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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Summary of a Fascinating Period,
By
This review is from: The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850 (Norton History of Modern Europe) (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.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Remarkable 61 Years,
By Al McChristy (Brownwood, TX USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850 (Norton History of Modern Europe) (Paperback)
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.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Revolution and Reaction,
By
This review is from: The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850 (Norton History of Modern Europe) (Paperback)
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... Read more ›
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