EUROPE (1815-1848) Romanticism

EUROPE (1815-1848)

Romanticism

Summary

Romanticism, unlike the other "isms", isn't directly political. It is more intellectual. The term itself was coined in the 1840s, in England, but the movement had been around since the late 18th century, primarily in Literature and Arts. In England, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron typified Romanticism. In France, the movement was led by men like Victor Hugo, who wrote the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Although it knew no national boundaries, Romanticism was especially prevalent in Germany, spearheaded by artists like Goethe and thinkers such as Hegel.

The basic idea in Romanticism is that reason cannot explain everything. In reaction to the cult of rationality that was the Enlightenment, Romantics searched for deeper, often subconscious appeals. This led the Romantics to view things with a different spin than the Enlightenment thinkers. For example, the Enlightenment thinkers condemned the Middle Ages as "Dark Ages", a period of ignorance and irrationality. The Romantics, on the other hand, idealized the Middle Ages as a time of spiritual depth and adventure. Looking wistfully back to the Middle Ages, the Romantic influence led to a Gothic Revival in architecture in the 1830s. Gothic novels increased in popularity, and in art, paintings of various historical periods and exotic places came into vogue.

It would be impossible to cover all of the Romantics in such a short space (and a disservice to them to attempt it), but representative examples can be given. Mary Shelley (the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, published Frankenstein in 1818. Few would argue that it is the best work of the British Romantics, but it is indicative. In this story, a scientist is able to master life, animating an artificially constructed person. But this "miracle of science," far from a simple story of man mastering nature through reason, ends up having monstrous results.

In Germany art, Friedrich Schiller produced plays known for their sense of a German "Volk", or national spirit. Karl Friedrich Schinckel led the Gothic Revival movement, beginning his first plans for Gothic structures as early as the 1820s. German romantic philosophy was dominated by W.G.F. Hegel. He construed the development of the state as part of a historical process, or "teleology". He is particularly famous for outlining a concept of the dialectic: the mind makes progress by creating opposites, which are then combined in a synthesis. Hegel tied his philosophy into nationalism by arguing for a German national dialectic that would result in synthesis into a state. Hegel's work increased the emphasis people put on historical studies, and German history writing boomed. Partially as a result of Hegel's influence, the idea developed that Germany's role was to act as a counterbalance to France. Seeing themselves as such, Germans began to feel that liberalism was not appropriate in Germany.

The French had their Romantics too, though not in the same profusion as Germany. For instance, Romantic painting is always associated with Eugene Delacroix, who prized the emotional impact of color over the representational accuracy of line and careful design. Delacroix painted historical scenes, such as "liberty Leading the People" (1830) which glorified the beautiful spectacle of revolution, perhaps construing it as part of the French national character. After 1848, Romanticism fell into decline.

Commentary

Romanticism can be construed as an opposite to "classicism," drawing on Rousseau's notion of the goodness of the natural. Romanticism holds that pure logic is insufficient to answer all questions. Despite a founding French influence, Romanticism was most widespread in Germany and England, largely as a reaction to the French Enlightenment. It also was a response to French cultural domination, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars. The Romanticist emphasis on individualism and self-expression deeply impacted American thinking, especially the transcendentalism of Emerson.

Instead of labeling, classifying, listing, tallying and condemning, the Romantics were relativist. That is, they looked less for ultimate, absolute truth than did Enlightenment thinkers. Romantics tended to think that everything had its own value, an "inner genius". Even in morality, the Romantics began to question the notion that there even was such a thing as absolute good and evil. Instead, each society was seen to create its own standards of morality. Romanticism also fueled many "isms" with the basic idea that "genius" had the power to change the world. German Romanticism, with its idea of a Volksgeist unique to each nation (derived from Herder's writings), gave an intellectual basis to nationalism.

The movement of Romanticism encompasses several contradictory aspects: several ideas are grouped into the movement, and they do not always fit together. For instance, some Romantics utilized the ideology to argue for the overthrow of old institutions, while others used it to uphold historical institutions, claiming that tradition revealed the "inner genius" of a people. Basically, as long as romantic intellectual passion, not rationalism and strict reason, were the basic underpinning of an idea, than it can be classified as "Romantic."

Interestingly, because of its geographical distribution, some historians argue that Romanticism was the secular continuation of the Protestant Reformation. Romanticism was most prominent in highly Protestant countries like Germany, England, and the United States. France, which had a significant Protestant movement but which remained Catholic-dominated, had something less of a Romantic movement. Other solidly Catholic countries were even less impacted by Romanticism.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Era, Europe's leaders worked to reorganize Europe and create a stable balance of power. After that Congress, The Austrian diplomat Metternich would call several more congresses to try and preserve European stability: the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), the Congress of Troppau (1820), and the Congress of Verona (1822). The Congress System that Metternich established was Reactionary, that is, its goal was to preserve the power of the old, monarchical regimes in Europe.



Revolution was brewing, however. In Britain, the Industrial Revolution continued to accelerate, causing economic transformations that had serious political and social implications. All across Europe, and especially in France and Britain, the rising Bourgeoisie class challenged the old monarchical Reactionaries with their Liberal ideology. "Isms" abounded. Ideologies such as Radicalism, Republicanism, and Socialism rounded into coherent form. In response to events like the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, worker consciousness of a class struggle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie began to emerge. The Bourgeoisie was clearly the ascendant class between 1815 and 1848; the Proletariat began to gain a sense of similar unification.

Another "Ism" coming into its own at this time was Romanticism, the intellectual response to the French Enlightenment rationalism and emphasis on Reason. At the same time, Romantic thinkers, artists, and writers posed powerful challenge to the Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism and reason. Such artists and philosophers as Herder, Hegel, Schiller, Schinckel, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Delacroix, to name a few, achieved remarkable intellectual and artistic heights and gained a wide following throughout Europe, particularly in Germany, Prussia, England, and to a lesser extent France.

Of all the "Isms" competing in this period, perhaps the greatest was Nationalism, an ideology, like Romanticism, which reacted against the universalist claims of French enlightenment thought. Whereas Romanticism often focused on intellectual and artistic matters, Nationalism, which proclaimed the unique character of ethnic and linguistic groups, was more overtly political. The Nationalist movements in Germany and Italy, which involved an effort at national unification, and those in the Austrian Empire, which involved efforts to carve the Austrian Empire into ethnically or linguistically defined states, created a great amount of instability in Europe.

In 1830, the various ideological beliefs resulted in a round of revolutions. These revolutions began when the Paris Mob, manipulated by the interests of the Bourgeoisie, deposed the Bourbon monarchy of Charles X and replaced him with Louis Philippe. In the rest of Europe, the French example touched off various nationalist revolts; all were successfully quelled by conservative forces.

Britain notably escaped any outbreak of violence, but it by no means escaped change: the battle between the formerly dominant landed aristocracy and the newly ascendant manufacturers led to the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, which partially remedied the Rotten Boroughs and gave the manufactures an increased amount of Parliamentary representation. The working class benefited from the growing class rivalry between aristocracy and middle-class. Often the aristocrats would ally with the working class to act against the manufacturers, forcing the manufacturers, in turn, to ally with the workers against the aristocrats. Although the working class did not yet have the vote in England, they were pushing for universal adult male suffrage in the late 1830s and early 1840s via the Chartist Movement. While this movement failed in the short- term, its demands were eventually adopted.


In the rest of Europe, political change would not happen so peacefully. In 1848, the February Revolution broke out in Paris, toppling Louis Philippe and granting universal suffrage to adult French men, who elected Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III) solely on name-recognition. Europe once again took its cue from Paris, and revolutions broke out nearly everywhere in Europe during 1848. Rebellion in Germany led to the establishment of the Frankfurt Assembly, which was plagued by internal squabbling and was unable to unify Germany. In the Austrian Empire, the various ethnicities revolted, and the Magyar nationalists led by Louis Kossuth pushed for an independent Hungary. Rioting in Vienna frightened Metternich so much he fled the city. All of the Eastern European rebellions were ultimately put down, a triumph for the reactionaries. However, the events of 1848 frightened the rulers of Europe out of their complacency and forced them to realize that gradually, they would have to change the nature of their governments or face future revolutions.