Revolutions and the rise of nations

TL;DR. From the 1600s to the early 1900s, Europe was remade twice over. First came a revolution in ideas. Thinkers of the Enlightenment argued that reason, science, and natural rights should guide how people are governed, not the unquestioned authority of kings and churches. England had already shown one path, replacing absolute royal power with a constitutional monarchy in which Parliament held real power. Then came political explosions. The American Revolution and, above all, the French Revolution of 1789 overturned a monarchy in the name of liberty and equality, slid into terror, and unleashed wars that swept the continent under Napoleon. After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, kings tried to turn back the clock at the Congress of Vienna, but they could not. A second, slower revolution was already under way: the Industrial Revolution, which moved people from farms to factories and cities and gave rise to new ideas like liberalism and socialism. Across the 1800s a powerful new feeling, nationalism, redrew the map, uniting Italy and Germany, while Europe's empires reached their height and carved up much of Africa and Asia.

Key takeaways

• The Enlightenment put forward ideas (reason, individual rights, government by consent, separation of powers) that still shape democracies today.
• England got to limited, constitutional government earlier and more peacefully than most of Europe, which helps explain its later stability.
• "Revolution" in this chapter means two different things: the political upheaval in France and America, and the economic transformation of the Industrial Revolution. Both reshaped the world.
• The French Revolution promised liberty and equality, but also produced the Reign of Terror and then Napoleon, who spread some of its reforms by conquest before being defeated.
• The Industrial Revolution created factories, railways, fast-growing cities, and a new urban working class, along with new ideologies like liberalism and socialism.
• Nationalism, the idea that people who share a language and culture should have their own state, unified Italy (1861) and Germany (1871) and reshaped the political map of Europe.
• European empires reached their peak in the late 1800s, including the "scramble for Africa," bringing both expansion and harsh exploitation, which provoked widespread resistance.

Main events at a glance

A revolution in ideas: the Enlightenment

The story of this era begins not with a battle but with a way of thinking. During the 1600s and 1700s, a movement we call the Enlightenment spread among educated Europeans. Its central belief was simple but powerful: that human reason, careful thinking and evidence, could explain the world and improve human life. The Scientific Revolution of the previous century, with figures like Isaac Newton, had shown that nature followed discoverable laws. Enlightenment thinkers asked whether society and government might follow rational principles too, rather than just tradition or the will of a king.

These thinkers are often called by the French word philosophes, meaning philosophers, though many were also scientists, writers, and reformers. They argued, debated, and published in books, pamphlets, and the salons (gathering places) of Paris and other cities. A few names stand out, and it helps to know what each is remembered for.

John Locke (1632 to 1704) was an English philosopher who argued that people have natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and that government exists only by the consent of the governed to protect those rights. If a government breaks that trust, he said, the people may replace it. These ideas would echo loudly in both America and France.

Montesquieu (1689 to 1755) was a French writer best known for the idea of the separation of powers. He argued that liberty is safest when the power to make laws, the power to enforce them, and the power to judge them are held by different branches of government, so that no single person or group can dominate. This principle is built into many constitutions today, including that of the United States.

Voltaire (1694 to 1778) was a French writer famous for his sharp wit and his campaigns for freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and against intolerance and abuses by church and state. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 to 1778), a Geneva-born thinker, wrote about the social contract, the idea that legitimate government rests on an agreement among the people, and about the "general will" of a community. His ideas inspired both democrats and, later, more radical revolutionaries.

Not all Enlightenment thinkers agreed with one another, and most did not call for revolution. But together they spread the conviction that people had rights, that rulers were accountable, and that society could be reformed by reason. When real political crises came, these ideas gave people a language for demanding change.

Don't be confused: a "republic" and a "constitutional monarchy" are different ways to limit power. A republic has no monarch at all; the head of state is chosen, often an elected president (revolutionary France and the United States became republics). A constitutional monarchy keeps a king or queen, but their power is limited by law and by an elected parliament (Britain became one). Both can be free and democratic. The key point in this era is the move away from absolute monarchy, where a ruler claimed nearly unlimited power, toward government limited by law.

England's earlier path: civil war and the Glorious Revolution

Before turning to France, it helps to look at England, which had wrestled with the power of kings a century earlier and reached a settlement that made it unusual in Europe.

In the 1600s, English kings of the Stuart family claimed wide authority and clashed repeatedly with Parliament, the assembly that represented (in a limited way) the nobility, the towns, and the propertied classes, and that controlled taxation. The quarrel was about money, religion, and who held ultimate power. It boiled over into the English Civil War (1642 to 1651), a conflict between supporters of King Charles I and supporters of Parliament. Parliament's side won. In a shocking act, Charles I was put on trial and executed in 1649, and for about a decade England had no king at all, ruled for much of that time by the soldier and Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell. The monarchy was eventually restored in 1660, but the old idea that a king could simply rule as he pleased had been badly shaken.

The decisive moment came in 1688. King James II, a Catholic in a mostly Protestant country, alarmed Parliament with his policies and his claims to power. Rather than fight another civil war, leading figures in Parliament invited James's Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange, to take the throne. James fled, and William and Mary became joint monarchs with almost no bloodshed. Because it was so nearly peaceful, this event is called the Glorious Revolution.

Its importance is hard to overstate. In 1689, Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights, which set clear limits on the crown. The monarch could not suspend laws, raise taxes, or keep an army in peacetime without Parliament's consent, and Parliament was to meet regularly and to have freedom of debate. This established England (and later, after union with Scotland, Britain) as a constitutional monarchy, where the monarch reigned but Parliament held the real power of the purse and the law. This early move to limited, lawful government is one reason Britain avoided the violent upheavals that shook the continent in the following centuries.

The American Revolution and its echo in Europe

Across the Atlantic, Britain's thirteen American colonies put Enlightenment ideas into action. Angered by being taxed by a Parliament in which they had no representation, the colonists rebelled, and in 1776 they declared independence in words drawn straight from Locke, asserting that all men are created equal and have rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." After a war (the American Revolution, 1775 to 1783), in which France allied with the American colonists against Britain, the colonies won their independence and built a new republic with a written constitution and a separation of powers.

The effect on Europe was electric. Here was proof that a people could throw off a king and govern themselves according to Enlightenment principles. French soldiers who had fought in America carried these ideas home. The contrast between the new American republic and the heavy, debt-ridden monarchy of France was not lost on a generation hungry for change. Within a few years, France would have a revolution of its own, far larger and far more violent.

The French Revolution

In 1789, France was the most populous and one of the most powerful kingdoms in Europe, yet it was in deep trouble. Several causes came together. The government was effectively bankrupt, partly from costly wars (including helping the Americans). Society was locked into a rigid system of three "estates": the clergy (First Estate) and the nobility (Second Estate), who enjoyed privileges and paid little tax, and everyone else (the Third Estate), from wealthy merchants to poor peasants, who carried the tax burden. Harvests had been bad and bread was expensive. And Enlightenment ideas had given people a vocabulary of rights and equality with which to judge all of this.

To deal with the financial crisis, King Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates-General, an old assembly of the three estates that had not met for 175 years. When the Third Estate found itself outvoted by the privileged orders, its members broke away and declared themselves a National Assembly representing the nation. In July 1789, crowds in Paris, fearing the king would use force, stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison that stood as a symbol of the old regime. That day, July 14, is still France's national holiday.

The Revolution moved fast. The Assembly abolished feudal privileges and, in August 1789, issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a ringing statement that men are born free and equal in rights, and that government must protect liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. For a time, France became a constitutional monarchy, with the king's power limited by an elected assembly.

But the Revolution grew more radical. War broke out with neighboring monarchies (Austria and Prussia) who feared the example France was setting and wanted to protect their fellow kings. In 1792 the monarchy was abolished and France became a republic. In 1793 King Louis XVI was tried and executed by guillotine, and his queen, Marie Antoinette, soon after.

Then came the darkest phase, the Reign of Terror (1793 to 1794). Facing foreign invasion and internal revolt, a faction led by Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety tried to defend the Revolution by ruthless means. Tens of thousands of people were arrested as suspected enemies, and many thousands were executed by the guillotine, often after hasty trials. The Terror finally consumed its own leaders: Robespierre himself was overthrown and executed in 1794, and the killing wound down. France had proved that a revolution for liberty could also produce mass violence, a lesson that haunted Europe for generations.

The shockwaves spread far beyond France. Kings and nobles across Europe were terrified that revolution might spread to their own lands, while reformers and radicals were inspired. For the next quarter century, the question of revolution versus order would dominate European politics.

Napoleon and his wars

Out of the chaos rose a brilliant young army officer, Napoleon Bonaparte. He won fame in the revolutionary wars, seized power in France in a coup in 1799, and in 1804 crowned himself Emperor. In a sense he ended the Republic, yet he kept and spread many of the Revolution's changes.

His most lasting reform was the Napoleonic Code, a clear, unified set of civil laws that swept away the tangle of old local rules. It established equality before the law for male citizens, protected property rights, and separated church from state authority in civil matters. Versions of this code spread across the lands Napoleon controlled and still influence the legal systems of many countries today. He also reformed government administration, finance, and education, building an efficient, centralized state.

Napoleon was, above all, a soldier, and his reign meant near-constant war, known as the Napoleonic Wars. Here it is important to be clear about who fought whom. On one side stood Napoleonic France and the states it controlled or allied with. On the other stood a series of coalitions, temporary alliances of other great powers that formed, broke apart, and reformed against him. The leading members of these coalitions were Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, joined at various times by smaller states such as Sweden, Spain, and Portugal. Britain, protected by its navy and never successfully invaded, was Napoleon's most constant enemy and the paymaster of coalition after coalition.

For years Napoleon won spectacular victories and dominated most of continental Europe. Two disasters undid him. First, his invasion of Russia in 1812 ended in catastrophe; his huge army was destroyed by battle, hunger, and the brutal Russian winter during the retreat. Sensing weakness, the coalition powers united and defeated him, forcing him into exile in 1814. He escaped and returned to power for about a hundred days in 1815, but a combined British and Prussian army, led by the Duke of Wellington (British) and Marshal Blucher (Prussian), defeated him decisively at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Napoleon was exiled again, this time for good. His wars had killed millions, redrawn borders, and spread revolutionary ideas across the continent, even as he was finally crushed.

The Congress of Vienna and the attempt to restore order

With Napoleon gone, the victorious powers met at the Congress of Vienna (1814 to 1815) to rebuild Europe. The leading statesmen, especially Austria's Prince Metternich, were conservatives who wanted to undo the upheavals of the previous twenty-five years. Their goals were to restore the old ruling families to their thrones where possible, to redraw borders so that no single power could dominate again (a "balance of power"), and to guard against future revolutions.

In the short term they succeeded, and they created a framework that helped Europe avoid another general war for decades. But they could not unmake the ideas the Revolution had spread. Liberalism (the demand for constitutions, rights, and elected government) and nationalism (the demand that peoples govern themselves) were now loose in the world. The next several decades would be a long struggle between the conservative order the Congress built and these restless new forces.

The Industrial Revolution

While politics churned, an even deeper transformation was under way, this one in the economy. The Industrial Revolution was the shift from making goods by hand in homes and small workshops to making them by machine in factories. It began in Britain in the late 1700s, for several reasons: Britain had coal and iron, a stable government and banking system, overseas trade and colonies, and a culture of invention.

The breakthrough was new sources of power and new machines. The steam engine, improved by James Watt, could drive machinery anywhere, not just beside a river. Mechanized spinning and weaving transformed the textile (cloth) industry, the first to industrialize. Iron, and later steel, became cheaper and stronger. The railway, powered by steam locomotives, spread across Britain and then the world from the 1830s, moving goods and people faster than ever before. Steamships did the same on water.

The social effects were enormous. People left the countryside in huge numbers to work in factories, and cities grew explosively. A new working class of factory laborers emerged, often working long hours for low pay in dangerous conditions, including many women and children. At the same time, a prosperous middle class of factory owners, merchants, and professionals grew in wealth and confidence. Over the long run, industrialization raised living standards enormously and produced the modern world of mass-produced goods, but the early decades brought grim poverty, pollution, and hardship in the crowded new industrial towns.

These conditions gave rise to new political ideas about how society should be organized. Liberalism favored free markets, individual rights, and limited government. Socialism held that the harsh inequalities of industrial society should be reduced, and that key parts of the economy should be owned or controlled in common, for the benefit of all rather than a few owners. The most influential socialist thinker was Karl Marx (1818 to 1883), a German writer who, with Friedrich Engels, argued that history is driven by struggle between economic classes, and predicted that the industrial working class would eventually overthrow the owning class and build a society without private ownership of factories and land. Marx's ideas would have a vast impact in the twentieth century, inspiring both reform movements and revolutions.

Don't be confused: liberalism, socialism, and nationalism are three different ideas, and they often clashed. Liberalism in the 1800s meant individual rights, constitutions, and free markets (its meaning has shifted since). Socialism focused on economic equality and shared ownership to soften the harshness of industrial capitalism. Nationalism was about identity and self-rule, the belief that a people sharing a language and culture should have their own nation-state. A person could hold one, two, or none of these. They sometimes allied (for example, liberals and nationalists together against old empires) and sometimes opposed each other fiercely.

Nationalism and the remaking of the map

The most visible political force of the 1800s was nationalism. Before this era, much of Europe was a patchwork. Italy was a collection of separate states, some ruled by foreign powers. "Germany" was not a country at all but dozens of independent states loosely connected. Many peoples lived inside large multinational empires (such as the Austrian Empire) ruled by a single crown. Nationalism held that these arrangements were wrong: people who shared a language, history, and culture should be united in one self-governing nation-state.

In 1848, a wave of revolutions swept across much of Europe, from France and the German and Italian lands to the Austrian Empire and beyond. Liberals demanded constitutions and rights; nationalists demanded unity and independence. Almost all of these revolutions were defeated within a year or two by the established monarchies, and in that sense 1848 failed. But it showed how strong the demand for change had become, and it taught nationalists a hard lesson: idealism alone was not enough. Unity, it turned out, would be achieved less by popular uprising than by skillful leaders using diplomacy and war.

The unification of Italy came first. Through a mix of popular enthusiasm, the military adventures of the soldier-hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, and the careful diplomacy of Count Cavour, the prime minister of the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, the separate Italian states were joined together. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, with Rome added a few years later as its capital.

The unification of Germany followed, and it was driven above all by the kingdom of Prussia and its formidable chief minister, Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck believed unity would be won by "blood and iron," meaning military strength and tough realism rather than speeches. Through a series of carefully managed wars, against Denmark, then Austria, and finally France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, Prussia rallied the German states around itself and defeated rivals who stood in the way. In 1871, the German states united into a single German Empire, with the Prussian king as emperor and Bismarck as chancellor. A powerful new industrial and military nation had appeared in the center of Europe, a development that would help shape the wars of the next century.

The height of European empire

In the late 1800s, the industrial nations of Europe were richer and militarily stronger than ever, and they used that strength to build the largest empires the world had seen. This is the period of high imperialism, when a handful of European countries came to rule or dominate huge portions of the globe.

The most dramatic example was the scramble for Africa. For centuries Europeans had mostly traded along Africa's coasts. Now, in just a few decades around 1880 to 1900, European powers (chiefly Britain, France, and later Germany, Belgium, Portugal, and Italy) rushed to claim and conquer the interior of the continent. At a conference in Berlin in 1884 to 1885, European governments laid down rules for dividing Africa among themselves. They drew borders on maps with little or no regard for the African peoples, kingdoms, and communities who actually lived there. By the early 1900s, nearly all of Africa was under European control. (Many of today's African borders still follow those colonial lines.)

In Asia, the pattern was similar. Britain ruled India, the most valuable of all colonies, and dominated much of South and Southeast Asia. France took Indochina (today Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). The Dutch held the East Indies (today Indonesia). European powers and a rising Japan also forced trade and territorial concessions from China.

It is important to be honest about what empire meant. Imperialists at the time often justified their rule with claims about spreading civilization, Christianity, and commerce, and some did build railways, schools, and hospitals. But empire rested on conquest and was driven by the pursuit of raw materials, markets, cheap labor, and national prestige. It frequently involved exploitation and brutality. Local economies were reshaped to serve the colonizing country. Forced labor was widespread, and in some places conditions were murderous; the rubber regime in the Congo, run as the personal possession of Belgium's King Leopold II, became infamous for the death and mutilation of vast numbers of people. Racism, the false belief that Europeans were naturally superior, was used to justify ruling over others.

Empire was also met with resistance at every stage. Colonized peoples fought back through armed revolt, such as the large Indian Rebellion of 1857 against British rule, and through wars of resistance across Africa, including the Ethiopian victory over an invading Italian army at Adwa in 1896, one of the few cases where an African state defeated a European power and kept its independence. Resistance also took the form of strikes, protests, and the slow growth of independence movements whose leaders often used the very Enlightenment language of rights and self-rule that Europe had produced. Those movements would come to fruition in the twentieth century, when the great empires finally broke apart. An honest history holds both sides together: the immense power and reach of European empire, and the exploitation and resistance that came with it.

Looking ahead

By the early 1900s, Europe had been transformed almost beyond recognition from the world of kings and estates that began this chapter. Old monarchies had been limited or overthrown. New ideas (liberalism, socialism, nationalism) competed for people's loyalty. Industry had created vast wealth, crowded cities, and a restless working class. Two powerful new nation-states, Italy and Germany, had appeared, and the great powers commanded empires that spanned the globe. These same powers were now locked in rivalry, building up armies, navies, and alliances. The energies released by a century of revolution had not been spent. They were about to collide in the most destructive conflicts the world had ever seen.

Next we turn to that collision: the two great wars of the twentieth century. 👉 The World Wars