468 Chapter 24
Illustration 24.4
— Romanticism in Painting. This
painting of the ruins of a medieval
monastery in northern Germany ex-
presses several of the themes of roman-
ticism. The power of nature is vividly
depicted (and felt?) in the stark force of
winter and the weathering of the ruins.
The viewer’s focus is drawn, however,
to the misty gothic architecture
(pointed arches and portals typified late
gothic churches) of a lost and moving
past, which is presented with a strong
dose of sentimentality.
Romanticism: European Culture
in the Age of Metternich
The standards of neoclassical culture that had charac-
terized the Old Regime did not survive into the
postrevolutionary era. Even before the French Revolu-
tion, classicism had come under attack for its strict
rules, formal styles, and stress upon reason. When the
Congress of Vienna assembled in 1815, European high
culture had become quite different. The new style,
known as romanticism, reached its apogee in the age of
Metternich and continued to be a force in European
culture past midcentury.
Romanticism is difficult to define because it was a
reaction against precise definitions and rules, and that
reaction took many forms. The foremost characteristic
of romanticism was the exaltation of personal feelings,
emotions, or the spirit, in contrast to cold reason. The
emphasis upon feelings led in many directions, from
the passions of romantic love to the spirituality of reli-
gious revival. Other attitudes also characterized ro-
manticism: a return to nature for themes and
inspiration, the admiration of the Middle Ages instead
of classical Greece and Rome, a fascination with the
exotic and the supernatural, and the canonization of
the hero or genius.
The emphasis upon feelings had begun in the late
eighteenth century. Rousseau, one of the central figures
of Enlightenment rationalism, was a transitional figure, a
precursor of romanticism who argued, “To exist is to
feel!” The greatest German poet, Johann von Goethe,
similarly bridged the change from the classical to the ro-
mantic. His short novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, de-
picted feelings so strong that the protagonist’s suicide
began a vogue for melancholy young men killing them-
selves as Werther had, with moonlight falling across the
last page of Goethe’s book. The name of the school of
German literature that evolved around Goethe, the Sturm
und Drang (“storm and stress”) movement, suggests the in-
tensity of this emphasis upon feelings. Romanticism was
the triumph of that emphasis. At the peak of romanti-
cism, the British poet William Wordsworth simply de-
fined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings,” and the landscape painter John Constable simi-
larly insisted that “[p]ainting is another word for feeling.”
The return to nature inspired much romantic po-
etry, especially Wordsworth’s. It produced two genera-
tions of landscape painters, such as Constable and
J. M. W. Turner, who found inspiration in natural
scenery. This mood even extended to symphonic mu-
sic, inspiring Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, known as
the Pastoral Symphony. The romantic fascination with
medieval Europe likewise had far-reaching influence.
The most visible expression of it was a Gothic revival in
architecture (see illustration 24.4). This produced both
new construction in the flamboyant Gothic style of the
late Middle Ages (such as the new Palace of Westmin-
ster, home of the British Houses of Parliament, built in
1836) and campaigns to preserve surviving Gothic mas-
terpieces (such as Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration of Notre
Dame Cathedral in Paris). The same inspiration stimu-
lated historical literature such as Hugo’s The Hunchback of

Notre Dame, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, and Alexandre
Dumas’s The Three Musketeers; its most lasting effect on
Western literature, however, was probably the inven-
tion of the Gothic horror story, a style made famous by
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Many of these themes made romanticism compati-
ble with conservative political philosophy. The focus
upon nature turned high culture toward the rural world,
home of aristocratic power and the bastion of conserva-
tive sentiments. The focus upon the Middle Ages re-
stored cultural emphasis upon a world of unchallenged
monarchy and universal Christianity, instead of the re-
publicanism, constitutionalism, and liberalism. The de-
thronement of rationalism and the recovery of emotion
encouraged the revival of religions of faith, mystery,
and miracle.
But another side of romanticism found a powerful
voice in the liberal and national revolutions of the early
nineteenth century. The revolutionary sympathies of
some romantics can be seen in Eugène Delacroix’s
painting “Liberty at the Barricades”; the radical poems
of Percy Bysshe Shelley; the angry novels of Victor
Hugo, such as Les Misérables; and even Giuseppe Verdi’s
powerful opera Rigoletto (which depicts the scandalous
behavior of a monarch). The link between romanticism
and nationalism was especially strong because many na-
tionalists built their philosophy upon the nation’s
shared culture. Many peoples found identity in folk
tales, and their compilation (such as the work of the
brothers Grimm in Germany) became a form of roman-
tic nationalism. So did the recovery of the history of
national minorities (as distinct from the history of their
foreign government), as František Palacký did for the
Czechs in his multivolume History of Bohemia.The
strongest expression of romantic nationalism, however,
was in music. All across Europe, nationalist composers
drew inspiration from patriotic themes and folk music:
Frédéric Chopin’s Polonaises (Polish pieces), Bedrich
Smetana’s tone poems about Czech scenes (Ma Vlast—
My Country), or Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies.
Challenging the Old Order: Revolutions, 1815–25
Despite their precautions, the conservative forces in
power after 1815 could not prevent revolutions. More
than a dozen revolutions, from Portugal to Russia, took
place in the decade following the Congress of Vienna,
plus historic rebellions in the British and Spanish em-
pires. Historians normally describe these upheavals as
liberal-national revolutions because most rebellions
sought national independence (in Serbia, Ireland,
The Defense of the Old Regime, 1815–48 469
Greece, and Spanish America) or constitutional govern-
ment (in Spain) or both (several Italian states).
Conservatives believed that these revolutions were
nurtured and led by radical secret societies and used
this to justify restricting civil rights. Such societies did
exist, the most famous being an Italian society known
as the Carbonari (“the charcoal burners”). Carbonari
swore an oath to fight despotism and seek governments
based on popular sovereignty, to oppose clericalism and
seek secular institutions, and to challenge the foreign
domination of the Italian states; in 1820 the Neapolitan
chapter claimed 100,000 members. Similar societies ex-
isted in most countries—in the circles of Greek busi-
nessmen (the Hetaires), in Polish universities (Adam
Mickiewicz founded his nationalist society at the Uni-
versity of Vilna in 1817), in the officer corps of the
Russian army (the Society of the South in Ukraine and
the Society of the North at St. Petersburg), in Masonic
lodges in Spain, and among Napoleonic war veterans
attending German universities who founded the
Burschenschaften.
With or without the encouragement of such soci-
eties, political uprisings were frequent occurrences in
the age of Metternich. While the Congress of Vienna
met, a Serbian uprising against Ottoman Turkish rule
began, the first in a series of Balkan revolts against the
government in Constantinople. In 1816 Britain faced
a slave rebellion in the Caribbean. A year later, a
Carbonari-led liberal revolution was suppressed in the
papal states. These uprisings provoked the conservative
powers to adopt the Troppau Protocol in 1818, but
barely two years later came the successful Spanish revo-
lution (stimulated by King Ferdinand VII’s abolition of
the constitution of 1812 and by the impact of wars of
independence in Spanish America), which was a nag-
ging problem for the congress system in 1820–23. In
1820 revolutions also broke out in Portugal and Naples
(both seeking constitutions), then at Palermo, in Sicily.
Congresses of 1821 and 1822 sent Austrian armies to
fight liberals in Italy, and French troops into Spain. By
1823 the conservative alliance had defeated the Spanish
and Italians, treating the defeated rebels with savage
cruelty; in Italy, captured rebels had their right hands
cut off before being sent to Austrian dungeons. The
British opposed the application of the Troppau Protocol
elsewhere. The British navy supported the Monroe
Doctrine (proclaimed by the United States to block al-
lied intervention in America), so most of Latin America
won its independence from Spain. As the British foreign
secretary bragged to Parliament, “I have called the New
World into existence to redress the balance of the old.”
470 Chapter 24
Illustration 24.5
— The Greek Revolution. The Greek revolution of 1821–30
(or the Greek War of Independence) was one of the most suc-
cessful nationalist uprisings of the Metternichian era, in part be-
cause philhellenism swept the educated classes in western
countries, encouraging governments to support the Greeks. One
moment of the Greek revolution became especially well-known
in western Europe: the Turkish siege and assault on the Greek
fortress of Missolonghi, which guarded the mouth of the Gulf of
Corinth. Lord Byron, the noted English romantic poet, was de-
voted to the Greek cause and died at Missolonghi in 1824.
Eugène Delacroix devoted one of the most famous paintings of
Romanticism to the battle, “Greece in the Ruins of Missolonghi,”
shown here, in 1826.
The conservative alliance broke apart over the rev-
olutions in the Balkans, where the Ottoman Empire was
slowly disintegrating. Revolutions broke out in Serbia,
Greece, and the Rumanian provinces of Moldavia and
Wallachia (on the border of Russia), but it was the
Greek revolution of 1821–27 that broke the Metter-
nichian alliance (see illustration 24.5). After the Serbs
won autonomy in their revolution, a Greek congress at
Epidaurus declared independence in 1822. According
to the principles of the Troppau Protocol, the great
powers should have supported the legitimate Turkish
government. Metternich was almost alone in favoring
that policy. Romantic philhellenism stimulated a pro-
Greek policy in Britain and France, and for once gov-
ernments agreed with the radical Shelley who wrote:
“We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our reli-
gion, our arts, have their roots in Greece.” Russian pol-
icy was less sophisticated but more adamant: The
Ottoman Empire deserved no help from the Holy
Alliance because it was not a Christian state.
The Greeks won their independence in a long, bru-
tal war that still echoes in Graeco-Turkish enmity.
Greek Orthodox clergymen proclaimed a “war of exter-
mination” against Islamic infidels, leading to the killing
of twenty-five thousand civilians within six weeks; the
sultan proclaimed an Islamic Holy War that produced
forty thousand civilian corpses. Along the way, the pa-
triarch of the Orthodox Church was hanged and his
body thrown into the Bosphorus. This killing did not
end until Britain, France, and Russia broke with Metter-
nich and intervened in 1827. The counterrevolutionary
alliance collapsed (there were no full congresses after
1822) because self-interest had prevailed over doctrine;
ironically, the most conservative state in Europe had
caused this.
Q
Autocracy in Romanov Russia
The czar of Russia held enormous power in Metter-
nichian Europe. No monarch had contributed more to
the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte: Napoleon’s Grand
Armée had perished in Russia in 1812, and Russian
troops had occupied Paris in 1814. The czar’s support
had sustained the congress system, and his defection
during the Greek revolution had destroyed it.
Russian internal affairs were less simple. The enig-
matic Alexander I had come to the throne in 1801 at
the age of twenty-four, after the assassination of his fa-
ther, in which Alexander may have been involved. He
was a tall and handsome youth who favored skin-tight
uniforms; he had become overweight by 1815, but his
vanity and his robust sexuality (which ranged from his
sister to religious mystics) put him in corsets instead
of loose-fitting clothes. This same Alexander was
considered the most intelligent monarch of the age by
both Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte (ex-
cepting himself). Alexander held more absolute power
than anyone else in Europe and with it came the oppor-