologies on political developments in 19th-century Europe?<\/li>\n<li>In what ways were national identities &#8220;natural&#8221; and in what ways were they constructed during this era?<\/li>\n<li>Define the concept of &#8220;the people&#8221; to romantics and nationalists and explain how this idea brings them into conflict with the conservatism discussed earlier in the chapter.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 id=\"h.1mrcu09\" class=\"c20\"><span class=\"c22\">10.6 Liberalism<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Nationalism\u2019s supporters tended to be members of the middle classes, including everyone from artisans to the new professional class associated with commerce and industry in the nineteenth century. \u00a0Many of the same people supported another doctrine that had been spread by the Napoleonic wars: <strong>liberalism<\/strong>. \u00a0The ideas of liberalism were based on the Enlightenment concepts of reason, rationality, and progress from the eighteenth century, but as a movement liberalism came of age in the post-Napoleonic period; the word itself was in regular use by 1830.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Nineteenth-century liberals were usually educated men and women, including the elites of industry, trade, and the professions as well as the middle classes. \u00a0They shared the conviction that freedom in all its forms\u2014freedom from the despotic rule of kings, from the obsolete privilege of nobles, from economic interference and religious intolerance, from occupational restrictions and limitations of speech and assembly\u2014could only improve the quality of society and the well-being of its members. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In something of a contrast to the abstract nature of national identity among nationalists, liberalism had straightforward beliefs, all of them reflecting not just abstract theories but the concrete examples of the liberal American and French Revolutions of the prior century. \u00a0Perhaps liberalism\u2019s most fundamental belief was that there should be equality before the law, in stark contrast to the old \u201cfeudal\u201d (almost a slur to liberals) order of legally-defined social estates. \u00a0From that starting point of equality, the very purpose of law to liberals was to protect the rights of each and every citizen rather than enshrine the privileges of a minority.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Whereas \u201crights\u201d had meant the traditional privileges enjoyed by a given social group or estate in the past, from the king\u2019s exclusive right to hunt game in his forests to the peasants\u2019 right to access the common lands, rights now came to mean a fundamental and universal privilege that was concomitant with citizenship itself. \u00a0Liberals argued that freedom of speech, of a press free from censorship, and of religious expression were \u201crights\u201d that should be enjoyed by all. \u00a0Likewise, most liberals favored the abolition of archaic economic interference from the state, including legal monopolies on trade (e.g. in shipping between colonies) and the monopolies enjoyed by those craft guilds that remained &#8211; the \u201cright\u201d to engage in market exchange unhindered by outdated laws was part of the liberal paradigm as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Just as had the French revolutionaries in the early phase of the revolution, most liberals early nineteenth-century liberals looked to constitutional monarchy as the most reasonable and stable form of government. \u00a0Constitutions should be written to guarantee the fundamental rights of the citizenry and to define, and restrict the power of the king (thus staving off the threat of tyranny). \u00a0Liberals also believed in the desirability of an elected parliament, albeit one with a restricted electorate: almost universally, liberals at the time thought that voting should be restricted to those who owned significant amounts of property, thereby (they thought) guaranteeing social stability.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c3\">Unlike nationalists, liberals saw at least some of their goals realized in post-Napoleonic Europe. \u00a0While its Bourbon monarchy was restored in France, there was now an elected parliament, religious tolerance, and relaxed censorship. \u00a0Britain remained the most \u201cliberal\u201d power in Europe, having long stood as the model of constitutional monarchy. \u00a0A liberal monarchy emerged as a result of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, and by the 1840s limited liberal reforms had been introduced in many of the smaller German states as well. \u00a0Thus, despite the opposition of conservatives, much of Europe slowly liberalized in the period between 1815 and 1848. <\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ol>\n<li>How are the terms liberal\/liberalism or socialist\/socialism used differently in the 19th century, at their origins, then they are today?<\/li>\n<li>Why did constitutional monarchy appeal to most liberals as the most reasonable and stable form of government?<\/li>\n<li>How did the ideas of liberalism evolve from the Enlightenment concepts of reason, rationality, and progress?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 id=\"h.46r0co2\" class=\"c20\"><span class=\"c22\">10.7 Socialism<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The third and last of the new political ideologies and movements of the early nineteenth century was socialism. \u00a0<strong>Socialism<\/strong> was a specific historical phenomenon born out of two related factors: first, the ideological rupture with the society of orders that occurred with the French Revolution, and second, the growth of industrial capitalism. \u00a0It sought to address both the economic repercussions of the industrial revolution, especially in terms of the living conditions of workers, and to provide a new moral order for modern society.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The term itself is French. \u00a0It was created in 1834 to contrast with <strong>individualism<\/strong>, a favourite term among liberals but one that early socialists saw as a symptom of moral decay. \u00a0Right from its inception, socialism was contrasted with individualism and egoism, of the selfish and self-centered pursuit of wealth and power. \u00a0Socialism proposed a new and better moral order, one in which the members of a society would care not only for themselves, but for one another. \u00a0For the first decades of its existence socialism was less a movement with economic foundations than with ethical ones. \u00a0It had economic arguments to make, of course, but those arguments were based on moral or ethical claims.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">By the middle of the nineteenth century, the word socialism came to be used more widely to describe several different movements than had hitherto been considered in isolation from one another. \u00a0Their common factor was the idea that material goods should be held in common and that producers should keep the fruits of their labor, all in the name of a better, happier, more healthy community and, perhaps, nation. \u00a0The abiding concern of early socialists was to address what they saw as the moral and social disintegration of European civilization in the modern era, as well as to repair the rifts and ameliorate the suffering of workers in the midst of early industrial capitalism.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">There was a major shift in socialism that occurred over the course of the century: until 1848, socialism consisted of a movement that shared a concern with the plight of working people and the regrowth of organic social bonds. \u00a0This kind of socialism was fundamentally <span class=\"c4\">optimistic <\/span>\u2013 early socialists thought that almost everyone in European society would eventually become a socialist once they realized its potential. \u00a0Following the later work of Friedrich Engels, one of the major socialist thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century, this kind of socialism is often referred to as &#8220;<strong>utopian socialism<\/strong>.&#8221; \u00a0In turn, after 1848, socialism was increasingly <span class=\"c4\">militant<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> because socialists realized that a major restructuring of society could not happen peacefully, given the strength of both conservative and liberal opposition. \u00a0The most important militant socialism was Marxism, named after its creator <strong>Karl Marx.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Three early socialist movements stand out as exemplary of so-called &#8220;<strong>utopian<\/strong>&#8221; socialism: the Saint-Simonians, the Owenites, and the Fourierists. \u00a0Each was named after its respective founder and visionary. \u00a0The binding theme of these three early socialist thinkers was not only radical proposals for the reorganization of work, but the idea that economic competition was a moral problem, that competition itself is in no way natural and instead implies social disorder. \u00a0The Saint-Simonians called egoism, the selfish pursuit of individual wealth, \u201cthe deepest wound of modern society.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In that, they found a surprisingly sympathetic audience among some aristocratic conservatives who were also afraid of social disorder and were nostalgic for the idea of a reciprocal set of obligations that had existed in pre-revolutionary Europe between the common people and the nobility. \u00a0In turn, the early socialists believed that there was nothing inherent in their ideas threatening to the rich \u2013 many socialists expected that the privileged classes would recognize the validity of their ideas and that socialism would be a way to bridge the class divide, not widen it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">The Saint-Simonians, named after their founder Henri de Saint-Simon, were mostly highly educated young elites in France, many from privileged backgrounds, and many also graduates of the <span class=\"c4\">\u00c9cole Polytechnique<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, the most elite technical school in France founded by Napoleon. \u00a0Their ideology, based on Saint-Simon&#8217;s writings, envisaged a society in which industrialism was harnessed to make a kind of heaven on earth, with the fruits of technology going to feed, clothe, and house, potentially, everyone. \u00a0They were, in a word, the first &#8220;technocrats,&#8221; people who believe that technology can solve any problem. \u00a0The Saint-Simonians did not inspire a popular movement, but individual members of the movement went on to achieve influential roles in the French industry, and helped lay the intellectual foundations of such ventures as the creation of the Suez Canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Owenites were initially the employees of Robert Owen, a British factory owner. \u00a0He built a community for his workers in New Lanark, Scotland that provided health care, education, pensions, communal stores, and housing. \u00a0He believed that productivity was tied to happiness, and his initial experiments met with success, with the New Lanark textile mill realizing consistent profits. \u00a0He and his followers created a number of cooperative, communalist \u201cutopian\u201d communities (many in the United States), but those tended to fail in fairly short order. \u00a0 Instead, the lasting influence of Owenism was in workers organization, with the Owenites helping to organize a number of influential early trade unions, culminating in the London Working Men&#8217;s Association in 1836.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">The Fourierists were part of a very peculiar movement, because their founder Charles Fourier was a <span class=\"c4\">very <\/span><span class=\"c3\">peculiar man. \u00a0Fourier, who may have been at least partially insane, believed that he had unlocked a &#8220;science of the passions.&#8221; \u00a0According to Fourier, the reason that most people detested what they did to survive was that they were not doing the right kind of work. \u00a0There were 810 specific kinds of personalities in the world, each of which was naturally inclined toward a certain kind of work. \u00a0Thus, if 1,620 people (one man and one woman of each type) were to come together in a community, and each did the kind of work they &#8220;should&#8221; do, perfect happiness became possible. \u00a0For example, according to Fourier, murderers were just people who should have been butchers, and children should be trash collectors, because they loved to play in the dirt. \u00a0These planned communities would be called &#8220;Phalanxes,&#8221; after the fighting formations of ancient Greece.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 713px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image73.jpg\" alt=\"Illustration of a large building - the phalanx itself - described as a palace of humanity.\" width=\"713\" height=\"335\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Illustration of a Fouriest phalanx. \u00a0The heading simply reads \u201cThe Future.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">Fourier was far more radical than most other self-understood socialists. \u00a0For one, he advocated complete gender equality and even sexual liberation &#8211; he was very hostile to monogamy, which he believed to be unnatural. \u00a0Regarding marriage as an outdated custom, he imagined that in his phalanxes children would be raised in common rather than lorded over by their parents. \u00a0Above and beyond forward-thinking ideas about gender, some of his concepts were a bit more puzzling. \u00a0Among other things, he claimed that planets mated and gave birth to baby planets, and that once all of humanity lived in phalanxes the oceans would turn into lemonade.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Practically speaking, the importance of the fourierists is that many phalanxes were actually founded, including several in the United States. \u00a0While the more oddball ideas were conveniently set aside, they were still among the first real experiments in planned, communal living. \u00a0Likewise, many important early feminists began their intellectual careers as Fourierists. \u00a0For instance, Flora Tristan was a French socialist and feminist who emerged from Fourierism to do important early work on tying the idea of social progress to female equality. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In general, the broad \u201cUtopian\u201d socialism of the 1840s was quite widespread leading up to 1848, it was peaceful in orientation, it was democratic, it believed in the \u201cright\u201d to work, and its followers hoped that the higher orders might join it. \u00a0These early movements also tended to cross over with liberal and nationalist movements, sharing a vision of more just and equitable laws and a more humane social order in contrast to the repression all three movements identified with conservatism. \u00a0Few socialists in this period believed that violence would be necessary in transforming society.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Considered in detail in the next chapter, there was an enormous revolutionary explosion all over Europe in 1848. \u00a0From Paris to Vienna to Prague, Europeans rose up and, temporarily as it turned out, overthrew their monarchs. \u00a0In the end, however, the revolutions collapsed. \u00a0The awkward coalitions of socialists and other rebels that had spearheaded them soon fell to infighting, and kings (and in France, a new emperor) eventually reasserted control. \u00a0Socialists made important realizations following 1848. \u00a0Democracy did not lead inevitably to social and political progress, as majorities typically voted for established community leaders (often priests or nobles). \u00a0Class collaboration was not a possibility, as the wealthier bourgeoisie and the nobility recognized in socialism their shared enemy. \u00a0Peaceful change might not be possible, given the forces of order&#8217;s willingness to employ violence to achieve their ends. \u00a0Russia, for instance, invaded Hungary to ensure the continued rule of (Russia\u2019s ally at the time) Habsburg Austria. \u00a0After 1848 socialism was increasingly militant, focused on the necessity of confrontational tactics, even outright violence, to achieve a better society. \u00a0 Two post-Utopian and rival forms of socialist theory matured in this period: state socialism and anarchist socialism. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The first, <strong>state socialism<\/strong>, is represented by the French thinker and agitator Louis Blanc. \u00a0Blanc believed that social reform had to come from above. \u00a0It was, he argued, unrealistic to imagine that groups could somehow spontaneously organize themselves into self-sustaining, harmonious units. \u00a0He believed that universal manhood suffrage should and would lead to a government capable of implementing necessary economic changes, primarily by guaranteeing work for all citizens. \u00a0He actually saw this happen in the French revolution of 1848, when he briefly served in the revolutionary government. \u00a0There, he pushed through the creation of National Workshops for workers, which provided paid work for the urban poor. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In stark contrast was <strong>anarchist socialism<\/strong>. \u00a0A semantic point: anarchism means the rejection of the state, not the rejection of all forms of social organization or even hierarchy (i.e. it is perfectly consistent for there to be an organized anarchist movement, even one with leaders). \u00a0In the case of nineteenth-century anarchist socialism, there were two major thinkers: the French Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Russian Mikhail Bakunin.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Proudhon was the author of a book entitled \u201cWhat Is Property?\u201d in which he answered unequivocally that \u201cproperty is theft.\u201d \u00a0The very idea of ownership was vacuous and false to Proudhon, a conceit that ensured that the wealthy maintained their hold on political and legal power. \u00a0Unlike his rival Louis Blanc, Proudhon was skeptical of the state&#8217;s ability to effect meaningful reform, and after the failure of the French revolution of 1848 he came to believe that all state power was inherently oppressive. \u00a0Instead of a state, Proudhon advocated local cooperatives of workers in a kind of \u201ceconomic federalism\u201d in which cooperatives would exchange goods and services between one another, and each cooperative would reward work with the fruits of that work. \u00a0Simply put, workers themselves would keep all profit. \u00a0He believed that the workers would have to emancipate themselves through some kind of revolution, but he was not an advocate of violence. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The other prominent anarchist socialist was Mikhail Bakunin, a contemporary, sometimes friend, and sometimes rival of Proudhon. \u00a0Briefly, Bakunin believed in the necessity of an apocalyptic, violent revolution to wipe the slate clean for a new society of free collectives. \u00a0He loathed the state and detested the traditional family structure, seeing it as a useless holdover from the past. \u00a0Bakunin thought that if his contemporary society was destroyed, the social instincts inherent to humanity would flower and people would \u201cnaturally\u201d build a better society. \u00a0He was also the great champion of the outcasts, the bandits, and the urban poor. He was deeply skeptical about both the industrial working class, who he noted all wished could be middle class, and of western Europe, which was shot-through with individualism, egoism, and the obsession with wealth. \u00a0He ended up organizing large anarchist movements in Europe&#8217;s \u201cperiphery,\u201d especially in Italy and Spain. \u00a0By about 1870 both countries had large anarchist movements.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In the end, the most influential socialist was a German: Karl Marx. \u00a0Marx was born in 1818 in the Rhineland, the son of Jewish parents who had converted to Lutheranism (out of necessity &#8211; Marx\u2019s father was a lawyer in conservative, staunchly Lutheran Prussia). \u00a0He was a passionate and brilliant student of philosophy who came to believe that philosophy was only important if it led to practical change \u2013 he wrote \u201cphilosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. \u00a0The point, however, is to change it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 473px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image75.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of Marx in maturity with his trademark bushy beard.\" width=\"473\" height=\"599\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The best-known portrait of Marx, dating from 1875.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1 c9\">A journalist as a young man, Marx became an avowed socialist by the 1840s and penned (along with his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels) the nineteenth century\u2019s most famous and influential socialist work, <strong><span class=\"c4\">The Communist Manifesto<\/span><\/strong>. \u00a0Exiled to Great Britain in the aftermath of the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, Marx devoted himself to a detailed analysis of the endogenous tendencies of capitalist economics, ultimately producing three enormous volumes entitled, simply,<span class=\"c4\">Capital<\/span><span class=\"c3\">. \u00a0The first was published in 1867, with the other two edited from notes and published by Engels after Marx\u2019s death. \u00a0It is worthwhile to consider Marx\u2019s theories in detail because of their profound influence: by the middle of the twentieth century, fully a third of the world was governed by communist states that were at least nominally \u201cMarxist\u201d in their political and economic policies.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">All of history, according to Marx, is the history of class struggle. \u00a0From ancient pharaohs to feudal kings and their nobles, classes of the rich and powerful had always abused and exploited classes of the poor and weak. \u00a0The world had moved on into a new phase following the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, however, one that (to Marx) simplified that ongoing struggle from many competing classes to just two: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. \u00a0The bourgeoisie were the rising middle classes, the owners of factories and businesses, the bankers, and all of those with direct control over industrial production. \u00a0The <strong>proletariat<\/strong> was the industrial working class.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Before this, the classes of workers in the pre-modern era generally had direct access to their livelihood: a small parcel of land, access to the common lands, the tools of their trade in the case of artisans. They had, in Marx\u2019s language, some kind of protected access to &#8220;the means of production,&#8221; which could mean anything from some land, a plow, and an ox to a workshop stocked with a carpenter&#8217;s tools. \u00a0In the modern era, however, those rights and those tools were systematically taken away. The common lands were closed off and replaced with commercial farms. \u00a0Artisans were rendered obsolete by the growth of industry. Peasants were pushed off the land or owned plots so small their children had to look for work in the cities. The net effect was, generally, that the class of workers who had &#8220;nothing to sell but their labor,&#8221; the proletariat, grew.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">At the same time, the people who did own property, &#8220;the bourgeoisie,&#8221; were under pressure themselves. In the climate of the new capitalism, of unregulated markets and cutthroat competition, it was terribly easy to fall behind and go out of business. Thus, former members of the bourgeoisie lost out and became proletarians themselves. The net effect was that the proletariat grew and every other conceivable class (including peasants, the owners of small shops, etc.) shrank.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Meanwhile, industry produced more and more products. \u00a0Every year saw improvements in efficiency and economy in production, arriving at a terrific glut of products available for purchase. \u00a0Eventually, there was simply too much out there and not enough people who could afford to buy it, as one of the things about the proletariat, one of their forms of &#8220;alienation,&#8221; was their inability to buy the very things they made. This resulted in a &#8220;crisis of overproduction&#8221; and a massive economic collapse. \u00a0This would be unthinkable in a pre-modern economy, where the essential problem a society faced was the scarcity of goods. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, however, products need consumers more than consumers need products.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">In the midst of one of these collapses, Marx wrote, the members of the proletariat <span class=\"c4\">could <\/span>realize their common interests in seizing the unprecedented wealth that industrialism had made possible and using it for the common good. Instead of a handful of super-rich expropriators, <span class=\"c4\">everyone <\/span>could share in material comfort and freedom from scarcity, something that had never been possible before. \u00a0That vision of revolution was very powerful to the young Marx, who wrote that, given the inherent tendencies of capitalism, revolution was inevitable.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In turn, revolutions did happen, most spectacularly in 1848, which Marx initially greeted with elation only to watch in horror as the revolutionary momentum ebbed and conservatives regained the initiative. \u00a0Subsequently, as he devoted himself to the analysis of capitalism\u2019s inherent characteristics rather than revolutionary propaganda, Marx became more circumspect. \u00a0With staggering erudition, he tried to make sense of an economic system that somehow repeatedly destroyed itself and yet regrew stronger, faster, and more violent with every business cycle. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">In historical hindsight, Marx was really writing about what would happen if capitalism was allowed to run <span class=\"c4\">completely rampant<\/span>, as it did in the first century of the Industrial Revolution. \u00a0The hellish mills, the starving workers, and the destitution and anguish of the factory towns were all part of nineteenth-century European capitalism. Everything that could contain those factors, primarily in the form of concessions to workers and state intervention in the economy, had not happened on a large scale when Marx was writing &#8211; trade unions themselves were outlawed in most states until the middle of the century. \u00a0In turn, none of the factors that might mitigate capitalism\u2019s destructive tendencies were financially beneficial to any <span class=\"c4\">individual<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> capitalist, so Marx saw no reason that they would ever come about on a large scale in states controlled by moneyed interests. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">To Marx, revolution seemed not only possible but probable in the 1840s, when he was first writing about philosophy and economics. \u00a0After the revolutions of 1848 failed, however, he shifted his attention away from revolution and towards the inner workings of capitalism itself. \u00a0In fact, he rarely wrote about revolution at all after 1850; his great work<span class=\"c4\">Capital<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> is instead a vast and incredibly detailed study of how England\u2019s capitalist economy worked and what it did to the people \u201cwithin\u201d it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">To boil it down to a very simple level, Marx never described in adequate detail when the material conditions for a socialist revolution were possible. \u00a0Across the vast breadth of his books and correspondence, Marx (and his collaborator Friedrich Engels) argued that each nation would have to reach a critical threshold in which industrialism was mature, the proletariat was large and self-aware, and the bourgeoisie was using increasingly harsh political tactics to try to keep the proletariat in check. \u00a0There would have to be, and according to Marxism there always would be, a major economic crisis caused by overproduction. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">At that point, somehow, the proletariat could rise up and take over. \u00a0In some of his writings, Marx indicated that the proletariat would revolt spontaneously, without guidance from anyone else. \u00a0Sometimes, such as in the second section of his early work <span class=\"c4\">The Communist Manifesto<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, Marx alluded to the existence of a political party, the communists, who would work to help coordinate and aid the proletariat in the revolutionary process. \u00a0The bottom line is, however, that Marx was very good at critiquing the internal laws of the free market in capitalism, and in pointing out many of its problems, but he had no tactical guide to revolutionary politics. \u00a0And, finally, toward the end of his life, Marx himself was increasingly worried that socialists, including self-styled Marxists, would try to stage a revolution \u201ctoo early\u201d and it would fail or result in disaster. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">In sum, Marx did not leave a clear picture of what socialists were supposed to do, politically, nor did he describe how a socialist state would work if a revolution was successful. \u00a0This only mattered historically because socialist revolutions <span class=\"c4\">were <\/span><span class=\"c3\">successful, and those nations had to try to figure out how to govern in a socialistic way.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ol>\n<li>What were the different movements under the umbrella of socialism and what did they have in common? What problems or situations in society were they trying to address?<\/li>\n<li>What were the main differences between socialist movements and how did these differences affect their effectiveness?<\/li>\n<li>What was Karl Marx&#8217;s contribution to socialism and what was the impact of his ideas? How influential has Marxist thought been on later generations and what was its strengths and weaknesses?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 id=\"h.2lwamvv\" class=\"c20\"><span class=\"c22\">10.8 Social Classes<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\">How much did European society resemble the sociological description provided by Marx? \u00a0At first sight, nineteenth-century Europe seems more similar to how it was in earlier centuries than it does radically new \u2013 most people were still farmers, every country but Britain was still mostly rural, and the Industrial Revolution took decades to spread beyond its British heartland. \u00a0That being said, European society <span class=\"c4\">was <\/span><span class=\"c3\">undergoing significant changes, and Marx was right in identifying the new professional middle class, the bourgeoisie, as the agents of much of that change.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The term &#8220;<strong>bourgeoisie<\/strong>&#8221; is French for &#8220;business class.&#8221; \u00a0The term originally meant, simply, &#8220;townspeople,&#8221; but over time it acquired the connotation of someone who made money from commerce, banking, or administration but did not have a noble title. \u00a0The bourgeoisie made up between 15% and 20% of the population of central and western Europe by the early 1800s. \u00a0The male members of the bourgeoisie were factory owners, clerks, commercial and state bureaucrats, journalists, doctors, lawyers, and everyone else who fell into that ambiguous class of \u201cbusinessmen.\u201d \u00a0They were increasingly proud of their identity as \u201cself-made\u201d men, men whose financial success was based on intelligence, education, and competence instead of noble privilege and inheritance. \u00a0Many regarded the old order as an archaic throwback, something that was both limiting their own ability to make money and society\u2019s possibilities of further progress. \u00a0At the same time, they were defined by the fact that they did not work with their hands to make a living; they were neither farmers, nor artisans, nor industrial workers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The growth of the bourgeoisie arose from the explosion of urbanization that took place due to both industrialism and the breakdown of the old social order that started with the French Revolution. \u00a0Cities, some of which grew almost 1000% in the course of the century, concentrated groups of educated professionals. \u00a0It was the middle class that reaped the benefits of a growing, and increasingly complex, economy centered in the cities.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">While the bourgeoisie was proud of its self-understood sobriety and work ethic, in contrast to the foppery and frivolity of the nobility, successful members of the middle class often eagerly bought as much land as they could, both in emulation of the nobles and because the right to vote in most of western Europe was tied for decades to land-ownership. \u00a0In turn, nobles were wary of the middle class, especially because so many bourgeois were attracted to potentially disruptive ideologies like liberalism and, increasingly, nationalism, but over the course of the century the two classes tended to mix based on wealth. \u00a0Old families of nobles may have despised the \u201cnouveau riche,\u201d but they still married them if they needed the money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">The bourgeoisie had certain <span class=\"c4\">visible<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> things that defined them as a class, literal \u201cstatus symbols.\u201d \u00a0They did not perform manual labor of any kind, and insisted on the highest standards of cleanliness and tidiness in their appearance and their homes. In turn, all but the most marginal bourgeois families employed at least one full-time servant (recruited from the working class and always paid a pittance) to maintain those standards of hygiene. \u00a0If possible, bourgeois women did no paid work at all, serving instead as keepers of the home and the maintainers of the rituals of visiting and hosting that maintained their social network. \u00a0Finally, the bourgeoisie socialized in private places: private clubs, the new department stores that opened in for the first time in the mid-nineteenth century, and the foyers of private homes. \u00a0The working classes met in taverns (\u201cpublic houses\u201d or just \u201cpubs\u201d in Britain), while bourgeois men and women stayed safely inside.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 686px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image77.jpg\" alt=\"Bourgeois men in top hats.\" width=\"686\" height=\"600\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Clothing among the bourgeoisie came to resemble a specific \u201cuniform\u201d of respectability in the nineteenth century &#8211; the top hat in particular was an iconic mark of class identity by the middle of the century.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1 c9\">In addition, the members of the bourgeoisie were supposed to live by certain codes of behavior. \u00a0In contrast to the sexual libertinage of the old nobility, bourgeois men and women were expected to avoid extra-marital affairs (although, practically speaking, bourgeois men regularly took advantage of prostitutes). \u00a0A bourgeois man was to live up to high standards of honesty and business ethics. \u00a0What these concepts shared was the fear of<br \/>\n<span class=\"c4\">shame<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> \u2013 the literature of the time describing this social class is filled with references to the failure of a bourgeois to live up to these standards and being exposed to vast public humiliation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">What about the nobility? \u00a0The legal structures that sustained their identity slowly but surely weakened over the course of the nineteenth century. \u00a0Even more threatening than the loss of legal monopolies over land-owning, the officer corps of the army, and political status was the enormous shift in the generation of wealth away from land to commerce and industry. \u00a0Relatively few noblemen had been involved in the early Industrial Revolution, thanks in large part to their traditional disdain for commerce, but by the middle of the century it was apparent that industry, banking, and commerce were eclipsing land-ownership as the major sources of wealth. \u00a0Likewise, the one thing that the bourgeoisie and the working class had in common was a belief in the desirability of voting rights; by the end of the century universal manhood suffrage was on the horizon (or had already come to pass, as it did in France in 1871) in almost every country in Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Thus, the long-term pattern of the nobility was that it came to culturally resemble the bourgeoisie. \u00a0While stubbornly clinging to its titles and its claims to authority, the nobility grudgingly entered into the economic fields of the bourgeoisie and adopted the bourgeoisie\u2019s social habits as well. \u00a0The lines between the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie and the bulk of the nobility were very blurry by the end of the century, as bourgeois money funded old noble houses that still had access to the social prestige of a title.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ol>\n<li>How were social classes and their relationships with one another changing over the course of the 19th century?<\/li>\n<li>What forces were most influential in causing these changes?<\/li>\n<li>How did the new ideologies that developed in this era reflect these changes or try to respond to them?<\/li>\n<li>How does the chapter characterize the emergence of political ideologies, such as conservatism, liberalism and socialism?<\/li>\n<li>How do these 19th century political ideological clash or converge?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"c17\"><em><span class=\"c8 c4\">Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\n<p class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Heads_on_pikes.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960719000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3R_rLaU8lLe8p9TvxSd63E\">Heads on Pikes<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Public Domain<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c10\"><a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/History_of_the_kilt%23mediaviewer\/File%253aHighland_soldier_1744.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960719000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3RsY2YSFDGa7MZP4FmGAyd\">Highland Soldiers<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\">&#8211; Public Domain<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c10\"><a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Karl_Marx_001.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960720000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2ti8V7vO5kT3gGmEsOZzsk\">Marx<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Public Domain<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"c10\"><a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel_preparing_the_launch_of_%2527The_Great_Eastern_by_Robert_Howlett_crop.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960721000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0aAMpyaJoKRe4VHsgignPR\">Top Hats<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Public Domain<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><em>For Further Reference:<\/em><\/h3>\n<p>&#8220;The Romantics&#8221; by Stephanie Forward, <em>The British Library<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bl.uk\/romantics-and-victorians\/articles\/the-romantics\">https:\/\/www.bl.uk\/romantics-and-victorians\/articles\/the-romantics<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Europe: 19th century Romanticism,\u00a0<em>Smarthistory<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/europe-19th-century\/romanticism\/\">https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/europe-19th-century\/romanticism\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Introduction to 19th-Century Socialism by Professor Paul Brians, Washington State University, <a href=\"https:\/\/brians.wsu.edu\/2016\/10\/12\/introduction-to-19th-century-socialism\/\">https:\/\/brians.wsu.edu\/2016\/10\/12\/introduction-to-19th-century-socialism\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Victorian Socialism: An Introduction&#8221; Dr Andrzej Diniejko, D. Litt.; Contributing Editor, Poland,<br \/>\non <em>The Victorian Web, <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/victorianweb.org\/victorian\/history\/socialism\/socialism.html\">https:\/\/victorianweb.org\/victorian\/history\/socialism\/socialism.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox shaded\">\n<p>This chapter contains a remix of text from the following:<\/p>\n<p>The main text is taken from Christopher Brooks, &#8220;Chapter 3: Political Ideologies and Movements&#8221; in\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.nscc.ca\/worldhistory\" rel=\"cc:attributionURL\">Western Civilization: A Concise History<\/a> <\/em>Volume 3, licensed under a <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Original material in the text boxes and the inclusion of a &#8220;For Further References&#8221; section by Nicole V. Jobin, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width: 0\" src=\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/80x15.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Original material in the section &#8220;Questions for Discussion&#8221; and the addition of terms for identification in the dialog boxes by Meghan K. Bowe, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width: 0\" src=\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/80x15.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2328,"menu_order":5,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-82","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":279,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2328"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":748,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/82\/revisions\/748"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/279"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/82\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}