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Europe After the Congress of Vienna
At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Era, Europe’s leaders worked to reorganize Europe and create a stable balance of power. In the following years, the Austrian diplomat Metternich would call several more congresses to try and preserve European stability: the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), the Congress of Troppau (1820), and the Congress of Verona (1822). The Congress System that Metternich established was Reactionary: that is, its goal was to preserve the power of the old, monarchical regimes in Europe.
Revolution was brewing, however. In Britain, the Industrial Revolution continued to accelerate, transforming the economy with serious political and social ramifications. Across Europe, and especially in France and Britain, the rising Bourgeoisie class challenged the old monarchical Reactionaries with their Liberal ideologies, such as Radicalism, Republicanism, and Socialism. While the Bourgeoisie was the ascendant class between 1815 and 1848, the Proletariat also began to gain a sense of similar unification, and awareness of a class struggle between the two began to emerge.
Intellectual and Social Movements
At the same time, Romantic thinkers, artists, and writers posed powerful challenge to the Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism and reason. Artists and philosophers such as Johan Gottfried Herder, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schiller, Karl Friedrich Schinckel, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Eugène Delacroix, to name a few, achieved remarkable intellectual and artistic heights, gaining a wide following throughout Europe, particularly in Germany, Prussia, and England.
Perhaps the most potent ideology of this period was Nationalism, which, like Romanticism, reacted against the universalist claims of French Enlightenment thought. Whereas Romanticism often focused on intellectual and artistic matters, Nationalism, which emphasized the unique character of ethnic and linguistic groups, was more overtly political. Nationalist movements in Germany and Italy, which wanted national unification, as well as those in the Austrian Empire, which sought to carve the Austrian Empire into ethnically or linguistically defined states, created a great amount of instability in Europe.
Early Revolutions
In 1830, these various ideologies resulted in a round of revolutions. These first began when the Paris Mob, manipulated by the interests of the Bourgeoisie, deposed the Bourbon monarchy of Charles X and replaced him with Louis Philippe. In the rest of Europe, the French example sparked other nationalist revolts, but all were successfully quelled by conservative forces.
Britain notably escaped any outbreak of violence, but it by no means escaped change: the battle between the formerly dominant landed aristocracy and the newly ascendant manufacturers led to the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, which gave the manufacturers an increased amount of Parliamentary representation. Meanwhile, the working class did not yet have the vote, but pushed for universal adult male suffrage via the Chartist Movement. Even if this movement failed in the short-term, its demands were eventually adopted.
The Revolutions of 1848
In the rest of Europe, political change would not happen so peacefully. In 1848, the February Revolution broke out in Paris, toppling Louis Philippe and granting universal suffrage to adult French men, who elected Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III) solely on name-recognition. Europe once again took its cue from Paris, and revolutions broke out nearly everywhere. Rebellion in Germany led to the establishment of the Frankfurt Assembly, which failed to unify Germany. In the Austrian Empire, the various ethnicities revolted, and Magyar nationalists pushed for an independent Hungary, while rioting in Vienna frightened Metternich so much that he fled the city. While all the Eastern European rebellions were ultimately put down, the events of 1848 frightened the rulers of Europe out of their complacency and forced them to realize that gradually, they would have to change the nature of their governments or face future revolutions.
