X. The Nineteenth Century Culture
1. Introduction
The coalition that defeated Napoleon in 1812–15 supported monarchy and the institutions of the Old Regime. During the next generation (1815–48), victorious conservatives tried to restore their world. This era starts with monarchists reasserting the Old Regime at the peace congress of 1815 (the Congress of Vienna). The restoration of the Old Regime was widely resisted. A variety of political movements, from liberal reformism to socialist revolution, challenged the old order. These movements encouraged the liberal-national revolutions of the 1820s and a wave of
revolutions in 1830–32.
A Quadruple Alliance of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain was needed to defeat Napoleon. Armies of these allies reached Paris in 1814. Napoleon received a generous settlement in return for his unconditional abdication. He kept the title of emperor (with an annual income of two million French francs,) and received the Italian island of Elba to govern (Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from his lenient exile on Elba in March 1815 and returned to France during these negotiations. A combination of British and Prussian armies defeated Napoleon outside Brussels at Waterloo, and his reign of one hundred days ended with harsher settlements. Napoleon became a British prisoner of war, and they held him under house arrest on the island of St. Helena until his death in 1821.). Similar leniency characterized the treaty given to France, the Treaty of Paris, which restored the Bourbon monarchy.
2. Protection of the Old Order by Religion and Law
The allies wanted to reconsider the entire map of Europe and restore the prerevolutionary order. and Russia pledged “to employ all their means to prevent the general tranquility from again being disturbed.” The conservatism of the post-1815 world is especially clear in the religious revival of that era. Many Christians were eager for their own restoration of old values and institutions.
Every state in Europe adopted such legislation as a bulwark against revolution. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech were the first targets. Russian restrictions were so severe that writers spoke of a “censorship terror.” Two of the greatest figures of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevski, were exiled—Pushkin for writing “Ode to Liberty” and Dostoevski for belonging to a radical organization. Such counterrevolutionary legal restrictions did not stop with obvious political targets.
The policy of social control made schools another favorite target of conservative governments. German universities were under the control of a government commissioner, liberal professors were fired, and student clubs closed. Francis I liked this policy; as he told a group of teachers in 1821: “I do not need scholars but obedient citizens.” German education laws provided a model for other countries. Alexander I adopted a similar program. His instructions for the University of Kazan (1820) eliminated free speech and freedom of inquiry: “No harmful or seductive literature or speeches in any form shall be permitted to spread through the university.” Alexander, like Francis I, thought that “[t]he soul of education, and the prime virtue of the citizen, is obedience.”His restrictions did not surpass the zeal of the French. In 1816 the government expelled the entire student body of their elite engineering school, the Ecole polytechnique (including Auguste Comte, a founder of sociology), for radicalism. Such attitudes also reached England, where one M.P. denounced plans for more schools by arguing that education only taught the masses “to despise their lot in life instead of making them good servants; instead of teaching them subordination, it would render them fractious[,] . . . insolent to their superiors.”
3. Challenges to the Old Order: The ‘-isms’
The changes that had shaken Europe in the generation before 1815—the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment, the political upheaval of the French Revolution, the social transformation of industrialization—had all produced pressures to reform the Old Regime. After 1815 these ideas of change began to crystallize into political doctrines (or ideologies). These new doctrines are known as the “-isms” because they took names ending in ism, a linguistic vogue that began with the word liberalism (coined in 1820), continued with the terms nationalism and socialism in the 1830s, and soon included such doctrines as radicalism, capitalism, Marxism, and feminism. These doctrines were sometimes compatible with each other and sometimes in conflict with each other, but they all called for changes.
The first of these doctrines, liberalism, was derived from the Latin word liber (free) to denote a doctrine about individual freedom. Early nineteenth-century liberalism (sometimes called classical liberalism to distinguish it from later liberalism) sought individual freedoms (such as freedom of speech), laws extending such liberty to more individuals (such as minorities), and the removal of impediments to liberty (such as laws favoring members of an established national church). To achieve such aims, liberals commonly demanded two fundamental documents: (1) a constitution establishing a representative government and specifying its powers, and (2) a bill of rights guaranteeing individual liberties. Few countries possessed such constitutions or bills of rights, and most monarchs opposed them. Liberals, therefore, were among the primary opponents of the Old Order.
A second ideology—nationalism—created additional problems for conservatives. This doctrine shifted discussion toward the collective rights of a nation. Nationalists asserted that it was possible to identify distinct nations, based upon shared characteristics such as language (see map 24.2). This nationalism is illustrated by a German song, Ernst Arndt’s Where Is the German’s Fatherland?:
“Where is the German’s Fatherland? Name me at length that mighty land! ‘Where’er resounds the German
tongue, Where’er its hymns to God are sung.’ ”Other nationalists defined their nation by a shared culture, history, or religion. All advocated the creation of nation-states independent from foreign rule, uniting members of the nation in a single, self-governing state. Nationalists considered these objectives more important than the political rights that liberals sought. As a Rumanian nationalist said in the 1840s, “The question of nationality is more important than liberty. Until a people can exist as a nation, it cannot make use of liberty.”
Governments especially dreaded radicalism, the term they usually applied to democratic movements. Radicals endorsed liberalism but demanded more; whereas liberals were willing to accept a limited franchise, radicals called for a democratic franchise and sometimes for the abolition of monarchy. In the words of Mazzini, radicals “no longer believed in the sanctity of royal races, no longer believed in aristocracy, no longer believed in privilege.” Radical movements, such as the Decembrists in Russia and the Chartists in Britain, however, made conservatives think of blood shed and death.
4. Different Forms of Socialism
The term socialism was also coined in the 1830s to identify doctrines stressing social and economic equality. Marxist socialism did not become a significant political philosophy until after midcentury, but many forms of pre-Marxist socialism existed.
The earliest, known as utopian socialism, grew from critiques of industrial society. Robert Owen, the son of a poor Welsh artisan, made a fortune as a textile manufacturer and devoted his wealth to improving industrial conditions. He branded the factory system “outright slavery” and called for a new social order based on cooperation instead of competition. Owen applied his ideas to his own factories at New Lanark, Scotland, where he limited his profits and invested in building a comfortable life for his workers (see illustration 24.3). This won Owen an international reputation, but neither industrialists nor governments copied his ideas.
Utopian socialism took different forms in France. The founder of French socialism, Count Henri de Saint-Simon, He was a critic of the industrial revolution. He denounced alle conomies in which “man has exploited man” and called
for a new order based upon the principle “from each according to his capacity, to each according to his productivity.”
Charles Fourier proposed utopian communities, which he called phalansteries. Fourier envisioned an idealistic, but highly structured, society whose members shared labor and freedom. Other pioneers called for a cooperative socialism of workers, a Christian socialism based upon Jesus’s devotion to the poor, or a
democratic socialism, on the theory that the poor would have a majority in a true democracy and create a socialist society. The champion of democratic socialism
was a French journalist, Louis Blanc, who developed the idea of a strong socialist state that regulated the economy and provided work for the unemployed in national
workshops.
A final doctrine of social change, feminism, hadnot yet acquired that name (a late nineteenth-century coinage) but already called for reconsideration of the role of women in European society. European legal systems, especially the Napoleonic Code, but also the British common law tradition and the Germanic Frederician Code, explicitly held women in an inferior position. The rights of women were exercised for them by men (their fathers, then their husbands). Women were expected to remain confined to limited spheres of activity—Kinder, Kirche, Küche (children, church, cooking) in a famous
German cliche. Formal education (especially higher education) and educated occupations were closed to them. The legal condition of women within marriage and the family began with an obligation to obey their husbands, who legally controlled their wives’ wages, children, and bodies. Divorce was illegal in many countries and rare everywhere (it required an act of parliament in Britain).
5. The Labor Movement and the Rise of Socialism
Even while victorious counterrevolutionaries dreamt of restoring the old order, the social and economic transformation of industrialization created great pressures for the social changes that they resisted. One of the foremost consequences of industrialization was the rise of a labor movement expressing the needs of the industrial working class (often known as the proletariat). The dreadful working and living conditions associated with industrialization were well known by midcentury, but neither conservative governments (typically dominated by great landowners) nor their liberal opposition (typically dominated by industrialists and manufacturers) did much to address the problem. Consequently, labor unrest and labor movements grew. These took two different forms: (1) associations of workers in the trade unions, seeking to persuade employers to grant better wages and working conditions, and (2) political movements, usually socialist, seeking to create governments that would govern in the interest of the laboring class.
Socialism began to emerge as the dominant philosophy of the workers’ movement in the 1860s, and Marxism slowly became the dominant form of socialism. Karl Marx was born to a comfortable middle-class Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism because of the legal requirements for Marx’s father to practice law in Trier. At the University of Berlin, Marx became an enthusiastic student of G.W. F. Hegel, the German idealist philosopher who deemphasized the individualism of liberal philosophy and taught the preeminence of the state. Marx was deeply impressed with Hegelianism and adopted many of Hegel’s concepts of the state and power, as well as his dialectic method of argument. Marx planned to become a philosophy professor, but his membership in a radical student organization during the age of Metternich closed that career to him. A brief stint as a journalist, which introduced Marx to industrial conditions, ended when censors closed his newspaper. Marx, already radicalized, began a life in exile. In France he learned revolutionary politics; in London he studied capitalist economics. By the 1850s Marx had already published several socialist works, and he had collaborated with Friedrich Engels (a factory owner’s son) on The Communist Manifesto (1848), a concise statement of the theory of class struggle. They wrote: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Only by overthrowing bourgeois society could peasants and industrial workers achieve social justice—hence their slogan, “Workers of the world, unite!” By the 1860s Marx—still in exile—was seeking to unite and direct European socialism through the International Workingman’s Association, founded in London in 1864. This association (later called the First International) assembled leaders of the workers’ movement in annual congresses and kept them informed of events in other countries. Marxist socialism was only one variant in the emerging working-class political movement of the 1860s. Although it was the strongest version of revolutionary socialism (which accepted the violent overthrow of the government as the means to power), it faced much competition from advocates of evolutionary socialism (who believed that democratic elections would lead to socialism and therefore opposed violent revolution).
Marx had little influence in Britain and was virtually unknown in France. He was not even dominant in his native Germany, where Ferdinand Lassalle had more influence. Lassalle had organized workers at Leipzig in 1862 and created a national Workers Association in 1863. His theory of state socialism, in which governments would adopt socialist programs without being overthrown by a Marxist revolution, initially appealed to German workers, but Lassalle died in a duel in 1864. A more radical workers’ party appeared in 1868, organized by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel. However, their first party congress, held at Eisenach in 1869, showed that socialism remained close to radical republicanism; the Eisenach program sought democratic reforms, not revolution.
If industrial conditions were heading toward revolution, the revolution would logically be expected to come in Great Britain, the birthplace of industrial society. The British census of 1851 showed the changes associated with the industrial revolution; more than 50 percent of the population lived in towns and cities, making Britain the first urban society in history. Comparative data show how unusual Britain was: The French census of 1851 found only 25.5 percent of the population in towns; the Spanish figure (1857) was 16.2 percent; and the Austrian figure (1857), 8.5 percent.
Despite the pressures of urbanization and industrialization, Britain had avoided revolution in 1848. Historians have explained this in many ways. Some have stressed the role of working-class religions (especially Methodism) that inculcated values such as the acceptance of one’s social position and obedience to one’s superiors. Charles Dickens put this into a prayer: “O let us love our occupations . . . and always know our proper stations.” Others have extended this view to stress the importance of deference to the leadership of the upper class. As the constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot put it, “The English constitution in its palpable form is this: the mass of the people yield obedience to a select few.” Economic historians have insisted that the answer is simpler: The working-class standard of living was steadily improving. A more traditional view stresses the importance of timely, but gradual, liberal reforms.
6. Romanticism: European Culture in the Age of Metternich
The standards of neoclassical culture that had characterized the Old Regime did not survive into the postrevolutionary era. Even before the French Revolution, classicism had come under attack for its strict rules, formal styles, and stress upon reason. When the Congress of Vienna assembled in 1815, European high culture had become quite different. The new style, known as romanticism, reached its apogee in the age of Metternich and continued to be a force in European culture past midcentury.
Romanticism is difficult to define because it was a reaction against precise definitions and rules, and that reaction took many forms. The foremost characteristic of romanticism was the exaltation of personal feelings, emotions, or the spirit, in contrast to cold reason. The emphasis upon feelings led in many directions, from the passions of romantic love to the spirituality of religious revival. Other attitudes also characterized romanticism: a return to nature for themes and inspiration, the admiration of the Middle Ages instead of classical Greece and Rome, a fascination with the exotic and the supernatural, and the canonization of the hero or genius.
The emphasis upon feelings had begun in the late eighteenth century. Rousseau, one of the central figures of Enlightenment rationalism, was a transitional figure, a precursor of romanticism who argued, “To exist is to feel!” The greatest German poet, Johann von Goethe, similarly bridged the change from the classical to the romantic. His short novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, depicted feelings so strong that the protagonist’s suicide began a vogue for melancholy young men killing themselves as Werther had, with moonlight falling across the last page of Goethe’s book. The name of the school of German literature that evolved around Goethe, the Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) movement, suggests the intensity of this emphasis upon feelings. Romanticism was the triumph of that emphasis. At the peak of romanticism, the British poet William Wordsworth simply defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and the landscape painter John Constable similarly insisted that “[p]ainting is another word for feeling.”
The return to nature inspired much romantic poetry, especially Wordsworth’s. It produced two generations of landscape painters, such as Constable and J. M.W. Turner, who found inspiration in natural scenery. This mood even extended to symphonic music, inspiring Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, known as the Pastoral Symphony. The romantic fascination with medieval Europe likewise had far-reaching influence. The most visible expression of it was a Gothic revival in architecture. This produced both new construction in the flamboyant Gothic style of the late Middle Ages (such as the new Palace of Westminster, home of the British Houses of Parliament, built in 1836) and campaigns to preserve surviving Gothic masterpieces (such as Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris). The same inspiration stimulated historical literature such as Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, and Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers; its most lasting effect on Western literature, however, was probably the invention of the Gothic horror story, a style made famous by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Many of these themes made romanticism compatible with conservative political philosophy. The focus upon nature turned high culture toward the rural world, home of aristocratic power and the bastion of conservative sentiments. The focus upon the Middle Ages restored cultural emphasis upon a world of unchallenged monarchy and universal Christianity, instead of the republicanism, constitutionalism, and liberalism. The dethronement of rationalism and the recovery of emotion encouraged the revival of religions of faith, mystery, and miracle.
But another side of romanticism found a powerful voice in the liberal and national revolutions of the early nineteenth century. The revolutionary sympathies of some romantics can be seen in Eugene Delacroix’s painting “Liberty at the Barricades”; the radical poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley; the angry novels of Victor Hugo, such as Les Misérables; and even Giuseppe Verdi’s powerful opera Rigoletto (which depicts the scandalous behavior of a monarch). The link between romanticism and nationalism was especially strong because many nationalists built their philosophy upon the nation’s shared culture. Many peoples found identity in folk tales, and their compilation (such as the work of the brothers Grimm in Germany) became a form of romantic nationalism. So did the recovery of the history of national minorities (as distinct from the history of their foreign government), as Frantisˇek Palack´y did for the Czechs in his multivolume History of Bohemia. The strongest expression of romantic nationalism, however, was in music. All across Europe, nationalist composers drew inspiration from patriotic themes and folk music: Frederic Chopin’s Polonaises (Polish pieces), Bedrich Smetana’s tone poems about Czech scenes (Ma Vlast—My Country), or Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies.
7. European Culture During the Belle époque
The Belle époque was a period of great cultural creativity, but no single style dominated the arts and typified the era. Unlike the baroque and classical styles of the eighteenth century, or the romanticism of the early nineteenth century, no style summarizes the cultural trends of the era. Instead, the Belle époque was an age of vitality expressed in conflicting styles. In painting, the realism of 1870 gave way to a succession of new styles, such as impressionism, fauvism, cubism, and expressionism. Realism lingered in novels and drama of social comment (such as Emile Zola’s novels of ordinary life in France or Henrik Ibsen’s plays of angry social criticism), a style known as naturalism, but poetry evolved into an introverted and sometimes mystical style called symbolism. Music, architecture, philosophy, sculpture, and the decorative arts produced no style that dominated the era.
The best remembered cultural style of the Belle époque was impressionism, a style of painting that originated in France in the 1860s–1880s. Impressionism produced several of the greatest artists of the century, such as Claude Monet, whose painting entitled Impression: Sunrise (1874) led to the name. And impressionism influenced the other arts, from music (Debussy is sometimes called an impressionist) to poetry (the symbolist poets are also called impressionists). But the Belle époque was an era of so much change that it cannot be called the “age of impressionism.”
Belle époque architecture illustrates both the jumble of cultural styles and the emergence of the dramatically new. Late nineteenth-century architecture first suggests an age of revivalism, because almost all past styles were exploited: Bavarians built another great castle in neorococo style, the most noted new building in central Vienna (a theater) was in neobaroque style, the Hungarian Parliament on the banks of the Danube in Budapest was neo-Gothic, the most discussed new church of the age in Paris was neoromanesque, the Dutch national museum built in Amsterdam was neo-Renaissance, and the vast Gum Department Store in Moscow was neoclassical. Despite this cacophony of styles of the past, an exciting architecture of the twentieth century began to emerge in the closing years of the nineteenth. The French built the tallest structure on earth for their world’s fair of 1889 (the centennial of the revolution), and they built the Eiffel Tower in structural steel. By the 1890s this use of steel and the Americanborn style of building skyscrapers by attaching a masonry exterior to a metal frame had begun a profound change in the appearance of cities. Walter Gropius, a German architect who had tremendous influence on the visual arts of the new century, built the first steel frame building with glass walls in 1911.
The birth of the twentieth century seen in architecture had parallels throughout the arts. Startling innovators broke with tradition. In music, the rejection of the nineteenth-century symphonic heritage led after 1900 to efforts to compose atonal music, culminating in 1914 with Arnold Schonberg’s system of composing to destroy the feeling of tonality. Other composers, such as Igor Stravinsky, boldly created dissonant harmonies.
Such music so offended traditional tastes that performances were sometimes met with howls of protest from the audience; the first performance of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring provoked a riot in Paris in 1913. Horrified traditionalists even saw the rules of dancing begin to break down as free dance abolished the following of steps or prescribed positioning.
The breakdown of traditional styles was especially controversial in the visual arts where the popularity of photography and the cinema pressed painters to find artistic expression that these new arts could not rival. The nonrepresentational styles of painting that emerged still evoke hostility from traditionalists a century later. The most inventive artist of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso, began his career producing works of emotional realism, but after 1904 he pioneered a style known as cubism in which shapes and structures (such as the human face) were simplified into geometric outlines. Picasso pushed the breakdown of realism so far that a face might have two eyes on the same side of the nose. Denounced for his nonrepresentational styles, Picasso responded that his art was “a lie that tells the truth.” Painting was no longer a simple depiction of the physical world; it revealed hidden truths about a two-faced world.
European thought during the Belle époque followed a similar course. The most influential works of the era drew upon the new discipline of psychology. Novelists from Feodor Dostoevski (whose The Brothers Karamazov appeared in 1879–80), through Joseph Conrad (whose Lord Jim appeared in 1900), to Marcel Proust (whose first volume of Remembrance of Things Past appeared in 1913) relied upon psychological detail and insight. The inner life of characters and their subconscious motivation gained emphasis as central features of the novel. Psychology also reshaped European philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, a pastor’s son who reacted against the piety of his home, was such a brilliant student that he became a professor at the University of Basel at age twenty-four. Nietzsche wrote with psychological insight about the sublimation of passions and instincts, the relativity of morals, and what he called “the will to power.” He had contempt for contemporary cultural and moral values and, in works such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), argued that “God is dead” and Christianity is based on the mentality of slaves. Such arguments did not have much immediate impact, but they grew increasingly influential in European thought.
Perhaps the most influential thinkers of the Belle époque were two scientists: Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist who founded the science of psychoanalysis and Charles Darwin, the English Naturalist who developed the theory of evolution by Natural Selection. Freud’s study of psychoneuroses in the 1890s led him to an analytic technique of the “free association” of thoughts, a process that he named “psychoanalysis.” This, in turn, led him to the analysis of dreams. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) stated his first model of the workings of the mind, a model that evolved into a description of three competing subconscious elements of the mind: the ego, the superego, and the libido (or id). Freud’s attention to the libido as the seat of emotional (and especially sexual) urges led to his famous stress upon sexual explanations (especially those with origins in infantile sexuality) in Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory (1905). Many of Freud’s theories have been controversial, and some are simply wrong, but Freud’s impact upon European thought has been so enormous that he remains the most influential author of his era.
Darwin had presented his theories in two controversial works, On the Origin of Species (1859), which demonstrated how natural selection worked, and The Descent of Man (1871), which applied evolution to humanity. The theory of evolution—that plants and animals naturally experience a process of gradual change into a more complicated or advanced state—was advanced by many scientists. Darwin’s greatest contribution was to demonstrate natural selection as the means of evolution. He first did this by studying the evolution of the beaks of birds in the Galapagos Islands, showing how the environment favored certain shapes of beaks, thus birds with such an advantage were naturally selected for survival and reporduction. Darwin’s application of evolution to human history was enormously controversial because it conflicted with the biblical account of human origins, but scientists steadily accepted his theory. Social theorists in many fields soon appropriated (and misappropriated) Darwin’s ideas. The most wide-spread derivation during the belle époque was known as “social darwinism.” This doctrine applied a crude version of natural selection to human society and then asserted that certain people were suited for dominance and they would triumph, following what Herbert Spencer called “the survival of the fittest.” Such social darwinism was used to justify the class system, unregulated capitalist competition, racism, and imperialism.
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