6 Nationalism and National Unification

The forms of nationalism that emerged in Europe in the 19th century might be the most powerful of all the isms.

Ideologies based on social class and economic causes were not as strong as they could have been because of nationalist sentiment.

The quip "scratch a Communist and you will find a Great Russian nationalist" made the point with disarming frankness.

Some historians think modern nationalism in Europe is unique.

They have different opinions about how far back its roots are.
By the late nineteenth century European nationalism had taken on some distinctive attributes, most notably in the way that modern nation-states were able to mobilize their populations around nationalist themes and concentrate power in the hands of national leaders.
In reference to competing nations, emerging European nations tended to define themselves.
The "spiritual" superiority of non-French nations was emphasized in contrast to the decadence of the French in early nineteenth-century European nationalism.

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Dictionary definitions of modern nationalism usually include references to a nation-state whose citizens are bound together by a sense of common identity in their physical attributes.

In the 19th century, European nationalists claimed territories where their ancestors were buried.

In their claims to a common pure race, many of the nationalistic claims of the nineteenth century seem problematic from the standpoint of the early twenty-first century.

The lack of clear frontiers for many nation-states was explored in the introduction.
Almost all nationalisms claimed that their territories were to beredeemed as rightfully theirs despite the fact that those territories contained other national groups.
Even when the majority of the current population in those territories was of a different nationality, a commitment to gaining or regaining such territories was central to the nationalist program.

In the mystical belief that individuals achieved fulfillment, a sense of higher meaning was associated with national purpose in the early nineteenth-century nationalism and romanticism.

In the early 19th century, liberalism and nationalism were connected, but that belief ran counter to the individualism that was fundamental to liberalism.
The national purpose was believed by many to be part of a divine plan, contrary to the secular foundation of liberalism, and national unity for liberals tended to have less mystical appeals, among them uniform laws and economic regulations that together fostered economic growth.

Irredentist claims brought up a number of issues, the most important of which was how to define "the people" and whether individuals from one people could join those from another.

In a time when the idea of popular sovereignty was replacing the belief in a monarch's divine right to rule, defining the people was important to legitimizing a nation-state.

By the middle years of the 19th century, most observers agreed that the French and the Germans each constituted a people, the first with a long-established nation-state, the second without one but still recognized as having a cultural-linguistic claim to form one in modern times.

Europeans didn't think that Jews or Gypsies were deserving of a modern nation-state.
They were outsiders, not European in origin or culture, their numbers were small, and their potential military power was so insignificant that they would not be able to defend any territory they claimed.
Their populations were not close to a majority in any large expanse of territory.
The peasant class and nobility of the land were considered essential components of a genuine European people.

The Basques were not able to establish a viable modern nationstate because they were too few to be incorporated into a larger state like Spain.

The Slovaks and Ukrainians were largely uneducated and uneducated peasants who spoke local dialects that were not considered genuine languages.
They should be absorbed into the "historical" peoples around them, such as the Magyars, Poles, or Russians.
In order to survive and preserve their identities, leaders of other Slavic nationalities, such as the Czechs, with a more urban, socially diverse, and literate population, generally believed that they needed the protection of a larger political entity.

The idea of major peoples absorbing minor peoples was popular in the 19th century.

Many non- French peoples abandoned their premodern identities and became French.
Many of them did so willingly, even with a sense of relief, because they were escaping the cramped world of the villages and small towns with their pettiness and bigotry.

In the early 19th century, the word "race" was a lot of things.

It was thought that different races could blend into each other.
It was possible that a person could change their racial identity by an act of will, if not from black to white.
Such a definition of race differed from the "scientific" definition of the word that it gradually acquired in the course of the century.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the word "race" continued to have different meanings in English.

The different associations from language to language grew more significant in the case of the words "nation" and " people".

It was assumed that non-Europeans who came from distant lands, such as Africans or Chinese, could not become members of a European race.

It was claimed that it was impossible for non-Europeans to pronounce European languages correctly because of their different racial nature.

The French nation was seen as a model for other modern nation-states.

It was a "hexagon" of geography and natural frontiers, and also because of the role of popular sovereignty in its history.
In the 19th century, France became a country of a single official language and high culture, as well as universally applied laws, monetary standards, and weights and measures, all centralized in Paris.
Local identities and dialects are still present in villages and small towns, but the French model of what was eventually termed "unitary nationalism" was copied in Latin lands and on the socialist left.

Anti-French feelings were an important part of the nationalism of many European peoples.

The Germans were looked down upon as impractical dreamers, poets, and philosophers because of their political differences.
A characteristic chip on the shoulder and a growing tendency to assert that German culture was superior to that of the French were some of the new national feelings of the Germans.

Almost all emerging peoples engaged in demonizing the Enemy.

The Slavs and Italians under Habsburg rule focused on the Habsburgs as the oppressive other.
The Great Russians and the tsars were the oppressors in eastern Europe.

Problems were presented by the German language.

There are no viable standards for a "real" language in which one can call one version of German, or any tongue, a "real" language.

The English version of the Bible, the Italian version of Dante, and the German version of Luther's translation of it were all examples of why one version of a language was more prestigious than the other.

There was an issue of how the nation-state should enforce standards of correctness, most importantly through state-supported schools, when a measure of consensus was reached regarding the desirable form of a language.
Until the late 19th century, there had never been a single unified German state to enforce these matters.

Drawing the borders of the German nation-state, since various dialects were to be found all along the borders of any such state, was a major problem for German nationalism.

There were pockets of German settlements scattered far and wide in central and eastern Europe.
Large numbers of Germans were to be found in southern Russia.
There were pockets of non-German people in the areas of the densest German population.

No recognized authorities were able to determine which part of the population belonged to which race or people.

There were a number of influential writers who had ideas that suggested links.

The most influential is Johann Gottfried von Herder.

He was a German Romantic who disliked French domination and the related cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment.
The kind of self-confidence necessary for genuine creativity can only be achieved through a deep emotional attachment to the people into which one was born and a lifetime ofimmersing in its language, culture, and history.
It was believed that the most authentic and uncorrupted German feeling was to be found in the folktales of the common people.

Herder's writings stressed German uniqueness but not superiority to other peoples.

His ideas were embraced by other nationalists outside of Germany.
He was resentful about French influence and arrogance, but he felt less anger and more kindness in his work.

Friedrich Hegel was an influential German thinker of the next generation, and his thought was wide-ranging and subtle at times.

This tendency was relatively moderate in the case of Otto von Bismarck, the leader of Germany who led the unification of the country, but it found plenty and notorious expression by some German nationalists.

It should be mentioned that Hegel's philosophy inevitably entails violence and suffering, as the old was destroyed and the new established, and that he contributed powerfully to the rising consensus that a people needed a nation-state in order to achieve fulfillment.

The establishment of a modern German nation-state was decades before Herder and Hegel died.

In the first years of the 19th century, political activists discussed how people, nation, and state would be conceived.
The leader of the group was to be the king of Prussia, but not the Germans in the Habsburg Empire.

The rise of Germans in central and eastern Europe led to the emergence of pan-Slavism.

The first Pan-Slav assembly was called after the Czechs of Bohemia refused to attend the Frankfurt Assembly.

Some Poles from outside the empire attended, as did some South Slavs from the Balkans, but most of them came from the Habsburg Empire.

The delegates to the Pan-Slav assembly did not oppose remaining within the Habsburg Empire.
They were resigned to being sheltered within the Habsburg Empire rather than being completely independent because of their fear of being absorbed by the Germans from the west.

In June of 1848, almost any kind of organized or formal Pan-Slavic union, even one as loose as the German Bund, appeared a remote prospect.

There was a large and bitter difference between the Catholic Poles and the Orthodox Great Russians.

The main goal of Polish nationalists in the early 19th century was to free themselves from the yoke of tsarist autocracy.
The Russians were more like a bully than a brother to the Poles.

Frantisek Palacky, one of the leading and most influential proponents of Czech nationalism and of Austroslavism, wrote his history of the Czechs in German, which was the language that most educated Czechs read best.

In the early 19th century, the most urbanized of the Slavic peoples, the Czechs, generally revered German high culture while dismissing Russia as hopelessly reactionary.
Germans were respected culturally but feared politically by Slavs, whereas Russians were less respected.
The crushing of the Hungarian revolt by tsarist troops in 1849 reinforced the general apprehension that tsarist autocracy could be expected to block any progressive evolution of the peoples on its borders.

Russian Nationalist stirrings were not as advanced as those in Czech or Polish areas.

Slavophilism began to take shape in the 1830s.
One of the best-known expressions of this trend was in the writings of the celebrated novelist and essayist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Russian intellectuals were familiar with and respectful of German high culture.

In the first half of the 19th century, Spain fell far short of being a successful modern nation-state in terms of popular support, administrative consolidation, and military power.

The goal of geographical union was not a concern for Spanish nationalists.
Similar to France and Portugal, irredentist claims were not important.
In Catalonia and the Basque areas, demands for regional autonomy or even independence remained major issues into the twenty-first century.
Spain was not counted among the major powers at Vienna, or at any time in the following two centuries, though in the late twentieth century it began a remarkable revival under the auspices of the European Union.

A great deal of what was considered essential to a modern people was lacking in Italy, but how much of those dreams actually trickle down from the educated few to the mass of rural residents is uncertain.

Over 90 percent of Italians spoke incomprehensible local dialects by the 1860s.
The concept of race was not a unifying one in Italy.
The idea of a pure Italian race was not supported by the fact that so many people from other areas of the Mediterranean had mixed with the indigenous people of the Italian peninsula.
Many northern Italians thought of southern Italians as inferior.

Despite a brief period of unity under Napoleon, the long-separated regions of north, central, and southern Italy retained their vaguest sense of a common identity.

The Apennine Mountains, running down the center of the peninsula, contributed to the isolation of villages and towns distant from the coastline.

The term "imagined community" of national identity is suggestive in the Italian case.

Giuseppe Mazzini was probably the most important figure in that imagined realm.

Two years after Herder's death, Mazzini blended the German theorist's ideas with those of others in a highly readable style.

By the 1830s and 1840s, he was involved in an underground of nationalist agitation, and was one of the people who saw a mystically redemptive mission in nationalism.
He founded Young Italy, which plotted armed uprisings to drive out the Austrian occupiers.
Although he became an inspiration to many Italians, Mazzini's initial efforts were failures and he became yet another symbol of the political impotence of the Romantics.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was a colorful, charis matic man of action.

He was the epitome of the Romantic hero and was active in both Latin America and Europe.
The founding father of modern Italy is Count Camilo di Cavour, who served as prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia from 1852 to his death in 1861.
A man of noble origin but with the habits and tastes of a no-nonsense businessman, he introduced a wide range of liberal reforms to his country.
It is hard to imagine the unification of Italy without the peculiar talents of both.

The power relations in Europe were shifting.

Even after the antirevolutionary surge of 1849-50, the future of the concert of Europe was not certain.
The emergence of a united Italy and Germany in 1871 marked a time when that concert, or the ideal of mutual consultations among the great powers, was largely ignored.
In the four to five decades after 1871, there was a new kind of balance of power, with new alliances and a major shift in the relative strengths of the major continental powers, Germany rising the most and Russia declining or at least not keeping up.

In the early 1850s, under Napoleon III's leadership, France seemed to be taking up anew the role of Europe's trouble-maker, but not by sending out armies.

Napoleon favored a range of "modern" ideas, among them a new system of nation-states, beginning with a unified Italy.
In domestic and foreign policy, Napoleon's goals lacked clarity and consistency.
Like his uncle, he began suppressing the left and establishing a dictatorship based on vague promises but impressive electoral successes.
The new Napoleon's right-wing inclinations seemed obvious when he sent troops into Italy to restore the Roman Republic.
His foreign policy in the early 1850s shifted toward more modern, progressive perspectives by exploiting the weaknesses of the two main antimodern powers, tsarist Russia and Habsburg Austria.

In 1854, Napoleon joined Turkey's side in the war between Turkey and Russia.

He was able to get Great Britain and Austria to join him in opposing Russia's plan to expand into the Turkish Empire.
The most intense battles of the war were limited to the peninsula of the Black Sea.
The two provinces that would join to become Romania in 1859 were moved into by Austria.
Some 750,000 military deaths were registered during the war, a large percentage of them not directly the result of combat but rather of disease and inadequate care for the wounded.
Florence Nightingale was able to convince authorities to allow women to act as army nurses because of those problems.
The role of journalists in reporting on this war was related to a "modern" development of both immediate and long-range importance.
They had a lot to say about the leadership and disregard for the welfare of the soldier.
Wars would never be the same after female nurses and reporters joined them.

Russia was humiliated in this conflict.

Alexander II commenced a comprehensive program of internal reform after Nicholas I died.
In 1856, a congress of the great powers was held in Paris, in order to fashion a peace that would satisfy a wide range of competing interests.

The Paris peace settlement of 1856 is seen as an important catalyst for many subsequent developments, in particular setting up conditions favorable to the creation of new nation-states.

The issues that led to the conflict were addressed in the Paris settlement, as well as the principles governing relations between the major powers.
Cavour brought Piedmont-Sardinia on the side of those attacking Russia in order to influence that refashioning.
He had made contacts with Napoleon III.
In the spirit of realism that came to prevail after 1848, Cavour reasoned that Italians could not hope to oust the Austrians from the peninsula without a major power.
Napoleon was the one who secretly revealed his plans for provoking war with Austria.
He was involved in the anti-Habsburg conspiracies.

Cavour succeeded in provoking Austria to declare war on Piedmont-Sardinia, and Napoleon, following a secret agreement he had made with the Piedmontese leader.

The French and Piedmontese forces defeated the Austrians in two battles.
Things began to go out of control, at least from Napoleon's perspective.
In the 19th century, revolutionary Italians to the south and east rose up and overthrew their governments.
Since French troops were still in Rome to protect the reactionary pope, Napoleon was not comfortable about being the cause of such revolutionary uprisings.

Cavour was dumbfounded by Napoleon's peace with the Austrians, one that gave Lombardy to Piedmont-Sardinia but left Venetia under Austrian control.

The betrayed Cavour contemplated suicide, only to die of natural causes a year later at age fifty-one.
The nationalist flames he helped to ignite were not easily quelled.
In a series of referendums, the people of Tuscany, the Romagna, and the smaller states south of Lombardy embraced annexation to Piedmont-Sardinia.

The leaders of the revolts were excommunicated by Pius IX, who included the Romagna.

In 1860, representatives from these states met in the Piedmontese capital of Torino to form a new parliament under an enlarged monarchy.
The British immediately recognized the new Italian state as a liberal monarchy.
Savoy and Nice were annexed to France after Napoleon agreed to the changes.

This was the first step towards unifying the entire Italian peninsula.

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was ruled by a Bourbon from Naples.

The next steps were even more dramatic.
He had rallied the Thousand (also called the Red Shirts), and launched an initially but finally dazzling military campaign, working his way from Sicily up the peninsula, gathering more followers as he progressed.
The unpopular Kingdom of Two Sicilies collapsed.

There was a chance of a clash with the French troops still guarding the pope in Rome, but nothing was said about it.

The confrontations were averted because Garibaldi agreed to recognize VictorEmmanuel rather than insist upon a republic.

In a scene widely reproduced in papers of the day, he and the Piedmontese king rode together in a carriage through the streets of Naples to the cheering of crowds in the city.

In 1861, most of Italy was united, although the northeast was still under Austrian rule and the area around Rome was still under papal jurisdiction.
The two areas were added at the same time as the unification of Germany.

The unification of Italy was an inspiration to nationalists in other areas, but the unification of Germany was more significant.

Prussia relied on its own military might to humble first Austria and then France in brilliantly executed wars, and it was one that differed from the Italian model.
The king of Prussia and his liberal-dominated parliament were at odds over the issue of financing an expansion of the military in the year after Italy's unification.

The conservative east erner was known as the "East-Elbian" and was hostile to the moderate liberal businessmen coming from Prussia's western territories.

The stern manner of the Junker class was affected by him.
He was known for his iron will and self-confidence.
He had no use for revolutionaries, republicans, or socialists.
Even though he became an icon of German nationalism, his deepest sympathies were to Prussia, its king, and its Junker leadership, and he looked upon many German nationalists with suspicion.
The unification of all German-speakers, including the numerous Catholics of the south, was seen as a threat to Protestantism by the German nationalists.

The liberals in the parliament refused to appropriate the taxes that were collected by Bismarck.

The weakness of German liberalism became manifest when the general population paid them.
Prussia's army was reequipped.
There is no moral code applied to the relations between states.

In the unification of Germany, Bismarck had duplicity, shrewdness, and ruthlessness.

His initial expansionist move was modest, in opposition to the neighboring province of Schleswig, which had a mixed German and Danes population.

Prussia and Austria easily defeated the Danes, thanks to Austria's support.

Prussia and Austria had differences over the administration of Schleswig and neighboring Holstein, which led to negotiations with other European powers.

The leaders of Austria were able to get the support of most of the German Confederation against Prussia.

The Seven-Weeks' War was fought between Austria and the Prussia in the 19th century.
The rest of Europe's major powers were still rubbing their eyes in amazement after the peace agreement was negotiated.

Prussia annexed the entire kingdom of Hanover in the peace settlement.

The North German Confederation was formed in 1867, combining the enlarged state of Prussia with twenty-one other German minor states.
He introduced universal manhood suffrage for the lower house of the Reichstag, but he also provided the new Confederation with a constitution that placed the Prussian monarch at its head.
He angered both his former Junker supporters and his liberal former opponents, but he also rallied German democrats and socialists.

The rough parallels with the first steps of Italian unification are obvious, but one very large difference soon emerged: Napoleon was about to see his "doctrine of nationalities" explode in his face.

Prussia's side in the anti-French war was aided by the fact that the smaller German states saw France as the aggressor.
France was first isolated diplomatically and then defeated in a matter of weeks, though formal hostilities lingered for a number of months more.

In the Hall of Mirrors at the palace of Versailles, a new German Empire was proclaimed.

The Kaiser was created by the constitution of the North German Confederation.
Two areas on Germany's southwest border that were important to the future defense of the new German Reich were annexed by Bismarck.
He imposed an indemnity of 5 billion gold Francs on France for starting the war.
After the first Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, France was demanded a huge sum.
Italy took over the papal lands after the French were moved to the northern front in France.
The pope was left a small enclave in Rome, the residence of popes thereafter.

Paris was surrounded by people.

As a final peace was being negotiated, France's capital city would be the scene of uprisings and civil war, to be described in Chapter 8.

See the broader diplomatic background to the unification of Italy and Germany.

G.O.

is one of the relevant biographies of the period.

The formation of new Italian and German nation-states was one of the more prominent developments of the two to three decades after the revolutions of 1848.

Austria, Russia, and Turkey were the most modernized of the multinational empires.

The designs of Cavour and Napoleon III led to the downfall of the Habsburg Empire in the 1850s and 1860s.

If the nationalists continued to spread, the empire was going to break.
The empire survived until the end of World War I.
It was not the case that all of the nationalities of the Habsburg Empire wanted to establish their own nation-state.
The Austroslavs looked for more respect for their cultures and languages in a liberalized empire.

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The Russians to the east and the Germans to the west are vulnerable to the Mid-CENTURY CONSOLIDATION.

Poland's partition was the worst-case scenario that other Slavs kept in mind.

The Habsburg Empire's many Slavic peoples were too scattered and diverse in their identities to contemplate a modern nation-state.

Most of the positions at the top of the empire were occupied by German-speakers.
The situation was not nationalistic in the sense of looking to an integral nation-state, but it still satisfied the German national feeling.
German nation-state, the dominant Germans of the Habsburg Empire, tended to reestablish their identity as the ruling elite, to a sense that they had a higher mission in providing the benefits of German rule and civilization to others.

Many non-Germans were offended by that mentality, but it wasn't as much of a problem as twenty-first-century readers might think.

The Slovenes, a small South-Slavic group along the north of the Adriatic Sea, were known to be especially favorable to German culture and language.
While retaining a sense of Jewish ethnic and religious difference, a large and growing percentage of the Jewish population embraced both German language and culture.
The more secular and urbanized of the Jews in the Habsburg Empire, especially in its western, urbanized areas, accepted the belief that German language and culture was the most important form of contemporary civilization.

Economic upward mobility and social respectability were achieved through the use of German language and culture.

The Emperor gradually gained the respect and affection of a significant part of the population, especially by that part that he came to call "my Jews" (condescending, no doubt, but not seen as offensive by most Jews).

He was a limited man, living in a world of haughty aristocracy and courtly pomp that was repelled by modern times.
He did not attract the kind of suspicion and hostility that the tsars of his day did.
The fact that the Jews didn't have any territory that could be used to break away from the empire was appreciated.
The Jewish population was modernizing and innovative, which contributed to the empire's productivity in ways that few other ethnic groups did.

The Habsburg Germans' sense of mission translated into a radical centralization of the power of the state using German language and efficiency.

Even though popular participation was not encouraged, there was a "liberal" or at least progressive aspect to that.
The abolition of serfdom in the 19th century needed a strong hand by state officials because of the resistance from large landlords and former beneficiaries.
The building of railroads was sponsored by the state.
A common language of commerce, lingua franca, could be seen as an important part of economic modernization.

After 1919, the free-trade area of the empire was broken into a number of small and economically important areas.

In the Hungarian half of the empire, there was a strong opposition to the idea of German rule, which resulted in the creation of an independent state in 1848.

Like the Germans in the western half, they were the top ethnic or language group in the eastern half, but they constituted less than a majority in the Kingdom of Hungary.

In the eastern half of the empire, there were pockets of German-speaking people.

There were passages in Herder that suggested that the Magyars might disappear in the future.

Lajos Kossuth, the nationalist leader of the Magyars, came to be known as an eloquent nationalist freedom fighter against Habsburg oppression.

The Habsburg armies tried to bring the Hungarians into line, but there were no clear victors.
Kossuth was elected governor-regent by the Hungarian assembly in April 1849.
Since the troops of Nicholas I intervention, Hungarian formal independence did not last long.
Kossuth went into exile again.
His support within Hungary was weakened by factional hostilities.
Even if the tsar's army did not intervene, it is not certain which terms he could have continued to rule.

In the repressive period after 1849, the desire to independence grew.

Kossuth gained fame in exile through his anti-Habsburg movement, which he found a lot of sympathy in.

After years of oppression, leaders in Vienna finally came to the conclusion that some sort of accommodation was necessary.
Austria's leaders were pushed to recognize that the national principle and the broader mandates of modernization could not be ignored after a number of setbacks.

There were no real parallels or precedents in European history when it came to the form that recognition took.

The new constitution allowed the Germans to continue governing the western half of the empire, even though it was not as authoritarian as before, and the eastern half was free of German domination.

German was the language of administration in the western half, but it was replaced by Magyar in the eastern half.

The king of Hungary was also the emperor.
Each half had its own parliament, with delegates from each meeting together in one body in alternate years in the two capital cities.
There were several ministries of finance, foreign affairs, and defense.
The German-dominated half did not follow in the footsteps of Bismarck.
The ideal of "one man, one vote" was not achieved until 1907.
Only a quarter of adult males in the Magyar-dominated half voted by 1914.
The English model never matched the principle of Ministerial responsibility to the two parliaments.

The Slavs were the main loser in the new arrangement.

In the Alto (Upper) Adige area northwest of Venice, there was a large block of unhappy Romanians in the Hungarian half and a small pocket of Italians in the western half.

Many looked back upon the dual monarchy with nostalgia after 1919.

AustriaHungary might be considered a success compared to Russia and Turkey.

Russia was being passed by many of them after it seemed so threatening to other countries the first part of the century.

Its humiliation in the Crimean War was more severe than that of the Habsburg Empire in its defeats at the hands of Napoleon III, and Bismarck, in the 1850s and 1860s.

The Russian Empire is compared to the Habsburg Empire.

Alexander II and Nicholas II were murdered by revolutionaries during the reign of four tsars, all of which were attributed to Lady Luck.
Compared to the Habsburg Empire, the tsars ruled over vaster territories and more diverse peoples, with large numbers of uneducated peasants or pastoral tribesmen.
The Russian Empire was larger than all the European states combined.
In the European part of Russia, west of the Urals, the Great Russians ruled over many non-Slavs.
There were large numbers of Muslims and other non-Christians in the lands near the Black and Caspian seas.
The largest population of Jews in the world was located along the western border of the Russian Empire.

Power to the people would be a formula for chaos because of the large land mass and diversity of peoples.

Western notions of freedom and individual rights could not work for a mostly uneducated population.
By the mid-century, organized pressure from below was insignificant.
Russia did not experience a revolution in the 19th century.
The Decembrist Revolt of 1824, led by military officers, was brutally crushed.

Those who came to be known as westernizers argued that Russia had no choice but to follow the path of western countries and that the Slavophile vision was based on illusion.

In the past, the tsars imported technologies and technical experts from the west in order to build up the power of the Russian state in order to face opposition from the native Russian population.

The Decembrist revolt showed that western contacts brought with them notions of personal liberty and the rule of law.

A large part of the Russian population remained enslaved, and in ways that were even more complete and degrading than had been the case for the serfs of central Europe.

serfdom had to go, for the simple reason that it was not working in simple economic terms, even for the owners of serfs, by the late 1850s.

The serf was not in line with the modern liberal ideal of a free, independent, and responsible citizen.

Liberal critics believed that serfdom perpetuated a class of seeming subhumans and lacked initiative.
The poor modern soldier that was made by the serf was on everyone's mind after the war.

The terms on which the Russian serfs were freed became the source of bitter disappointment as they were with the black slaves in the United States.

New ideas were discouraged and traditional methods were reenforced.

As the population grew, the problem of rural poverty grew worse.
The economic situation of the large landowners was not in danger even though they had to give up formal title to half of their lands.

Alexander's reform measures were better conceived.

Intellectuals were given more freedom, and travel to the west became easier, and controls over the universities were loosened.
Jews were allowed to travel out of the Pale of Settlement in European Russia, and in the general economic upswing of the time, a number of them made fortunes like those of the Rothschilds of central and western Europe.
The legal system was completely overhauled in the most widely admired and lasting of the reforms.
The reform was a result of freeing the serfs, since the government now takes over justice in the countryside.
Important steps were taken in the direction of liberal ideals, by respecting the individual rights of all subjects and avoiding the arbitrariness of tsarist officialdom.
Those appearing in court were considered equal before the law, trials were to be held in public, and defendants had the right to be represented by a trained lawyer.
All observers agreed that a significant change had been introduced in terms of the rule of law as experienced by most Russian subjects.

Representative institutions are considered the hardest nut to crack in Russia.

Alexander created a system of elected district assembly with the responsibility of administering local issues such as roads, public health, and education.
Alexander was against the creation of a nationwide representative body similar to the parliaments of the west.

He came to doubt the wisdom of this flurry of reforms, and gave a more respectful hearing to his advisers who were worried that a Pandora's box had been opened.

Alexander narrowly escaped assassi nation in 1866, again in 1873, and then again in 1880, only to be killed by a bomb.

Liberalism seemed to be especially disruptive and violent in Russia.

As part of his program of sponsoring modern ideas, Napoleon III looked to a Europe of nation-states, initially offering an encouragement to Cavour and Bismarck that he came to regret.

His internal policy had ambiguous aspects.

The June Days left the revolution in France in a state of limbo.

In the spring of 1848 it became clear that popular support for a social republic was not shared by the propertied.
The assembly that drafted the new constitution decided that a strong executive power was needed.
The assembly sponsored elections for a president based on universal manhood suffrage.
The results shocked the left and were seen as a sign of a new mood.
Lamartine, the Romantic poet considered the spokesman of the opening days of the revolution, received a laughable 18,000 votes.
Ledru-Rollin, the leading socialist candidate, won 370,000.
The fact that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte received more votes than all the other candidates combined was a real shock.

Unsophisticated voters, who had not voted before, were linked to what the first Napoleon had come to symbolize by name recognition.

He saved the revolution by establishing order.
In the early 19th century, that legend tended to blur the memory of Napoleon's harsh rule and other misadventures.
Louis Napoleon was not associated with the revolutionary left or the extreme right, but he was still favorable to business interests and presented himself as a friend of the common people.

The way in which he made his statements cut across many of the hard lines drawn in French political life by this time has led some scholars to see a Proto-Fascist aspect to Bonapartism.

Louis Napoleon has been described as a progenitor of modern mass politicians.

The portrait suggests nobility and an association with Emperor Napoleon I, whereas Napoleon III was often cruelly caricatured by his peers, most famously by Karl Marx.

A new legislative assembly based on universal speach manhood took over in May of 1849.

Its political complexion was mostly right-wing.
The French monarchists were divided between those who wanted the Bourbons to return and those who wanted the Orleanists to return.
Louis Napoleon, who had the approval of this conservative majority, quickly moved to suppress the small socialist group in the assembly and to restrict the freedom of the press.
He curbed civil liberty to make it harder for the poor to vote.
He gained approval from traditional Catholics by sending French troops to crush the Roman Republic and by putting schools under the Catholic clergy.

On the anniversary of Napoleon I's famous victory at Austerlitz, Louis Napoleon was able to install himself as dictator in a violent coup d'etat.

In December, Napoleon's police and military killed 150 opponents and arrested 150,000 others in street fighting.
Voters reelected Louis Napoleon by a majority of 7.5 million in favor of 650,000 against, two weeks after universal suffrage had been restored.
Napoleon would have won a strong majority even if the elections were free.
He assumed the name Napoleon III within a year.

France by 1852 was less liberal than it had been under Louis Philippe, or even under Charles X, because of the constitutionalist aspect of liberalism that stipulated a legislative body to check the power of the executive.

Inevitably, the belief that universal manhood suffrage would mean a turn to radicalism and socialism became less firm: Perhaps, after all, giving the vote to the masses could be reconciled with respect for property and privilege.

Universal speach manhood was introduced in Germany.
Benjamin Disraeli was able to move the Conservative Party in that direction because he believed in an alliance of working-class and landed aristocracy.
The electoral laws were managed in ways that effectively disqualified a large portion of the population.
The vote in Britain after 1867 excluded large parts of the non-propertied laboring poor.

Conservatives in many countries began to reconcile themselves to the idea that "democracy" could be consistent with the survival of conservative values.

Napoleon III's government violated liberal political norms, but he took measures that fulfilled other aspects of the liberal agenda.

Napoleon's policies might just as well be termed socialistic because existing labels were inadequate to describe the Second Empire.
Napoleon believed that parliamentary regimes were special, moneyed interests and did not represent genuine popular interests.
He maintained that power had moved into the hands of a man who stood above social class and who appointed disinterested experts, like Saint-Simon had advocated.

These earlier relations of rulers and common people were created by Napoleon III and his advisers.

He introduced a glittery court life because he recognized the appeal of pomp and pageantry.
He oversaw, under the inspired direction of the city-planner Baron Haussmann, a massive program of urban renewal, transforming Paris and giving it the general contours that remain to this day: wide boulevards, inspiring vistas, and splendid squares and parks.
Many of the older, poorer areas were torn down and workers moved to outlying areas.
A new water supply and sewer systems were installed.
Paris became the center of French economic life and the role of the state as stimulator was more important than in the British model.

In the first few years of his rule, Napoleon assured the nation that he was a man of peace, but that was not what the name Napoleon suggested to most people.

The wars Napoleon was involved in were against Russia in the Crimea, Austria in northern Italy, Mexico and Prussia.

The last of the small-scale conflicts proved to be Napoleon's undoing, as described in Chapter 8.

Excellent introductions to this period are 1995).

For a more general introduction, see A.J.P.

British leaders weathered the storms better than their counterparts in other countries.

Britain entered its classic age of economic growth, effective parliamentary rule, and world influence in the 1850s and 1860s despite there being no political revolution throughout the period.
The British rise was particularly striking, as was the sense that developments in Britain represented the voice of the future, as these decades were generally a time of growth and prosperity throughout Europe.
The British were optimistic about their own future and harbored a strong belief in progress.

The French prospered in the two decades of the Second Empire, but their optimism was clouded by the disasters of 1870-1.

Their position as the leading nation of Europe was further diminished.
The British and Germans were above them.

In these years other peoples and nations were surging forward economically and on many other fronts as never before, each with different versions of how to adjust to the advent of modern times.

"Science" was a new religion for influential parts of European society.

During the fall of 1870 to the spring of 1871, France was ravaged by the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing revolutionary upheaval known as the Paris Commune.

It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

After the early 1870s, Marxist ideas spread through other books and articles.

The last years of Napoleon III were not good.

His health began to fail and he was unable to establish a kingdom in Mexico under the French empire.
The French forces were withdrawn after five years.
Disgruntled with the empire was growing inside France.
The issue of how a liberal empire might have developed in the future is unimportant since Napoleon's rule came to a calamitous end when he fell into a trap and declared war against Prussia.
Napoleon was captured on the battlefield in September 1870 after France's armies were overwhelmed.

Since the 1790s, a romantic aura has grown up around all aspects of the revolution.

The Paris of the late 1860s showed renewed energy after the June Days of 1848 and the effective suppression of the left by Louis Napoleon.
The fall of the Second Empire in the fall of 1870 gave rise to a plethora of left-wing groups vying for power in the capital city, their strength enhanced by the exodus of wealthier Parisians who hoped to escape the war zone.

Most of the activists in Paris by 1871 identified themselves with French theorists, only a small number with Marxism, but they were deeply divided about the role the state would play in the revolution and in a socialist society.

Those in the Jacobin tradition believed in a key role to be played by a strong and centralized state.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was one of France's most influential writers for a long time.

Napoleon and his supporters did not allow the Second Empire to have its own municipal government because they were afraid of the city's left-wing population.

Proudhon and Marx were studied in different ways.

The German was the ultimate system builder, and he believed it was necessary to use the power of the modern state to establish socialism.
Proudhon's vision of the Highest Good reflected his own village background, and he envisioned an ideal future for small workshops and independent peasants.
Marx was contemptuous of the idiocy of rural life and his Highest Good assumed an urbanized, industrialized future with collective ownership of the means of production.

The International Working Men's Association was founded in 1864 and later known as the First International.

After ordering Paris to be bombarded and putting the city to siege so that he could negotiate with representatives authorized to speak for the French people as a whole, Bismarck insisted on national elections based on universal manhood suffrage so that he could negotiate with representatives authorized to speak for the French people as a whole.

The elections held in February 1871 were very conservative.
Most of France's rural and propertied population believed that further war was futile and a continuing war only promised to deliver the country into the hands of the Parisian radicals.

Beyond that, what the revolutionaries hoped to accomplish was not easy to describe because they were so divided among themselves.

The fear and hatred of the newly elected National Assembly, headed by Adolphe Thiers, a prominent politician who feared and hated the Parisian radicals, united the left in the early spring.
The Franco-Prussian War evolved into a French civil war between the Parisian radicals and the conservatives in the National Assembly.
This civil war is one of the most haunting chapters of French history, not so much because of its brutal violence, but because of what the leaders of the Paris Commune tried to do with the power they temporarily had.

Military defense was the most pressing concern.

The residents of Paris experienced terrible hardship as a result of the siege by the Versailles forces.
They were driven to eat their pets, stray cats, rats, wallpaper, boiled weeds and grass, and the animals of the Paris zoo.
There was a festive quality to life in Paris even as gunfire could be heard daily.
Mass rituals to honor those who died in battle against the Versailles troops were similar to those in the 1790s.
The lower orders were removed from the inner city because of the urban redevelopment of the Second Empire.
The lower classes attended the concerts and plays to benefit the wounded, widowed, and orphan.

What the Communards believed they could accomplish in the long run is a puzzle.

The idea of leaving their mark on history as an inspiration for future generations may have been what drove some of them.
The leaders of the Commune ordered the burning of the guillotine, abolished the death penalty, and toppled the Vendome Column in order to popularize their actions.
The red flag of Paris was raised over the meetings of the Commune rather than the republican tricolor.
Giving the vote to women was one of the progressive measures of the time.
The property of the church was taken over by the school.
The intent of many laws was to alleviate the hardship of the lower classes.
The abandoned properties were handed over to associations of workers when the propertied part of the population left.

It was debated if the rule of the Commune constituted a "dictatorship of the proletariat".

The rule of the Commune was claimed to be what Marx meant by the term.
The level of violence and wanton destruction rose in the spring despite the Commune's dictatorship being mild.
Executions of hostages, including the archbishop of Paris, were part of an increase in atrocities by both sides.

The last week of May was known as "Bloody Week", when a lot of downtown Paris was on fire.

Some 150 Communards were taken prisoner, lined up along a wall, and executed in a legendary battle among the tombstones of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery.
Executions continued for days in all parts of the city.

Many of the captured were sentenced to prison, and the final toll of dead and wounded was much higher than during the June days of 1848.

Thousands of others went into hiding.
More than 300,000 denunciations were made to the Versailles authorities after a mass exodus of left-wingers from the city.
The French left wouldn't recover for a long time.
It would take nearly five years for a new constitution to be agreed upon.

Bonapartists couldn't reach an agreement.

France's third republic, which was just a temporary one, was later to be converted into a monarchy.

Observers in other nations were appalled by the savagery of the Paris Commune.

Left-leaning observers blamed the right for the violence, while the right blamed the left.
British observers of all stripes could not help but be happy that their own country had taken a different path.
The overall mood in Britain was positive by 1871.
The 1850s and 1860s had been excellent years for the country in terms of economic productivity but also in the peaceful relations between the working class and the owners of capital.

It wasn't a happy story.

The disease and slaughter of the Crimean War cost the country 60,000 lives, even if it was Britain's only major involvement in Continental warfare until 1914.
The possibility of a future solution to the Social Question was viewed with a more widely shared optimism than before, despite the dark side of modern times.

Napoleon I's troops were named after him because of his efforts to make them feel that any one of them could aspire to the heights he had attained.

In Britain, the tone was more upbeat and anti-statist, and was embraced by a larger part of the population.

Men who are constantly complaining about their ill luck are only reaping the consequences of their own mismanagement.

He was not considered to be one of the most sophisticated thinkers of the age, though he had a large audience and a readership that was much larger than that of Marx or Proudhon.

His negative experience in the Chartist movement contributed to his later pro-capitalist effusions and his belief that political solutions to social problems only made things worse, as they did the all important virtues of individual initiative and self-reliance.

He viewed the suffering of the lower orders as the result of individual defects of character, not bad luck.

He said that some suffering was beneficial.
His thought merged with the deeper conviction that is central to European identity in modern times, that strife and suffering are necessary to creativity and progress.
Most of Europe has an austere view of progress.
The belief in the clash of material forces was not compatible with the realism of the post-1848 period.
Marx said that proletarian suffering, class conflict, and a violent dictatorship were needed to reach the promised land of communism.

Many prominent politicians of the day in Britain shared Smiles's distrust of political efforts to solve social and economic problems.

The Reform Bill of 1832 was held to have allowed Britain to reach a stage of political perfection while Lord Palmerston was prime minister.
Thomas Macaulay, one of Britain's most esteemed historians, commented at the end of the troubled 1840s that "all around us the world is convulsed by political upheaval."
The course of government in our island has never been interrupted.

In the 19th century, confrontations between the forces of order and the protesters in Britain were relatively tame compared to those in France and other European nations.

In the first part of the century, there were only eleven deaths and 400 wounded in the Peterloo massacre.

Number of that order was involved in Britain's subsequent clashes.

The battles between the leading figures of the Victorian era could be fierce.
Two Victorian statesmen were famous for that.
The hostilities were mostly verbal, less likely to be linked to violence than on the Continent.

Parliament remained in the hands of the upper classes and they still spoke the same language, one in which wit and repartee had been honing to an impressive sharpness.

Observers have seen luck in British politics.

The British throne had only one queen between 1836 and 1901, so they had an advantage over France, just like the Habsburg Empire had one Kaiser, Franz Joseph, from 1848 to World War I.

In the same period there were three kings, a short-lived second republic, a second empire, and then another republic, with increasingly violent revolutions in 1830, it is unlikely that any queen or king would have lasted long in France.

The popularity of Queen Victoria's name was developed in the later part of the century.
The premature death of Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, in 1861, sent her into a period of mourning and withdrawal from public view, but antimonarchical feelings in those years remained relatively unimportant and unavoidably mixed with sympathy for her personal tragedy.

A long-lived monarch is not the sole reason for Britain's political calm.

Aside from the flexibility of the country's ruling classes, perhaps the most important of them was the lasting ingenuity and productivity of its rapidly expanding population, especially its middle classes, linked to the unusual preoccupation of its subjects with the creation of material wealth.

Britain's renewed industrial and commercial surge in the 1850s and 1860s could be traced back to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.

Heavy industry expanded the textile base of the earlier industrial revolution.
The repeal of the Corn Laws caused Britain to become more reliant on imports.
The country made handsome profits from exporting manufactured products.
Shipping services and interest on capital investments abroad earned Britain's profits.

The years after the repeal of the Corn Laws saw an expansion of British trade with the rest of the world.

The Treaty of the Chevalier-Cobden between France and Britain was seen as a victory for the principles of free trade.
Those who believed in the benefits of free trade were encouraged by the fact that two nations that had historically been enemies had agreed to move toward dismantling long-standing tariffs.

The industrial productivity of the 1850s and 1860s was paralleled by a continued population increase in most of Europe.

Higher birth rates, lower death rates, and mass movements of populations are included in the nature and origins of rapid demographic increase.
Despite the ravages of the Potato Famine and the drain of emigration to the New World, Britain had one of the fastest rates of population growth in Europe.
In the first half of the 19th century of Europe as a whole, the population grew at a rapid rate, but in the 1850s and 1860s it slowed down.
Europe's rising share of the world's population showed a particular spurt between 1850 and 1939 as part of a larger story of population growth around the world.

Malthus's dour predictions about the dangers of popula tion growth began to seem unnecessarily alarmist, or at least out of sync with the rising optimism of the Victorian era.

The French began to worry that France's population was not growing fast enough since it was being passed by Germany and Britain.
Malthus's observations about how population growth tended to outstrip the production of food continued to impress a wide variety of observers in this optimistic age.

In the 1850s, a large proportion of Britain's expanding population was denied the vote.

Many prominent figures in Britain remained wary of popular rule despite the fact that France and Germany included universal male suffrage in their constitutions.

The popular vote came to Britain more slowly than in France or Germany.

The next step in that direction would be under a Conservative ministry led by Disraeli.

He concluded that a conservative alliance of the working class and upper class against middle-class liberals was a notion of promise after changing his mind about the mass.

The Reform Bill of 1867 doubled the number of voters, but Disraeli's Conservative Party was defeated by the Liberals.

Disraeli resigned in disgrace.

Disraeli's democracy had a future.

Disraeli was prime minister from 1874 to 1880, and Britain's privileged upper orders reconciled themselves not only to liberal economic principles but also to democraticconstitutional liberalism, which is what "democracy" came to imply from then on in Britain and the United States, rather than directconstitutional liberalism.
In 1884 another reform bill added 2 million more male voters, which was close to what the Chartists had demanded.

During the Great Hunger of the late 1840s, the Irish Question flared up in such an ugly form that it tested the optimism of the day.

Many people were touched by the Irish Question.
The English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were referred to as "races" in British identity.
It would be difficult to describe any of them as having warm feelings for the other people.
The Scots and Welsh, like the Irish, had their own grievances, but they were not as bitter as the Irish.
As the century progressed, British leaders began to view racism in a different way, with arrogance and superiority from that found in Germanspeaking areas.
One of the strongest partisans of the idea of racial hierarchies was Benjamin Disraeli, who was a proud member of the Semitic race, but did not fit into any of Britain's historical racial groups.

The English-Irish hostilities were among the worst in Europe by the 1850s.

In 1868, after taking over from Disraeli, Gladstone promised to "pacify" Ireland.
It would seem odd for a man to claim that it is not by the state that the world can be effectively dealt with.
He made progress in disestablishing the Church of England in Catholic Ireland, but he ran into trouble when he proposed allocating plots of land to the Irish rural poor.
The landlords were part of the Liberal Party.

Home Rule means Irish independence with a separate parliament but not full inde pendence from Britain.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood, a more militant nationalist group in Ireland, wanted a complete break and the creation of a nation-state, linked to a program of land reform.
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, parliamentary debates raged.
There was a formal split in the Liberal Party because of Home Rule.
Efforts to reach a compromise failed and the ministry was brought down.
When he was in his eighties, he returned to the task many times, even in his final ministry in the early 1890s.
The Irish cauldron exploded again in 1914-16, and remained a major problem into the second half of the twentieth century.

The Victorian era was considered to be one of the most confident in progress due to the progress being made in scientific discovery.

Intellectual creativity and cultural richness are rare in human history.
Life seemed to be getting better for a lot of people.
Scientists were venerated in ways that saints and military heroes had been in the past, even though they were feared and vilified by part of the population.

Charles Darwin is the only thinker of the 19th century who could match the prestige and influence of IsaacNewton.

The phrase "and God said" did not fit in his case, for Darwin's scientific findings demolished the biblical account of human origins and denied any role to a benevolent deity.
Many Christians of his day were dismayed and angry by this.

The biblical account of divine creation was dismissed as a myth by Enlightened observers.

The denunciations that thundered down on him were more significant than the widespread praise he received from mid-century intellectual elites.

Darwin politely declined the honor.

The nature of Darwin's scientific contribution is often misconstrued.

The idea of evolution was not novel or shocking because the ancient Greeks had proposed something similar and Darwin's grandfather had published a work speculating that all species had evolved from a common ancestor.
Jean Baptiste Lamarck, a French scientist, suggested that species adjust to their environment and then pass those changes on to their offspring.
Hegel's philosophy was about evolution and the nature of change in history.
"Change," evolutionary or revolutionary, of a beneficial and progressive nature was the watchword of an age that had seen so much of it.

"Progress" was not a new word.

Darwin's friends and early supporters, including an older friend and early supporter of his, Charles Lyell, had observed progressive change in rocks and artifacts that were much older than the Book of Genesis.

Darwin may be seen as someone standing on the shoulders of his predecessors and surrounded by supportive peers.

He was suggesting something that the world was ready to hear.
Alfred R. Wallace's findings are similar to Darwin's in 1855.
Wallace's announcement pushed Darwin to publish his own book.

The way that individual organisms, through random hereditary variations, were "selected" according to their ability to fight, defend, feed, and reproduce more successfully than others, was the subject of Darwin's presentation.

The process involved an eternal, desperate struggle for existence that resulted in the survival of the fittest or the most favored races.
Darwin's testimony shows that he developed these concepts from reading Malthus, who emphasized the disparity between how little food can be produced in relation to how many babies can be created.
Malthus believed that the result of the disparity was human suffering.
New, more "fit" species was what Darwin saw.

A range of hugely contentious issues were touched on by Darwin.

He seemed to his detractors to be positioning a meaningless world, one of moral anarchy and human worthlessness, when he passed over the role of God.
Darwin's concept of fitness was based on the ability of an organisms to survive and produce offspring.
The phrase "most favored races" was used by Darwin's detractors to question human equality and Christian universalism.

"A Venerable Orang- Outang" was the caption.

Many of those who began to call themselves Darwinians were concerned that their conclusions about the implications for human equality were unwarranted.

The conclusion that the races of humanity represented different stages of human evolution was a tempting one, given the wide range of existing human civilizations in the world.
Some races were more intelligent than others, just as some were taller or darker.

Modern human beings were descended from earlier simian ancestors according to Darwin.

The earlier ancestors were inferior to the modern humans in intelligence and had not been created in God's image.

It was just such conclusions that many people reached.

Many had reached similar conclusions long before the appearance of Darwin's book, and they welcomed it as a scientific confirmation of their existing beliefs.

His approach was more in line with Herder's reasoning, based on linguistic and literary evidence.

The European white race was superior in creativity to the other two basic racial types, yellow and black.
He claimed that the upper classes in France were made up of a separate race of whites.
The term "Aryan" is derived from a Sanskrit word meaning "noble" and is used to describe the upper classes.
The lower classes in France are similar to Africans in their low intelligence, poor control of their emotions, and proclivity to violence and destructive rioting.

It is not known how many people who came to be called "social Darwinists" in Britain actually read him.

The English translation of his book was not published for another fifty years.

The social Darwinians in Britain and other countries were not a single theory, but a diverse group of intellectuals.
They were never an organized movement in the way that Marxists came to be, and not all of them were racist.
Britain was a bit awkward because it considered itself to be composed of four racial types and more remotely derived from Anglo-Saxons and Normans.
In his native country, Gobineau was not well received.
He won the most attention in Germany in the late 19th century.

Darwinian ideas about nature were applied to contemporary society.

The "best" rose to the top and the "worst" sank to the bottom according to social Darwinians.
Herbert Spencer was the most widely read and prolific of Darwin's social Darwinists.
The marketplace was where human beings proved their worth, with the superior rising to be captains of industry and the inferior sinking to become manual laborers.

It might be more accurate to call Darwin a Spencerian bio logist than a social Darwinian.

Spencer's arguments might be called Lamarckian since he emphasized that individual adaptation and cultural evolution are more important than the role of heredity.

The Monarchist Republic is what he calls it after the Paris Commune.

Part III covers the period from the early 1870s to the outbreak of World War I, with an important subdivision from the early 1890s to 1914.

The early 1870s have been presented by historians as a break from the previous decades.
Prussia's victory over France in the autumn of 1870 is the most obvious example of long-term symbolism.
France's civil war in the spring of 1871 contributed to the catastrophic defeat the country had experienced.
The other powers were confronted with a terrifying vision of future class conflict in the Paris Commune, but they had to take note of a rising Germany.
The stock-market rally and crash in Germany in the next two years were caused by the influx of cash from the French.
The depression was considered to be the most alarming after the crash.
The optimism of the 1850s and 1860s was associated with laissez-faire economics and rapid economic growth, but the 1870s and 1880s were times of relative stagnation, economic uncertainty, and a renewed interest in antibourgeois ideologies.

Europe's economy recovered in the early 1890s, and the dec ades before 1914 were of renewed economic growth.

Great Britain's variety of liberalism was a work in progress and never really a finished product.
Italy and Germany were established in 1871 with limited degrees of attachment to the ideals of liberalism.
In moving from the Second Empire to the Third Republic, France was new and liberalized.
Russia and Austria-Hungary are problematically new and liberalized.

It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

Marxism and antisemitism are given special attention in the following chapters.

Antisemitism was a late-comer, at least as an organized political movement, a new ism that was at first rather lackluster compared to the other major isms of the day.
In a perverse sense, it has been termed the most successful ideology of modern times.
Marxism was seen as a failed ideology by the 1870s and 1880s, but its theoretical sophistication impressed many.
The rapid growth of the German Social Democratic Party, widely considered to be Marxist, gained wide attention and imitation, whereas the antisemitic parties of the same period were widely considered failures by the end of the century.

Zionism attracted little attention when it first appeared in the late 19th century.

There were important ways in which Zionists differed.
Zionism can either be understood as a reaction to antisemitism or as the expression of the Jewish people at a time of nationalist growth everywhere.
Theodor Herzl, the leader of the Zionism movement, died young in 1906, an apparent failure, and even the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which the British announced that they favored the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people, went nearly unnoticed.
Zionism was created after the rise of Nazism.

Europe became a world power more than ever before in the late 19th century, but it also began to clash with other rising powers, notably the United States and Japan.

The United States began to build its own empire after defeating Spain.
After the war between Russia and Japan in 1904-5, President Theodore Roosevelt played a major role in the peace negotiations between the two countries.
The treaty with Britain concluded with implications for Europe.

Between 1870 and 1914, the six major questions introduced in Chapter 4 were vastly different.

As Germany's neighbors began to ally against the threat to their interests, the German Question became a more menacing one, as leaders of the new German Reich began to demand a place in the sun.
On the eve of World War I, Home Rule for Ireland seemed to point at a solution to the Irish Question, but that was a false hope.
The Eastern Question took on a new focus in the Balkans.

The South-Slav peoples were in the process of throwing off Ottoman rule when they were faced with the prospect of the Habsburgs taking over.

South-Slav resistance to Habsburg ambitions was the most immediate origin of World War I.
Waves of violent strikes by workers in most countries and a revolution in Russia in 1905 revived the Social Question.
The Woman Question achieved a new visibility in Britain and the United States in the years immediately before 1914.