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  • Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History so today we're looking

  • at early 19th century Europe, which is to say everything from 1815 to 1848, when various

  • forms of excrement hit various fans.

  • You'll recall that at the Congress of Vienna, Prince Metternich and his allies tried to

  • extinguish the fires of social ferment and prevent another French Revolutionor indeed

  • any hint of revolution.

  • But despite the Congress of Vienna's determined efforts to prevent them, reform and activism

  • heated up after 1815 alongside industrialization.

  • [Intro]

  • In the 19th century, people were looking inward at the domestic policies of each kingdom or

  • state, which was a sharp difference from the early modern period when kingdoms were constantly

  • fighting one another with domestic issues being much less of a concern.

  • But much of what was happening outside of Europe did affect Europe, of course.

  • In the 1810s and 1820s, for instance, North, Central, and South American people gained

  • their independence from Portugal and Spain.

  • Simón Bolívar, one upper-class leader of the independence movement, took his inspiration,

  • and to some extent his aesthetic, from Napoleon, who, he believed, had freed people from the

  • old regime of absolutism.

  • Which is an interesting take on Napoleon.

  • Oppressed by the heavy taxation inflicted byenlightenedadministration on the

  • colonies, native peoples, African slaves, and other poor people backed elite, locally-born

  • leaders like Bolívar.

  • And they were all united in their resentment of Spanish domination.

  • By 1830, colonists' victories put mainland Spain at its weakest in three centuries.

  • So, while distant ferment liberated much of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, within

  • post-Napoleonic Europe, citizens' groups of all sorts blossomed across the continent

  • and reformist uprisings against rulers flourished, often having developed in secret given the

  • operation of censorship and not-so-secret police.

  • Literacy grew following the Enlightenment's emphasis on education, technology, and rational

  • thought.

  • Constitutions and the rule of law were increasingly longed for and valued.

  • Even many aristocrats were themselves surprisingly restless and ready for change.

  • Russian aristocrats feared that, despite their own centrality in defeating Napoleon, the

  • czar would exercise his dictatorial inclinations.

  • Because, you know.

  • Czars.

  • And many in the Russian nobility were now acquainted with the possibilities for a different

  • kind of political systemespecially one guided by the rule of law and constitutions.

  • In December 1825, some of the aristocratic elite challenged the new Tsar Nicholas I in

  • order to make his supposedly more liberal older brother Constantin tsar instead.

  • But theseDecembristswere mowed down or captured by loyal units of the army.

  • Some were executed and many were sent into exile in Siberia, where they made new towns

  • and cities into cultural centers.

  • Albeit, cold ones.

  • By this time, a large contingent in the Russian aristocracy were more deeply cultured and

  • polylingual than the upper classes in any other European kingdom, but the possibility

  • for a non-autocratic Russia seemed to end with the Decembrist defeat.

  • Nicholas and his successors upheld the monarchy, relentlessly clamping down on any threats

  • to it, including a Polish uprising in 1830-31, continuing Poland's run of poor fortune

  • that would remain essentially the only constant in European history for another 160 years.

  • Let's go to the Thought Bubble.

  • 1.

  • In 1830, another revolution broke out in France,

  • 2.

  • bringing about a quick but consequential change in government.

  • 3.

  • It began after Charles X ushered in strict censorship,

  • 4.

  • compensation for aristocratic losses in the revolution of 1789,

  • 5. and similarly regressive measures such as imposing the death penalty for any pilfering

  • of church objects.

  • 6.

  • Opponents, many from the well-educated and land-owning upper class

  • 7. and others from the religious object pilfering class,

  • 8. took these moves as harbingers of a return to absolutism,

  • 9. which to be fair, they were.

  • 10.

  • As street protests erupted, these opponents also worried that commoners would demand that

  • France become a republic once again.

  • And they didn't want that.

  • 11.

  • In what is known as theThree Glorious Daysof July 1830,

  • 12.

  • they installed Charles's cousin Louis-Philippe as king and created a constitutional monarchy

  • 13.

  • that is, they returned the country to the situation of the early 1790s with a government

  • based on a form of popular sovereignty instead of divine right.

  • 14.

  • The new king Louis-Philippe expanded voting rights, known as suffrage, to around 170,000

  • men,

  • 15.

  • but that was still a tiny fraction of the 30 million French citizens.

  • 16.

  • Social unrest remained high as France became a more industrialized economy with more people

  • living in cities.

  • 17.

  • Both living and working conditions for common people were often terrible.

  • 18.

  • The silk workers of Lyon, for instance, went on strike in 1831 over poor pay,

  • 19. and even briefly seized the city's arsenal

  • 20. before the revolt was eventually put down.

  • 21.

  • In short, the entrenched system of power wasn't going to allow another fully populist revolution.

  • Thanks Thought Bubble.

  • So, Prince Metternich's ambitions for a tranquil citizenry had clearly failed to materialize.

  • Across the Austrian lands there was the kind of discussion and agitation that came from

  • reading books, meeting in cafés, and having a better education: More people wanted a say

  • in their governance, and expected rights that would be protected by the state.

  • But this agitation percolated mostly in secret, thanks to Metternich's censors and secret

  • police.

  • In Italy, the Carbonari, a secret society aiming for constitutional government in parts

  • of Italy, directed uprisings in 1820 and 1830.

  • But the forces of the Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia and Russia put down both revolts.

  • Also during these decades, Hungarian nobility, also operating in Metternich's orbit, lobbied

  • for separation from the Austrian empire, but without much luck.

  • Serbia and Greece had more success in pulling away from the Ottomans.

  • The Serbs became an independent principality under the Ottomans in 1817 after an uprising

  • in 1815.

  • And the Greeks won complete independence from the Ottomans in 1831.

  • For romantics such as the English poet Lord Byron, these were the struggles of heroes

  • seeking revolutionary freedoms.

  • Did the Center of the World just open?

  • Is my Norton Anthology of Poetry in there?

  • Ah Lord Byron.

  • He wrote a poem from Greece in 1824 called, “On this Day I Complete My 36th Year.”

  • In that poem he writes, “Awake!

  • Not Greece, She is awake.”

  • In fact, Byron went to Greece in the 1820s to aide in the independence movement.

  • He also died there.

  • Just a few months after this poem was written, actually, in which he says, “my days are

  • in the yellow leaf.

  • The flowers and fruits of love are gone.

  • The worm, the chancre, and the grief are mine alone.”

  • That's what it was like to be 36 in 1824.

  • Ah god, I hope my days aren't in yellow leaf.

  • OK, let's talk about Peterloo.

  • Struggles in Britain during these decades were tinged with the rebellions of Irish Catholics

  • against official religious discrimination.

  • Simultaneously, in the difficult years immediately following Waterloo when harvests failed and

  • the cost of living rose, crowds of working people by the tens of thousands gathered in

  • cities across Great Britain to listen to calls for change.

  • Parliament wanted to protect aristocratic agricultural interests, which tells you a

  • lot about the British Parliament at the time, and so they raised the price of grain by passing

  • the Corn Laws.

  • Orators demanded their repeal.

  • And the upper classes were on edge.

  • Then in 1819, during a protest in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, police shot into the crowd

  • and killed some 15 people and wounded 500.

  • The so-calledPeterloo Massacre”--a term created by pundits to invoke Waterloo--was

  • followed by the draconian Six Acts that allowed government searches, prohibited large assemblies,

  • and punished anti-government publications.

  • But outrage and activism continued in Great Britain and Ireland.

  • The Irish were especially hard hit by the economic downturn, which resulted in the confiscation

  • of peasant lands by Great Britain.

  • And in 1801 a series of laws joined Ireland to the rest of Great Britain (together, the

  • laws are referred to as The Act of Union).

  • And despite this purported unity, discrimination among Catholics remained powerful allowing

  • almost unchecked confiscation of Catholic property and other assets.

  • In 1823, Irish activist and lawyer Daniel O'Connell formed the Catholic Association

  • which lobbied for allowing Catholics to have high positions, including membership in the

  • British Parliament.

  • And the Catholic Association's activism plus the accumulation of middle- and working-class

  • grievances eventually led to the Great Reform Act of 1832.

  • This act eliminatedrotten boroughs”—that is, districts where aristocrats would become

  • members of parliament almost by birthright, even in somedistrictsthat had no actual

  • residents.

  • The Great Reform Act also gave representation to new industrial citieslike Manchesterthat

  • had no parliamentary representation at all.

  • And more men got the right to vote, including middle-class property owners and those paying

  • an established minimum rent.

  • But of course the definition of that minimum rent was kept high enough to keep lots of

  • other people, including most ordinary workers, and all women, were still left out.

  • OK, so we saw in our episodes on industrialization that in France a group of aristocrats, calling

  • themselves socialists, wanted to better society due to a belief that the late eighteenth century

  • revolutionary era had focused too much on the individual and should focus more on the

  • health of the whole.

  • Their socialism entailed philanthropy.

  • And by the 1820s a new group of socialists, especially prominent in England and France,

  • had a different take on the issues of the day.