The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848 — the study guide

CHAPTER 1 · 1763–1775 · APR 1775

The World of 1775

The Atlantic world of 1775 joined places that worked in strikingly different ways. At Potosí, silver came from an older mining economy shaped by coerced Indigenous labor. At Cap-Français, sugar wealth depended on enslaved plantation workers. Boston was a settler community with assemblies and the means to organize against distant taxation. All belonged to an imperial system that drew wealth from ports, mines and plantations, while claiming inland territories where Indigenous nations often continued to govern.

Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War in 1763 enlarged its responsibilities as well as its empire. The government had a large debt and troops to maintain in North America, and ministers wanted colonists to contribute. Yet the people asked to pay were used to taxes voted by their own assemblies. Stamp and tea duties brought that custom into conflict with Parliament’s claim to authority; newspapers and pamphlets gave the dispute a language of rights.

The price of tea helps show why the dispute became so difficult. The Tea Act lowered it, but the duty remained. For colonial opponents, buying the cheaper tea meant accepting the authority that imposed the tax. Protesters destroyed the cargo in 1773, and Britain responded by closing Boston’s port and altering Massachusetts government. Other colonies could see their own position in the punishment of Massachusetts, and they had a reason to cooperate against it.

Ships carried people, revenue and political writing among Boston, Cap-Français and the wider Atlantic. The language of rights could travel along those routes, but it did not arrive in identical societies. Settlers arguing over taxation, enslaved people producing sugar and Indigenous communities facing claims to their land confronted different forms of power. The revolutions that followed would give their shared vocabulary different uses and consequences.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Paying for an empire. Britain’s victory in 1763 left it with the world’s biggest empire and biggest debt, as well as a new American frontier to garrison. Ministers could reasonably ask those protected by its troops to contribute to their cost. Colonial assemblies, however, had voted taxes for 150 years. The attempt to raise revenue therefore put the question of representation before the colonies: who had the authority to require payment? War debt and fiscal reform will bring France to another crisis in Chapter 3.

Readers and the language of rights. Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau gave political arguments an influential body of theory. Print helped carry those arguments to readers: colonial literacy was among the highest in the world, and printers such as Franklin made political writing widely available. The “rights of Englishmen” and, later, the “rights of man” supplied terms in which people could make claims on their governments.

An empire sustained by slavery. About one in five people in British America was enslaved; in the sugar islands the proportion was about nine in ten. Plantation wealth supported an imperial world that maintained navies and circulated pamphlets. A declaration about “all men” would have to meet the fact that these societies depended on enslaved labor. In Chapter 5, enslaved people force that question upon the Atlantic world.

The people beyond the line. The Proclamation Line of 1763 sought to keep settlers off Native land and preserve peace at less cost. Colonial speculators, including Washington, resented the restriction. For the Six Nations, the Cherokee and many other nations, the same line offered some restraint on settlers. A movement to free the colonies from British authority could remove that restraint, with very different consequences for the people whose land settlers wanted.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A common deliberation. Twelve colonies with separate governments sent delegates to Philadelphia in 1774; they had never cooperated on anything before. Their Continental Congress gave them an institution through which to deliberate and speak for “America” before fighting began.

France sees an opportunity. Defeat in 1763 had humiliated France, and its ministers saw the American crisis as a chance for revenge against Britain. French money and gunpowder would support the rebels, while the resulting debt added to France’s own financial difficulties. Those financial ties connect Lexington to the Bastille.

Rights travel with cargo. Ships linking Nantes, Boston and Cap-Français carried printed arguments along with goods. Free people of color from Saint-Domingue would fight at Savannah in 1779 alongside men who spoke of rights. The ideas circulating through this trade could reach people excluded by those who first advanced them, and be put to new uses.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the American crisis really about taxes, when the tea duty amounted to only a few pence?

The amount was small, but both sides understood the decision as a precedent. Parliament claimed power to legislate for the colonies in all cases; colonial opponents held that their own representatives had to consent to taxes. Ministers feared that giving way would weaken imperial authority, while colonists feared that accepting the duty would leave future taxation without a limit. War debt brought the demand for revenue; assemblies and print helped colonists organize resistance. The resulting crisis concerned who could rightfully govern, as well as who should pay.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The people who destroyed the tea did not call the event the “Boston Tea Party”. They spoke of “the destruction of the tea”; the festive name appears in print in the 1820s, when surviving participants were old men giving interviews. The East India Company claimed that the 342 chests, about 46 tons of tea, were worth £9,659. Afterward the raiders swept the decks and replaced a padlock they had broken.

CHAPTER 2 · 1775–1783 · SEP 1783

The American Revolution

British troops left Boston on 19 April 1775 to seize colonial military stores. At Lexington and Concord they encountered militia, and on the return march they suffered heavy losses. The fighting began a war in which the opponents had different things to accomplish. Britain could take a city, but the rebels could continue fighting elsewhere. Washington had to keep the Continental Army from being destroyed in a decisive battle; as long as it survived, Congress could sustain the struggle and foreign governments could see a rebellion worth supporting.

The British campaign of 1777 aimed to isolate New England. Burgoyne moved south from Canada, but the forces meant to cooperate with him failed to coordinate, and his army surrendered at Saratoga. The news mattered in Paris. French ministers could now judge that the Americans might remain in the field as allies. In 1778 France entered the war with money, soldiers and a navy; Spain and the Dutch helped turn the struggle into a wider war.

Look at the two final arrows on the map. In 1781 Washington and Rochambeau marched south toward Cornwallis, while Admiral de Grasse controlled Chesapeake Bay. Cornwallis faced allied troops on land and a French fleet blocking escape or relief by sea. Neither movement alone explains the trap. Their combination brought his surrender at Yorktown, a victory made possible by the alliance.

The peace of 1783 recognized a republic extending to the Mississippi. That settlement changed imperial sovereignty, but it left other questions of power open. Most enslaved people were not freed. Native nations were not consulted when the treaty assigned their lands to the republic on paper, although they had never surrendered them and the negotiators did not control them. The new boundary would become the scene of further struggles over who could govern and occupy the land.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Atlantic and the cost of reconquest. An army fighting 3,000 miles from Britain depended on men and supplies sent by sail; an order and its answer could take three months. Distance raised costs and slowed decisions, but it became a serious burden because resistance continued. The rebels needed to keep their army and movement alive until the expense of reconquest weakened London’s will and credit.

The French decision. Vergennes arranged covert arms for the rebels from 1776, and most of the gunpowder at Saratoga was French. France wanted revenge for its defeat in 1763, yet open war exposed its own resources and possessions. The alliance of February 1778 brought a French fleet and army into the struggle and stretched British resources across a global war. France’s estimated expenditure of 1.3 billion livres would add to the debt behind its own crisis.

Resistance beyond the garrison. Colonial armed communities and self-governing institutions had a century of experience. Britain captured New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, but its garrisons could not exercise the same power everywhere beyond them. Assemblies, committees and militias could sustain or rebuild local resistance. A captured city gave Britain a foothold; it did not by itself restore rule over the surrounding population.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Written constitutions as examples. American state constitutions, followed by the federal Constitution of 1787, offered a working precedent for government under written, ratified and amendable rules. Revolutionaries from Paris to Caracas could take up that example, whether they adopted its provisions or argued against them.

Slavery and the new republic. Independence left about half a million people enslaved. The Constitution counted enslaved people as three-fifths for representation and taxation and protected the slave trade for twenty years. Northern states began gradual abolition. Tens of thousands of Black Loyalists left with the British, many having looked to them for freedom. The change of government did not give freedom to everyone living under it.

A peace made over Native lands. Many Native nations had fought with Britain to resist settler expansion. The Treaty of Paris assigned their lands to the republic on paper without consulting them. Native peoples continued to occupy and defend those lands, and frontier wars followed as settlers and the new state sought control.

The cost of French victory. France gained revenge against Britain, but paid an estimated 1.3 billion livres, raised through borrowing. Interest consumed about half the royal budget. The burden of victory helped bring the monarchy to the Estates-General.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Britain had a powerful navy, great resources and a professional army. Could it ever have won?

Yes. Washington’s army nearly dissolved in 1776, and Britain could have defeated it. Even then, Britain would have faced the task of establishing durable rule over self-governing communities along a vast coast. Occupying cities did not remove the political networks that sustained resistance. After France entered, British ships and troops were also needed to defend valuable positions elsewhere. Together, Atlantic distance, local resistance and the global coalition made reconquest too costly for Britain to accept.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Perhaps 11,000 Americans died aboard British prison hulks in New York’s Wallabout Bay, although estimates run higher. That exceeds the roughly 6,800 killed in all the war’s battles combined. Survivors called the worst ship, the Jersey, “Hell afloat.” For decades bones washed out of the Brooklyn shoreline; a crypt at Fort Greene gathered the dead in 1908.

CHAPTER 3 · 1789–1792 · JUL 1789

The French Revolution

The French Revolution began with a government asking how to pay its bills. France had considerable wealth, but noble and Church privileges restricted the taxes the crown could collect, and interest on war debts consumed much of its budget. The harvest failure of 1788 made bread more expensive just as ministers needed new revenue. Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614. Elections and written grievance lists gave millions a way to bring their complaints into a national debate. The search for money had opened a larger question: who spoke for France?

In June 1789 the Third Estate answered by declaring itself the National Assembly. Its claim gained force from events outside the meeting hall. On 14 July Parisians took the Bastille in search of weapons and gunpowder. The fortress had little military value, but its capture showed that the crown could not simply use force to make the capital obey. Peasants attacked feudal records, helping to press the Assembly into abolishing privileges on 4 August; the Declaration of Rights followed. That October women marched to Versailles and brought the royal family to Paris. Authority was contested in villages and streets as well as in the Assembly.

Many still supported a constitutional settlement with Louis as king. Such an arrangement depended on his willingness to accept limits, and his attempted flight in June 1791 made that willingness hard to believe. Caught at Varennes, Louis gave people reason to think that the king who publicly accepted the constitution was seeking a way to undo it. War from April 1792 sharpened the distrust. Each side had more reason to fear that the other would overturn a compromise when it had the chance.

The map’s Bastille, Versailles and Varennes show different stages of this change. At the first, the crown lost control of armed force in Paris; at the second, citizens compelled the court to move; at the third, the king’s flight exposed the limits of his cooperation. None made a republic inevitable by itself. Together they help explain why the revolution moved so quickly: hunger and ideas brought people into politics, while the loss of trust made a durable settlement increasingly difficult.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The cost of war and credit. France’s long struggle with Britain, followed by its support for American independence, left the crown with heavy debts. Chapter 1 traced a similar chain from war to debt, taxation and a dispute over representation; in France it operated on a much larger scale. Britain could authorize taxes through Parliament and organize cheaper borrowing with the Bank of England. France lacked those equivalents. By summoning the Estates-General, the crown brought its own version of “no taxation without representation” into the effort to solve the debt crisis.

The problem of privilege. Versailles had concentrated political power around the crown, while nobles retained honors and exemptions from taxes. Lawyers, merchants and philosophes who helped support the state could see a mismatch between its burdens and its privileges. Enlightenment arguments gave that mismatch a political meaning: the deficit became evidence of an unjust order. The writers did not create the shortage of money; they helped explain why its distribution mattered.

Bread and the harvest. Hail and drought damaged the 1788 harvest. In 1789, the hungriest year in a generation, bread reached around fourteen sous and peaked in price during the week the Bastille fell. The pressure on households gave urgency to the political crisis. Ideas helped people identify privileges to challenge; hunger helped bring crowds into the streets.

The American example. French officers had seen another revolution at close range. Lafayette, especially, returned from America with the example of rights set down in writing and citizen armies winning a war. In Paris, Jefferson was consulted as the Declaration of 1789 took shape. People and correspondence carried the American experience into the French debate.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Sovereignty in the nation. Article 3 put authority in a new place: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation”. That claim invited a question beyond France: if the nation was sovereign, what authorized a monarch to rule? European powers would go to war with revolutionary France as the crisis developed.

The Church and the revolution. To support a new paper currency, the revolutionary state confiscated Church lands; it then required clergy to swear loyalty to the state. Parish communities had to confront these decisions in their own religious lives. Divisions over the Church helped feed counter-revolution, particularly in the Vendée, alongside the wider opposition described in Chapter 4.

From Varennes to the Tuileries. Louis’s flight made republicanism more persuasive. War and foreign threats added to the suspicion that he sought help against the revolution. After the Brunswick Manifesto threatened Paris with “exemplary vengeance”, a crowd stormed the Tuileries on 10 August 1792. The monarchy fell.

Rights across the Atlantic. The Declaration’s language reached Saint-Domingue quickly. Within months, free men of color petitioned for the Rights of Man; by 1791 enslaved people were making claims of their own through revolt. France would spend years confronting whom its universal words were meant to include.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Could Louis XVI have saved the monarchy — and when might compromise still have worked?

There were opportunities to preserve a monarchy, but they required concessions early enough to make cooperation believable. Fiscal equality in 1787–88 might have reduced the need for the Estates-General; acceptance of the National Assembly in 1789 could have given constitutional monarchy a stronger foundation. Varennes was the last practical exit in this account because Louis’s flight supplied visible evidence against his promises. The monarchy survived until August 1792, yet royal vetoes and war deepened suspicion. Its fall was not fixed at the outset: resistance and events steadily narrowed the room for compromise.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Pierre-François Palloy found a market for the fallen Bastille. The demolition contractor had its stones carved into miniature fortresses and sent one to each of the eighty-three new départements within the year. Another piece traveled across the Atlantic: in 1790 Lafayette sent the prison’s great key to George Washington as “a tribute … from a missionary of liberty to its patriarch,” and it still hangs at Mount Vernon.

CHAPTER 4 · 1792–1795 · AUG 1793

The Republic in the Balance

At Valmy in September 1792, French regulars and volunteers held their ground against a Prussian advance. The engagement was limited, but it showed that revolutionary troops could stand against a professional army. Within days the new Convention abolished the monarchy, and early in 1793 it executed Louis XVI. By midyear the Republic faced a much wider struggle: war with much of Europe, revolt at home and economic collapse.

The government sought to put the resources of the country behind the war. The levée en masse, or mass call-up, mobilized the population and economy; by 1794 France fielded roughly 750,000 troops. Emergency committees regulated prices, requisitioned food and prosecuted suspected enemies. These powers helped the Republic mobilize, but they also reached deeply into civilian life. About 17,000 people were executed after legal sentence, and many more died in prison, local reprisals and civil war.

In the Vendée, opposition to conscription and measures against the Church grew into a royalist war. Republican “infernal columns” devastated communities there. Estimates of 170,000–250,000 deaths include many civilians and remain debated in detail. The map separates the Vendée from the foreign fronts, but leaders in 1793–94 could see revolt, shortage and military defeat as parts of the same threat. Once criticism could be treated as sabotage and local violence defended as national security, limits on repression became hard to enforce.

Victory at Fleurus in June 1794 improved France’s military position. Yet the Great Terror intensified as that pressure began to ease. Fear and political momentum had acquired force within the institutions created to meet the emergency. In Thermidor deputies overthrew Robespierre, fearing that the machinery of repression would reach them too.

WHY IT HAPPENED

War and suspicion. A military defeat could be taken as evidence that someone had betrayed the Republic. The fear was not always groundless: a commanding general defected in April 1793. Leaders used the war to justify centralized authority and punishment of enemies; within the Convention’s logic, even the guillotine became an instrument of defense. Chapter 11 shows a related connection between danger and repression when restored kings purged liberals.

Faith, conscription and war in the Vendée. Measures against priests had already angered western peasants when conscription helped bring their grievances into revolt. Riots became a counter-revolutionary war. The Republic’s “infernal columns” passed through the Vendée in 1794, devastating communities. The contested estimate of 170,000–250,000 deaths includes many civilians. Both the war and its suppression left a deep wound.

Wartime control of the economy. The assignat lost value as inflation and shortages threatened households and the war effort. The authorities tried to secure supplies through requisition and imposed price controls backed by severe penalties. Repression had an economic purpose as well as military and political ones. Its institutions weakened after France’s military position improved, though the Great Terror had intensified as that improvement began.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The army and its generals. The Republic built successful armies through mass conscription and promotion by ability. Their victories also gave generals authority that rested on their own achievements. At Toulon, Napoleon is directing cannon (see the ✕ marker). The Republic that armed the nation would eventually give way to his rule.

Emancipation under pressure. The Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies in February 1794. In Saint-Domingue, enslaved people had already fought for freedom, and the decree offered France a way to retain the colony against Britain and Spain. Principle and military need both shaped the decision. Napoleon later restored slavery in French territories where abolition had taken effect.

A model and a warning. Later revolutionaries could look to mass mobilization, public-safety committees and revolutionary tribunals as ways to defend a revolution. Opponents could point to the same institutions as a warning about the destination of the “rights of man”. The revolutions of 1848 provide another opportunity to test those readings.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Terror the Revolution’s betrayal, or its self-defense? Choose, then argue the other side.

The Republic was in danger, and centralized mobilization helped it survive militarily. That is a serious case for self-defense. The case for betrayal rests on indiscriminate repression, the devastation of the Vendée and the Great Terror’s acceleration as immediate danger eased. The distinction between the origin and development of emergency institutions helps us judge both claims. War helped bring them into existence; fear and political incentives helped sustain them. Their defensive purpose explains their rise without justifying every act or establishing that terror was necessary for victory.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The revolution reached even into the calendar. From late 1793 France dated years from the Republic’s beginning and used ten-day weeks that displaced Sunday. The poet Fabre d’Églantine named the months, including Thermidor, associated with heat; Robespierre’s fall took its name from that month. Fabre himself was guillotined before the calendar was a year old, and Napoleon ended its use on 1 January 1806. A companion reform lasted: the metre was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from pole to equator, and surveyors worked on its measurement through the Terror.

CHAPTER 5 · 1791–1804 · JAN 1804

The Haitian Revolution

The wealth of Saint-Domingue depended on sugar and coffee grown by enslaved people whose mortality was extraordinarily high. When revolution in France raised questions about citizenship, the colony's planters, poorer whites and free people of color fought over who should exercise authority. Their quarrel opened a different question: whether plantation slavery itself would survive. Enslaved organizers rose in August 1791, and the revolt spread across the northern plain. Restoring the old order would now require a major war.

Toussaint Louverture dealt with Spain, France and local rivals in turn, changing alliances while insisting on emancipation. By 1801 he governed under a constitution that kept Saint-Domingue within France. Napoleon sent General Leclerc with tens of thousands of troops in 1802; Toussaint was captured during negotiations and deported. French assurances became harder to accept when news came that slavery had been restored in Guadeloupe. Black officers returned to resistance under Dessalines, for the freedom at stake could be lost under renewed French control. Haitian forces prolonged the fighting into the disease season, and yellow fever killed more soldiers than battle. The last major French force lost at Vertières in November 1803. Haiti declared independence on 1 January 1804; slaveholding powers withheld recognition, and France later imposed a vast indemnity benefiting former enslavers.

The markers trace the making of that state. Bois Caïman represents the networks of organization that planters had insisted enslaved people could not build; Vertières marks the military defeat of France's last major force; and Gonaïves is where independence was declared under the Indigenous name Haiti. Colonial restoration had been rejected. The new country still faced coercion and internal conflict, but its sovereignty rested on permanent abolition. For neighboring slaveholding powers, that achievement was itself a threat.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A plantation society in revolt. About ten enslaved people lived in Saint-Domingue for every free person, and many had been born in Africa. The plantation system produced immense wealth while killing its workers at a high rate. Its survival depended on the continued subjection of the majority. Whereas the American Revolution compromised with slavery and French governments equivocated, the people who sustained Saint-Domingue's plantations fought to end their own enslavement. Emancipation became the foundation of their new state.

An opening in a divided colony. The French Revolution left competing groups claiming authority in the colony. By 1791 royalist planters, republican small whites and free people of color seeking citizenship were fighting one another. Their divisions weakened plantation rule just as enslaved people organized a rising of their own. A dispute over who belonged in the French political community became a war over slavery.

Emancipation and the war. Sonthonax, the republican commissioner, proclaimed emancipation in the north in 1793 as he tried to hold the colony against Britain and Spain. The Convention extended abolition throughout the French empire in 1794. Military necessity and revolutionary principle thus worked together, and Toussaint made emancipation central to his government. Once Napoleon restored slavery elsewhere, French promises offered little security to people who stood to lose their freedom.

The fever season. European expeditions faced a danger that could grow worse with time. British deaths in the Caribbean islands in the 1790s are estimated at about 45,000, and deaths in Leclerc's expedition at more than 40,000; these totals include deaths from causes other than yellow fever. Dessalines' strategy counted on “the rainy season and its fevers.” Continued resistance kept French troops exposed long enough for disease to erode their strength.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The price of independence. Independence brought costly pressure from abroad. The United States embargoed trade in 1806. In 1825 French warships accompanied a demand for 150 million francs to compensate former enslavers for property lost through emancipation. Haiti was required to pay those who had claimed ownership of its people. The burden of the indemnity and the loans taken to pay it lasted until 1947, while isolation added to the new state's difficulties.

Fear and possibility. Slaveholders from Virginia to Brazil tightened restrictions and tried to limit news of Haiti. Enslaved people nevertheless learned from its example: Haiti figured in accounts of Gabriel's conspiracy in 1800 and the German Coast rising in 1811. The same events prompted fear among slaveholders and offered evidence to the enslaved that their condition could be overthrown.

Haiti and Bolívar. When Bolívar was defeated, President Pétion supplied him in 1816 with ships, muskets, a printing press and men. Pétion asked him to abolish slavery in the territories he liberated, and Bolívar issued emancipation decrees. Haitian leaders supported independence elsewhere while pressing its champions to extend freedom to enslaved people.

Napoleon turns from the Atlantic. Napoleon reportedly said, “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies.” The costly campaign helped bring his American ambitions to an end, and the Louisiana sale brought money to France. As his attention shifted increasingly to Europe, the soldiers lost in the Caribbean were unavailable for later campaigns.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

What made Haiti a demanding test of the revolutionary claim to universal freedom?

Universal freedom had a severe material consequence in Saint-Domingue: it destroyed claims to the plantation property that supported French wealth and white power. American leaders preserved slavery, and French revolutionaries abolished it under pressure before Napoleon restored it where he could. Haitians made emancipation a condition of their state's survival. Other slaveholding powers responded by isolating the country whose revolution had put freedom into effect.

AN INTERESTING FACT

As Toussaint Louverture boarded the ship taking him to France, his captors recorded his warning: “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.” He died of pneumonia on 7 April 1803 in an unheated cell at the Fort de Joux, nine hundred metres up in the Jura mountains, far from the sea and Saint-Domingue. Seven months later the resistance defeated France at Vertières.

CHAPTER 6 · 1796–1807 · JUL 1807

Napoleon Ascendant

Napoleon's Italian campaign in 1796 displayed a method that would serve him repeatedly: move fast enough to separate enemy armies, then defeat them one at a time. Egypt showed the limits of victory on land. His expedition won near the Pyramids in 1798, but Nelson destroyed the French fleet, leaving it strategically isolated. Napoleon returned to France and, in the coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799, helped overthrow the Directory and took power himself.

The ruler who emerged from the Revolution secured some of its gains in law. The Civil Code protected property and formal equality among men, while service counted more than birth in careers. Its equality had boundaries: it strengthened paternal authority and reduced women's legal autonomy, and Napoleon restored slavery in French colonies. Stability for some beneficiaries of revolution came alongside a severe restriction of freedom for others.

His armies brought a different kind of power to Europe. The Grande Armée's corps could march separately and assemble quickly for battle. At Austerlitz in 1805, Napoleon drew an allied attack toward his apparently weak right and struck the center. Prussia fell after Jena–Auerstedt in 1806, and Tilsit in 1807 left much of Europe under French power or influence. The French and satellite tan spreading across the map records the extent of those gains.

Speed alone does not explain them. Prussia stayed out of the war of 1805, while Austria stayed out of the war of 1806–7; Napoleon could concentrate against enemies who had failed to bring their combined strength to bear. Even at Tilsit, however, Britain remained beyond his reach. Trafalgar had secured British command of the sea, and Russia was an ally rather than a French dependency. Napoleon tried to fight Britain economically by closing continental ports to its trade. That policy made the cooperation of other governments essential, even when their interest in commerce led them to resist it.

WHY IT HAPPENED

An army made by revolution. Napoleon inherited much of the military machinery that made his victories possible. Revolutionary France had expanded recruitment and opened promotion beyond aristocratic birth. Its armies used requisition and mobile formations that could move separately and concentrate for battle. Napoleon coordinated these resources under strong personal command. At Jena the Prussians faced a force able to move and assemble with remarkable speed; revolutionary institutions supplied the means, and Napoleon directed their use.

Enemies who fought separately. Austria, Prussia and Russia had interests of their own and distrusted one another. Their combined strength mattered little if Napoleon could meet each before the others joined it. Prussia stayed out of the 1805 campaign, Austria out of the war of 1806–7, and defeated powers made separate peace. This division gave Napoleon opportunities to concentrate against forces smaller than the coalition as a whole.

The appeal of order. A decade of revolution had given many French people something they wanted to keep: transferred land, equality before the law and opportunities for advancement. Napoleon offered landholders, the army and property owners a government capable of securing those gains. Their support helped him consolidate power after Brumaire. The promise of order was attractive to beneficiaries of the Revolution, even as his government narrowed political liberty.

Britain’s command of the sea. Nelson's victory over the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 came in the same fortnight as Ulm. France could win on the continent, but Napoleon could not readily cross the sea to invade Britain. Britain, meanwhile, could finance further enemies on land. The naval defeat left a powerful opponent able to continue the war beyond the reach of French armies.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Reform and resentment in Germany. Germany's political landscape contracted from roughly 300 states to around 40. In parts of Germany, the Confederation of the Rhine brought the Civil Code, secularized lands and modern administration; it also brought French garrisons and conscription. The reforms came with foreign domination, and resistance grew. Fichte lectured in occupied Berlin on “the German nation,” and German forces would fight Napoleon at Leipzig in 1813.

A blockade that had to be enforced. With invasion of Britain beyond reach, Napoleon issued the Berlin decree in 1806 to close Europe to British trade. The blockade could work only if ports complied. Governments with an interest in commerce had reason to resist, and enforcing the policy would draw France into conflicts involving Portugal, Spain and eventually Russia.

Polish hopes and French power. Eleven years after Poland's final partition, the Duchy of Warsaw gave Poles a new state. Find its tan patch on the Vistula. About 100,000 Poles would fight for Napoleon, hoping for a fuller restoration, but the Vienna settlement ended the duchy in 1815. The hope and the disappointment both remained in Polish memory.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

In what ways did Napoleon preserve and overturn the French Revolution?

Napoleon preserved important gains: he protected revolutionary land transfers and legal equality for men, opened careers to ability and removed feudal privileges. His political settlement moved the other way. Censorship, police rule, managed plebiscites and empire curtailed liberty, while the restoration of colonial slavery violated the promise of universal freedom. He secured selected social gains under authoritarian rule.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The army Napoleon took to Egypt included 167 scholars, among them engineers, chemists, naturalists and artists. Their research helped produce the Description de l’Égypte, twenty-three volumes published over two decades that influenced the development of Egyptology. In 1799 soldiers strengthening a fort found the Rosetta Stone; after the 1801 capitulation it passed to Britain. The French scholar Champollion used copies and ink rubbings to decipher hieroglyphs in 1822.

CHAPTER 7 · 1807–1812 · JUN 1810

The Empire and Its Cracks

Napoleon could not carry an army across the sea to Britain after Trafalgar. He could, however, try to deny Britain its European markets. The Continental System depended on governments closing their ports to British goods, and Portugal refused. In 1807 French troops crossed Spain on their way to enforce the blockade. Napoleon then went beyond the immediate problem of Portugal: he forced the Spanish royal family to abdicate and put his brother Joseph on the throne. Madrid rose on 2 May 1808; severe French reprisals followed. Across Spain, local juntas, or emergency councils, claimed authority in the name of the absent king.

The surrender of a French corps at Bailén in July 1808 showed that an imperial army could be defeated. Napoleon retook Madrid, but a captured capital did not settle the question of who could govern Spain. Regular Spanish armies rebuilt after defeats, while guerrillas struck couriers, foragers and isolated units. Britain, meanwhile, could sustain an army in Portugal by sea. Wellington's Lines of Torres Vedras protected Lisbon, and Masséna withdrew when he could no longer feed his forces. None of these opponents could have done the whole job alone: guerrillas could not remove major garrisons, and Britain could not hold the countryside by itself. Together they kept the French fighting on several terms at once.

The British arrows trace a route from Portugal's protected coast into Spain. Behind Wellington stood the Royal Navy and a secure supply line; French troops had to forage and protect long roads. Concentrating against Wellington left those roads exposed to guerrillas. Guarding them dispersed troops who might otherwise have faced Wellington. Occupation of a city therefore did not mean control of the country around it. The crisis had political consequences across the Atlantic as well. If Spanish juntas could exercise authority for a captive king, American cities could use the same argument to form their own. At Cádiz, the constitution of 1812 declared national sovereignty, supplying a program that Ferdinand VII would later reject.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Economic war without an exit. The blockade damaged Britain: exports slumped, and 1808 and 1811–12 were years of crisis. It also deprived continental producers of markets and consumers of supplies. Smuggling spread from Lisbon to Riga. Each port that admitted British goods weakened Napoleon's system, so the commercial choices of Portugal, the Papal states and eventually Russia became problems he sought to solve through coercion or occupation. Enforcement created conflicts with the very states whose cooperation the blockade required.

Bayonne: legitimacy fumbled. In parts of Italy and the Rhineland, the French could present their rule as liberation from foreign or feudal rulers. At Bayonne, Napoleon instead displaced the Bourbons of an intact Spanish kingdom and gave their crown to Joseph. Many Spaniards across social classes saw a seizure of their king's authority. Defeating their armies could secure ground, but it could not make them accept Joseph. Napoleon later called the Spanish affair the knot that strangled him.

Insurgency plus sea power. France faced enemies with different strengths. Guerrillas disrupted intelligence and forage and made roads dangerous, though fortresses lay beyond their usual reach. Wellington could meet French armies in the field, but could not hold Spain alone against roughly 250,000 imperial troops. The Royal Navy could supply Lisbon and Cádiz, and the insurgents raised the cost of occupying the land between them. France had to counter these threats together.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The veteran drain. The war in Iberia became a lasting second front. Men and horses committed or lost there could not serve elsewhere, reducing the resources available for the Russian campaign of 1812. France raised a multinational army that included allied conscripts of doubtful loyalty, but replacing experienced soldiers and horses was harder than raising numbers.

Nationalism changes sides. The French Revolution had demonstrated the force of an appeal to the nation. In Spain, that appeal helped sustain resistance to France itself. Prussian reformers, including Stein and Scharnhorst, rebuilt their state and army after defeat; by 1813, France's opponents as well as its supporters were mobilizing people through national appeals.

Cádiz writes the liberal script. The Cádiz constitution combined national sovereignty with a Catholic monarchy. For the next thirty years it offered liberals in the Mediterranean world and Latin America a model, while the political term “liberal” spread from Spanish usage. Ferdinand VII abolished the constitution on his return in 1814. Its supporters retained a grievance that helped fuel the revolutions of 1820.

An empire decapitated across the ocean. With the king held by France and a junta governing under siege in Spain, Spanish American cities faced a question of authority. Some formed juntas that claimed to conserve sovereignty for the captive monarch. A claim made in his name could also allow local governments to act for themselves, opening a path to independence even where its authors had not intended that outcome.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Why did victories over Spanish armies fail to end Napoleon’s war in Spain?

Napoleon could defeat an army without finding a government able and willing to end the war. Juntas continued to claim authority, guerrillas made French communications costly to protect, and Wellington's army, supplied by sea, remained a threat in the field. Difficult terrain and poor forage increased the strain. Joseph's installation at Bayonne had also left his government without legitimacy among many Spaniards. Each victory dealt with part of the resistance; none removed all of it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Francisco Goya's paintings of the Madrid rising were made in 1814, six years after events he had witnessed. To obtain funds for the Second of May and the firing squad of the Third of May, he petitioned the restored government to “perpetuate by means of his brush the most notable and heroic actions of our glorious insurrection.” His other record, the eighty-two etchings of The Disasters of War, remained unpublished in his lifetime. It appeared in 1863, thirty-five years after his death.

CHAPTER 8 · 1812 · SEP 1812

1812: The Russian Campaign

Napoleon crossed the Niemen on 24 June 1812 with a plan for a short war. Around 600,000 men took part in the campaign, many supplied by allied or subject states. A battle near the frontier would allow him to defeat the Russian armies before distance and supply became overwhelming, then seek peace. But the Russians withdrew. Whether this was deliberate or resulted from the difficulties of divided command, the effect was the same: Napoleon had to march east to reach them. His supply lines lengthened, forage grew scarcer, and typhus, dysentery, heat and desertion took large numbers before the first major battle.

That battle came at Borodino on 7 September. More than 70,000 men on the two sides became casualties, yet the Russian army escaped. Napoleon entered Moscow a week later, only to see much of the city destroyed by fire. He had gained a great city without gaining the peace for which he had fought. Alexander I refused to negotiate, and Napoleon waited about five weeks for a change of mind. On 19 October he ordered the retreat.

The outward and return arrows follow much of the same narrow corridor. On the way east the army had consumed the food it could find; now the retreating columns returned over exhausted ground. Russian forces marched alongside, attacking vulnerable troops and harassing flanks and river crossings. Hunger and disease had already weakened the army when severe cold added to the disaster. At the Berezina, engineers built bridges under attack and saved part of the force. Fewer than 100,000 effective troops returned. France could call up young conscripts, but trained officers and gunners and cavalry horses were much harder to replace. The decision to wait at Moscow had brought this depleted army closer to winter without persuading Alexander to end the war.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Logistics against arithmetic. Napoleon's familiar way of war joined rapid movement, local forage and a decisive battle. In the comparatively rich, densely settled regions of Western Europe, roads and supplies had helped make that possible. Russia posed another problem: distances were longer, roads poor and forage sparse. Wagons brought food, but their draft horses consumed some of it. One estimate puts losses from disease and other attrition at roughly 120,000 before Smolensk. Napoleon expected a short campaign near Vilna; as the march continued east, the army's needs exceeded what could be supplied.

Scorched earth and the refused battle. Barclay's retreat, whether chiefly planned or improvised, kept the Russian army away from the decisive battle Napoleon wanted near his supply base. Each march east increased the strain on the invaders and the danger of their eventual return. In Spain, dispersed resistance prolonged the war; in Russia, an army that kept receding remained available to fight another day. Both denied Napoleon the ending he sought, by different means.

An empire of conscripted allies. Roughly half the invading force came from outside France. Prussian, Austrian, German, Italian and Polish contingents served under treaties, but their reasons for following Napoleon differed. Many Poles attached strong hopes to him; other states had recently suffered defeat at his hands. Hardship damaged the army, and defeat strained the political ties that held its contingents together. In December the Prussian corps agreed to neutrality, and Austria later moved away from France.

Winter was the finisher, not the cause. The cold of November killed and disabled men and horses on a terrible scale. It did not begin the army's losses. During the warmer months, heat, typhus, dysentery, hunger and desertion had already reduced its strength, although estimates of the proportion lost before the first hard frost vary. Napoleon emphasized weather, while Russian patriotic accounts celebrated “General Winter”. The cold struck a force already depleted and far from its supplies.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The spell breaks in public. France learned of the disaster through the 29th Bulletin, which nevertheless assured readers that the Emperor's health “has never been better”. Prussian forces moved away from the alliance within weeks, and Austria joined the opposing coalition in 1813. Russia's surviving army helped sustain the effort that became the Sixth Coalition. Bailén had already damaged Napoleon's reputation; Russia revealed a defeat on a much larger scale.

The instrument is gone. Men could be conscripted more quickly than experience could be replaced. France raised young soldiers, including the “Marie-Louises” who fought in 1814, but horses, veteran noncommissioned officers and trained gunners were harder to recover. Napoleon rebuilt an army for 1813; its losses in experience and cavalry limited what it could accomplish, including after battles such as Leipzig.

Russia marches west, twice. The Russian pursuit carried armies west to Paris in 1814 and helped make the tsar a principal arbiter of Europe. The journey also exposed young Russian officers to societies and political ideas beyond their own country. For some, comparison with constitutional France contributed to the discontent expressed in the Decembrist revolt of 1825.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Napoleon had studied Charles XII’s 1709 disaster in Russia. Why did knowledge of that precedent not save him?

Napoleon had addressed some dangers visible in Charles XII's experience: he started in summer and brought more men and supply formations. But the larger army also consumed more food and was difficult to move and supply. His plan still required a decisive battle and peace before distance exhausted the force. Russian withdrawal denied him that early decision. Knowing the precedent had not resolved the problem of an opponent able to exchange space for time.

AN INTERESTING FACT

A retired French engineer, Charles-Joseph Minard, made a celebrated picture of the campaign in 1869, when he was eighty-eight. His band representing the Grande Armée leaves the Niemen 422,000 men wide and returns 10,000 wide, narrowing along its route. A temperature line accompanies the return journey below it. The chart brings strength, position, direction, distance, temperature and time together in one image.

CHAPTER 9 · 1813–1815 · JUN 1815

The Fall

The powers fighting Napoleon had repeatedly discovered how dangerous it was to act separately. By 1813 Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden were bringing their armies into a common effort, sustained in part by British finance. At Leipzig in October their forces converged on Napoleon and outnumbered him. They continued the battle despite local setbacks, while several of his German allies changed sides. The retreat that followed destroyed the French satellite system east of the Rhine.

Those satellites had supplied troops and helped shield France’s frontier. Their loss changed the military problem for the coalition: its armies could now carry the war toward France without first breaking through that network. They entered Paris in 1814. Napoleon abdicated after his marshals refused to continue fighting.

His fall did not end the fighting at once. Napoleon escaped Elba in March 1815 and regained France without an initial battle. At Waterloo on 18 June, Wellington’s army held a defensive ridge while the Prussians recovered from Ligny and arrived on the French flank. Their arrival helped defeat Napoleon and end the Hundred Days.

The Congress of Vienna had already begun to design a peace. Its negotiators strengthened buffer states and arranged a balance of powers to prevent another bid for domination. France was contained, then eventually readmitted; the great powers also agreed to consult during crises. This was a different network from Napoleon’s dependencies, and it did not simply restore the map of 1789. Useful reforms survived alongside territorial rearrangements.

The settlement helped prevent another continent-wide war until 1914, though serious wars occurred in the intervening years. Its political costs fell on people whose claims the rulers placed below dynastic “legitimacy”: Poles, Italians, Germans and others seeking national or constitutional change. The governments that sought stability between states also left their subjects fewer legal ways to revise the order, and intervention became a weapon against revolution.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The coalition learned to cooperate. Napoleon had profited when his opponents fought and made peace separately: he could turn against one before another was ready. By 1813 the powers had reason to keep their disagreements from breaking the alliance. Schwarzenberg commanded their principal army, British subsidies supported continental forces (£11 million in 1813 alone), and at Chaumont in 1814 the allies pledged not to make a separate peace. Under the Trachenberg Plan, commanders were to avoid Napoleon himself and attack his marshals. Rivalry and uneven execution remained, but a local defeat no longer had to end cooperation. This learning worked alongside the pressure on France’s resources.

Mobilization against Napoleon. French conquest helped awaken loyalties that could be turned against French rule. German students and other volunteers, the Prussian Landwehr and Russian serf-militia joined armies fighting for rulers and fatherlands. The War of Liberation drew on mass mobilization and appeals to the nation associated with revolutionary France. Methods spread by the Revolution had become means of resisting Napoleon.

France’s resources ran down. France had spent a quarter-century at war, at a cost of roughly 1.4 million French lives. Conscription classes were called up years early; in 1813 cavalrymen rode requisitioned farm horses. The state could still raise armies, but it had fewer resources with which to replace its losses. When the allies crossed the frontier, there was no general rising like that of 1792. In April 1814 Napoleon’s marshals refused to fight on.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Consultation and intervention. Meetings of the Concert at Aix-la-Chapelle, Troppau and Verona gave the powers a way to consult. Cooperation could serve another purpose too. Some rulers regarded revolution inside a state as a danger to the established order beyond it; at Troppau in 1820, some powers asserted a principle of intervention against revolutionary states. An arrangement that helped governments preserve peace among themselves could also help rulers resist their subjects.

A harsher peace after the Hundred Days. Napoleon’s rapid return showed the victors how quickly France could change course. The second Treaty of Paris imposed an indemnity and occupation, and the powers remained watchful. The restored Bourbons also faced pressure from returning ultras. White Terror and reactionary politics marked the years leading to 1830.

Britain’s overseas advantage. Maritime supremacy and possessions including Malta, the Cape and Ceylon gave Britain advantages far beyond Europe. Its industrial strength supported its work as banker, carrier and insurer. Trade became an important instrument of British influence in Latin America as elsewhere, alongside the colonies Britain held and expanded.

Veterans carried ideas home. Officers on half pay and demobilized volunteers returned to a Europe whose rulers hoped to contain revolution. They had seen armies raised in the name of nations and constitutions. Carbonari, Decembrists and Greek klephts belonged to different movements, but their struggles showed that revolutionary politics survived the Restoration. Wartime experience and surplus muskets could find new uses.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Congress of Vienna a masterpiece of statecraft or a conspiracy against the future?

The answer depends on what we ask the settlement to accomplish. Vienna’s negotiators wanted to restrain rivalry among the great powers. They balanced states, eventually reintegrated France and encouraged consultation, helping prevent general war for decades. On that measure their work was successful. But many national and constitutional demands received little weight, and later intervention protected rulers against their subjects. Peace among governments left the question of who should govern within them unresolved.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Congress of Vienna spent nine months at work without holding a single plenary session. Delegates redrew Europe’s map through committees, meetings and social gatherings. The Prince de Ligne observed that “the Congress dances, but it does not march.” He died in December 1814, having joked that his funeral would offer the delegates another entertainment: the funeral of a field marshal. The Final Act was signed on 9 June 1815, nine days before Waterloo, as Napoleon prepared the campaign that ended his return.

CHAPTER 10 · 1810–1825 · DEC 1824

Latin America Breaks Free

Napoleon’s removal of Spain’s royal family in 1808 raised a problem across the empire. If the legitimate king could not rule, who could govern in his name? Spanish American juntas formed in 1810 and often professed loyalty to Ferdinand VII. In practice they took authority locally, leaving open how that authority would be shared if the king returned.

The struggle over rule also exposed divisions within Spanish America. In Mexico, Hidalgo mobilized Indigenous and mestizo villagers. Their rising alarmed creole elites as well as royal officials, and his defeat showed that those who opposed imperial rule did not necessarily want the same social changes. Ferdinand returned in 1814, rejected constitutional rule and sent reconquest forces under Morillo. The old bargain was not restored.

After exile, Bolívar rebuilt his campaign with Haitian weapons and support and promised emancipation. He crossed flooded plains and the high Andes to win New Granada at Boyacá in 1819. Its resources helped him return to Venezuela, secured at Carabobo. From the south, San Martín crossed the Andes, liberated Chile and approached Peru by sea: a direct overland advance was impractical. He withdrew after meeting Bolívar at Guayaquil. Sucre defeated the last major royalist field army at Ayacucho in December 1824, although local conflicts continued.

The routes on the map show how hard it was to join these campaigns across mountains and long distances. Armies and governments had to operate regionally before they could overcome Spanish power. That experience helped shape what followed: commanders emerged stronger from the wars, while many regions remained weakly connected to their capitals. Removing Spanish appointment did not by itself settle borders, establish broad citizenship or provide institutions capable of containing those commanders.

Brazil’s separation took another course. The Portuguese court had moved to Rio, and Prince Pedro declared independence in 1822. Monarchy and slavery remained. Across the region, the end of colonial rule did not have a single social meaning.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A crisis at the imperial center. The first crisis was in Spain itself: the king was captive and the country a battlefield. Juntas claimed to be “conserving sovereignty for Ferdinand” while making decisions locally. That claim let them exercise power without yet declaring independence. Ferdinand’s absolutist restoration made it harder to accommodate those practices. A dispute over who could govern for the king became a struggle over whether his American subjects should remain under his rule.

Creole grievances and divided aims. American-born elites had grievances against an imperial system in which peninsular Spaniards held prominent high offices. Ideas associated with 1776 and Cádiz also circulated among them. Yet many elites feared what might happen if Indigenous, mestizo and enslaved people mobilized for change of their own. Hidalgo’s rising exposed that fear; Peru’s elites had reasons to prefer royal protection to social upheaval. Independence and social revolution could therefore pull apart. Bolívar’s emancipation and Indian-tribute measures, encouraged by Haitian support, attempted to bring them together.

Riego’s mutiny. An expedition was assembling at Cádiz to fight Buenos Aires when Colonel Riego led a mutiny in January 1820. The force did not sail. Its revolt began Spain’s liberal revolution: the American war had helped bring about a crisis in Spain, and that crisis in turn changed the course of the war across the Atlantic.

British interests and American campaigns. British merchants saw opportunities in American markets. They supplied weapons and bought early republican bonds; British volunteers also fought, including the British Legion at Boyacá and Carabobo. British naval power discouraged European reconquest. Canning later boasted, “I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old”. The boast tells us about British policy, though it gives Britain more credit than it can claim for independence.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Republics and regional commanders. By 1830 Gran Colombia had broken into Venezuela, New Granada and Ecuador. Near the end of his life that year, Bolívar wrote, “I have ploughed the sea,”. The wars had strengthened local commanders in militarized provinces. Independence could be proclaimed, but governing those regions together required institutions that a proclamation could not immediately supply. Authority remained the subject of a long struggle.

The Monroe Doctrine and British power. Washington declared the Americas closed to new European colonization in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. British naval power also discouraged European intervention, in pursuit of Britain’s own interests. New commercial relationships followed independence: British loans, cloth and later railways brought finance and trade, while also creating possibilities for economic dependence. Freedom to seek finance left the terms of that finance to be negotiated.

Slavery ended unevenly. Emancipation followed different paths. Chile abolished slavery in 1823, Central America in 1824 and Mexico in 1829. Military service could bring freedom, and Bolívar acted imperfectly on his promise to Pétion. Brazil retained slavery, while Cuba’s sugar economy expanded under Spanish rule. Cuban planters’ fear of “another Haiti” helped keep them loyal to Spain, which ruled the island until 1898.

Losses for Spain and Portugal. Spain lost access to American resources, including silver, that had supported its power for centuries. Foreign intervention and the Carlist wars followed in Spain. Portugal, too, lost a major source of wealth with Brazil’s independence. Changes beyond Europe thus altered the position of powers whose European boundaries had been negotiated at Vienna.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Same age, same Enlightenment, similar wars — why did British America produce one durable federation and Spanish America a dozen fragile republics?

Institutions, geography and the wars themselves explain more than cultural stereotypes. British colonies had long practiced elected government and were linked along an Atlantic coast. Spanish American centers lay far apart, and peninsular appointees had dominated their highest offices. Long civil wars strengthened regional commanders, while social divisions made many elites wary of broad participation. None of these conditions made division inevitable: Gran Colombia was a serious union, the United States was itself fragile, and Brazil remained united partly under a monarchy that preserved slavery and concentrated power.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Bolívar inherited a great Caracas fortune, including cacao plantations, mines and town houses, and spent much of it during the wars. He died near Santa Marta in December 1830, aged forty-seven and traveling toward exile. The story of his burial in a borrowed shirt became a powerful image of his poverty. Venezuela brought his remains home in 1842; they were later placed in the Panteón Nacional, established in 1876. The honors after his death contrasted sharply with his difficult final years.

CHAPTER 11 · 1815–1847 · AUG 1830

The Age of Restoration

The rulers who gathered after Napoleon’s defeat knew that a revolution could travel. France’s upheaval had led to years of war and the overthrow of monarchies, so Metternich and his allies treated opposition within one state as a danger to its neighbors. After a political murder, the Carlsbad Decrees censored German universities and newspapers. Austria suppressed constitutional movements in Naples and Piedmont, France invaded Spain in 1823 to restore Ferdinand VII’s full power, and Russia crushed the Decembrist officers in 1825. Governments gained protection, but moderate opponents lost legal ways to seek change.

The Greek revolt showed that the powers had other interests besides defending established rulers. Greeks rose against Ottoman rule in 1821. Reports and art depicting the massacre and enslavement at Chios in 1822 stirred sympathy across Europe; when Ottoman-Egyptian forces threatened to defeat the rebels, British, French and Russian fleets destroyed their fleet at Navarino in 1827. Public pressure and strategic rivalry helped bring about Greek independence. Support for a revolution could serve the powers when the alternative threatened their interests more.

In July 1830, Charles X’s emergency ordinances brought Parisians to the barricades. Three days later he had lost his throne. Belgium rose soon afterward and gained independence, and the powers managed these changes instead of reversing them. In 1823, restoring an absolute monarch in Spain had seemed a common interest; intervention in France or Belgium now risked a wider war and offered no such agreement. Britain took another course at home. Its 1832 Reform Act expanded representation without satisfying every demand, giving some opponents a legal route while preserving the political system. Repression and concession could both be intended to maintain order, but they left reformers with very different possibilities.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The fear behind restoration. At Vienna, rulers remembered how the French Revolution had been followed by war and the fall of monarchies. Censorship and policing seemed a modest cost if they could prevent another upheaval. Yet arresting conspirators did not remove the reasons for opposition. Literacy, railways and factory towns were changing society, while the settlement treated political agitation chiefly as a danger to control.

A changing economy. Restoring a monarch did not restore the society over which that monarch ruled. Between 1815 and 1848, steam power, cotton manufacturing and railways transformed towns; a growing middle class read, traded and lent money, and workers crowded into industrial districts. Handloom weavers were among the crowd at Peterloo. The Lyon silk workers’ risings of 1831 and 1834 brought wages and work into politics, raising questions that a settlement concerned with dynasties had left unanswered.

National movements in exile. National movements could be driven out of public life without disappearing. Activists organized through Carbonari lodges, Mazzini’s Young Italy, German gymnastic societies and student Burschenschaften. After the Polish rising of 1830–31 was crushed, exiles carried its cause abroad. Secrecy protected some organizers; emigration also carried their arguments and contacts between European capitals.

Why Greece was different. European sympathy for Greek rebels drew on Christian solidarity and memories of ancient Greece. The Eastern Question gave governments reasons of their own to act: Russia sought influence at Ottoman expense, while Britain wanted to contain Russian gains. Each could prefer a Greek settlement in which it had influence to one dominated by its rival. Sympathy for rebels and strategic interest thus came together, despite the powers’ usual defense of established rulers.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Different political paths. The settlement left different kinds of government on either side of the Rhine. In France, the “citizen king” ruled under a constitution, but the pays légal was narrow: roughly one man in 170 could vote. Farther east, Metternich’s influence remained strong. Russia crushed Poland’s 1830–31 rising with an army reported at 250,000 and abolished its constitution. Demands met by restricted constitutional government in the west and repression in the east would return in 1848.

Reform in Britain. After two years of intense crisis, the 1832 Reform Act removed many rotten boroughs and enlarged Britain’s electorate by roughly 50 percent. Some supporters hoped to preserve the system by making a concession; others wanted to change it. Many people still could not vote. Slavery abolition followed in 1833, as did factory legislation. Britain passed through 1848 without the continental wave of barricades, having given some grievances a parliamentary outlet.

Belgium and the powers. Belgium’s revolution became a new state through negotiation as well as fighting. It acquired an invited king and a constitution in 1831 that liberals elsewhere admired and copied. The powers negotiated its place in Europe and guaranteed its neutrality, later described in 1914 as a “scrap of paper”. Together with Greece, Belgium showed that diplomacy could accommodate a new state without a general European war.

Workers and the social question. The July barricade fighters helped bring a monarchy associated with bankers to power. Lyon’s silk workers raised a different demand in 1831, under the banner “Live working or die fighting.” Constitutions and nations mattered to opponents of the old order, but so did food, wages and the right to work. Political and social demands would meet, and sometimes conflict, in 1848.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Metternich called his system the “repose” Europe needed. It helped preserve peace among the great powers for a generation. Did that peace require repression?

The peace was real, but its preservation and the security of individual rulers were different tasks. Balance, consultation and restraint helped the great powers manage disputes; censorship and armed intervention directly protected governments against their subjects. Leaders who remembered the wars after 1792 had good reason to connect revolution with international danger. Yet Britain supported the European balance while resisting a general right of intervention and later reforming at home, and the powers managed Greek and Belgian independence without a general war. These comparisons give us reason to question whether repression was necessary for peace. It could secure a regime for a time while closing legal routes to reform and encouraging underground opposition.

AN INTERESTING FACT

At Navarino, the last great battle fought entirely under sail, British, French and Russian ships fired close-range broadsides in a crowded bay. In about two hours they destroyed some sixty Ottoman and Egyptian vessels and thousands of their crews, without losing an allied ship. London was embarrassed by this victory over a friendly power’s navy: the King’s Speech of 1828 called it “an untoward event”, and Admiral Codrington was recalled to explain himself.

EPILOGUE · 1848–1849 · MAR 1848

1848: The Springtime of Peoples

By 1848, failed harvests and high food prices had joined a credit crisis and urban unemployment to put Europeans under severe strain. In February Parisians overthrew the July Monarchy, and the new republic established universal male suffrage. The news traveled quickly. Within weeks Vienna had risen and Metternich had fled; Budapest had won the April Laws; Berlin’s king had conceded after street fighting; and Milan had driven out its Austrian garrison. At Frankfurt, delegates began drafting a constitution for a united Germany that did not yet exist. Habsburg authorities abolished serfdom, relieving more than forty million people of feudal obligations.

A common opponent had brought different groups together. Once governments conceded, their differences became harder to contain. In Paris the closing of the National Workshops brought workers into the streets in June, and the republic crushed the rising, killing or deporting thousands. National claims divided revolutionaries too: Frankfurt’s proposed Germany included lands with Polish or Czech populations, while Hungarian leaders resisted autonomy for Croats and Romanians. Habsburg authorities could use these conflicts as loyal armies regrouped.

The military recovery took time. Radetzky defeated Piedmont, Windischgrätz retook Prague and Vienna, and Russian intervention defeated Hungary in 1849. France destroyed the Roman Republic, and Venice fell after siege and cholera. On the map, the revolutionary zones disappear more slowly than the first capitals had risen. The risings were nearly simultaneous, but their participants lacked a shared command and had not resolved competing national claims. Monarchs still had organized armies and eventually helped one another, as Russia did in Hungary.

Defeat did not restore Europe intact to 1847. Governments reversed much of the sharing of power, yet retained changes that had altered the societies they governed. Serfdom remained abolished, Prussia and Piedmont kept constitutions, and mass suffrage endured in France. The revolutionary governments fell; some of the questions they had forced onto the political agenda remained.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Hunger and unemployment. Potato blight and failed harvests in 1845–47 drove food prices sharply upward, in some places to around twice their earlier level. A credit crisis and urban unemployment followed. Families faced a subsistence crisis in a society already being changed by industry. Ideas about constitutions and nations gave opposition its political aims; expensive bread helped bring desperate people into the streets. The revolutions ebbed as the 1848 harvest improved, although better crops alone did not defeat them.

Demands left unresolved. Arguments over constitutions, press freedom, national unification and the emancipation of serfs and Jews had occupied Europeans since 1815. Governments suppressed many movements, although opportunities for legal reform varied between countries. In 1848 people with different demands could unite against a common regime. Their agreement on removing an obstacle did not settle what ought to take its place.

News travels quickly. News of victory gave opponents elsewhere a reason to think action possible. Reports of the February revolution in Paris reached Vienna within days, carried through a network of railways, steamships, telegraph lines and cheap newspapers linking growing cities. A monarch who had seemed immovable had conceded; perhaps another could be made to do so. This helped synchronize the risings, though news could not supply a common program or resolve the disputes among them.

The armies regroup. Concessions made under pressure left monarchies with a means of recovery: organized troops. Radetzky and Windischgrätz had forces available to suppress revolution, as did Nicholas I, who sent Russian troops. Many soldiers came from rural communities and could be deployed against urban movements; some belonged to national groups different from those they confronted. Their loyalty and organization mattered greatly, though willingness to fire alone cannot explain every revolution’s course.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Changes that endured. Restored rulers recovered authority without reversing everything that had happened. The abolition of serfdom affected more than forty million people across much of Central Europe. Piedmont and Prussia kept constitutions, while Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland retained constitutional changes; Switzerland’s 1848 federal constitution continued in amended form. France retained universal male suffrage, and several states kept parliaments. Rulers could recover powers they had conceded while preserving reforms that weakened feudal obligations or changed administration.

Unification by other means. Frankfurt’s delegates had tried to unite Germany through constitutional deliberation. Their failure left the national ambition alive, but others would pursue it differently. Within 23 years Cavour and Bismarck helped build Italy and Germany through monarchy, diplomacy and war. Bismarck had opposed the revolution as a young Prussian conservative in 1848. National unification answered one revolutionary demand; whether it was a delayed victory or a defeat also depends on the importance given to the liberals’ hopes for how it should be achieved.

Exiles carry the arguments abroad. Revolutionaries carried their arguments into exile. Kossuth toured the United States, Mazzini continued to plot, and Carl Schurz became a Union general. An estimated quarter-million Forty-Eighters reached the United States, though the size of that migration is disputed. Marx, a German journalist, worked in London and the British Museum; his interpretation of bourgeois revolution would influence later movements. Defeat scattered these people, but did not end their political work.

The age in the balance. From Lexington to Világos, the conflicts in this atlas cost several million lives. They also helped leave republics as an established form of government, slavery abolished or challenged across much of the hemisphere, declarations of rights as a constitutional model, and national statehood as a goal for peoples without a state. These gains and the deaths belong in the same account. How should we weigh them against the violence through which they emerged?

DISCUSSION QUESTION

“1848: the turning point at which modern history failed to turn.” How far is that verdict justified?

The verdict captures the immediate outcome: revolutionary governments fell, liberal national unification by consent failed, and restored armies prevailed. But the rulers who recovered power did not recover an unchanged society. Serfdom ended across much of Central Europe, several constitutions survived, and mass electoral politics remained in France. Within a generation, rulers and armies pursued Italian and German unification by methods very different from those envisaged at Frankfurt. The revolutionaries lost control of states, yet governments still had to answer questions about nations, constitutions and social provision.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Around 21 February 1848, an émigré press in Bishopsgate, London, printed the Communist Manifesto in German. Paris rose about a day later. The coincidence was striking, but the first printing numbered only a few hundred copies and its small early circulation gave it no significant role in the revolutions. Its much wider political career developed later, especially from the 1870s.