The Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850

The revolutions in this unit began as revolutions in ideas. During the Scientific Revolution, which historians often date from 1543 to 1687, European scholars began to test old beliefs by observation, measurement, and mathematics. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published his argument that the Earth moves around the Sun. With a telescope he improved, Galileo Galilei saw moons circling Jupiter and the phases of Venus, and in 1633 the Catholic Church tried him for heresy for defending Copernicus. In 1687, Isaac Newton published the Principia, which explained the motion of planets and falling objects with the same few laws.

If nature followed laws that reason could discover, some thinkers asked, why not human society too? This movement of the 1700s is called the Enlightenment. In 1784, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant summed it up with an old Latin motto, Sapere aude, which he explained as "Have courage to use your own understanding!" Enlightenment writers attacked superstition, censorship, cruel punishments, and rule by birth. Their books were read in coffeehouses and salons from Edinburgh to Philadelphia and Buenos Aires.

The first great revolution of the age came in Britain's Thirteen Colonies. After 1763, Britain tried to tax the colonies to pay for its wars, and colonists protested that they had no representatives in Parliament. Fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in 1775. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, which used Locke's language of natural rights. With help from France, the Americans won at Yorktown in 1781, and Britain recognized their independence in the Treaty of Paris of 1783. In 1787, a convention in Philadelphia wrote a new Constitution with a separation of powers.

The American Revolution mattered far beyond America. It showed that a people could declare its rights and found a republic. France's support for it helped push the French crown deep into debt. Yet the new republic kept slavery and excluded most people from voting, a contradiction that critics noticed at once. Jugami tells the full story in The American Revolution.

France in the 1780s was divided by law into three estates: the clergy (the First Estate), the nobility (the Second Estate), and everyone else, from rich merchants to poor peasants (the Third Estate). The government was deep in debt, partly from paying for wars, including its help to the Americans, and by 1788 half of the state's income went to paying that debt. Bad harvests pushed up the price of bread. To raise taxes, King Louis XVI called the Estates-General, an assembly that had not met since 1614. It opened at Versailles on May 5, 1789.

The First and Second Estates wanted each estate to vote as a body, so that they could outvote the Third two to one. The Third Estate demanded a vote by head. On June 17, 1789, its deputies declared themselves the National Assembly, and on June 20, locked out of their hall, they swore the Tennis Court Oath not to separate until France had a constitution. On July 14, crowds in Paris stormed the Bastille, a fortress and prison that stood for royal power. On the night of August 4, the Assembly voted to abolish the feudal system, and on August 26 it adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

At first France became a constitutional monarchy, but the king did not trust it. On the night of June 20, 1791, the royal family fled Paris in disguise and was caught at Varennes. In April 1792, France went to war with Austria, and a war against much of Europe followed. In September 1792 the new National Convention abolished the monarchy and made France a republic. Louis XVI was tried for treason and guillotined on January 21, 1793. Queen Marie Antoinette was executed that October.

Facing foreign armies, revolt at home, and hunger, the Convention's Committee of Public Safety, led by Maximilien Robespierre, began the Reign of Terror. It is often dated from the Law of Suspects of September 17, 1793, which allowed the arrest of anyone vaguely "suspected," to Robespierre's own execution on July 28, 1794. The Convention also drafted hundreds of thousands of men in the levée en masse, and on February 4, 1794, it abolished slavery in all French colonies. After Robespierre's fall, a five-man Directory ruled from late 1795. It was weak and unpopular, and on November 9, 1799 (18 Brumaire in the revolutionary calendar), the general Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in a coup.

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the island of Corsica in 1769 and rose fast in the revolutionary army. After his coup of 1799, he ruled as First Consul. In 1801 he made peace with the Catholic Church in the Concordat, and in 1804 he issued the Civil Code, later called the Napoleonic Code. It kept some of the Revolution's main gains: equality before the law for men, religious toleration, secure property rights, and an end to feudal privileges. It also made a husband the master of his wife and children. On December 2, 1804, in Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, with Pope Pius VII present, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French.

At sea, Britain's navy under Admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed a French and Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar in southern Spain on October 21, 1805, and Napoleon never again seriously threatened to invade Britain. On land he seemed unbeatable. At Austerlitz on December 2, 1805, he crushed the armies of Austria and Russia, and soon afterward the centuries-old Holy Roman Empire was dissolved. He placed his brothers on the thrones of Holland, Naples, Westphalia, and Spain, and tried to ruin Britain's trade with the Continental System, a ban on British goods begun on November 21, 1806.

Napoleon's conquests spread the Revolution's laws, but they also stirred up nationalism, the belief that each people, or nation, should rule itself, against the French. In Spain, a long war of ambushes and raids, the Peninsular War (1808–1814), gave the world the word guerrilla, "little war." His invasion of Russia cost him far more. When Russia's tsar stopped obeying the Continental System, Napoleon invaded on June 24, 1812. Historians' estimates of the size of his whole invasion force range from about 450,000 to 685,000 soldiers. The Russians retreated, burning crops as they went. After the bloody battle of Borodino on September 7, Napoleon entered Moscow on September 14 and found it deserted and on fire. On October 19 he began the long retreat through the Russian winter.

The armies of Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Sweden beat Napoleon at Leipzig, the "Battle of the Nations," on October 16–19, 1813, the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars. Allied armies took Paris, and on April 6, 1814, Napoleon abdicated. He was sent to rule the small Mediterranean island of Elba, and the Bourbon family returned to the French throne. On March 1, 1815, he landed in France again and marched on Paris, beginning the period called the Hundred Days. It ended at Waterloo, in present-day Belgium, on June 18, 1815, where a British-led army under the Duke of Wellington and a Prussian army under Gebhard von Blücher defeated him. Napoleon was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died on May 5, 1821.

While Napoleon was on Elba, the victors met at the Congress of Vienna (September 1814 to June 1815), chaired by Austria's foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich. They redrew the map of Europe to restore a balance of power, so that no single state could dominate again. Old ruling families returned to their thrones, and a loose German Confederation of 39 states replaced the Holy Roman Empire. The great powers agreed to meet whenever peace was threatened, a system called the Concert of Europe. No war drew in all of Europe's great powers again until 1914, although smaller wars, such as the Crimean War of 1853–1856, still broke out. But the settlement ignored the nationalism and liberalism that the Revolution had awakened.

The French colony of Saint-Domingue, on the western part of the island of Hispaniola, was the most profitable colony in the Americas. Enslaved Africans were forced to grow sugar, coffee, and other crops on its plantations under brutal conditions, and many died from overwork and disease. By 1789 they made up the great majority of its people. Free people of color, many of mixed African and European descent, could own land and even enslaved people, but white colonists denied them equal rights.

News of the French Revolution and its Declaration of the Rights of Man reached Saint-Domingue quickly. Free people of color demanded the equal rights it promised, and in 1790 Vincent Ogé led a short armed revolt for them; he was captured and executed in February 1791. On August 14, 1791, enslaved leaders from many plantations met in secret to plan a revolt. About a week later, probably on August 21, a gathering in the woods at Bois Caïman, remembered for its religious ceremony and oath, sealed the plan, and on the night of August 22, 1791, a great revolt broke out in the northern plain. Spain and Britain sent forces to seize the colony. In 1793, the French commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax abolished slavery in the north to win the rebels to France's side, and on February 4, 1794, the National Convention in Paris abolished slavery in all French colonies.

A formerly enslaved man, Toussaint Louverture, became the colony's leading general. He fought off Spanish and British invaders and, in 1801, issued a constitution for Saint-Domingue that abolished slavery forever and named him governor for life. Napoleon would not accept it. In December 1801 he sent a large army under his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to restore French control, and in 1802 Napoleon brought slavery back in France's other sugar colonies. Toussaint was tricked into a meeting, seized on June 7, 1802, and shipped to France, where he died in a prison fortress, the Fort de Joux, on April 7, 1803.

The war went on under Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Yellow fever killed Leclerc and thousands of his soldiers, and on November 18, 1803, Dessalines's army beat the French at Vertières. On January 1, 1804, at Gonaïves, Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, taking back the name its first inhabitants had given the island. Haiti was the first country founded by formerly enslaved people. Its revolution also changed North America: with his army in Saint-Domingue dying and a new war with Britain about to begin, Napoleon had already given up his plans for an American empire and agreed in 1803 to sell Louisiana to the United States.

By 1800, Spain ruled an American empire that stretched from California to the tip of South America, and Portugal ruled Brazil. Colonial society was ranked by birth. At the top were peninsulares, officials born in Spain. Below them were creoles (criollos), people of Spanish descent born in the Americas, who were often rich but were mostly shut out of the highest offices. Below them came people of mixed descent, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans. In 1780, the Indigenous leader Túpac Amaru II led a huge rebellion in the Andes of Peru; it was crushed, and he was executed in 1781.

The spark came from Europe. In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain and made his brother king. With their own king gone, creole leaders across Spanish America set up local governments, called juntas, to rule in his name, and many soon moved toward full independence. Venezuela declared independence on July 5, 1811, and Paraguay in May of that year.

Independence did not bring the equality that its leaders promised. Bolívar dreamed of a united Spanish America, but his Gran Colombia, which joined today's Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama, broke apart in 1830–1831. Power passed to creole landowners and generals, called caudillos, and most Indigenous and mixed-race people stayed poor. Slavery was not abolished at once: Chile ended it in 1823 and Mexico in 1829, but in Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, and Peru it lasted into the 1850s.

After 1815, the rulers who met at Vienna tried to hold back the two great forces the French Revolution had released: liberalism, the demand for constitutions, elected parliaments, and rights, and nationalism, the belief that each people, or nation, should rule itself. They did not fully succeed. Greece won its independence from the Ottoman Empire after a war that began in 1821 and was recognized in 1830. A revolution in Paris in July 1830 replaced the king, and Belgium broke away from the Netherlands in 1830–1831. In Britain, the Chartists collected millions of signatures demanding the vote for every man aged 21 and over.

Then, in 1848, revolution swept across Europe. It began in Sicily on January 12. In Paris, King Louis-Philippe gave up his throne on February 24, and France became a republic again; that April, the new government abolished slavery in France's colonies for good. In Vienna, crowds drove Metternich from power on March 13, and he fled to London. Hungarians, Czechs, Italians, and Germans demanded their own governments, and a Frankfurt Parliament met in May 1848 to unite the German states under a constitution. People called that year the "Springtime of the Peoples."

Within about a year and a half, most of the revolutions had failed. Armies stayed loyal to the old rulers, and middle-class liberals and working-class radicals fell out with each other. Russian troops helped Austria crush Hungary in 1849, and the king of Prussia refused the crown of a united Germany offered by the Frankfurt Parliament. In France, voters elected Napoleon's nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, president in December 1848, and four years later he made himself Emperor Napoleon III. Yet some changes lasted: serfdom was ended in Austria and Hungary, and Denmark's king gave up absolute power. Early in 1848, two German writers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, also published The Communist Manifesto, which would shape the politics of the next century.

While kings and republics rose and fell, a quieter revolution was changing how people worked and lived. It began in Britain around 1760. Historians point to several reasons: Britain had plenty of coal and iron, rivers, canals, and ports for moving goods, money to invest, a stable government with laws that protected business, and a growing empire and trade, including the cotton grown by enslaved people in the Americas. Before this, most cloth was spun and woven by hand in workers' homes. Now machines and factories took over.

Life in the factory towns. People poured from the countryside into fast-growing cities such as Manchester. Most textile factory workers were young women and children, who worked 12 to 14 hours a day with only Sundays off. Housing was crowded, and smoke and sewage fouled the air and water. Some handloom weavers and other skilled workers, the Luddites, smashed machines between 1811 and 1816. On August 16, 1819, cavalry charged a peaceful crowd of about 60,000 people demanding reform of Parliament at St Peter's Field, Manchester, in the Peterloo Massacre; about 18 people were killed and 400 to 700 injured.

Slowly, Parliament stepped in. The Factory Act of 1833 banned most textile mills from employing children under 9, limited children aged 9 to 13 to 9 hours of work a day and 48 hours a week, and created inspectors to enforce the law. The Mines Act of 1842 barred women and girls, and boys under 10, from working underground, and the Ten Hour Act of 1847 met the millworkers' long campaign for a ten-hour day. Britain also banned its slave trade in 1807 and, from August 1, 1834, abolished slavery in most of its empire.

Spreading out. Britain tried to keep its machines secret, but skilled workers carried the knowledge abroad. In 1793, the British-born mill worker Samuel Slater opened a water-powered cotton mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The same year, Eli Whitney built his cotton gin, which made cotton growing more profitable, so planters in the American South bought more enslaved people to grow it. In 1817, the Englishman John Cockerill founded a great ironworks at Seraing in Belgium, the second country after Britain to industrialize. France followed, and the German states, joined in a customs union, the Zollverein, from January 1, 1834, caught up by the middle of the century. London's Great Exhibition of 1851 showed off the new industrial world. After about 1870, a Second Industrial Revolution of steel, electricity, oil, and the telephone spread industry further still.

The Age of Revolutions ended around 1850, but the forces it released kept working for the next sixty years. Each one helped lead to the war that began in 1914. Here is how the threads connect.

The Concert of Europe built at Vienna in 1815 had kept the great powers talking. By 1914, it had given way to two armed alliances. On June 28, 1914, the Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo. Within weeks, the alliances pulled almost all of Europe into war. The story continues in World War I, 1914–1918.

Follow the Age of Revolutions from the Scientific Revolution to the eve of World War I. Use the buttons to show one kind of event or one period at a time.

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