Chapter 24: Chapter Outline
The following annotated chapter outline will help you review the major topics covered in this
chapter.
Instructions: Review the outline to recall events and their relationships as presented in the
chapter. Return to skim any sections that seem unfamiliar.
I. Napoleon III in France
A. France’s Second Republic
1. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory in the French presidential election of December
1848 occurred for several reasons.
2. First, Louis Napoleon had the great name of his uncle, whom romantics had
transformed from a dictator into a demigod.
3. Second, middle-class and peasant property owners wanted a tough ruler to provide
protection from the socialist challenge of urban workers.
4. Third, Louis Napoleon had a positive “program” for France, which had been
elaborated in widely circulated pamphlets before the election.
5. Above all, Louis Napoleon believed that the government should represent the people
and that it should try hard to help them economically.
6. To accomplish these tasks, France needed a strong, even authoritarian, national
leader who would be linked to each citizen by direct democracy, his sovereignty
uncorrupted by politicians and legislative bodies.
7. Louis Napoleon’s vision of national unity and social progress was at least vaguely
understood by large numbers of French peasants and workers in December 1848.
8. President Louis Napoleon had to share power with a conservative National
Assembly, according to the constitution, but after the Assembly failed to cooperate,
Louis Napoleon illegally dismissed the Assembly and seized power in a coup d’état
on December 2, 1851.
9. Restoring universal male suffrage and claiming to stand above the divisive
politicians, Louis Napoleon called on the French people to legalize his actions; they
did, and a year later they made him emperor.
B. Napoleon III’s Second Empire
1. Louis Napoleon—now Emperor Napoleon III—experienced great success with the
economy as his government encouraged new investment banks and massive
railroad construction in the 1850s.
2. The government also fostered general economic expansion through an ambitious
public works program that included rebuilding Paris to improve the urban
environment.
3. The profits of business people soared with prosperity, workers’ wages more than
kept up with inflation, and unemployment declined greatly.
4. Napoleon III’s regulation of pawnshops and his support of credit unions and better
housing for the working classes garnered the support of urban workers in the
1850s.
5. In the 1860s, he granted workers the right to form unions and the right to strike.
6. Napoleon III solidified his political power by choosing his own ministers and allowing
them great freedom of action, while at the same time restricting but not abolishing
the Assembly.
7. Moreover, the government used its officials to spread the word that electing the
government’s candidates was the key to roads, tax rebates, and a thousand other
local concerns.
8. In 1857 and again in 1863, Louis Napoleon’s system worked brilliantly, but in the
1860s it gradually disintegrated, as the middle-class liberals who had always
wanted a less authoritarian regime continued to denounce his rule, with increasing
effectiveness.
9. Sensitive to the public mood, Napoleon responded to critics by progressively
liberalizing his empire, giving the Assembly greater powers.
10. In 1869, the opposition, consisting of republicans, monarchists, and liberals, polled
almost 45 percent of the vote.
11. The next year, a sick and weary Louis Napoleon again granted France a new
constitution, which combined a basically parliamentary regime with a hereditary
emperor as chief of state.
II. Nation Building in Italy and Germany
A. Italy to 1850
1. Italy had never been united prior to 1850.
2. Between 1815 and 1848, the goal of a unified Italian nation captured the
imaginations of many Italians and was articulated in three approaches.
3. First, idealistic patriot Giuseppe Mazzini preached a centralized democratic republic
based on universal male suffrage and the will of the people, which to some seemed
quixotic and too radical.
4. Second, Vincenzo Gioberti, a Catholic priest, called for a federation of existing
states under the presidency of a progressive pope, which initially received cautious
support from Pius IX (pontificate 1846–1878).
5. After being temporarily driven from Rome during the upheavals of 1848, however,
Pius opposed national unification and denounced rationalism, socialism, separation
of church and state, and religious liberty in his Syllabus of Errors (1864).
6. Third, a number of people looked for leadership to the autocratic kingdom of
Sardinia-Piedmont and its new monarch, Victor Emmanuel.
7. To some of the Italian middle classes, Sardinia appeared to be a liberal, progressive
state ideally suited to drive Austria out of northern Italy and lead a free Italy of
independent states.
B. Cavour and Garibaldi in Italy
1. Sardinia’s brilliant statesman Count Camillo Benso di Cavour had limited and
realistic national goals, seeking unity only for the states of northern and perhaps
central Italy.
2. In the 1850s Cavour worked to consolidate Sardinia as a liberal constitutional state
capable of leading northern Italy, successfully building support for Sardinia through
a program of highways and railroads, civil liberties, and opposition to clerical
privilege.
3. Cavour realized that Sardinia could not drive Austria out of Italy without a powerful
ally, and so he worked for a secret diplomatic alliance with Napoleon III against
Austria.
4. When Sardinia goaded Austria into attacking it in 1859, Napoleon III came to
Sardinia’s defense and defeated Austria.
5. Napoleon then did an about-face, abandoning Cavour and making a compromise
peace with the Austrians at Villafranca in July 1859 that required Austria give up
only Lombardy to Sardinia.
6. Cavour resigned in a rage, but his plans were salvaged by the skillful maneuvers of
his allies in the moderate nationalist movement.
7. By fanning popular revolts, pro-Sardinian nationalists in the small states of central
Italy easily toppled their ruling princes and called for fusion with Sardinia.
8. Cavour returned to power in early 1860, gained Napoleon III’s support, and
achieved his original goal of a northern Italian state when the people of central Italy
voted to join the kingdom of Sardinia under Victor Emmanuel.
9. For superpatriots such as Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), the job of unification
was still only half done.
10. Partly to use him and partly to get rid of him, Cavour secretly supported Garibaldi’s
bold plan to “liberate” the kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
11. In 1860 Garibaldi’s guerrilla band of a thousand Red Shirts captured the
imagination of the Sicilian peasantry and outwitted the twenty-thousand-man
Sicilian royal army, as Garibaldi won battles, gained volunteers, and took Palermo.
12. When Garibaldi and his men crossed to the mainland and prepared to attack Rome,
the wily Cavour quickly sent Sardinian forces to occupy most of the Papal States
(but not Rome) and to intercept Garibaldi.
13. Cavour feared Garibaldi’s radicalism and popular appeal, so he immediately
organized a plebiscite in the conquered territories that went unopposed by patriotic
Garibaldi, and the people of the south voted to join the kingdom of Sardinia.
14. When Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel rode together through Naples to cheering
crowds, they symbolically sealed the union of north and south, of monarch and
nation-state.
15. Cavour had turned popular nationalism in a conservative direction, and the result
was a new kingdom of Italy, which expanded to include Venice in 1866 and Rome in
1870.
16. The parliamentary monarchy under Victor Emmanuel was neither radical nor
democratic, and although it was politically unified, a growing social and cultural gap
separated the progressive, industrializing north from the stagnant, agrarian south.
C. The Growing Austro-Prussian Rivalry
1. In the aftermath of 1848, tension grew between Austria and Prussia as each power
sought to block the other within the German Confederation.
2. By the end of 1853 Austria was the only German Confederation state that had not
joined the German customs union (Zollverein), which gave Prussia, with its leading
role within the Zollverein, an advantage in its struggle against Austria’s supremacy
in German political affairs.
3. Prussia had emerged from the upheavals of 1848 with a parliament of sorts, and its
liberal middle-class representatives wanted to establish once and for all that the
parliament, not the king, had the ultimate political power.
4. Prussia’s tough-minded William I (r. 1861–1888), convinced that great political
change and war were quite possible, pushed to raise taxes and increase the
defense budget in order to double the size of the army.
5. When the Prussian parliament rejected the military budget in 1862, and the liberals
triumphed completely in new elections, King William called on Count Otto von
Bismarck to head a new ministry and defy the parliament.
D. Bismarck and the Austro-Prussian War
1. Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), a great hero to some and a great villain to others,
was above all a master of politics who combined a strong personality and desire for
power with extraordinary flexibility and pragmatism
2. When he took office as chief minister in 1862, he made a strong but unfavorable
impression by lashing out at the middle-class opposition and declaring that the
government would rule without parliamentary consent.
3. Denounced for his view that “might makes right,” Bismarck reorganized the army
and had the Prussian bureaucracy go right on collecting taxes, even though the
parliament refused to approve the budget.
4. From 1862 to 1866 the voters of Prussia continued to express their opposition by
sending large liberal majorities to the parliament, which just spurred the search for
success abroad.
5. In the extremely complicated question of Schleswig-Holstein, two provinces that
belonged to Denmark but were members of the German Confederation, Prussia
joined Austria in a short and successful war against Denmark.
6. After the victory over Denmark, Bismarck was convinced that Prussia had to control
completely the northern part of the German Confederation, and he skillfully
maneuvered Prussia into a position to force Austria out of German affairs, by war if
necessary.
7. In the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, which lasted only seven weeks, the
reorganized Prussian army overran northern Germany and defeated Austria
decisively at the Battle of Sadowa.
8. Anticipating Prussia’s future needs, Bismarck offered Austria generous peace terms
that dissolved the existing German Confederation and allowed Austria to withdraw
from German affairs.
9. Prussia also conquered and annexed several small states and completely dominated
the remaining principalities in the newly formed North German Confederation, as
Bismarck began to realize his goal of Prussian expansion.
E. The Taming of the Parliament
1. Bismarck realized that the nationalism of the liberal middle class was not
necessarily hostile to conservative, authoritarian government, and thus during the
attack on Austria in 1866, he increasingly identified Prussia’s fate with the “national
development of Germany.”
2. Bismarck then fashioned a federal constitution for the new North German
Confederation in which each state retained its own local government, but the
Prussian king became president of the confederation.
3. The chancellor—Bismarck—was responsible only to the president, and the federal
government—William I and Bismarck—controlled the army and foreign affairs.
4. With members of the legislature’s lower house elected by universal, single-class
male suffrage, Bismarck opened the door to popular participation and the possibility
of going over the head of the middle class directly to the people.
5. In the decades after the constitutional struggle in Prussia had ended and the
German middle class had respectfully accepted the monarchical authority that
Bismarck represented, the values of the aristocratic Prussian army officer
increasingly set the social standard.
F. The Franco-Prussian War
1. Bismarck realized that a patriotic war with France would drive the south German
states into his arms.
2. By 1870 the French leaders of the Second Empire, goaded by Bismarck and
alarmed by their powerful new neighbor on the Rhine, had decided on a war to
teach Prussia a lesson.
3. As soon as war against France began in 1870, Bismarck had the wholehearted
support of the south German states, who by the end of the war agreed to join a
new German Empire.
4. Paris surrendered in January 1871, and France went on to accept Bismarck’s harsh
peace terms: France was forced to pay a colossal indemnity of 5 billion francs and
to cede the rich eastern province of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany.
5. The French people viewed the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine as a terrible crime,
and relations between France and Germany were tragically poisoned.
6. The Franco-Prussian War was viewed as a test of nations in a pitiless Darwinian
struggle for existence, and it released an enormous surge of patriotic feeling in
Germany.
7. Prussia had become the most powerful state in Europe in less than a decade, and
most Germans were enormously proud, imagining themselves the fittest and best
of the European species.
III Nation Building in the United States
A. By 1850 the industrializing, urbanizing Northern U.S. states were building a system
of canals and railroads and attracting the majority of European immigrants to the
United States.
B. Though three-quarters of all Southern white families were small farmers and owned
no slaves in 1850, profit-minded plantation owners holding twenty or more slaves
dominated the Southern economy and society and extended their cotton kingdom
across the Deep South.
C. The large profits flowing from cotton led influential Southerners to defend slavery,
while Northern whites viewed their free-labor system as economically and morally
superior to slavery.
D. These regional antagonisms intensified after 1848 when a defeated Mexico ceded to
the United States a vast area stretching from west Texas to the Pacific Ocean;
debate over the extension of slavery in this new territory caused attitudes to
harden on both sides.
E. Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in 1860 fueled Southern secessionism, and
eventually eleven states left the Union, formed the Confederate States of America,
and initiated war by firing on a Union fort in the Charleston harbor of South
Carolina.
F. The long Civil War (1861–1865), the bloodiest conflict in American history, ended
with the South’s defeat and the preservation of the Union.
G. The emergence of powerful business corporations and the passage of the
Homestead Act of 1862, which gave western land to settlers, and the Thirteenth
Amendment (1865) ending slavery all reinforced the concept of free labor and gave
shape to other dominant characteristics of American life and national culture.
H. The outcome of the war sparked a new American nationalism and confirmed for
many in the United States that its “manifest destiny” was indeed to straddle a
continent as a great world power.
IV. The Modernization of Russia and the Ottoman Empire
A. The “Great Reforms” in Russia
1. Both the Russian and the Ottoman empires were already vast multinational states
built on long traditions of military conquest and absolutist rule by elites from the
dominant ethnic groups.
2. The drawbacks of relentless power politics led the leaders of both empires to
realize that they had to embrace the process of modernization in order to compete
effectively with the leading countries.
3. In the 1850s, Russia was a poor agrarian society with a rapidly growing
population and poorly developed industry.
4. Serfdom, in which the peasant serf was bound to the lord on a hereditary basis
and was little more than a slave in reality, had become the great moral and
political issue for the government by the 1840s.
5. France and Great Britain inflicted a humiliating defeat on Russia in the Crimean
War (1853–1856), demonstrating how far Russia had fallen behind the rapidly
industrializing nations of western Europe.
6. Clearly, Russia needed railroads, better armaments, and reorganization of the
army to maintain its international position, as well as reform of serfdom to avoid
massive peasant rebellion.
7. These issues forced Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) and his ministers along the
path of rapid social change and general modernization.
8. The first reform freed the serfs in 1861, but because collective ownership of the
land made it very difficult for individual peasants to improve agricultural methods
or leave their villages, the old patterns of behavior predominated and the effects
of reform were limited.
9. Most reforms were halfway measures; for example, the new institution of local
government, the zemstvo, had locally elected members that dealt with local
problems, but each zemstvo remained subordinate to the traditional bureaucracy
and the local nobility.
10. More successful was reform of the legal system, which established independent
courts and equality before the law.
11. After 1860, the government encouraged and subsidized private railway
companies, which enabled agricultural Russia to export grain and boosted the
economic modernization of Russia.
12. Strengthened by industrial development, Russia’s military forces began seizing
territory to the south and east.
13. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 by a small group of anarchist terrorists
ended the era of reform and ushered in a new tsar, Alexander III (r. 1881–1894),
who was a determined reactionary.
14. Led by Sergei Witte, the minister of finance from 1892 to 1903, Russia’s economic
modernization sped forward in a massive industrialization surge from 1890 to
1900.
15. Witte doubled the miles of the railroad network, established high protective tariffs,
put the country on the international gold standard, and encouraged foreigners to
build factories in Russia.
16. In eastern Ukraine, foreign capitalists and their engineers built an enormous and
very modern steel and coal industry.
B. The Russian Revolution of 1905
1. Catching up to the West partly meant vigorous territorial expansion, for this was
the age of Western imperialism.
2. When Russia ignored the diplomatic protests of an equally imperialistic Japan over
Russian aspirations in northern Korea, the Japanese launched a surprise attack in
February 1904 and forced Russia into a humiliating defeat in September 1905.
3. Military disaster abroad brought political upheaval at home: in January 1905,
troops opened fire on a massive crowd of workers and their families who had
converged peacefully on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to present a petition
to the tsar.
4. The Bloody Sunday massacre turned ordinary workers against the tsar and
produced a wave of general indignation.
5. Strikes, peasant uprisings, revolts among minority nationalities, and troop
mutinies throughout the summer culminated in October 1905 in a great paralyzing
general strike that forced the government to capitulate.
6. The tsar issued the October Manifesto, which granted full civil rights and promised
a popularly elected Duma (parliament) with real legislative power.
7. On the eve of the opening of the first Duma in May 1906, the government issued
the new constitution, the Fundamental Laws, in which the tsar retained great
powers, including an absolute veto over any laws passed by the Duma.
8. The newly elected Duma saw the Fundamental Laws as a step backward, which
led to a breakdown in efforts to cooperate with the tsar’s ministers, and after
months of deadlock, the tsar dismissed the Duma.
9. New elections ensured a majority in the Duma that was loyal to the tsar, and
Alexander’s chief minister then pushed through important agrarian reforms
designed to break down collective village ownership of land.
C. Decline and Reform in the Ottoman Empire
1. The Ottoman Empire, which had reached its high point under Suleiman in the
sixteenth century, was falling rapidly behind eighteenth-century Europe in science,
industrial skill, and military technology.
2. In 1816 the Ottomans were forced to grant Serbia local autonomy, and in 1830
the Greeks won their national independence.
3. Another threat to the empire came from within: the rise of Muhammad Ali, the
Ottoman governor in Egypt, whose forces occupied Syria and then Iraq and
appeared ready to depose the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839).
4. The sultan survived, but only because the European powers, preferring a weak
and dependent Ottoman state rather than a strong one with a dynamic leader,
forced Muhammad Ali to withdraw.
5. In 1839 liberal Ottoman statesmen launched a series of radical reforms, known as
the Tanzimat (literally, regulations or orders), that were designed to remake the
empire on a western European model.
6. The high point of reform came with Sultan Abdul Mejid’s Imperial Rescript of
1857, which called for equality before the law, a modernized administration and
military, and religious freedom for Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
7. Intended to bring revolutionary modernization, the Tanzimat permitted partial
recovery, but it failed to halt growing nationalism among Christian subjects in the
Balkans and also failed to prevent Western imperialism from securing a
stranglehold on the Ottoman economy.
8. Equality before the law for all citizens and religious communities, along with
relentless interference by European powers, exacerbated disputes among the
religious communities and split Muslims into secularists and religious
conservatives.
9. Islamic conservatives detested the Tanzimat’s departure from Islamic tradition
and threw their support to Sultan Abdülhamid (r. 1876–1909), who abandoned
the model of European liberalism in his long and repressive reign.
10. Conservative tyranny eventually led to a powerful resurgence of the modernizing
impulse among idealistic Turkish exiles in Europe, the so-called Young Turks, who
seized power in the revolution of 1908 and forced the sultan to implement
reforms.
V. The Responsive National State, 1871–1914
A. General Trends
1. Despite some major differences between countries, European domestic politics after
1871 had a common framework, the national state, within which the common
themes were the emergence of mass politics and growing mass loyalty toward the
state.
2. Ordinary people felt increasing loyalty to their governments because more people
could vote, which had as much psychological as political significance for citizens,
who now felt that they counted.
3. The women’s suffrage movement also made some gains: by 1913 women could
vote in twelve of the western United States, and in 1914 Norway gave the vote to
most women.
4. Elsewhere, women such as the English Emmeline Pankhurst were militant in their
demands, heckling politicians and holding public demonstrations, but their efforts
generally failed before 1914.
5. As the right to vote spread, the multiparty system prevailing in most countries
meant that parliamentary majorities were built on shifting coalitions.
6. Governments acquired greater legitimacy as they passed laws to alleviate general
problems.
7. After 1871, governments found that they could manipulate national feeling to
create a sense of unity and to divert attention away from underlying class conflicts
by using antiliberal and militaristic policies, though they did so at the expense of
increasing international tensions.
8. Some political leaders also built extreme nationalist movements by whipping up
popular animosity toward imaginary enemies, especially the Jews; the growth of
anti-Semitism after 1880 epitomized the most negative aspects of European
nationalism.
B. The German Empire
1. The new German Empire—a federal union of Prussia and twenty-four smaller
states—was led by a strong national government with a chancellor and a popularly
elected lower house, called the Reichstag.
2. Bismarck refused to be bound by a parliamentary majority, but he tried
nonetheless to maintain one and relied mainly on the National Liberals, who
supported legislation useful for further economic and legal unification of the
country.
3. The National Liberals supported Bismarck’s attack on the Catholic Church, the socalled Kulturkampf (“struggle for civilization”), which was a response to Pius IX’s
somewhat alarming declaration of papal infallibility in 1870.
4. Only in Protestant Prussia did the Kulturkampf have any success, because Catholics
throughout the country generally voted for the Catholic Center Party, which blocked
passage of national laws hostile to the church.
5. In 1878 Bismarck abandoned his attack on the church and instead courted the
Center Party by enacting high tariffs on grain, which won over both the Catholic
Center and the Protestant Junkers, who had large landholdings.
6. Many other governments followed Bismarck’s lead, and the 1880s and 1890s saw a
widespread return to protectionism in Europe, the downside of which was
international name-calling and nasty trade wars.
7. Bismarck tried to stop socialism’s growth in Germany because he genuinely feared
its revolutionary language and allegiance to a movement transcending the nationstate.
8. In an attempt to win the support of working-class people, Bismarck urged the
Reichstag to take bold action and enact a variety of state-supported social
measures.
9. Bismarck pushed through several modern social security laws to help wage earners,
establishing national sickness and accident insurance in 1883 and 1884 and old-age
pensions and retirement benefits in 1889.
10. Bismarck’s social security system did not wean workers from voting socialist, but it
did give them a small stake in the system and was a product of political
competition and government efforts to win popular support.
11. In 1890 the new emperor, William II (r. 1888–1918), forced Bismarck to resign,
but he was no more successful than Bismarck in getting workers to renounce
socialism.
12. Social Democrats became Germany’s largest single party in 1912, which shocked
aristocrats and their wealthy conservative middle-class allies, but the
“revolutionary” socialists were actually becoming less radical and were instead
concentrating on gradual social and political reform.
C. Republican France
1. The war with Prussia undid Napoleon III’s efforts to reduce antagonisms between
classes, and in 1871 France seemed hopelessly divided once again.
2. Conservatives and monarchists in the National Assembly decided they had no
choice but to surrender Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, causing patriotic Parisians
to proclaim the Paris Commune in March 1871.
3. The National Assembly, led by aging politician Adolphe Thiers, ordered the French
army into Paris and brutally crushed the Commune.
4. Thiers’s destruction of the radical Commune and his other firm measures showed
the fearful provinces and the middle class that the Third Republic might be
moderate and socially conservative, and so France retained the republic, though
reluctantly.
5. Another stabilizing factor was the skill and determination of Léon Gambetta and
other moderate republican leaders, who gave the Third Republic firm foundations
by legalizing trade unions, pursuing a colonial empire, and establishing free
compulsory education.
6. Although the educational reforms of the 1880s disturbed French Catholics, many of
them rallied to the republic in the 1890s, but the Dreyfus affair renewed tensions
between church and state.
7. In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely accused
and convicted of treason, an action that was supported by anti-Semites and most
of the Catholic establishment and opposed by civil libertarians and the more radical
republicans.
8. Their battle, which eventually led to Dreyfus’s being declared innocent, revived
republican feeling against the church, and the result was a severing of all ties
between the state and the Catholic Church after centuries of close relations.
D. Great Britain and Ireland
1. In 1867 the Second Reform Bill of Benjamin Disraeli and the Conservatives
extended the vote in Great Britain to all middle-class males and the best-paid
workers in order to broaden the Conservative Party’s traditional base of aristocratic
and landed support.
2. While the House of Commons was drifting toward democracy, the conservative
House of Lords tried to reassert itself and vetoed several measures passed by the
Commons, including the so-called People’s Budget, which was designed to increase
spending on social welfare services.
3. The Lords finally capitulated when the king threatened to create enough new peers
to pass the bill, and aristocratic conservatism yielded to popular democracy once
and for all.
4. The Liberal Party, inspired by David Lloyd George (1863–1945), substantially raised
taxes on the rich as part of the People’s Budget; this income helped the
government pay for national health insurance, unemployment benefits, old-age
pensions, and a host of other social measures.
5. The terrible Irish famine fueled an Irish revolutionary movement, and Liberal prime
minister William Gladstone (1809–1898) introduced bills to give Ireland selfgovernment in 1886 and in 1893, both of which failed to pass.
6. Finally in 1913, a home-rule bill put Ireland on the brink of achieving selfgovernment, but Protestants in the northern counties of Ireland refused to submit
to a Catholic Ireland.
7. After rejecting a compromise bill, Parliament passed the original home-rule bill in
September 1914 but simultaneously suspended it, as the Irish question had been
overtaken by an earth-shattering world war in August 1914.
8. The conflicting nationalisms created by Catholics and Protestants in northern
Ireland were echoed in Sweden, where a Norwegian national movement culminated
in Norway becoming a fully independent nation in 1905.
E. The Austro-Hungarian Empire
1. In 1849 Magyar nationalism had driven Hungarian patriots to declare an
independent Hungarian republic, which was savagely crushed by Russian and
Austrian armies.
2. Throughout the 1850s, Hungary was ruled as a conquered territory, and Emperor
Francis Joseph tried hard to centralize the state and Germanize the language and
culture of the different nationalities.
3. When Austria was forced to establish the so-called dual monarchy after its defeat
by Prussia in 1866, the Magyars gained virtual independence for Hungary.
4. In Austria in 1895, many Germans saw their traditional dominance threatened by
Czechs, Poles, and other Slavs, as the Austrian parliament dealt with the
particularly emotional issue of the language used in government and elementary
education.
5. In Hungary, the Magyar nobility restored the constitution of 1848 and used it to
dominate both the Magyar peasantry and the minority populations, alienating those
minorities, especially the Croatians and Romanians, by enacting laws prescribing
the use of the Magyar (Hungarian) language in schools and government.
6. While Magyar extremists campaigned loudly for total separation from Austria, the
radical leaders of the subject nationalities dreamed in turn of independence from
Hungary.
F. Jewish Emancipation and Modern Anti-Semitism
1. Revolutionary changes in political principles extended to Jewish life in western and
central Europe.
2. In 1871 the constitution of the new German Empire consolidated the process of
Jewish emancipation and abolished all restrictions on Jewish marriage, choice of
occupation, place of residence, and property ownership.
3. Many Jews responded energetically and successfully, excelling in wholesale and
retail trade, consumer industries, journalism, medicine, and law, and by 1871 a
majority of Jews in western and central Europe had improved their economic
situation and entered the middle classes.
4. Most Jewish people also identified strongly with their respective nation-states and
saw themselves as patriotic citizens.
5. Vicious anti-Semitism reappeared after the stock market crash of 1873, whipping
up resentment against Jewish achievement and Jewish “financial control,” while
fanatics claimed that the Jewish race posed a biological threat to the German
people.
6. In Austrian Vienna in the early 1890s, Karl Lueger and his “Christian socialists” won
electoral victories, spurring the journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl to advocate
political Zionism and the creation of a Jewish state.
7. Lueger, the popular mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, spewed fierce anti-Semitic
rhetoric and appealed especially to the German-speaking lower middle class.
8. In the Russian empire, where there was no Jewish emancipation, officials used antiSemitism to channel popular discontent away from the government and onto the
Jewish minority.
9. Russian Jews were denounced as foreign exploiters who corrupted national
traditions, and in 1881–1882 a wave of violent pogroms commenced in southern
Russia.
10. As official harassment continued in the following decades, some Russian Jews
turned toward self-emancipation and the vision of a Zionist settlement in Palestine,
while others emigrated to western Europe and the United States.
VI. Marxism and the Socialist Movement
A. The Socialist International
1. Neither Bismarck’s antisocialist laws nor his extensive social security system
checked the growth of the German Social Democratic Party, which espoused the
Marxian ideology.
2. Marxian socialist parties were eventually linked together in an international
organization.
3. Marx himself, who called for proletarians of all nations to unite, played an
important role in founding the First International of socialists—the International
Working Men’s Association—an organization he battled successfully to control in
the following years.
4. Then Marx embraced the radical patriotism of the Paris Commune and its terrible
conflict with the French National Assembly as a giant step toward socialist
revolution, frightening many of his early supporters and causing the First
International to collapse.
5. In 1889, as the individual parties in different countries grew stronger, socialist
leaders formed the Second International as a federation of national socialist
parties, which had a great psychological impact.
B. Unions and Revisionism
1. As socialist parties grew and attracted large numbers of members, they
increasingly combined radical rhetoric with sober action, looking more and more
toward gradual change and steady improvement for the working class and less
and less toward revolution.
2. As workers gained the right to vote and to participate politically in the nationstate, they focused their attention more on elections than on revolutions.
3. Workers were also not immune to patriotic education and indoctrination during
military service, and many responded positively to drum-beating parades and
aggressive foreign policy as they loyally voted for socialists.
4. As workers’ standard of living rose gradually but substantially and the quality of
life in urban areas improved dramatically, workers tended more and more to
become moderate.
5. The growth of labor unions reinforced this trend toward moderation.
6. In the early stages of industrialization, modern unions were generally prohibited
by law: a law of the French Revolution had declared all guilds and unions illegal;
British workers’ attempts to unite were considered criminal conspiracies; and
other countries saw unions as subversive and enacted laws that hampered their
development.
7. Workers struggled to escape from this sad position, with Great Britain leading the
way in 1824 and 1825 when unions won the right to exist but not the right to
strike.
8. New and more practical kinds of unions, limited primarily to highly skilled workers
such as machinists and carpenters, concentrated on winning better wages and
hours through collective bargaining and compromise.
9. Unions in Germany, the most industrialized, socialized, and unionized continental
country by 1914, were not granted important rights until 1869, and then union
membership skyrocketed, reaching roughly 3 million in 1912.
10. This great expansion both reflected and influenced German unions’ focus on
bread-and-butter issues—wages, hours, working conditions—rather than on pure
socialist doctrine.
11. Genuine collective bargaining, long opposed by socialist intellectuals as a
“sellout,” was officially recognized as desirable by the German Trade Union
Congress in 1899.
12. The German trade unions and their leaders advocated the philosophy of
revisionism, which essentially was an effort by various socialists to update Marxian
doctrines to reflect the realities of the time.
13. Although revisionism horrified militant Marxists in the twentieth century, socialist
Edward Bernstein (1850–1932) argued in his Evolutionary Socialism (1899)that
many of Marx’s predictions had been proved false.
14. Bernstein suggested that socialists reform their doctrines and unite with other
progressive forces to win gains for workers through legislation, unions, and
further economic development; his views were denounced as heresy by the
German Social Democratic Party and later by the Second International.
15. In France the socialist leader Jean Jaurès (1859–1914) formally repudiated
revisionist doctrines but remained at heart a gradualist and optimistic secular
humanist.
16. Socialist policies and doctrines varied from country to country, but socialism itself
was to a large extent “nationalized” behind the imposing façade of international
unity.