The Peace of Westphalia, concluded in the year with which this volume begins, not only brought to an end one of the most devastating wars in the history of Europe; it also terminated one of the most decisive periods of European history, that of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Although religious events and motives continued to be of vital importance in the history of many European countries— such as France, England and the Habsburg territories—there were no further changes in the religious frontiers: the European countries and principalities retained the religion which was established there in 1648. Only religious minorities—such as the Austrian Protestants and the French Huguenots—might be forced to leave their native countries; or they might receive official recognition—as the Non-Conformists did in England. It is true, of course, that the rule of Islam was broken in southeastern Europe during the period covered by this and subsequent volumes, but this was a political change; it freed the Hungarians and other Balkan Christians from Turkish overlordship, but did not change the religious loyalties of the population. Even in much-divided Germany the religious frontiers remained stable after the peace of 1648. Although several German princely houses changed their faith during the subsequent decades—mainly from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism—their subjects did not follow this example, but kept their religion. Very slowly— perhaps only through mutual exhaustion after many years of fighting— the religious conflicts began to subside and religious hatred started to recede: to be fanned into new flames by the dragonnades and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685).

In Portugal in the second half of the seventeenth century a population of nearly two million occupied, as it had done since the mid-thirteenth century, an area of 34,000 square miles (55 to the square mile). Portugal's demographic position was thus stronger than that of Spain, whose density of population was only about 31–4 to the square mile (with a total of under six millions), and did not compare badly with that of the United Provinces, whose population was not much larger than that of Portugal. Yet, because of the injuries inflicted by war, there was no increase of population until the end of the century. Lisbon, the capital, had at least 165,000 inhabitants, a figure comparable to that of Amsterdam. Four towns had between 16,000 and 20,000 inhabitants: the university city of Coimbra, the great northern port of Oporto, and Évora, the grain centre of the south. A newcomer to this group was Elvas, the vital stronghold of the War of Independence. There were another thirty towns with more than a thousand houses each, most of them in the south.

The Portuguese Empire stretched from South America to China. In the vast territory of Brazil, which was being mapped by the bandeiras, the population, which had increased rapidly in the first third of the seventeenth century, later suffered seriously from the Dutch wars and the sugar slump and resumed a slow increase only towards the end of the century. The most densely populated areas were the north-east, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the Amazon basin and the Maranhã. Europeans, Indians and Negroes together totalled half a million, about one-fifth of these being Europeans.

The seventeenth century has been called the heroic age of rationalism in Western Europe, and the term does indeed accurately express the three essential features of the thought of the period. These were, first, the alliance between the traditions of Galileo and of Descartes— between the new mathematico-mechanical science and the idea of natural law—second, the divorce of political thought from theology, and finally, the capacity of its great minds for creative thought. For there are few centuries so rich in creative philosophic ability, or in which political theory so boldly aspires to the utmost heights of intellectual speculation. But the spell cast by the great philosophers of the period presents a danger to the historian of its thought. He tends much too easily to confuse their originality with their influence, their future importance with their authority among their contemporaries. Many of their most important ideas are far ahead of their time—ideas which could not be fully developed in the intellectual climate of the age and did not leave their full mark on the history of thought until much later. The importance of Spinoza was first fully revealed by Goethe, that of Leibniz by the German idealists. That is why, more than in any other period since then, the history of ideas cannot be considered in vacuo, but must be related to the changing conditions of an age in which the basic problems of political life constantly take on new forms.

The restoration of Charles Stuart to the thrones of England and Scotland in 1660 nearly coincided with the assumption of regal power by his cousin, Louis XIV of France. In each case, this meant the end of an interregnum and the beginning of an era of personal, monarchic rule. The two kings started with very different problems, for their countries were strikingly contrasted in temper and institutions; but, by 1685, the year of Charles's death, France and England showed an apparent approximation, since Stuart rule was no longer parliamentary in the true sense of the word; in both countries Protestants were subjected to active persecution, and there even seemed a possibility that England might become little more than a dependency of France. How that state of things was reached is the subject of this chapter; how it was averted by revolution is the subject of another.

Cromwell's death in September 1658 had been followed by a period of about twenty months during which the army leaders, Fleetwood, Lambert and Monck, struggled for supremacy; until in January 1660 Monck, the most astute and secretive man of his age, marched into England at the head of the army of occupation of Scotland. Having left this army at nearby Finsbury, the general proceeded to ‘countenance’ (that is, extend unasked-for protection to) the remnants of the Rump at Westminster, now reduced to about forty members, who represented the elderly survivors of that Long Parliament which had initiated a great rebellion. Monck, who was perceptive enough to see that monarchy could be peaceably restored only by the civil power, brought back to the Commons (in February 1660) the survivors of the Presbyterians who had been expelled by Pride's Purge in December 1648, thereby completely swamping the small residue of republicans and visionaries to which the House had been reduced.

In France, the sequel to the revolution of 1848 seemed to mean more than the disappointment of the hopes of republicans. It seemed to mean, as well, an undoing of much of the progress towards liberal government that France had made prior to the outbreak of the revolution. For the coup d'état of 2 December 1851 inaugurated a more autocratic rule than France had known since the overthrow of Charles X, and inasmuch as one of the main purposes of this new absolutism was to safeguard the propertied classes and the church, its inception had the appearance of a return to the familiar pattern of political and social conservatism. Nevertheless, the Second Empire was not a mere retrogression, and the amiable adventurer who became Napoleon III was to earn the execration of reactionaries no less than of republicans. To the chagrin of both, time was to show that he was not insincere when he professed that the broad aim of his regime was to reconcile those whose watchword was ‘progress’ with those whose motto was ‘order’. His success was to prove meagre, since this schism was to persist throughout his reign, and it was to issue again in bitter internecine strife when ultimately the Second Empire disappeared. Yet the endeavour was not quite vain. The empire was to endure as long as any regime in France since 1789, and in this period the nation was to experience a remarkable economic advance. Moreover, whatever the original intention of the emperor, France was to witness a gradual return to the practices of representative government, which were to be more firmly established at the close of his reign than ever before.

In the perspective of military history the Civil War is the first modern war. It marked a transition from the older warfare, which involved principally the fighting forces, to the modern which affects in varying degree every group of society and which would demand ultimately a totalisation of national life. The Civil War was a war of material as well as of men. It witnessed the innovation or employment of mass armies, railroads, armoured ships, the telegraph, breech-loading and repeating rifles, various precursors of the machine-gun, railway artillery, signal balloons, trenches, and wire entanglements. It was a war of ideas and therefore of unlimited objectives. One side or the other had to win a complete victory: the North to force the South back into the Union, the South to force the North to recognise its independence. There could be no compromise, no partial triumph for either. In contrast to the leisurely, limited-objective wars of the eighteenth century, the Civil War was rough, ruthless and sometimes cruel.

It was the first great military experience of the American people and their greatest historical experience. The drama, the agony, the valour of the years 1861–5 became a permanent part of the national consciousness. So did a profound realisation of its significance. In American history the Civil War is the great pivotal event, comparable to the revolution of 1789 in France. It settled certain differences, and it settled them permanently. It destroyed slavery, and assured the ascendancy of industrial capitalism. Furthermore, it preserved the Union and stabilised, if it did not indeed create, the modern American nation.

Education, like every other department of European life, had been deeply affected by the French Revolution and its aftermath. All the European states had seen ancient institutions tumbled to the ground, ancient conceptions swept away; the only exceptions were Russia, remote in its eastern plains, and Great Britain, which in this, as in so many other ways, pursued its own course. In France, out of the debris of the old order had arisen the secular state-controlled ‘University’, founded by Napoleon in 1808 to direct secondary and higher education; nothing was done by the state for primary education until after the Restoration. In Germany academic learning took the place occupied in the other civilised countries of the West by political and economic life; there was nothing in other lands to compare with the German belief in education. In Prussia, in particular, the great revival after 1807 had produced the University of Berlin (1810), which set the standard of all nineteenth-century university work. The Gymnasium, or secondary school, was developed out of the old Latin school, and primary education was fostered on lines suggested by the Swiss teacher and theorist, Pestalozzi. When peace returned after 1815, there was a widespread interest in education, expressed both by statesmen and by theorists, in all European countries. Everywhere there was much to be done, more especially in the backward countries like Italy, the eastern provinces of the Habsburg empire, and Russia, and considerable efforts were made, though political reaction was often harmful to educational advance.

In this chapter it is not the intention to recapitulate the political history of the various Mediterranean countries—the unification of Italy, the French conquest and settlement of Algiers, the consolidation of the small Greek state, the reawakening of Egypt and the effort to conserve and reform the remains of the Turkish empire; or, again, to relate the diplomatic and military history of the international crises which these and other developments produced. Nor would it be easy, within this compass, to trace the influence of new ideas and habits which these countries shared in unequal degrees with the rest of Europe. Instead, an attempt will be made to define the common characteristics of the Mediterranean region in this period and to fasten upon some changes in the outward conditions of the region as a whole. The main key to these changes is the gradual advent of the steamship and, to a lesser extent, that of the railway, as carriers of the new industrial age into a still traditional pattern of life; if that is true, no apology is needed for focusing attention upon the Mediterranean considered internally as a network of communications and internationally as a through-route between Asia and the West. The political and strategical implications of these changes must be noticed, but not merely as part of the history of the several Mediterranean countries or of the two extra-Mediterranean powers, England and Russia, whose rivalry so much influenced the course of events within the region.

It is customary to divide the history of the Austrian monarchy in the mid-nineteenth century into periods: the Vormärz, during which the forces (chiefly national ones), impatient of the system established under the Emperor Francis and prolonged under Ferdinand, took shape and gathered strength; the revolution, when those forces actively challenged and temporarily overthrew the regime; the reaction, the violent repression of the revolution by those forces still at the disposal of the old order; and the gradual emergence of a new system, based on a compromise between the various elements.

The first two of these periods are touched upon elsewhere (see vol. XI and this volume, ch. XV), so that the present chapter need concern itself only with the readjustment which followed the revolution. Yet it is difficult to know where to begin. The scheme described above, while convenient when taken broadly, is difficult to apply in detail. Neither the political nor the chronological distinctions are clear cut. There were in the Austria of the Vormärz a full dozen national movements, each with aims which involved changes in the existing order, while the regime itself was fundamentally hostile to any nationalism; but so conflicting were the ambitions of the different nationalities that many of them saw their chief hope in a strengthening of the central authority of the crown as a protection against their stronger neighbours; and conversely, the crown felt obliged to seek the alliance of this or that nationality, against some more dangerous common enemy. The chosen ally was then a loyal supporter of the regime while the third party was a revolutionary; but these definitions were political rather than juridical, and often short-lived, as was well shown by the case of Baron Jellačić, described by the crown in a close succession of documents as a trusted servant, a rebel, and a true man again.

Even in Britain the Industrial Revolution was not all over by 1830; nor were the agricultural and transport revolutions. Some ways of growing, making, and moving commodities had undergone changes worthy of being deemed revolutionary, especially by Frenchmen. The problems of capital accumulation, of assembling and managing a labour force, of marketing an expanding output, of banking and business practice, and of coping with such phenomena of the business cycle as had been revealed by the boom and collapse of the mid-'twenties were all calling for changes in organisation, methods, voluntary association, and state policies. Thus the economic shape of things to come was clearly visible, provided one looked in the right places, especially in Great Britain. Yet even there nothing was finished, and over the rest of the panorama the picture was one of slow motion or still life.

Apart from the railway, 1830 was no great divide. During the next forty years the methods and organisation already developed were improved, supplemented, or supplanted by important innovations, and spread more widely over western Europe and North America. During the first two decades the pace of expansion and change was at times too fast to be maintained, the consequent depression deep and prolonged, and the transition disastrous to those whose skill was being rendered obsolete. After 1850, however, the new or remodelled institutions worked somewhat better, great new areas of natural resources and of new technology were opened up, while political and social tensions eased after the tumults of 1848.

Although the revolutions of 1848 were simultaneous and inspired by a common ideology, yet they were isolated phenomena. There was no international revolutionary organisation and the political refugees gathered together in France, Belgium, Switzerland and England were not the instigators of the revolutions in their countries. There was no plot and the revolutions were not concerted. Problems which were analogous in general took different forms in each state and produced conflicting results; the same vocabulary, the same programme, concealed dissimilar situations.

At the beginning of 1848 no one believed that revolution was imminent; yet the situation in many parts of Europe was such as precedes revolutions. In Italy the advent of Pius IX in June 1846, the general amnesty which he declared and the promises which he uttered, had created an atmosphere of wild excitement. There was unrest in Lombardy–Venetia which led to the declaration of a state of siege, there was the Sicilian insurrection of 12 January, and there was the grant or promise during February of constitutions at Turin, Florence and Naples. To a lesser degree a pre-revolutionary situation also existed in France. In the campaign of banquets to demand parliamentary and electoral reform the coalition of opposition parties had allowed the leadership to pass to the republicans, and Guizot's ministry barely survived the debate on the address on 12 February. In Germany liberal and radical party congresses had drawn up definite programmes of reform. In Ireland, general agreement had been reached on a programme of independence, and the supporters of Smith O'Brien and John Mitchel differed only on the means of attaining this end—by political agitation or by resort to force.

For nearly two centuries there was a war between Russia and Turkey about every twenty years. In October 1853 the ninth of this series began. But from the outset it was radically different from its predecessors; for Turkey felt confident of the armed support of Britain and France. By March 1854 they had joined her as allies. The Emperor Nicholas stood alone, deserted to his intense chagrin even by his young protégé, the Emperor Francis Joseph, whom he had saved from the Hungarians only five years before. Europe was ranged with the Muslim sultan against the Orthodox tsar.

Never before had the Ottomans had more than diplomatic support from the West, usually from France. Once, indeed, they had faced a momentary combination of Britain and France with Russia and had suffered the loss of their fleet at Navarino. The Habsburgs, their most ancient foe in Europe, had more than once been leagued with Russia against them, and, as recently as 1849, hand in hand with her, had quarrelled virulently with them over Hungarian and Polish refugees in Turkey. This last acute incident was a pointer to the future which gave much encouragement to the Turks and should have warned the Russians. Both France and Britain vigorously supported Turkey and sent their fleets to the Aegean. Stratford Canning, British ambassador at the Porte, even connived at the entry of Admiral Parker's squadron into the Dardanelles, despite the Straits Convention of 1841, and provoked justifiable remonstrances from St Petersburg.

The problem of the form of German unification was raised by the nature of the settlement of Germany made at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This had failed to satisfy the hopes of those who had wanted to see some form of German national unity emerge from the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars; nor had the expectation of constitutional reforms in the individual states been fulfilled to any great extent. The German Confederation as established at Vienna was to prove an unsatisfactory—and unworkable—compromise. In Prussia much of the work of the period of reforms after 1808 was undone, and Austria under Metternich provided a pattern of reaction that, since 1819, had been followed by the majority of the other German states. For a decade after the Carlsbad decrees of 1819 political discussion, whether of constitutional reform or of German unification, was difficult, and political action almost impossible.

The French Revolution of July 1830 gave the signal for a revival of liberalism throughout Germany. The actual outbreaks of violence were few, and their effects small. In Brunswick an unpopular duke was replaced by his brother; the elector of Hesse, hated for his arbitrary rule and his extravagant mistress, was forced to grant a constitution that was to be repeatedly broken. There were smaller disturbances in Saxony, Bavaria and elsewhere, while some months later, at Göttingen in the kingdom of Hanover, members of the university seized the town-hall. The Polish national revolt in 1831 was almost as important as the July Revolution in arousing liberal enthusiasm in Germany, and Polish representatives took part in the gathering of liberals held at Hambach in the Bavarian Palatinate in May 1832.

‘A free church in a free state.’ The maxim of Cavour, which was to become the most influential principle of the relations of church and state in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century, had too much novelty to win its way easily to general acceptance. The French Revolution indeed had shaken altars no less than sceptres within the sphere of its direct conquests and even beyond; and had broken the traditional association of church and state. Consequently in England, where émigrés from across the Channel, both clerical and lay, were received with sympathy, the clergy of the established church, as portrayed in the novels of Jane Austen, assumed a new character and importance as commissioned officers in the army of the church militant against Jacobinism and atheism. A contemporary French historian, Professor A. Latreille, indeed has fortified this interpretation by arguing that the principles of 1789 were a portent of the modern conflict of the totalitarian state with Christianity. ‘Thence came the demand for total obedience, comparable to a religious obedience, to the State and the Law, and thence the fanatical determination, in case of resistance, to secure the triumph of the principles necessary for social order.’ If the meaning of the French Revolution were to involve the translation of the maxim of Gambetta, ‘Clericalism—there is the enemy’, into ‘Christianity—there is the enemy’ then the nature of the ecclesiastical reaction which followed the defeat of Napoleon may be more easily understood, if not exculpated. In France the restored Bourbon monarchy espoused the closest possible alliance with the church: altar and throne were to be indissolubly bound together; whilst to Rome itself and to the Papal States the Papacy returned in the baggage train of the victorious allies.

The years round about 1830 were momentous for the progress of a cause little regarded in 1815, the cause of nationality. About the same time the word ‘nationality’ was first used as a term with a special political significance. It was accepted by the Académie Française in 1835. In 1834 a Russian, Pletkov, spoke of it (Narodnost) as a new word of unclear meaning; it was rapidly becoming current in Czech and Italian and had for some time been known in Germany (Nationalität or Volkstum) and England. To define it was not easy. In the sixties the Frenchman Buchez commented that the word had had a prodigious success, although people did not know whence it came and perhaps because they did not know what it meant. And he added ‘It means not only the nation, but also the something in virtue of which a nation continues to exist even when it has lost its autonomy’. Political scientists have since essayed elaborate definitions, but it may well be that Buchez's vague formula is as good as any and that it was precisely because of its vagueness that the word had become so popular: ‘Each theorist, each party, each country was able to read into it what it wished, what justified its own aspirations.’ For liberals it implied liberty and a degree of popular sovereignty—thus Mazzini could speak of ‘the progressive principle which constitutes British nationality’; for conservatives the maintenance of native traditions and an established order of society; for others a community spiritually bound by a common heritage of language and culture or one linked by bonds of blood or a special relationship to a homeland.

Eighteen-thirty, the ‘revolution stopped half-way’, and eighteen-forty-eight, the ‘turning point at which modern history failed to turn’, are the principal landmarks of this period during which the forms of government of states changed perhaps more sharply and in more interesting and varied ways than at any other time between the revolutionary decade of the 1790's and the ten years that shook the world between 1910 and 1920.

In a brief period of some forty years between 1830 and 1871 France experimented with a semi-liberal ‘bourgeois monarchy’, a radical Second Republic, a semi-authoritarian prince-presidency, an authoritarian Second Empire (see ch. XVII), a so-called ‘liberal empire’, an ultra-radical Paris Commune and an (at first) ill-defined Third Republic. Great Britain passed two parliamentary reform acts (cf. ch. XIII, pp. 335 and 336), abandoning the 400-year-old forty-shilling franchise in the counties and sweeping away the rotten and pocket boroughs, and in 1870 was on the eve of adopting that secret ballot which the dreaded Chartists had demanded as one of their ‘Six Points’ in 1839. Prussia, after a false dawn of liberalism when Frederick William IV became king in 1840 (like that in Italy when Pius IX was elected pope in 1846), saw a united Diet called for the first time in 1847, initiated a constitutional regime in 1848 and, after briefly adopting universal manhood suffrage, settled down at last as a mildly limited monarchy (though with a distinctly undemocratic class franchise) under the constitution of 1850—which was to last until the year 1918 (see ch. xix passim).

Between 1830 and 1870 the internal development of the United Kingdom passed through two phases, dividing roughly at 1850. By the middle of the century Great Britain (but not Ireland) had been transformed from a society that was predominantly rural and agricultural to one predominantly urban and industrial. In the first two decades social and political conflicts arose between the landed and agricultural interest on one hand and the growing commercial and industrial interests on the other. They arose over such issues as the reform of the electoral and parliamentary system, reorganisation of poor relief and of municipal government, free trade and factory legislation. The decades 1830–50 also saw the rise and temporary failure of such working-class movements as Chartism and trade unionism, born of the growth of industrialism during these years. By the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851, it was clear that at almost every point the commercial and industrial interests had gained what they wanted, and that the efforts of the working classes to claim that freedom of action and association which the rising class of merchants and manufacturers succeeded in claiming for themselves, had been severely checked. The two decades after 1851 brought consolidation and extension of the advantages gained by the new ruling classes; a remarkable growth of overseas trade and investment as well as of total national wealth; and a multitude of legislative measures adjusting the political and administrative system to the needs of the new society of towns and factories.

In the mid-nineteenth century the pursuit of scientific knowledge at last attained true autonomy and independence. Emerging as a consistent discipline with experiment and observation as its sanctions and mathematics as its logic, science extended its province far into space, and brought millions of years within the scope of its pronouncements. Emancipated from the limitations imposed by formal reasoning and dogmatic theology, an unquestionable force of certainty was claimed for scientific truths such as had never before been granted to any products of the intellect; and though only a small part of the swift advance in material civilisation that was made in this period can be directly attributed to contemporary progress in science, vast accretions of potential power were being built up. The formative period of modern science in which its character, its methods and its problems were established may be said to have ended about 1830; the modern age, with the technical ascendancy of science, to have begun about 1870. The interval is both classical, in that it contains the fulfilment of much that had been originated earlier, and transitional, because the beginning of recent science lies within it. Without abrupt discontinuity there was a remodelling of activity, a displacement of some guiding concepts of scientific thought by others. A single individual, like James Clerk Maxwell, might in one investigation add a coping-stone to the fabric of Newtonian celestial mechanics, while in another he helped to lay the foundations of the new theoretical physics. The doctrine of universal gravitation received its fullest vindication in 1845–6 from the discovery of the planet Neptune in accordance with theoretical predictions, when Newton's optical theories had already been shaken by the newer theory of wave-motion.

It is characteristic of this period of literature that, with exceptional vigour, it both provokes and defeats large historical generalisations. For its writers show an exceedingly high degree of historical self-consciousness and debate their problems in terms of ‘the needs of the age’, believing that theirs is an age which calls for radically new insights, approaches and departures of the mind. On the other hand, this feeling is but a symptom of the dissolution of all naively held common beliefs, a negative fact which makes it hard to find for the epoch any positive common denominator. Is it a scientifically minded, materialistic, positivistic age? Yes, it is the age of Comte, Feuerbach, Darwin, Marx and Herbert Spencer. Yet it is also romantic, idealistic and anxiously waiting upon the spirit of man and his cultural possessions. Its intellectual history would certainly be badly out of focus if no mention were made of Carlyle, Emerson, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Is it an age estranged from religion? Certainly. Yet religious feelings run high, and not only feelings. There are such profound and dramatic religious thinkers as Kierkegaard and Cardinal Newman, and there is, in literature, the deeply religious genius of Dostoevsky. Is it a prosaic age? Very likely; yet it is also the age which invented and passionately practised the doctrine of ‘pure poetry’, and which revelled in the emotional abandon of Richard Wagner's music. Is it an age which believes in the innate power of man to embark on a voyage of infinite progress? It would no doubt be easy to answer in the affirmative were it not for the eager reception given—and by no mean hosts—to the metaphysical pessimism of Schopenhauer.

In the arts of building, painting and sculpture, the nineteenth century starts about 1760. Before that date in most countries art had been a need of the church or the pleasure of court and nobility. From that date the artist, like the writer, began to emancipate himself from patronage. Art became the pursuit of self-reliant, socially emphatically independent men. ‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world’, is what Shelley called the artists, and Schiller ranks the bard with the king; ‘for both walk on the summits of mankind’. The social break is best remembered in this country by Dr Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield, written in 1755:

It is characteristic that this remarkably early declaration of liberty should have been written in England. For socially, politically, philosophically, England was the leading country of Europe in the eighteenth century. That this was so in art and architecture too, is less known. It might be denied on the strength of the supreme aesthetic qualities of Watteau's or Tiepolo's paintings or the South German and Austrian churches and palaces of the Rococo. But if the later eighteenth century is looked at as a preface to the nineteenth, then it will be recognised beyond any doubt that from road making and canal making, from factory construction (of iron as early as 1792) and bridge construction to the arts of architecture and painting England was ahead at least until the closing years of the century.