Europe and Western Civilization in the Modern Age

Historians often see the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution as ushering in "the modern age." These two revolutions effected an epochal break in Western history, altering the economic, social, and political landscape of Europe in ways that can be traced over the succeeding centuries.

Here is an account of the cultural practices, social structure, and political institutions of the order that was to be swept away by the Age of Revolution. Special attention is paid to the positions of various classes, and to the various forms that the monarchical state had assumed by the eve of the French Revolution.

What were the main ideas of the late 18th-century Enlightenment? Who were its leading figures? How did this movement of thought challenge Europe's old order? Also examined is the basis of the Enlightenment in the Atlantic societies of Britain and France.

Both long- and short-term conditions contributed to the crisis of the French monarchy and the Revolution of 1789. The two sets are analyzed, with special focus on the dilemmas of French absolutism and the social bases of political unrest.

Between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the creation of the constitutional monarchy in 1792 came the Great Fear, the Tennis Court Oath, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the breakup of the revolutionary coalition, and a number of threats to the Revolution at home and abroad.

The "Second Revolution" of 1792 was followed by the Terror of 1793–94, with Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety at its head. How did the Revolution take this extremist turn? What was the Terror like, and what were its immediate toll and lasting impact?

Out of the period of the Directory (1795–99) came an ambitious young general named Napoleon Bonaparte. What lay behind his dramatic rise to power and his creation of the Empire out of elements both revolutionary and authoritarian? Was he, as he claimed, the legitimate heir of the Revolution's ideals?

The Napoleonic state—Europe's largest empire since Roman days—had a brief but violent career from 1800 to 1815. It posed severe ideological and geopolitical challenges to the monarchies, confronting them in a series of wars that set the continent aflame until Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.

At the close of the Napoleonic Wars, the victorious legitimist powers met at the Congress of Vienna. There, led by the Austrian chief minister Klemens Metternich, they tried to create a Concert of Europe that would check the rise of revolutionary forces anywhere on the continent.

A leading threat to the restored monarchies of Europe was the conjunction of liberalism and nationalism that arose in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. From 1815 to 1848, Metternich and other legitimist leaders would struggle to suppress nationalism wherever it raised its head.

The focus shifts from politics to the momentous economic changes that would transform overwhelmingly agrarian Europe into an industrial colossus by the end of the 19th century. England takes center stage as the Industrial Revolution is defined and its component parts are analyzed, with the focus on the questions of why it began where and when it did.

Industrialization had dramatic social implications, not least in the rise of a new class of aggressive industrial and commercial entrepreneurs. With burgeoning factories and growing cities came also a large working class whose difficult living and working conditions led to the first stirrings of a labor movement.

The first Europe-wide revolution of the modern age began in France in February 1848. In this first of three lectures on the events of that critical year, France is the focus. There, both the revolutionary forces and their conservative opponents were split into factions. By December, Louis Napoleon had come to power through elections and set about turning the Second Republic into a new kind of modern conservative regime.

In the German- and Italian-speaking lands, the revolutionaries of 1848 faced the challenge not only of erecting constitutional polities, but of forging politically unified nation-states. A recounting of the political dramas that unfolded in this region is accompanied by a look at the reasons why revolution failed there.

What did the revolutionary events accomplish, and what lessons could be drawn from this year marked by upheaval on a continental scale? Revolutionary governments that rode to power on a wave of liberal fervor were swept out again after less than 12 months. Yet the spirit of liberal nationalism would not go away, even as the most astute conservatives were learning how they could use nationalism for their own purposes.

No conservative leader was more skillful at co-opting nationalism than Prince Otto von Bismarck, chief minister of Prussia beginning in 1858. He used a combination of liberal economic policy, popular nationalism, astute diplomatic maneuvering, and sheer military might to pursue his goals, securing the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership in 1871.

Under Count Cavour, chief minister of Sardinia-Piedmont, Italy, began a process of national unification that would also culminate in 1871. Cavour, like Bismarck, successfully employed elements of liberalism and nationalism, underscoring the latter's migration from left to right on the political spectrum.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, the European powers embarked on a wave of colonial expansionism that differed significantly from earlier drives from territory abroad. What were the causes and dynamics of this new drive for empire, and why did it occur when it did?

Observers at the time, including Lenin and J. A. Hobson, tried to explain the new imperialism in economic terms. These and other possible motivating factors explored, and imperialism's effects on Europe itself are weighed.

Socialism appeared early in the 19th century as a utopian political movement, received its most influential "orthodox" theoretical development in the works of Karl Marx, and also proved a driving force in the rise of labor unions and socialist parties across Europe as the century drew to a close.

By the 1890s, universal male suffrage had ushered in a new political era, and socialism's mounting challenge was pressing liberals and conservatives alike. Capitalism had generated unheard-of wealth, but inequities in its distribution remained acute. How did liberals come to grips with "the social problem" in ways that remain influential today?

With the return of divine-right monarchy no longer possible, conservative voices began to object to both liberal capitalism and Marxian socialism. In England, France, Germany, and Italy, there were manifestations of a neo-Romantic revolt against modernity and its urbanism, materialism, and instrumental rationality. Intermixed with this was an ominous strain of anti-Semitism that would later help to shape Fascism.

Intellectual trends sparked by Darwin, Freud, and Einstein are discussed, as is their enormous influence on culture and values. Among those discussed are Zola, Ibsen, Monet, Gauguin, Kandinsky, and other leaders of such literary and artistic movements as Naturalism, Impressionism, and Expressionism.

Between 1871 and 1914, Europe was at the height of its power in nearly every sense—financial, military, technological, and cultural. What were the attitudes about race, social class, and relations with the family and between the sexes that accompanied this period of predominance?

As chancellor at the helm of a newly united Germany, Bismarck maintained peace and political stability until his departure from office in 1890. What were the basic elements of the Iron Chancellor's diplomacy? How did he maintain Germany's position of hegemony on the continent?

Under the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany abandoned Bismarckian caution in favor of an ambitious, even aggressive, Welpolitik (global policy). What implications did this have for peace and stability in an age of alliance systems and arms race?

In the first decade of the new century, the polyglot Habsburg and Ottoman empires found themselves facing grave challenges from subject nationalities in the mountainous, volatile Balkan Peninsula and southeastern Europe. The crisis that erupted over Bosnia in 1908–09 was defused but not before furnishing a sinister hint of things to come.

After the assassination of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, a crisis consumed the Great Powers of Europe and led to war before the summer's end. Controversy continues to swirl around Germany's role in this chain of events, which is analyzed via an examination of each Power's goals and options.

The statesmen and peoples who went to war in August 1914 thought that it would all be over by Christmas. Instead, unimaginable killing and destruction dragged on for years—the 19th century died in the trenches. The military course of the war and its shocking character are described, with special attention to two gigantic battles of 1916: the Somme and Verdun.

We study the closing months of the war, the troubling circumstances surrounding the Armistice, and the controversial Treaty of Versailles. Did the Allies win the war only to lose the peace? What were the hopes of the nations gathered at Versailles, and what kind of international system did they intend to raise from the ashes?

What were the long-range causes that destabilized the Tsarist regime? How did Russia's involvement in the war contribute to these? Why did Kerensky's liberal Provisional Government lose its grip after less than a year? How did Lenin and his tiny band of Bolsheviks succeed in their drive to power?

Dr. Childers looks at the contest between Reds and Whites, repression and the consolidation of Bolshevik rule, the travails of socialism and the New Economic Policy, and the power struggle between Trotsky and Stalin over "permanent revolution" versus "socialism in one country."

With Lenin's death in 1924 and Stalin's triumph over Trotsky, the Soviet state was transformed. Forced industrialization and the coerced collectivization of agriculture were undertaken to serve the goal of "socialism in one country." By the close of the 1930s, Stalin and his secret police had created a regime based on bloody purges and pervasive terror.

Along with Communism, another political product of the Great War was Fascism. Fascist ideas had circulated since the 1890s, but it took the war to create the conditions for Fascist success. The first Fascist regime came to power in Italy in 1922 under Benito Mussolini, a socialist-turned-nationalist, former journalist, and political adventurer.

For France, for Britain, and for the fragile Weimar Republic in Germany, the interwar years were a time of turmoil, punctuated by recurrent economic crises and threats of political extremism emanating from both left and right. What were the origins of this rising tide of instability? How did it shape the course of events?

Although Mussolini and his Fascists preceded them, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party would become the most powerful and aggressive movement on the European radical right by the 1930s. Founded as a tiny faction in 1919, the Nazis came to power just 14 years later. Their novel campaign methods are examined, as are the reasons for the weakness of Weimar democracy.

An application and assessment of the concept of totalitarianism, first devised by Hannah Arendt to describe the Nazi and Soviet systems with their all-encompassing ideologies and use of state terror to remake the world. The moves through which Hitler consolidated his regime between 1933 and 1939 are dissected.

Trace the unfolding of the Nazis' ideological agenda, with special attention to the creation of Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) and the evolution of racial policy and anti-Semitism under the repressive regime of competing power centers that Hitler had brought into being.

What was Hitler's vision of the international system? His goals included Lebensraum (living space) in the East, the overthrow of the Treaty of Versailles, and the destruction of "Judeo-Bolshevism."

What were the underlying assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses of the interwar state system? What drove the diplomacy of France and Britain, and why were they unable to restrain Hitler's Germany, a regime whose aggressiveness outstripped its actual power?

Dr. Childers examines the chain of events, beginning with the Munich Conference of autumn 1938, that came to include the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in August, and the German invasion of Poland and ensuing Anglo-French declaration of war at the beginning of September.

From the invasion of Poland in September 1939 until their check before Moscow in December 1941, Hitler's armies overran most of Europe using a revolutionary, mobile approach to warfare. France fell in just weeks, leaving Britain to stand alone under the indomitable Winston Churchill. In June 1941 came the invasion of Russia, the largest military operation in history, and the beginning of a savage, ideologically charged struggle with no rules and no quarter.

The Nazis' decision to perpetrate a murderous "final solution" to "the Jewish question" is dissected in its various phases from the invasion of Poland to the construction of the Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) in the East in 1942.

The final lecture on World War II examines its expansion into a truly global conflagration with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war against all the Axis Powers. Special attention is paid to the question of collaboration versus resistance, to the remarkable alliance that defeated Hitler, and the awful costs of war.

The British-American-Soviet coalition that destroyed the Third Reich began to come apart even before the surrender of Japan in August 1945. The inner dynamics and tensions of the alliance are analyzed, with special attention to developments in Eastern and Central Europe between 1944 and the Berlin Airlift of 1948–49.

Divided and devastated by war and its aftermath, Europe rose from the ashes in the 1950s as the nations of the West set an ambitious, even visionary, course. Riding a wave of economic recovery, they planned military, economic, and political institutions that would move Western Europe—and eventually, they hoped, the whole continent—toward unification.

A look at the postwar Soviet empire, including its East European satellites, with special emphasis on the unexpected and revolutionary events that brought down Communism, first in Poland and then throughout the Soviet world, between 1989 and 1991.

The 1990s have marked an end to a half-century of global and cold war, leaving an increasingly unified Europe more globally influential than it has been since 1939. Yet old questions like ethnic trouble in the Balkans and the role of Germany continue to haughty the continent. How should we assess Europe's present in light of its past? Can we hazard any predictions about its future?