The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850 [Paperback]

This book is an excellent summary of the critical period when the old feudal Europe was swept away, and the modern industrial Europe was born. It begins describing the philosophes of the ancien regime, and ends with the Communist Manifesto. In between, it builds the bridge between the two.

Breunig descibes each of the major European powers (England, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and of course France), how their status quo was disrupted by the French Revolution and Napoleon, then how their reactionary governments tried, ultimately in vain, to stem the tide of revolution that swept Europe in the 1820's through 1850. One fascinating passage describes how the post-Napoleonic European leaders, desperately sick of war, struck a careful balance of power among themselves to ensure a steady, yet fragile, peace. Yet while maintaining this, the sovereigns (or most of them) ruthlessly crushed their internal conflicts, sometimes willingly accepting help from neighbors and formal rivals.

This book is especially interesting to Americans looking to understand the relationships between European countries and the roots of modern Europe.

Charles Breunig does a masterful job of painting a picture of a growing, developing Europe, in what many believe was the most remarkable period in European history.

Breunig's scholarship and narrative style notwithstanding, the illustrations are excellent in providing a stimulating historical perspective.

One expects that the French Revolution would be the centerpoint, but excellent pre-revolution observations and post-revolution results are treated as well. Breunig shows how the Industrial Revolution, in resource rich England, was the begining and the various European Revolutions were the results. The section on Russia and its gradual revolution is excellent on several fronts, not the least of which as a partial explanation for the second revolution in the early 20th century.

"Revolutionary Europe" is an excellent reading experience for anyone from someone looking to be introduced to this exciting period to graduate student. Breunig's dry wit make this an enjoyable experience.

Everyone knows that the French Revolution began in 1789, but when did it end? In 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power as First Consul of the Republic? Or perhaps in 1815, with the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty over France? One might even look ahead to 1848 and the deposition of France's last king, Louis Philippe. Even so, the aftershocks and consequences of the period 1789-1799 would take many decades to play out through the European continent and indeed the world. Asked what he thought had been the Revolution's influence upon world history, Mao's foreign minister Chou En Lai famously replied, "It is too soon to say."

_The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850_, the late Lawrence University professor Charles Breunig's lucid treatment of the French Revolution and its European aftermath down to the social and political convulsions of 1848, explores the fall of the French monarchy and the republican experiments that followed, both as a series of events in their own right and as prologue to the European nineteenth century. The French Revolution and the reactions against it played out against the background of a wider transformation already well underway by 1789: the Industrial Revolution. As Breunig shows, the material changes in life wrought by industrialization had direct social consequences for Europe. As some reaped economic benefits and others found their means of employment and experience of life irrevocably changed, older structures of power became increasingly less tenable. The revolutionists of 1848 took their cue from the ideals of 1789, but those ideals were filtered through the concerns of the Industrial Revolution.

The year 1789 is often considered the French Revolution's most 'revolutionary' year. But the French Revolution is perhaps best considered as a series of revolutionary moments which unfolded over a ten year period. The crisis of the French monarchy in 1789 was in essence a crisis of the royal treasury: the crown had borrowed beyond its means to finance foreign wars, especially the Seven Years War of 1756-1763 and the American Revolutionary War of 1776-1783, and lacked the means to compel the wealthiest members of French society, the aristocratic nobility, to pay their share of taxes. Simply put, the crown was bankrupt, and the price of greater taxation was to cede some measure of power to the aristocracy. Accordingly, in 1788 Louis XVI called the Estates-General, a representative body which had last met in 1614, to convene at Versailles in the spring of 1789. Once assembled, the nobles found the formerly quiescent Third Estate, representing all of non-noble, non-clerical France, unwilling to have its interests ignored. The merchants, lawyers, doctors and professional men of the Third Estate - the newly risen middle class of the eighteenth century - stunned crown, nobility and clergy by declaring itself the true representative of the French nation, in fact a National Assembly, and sat down to write a new constitution for France.

In August 1789 the Constituent Assembly, as it now called itself, produced the remarkable document known as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. It asserted the concept of natural rights enjoyed by all citizens regardless of birth or social station. The purpose of the state was the protection of those natural rights: "liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression." The Constitution of 1791 would not perfectly embody the ideals of the Declaration: it established property qualifications for voting, and preserved the institution of the monarchy. In fact the early years of the Revolution reflected an "essentially moderate" approach to reform. Nonetheless, the Declaration's core principles - natural rights, personal liberties, popular sovereignty and equality before the law - would stand to inspire many future generations of reformers, radicals and revolutionists. As Breunig writes, the Declaration was "a remarkable distillation of those ideals of the eighteenth century Enlightenment which became, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the gospel of European liberals." "In a sense", he writes, the Declaration "links the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."

How did France pass in two short years from an "essentially moderate" constitutional monarchy to the notorious and bloody reign of Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety (1793-1794)? The years 1791-1793 saw increasing radicalism among members of the Legislative Assembly and rising discontent among conservatives and royal partisans. In 1789 the Assembly addressed the fiscal crisis through nationalization of lands and property of the Catholic Church in France. The following year, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy opened a schism between those who accepted and those who rejected the required oath to the civil authority. King Louis XVI could not reconcile himself to the new regime and attempted to flee the country with his wife Marie Antoinette in June 1791; according to Breunig the so-called "flight to Varennes" was "the episode which probably sealed the fate of the monarchy." Louis was not trusted after this. The radical Assembly faction known as the Girondins egged their colleagues on to a declaration of war against Austria in April 1792; within a year France was at war with no fewer than seven foreign powers including Austria, Prussia, Great Britain and Spain. By 1793 a Catholic-royalist rebellion centered on the northwestern Vendee region also threatened the government at Paris. The king, found to be plotting with Austria for the defeat of French armies and the suppression of the Revolution, was deposed in September 1792 and publicly executed in January 1793.

For all their crusading zeal, the Girondins had opposed the king's execution. The votes in favor of execution in France's new National Convention legislature had come from Danton's extreme-left Mountain faction. With France fighting a major war and an internal rebellion, the Mountain resorted to the desperate tactics they believed necessary to safeguard the Republic. Girondists were placed under house arrest and emergency powers vested in the Committee of Public Safety under the enigmatic Maximilien Robespierre. During his "Reign of Terror" (July 1793 - July 1794) some 20,000 supposed enemies of the Republic were condemned and executed. Breunig takes care to note that only some 15% of the Terrorist regime's victims were aristocracy or clergy; the remainder were citizens who opposed (or were suspected to oppose) Robespierre's designs to realize his Republic of Virtue. Indeed Breunig notes the supra-political aspects of the Robespierrist regime and "the heart of the Terror - its semireligious, messianic character." This can be seen in the attempt to replace traditional religion with the Cult of the Supreme Being. Our own day has seen multiple re-evaluations of Robespierre variously as "bloodthirsty tyrant" and "the incorruptible"; recent analyses have noted some of the positive developments of the Committee of Public Safety's tenure including successful economic measures and stabilization of a precarious military situation.

By spring of 1794 opposition to the Terrorist regime had mounted from Dantonists, supported by those for whom the Republic had grown too virtuous, and also from radicals led by the fire-breathing Jacques Hebert. Robespierre succeeded in having first Hebert and then Danton guillotined. June and July 1794 saw the bloodiest days of the Terror with 1,300 executed in Paris. It was the last straw: on 9 Thermidor (July 27), 1794 Robespierre's fellow Convention delegates, fearing for their own safety, rebelled against him. Robespierre was arrested and the next day himself led to the guillotine.

Robespierre's fall ended the Terror and opened the way to political stability for France under the Directory (1795-1799). It also opened a path of advancement for the young Corsican artillerist Napoleon Bonaparte, who first made a name for himself as a soldier of the Terrorist regime at the siege of Toulon in 1793 and then made himself the indispensable defender of the Directory with his "whiff of grapeshot" in 1795. From this point began his meteoric rise from mere soldier of the Republic to master of a new French Empire. Made commander of the French Interior Army, he broke the military deadlock in northern Italy, smashed the Republic of Venice and imposed harsh terms on Austria in the 1797 Peace of Campoformio. In 1798 he crossed with a large force to Egypt, there to crush the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids, campaign into Palestine and dream of the conquest of India. But while the Egyptian campaign burnished the myth of Bonaparte, it proved a strategic dead end. Nelson's victory at Aboukir left the French force marooned in Egypt; with political turmoil building at home and a new coalition forming against France (the Second: Britain, Austria, Russia), the conqueror's proper place was on the continent. Leaving his forces in Egypt he crossed back to France in 1799 and seized power as First Consul. By 1802 he had defeated Austria in Italy a second time, settled with Britain in the Peace of Amiens, and had himself named Consul for Life. In December 1804 he crowned himself Emperor.

Napoleon's career embodied many of the leading trends of his age: as exemplar of the self-made man, the creative genius and even the Romantic hero, he was at once a product of the Enlightenment and "a son of the Romantic era." Beyond his undoubted military genius, Napoleon undertook a series of remarkable reforms both in France and in conquered territories. In the spheres of taxation, central banking, education, bureaucratic reform and not least the law, Napoleon introduced a rationalism born of the Enlightenment but also a centralization of power which ran counter to Revolutionary ideals. For all the progressivism of the 1804 Civil Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure reversed the Revolutionary presumption of innocence, and the Empire under Napoleon prefigured the surveillance states of the twentieth century. The sum of Napoleonic reforms came to a reversal of the principle of popular sovereignty affirmed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man. While the Empire preserved the trappings of the Republic, it hollowed out that Republic in substance: "Napoleonic parliamentary institutions were from the beginning little more than window dressing for what was essentially a dictatorship."

Hostilities with Britain had resumed in 1803. Russia and Austria soon joined in and the War of the Third Coalition was on. The year 1805 was the decisive one: in October Nelson destroyed a French fleet off southwest Spain at Trafalgar; Nelson died in action but the French defeat "ended definitively all French hopes of challenging Britain's mastery of the seas." Napoleon abandoned plans to invade Britain and turned his attention to the continent. In December he invaded central Europe, outmaneuvered an Austrian force at Ulm and inflicted a decisive defeat on a Russian-Austrian army at Austerlitz. Russia was knocked out of the war; Austria sued for peace. The humiliating Treaty of Pressburg ended Austrian influence in north Italy for ten years and in western Germany for all time. Napoleon could now organize the small German states into the French-directed Confederation of the Rhine, provoking a rash Prussian declaration of war in 1806. Moving impulsively to attack France ahead of his Russian ally, Kaiser Frederick William III suffered a double defeat at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt. Napoleon pushed east to meet the advancing Russians, fighting Alexander I to a draw at Eylau in January 1807 and defeating him at Friedland in June.

The War of the Third Coalition drew Napoleon to the apogee of his power in Europe. Under the July 1807 Treaties of Tilsit, all Prussian territory west of the Elbe would be ceded to France. Beyond territorial concessions, Tilsit drew Germany and Russia into the so-called Continental System, which closed off European continental seaports from trade with Britain. Napoleon's attempt to coerce a seapower without a navy of his own was doomed to early failure. Britain countered with a blockade of French ports and an efficient smuggling regime, aided by poor enforcement and corruption on the continent. Napoleon added Austria to the scheme after a short war in 1809, but by the end of 1810 the Continental System was a dead letter. The victories of 1805-1807, however, permitted Napoleon the latitude to reorganize Europe as a new French Grand Empire. The Confederation of the Rhine at once established French hegemony in Germany and laid crucial groundwork for Germany's future through rationalization of the fragmented state system. In Italy, temporary exclusion of Austrian influence raised the possibility of an independent course to a nascent Italian nationalist movement. Generally, however, Napoleon's actions in conquered territories "suggest no profound understanding of national differences or sympathy with nationalist goals." The greatest spur to nationalism in the Napoleonic era, as reflected in the writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte among others, was resistance to Napoleonic rule. "In the final analysis," concludes Breunig, "Napoleon came to be viewed more as a conqueror than as a liberator."

Despite a simmering guerilla conflict in Spain, the years 1810-1812 generally were ones of peace for Europe. By 1812 however the balance of power between France and her only viable continental challenger, Russia, had grown precarious. Relations had soured after Russia's withdrawal from the Continental System in 1810. Now Napoleon and Alexander eyed each other warily across Poland where each distrusted the other's intentions. In what he viewed as a pre-emptive move Napoleon launched in June 1812 an invasion of Russia with a force 600,000 strong, "probably the largest military force that had ever been brought together." Despite sharp battles at Smolensk and Borodino, the Grand Army entered a deserted Moscow in September having failed to destroy Alexander's forces in the field. Facing a starvation winter in a land denuded of resources, Napoleon began his retreat in October. By the time he reached East Prussia in December barely 100,000 of the original force remained. Falling back to France to raise a new army, he was finally confronted with an effective coalition of all the powers. In March 1814 Russian troops marched into Paris.

Napoleon's comeback from exile on Elba and desperate bid to reclaim the leadership of France, ending with the famous defeat at Waterloo on June 15, 1815 unfolded against the backdrop of a less noisy but crucial series of conferences and negotiations known as the Congress of Vienna. From September 1814 to June 1815 representatives of the victorious Great Powers assembled in the Austrian capital "to dispose of all the lands that had been conquered by the French armies over two decades." Never a true congress, as the participants never met in plenary session, the conferees devised a set of treaties and alliances which would result in almost 40 years of peace among the Great Powers of Europe. Of its three guiding principles - legitimacy, compensation, and balance of power - the Congress applied the first two unevenly but hewed strictly to the third. In a key sense, by the time of Waterloo Napoleon was already an anachronism. Even as he fought the battles of the Hundred Days, a consensus had already been reached among the allies: a sustainable balance of power must be established on the continent of Europe. Henceforth there could be no more Napoleons.

The foremost issue which confronted the luminaries of the Vienna Congress was the disposition of France. The Bourbon monarchy would be restored in the person of Louis XVIII. Initially inclined to treat France leniently to avoid planting the seeds of future conflict, the Congress imposed harsher terms upon the defeated power after the Hundred Days. France would pay a substantial indemnity and an occupation force of British, Prussian, Austrian and Russian troops would remain. An array of buffer states was established on France's eastern frontiers, including the Dutch Belgian provinces (today's Belgium), Prussian annexations west of the Rhine and a reconstituted Switzerland. Furthermore, France would return the art treasures looted by Napoleon's forces.

Beyond France and her borderlands, the Vienna Congress powers sought variously to enlarge their spheres of influence or temper the appetites of their allies on the continent. Britain, with no territorial aspirations in Europe, adopted the role of moderator with respect to Prussian, Russian and to a lesser extent Austrian territorial aspirations. Tensions between Britain and the eastern powers came to a head over the question of Poland. Tsar Alexander proposed the handover of the entirety of Polish territory as a Russian protectorate; in compensation for his piece of Poland, the Kaiser Frederick William III demanded the whole of Saxony. The wily Talleyrand though the representative of the defeated power managed to insert himself into the proceedings, and engineered a "secret" alliance of Britain, Austria and France against Russia and Prussia. The threat of war persuaded the Tsar to moderate his demands: Prussia gained only one-fifth of Saxony and Alexander received only a rump Poland on which to conduct his constitutionalist experiments though in fact he ruled the Polish protectorate just as autocratically as he did the Russians.

The final coalition against Napoleon had seized the moment of unity to forge the Quadruple Alliance first to defeat France and then to enforce the peace. However differences of opinion quickly arose over the proper role of the alliance in the new Europe. For the eastern powers, and especially Tsar Alexander, the Quadruple Alliance was the gateway to a pact among autocrats which would ensure the security of existing regimes against any resurgence of revolutionary or even liberal reformist ideals. To this end he concocted the Holy Alliance to which he persuaded the Prussian and Austrian monarchs to adhere. The Holy Alliance, which would be based on Christian principles of justice, charity and peace, would form the basis of bloody military suppression of liberal revolutions in Naples and Spain in the 1820s. For Britain's foremost diplomat of the era, Lord Castlereagh, the Holy Alliance was not only "a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense", but it also ran counter to the spirit of the Quadruple Alliance and offended British sensibilities against intervention in other nations' internal affairs.

The paradox of British policy in the period after 1815 was the contrast between opposition to counter-revolutionary action on the continent, as in the Neapolitan and Spanish revolts of the 1820s and the 1830 Belgian revolt against Dutch rule - and even active support of revolutionary movements, as in Greece in the late 1820s - and strict reactionary policies at home. The governments of Liverpool and Wellington - the former "one of the most reactionary in modern British history" - saw harsh repression of political liberalism and nascent labor movements. However even as the landed aristocracy moved to protect its interests at the expense of commoners as in the Corn Law of 1815 and brutally suppressed 'illegal' labor gatherings in unpleasant incidents such as the 1819 "battle of Peterloo", the great impersonal social and economic forces of the Industrial Revolution conspired to undermine the old order. A rising class of bourgeoisie made prosperous by the new industrial economy demanded representation of its interests, while accelerating capitalist transformation yielded a gathering swell of urbanized industrial workers. By 1830, the tide had begun to turn in favor of the liberal reforms and laissez-faire free trade policies that would define British policy and frame her globe-spanning imperial dominance through the remainder of the nineteenth century.

By 1848, the Europe created at the Congress of Vienna had reached a state of deep ossification. Extreme reaction had set in following the upheavals of the late 1820s and early 1830s, particularly in the eastern states of Russia, Austria and Prussia. The autocrats of central Europe could not quell the principles of legal equality and liberal constitutionalism which remained as the ideological legacy of the French Revolution. Social changes wrought by industrialization had worked to render much of the old order irrelevant to the circumstances of modern European life. And the complex atmosphere of emotionalism, individualism and rejection of capitalist materialism we call the Romantic movement served to accelerate a widespread sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo. The revolutionists of 1848 drew their senses of grievance from a wide spectrum and cannot be easily grouped or categorized. Their challenge to the monarchs of Europe met with various results, but generally with failure. In France, the king was forced to abdicate and a true republic succeeded to power, only to be usurped by Louis Napoleon. In Austria, the initially triumphant bourgeoisie paid the price for dithering and were crushed by Russian and Austrian troops. In Germany, the Kaiser's waiting game paid off as the Frankfurt Parliament succumbed to indecision and lack of a popular mandate. It offered the Kaiser the crown of a united Germany which he famously refused to "pick up out of the gutter." The cause of parliamentarianism and of national unification had for the time being failed in Germany.

By 1850 "the defeat of liberalism was nearly total." Furthermore 1848 marked a sea-change in class relations: the bourgeoisie and the working class had initially collaborated to challenge the aristocratic powers, but under threat of force the middle classes had backed away leaving the workers exposed to retaliation and defeat. The victory of reactionary forces marked "the destruction of working-class hopes and illusions." It was not by coincidence that Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto in 1848. The lessons of 1848 fostered the creation of class consciousness among the urban working class: there would be no more collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

Just as significantly, the year 1848 marked a shift in mood and perspective throughout the continent of Europe which Breunig characterizes as the death of Romanticism and the advent of realism. The disillusionments of 1848-1849 produced a "new tough-mindedness" that characterized succeeding generations. Contemplating the failure of their reform movements in the face of superior arms, Europeans concluded that "abstract ideals and principles were less important in securing their goals than were power and force." Breunig's summation of the lessons of 1848 could serve as a key to his own sobering perspective on, not just the events of 1848, but the entire period 1789-1848, and perhaps to the general sweep of history: "... the abortive uprisings of that year seemed to prove that ideals were not enough, that in the last analysis physical force, material resources, and power were what counted in human relations."

The narrative, then, ends on a bit of a sour note. But the defeat of the 1848 revolutionists and the end of Romanticism did not mean the death of reform. The ideals of 1789 are now of course common currency in much of the western world, and resonate in the aspirations of countless millions across the globe, whatever their status in terms of gold, guns or material resources. For confirmation of the power of ideas and ideals in human events we have only to look to recent events in Tunisia, in Egypt and even in Chou En Lai's own China. What have been the consequences of the French Revolution for world history? It is, perhaps, too soon to say.

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