19th-Century Perspectives & Politics: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
62 flashcard terms for AP European History Unit 7, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 25-question quiz — free, no account needed.
The ideology of the Vienna settlement — Burke's inheritance: order, throne, altar, and tradition against revolution and abstract rights. Its instruments were the Concert of Europe, censorship, and police; its statesman, Metternich.
Liberalism (19th century)
The creed of the educated middle class: constitutional government, civil liberties, rule of law, free markets, and careers open to talent — but typically property-qualified suffrage, not democracy. Its economics were laissez-faire; its hero, John Stuart Mill.
John Stuart Mill — On Liberty (1859)
The classic defense of individual freedom: society may coerce the individual only to prevent harm to others; liberty of thought and discussion benefits everyone because even false opinions test truth. Mill also championed women's suffrage (The Subjection of Women, 1869).
Nationalism
The doctrine that humanity divides into nations — communities of language, culture, and history — and that each nation deserves its own sovereign state. Revolutionary before 1848 (against Vienna's dynasties), it was captured by conservatives after 1850 (Bismarck, Cavour).
Socialism (19th century)
The response to industrial inequality: from utopian communities to Marx's revolutionary class struggle to late-century mass parties (the German SPD) and revisionist reformism — all seeking collective control of production.
Romanticism
The cultural revolt against Enlightenment rationalism and classical rules: emotion, imagination, nature, the exotic, the medieval past, and the heroic individual. Politically double-edged — inspiring both reactionary nostalgia and revolutionary nationalism.
Romantic Artists & Writers
Wordsworth and Coleridge (nature and the common man), Byron (the rebel hero — died aiding Greek independence), Victor Hugo, Goethe's Faust, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Friedrich's mystical landscapes, Beethoven bridging classical form and romantic feeling.
Congress System in Action
The Concert of Europe suppressed revolution by congress mandate: Austria crushed risings in Naples and Piedmont (1821), France restored Spain's absolute king (1823) — while Britain drifted from the interventionist principle.
Greek War of Independence (1821–1830)
Greek revolt against Ottoman rule that captivated romantic Europe (philhellenism; Byron's death at Missolonghi). Uniquely, the powers intervened for the rebels (Navarino, 1827) — Christian sympathy and strategic interest trumping legitimacy. Greece became independent in 1830.
Decembrist Revolt (1825)
Liberal army officers' failed uprising in Russia at Nicholas I's accession — crushed in a day. It confirmed Nicholas's reactionary course: 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality' and the gendarme state.
July Revolution (France, 1830)
Charles X's attempt to gut the constitutional Charter provoked three days of Paris barricades. He fled; Louis-Philippe, the 'Citizen King,' took the throne of a more liberal but still narrow constitutional monarchy — revolution stopping at the upper bourgeoisie.
Belgian Independence (1830)
Belgium revolted against the Dutch king assigned by Vienna and won independence with great-power blessing — a liberal, neutral constitutional monarchy (guaranteed 1839, the 'scrap of paper' of 1914).
Revolutions of 1848 — Causes
A perfect storm: harvest failures and the 'Hungry Forties' (potato blight, bread prices), industrial depression and unemployment, liberal and nationalist frustration with the Metternich system, and the example of Paris — revolution's contagion in the railway and telegraph age.
France 1848 — Second Republic
February: Louis-Philippe fell; a republic with universal male suffrage and 'national workshops' for the unemployed. June: the workshops' closure sparked the June Days workers' rising, crushed with thousands killed — the class split that doomed the revolution. December: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte elected president by landslide.
June Days (1848)
The Parisian workers' insurrection after the national workshops closed — suppressed by General Cavaignac with ~3,000 killed and 12,000 arrested. It terrified property owners across Europe and turned liberalism against social revolution.
Habsburg 1848
Vienna rose; Metternich fled; Hungary under Kossuth won near-independence; Czechs demanded autonomy; Italy revolted. The dynasty recovered by playing nationalities against each other — Croats against Hungarians — and calling in Russian troops (1849) to crush Hungary.
Frankfurt Parliament (1848–1849)
Germany's elected national assembly that debated unification — Grossdeutsch (with Austria) vs. Kleindeutsch (without) — wrote a liberal constitution, and offered the imperial crown to Prussia's Frederick William IV, who refused a 'crown from the gutter.' The liberals' failure left unification to other means.
Italy 1848–1849
Revolts across the peninsula: Milan's Five Days, Venice's republic, the Roman Republic (Mazzini; defended by Garibaldi, crushed by French troops), Piedmont's war on Austria defeated at Custoza and Novara. Failure taught realists that idealism alone would not unify Italy.
Why 1848 Failed
The revolutions split internally — liberals against radical workers (June Days), nationalities against each other (Germans vs. Czechs, Magyars vs. Croats) — while armies stayed loyal to kings and emperors. Conservatives regrouped and reconquered; yet feudalism's abolition in Austria and universal suffrage's precedent survived.
Napoleon III & the Second Empire (1852–1870)
Louis-Napoleon's 1851 coup and 1852 empire: authoritarianism ratified by plebiscite, prosperity through railways and Haussmann's rebuilt Paris, glory sought in Crimea and Italy — a new model of popular authoritarianism, undone at Sedan in 1870.
Crimean War (1853–1856)
Britain and France (with Piedmont) fought Russia to protect the Ottomans and the balance of power. Incompetence on all sides (the Charge of the Light Brigade), Florence Nightingale's nursing reforms, and ~750,000 dead. It shattered the Concert of Europe — freeing the decade of Italian and German unification.
Florence Nightingale
Reformer whose nursing at Scutari during the Crimean War cut hospital death rates dramatically — founding modern professional nursing and using statistics (her polar-area charts) to force sanitary reform on the army.
Alexander II & Emancipation of the Serfs (1861)
Defeat in Crimea forced Russian reform: the 'Tsar-Liberator' freed 23 million serfs (with burdensome redemption payments and communal land tenure), created zemstvos (local councils) and jury courts — then was assassinated by populist terrorists (1881), triggering renewed reaction.
Italian Unification — Cavour
Count Camillo di Cavour, Piedmont's liberal prime minister, unified northern Italy by realpolitik: modernizing Piedmont, joining the Crimean War for a seat at the table, and engineering war with Austria (1859, with Napoleon III's help) to win Lombardy — diplomacy and railways over romantic conspiracy.
Giuseppe Mazzini
The prophet of romantic nationalism — founder of Young Italy, apostle of 'God and the People,' leader of the doomed Roman Republic (1849). His republican vision lost to Cavour's monarchy, but his propaganda made 'Italy' imaginable.
Giuseppe Garibaldi & the Thousand (1860)
The guerrilla hero who sailed with 1,000 red-shirted volunteers, conquered Sicily and Naples from the Bourbons, and then handed southern Italy to King Victor Emmanuel II at Teano — romantic nationalism serving Piedmont's crown. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861.
Completing Italy
Venetia came in 1866 (alliance with Prussia against Austria) and Rome in 1870 (when French troops left for the Franco-Prussian War). The pope retreated to the Vatican as 'prisoner'; the north-south divide and 'unredeemed' lands (Italia irredenta) remained.
German Unification — Bismarck
Otto von Bismarck, Prussian minister-president from 1862: 'The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions — that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood.' Realpolitik through three engineered wars.
Realpolitik
Politics of realism and power — pursuing state interest through any effective means, unbound by ideology or sentiment. Its masters: Cavour and Bismarck, who achieved by war and diplomacy what 1848's idealists could not by speeches.
Danish War & Austro-Prussian War
1864: Prussia and Austria seized Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark. 1866: Bismarck provoked Austria over the spoils; Prussia's needle-gun and railways won at Sadowa (Königgrätz) in seven weeks. Austria was excluded from Germany; the North German Confederation formed under Prussia.
Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867)
Defeated Austria restructured as the Dual Monarchy: Hungary gained internal self-rule under the common crown, satisfying Magyar elites while leaving Slavic nationalities frustrated — the empire's fatal nationality problem institutionalized.
Ems Dispatch & Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871)
Bismarck edited a royal telegram to insult France; Napoleon III declared war. German armies crushed France at Sedan (Napoleon captured); Paris besieged; the German Empire proclaimed in Versailles's Hall of Mirrors (January 1871). France lost Alsace-Lorraine — a wound that festered until 1914.
German Empire (1871)
A federal empire under the Prussian king as Kaiser: universal male suffrage for a weak Reichstag, real power with Kaiser, chancellor, and army. Industrial might plus authoritarian constitution — Europe's new colossus.
Kulturkampf
Bismarck's 1870s 'struggle for civilization' against Catholic Church influence — expelling Jesuits, state control of education and marriage. It failed (the Catholic Centre Party grew), and Bismarck retreated to fight socialism instead.
Bismarck's Alliance System
After 1871, Bismarck declared Germany 'satiated' and wove alliances to isolate France: the Three Emperors' League, the Dual Alliance with Austria (1879), the Triple Alliance with Italy (1882), and the secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia (1887) — peace through complexity.
Third French Republic
Born from defeat and the Commune's blood (1871), it survived monarchist majorities, the Boulanger crisis, and Panama scandals to become France's most durable regime since 1789 — anticlerical, parliamentary, and republican by habit.
Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906)
Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was falsely convicted of treason on forged evidence. France split: army, Church, and nationalists against republicans and intellectuals (Zola's 'J'Accuse!', 1898). Dreyfus was finally exonerated; the affair discredited the anti-republican right, led to church-state separation (1905) — and convinced Theodor Herzl that Jews needed their own state.
Zionism — Theodor Herzl
Viennese journalist who, covering the Dreyfus Affair, concluded assimilation could not protect Jews from anti-Semitism. The Jewish State (1896) and the First Zionist Congress (Basel, 1897) launched political Zionism — Jewish nationalism seeking a homeland in Palestine.
Anti-Semitism — New Forms
Late 19th-century anti-Semitism turned racial and political: pogroms in Russia (after 1881), the Dreyfus Affair in France, Karl Lueger's anti-Semitic mayoralty in Vienna, and pseudo-scientific race theory — the poisonous inheritance the 20th century would weaponize.
Second Reform Act (1867) & British Democratization
Disraeli's 'leap in the dark' enfranchised urban workingmen, doubling the electorate; 1884 extended it to rural workers. Gladstone and Disraeli's rivalry built mass parties; Britain democratized by installment, without revolution.
Gladstone vs. Disraeli
The era's great parliamentary duel: Gladstone's Liberals — free trade, Irish conciliation (Home Rule attempts), moral foreign policy; Disraeli's Conservatives — social reform ('Tory democracy'), empire (Suez shares, Victoria as Empress of India), and national glory.
Irish Question
Famine memory, land agitation (Parnell's Land League), and Home Rule demands dominated late-century British politics. Gladstone's Home Rule bills (1886, 1893) failed, splitting his party; the question exploded again before 1914.
Women's Suffrage Movement
From property and education rights to the vote: suffragists (Millicent Fawcett's NUWSS, constitutional methods) and suffragettes (Emmeline Pankhurst's WSPU, 'Deeds not words' — window-smashing, hunger strikes, force-feeding) fought a resistant establishment; British women won the vote in 1918/1928.
Charles Darwin — On the Origin of Species (1859)
Evolution by natural selection: species change through differential survival of random variations — no design required. The century's most consequential scientific idea, extending Lyell's deep time to life itself; The Descent of Man (1871) included humanity.
Social Darwinism
Herbert Spencer's 'survival of the fittest' applied to society: poverty as unfitness, laissez-faire as natural law, and — in imperialist and racist hands — conquest as biology. A misuse of Darwin with murderous 20th-century consequences.
Science's Triumphs
Pasteur's germ theory and vaccines, Koch's bacteriology (tuberculosis, cholera bacilli), Lister's antisepsis, Mendeleev's periodic table, Faraday and Maxwell's electromagnetism, Mendel's unnoticed genetics — science became medicine, industry, and worldview.
Positivism — Auguste Comte
The philosophy that knowledge passes from theological to metaphysical to 'positive' (scientific) stages — society itself to be studied scientifically (Comte coined 'sociology'). The century's confident scientism.
Realism in Literature & Art
Against romantic idealization: the world as it is — Balzac's and Dickens's social panoramas, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Zola's naturalism (heredity and environment as fate), Courbet's stone breakers, Millet's gleaners. Art turned to ordinary life and social criticism.
Impressionism & Post-Impressionism
Monet, Renoir, and Degas painted light, movement, and modern urban leisure with visible brushwork — rejected by official Salons, they exhibited independently (1874). Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin pushed further toward structure, expression, and symbol — opening the road to modern art.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosopher who declared 'God is dead' — European civilization's Christian foundations had collapsed and nihilism loomed; he called for the revaluation of all values and the self-overcoming Übermensch. Misappropriated later by nationalists and Nazis.
Sigmund Freud
Viennese founder of psychoanalysis (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900): the mind driven by unconscious desires and conflicts, civilization built on repression — reason dethroned in the very citadel of the self.
Fin-de-Siècle Anxiety
By 1900, confidence cracked: Nietzsche and Freud questioned reason, physics dissolved certainties (X-rays, radioactivity, relativity coming), degeneration theory and irrationalism spread — modernity doubting itself even at its material peak.
Mass Politics
Expanded suffrage created the mass electorate: organized parties (SPD, Britain's caucuses), cheap newspapers (the yellow press), demagogues (Boulanger, Lueger), and pressure groups — politics as mass mobilization, manipulable by nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Pan-Slavism & Balkan Nationalism
Russia's claim to lead the Slavic peoples fed Balkan crises as Ottoman power receded: Serbian, Bulgarian, and other national movements — the 'Eastern Question' that repeatedly brought Europe to the brink and finally over it in 1914.
Russification & Pogroms
Alexander III and Nicholas II answered reform's assassins with repression: forced Russification of minorities, the Okhrana secret police, and waves of anti-Jewish pogroms (1881–84, 1903–06) that drove two million Jews to emigrate — many to America, some to Zionism.
Paris Commune's Shadow & Socialist Parties
After the Commune's suppression, socialism rebuilt as electoral mass movements: the German SPD (largest party by 1912), French socialists under Jaurès, the Second International (1889) — May Day, eight-hour campaigns, and the unresolved question: reform or revolution?
Trade Union Growth & New Unionism
Late-century unions organized the unskilled (London dock strike, 1889), won legal status across Europe, and allied with socialist and labor parties — Britain's Labour Party born 1900–06 from union-socialist alliance.
Papal Responses — Syllabus & Rerum Novarum
Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemned liberalism and modern civilization; Vatican I (1870) declared papal infallibility. Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) accepted the social question — defending property but endorsing just wages and Catholic unions: social Catholicism's charter.
Jewish Emancipation & Its Limits
Legal emancipation spread across western Europe (France 1791, Germany 1871, Britain by stages) and Jews entered professions, culture, and politics — while the new racial anti-Semitism showed emancipation's precariousness, from Berlin's 'anti-Semitism dispute' to Vienna and Paris.
Irredentism
Nationalism's expansionist edge: claims to 'unredeemed' co-national lands abroad — Italia irredenta (Trent, Trieste), Serbian claims in Bosnia, Greek 'Megali Idea' — keeping borders contested and diplomacy explosive.
Education & National Identity
Compulsory state schooling (Ferry laws, 1880s France; Britain 1870; Germany earlier) taught national language, history, and loyalty — turning 'peasants into Frenchmen' and subjects into patriotic citizens; conscript armies completed the nationalizing machine.
The Eastern Question
What happens as Ottoman power recedes? Crimea (1853–56), the Russo-Turkish War and Congress of Berlin (1878 — Disraeli and Bismarck redrawing the Balkans, Bosnia to Austrian administration), and the Balkan Wars (1912–13) — each 'solution' seeding the next crisis, until Sarajevo.