The Evolution of Politics in Europe: The Dark Ages to the Present
Feudalism
● Feudalism was a social system that existed in Europe during the Middle Ages in which people worked and fought for nobles who gave them protection and the use of land in return.
● This system followed the general trend of a weak monarch struggling to control a group of powerful nobles, who were the real power in complete control of their peasants and land.
The Hundred Years War (pp. 387-393)
● An assembly of French barons excluded Isabella and her son Edward III from the French throne. Instead they crowned Philip VI of Valois. Edward rejected this decision, upsetting feudal order.
● In the Treaty of Paris 1259, the English king agreed to become vassal of the French crown for the duchy of Aquitaine. Philip VI of France confiscated the duchy in 1337, sparking the Hundred Years’ War.
● To increase their independent power, French vassals of Philip VI transferred their loyalty to Edward III in order to thwart the centralizing goals of the French crown.
● Representative assemblies—the English Parliament, German diets, and Spanish cortes—flourished, laying the foundations for the representative institutions of modern liberal-democratic nations.
● Edward III’s need for money to pay for the war compelled him to summon the knights and burgesses as well as the great barons. The knights and burgesses—the Commons—recognized their mutual interests and began to meet apart from the great lords. A parliamentary statute of 1341 required that all nonfeudal levies have parliamentary approval.
● In France, the monarchy found that the large gatherings of the nobility threatened the king’s power. People tended to think of themselves as Breton or Norman, not French. Provincial assemblies valued their independence and did not want a national assembly.
● The Hundred Years’ War did, however, promote the growth of nationalism in both England and France.
Politics and State in the Renaissance (pp. 441-446)
● During the period of the Hundred Years’ War, no ruler in Western Europe was able to provide a strong monarchy. The power of feudal nobilities weakened the centralizing work of the monarch. In the Renaissance era, rulers began the work of reducing violence, curbing unruly nobles, and establishing domestic order.
● The dictators and oligarchs of the Italian city-states, together with Louis XI of France, Henry VII of England, and Ferdinand of Aragon, stressed that monarchy was the one institution that linked all classes and peoples within definite territorial boundaries. They emphasized royal majesty and royal sovereignty and insisted on the respect and loyalty of all subjects.
● These ‘new monarchs’ ruthlessly suppressed opposition and rebellion, especially from the nobility.
● Charles VII, crowned at Reims with the help of Joan of Arc, reconciled the Burgundians and Armagnacs and ended their civil war. He also expelled the English from almost all of France.
● Charles reorganized the royal council, giving increased influence to middle-class men, and strengthened royal finances through taxes such as on land and salt.
● Charles also created the first permanent royal army by establishing regular companies of cavalry and archers—recruited, paid, and inspected by the state.
● Charles published the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, asserting the superiority of a general council over the papacy, giving the French crown major control over the appointment of bishops, and depriving the pope of French ecclesiastical revenues. Greater control over the church and the army helped to consolidate the authority of the French crown.
● Charles’s son Louis XI, the ‘Spider King,’ facing the problem of reducing feudal disorder, promoted new industries, welcomed foreign craftsmen, and entered into commercial treaties with other countries.
● Louis used the revenues raised through these economic activities and severe taxation to improve the army, which he used to stop aristocratic brigandage and cut into urban independence.
● With a few timely deaths, Louis XI gained several French territories. The marriage of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany added the large western duchy of Brittany to the state, favoring the monarchy’s goal of expanding royal authority and unifying the kingdom.
● In the Concordat of Bologna, the Pragmatic Sanction was rescinded and Pope Leo X recognized the French ruler’s right to select French bishops and abbots, allowing French kings to control the policies of church officials within the kingdom.
● In England, the aristocracy dominated the government of Henry IV, and indulged in local violence. The houses of York (white) and Lancaster (red) waged the civil war known as the War of the Roses, hurting trade, agriculture, and domestic industry.
● The Yorkist Edward IV began establishing domestic tranquility. He defeated Lancastrian forces and reconstructed the monarchy. With his brother Richard III and Henry VII, he worked to restore royal prestige, to crush the power of the nobility, and to establish order and law at the local level.
● Dominated by baronial factions, Parliament was the arena where the nobility exerted its power—as long as the monarchy was dependent on the Lords and the Commons for revenue, the king had to call Parliament. Edward IV, therefore, avoided expensive wars and stopped depending on Parliament for money, undercutting aristocratic influence.
● Henry VII did summon several meetings of Parliament, but the center of royal authority was the royal council, which governed at the national level and included very few great lords—most representatives were middle-class.
● The royal council handled any business the king needed. It dealt with real or potential aristocratic threats through a judicial offshoot, the court of Star Chamber, which applied the principles of Roman law, and its methods were sometimes terrifying, but they effectively reduced aristocratic troublemaking.
● England, unlike Spain and France, had no standing army or professional civil service bureaucracy. It relied on the support of unpaid local officials, the justices of the peace. These landowners handled all the work of local government.
● The Tudors won the support of the influential upper middle class by promoting peace and social order. Henry VII rebuilt the monarchy and led the country to peace and prosperity, with the dignity and role of the royal majesty much enhanced.
● Despite the centuries-long reconquista to control the entire peninsula, Spain remained a loose confederation of separate kingdoms without a common cultural tradition, each maintaining its own cortes (parliament), laws, courts, and taxation.
● To curb the rebellious and warring aristocracy, Ferdinand and Isabella revived the hermandades, which were popular groups in the towns given authority to act as local police forces, repressing violence with savage punishments.
● The decisive step Ferdinand and Isabella took to curb aristocratic power was the restructuring of the royal council—aristocrats were excluded, and only people of middle-class background were appointed.
● Through a diplomatic alliance with the Spanish pope Alexander VI, the Spanish monarchs secured the right to appoint bishops in Spain and gained the title of ‘Catholic Kings of Spain’—creating, in effect, a national church.
● With vast numbers of Muslims, Jews, and Moorish Christians, medieval Spain represented the most diverse country in Europe.
● Religious faiths that differed from the official state religion were considered politically dangerous. However, anti-Semitism in Spain rose more from popular sentiment than from royal policies.
● King Ferdinand feared urban rioting and disorder, but he knew the Crown would lose popular support if he protected the conversos. Therefore he sought papal permission to set up the Inquisition in Spain; if its actions provoked public criticism, the papacy could be blamed.
● Spanish anti-Semitism emerged at the very time a Spanish national feeling was emerging. Jews—with their supposed plans to take over all public offices in Spain—represented a grave threat to national unity. Although the Inquisition was a religious institution, it was controlled by the Crown and served primarily as a politically unifying tool.
● When Charles V’s son Philip II joined Portugal to the Spanish crown, the Iberian Peninsula was at last politically united. The various kingdoms, however, were administered separately.
Germany and the Protestant Reformation (pp. 466-470)
● Unlike Spain, France, and England, the German Empire lacked a strong central power. The Golden Bull of 1356 legalized what had long existed—government by an aristocratic federation, with each of the seven electors gaining virtual sovereignty in his own territory, reducing the central authority of the emperor.
● Charles V was a vigorous defender of Catholicism, and denied the possibility of two religions coexisting peacefully in one territory. Thus many princes used the religious issue to extend their financial and political independence.
● The Habsburg-Valois Wars advanced the cause of Protestantism and promoted the political fragmentation of the German Empire.
● Charles agreed to the Peace of Augsburg, which officially recognized Lutheranism. Each prince was permitted to determine his territory’s religion.
Politics, Religion, and War (pp. 490-502)
● In France, the population losses cause by the plague and the Hundred Years’ War had created such as labor shortage that serfdom almost disappeared. Cash rents replaced feudal rents and servile obligations, benefitting the peasantry. This declining buying power of money hurt the nobility.
● Francis I and his son Henry II governed through a small, efficient council, and great nobles held only titular authority in the provinces. The whole of France was under the jurisdiction of the royal law, and French was the language of those courts—a powerful centralizing act.
● The Concordat of Bologna established Catholicism as the state religion.
● The feebleness of the French monarchy under Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III was the seed from which the weeds of civil violence sprang. The French nobility took advantage of this monarchical weakness. Just as the German princes in the Holy Roman Empire had adopted Lutheranism as a means of opposition to Emperor Charles V, so French nobles frequently adopted the reformed religion as a religious cloak for their independence.
● The Reformation thus led to a resurgence of feudal disorder. Armed clashes between Catholic royalist lords and Calvinist antimonarchical lords occurred in many parts of France.
● The Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre led to fighting called the War of Three Henrys, a civil conflict among factions led by the Catholic Henry of Guise, the Protestant Henry of Navarre, and King Henry III.
● A small group of moderates of both faiths called politiques believed that only the restoration of strong monarchy could reverse the trend toward collapse, and favored accepting the Huguenots as an officially recognized and organized pressure group.
● Protestant Henry of Navarre, who above all wanted a strong and united France, was received into the Roman Catholic Church because the majority of the French were Roman Catholic.
● Henry IV published the Edict of Nantes, granting freedom of public worship to 150 fortified towns in France and restoring internal peace in France.
● Each of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands possessed historical liberties: each was self-governing and enjoyed the right to make its own laws and collect its own taxes. In addition to important economic connections, only the recognition of a common ruler in the person of Emperor Charles V united the provinces, giving them a limited sense of federation.
● Charles V abdicated and gave Spain and the Low Countries to his son Philip, who could speak neither French nor Flemish, and Netherlanders never forgot that Philip was Spanish.
● In most of the cities of the Netherlands there was a strong, militant minority of Calvinists. The seventeen provinces possessed a large middle-class population, and the reformed religion had a powerful appeal to the middle class because of its intellectual seriousness and emphasis on labor.
● From Madrid Philip II sent twenty thousand Spanish troops under the duke of Alva to pacify the Low Countries. Alva interpreted this to mean the ruthless extermination of religious and political dissidents, and opened his own tribunal, called the Council of Blood.
● For ten years civil war raged in the Netherlands between Catholics and Protestants and between the seventeen provinces and Spain. The seventeen provinces united under the leadership of Prince William of Orange, called ‘the Silent.’
● Philip II then sent his nephew Alexander Farnese to crush the revolt once and for all. He fought by patient sieges, and one by one the cities of the south fell. The seven northern provinces, led by Holland, formed the Union of Utrecht and declared their independence from Spain. In these provinces the commercial aristocracy possessed the predominant power.
● The war in the Low Countries badly hurt the English economy. The murder of William the Silent eliminated not only a great Protestant leader but also the chief military check of the Farnese advance. Third, the collapse of Antwerp appeared to signal a catholic sweep through the Netherlands. For these reasons Queen Elizabeth pumped money and troops into the Protestant cause in the Low Countries.
● On the issues of the Inquisition and religious toleration, Philip II was completely inflexible. He identified toleration with the growth of heresy, civil disorder, violence, and bloodshed, and he was determined to crush heresy in the Low Countries.
● In England, Mary, Queen of Scots, became implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Philip, hoping to reunite England with Catholic Europe, gave the conspiracy his full backing. Mary was discovered and beheaded. Pope Sixtus V promised to pay Philip 1 million ducats the moment Spanish troops landed in England.
● The Spanish Armada met an English fleet in the Channel, and a combination of storms and squalls, spoiled good and rank water, inadequate Spanish ammunition, and English fire ships gave England the victory.
● This defeat prevented Philip II from reimposing religious unity on Western Europe by force. He did not conquer England, and Elizabeth continued her financial and military support of the Dutch.
● Beginning with the defenestration of Prague, the Thirty Years’ War was characterized by civil war in Bohemia between the Catholic League and the Protestant Union; the Lutheran victories under Gustavus Adolphus; and French support of German Protestant princes.
● The Peace of Westphalia ended conflicts over religious faiths, recognizing the sovereign, independent authority of more than three hundred German princes. The imperial power of the Holy Roman Empire was severely limited, but it continued to function as a federation.
Absolutism
● Absolutism was a political theory that absolute power should be vested in one or more rulers.
● This system followed the general trend of a strong, absolute monarch who controlled the entire state by the use of an appointed bureaucracy solely accountable to the king.
Absolutism (pp.532-547)
● In the absolutist state, kings claimed to rule by divine right, meaning that they were responsible to God alone. Kings became legislators—they made law—and because of that sovereignty was embodied in the person of the king.
● Absolute rulers tried to control competing jurisdictions, institution, or interest group in their territories. They regulated religious sects. They abolished the liberties long held by certain groups or areas.
● Absolute kings also secured the cooperation of the one class that had posed the greatest threat to monarchy, the nobility. Medieval governments, restrained by the church, the feudal nobility, and their own financial limitations, had been able to exert none of these controls.
● The absolutist solution to financial problems was the creation of new state bureaucracies that directed the economic life of the country in the interests of the king, either forcing taxes even higher or advising alternative methods of raising revenue
● Bureaucracies were appointed by and solely accountable to the king, sometimes drawn from the middle class, sometimes from the nobility.
● Absolute monarchs also maintained permanent standing armies. Medieval armies had been raised by feudal lords for particular war or campaigns, after which the troops were disbanded. Later, monarchs alone recruited and maintained armies, in peacetime as well as wartime. Armies became basic features of absolutist states.
● Absolute rulers also invented new methods of compulsion, concerning themselves with the private lives of potentially troublesome subjects, often through the use of secret police.
● Henry VI inherited an enormous mess. Civil wars, poor harvests, and low commercial activity left nobles, officials, merchants, and peasants wanting peace, order, and stability. Henry inaugurated a remarkable recovery.
● Henry VI converted to Catholicism, but kept Protestant confidence by issuing the Edict of Nantes and by appointing the devout Maximilien de Bethune of Sully as his chief minister. Henry also kept France at peace, sharply lowered taxes on the peasants and compensation with a fee on royal officials.
● Sully proved to be an effective administrator. He increased revenue with the revival of trade while lowering the number of taxes. Together, Henry and Sully restored public order in France and laid the foundation for economic prosperity.
● Marie de Medici headed the government for the child-king Louis XIII, and appointed Cardinal Richelieu to the council of ministers. He became the president of the council and later the first minister of the French crown.
● Richelieu used his strong influence over King Louis XIII to exalt the French monarchy as the embodiment of the French state.
● Richelieu’s policy was the subordination of all groups and institutions to the French monarchy. The French nobility had long constituted the foremost threat to the centralizing goals of the Crown and to a strong national state. He succeeded in reshuffling the royal council, eliminating potential power brokers, and proceeded to level castles, long symbols of feudal independence, and crush aristocratic conspiracies.
● Richelieu extended the use of the royal commissioners called intendants, dividing France into thirty-two districts and assigning a royal intendant to each. These were appointed directly by the monarch, to whom they were solely responsible. They recruited men for the army, supervised the collection of taxes, presided over the administration of law, and checked up on the local nobility.
● Henry IV’s lawyers had written the Law of Concord, known as the Edict of Nantes. However, it was temporary. All French people were theoretically still united under the king’s religion, Roman Catholicism.
● Louis XIII, with the unanimous consent of the royal council, decided to end Protestant military and political independence.
● Louis XIII and Richelieu faced serious urban protests due to real or feared unemployment, high food prices, grain shortages, new taxes, and oppressive taxation. Officials who attempted to collect taxes were seized and beaten to death.
● At first municipal and royal authorities responded feebly, lacking the means of strong action, and thus allowed the crowds to burn themselves out. Later on, municipal governments were better integrated into the national structure, and local authorities had the prompt military support of the Paris government. Those who publicly opposed government policies and taxes received swift and severe punishment.
● Richelieu’s foreign policy was aimed at the destruction of Habsburg power, and consequently he supported their enemies.
● According to Richelieu, a state secures its revenue through taxation, but the political and economic structure of France greatly limited the government’s ability to tax. France was still a collection of local economies and local societies dominated by local elites. Richelieu solved this problem by securing the cooperation of these elites. However, it was limited in this way.
● Richelieu’s raison d’etat was “Where the interests of the state are concerned, God absolves actions which, if privately committed, would be a crime.”
● Richelieu’s successor as chief minister and then regent was Cardinal Mazarin. He continued Richelieu’s centralizing policies, but his attempts to increase royal revenues led to the civil wars known as the Fronde. The state’s financial situation steadily weakened because entire regions of France refused to pay taxes. Popular rebellions led by aristocratic factions broke out in the provinces and spread to Paris. Civil order broke down completely. A vast increase in the state bureaucracy, representing an expansion of royal power, and new means of extracting money from working people incurred the bitter opposition of peasants and urban artisans.
● Louis XIV, the Sun King, achieved the cooperation of the nobility. Throughout France the nobility agreed to participate in projects that both exalted the monarchy and reinforced the aristocrats’ ancient prestige.
● Louis XIV installed his royal court at Versailles and required all the nobility of France to come live there for at least part of the year. The art and architectures of Versailles served as fundamental tools of state policy under Louis XIV. The king used it to overawe his subjects and foreign visitors. Also, French became the language of polite society and replaced Latin as the language of international learning.
● Louis utilized several councils of state, which he personally attended, and the intendants, who acted for the councils throughout France. Councilors of state came from the recently ennobled or the upper middle class.
● Louis XIV never called a meeting of the Estates General, and therefore the nobility had no means of united expression or action. Louis didn’t have a first minister either. He also made use of spying and terror with a secret police force and a system of informers.
● Finance proved the grave weakness in Louis XIV’s administration. The expanding professional bureaucracy, the court at Versailles, extensive military reform, and war cost a great deal of money.
● In many parts of France the method of collecting taxes consistently failed to produce enough revenue. Tax farmers pocketed the difference between what they raked in and what they handed over to the state. Also, an old agreement between the Crown and the nobility stated that the king could freely tax the common people as long as he didn’t tax the nobles. This meant that the nobles could not say how these taxes were to be used—however, Louis lost enormous potential revenue. The middle class also secured many tax exemptions.
● Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s central principle was that the wealth and the economy of France should serve the state, and he applied mercantilism rigorously to France. He attempted to accomplish self-sufficiency through state support for industries. He set up a system of state inspection and regulation. He also organized craftsmen into guilds and gave the masters absolute power over their workers. He encouraged foreign craftsmen and built roads and canals. He also abolished many domestic tariffs and enacted high foreign tariffs to protect French goods. He created a powerful merchant marine for the transportation of French goods. Colbert also worked to utilize the vast resources of Canada by sending four thousand French peasants to inhabit it.
● The absolutist state also attempted to control religion, and Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. The French monarchy had never intended religious toleration to be permanent. Louis XIV considered religious unity to be politically necessary. Also, the permission of religious liberty was not a popular policy, and its revocation won him enormous praise.
● Louis XIV appointed Francois le Tellier secretary of state for war, who created a professional army that was modern in the sense that the French state, rather than private nobles, employed the soldiers. The king himself took command and directly supervised all aspects and details of military affairs.
● Louis XIV continued the expansionist policy begun by Cardinal Richelieu. Encouraged by his successes in Flanders, Louis continued his aggression. However, the military revolution involving the reform and great expansion of the army required funding that the state could not meet.
● To raise revenue for the war effort, Louis published a declaration ordering that all the nation’s silverware be handed over to the mint. The weight of taxation, however, fell on the overburdened peasants.
● Rising grain prices, new taxes for war, and the constant pillaging of troops meant that France wanted peace at any price.
● The War of Spanish Succession started when Louis XIV acquired Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. Therefore, the English, Dutch, Austrians, and Prussians formed the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV.
● The war was concluded with the Peace of Utrecht, which represented the balance-of-power principle in operation, setting limits on the extent to which any one power could expand. It also marked the end of French expansionist policy.
The Rise of Austria and Prussia (pp. 569-576)
● Strong kings did, however, begin to emerge, war and threat of war aiding rulers in their attempts to build absolute monarchies. In this atmosphere of continual wartime emergency, monarchs reduced the political power of the landlord nobility. Leaving the nobles as masters of their peasants, the absolutist monarchs of Eastern Europe gradually gained and monopolized political power.
● The kings imposed and collected permanent taxes without consent, and also maintained permanent standing armies.
● In Austria, the Bohemian Estates—the representative body of different estates—had risen up in defense of Protestant rights. This revolt was crushed at the Battle of White Mountain, allowing Ferdinand II to drastically reduce the power of the Estates and confiscate the landholdings of many Protestant nobles and gave them to Catholics.
● A large portion of the Bohemian nobility as of recent foreign origin and loyal to the Habsburgs. With their help, the Habsburgs established strong direct rule over reconquered Bohemia. The condition of the peasantry worsened, and Protestantism was also stamped out.
● After the Thirty Years’ War Ferdinand III centralized the government and created a permanent standing army ready to put down internal opposition.
● The Turkish wars and the great expansionist strength of Austria strengthened the Habsburg army and promoted some sense of unity.
● The Habsburg state was composed of the territories of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, tied together primarily by their common rulers. Each had its own laws and political life.
● The Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VI stated that the Habsburg possessions were never to be divided and were always passed intact to a single heir.
● The Hungarian nobility, despite its reduced strength, effectively thwarted the full development of Habsburg absolutism. Hungarian nobles, many remaining Protestants, were determined to maintain as much independence and local control as possible. They rose in patriotic rebellion under Francis Rakoczy, who was defeated. However, the Habsburgs had to restore some of the traditional privileges of the Hungarian aristocracy.
● Eastern German princes lost political power and influence, while a revitalized landed nobility became the undisputed ruling class. The Hohenzollern family had little real princely power.
● The elector of Brandenburg had the right to help choose the Holy Roman emperor, but had no military strength whatsoever. He was a helpless spectator in the Thirty Years’ War. However, this war dramatically weakened the political power of the Estates—the representative assemblies of the realm.
● Each of the three provinces were inhabited by Germans, but each had its own Estates, who power had increased as the power of the rulers declined. They still however had the power to levy taxes.
● To pay for the permanent standing army he established, Frederick William forced the Estates to accept the introduction of permanent taxation without consent, and the Great Elector gained both financial independence and superior force. The size of the army leaped about tenfold.
● As in the formation of every absolutist state, war was a decisive factor. Also, the nobility had long dominated the government through the Estates, but it was unwilling to join the representatives of the towns in a consistent common front and was focused on its own rights and privileges.
● Frederick William I, the Soldiers’ King, created the best army in Europe for its size, and infused strict military values into a whole society. He also created a strong centralized bureaucracy, while the last traces of the parliamentary Estates and local self-government vanished.
● The king’s grab for power brought him into conflict with the noble landowners, the Junkers. The Prussian nobility, instead of being destroyed, was enlisted into the army.
Russia
● why the east was so far behind the west
● weak monarchs, ineffective empires, strong nobility
● few towns, high landed nobility,
● ineffective simple agrarian economy
● less productive human labor
● no middle class
● increasing serfdom
● Boyard nobility, had power over peasants
● Mongols- once ruled most of russia, brutally, eventually forced out,
● Mongol Yoke- ruling eastern slavs for 200 years, capital in Saray on lower Volga
● Autocracy- having power of sovereignty, government
● “Third Rome” Russia seen as third Rome by the tsars with their total power,
● Service Nobility- held tsar’s land with condition they serve in his army.
● Ivan the Terrible- 1533- 1584 transformed all nobility into service nobility, struck down ancient Muscovite boyars and their families,
● Cossacks- peasants who fled to the east and south and were out of tsar’s reach, free groups and outlaw armies,
● “Time of Troubles” 1598- 1613 after Ivans son theodore died with out an heir, russia fell into a time of war and stuggle for power, before Ivans nephew Michael Romanov elected
● Michael Romanov, peasants put back in serfdom but the nobility had much less military requirements
● “Old Believers” - people who spilt with the church for desire to be reunited with the greek orthodox tradition
● Peter the Great - part time army but had only 1 of 36 years at peace, had smaller more specialized army, obsessed with expansion and tsarist rule, got foreigners to make gov more effective, total absolute monarch
● made interlocking civilian and military bureaucracy, everyone started at bottom
● drafting was widespread, drafted for life,
● serfs mostly worked in gov. owned facotries for the military
● built navy
● educated russians began to evolve
● split between peasentry and elite widened
● selective westernization- Peter would bring back people from west to build stuff but teach russians so he could send them back and not expose russia to liberalism.
● Baroque- culture thrived in eastern europe
● used large building to show power, superiority
● St. Petersburg- built as modern baroque city by peter with thousands drafted to work on it, nobles required to built large houses there
● peasentry went down, elite went up
Constitutionalism
● Constitutionalism was the belief that a government should be based on a constitution.
Issue of Sovereignty
● Who gives the government is power?
● Monarch?
● Parliament?
● People? (John Locke- theory of people’s right to establish a government for their needs. If it failed they had the right to change it.)
Beginning of Constitutionalism - England
● 1603- Elizabeth I dies- religious flexibility ends
● 1603- James I ascends to throne- Scottish, bold, insisted on Divine Right, hated by people.
● 1629- Charles I disbands parliament- Gives himself rule over all including courts which upheld all his arbitrary non-parliamentary measures.
● 1637- Scottish Protestant Uprising- Scots revolt, Charles brings back parliament and Charles cannot get money from Parliament because he ticked them off and they do not trust him with army.
● 1641- Irish Catholic Uprising- Irish rebel to harsh rule since 1121 and ultimately this leads to English Civil War because of the fragmentation already rooted in Parliament.
● 1642- English Civil War- King Charles army of rural people and mercenaries begin fighting Parliaments militia. Stemmed from Charles ruling without Parliament.
● 1653-1658- Oliver Cromwell Protectorate- Military Government started divided into 12 districts each with a general. Economy similar to absolutism only time England ever had military government. Ends when cromwell dies.
● 1660- Charles II restored to monarchy- Both houses of parliament restored and invite Charles to take over. Church of England forced on people. Charles summoned parliament often so they would help him out with revenue.
● 1668-74 CABAL- middle men between king and parliament and secured rapport between them. gave way to royal ministries must answer to Commons
● 1670- Charles II secret agreement with Louis XIV- Charles relax persecution of Catholics in return for 200,000 pounds annually. He (charles would recatholocize England, help France vs. Dutch and convert himself.
● 1673?- James II violates Test Act- James appoints catholics to lots of government positions and courts who ruled in his favor. Issued declaration of religious freedom to save himself, didn’t work.
● 1688-1689- Glorious Revolution- William and Mary brought to throne, recognized superiority of Parliament, Bill of Rights Passed. Shared power with king-courts-parliament
● 1690- John Locke Second Treatise of Civil Government- people set up gov. and give it its sovereignty and you must obey if it is good, but if not you can change it.
● Bill of Rights-
● law made in parliament, could not be revoked by crown
● parliament had to be called atleast every 3 years
● no standing army in peacetime
● judges could not be threatened with removal
● natural rights preserved
● parliamentary discussions were free
● religious freedom but the monarch must always be protestant
● Cabinet System of government evolved
Dutch Constitutionalism
● 7 northern provinces of Netherlands fought for and won their independence from Spain as the Republic of United Provinces of the Netherlands confirmed by Peace of Westphalia 1648
● ‘golden age’ of the netherlands due to intellectual surge
● fishing, shipping, manufacturing, banking (protestant work ethic)
● Dutch East India Company, trade and global empire
● highest standard of living in europe, avoided famine
● strong middle class
● religious toleration (invited others)
● internationalism (led to colonial empire and banking)
● constitutional republic
● confederation of independent provinces led by Holland
● government controlled by oligarchy of merchants and bankers (Regents)
● States General- federal assembly, only power over foreign affairs
● Stadholder- represented each province to States General; governor
● Calvinist but tolerance attracted foreign capital and investment
Parliamentarianism
● Parliamentarianism is a system of democratic governance of a state in which the executive branch derives its legitimacy from the legislature, or parliament.
● Eighteenth-century British society was dominated by the landowning aristocracy. The Tory party, controlled by landed aristocracy, was fearful of radical movements and the same intense conservatism motivated the Tory government (balance). After 1815 the aristocracy defended its ruling position by repressing popular protest.
● In 1815, they began with the Corn Laws, which had regulated the foreign grain trade before (shortages of grain had occurred and agricultural prices skyrocketed but peace meant that grain could be imported again and prices went down). The new regulation prohibited the importation of foreign grain unless the price at home rose above 80 shillings per quarter (class-based interpretation). The Corn Laws led to protests and demonstrations by urban laborers and were supported by radical thinkers who campaigned for a reformed House of Commons.
● In 1817, government responded by temporarily suspending the rights of peaceable assembly and habeas corpus; two years later, Parliament passed the Six Acts controlling heavily taxed press and practically eliminated all mass meetings. These acts followed an orderly protest at Saint Peter’s Fields (‘Battle of Peterloo’).
● Ongoing industrial development strengthened the upper middle class. In the 1820s the Tory government moved in the direction of better urban direction, greater economic liberalism, and civil equality of Catholics (heavy tariff). The Whig party introduced an act to amend the representation of people.
● The Reform Bill of 1832 allowed the House of Commons to emerge as the all-important legislative body and new industrial areas of the country gained representation in the Commons and electoral districts were eliminated.
● The principal radical program was embodied in the “People’s Charter” of 1838 and Chartist movement (core demand was universal male suffrage, not female suffrage).
● Parliament rejected petitions for male suffrage and many working-class people joined with middle-class manufacturers in the Anti-Corn Law League (1839). The climax of the movement came in 1845, the year of the Ireland’s famine and to avert catastrophe Robert Peel and the Whigs repealed the Corn Laws in 1846.
● In 1847, the Tories passed the Ten Hours Act of 1847, which limited the workday for women and young people in factories to ten hours and healthy competition between the aristocracy and strong middle class was a factor in the peaceful evolution.
● Great Britain was under an effective two-party parliament that skillfully guided the country from classical liberalism to full-fledged democracy. The right to vote was granted to males of the solid middle class in 1832 but people, like John Stuart Mill (On Liberty), were uncertain about future extension. In 1867, Disraeli and the Conservatives extended the vote to all middle-class males and best-paid workers in order to gain new supporters.
● Third Reform Bill of 1884 gave the vote to almost every adult male. While the House of Commons drifted toward democracy, the House of Lords, between 1901-1910 ruled against labor unions in two important decisions. After the Liberal party came to power in 1906, the Lords vetoed several measures passed by the Commons, including the People’s Budget (Lords finally gave in).
● Extensive social welfare measures were passed in a rush between 1906 and 1914. The Liberal party between those years, inspired by David Lloyd George, raised taxes on the rich as part of the People’s Budget and this income helped the government pay for national health insurance, unemployment benefits, and old-age pensions.
Republicanism
● Republicanism is the ideology of governing a state where the head of state is a representative of the people who hold popular sovereignty.
● Louis XVIII’s Constitutional Charter of 1814 was basically a liberal constitution. Louis appointed moderate royalists his ministers who sought to obtain the support of a majority of the representations elected to the lower Chamber of Deputies. Louis’s charter allowed only about 100,000 of the wealthiest people to vote for deputies, who with the king and his ministers, made the laws of the nation.
● Charles X, Louis’s successor, wanted to re-establish the old order in France. Charles repudiated the Constitutional Charter in 1830, issued decrees stripping much of the wealthy middle class of its voting rights and censored the press.
● The immediate reaction was an insurrection in capital by printers and in “three glorious days,” the government collapsed and the upper middle class skillfully seated Charles’s cousin, Louis Philippe, duke of Orleans on the vacant throne.
● Louis Philippe accepted the Constitutional Charter of 1814. The wealthy notable elite actually tightened its control as the old aristocracy retreated. For the upper middle class, there had been a change in dynasty in order to protect the status quo and narrowly liberal institutions of 1815.
● Pre-Revolutionary” outbreaks occurred all across Europe (revolution in Paris). Louis Philippe’s “bourgeois monarchy” was characterized by stubborn inaction. Lack of social, legislation, and politics was dominated by corruption. The king’s chief minister in the 1840s, Francois Guizot, was personified and satisfied with the electoral system were only rich could vote for deputies.
● Barricades went up on the night of February 22, 1848 and by February 24, Louis Philippe had abdicated in favor of his grandson but refusal led to the proclamation of a provisional republic, headed by a ten-man executive committee supported by public. A generation of writers had praised the First French Republic and revolutionaries were firmly committed to a republic as opposed to any form of constitutional monarchy and they immediately set about drafting a constitution for France’s Second.
● Government truly wanted the forces of the common people (could reform society). Revolutionary compassion and sympathy for freedom were expressed in the freeing of all slaves in French colonies, the abolition of the death penalty, and the establishment of a ten-hour workday for workers in Paris
● The revolutionary coalition were the moderate, liberal republicans of the middle class. They viewed universal male suffrage as the ultimate concession; but they opposed any further radical social measures but on the other hand, were radical republicans. The radical republicans were committed to socialism (various degrees). Worsening depression and rising unemployment raised issues.
● On June 22, the government dissolved the national workshops in Paris, giving the workers the choice of joining the army or going to workshops in the provinces. The result was a spontaneous and violent uprising and barricades sprang up. Class war had begun and working people fought with the courage of utter desperation but the government had the army and the support of peasant France.
● After three terrible “June Days” and the republican army stood triumphant. In place of a generous democratic republic, the Constituent Assembly completed a constitution featuring a strong executive; allowed Louis Napoleon to win election.
● In 1848 Louis Napoleon had a positive “program” for France, which guided him throughout most of his long reign (Napoleonic Ideas and The Elimination of Poverty). Louis Napoleon believed government should represent the people (economically).
● When politicians ran a parliamentary government, they stirred up class hatred because they were not interested in helping the poor and Louis believed that the answer was a strong, authoritarian, national leader, who would serve the people. The leader would be linked by direct democracy and universal male suffrage. These ideas accompanied his vision of national unity and social progress.
● Elected to a four-year term, President Louis Napoleon had to share power with a conservative National Assembly; Louis also signed a bill to increase greatly the role of the Catholic church in primary and secondary education.
● Louis also signed another law depriving many poor people of the right to vote because he wanted the Assembly to vote funds to pay his personal debts and he wanted it to change the constitution so he could run for a second term.
● In 1851 Louis Napoleon began to organize a conspiracy and on December 2, 1851, he illegally dismissed the Assembly and seized power in a coup d’etat.
● Restoring universal male suffrage Louis Napoleon called on the French people to legalize his actions (92 %) and a year later, 97 % agreed in a national plebiscite to make him hereditary emperor and Louis Napoleon was elected to lead France.
● His greatest success was with the economy, particularly in the 1850s. His government encouraged the new investment banks and massive railroad construction that were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution on the Continent. The government fostered general economic expansion through a program of public works, which included the rebuilding of Paris to improve the environment.
● Political power remained in the hands of the emperor; Napoleon III chose his ministers and restricted but did not abolish the Assembly and members were elected by universal male suffrage every six years (parliamentary elections handled seriously). Government used its officials and appointed mayors to spread the word that the election of the government’s candidates was the key to roads, schools, and tax rebates.
● In 1857 and in 1863, Louis Napoleon’s system worked brilliantly; he won electoral victories but in the 1860s, France’s problems in Italy and the rising power of Prussia led to increasing criticism from Catholic and nationalist supporters back home. The middle-class liberals wanted a less authoritarian regime (denounced his rule).
● In the 1860s, he progressively liberalized his empire by giving the Assembly greater powers and the opposition candidates greater freedom and in 1870, Louis Napoleon granted France a new constitution, which combined a basically parliamentary regime with a hereditary emperor as chief of state.
● The Italian peninsula was divided in the Middle Ages into competing city-state, which led the commercial and cultural revival of the West with amazing creativity. Sought after 1494, Italy was reorganized in the 1815 at the Congress of Vienna. Between 1815 and 1848, the goal of a unified Italian nation captured the imaginations of increasing numbers of Italians and there were three approaches.
● The radical program of the idealistic Giuseppe Mazzini stated that Italy become a centralized democratic republic based on universal suffrage and will of the people. Vincenzo Gioberti, a Catholic priest, called for a federation of existing states under the presidency of a progressive pope. The third was the program of those who looked for leadership toward the autocratic kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, as Germans looked toward Prussia.
● The third alternative was strengthened by the failures of 1848, when Austria smashed and discredited Mazzini’s republicanism and Sardinia’s monarch, Victor Emmanuel, retained the liberal constitution granted under duress in March 1848. The constitution provided for a fair degree of civil liberties and real parliamentary government complete with elections and parliamentary control of taxes. To the Italian middle classes, Sardinia appeared to be a liberal progressive state ideally suited to achieve the goal of national unification but Mazzini seemed quixotic
● As for the papacy, the initial support by Pius IX for unification had given way to fear and hostility after he was driven from Rome during the upheavals of 1848.
● Cavour was the dominant figure in the Sardinian government (1850-1861). Cavour’s personal development was an early sign of coming tacit alliance between the aristocracy and the middle class under a strong nation-state. Cavour turned toward industry and entered the world of politics after 1848 and became chief minister in the liberalized Sardinian monarchy in 1852.
● Cavour’s national goals were limited and realistic and until 1859, he sought unity only for the states of northern Italy (moderate nationalist and aristocratic liberal). Cavour in the 1850s wishing to consolidate Sardinia as a liberal constitutional state introduced a program of highways and railroads, of civil liberties and opposition to clerical privilege, increasing support for Sardinia throughout northern Italy.
● Cavour worked for a secret diplomatic alliance with Napoleon III against Austria and in July 1858, he succeeded and provoked Austria into attacking Sardinia. Napoleon III came to Sardinia’s defense and after the victory of the combined Franco-Sardinian forces, Napoleon III did a complete turn around. Criticized by French Catholics for supporting the pope’s declared enemy, Napoleon III abandoned Cavour and made a compromise peace with the Austrians at Villafranca in July 1859 (Sardinia received Lombardy, around Milan).
● Cavour’s plans were salvaged by popular revolts and Italian nationalism; while war against Austria had raged in the north, nationalists in central Italy and driven out their rulers and nationalist fervor seized the urban masses (called for fusion of Sardinia). The other Great Powers opposed this but the nationalists held firm and Cavour returned to power when the people of central Italy voted to join Sardinia.
● For patriots such as Garibaldi, the job of unification was only half done. Sentenced to death in 1834 for his part in an uprising in Genoa, Garibaldi escaped to South American where he led a guerrilla band in Uruguay’s independence. Returning to Italy to find fight in 1848, he led a corps of volunteer against Austria and in 1860, Garibaldi had emerged as a powerful force in Italian politics. Cavour secretly supported Garibaldi’s bold plan to liberate the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (to use him and to get rid of him) and in May 1860, Garibaldi’s band of thousand “Red Shirts” outwitted the twenty-thousand royal army of Austria.
● Garibaldi then prepared to attack Rome and the pope but Cavour sent Sardinian forces to occupy most of the Papal Sates (to intercept Garibaldi). Cavour realized that an attack on Rome would bring about war with France and immediately organized a plebiscite in the conquered territories; Garibaldi did not oppose Cavour and the people of the south voted to join Sardinia.
● When Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel rode through Naples, they sealed the union of the north and south, of the monarch and the people of Italy. Cavour had controlled Garibaldi and turned popular nationalism into conservatism; the parliamentary monarchy under Victor Emmanuel with the liberal Sardinian constitution of 1848, only a small minority of Italian males had the right to vote.
● In 1871, the patriotic republicans who proclaimed the Third Republic in Paris after the military disaster at Sedan, refused to admit defeat, defended Paris for weeks but were eventually starved into submission by the German armies in January 1871. When national elections send a majority of conservatives and monarchies to the National Assembly, the Parisians exploded and proclaimed the Paris Commune.
● In March 1871, the leaders wanted to govern without the conservative peasants. The National Assembly led by Adolphe Thiers ordered the French army into Paris and crushed the Commune; twenty thousand people died in the fighting.
● The monarchists could not agree who should be king and the compromise Bourbon candidate refused to rule except under the white flag of his ancestors (unacceptable). President Thiers showed the Third Republic might be moderate/socially conservative.
● Another stabilizing factor was the skill and determination of the moderate republicans. The most famous was Leon Gambetta who preached a republic of truly equal opportunity; Gambetta was instrumental in establishing absolute parliamentary supremacy between 1877 and 1879, when deputies forced MacMahon to resign.
● By 1879, the majority of members of both the upper and lower houses of the National Assembly were republics, the Third Republic had firm foundations. Trade unions were fully legalized and France acquired a colonial empire; under the leadership of Jules Ferry, the moderate republicans passed a series of laws between 1879-1886 establishing free compulsory elementary education for children.
● The government expanded the state system of public tax-supported schools; free compulsory elementary education in France became secular republican education. Unlike most western countries, the Third Republic encouraged young teachers to marry and guaranteed that both partners would teach in the same location.
● French Catholics rallied to the republic in the 1890s after the educational reforms. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely convicted of treason. His family fought to reopen the case and the case was split in 1898 into two sides of which was the army, joined by anti-Semites, and the other side which stood the civil libertarians and most of the more radical republicans. After Dreyfus was declared innocent, it revived republican feeling against the church and between 1901 and 1905, the government severed all ties between the state and the Catholic church (Catholic schools lost a third of their students).
Totalitarianism
● Totalitarianism is the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute state authority.
● The traditional form of anti democratic government in European history was conservative authoritarianism (leaders of such governments tried to prevent major changes that would undermine the existing social order). Authoritarian leaders depended on obedient bureaucracies, vigilant police departments and trustworthy armies; liberals, democrats, and socialists prosecuted. The old-fashioned authoritarian government were preoccupied with the goal of mere survival and limited their demands to taxes, army recruits, and passive acceptance.
● The parliamentary regimes that had been founded on the wreckage of empires in 1918 fell one by one and by early 1938 only economically and socially advanced Czechoslovakia remained true to liberal political ideals. The lands lacked a tradition of self-government, with restraint and compromise. Many of these new states were torn by ethnic conflicts that threatened existence. Dictatorship appealed to nationalists and military leaders as a way to repress such tensions and preserve national unity (middle class weak in Eastern Europe).
● Although some of the conservative authoritarian regimes adopted certain Hitlerian and fascist characteristics in the 1930s, their general aims were limited. They were more concerned with maintaining the status quo then with forcing society into rapid change or war; this tradition has continued into our own time.
● While conservative authoritarianism predominated smaller states of Europe by the mid-1930s, radical dictatorships emerged in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy. Leaders of the radical dictatorships rejected parliamentary restraint and liberal values; they exercised unprecedented control over the masses and sought to mobilize them for constant action (three main approaches to understanding radical dictatorships).
● The first approach relates the radical dictatorships to the rise of modern totalitarianism and the second focuses on the idea of fascism as the unifying impulse. The third stresses the limitations of such generalization and uniqueness of regime. The concept of totalitarianism emerged in the 1920s and the 1930s and in 1924 Mussolini spoke of the “fierce totalitarian will” of his movement in Italy; in the 1930s many exiled writers used the concept of totalitarianism to link Italian and German fascism with Society communism under a common antiliberal umbrella
● Lenin showed how institutions and human rights are subordinated to the needs of a single group and its leader and provided a model for single-party dictatorship. Modern totalitarianism reached maturity in the 1930s in the Stalinist U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany, according to this school of interpretation. The grandiose vision of total state control broke decisively not only with conservative authoritarianism but also with nineteenth-century liberalism and democracy; indeed, totalitarianism was a radical revolt against liberalism as classical liberalism had sought to limit the power of the state and to protect the sacred rights of the people.
● Liberals stood for rationality, peaceful progress, economic freedom, and a strong middle class and the totalitarianism believed in will power, preached conflict, and worshiped violence (individual was infinitely less valuable than the state). Modern totalitarianism was based not on an elite but on people who had become engaged in the political process, most notably through nationalism and socialism; real totalitarian states built on mass movements and possessed boundless dynamism.
● Totalitarianism was in the end a permanent revolution, an unfinished revolution, in which rapid, profound change imposed from on high went on forever (Trotsky). A second group of writers approached radical dictatorships outside the Soviet Union through the concept of fascism; a term of pride for Mussolini and Hitler, who used it to describe the supposedly “total” and revolutionary character of their movements, fascism was severely criticized by these writers.
● Fascism was linked to reactionary forces, decaying capitalism and domestic class conflict and Marxists argued that fascism was the way powerful capitalists sought to manipulate a mass movement capable of destroying the revolutionary working class and thus protect eh profits to be reaped through war and territorial expansion. Less doctrinaire socialists saw fascism as only one of the several possible ways for the ruling class to escape from a general crisis of capitalism. Fascist movements all across Europe showed that they shared many characteristics, including extreme, often expansionist nationalism; an antisocialism aimed at destroying working-class movements; alliances with capitalists and landowners; mass parties appealing to the middle class and peasantry; a dynamic and violent leader, and glorification of war and the military
● European fascism remains a product of class conflict, capitalist crisis, and postwar upheaval in these more recent studies but interpretation has become convincing. Historians often adopt a third approach which emphasizes the uniqueness of developments in a country (challenge interpretations of totalitarianism and fascism). Four tentative judgments concerning these debates seem appropriate.
● The concept of totalitarianism retains real value (Germany and Soviet Union made an unprecedented “total claim” on the belief and behavior of their citizens. Antidemocratic, antisocialist movements sprang up all over Europe but only in Italy and Germany (and some would say Spain) were they able to take power
● By the spring 1921 after Lenin and the Bolsheviks had won the civil war, in southern Russia drought combined with the ravages of war to produce one of the worst famines; the Bolsheviks had destroyed the economy as well as their foes. In the face of economic disintegration, riots by peasants and workers, and an open rebellion by previously pro-Bolsheviks sailors at Kronstadt changed Lenin’s course.
● In March 1921 Lenin announced the New Economic Plan, which re-established limited economic freedom in an attempt to rebuild agriculture and industry. With the NEP, Lenin substituted a grain tax on the country’s peasants producers, who were permitted to sell their surpluses in free markets; peasants were encouraged to buy as many goods as they could afford from private traders.
● Heavy industry, railroads, and banks, however, remained wholly nationalized. The NEP was shrewd and successful both politically and economically. It was a necessary but temporary compromise with the Soviet Union’ peasantry. Flushed with victory after the revolutionary gains of 1917, the peasants would have fought to hold onto their land (Lenin realized that in 1921, his government was not strong enough to take land from the peasants) Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
● The NEP brought rapid recovery and in 1926 industrial output surpassed levels of 1913 and Soviet peasants were producing almost as much grain as before the war. Counting shorter hours and increased social benefits, workers were living better than they had lived in the past (as the economy recovered and the government relaxed its censorship and repression, intense struggle for power began within the Communist party between stolid Stalin and the flamboyant Trotsky (after 1924).
● Joseph Dzhugashvili, later known as Stalin, joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and after engaging in many revolutionary activities in the southern Transcaucasian area during the WW I, including a daring bank robbery to get money for the Bolsheviks. This raid gained Lenin’s attention and approval; Stalin in his early writings focused on the oppression of minority peoples in the Russian Empire (good organizer)
● Trotsky, a great and inspiring leader who had planned the 1917 takeover and then created the victorious Red Army, appeared to have all the advantages. Stalin succeeded Lenin because Stalin was more effective at gaining the all-important support of the party, the only genuine source of power in the state.
● Rising to general secretary of the party’s Central Committee just before Lenin’s first stroke in 1922, Stalin used his office to win friends and allies with jobs and promises and Stalin also won recognition as commissar of nationalities, a key position in which he governed many of the minorities of the vast Soviet Union. The “practical” Stalin also won because he appeared better able than the brilliant Trotsky to relate Marxian teaching to Soviet realities in the 1920s.
● As commissar of nationalities he built on Lenin’s idea of granting minority groups a certain degree of freedom in culture and language while maintaining rigorous political control through carefully selected local communists (multinational state). Stalin developed a theory of “socialism in one country” that more appealing to the majority of communists than Trotsky’s doctrine of “permanent revolution”.
● Stalin argued that the Russian-dominated Soviet Union had the ability to build socialism on its own while Trotsky maintained that socialism in the Soviet Union could succeed only if revolution occurred quickly throughout Europe. Trotsky’s views seemed to sell their country short and to promise risky conflicts with capitalist countries by recklessly encouraging revolutionary movements.
● Stalin’s willingness to break with the NEP and push socialism at home appealed to young militants (provided the party with a glimmer of hope against NEP). Stalin achieved absolute power between 1922 and 1927.
● First, Stalin allied with Trotsky’s personal enemies to crush Trotsky, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and eventually murdered in Mexico in 1940. Stalin aligned with the moderates, who wanted to go slow at home, to suppress Trotsky’s radical followers and third, having defeated all the radicals, he turned against his allies, the moderates, and destroyed them as well. Stalin’s final triumph came at the party congress of December 1927, which condemned all “deviation from the general party line” formulated by Stalin
● The party congress of 1927, which ratified Stalin’s seizure of power, marked the end of the NEP and the beginning of the era of socialist five-year plans; the first five-year plan had staggering economic objectives (total industrial output increases by 250%). Heavy industry, the preferred sector, was to grow even faster (steel production). Agricultural production was slated to increase by 150 percent and one-fifth of the peasants in the Soviet Union were scheduled to give up private plots and join socialist collective farms (by 1930 economic and social change swept the country).
● Stalin unleashed his “second revolution” for a variety of interrelated reasons. There were ideological considerations and since the country had recovered economically and their rule was secure, they burned to stamp out the NEP’s private traders, independent artisans, and few well-to-do peasants. A new socialist offensive seemed necessary if the economy were to grow rapidly. There were political considerations and internationally, there was the old problem of catching up with the advanced and capitalist nations of the West.
● Domestically, there was what communist writers of the 1920s called the “cursed problem”—the problem of the peasants; for centuries, the peasantry had wanted to own the land and finally they had it and sooner or later, the communists reasoned that peasants would become conservative capitalists and pose a threat to regime. Therefore, Stalin decided on a preventive war against the peasantry (absolutism).
● The war was collectivization—the forcible consolidation of individual peasants farms into large, state-controlled enterprises and beginning in 1929, peasants all over the Soviet Union were ordered to give up their land and join these collective farms.
● As for the kulaks, the better-off peasants, Stalin instructed party workers to “liquidate them as a class” and stripped of land, the kulaks were generally not permitted to join the collective farms and many starved or were deported to forced-labor camps; the term kulak soon meant any peasant who opposed the new system.
● Forced collectivization of the peasants led to economic and human disaster. Large numbers of peasants slaughtered their animals and burned their cops in sullen, hopeless protest, and between 1929 and 1933, the number of livestock fell by at least half; nor were the state-controlled collective farms more productive. The output of grain barely increased between 1928 and 1938 (identical to 1913).
● Communist economists had expected collectivized agriculture to pay for new factories but instead, the state had to invest heavily in agriculture and was unable to make any substantial financial contribute to industrial development at first. Collectivization created human-made famine in 1932 and 1933 (many perished). Collectivization was a political victory of sorts for the Soviet Union government.
● Regimented and indoctrinated as employees of the all-powerful state, the peasants were no longer even a potential political threat to Stalin and the Communist party. The state was assured of grain for bread for urban workers, who were much more important politically than the peasants (collective farmers had to meet quotas). The industrial side of the five-year plans was more successful—quite spectacular. The output of industry doubled in the first five-year plan and doubled in the second; No other major country had ever achieved such rapid industrial growth.
● Heavy industry led the way, consumer industry grew slowly, and steel production (Stalin means “man of steel”) increased roughly 500 percent from 1928 to 1937. Industrial growth also went hand in hand with urban development and more than twenty-five million people migrated to cities during the 1930s in the Soviet Union. The great industrialization drive was achieved at enormous sacrifice and the creation of new factories required a great increase in total investment and a sharp decrease in consumption (few nations had ever invested more than one-sixth of their net national income); Soviet planners decreed more than one-third of the net income be devoted and that meant money being collect by hidden sales taxes. There was therefore no improvement in average standard of living and average wages apparently purchases only about half as many goods in 1932 as in 1928.
● Two other factors contributed to rapid growth: labor discipline and foreign engineers. Between 1930 and 1932, trade unions lost most of their power and the government could assign workers to any job and individuals could not move. Foreign engineers were hired to plan and construct many of the new factories and highly skilled American engineers were particularly important until newly trained Soviet experts began to replace them after 1932 (surge of socialist industry).
● The aim of Stalin’s five-year plans was to create a new kind of society and human personality as well as a strong industrial economy and a powerful army for the state. Once everything was owned by the state, they believed, a socialist society and a new kind of human being would inevitably emerge and this had both good and bad aspects. The most frightening aspect of society was brutal, unrestrained police terrorism; first directed against the peasants after 1929, terror was increasingly turned on leading Communists, powerful administrators, and ordinary people for no reason.
● In the early 1930s, the top members of the party and government were Stalin’s obedient servants but there was some grumbling in the party. After Stalin’s wife complained at a small gathering in November 1932, she died that same night, apparently by her own hand and in late 1934 Stalin’s number-two man, Sergei Kirov, was suddenly and mysteriously murdered. In August 1936, sixteen prominent old Bolsheviks confessed to all manner of plots against Stalin in spectacular public trials in Moscow and then in 1937 lesser party officials and newer henchmen were arrested; in addition to party members, union officials, managers, intellectuals, army officers, and citizens were struck. In all, at least eight million people were probably arrested.
● Stalin’s mass purges were baffling and many explanations have been given for them. Possibly Stalin believed that the old Communists, like the peasants under NEP, were a potential threat to be wiped out in a preventative attack.
● Some prisoners were cruelly tortured and warned that their loved ones would also die if they did not confess (Stalin’s bloodbath weakened the government/army). Others see the terror as an aspect of the fully developed totalitarian state, which must by its nature always be fighting real or imaginary enemies (message).
● Another aspect of life in the 1930s was constant propaganda and indoctrination. Party activists lectured workers in factories and peasants on collective farms, while newspapers, films, and radio broadcasts endlessly recounted achievements. Art and literature became highly political (“engineers of human minds”). Writers who could effectively combine creativity and political propaganda often lived better than top members of the political elite (glorified Russian nationalism). Stalin seldom appeared in public, but his presence was everywhere and although the government persecuted religion and turned churches into “museums of atheism,” the state had both Marxism-Leninism and Joseph Stalin.
● Life was hard in Stalin’s Soviet Union and mass of people lived primarily on black bread and wore old, shabby clothing (constant shortages in the stores and in housing). A relatively lucky family received one room for all its members and shared both a kitchen and a toilet with others on the same floor as that family (average 4 per room). Idealism and ideology had real appeal for many communists, who saw themselves heroically building the world’s first socialist society while capitalism crumbled.
● On a more practical level, Soviet workers did receive some important social benefits, such as old-age pensions, free medical services, free education and day-care centers. The keys to improving one’s position were specialized skills and technical education. Industrialization required massive numbers of train experts, such as skilled workers, engineers and plant managers (state provided tremendous incentives). The technical elite joined with the political and artistic elites in a new upper class, who members were rich, powerful, and insecure, especially during the purges
● Marxists had traditionally believed that both capitalism and the middle-class husband exploited women and the Russian Revolution of 1917 immediately proclaimed complete equality of rights for women (in the 1920s divorce and abortion available). Women were encouraged to work outside the home and liberate themselves sexually. After Stalin came to power, sexual and familial liberation was played down and the most lasting changes for women involved work and education. Young women were constantly told that they had to be fully equal to men, that they could and should do anything men could do (peasant women enjoyed equality on collective farms with the advent of the five-year plans).
● Most of the opportunities open to men through education were also open to women and determined women pursued their studies and entered the ranks of the better-paid specialists in industry and science (medicine became women’s job). Stalinist society gave women great opportunities but demanded great sacrifices. The vast majority of women simply had to work outside because wages were so low that its was almost impossible for a family to live only on the husband’s wages. Most of the Soviet men in the 1930s still considered the home and the children the woman’s responsibility (men continued to monopolize the best jobs).
● In the early twentieth century Italy was a liberal state with civil rights and a constitutional monarchy and on the eve of WW I, the parliamentary regime finally granted universal male suffrage but serious problems existed in Italy. Much of the Italian population was still poor and many peasants were more attached to their villages and local interests than to the national state. The papacy, many devout Catholics, conservatives, and landowners remained strongly opposed to liberal institutions and to the heirs of Cavour and Garibaldi, the middle-class lawyers and politicians who ran the country for their own benefit. Class differences were also extreme and a revolutionary socialists movement developed and only in Italy did the radical left win go the Socialist party gain the leadership as early as 1912 (Socialists party from Italy opposed war in beginning). The war worsened the political situation (having fought on the side of the Allies for purposes of territorial expansions, the parliamentary government bitterly disappointed Italian nationalists with Italy’s modest gains at Versailles; no social and land reform)
● The Russian Revolution inspired and energized Italy’s revolutionary socialist movement and the radical workers and peasants began occupying factories and seizing land in 1920, scaring and mobilizing the property-owning class. After the war, the pope lifted his ban on participation by Catholics in Italian politics and a strong Catholic party quickly emerged and thus by 1921 revolutionary socialists, antiliberal conservatives, and property owners were all opposed—through for different reason—to the liberal parliamentary government
● Into the crosscurrents of unrest and fear stepped Benito Mussolini (1883-1945). Influenced by antidemocratic cults of violent action, the young Mussolini urged that Italy join the Allies, or which he was expelled from the Socialist party. Returning home after being wounded at the front in 1917, Mussolini began organizing bitter war veterans into a band of fascists (“a union of forces”). Mussolini’s program was a radical combination of nationalists and socialists demands, including territorial expansion, benefits for workers, and land reform
● It competed directly with the well-organized Socialist party and failed to get off; when Mussolini saw that his violent verbal assaults on rival Socialists won him growing support from conservatives and middle classes, he shifted gears in 1920. Mussolini and his growing private army of Clack Shirts began to grow violent; typically fascists would sweep down on a few isolated Socialist organizers but soon socialist newspapers, union halls and local Socialist headquarters were destroyed. Mussolini’s toughs pushed Socialists out of the city governments of northern Italy. Mussolini allowed his followers to convince themselves that they were not just opposing the “reds” but also making a real revolution of their own (dynamic).
● With the government breaking down in 1922, Mussolini stepped forward as the savior of order and property and striking a conservative note in his speeches and gaining the sympathetic neutrality of army leaders, Mussolini demanded the resignation of the existing government and his own appointment by the king. Victor Emmanuel II asked Mussolini to form a new cabinet, Mussolini seized power “legally” and was granted dictatorial authority for one year by king and parliament.
● Mussolini became dictator on the strength of Italians’ rejection of parliamentary government coupled with fears of Soviet-style revolution (power not clear until 1924) Some of his dedicated supports pressed for a “second revolution” but Mussolini’s ministers included conservatives, moderates, and reform-minded Socialists. A new electoral law was passed giving two-thirds of the representatives in the parliament to the party that won the most votes, a change that allowed the Fascists and their allies to win an overwhelming majority in the elections of 1924. Shortly after, five of Mussolini’s fascist kidnapped and murdered Giacomo Matteotti, the leader of the Socialists in the parliament (opposition demanded violence cease).
● Declaring his desire to make the nation Fascist, he imposed a series of repressive measures; freedom of the press was abolished, elections were fixed, and the government ruled by decrees (Mussolini arrested his political opponents) and moreover, he created a fascist youth movement, fascist labor unions/organizations. By the end of 1926, Italy was a one-party dictatorship under Mussolini’s leadership but Mussolini did not complete the establishment of a modern totalitarian state. His Fascist party never destroyed the old power structure, as the communists did in the Soviet Union, or succeeded in dominating it, as the Nazis did in Germany.
● Interested primarily in personal power, Mussolini was content to compromise with the old conservative classes that controlled the army, the economy, and state. Mussolini never tried to purge these classes and controlled and propagandized labor but left big business to regulate itself (no land reform occurred in Italy). Mussolini also drew increasing support from the Catholic church and in the Lateran Agreement of 1929, he recognized the Vatican as a tiny independent state and he agreed to give the church heavy financial support (pope urged Italians to support).
● Mussolini abolished divorce and told women to say at home and produce children and to promote that goal, he decreed a special tax on bachelors in 1934 and in 1938 women were limited by law to a maximum of 10 percent of the better-paying job in industry and government (no change in attitude toward Italian women under fascism). Mussolini’s government did not pass racial laws until 1938 and did not persecute Jews savagely until late in the Second World War, when Italy was under Nazi control. Nor did Mussolini establish a ruthless state police (never a totalitarian government).
● Nazism grew out of many complex developments: extreme nationalism and racism; these two ideas captured the mind of the young Hitler who dominated Nazism. Adolf Hitler was born in Austria but after dropping out of high school following the death of his father he left for Vienna to become an artist. Denied admission to the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, the dejected Hitler stayed in Vienna and found many beliefs that guided his later life.
● In Vienna Hitler soaked up extreme German nationalism (Austro-German nationalists believed Germans to be a superior people and natural rulers of central Europe; advocated union with Germany and expulsion of “inferior people”). Hitler was deeply impressed by Vienna’s mayor, Karl Lueger (“Christian socialist”). With the help of the Catholic trade unions, he had succeeded in winning the support of the little people of Vienna for an attack on capitalism and liberalism.
● Lueger showed Hitler the potential of anti-capitalist and antiliberal propaganda. From Lueger and others, Hitler absorbed virulent anti-Semitism, racism, and hatred of the Slavs (particularly inspired by racism of Lanz von Liebenfels). Liebenfels stressed the superiority of Germanic races, the inevitability of racial conflict, and the inferiority of the Jews (anticipated policies of the Nazi state).
● Anti-Semitism and racism became Hitler’s most passionate convictions; the Jews, he claimed, directed an international conspiracy of finance capitalism and Marxian socialism against German culture, German unity, and the German race.
● After he moved to Munich in 1913 to avoid the draft, Hitler greeted the outbreak of the First World War as salvation and the struggle and discipline of war gave life meaning and Hitler served bravely as a dispatch carrier on the western front. When Germany was suddenly defeated in 1918, Hitler’s world was shattered as war was his reason for living; convinced that Jews and Marxists had “stabbed Germany in the back,” he vowed to fight on and his speeches began to attract attention.
● In later 1919 Hitler joined a tiny extremist group in Munich called the German Workers’ party and in addition to denouncing Jews, Marxists, and democrats, the German Workers’ party promised unity under a German “national socialism” which would abolish injustices of capitalism and create a “people’s community”.
● By 1921 Hitler had gained absolute control of this small but growing party and Hitler was already a master of mass propaganda and political showmanship. Hitler’s most effective tool was the mass rally, a kind of political revival meeting and when he arrived he would work the audience with attacks on the Versailles treaty, the Jews, the war profiteers, and Germany’s Weimar Republic. Party membership multiplied tenfold after early 1922 and in late 1923 Hitler decided on an armed uprising in Munich; Hitler found an ally in General Ludendorff.
● After Hitler had overthrown the Bavarian government, Ludendorff was supposed to march on Berlin with Hitler’s support but the plot was poorly organized and it was crushed by the police and back up by the army, in less than a day. Hitler was arrested, tried, and sentenced to five years in prison.
● At his trial, Hitler violently denounced the Weimar Republic and skillfully presented his own program and in doing so, gained enormous publicity and attention; Hitler concluded that he had to undermine, rather than overthrow, the government, that he had to used its democratic framework to intimidate the opposition and come to power. Hitler forced his more violent supporters to accept his new strategy and he used his brief prison term (released in less than a year) to dictate Mein Kampf. There he expounded on his basic themes: “race,” with a stress on anti-Semitism; “living space,” with a sweeping vision of war and conquered territory; and the leader-dictator (Fuhrer) with unlimited, arbitrary power.
● In the years of prosperity and relative stability between 1924 and 1929, Hitler concentrated on building his National Socialist German Workers’ party, or Nazi party. By 1928 the party had 100,000 highly disciplined members under Hitler’s absolute control and to appeal to the middle classes, Hitler de-emphasized the anti-capitalist elements of national socialism and vowed to fight Bolshevism.
● The Nazi were still a small group in 1928 and only received 2.6 percent of the vote in the general elections and twelve seats in the Reichstag (parliament). There the Nazi deputies pursued the legal strategy of using democracy to destroy democracy (Hitler’s talented future minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels).
● In 1929 the Great Depression began striking down economic prosperity as unemployment jumped from 1.3 million in 1929 to 5 million in 1930; industrial production fell by ½ between 1929 and 1932 (by 1932, 43 percent unemployed); No factor contributed more to Hitler’s success than the economic crisis (promises). Hitler pitched his speeches especially to the middle and lower middle class business people, office workers, artisans and peasants (left conservative/moderate parties). Simultaneously, Hitler worked hard to win the support of two key elite groups. Hitler promised big business leaders that he would restore their depression-shattered profits, by breaking Germany’s labor movement even reducing wages. He reassured top army leaders that the Nazis would overturn the Versailles settlement and rearm Germany (successfully followed Mussolini’s fascist recipe). Hitler won at least the tacit approval of powerful conservatives.
● The Nazis appealed strongly to German youth (mass movement of young Germans). Hitler and most of his top aides were much younger than other leading German politicians (“National Socialism is the organized will of the youth”). National recovery, exciting and rapid change, and personal advancement: these were the appeals of Nazism to the millions and millions of German youth. In the election of 1930, the Nazis won 6.5 million votes and 107 seats, which made them second in strength only to the Social Democrats, the moderate socialists; as economic and political situation deteriorated, Hitler and the Nazis kept promising that they would bring economy recovery/national unity (largest party in Reichstag 1932).
● Another reason Hitler came to power was breakdown of democratic government as early as May 1930; unable to gain support of a majority in the Reichstag, Chancellor Heinrich Bruning convinced the president General Hindenburg, to authorize rule by decree (before, only used in emergency but Bruning intended to use it indefinitely). Bruning was determined to overcome the economic crisis by cutting back government spending and forcing down prices and wages (intensified economic collapse and convinced lower middle classes that the republican country’s leaders were corrupt).
● After President Hindenburg forced Bruning to resign in May 1932, the new government, headed by Franz von Papen, continued to rule by decree. The continuation of the struggle between the Social Democrats and Communists was another aspect of the breakdown of democratic government. The Communists refused to cooperate with the Social Democrats even after the elections of 1932; German Communists were blinded by the hatred of Socialists and by ideology: the Communists believed that fascism was reactionary.
● Hitler’s rise represented the last agonies of monopoly capitalism and that a communist revolution would soon follow his taking of power. Socialist leaders pleaded for at least a temporary alliance with the Communists to block Hitler but to no avail and perhaps the Weimar Republic had gone too far.
● Finally, there was Hitler’s skill as a politician and as a master of mass propaganda and psychology, he had written in Mein Kampf that the masses were the “driving force of the most important changes in this world” and were driven by fanaticism. To arouse such hysterical fanaticism, he believed that all propaganda had to be limited to a few simple, endlessly repeated slogans (passionate, irrational oratory).
● At the same time, Hitler continued to excel at dirty, back-room politics and in the complicated in-fighting in 1932, he succeeded in gaining additional support from key people in army and big business (thought they could use Hitler for own advantage)
● There would be only two other National Socialists and nine solid conservatives as ministers, and in such a coalition government, they reasoned, Hitler could be used and controlled; on January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg
● Hitler moved rapidly and skillfully to establish an unshakable dictatorship. His first step was to continue using terror and threats to gain more power while maintaining legal appearances; he immediately called for new elections and applied the enormous power of the government to restrict his opponents. In the midst of a violent electoral campaign, the Reichstag building was partly destroyed by fire and Hitler screamed that the Communist party was responsible. On the strength of this accusation, he convinced President Hinenburg to sign dictatorial emergency acts that practically abolished the freedom of speech and assembly as well as most of the basic personal liberties. When the Nazis won only 44 percent of the vote in the elections, Hitler quickly outlawed the Communist party and arrested its parliamentary representatives.
● On March 23, 1933, the Nazis pushed through the Reichstag the so-called Enabling Act, which gave Hitler absolute dictatorial power for four years (only Social Democrats voted against this bill, for Hitler blackmailed the Center Catholic party). Hitler and the Nazis moved to smash or control all independent organizations. Hitler and his propagandists constantly proclaimed that their revolution was legal and constitutional and this stress on legality, coupled with divide-and-conquer techniques, disarmed the opposition until it was too late for effective resistance. The systematic subjugation of independent organizations and the apparent creation of a totalitarian state had massive repercussions; the Social Democratic and Center parties were soon dissolved and Germany became a one-party state.
● Only the Nazi party was legal, elections were shams, Hitler and the Nazis took over the government bureaucracy that was intact, and created a series of overlapping Nazi part organizations responsible solely to Hitler. The resulting system of dual government was riddled with rivalries, contra-dictions, and inefficiencies; Nazi state lacked the all-compassing unity. The fractured system suited Hitler as he could play the established bureaucracy against his personal “party government” and maintain his freedom of action.
● In the economic sphere, on big decision outlawed strikes and abolished independent labor unions, which were replaced by the Nazi Labor Front. Professional people—doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers—saw their previously independent organizations swallowed up in Nazi organizations; publishing houses were put under Nazi control, and universities and writers were quickly controlled. Democratic, socialist, and Jewish literature was put on ever-growing blacklists. Modern art and architecture were prohibited and life became anti-intellectual.
● Only the army retained independence, and Hitler moved brutally and skillfully to establish his control there, too; he realized that the army as well as big business was suspicious of the Nazi storm troops (SA), the quasi-military band of three million toughs in brown shirts who had fought communists and beaten up Jews.
● The storm troopers expected top positions in the army and even talked of a “second revolution” against capitalism; Hitler decided that the SA leaders had to be eliminated and on the night of June 30, 1934, Hitler’s elite personal guard (SS) arrested and shot without trial a thousand SA leaders and political enemies. Army leaders and President Hindenburg responded to the purge with congratulatory telegrams and shortly thereafter army leaders whore a binding oath. The SS grew rapidly and under its methodical, inhuman leader, Heinrich Himmler, the SS joined with the political police, the Gestapo, to expand its network of special courts and concentration camps; no one was safe.
● From the beginning, Jews were a special object of Nazi persecution and by the end of 1934, most Jewish lawyers, doctors, professors, civil servants, and musicians had lost their jobs and the right to practice their professions; in 1935 the infamous Nuremberg Laws classified as Jewish as anyone having at least one Jewish grandparent and deprived Jews of all rights of citizenship (by 1938 ¼ of Germany’s Jews had left). Following the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish boy trying desperately to strike out at persecution, the attack on Jews accelerated. A well-organized wave of violence destroyed homes, synagogues, and businesses, after which German Jews were rounded up and made to pay for the damage. It became very difficult for Jews to leave Germany; many Germans went along or looked the other way reflecting strong popular support Hitler’s government enjoyed.
● Hitler had promised the masses economic recovery—“work and bread”—and he did. Breaking with Bruning’s do-nothing policies, Hitler immediately launched a large public works program to pull Germany out of the depression. Work began on superhighways, offices, gigantic sports stadiums, and public housing; in 1936 Germany turned toward rearmament, and government spending began to concentrate on the military (unemployment dropped steadily). By 1938 there was a shortage of workers, and women eventually took many jobs previously denied them by the antifeminist Nazis (everyone had to work and between 1932 and 1938 standard of living for the worker increased moderately. The profits of business rose sharply and economic recovery was tangible evidence in their daily lives that the excitement and dynamism of Nazi rule was positive.
● For masses of ordinary German citizens, who were not Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, or homosexuals, Hitler’s government meant greater equality and more opportunities (position of traditional German elites strong). Barriers between classes were generally high and Hitler’s rule introduced changes that lowered barriers (stiff educational requirements favoring well-to-do relaxed).
● The new Nazi elite included many young and poorly educated dropouts and Nazis tolerated privilege and wealth only as long as they served the needs of the party. Millions of modest middle-class and lower-middle-class people felt that Germany was becoming more open and equal, as Nazi propagandists constantly claimed. It is significant that the Nazis shared with the Italian fascists the stereotypic view of women as housewives and mothers (pressure of war mobilized German women).
● Hitler’s rapid nationalism continued to appeal to Germans after 1933 and since the wars against Napoleon, many Germans had believed in a special mission for them. When Hitler went from one foreign triumph to another and a great German empire seemed within reach, the majority of the population was delighted.
● Not all Germans supported Hitler, however, and a number of German groups actively resisted him after 1933 (tens of thousands of political enemies were imprisoned). Opponents of the Nazis pursued various goals and under totalitarian conditions they were never unified (communists and social democrats in the trade unions); after 1935, a second group do opponents arose in the Catholic and Protestant churches; finally in 1938, some high-ranking army officers plotted against him, unsuccessfully.
Feudalism
● Feudalism was a social system that existed in Europe during the Middle Ages in which people worked and fought for nobles who gave them protection and the use of land in return.
● This system followed the general trend of a weak monarch struggling to control a group of powerful nobles, who were the real power in complete control of their peasants and land.
The Hundred Years War (pp. 387-393)
● An assembly of French barons excluded Isabella and her son Edward III from the French throne. Instead they crowned Philip VI of Valois. Edward rejected this decision, upsetting feudal order.
● In the Treaty of Paris 1259, the English king agreed to become vassal of the French crown for the duchy of Aquitaine. Philip VI of France confiscated the duchy in 1337, sparking the Hundred Years’ War.
● To increase their independent power, French vassals of Philip VI transferred their loyalty to Edward III in order to thwart the centralizing goals of the French crown.
● Representative assemblies—the English Parliament, German diets, and Spanish cortes—flourished, laying the foundations for the representative institutions of modern liberal-democratic nations.
● Edward III’s need for money to pay for the war compelled him to summon the knights and burgesses as well as the great barons. The knights and burgesses—the Commons—recognized their mutual interests and began to meet apart from the great lords. A parliamentary statute of 1341 required that all nonfeudal levies have parliamentary approval.
● In France, the monarchy found that the large gatherings of the nobility threatened the king’s power. People tended to think of themselves as Breton or Norman, not French. Provincial assemblies valued their independence and did not want a national assembly.
● The Hundred Years’ War did, however, promote the growth of nationalism in both England and France.
Politics and State in the Renaissance (pp. 441-446)
● During the period of the Hundred Years’ War, no ruler in Western Europe was able to provide a strong monarchy. The power of feudal nobilities weakened the centralizing work of the monarch. In the Renaissance era, rulers began the work of reducing violence, curbing unruly nobles, and establishing domestic order.
● The dictators and oligarchs of the Italian city-states, together with Louis XI of France, Henry VII of England, and Ferdinand of Aragon, stressed that monarchy was the one institution that linked all classes and peoples within definite territorial boundaries. They emphasized royal majesty and royal sovereignty and insisted on the respect and loyalty of all subjects.
● These ‘new monarchs’ ruthlessly suppressed opposition and rebellion, especially from the nobility.
● Charles VII, crowned at Reims with the help of Joan of Arc, reconciled the Burgundians and Armagnacs and ended their civil war. He also expelled the English from almost all of France.
● Charles reorganized the royal council, giving increased influence to middle-class men, and strengthened royal finances through taxes such as on land and salt.
● Charles also created the first permanent royal army by establishing regular companies of cavalry and archers—recruited, paid, and inspected by the state.
● Charles published the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, asserting the superiority of a general council over the papacy, giving the French crown major control over the appointment of bishops, and depriving the pope of French ecclesiastical revenues. Greater control over the church and the army helped to consolidate the authority of the French crown.
● Charles’s son Louis XI, the ‘Spider King,’ facing the problem of reducing feudal disorder, promoted new industries, welcomed foreign craftsmen, and entered into commercial treaties with other countries.
● Louis used the revenues raised through these economic activities and severe taxation to improve the army, which he used to stop aristocratic brigandage and cut into urban independence.
● With a few timely deaths, Louis XI gained several French territories. The marriage of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany added the large western duchy of Brittany to the state, favoring the monarchy’s goal of expanding royal authority and unifying the kingdom.
● In the Concordat of Bologna, the Pragmatic Sanction was rescinded and Pope Leo X recognized the French ruler’s right to select French bishops and abbots, allowing French kings to control the policies of church officials within the kingdom.
● In England, the aristocracy dominated the government of Henry IV, and indulged in local violence. The houses of York (white) and Lancaster (red) waged the civil war known as the War of the Roses, hurting trade, agriculture, and domestic industry.
● The Yorkist Edward IV began establishing domestic tranquility. He defeated Lancastrian forces and reconstructed the monarchy. With his brother Richard III and Henry VII, he worked to restore royal prestige, to crush the power of the nobility, and to establish order and law at the local level.
● Dominated by baronial factions, Parliament was the arena where the nobility exerted its power—as long as the monarchy was dependent on the Lords and the Commons for revenue, the king had to call Parliament. Edward IV, therefore, avoided expensive wars and stopped depending on Parliament for money, undercutting aristocratic influence.
● Henry VII did summon several meetings of Parliament, but the center of royal authority was the royal council, which governed at the national level and included very few great lords—most representatives were middle-class.
● The royal council handled any business the king needed. It dealt with real or potential aristocratic threats through a judicial offshoot, the court of Star Chamber, which applied the principles of Roman law, and its methods were sometimes terrifying, but they effectively reduced aristocratic troublemaking.
● England, unlike Spain and France, had no standing army or professional civil service bureaucracy. It relied on the support of unpaid local officials, the justices of the peace. These landowners handled all the work of local government.
● The Tudors won the support of the influential upper middle class by promoting peace and social order. Henry VII rebuilt the monarchy and led the country to peace and prosperity, with the dignity and role of the royal majesty much enhanced.
● Despite the centuries-long reconquista to control the entire peninsula, Spain remained a loose confederation of separate kingdoms without a common cultural tradition, each maintaining its own cortes (parliament), laws, courts, and taxation.
● To curb the rebellious and warring aristocracy, Ferdinand and Isabella revived the hermandades, which were popular groups in the towns given authority to act as local police forces, repressing violence with savage punishments.
● The decisive step Ferdinand and Isabella took to curb aristocratic power was the restructuring of the royal council—aristocrats were excluded, and only people of middle-class background were appointed.
● Through a diplomatic alliance with the Spanish pope Alexander VI, the Spanish monarchs secured the right to appoint bishops in Spain and gained the title of ‘Catholic Kings of Spain’—creating, in effect, a national church.
● With vast numbers of Muslims, Jews, and Moorish Christians, medieval Spain represented the most diverse country in Europe.
● Religious faiths that differed from the official state religion were considered politically dangerous. However, anti-Semitism in Spain rose more from popular sentiment than from royal policies.
● King Ferdinand feared urban rioting and disorder, but he knew the Crown would lose popular support if he protected the conversos. Therefore he sought papal permission to set up the Inquisition in Spain; if its actions provoked public criticism, the papacy could be blamed.
● Spanish anti-Semitism emerged at the very time a Spanish national feeling was emerging. Jews—with their supposed plans to take over all public offices in Spain—represented a grave threat to national unity. Although the Inquisition was a religious institution, it was controlled by the Crown and served primarily as a politically unifying tool.
● When Charles V’s son Philip II joined Portugal to the Spanish crown, the Iberian Peninsula was at last politically united. The various kingdoms, however, were administered separately.
Germany and the Protestant Reformation (pp. 466-470)
● Unlike Spain, France, and England, the German Empire lacked a strong central power. The Golden Bull of 1356 legalized what had long existed—government by an aristocratic federation, with each of the seven electors gaining virtual sovereignty in his own territory, reducing the central authority of the emperor.
● Charles V was a vigorous defender of Catholicism, and denied the possibility of two religions coexisting peacefully in one territory. Thus many princes used the religious issue to extend their financial and political independence.
● The Habsburg-Valois Wars advanced the cause of Protestantism and promoted the political fragmentation of the German Empire.
● Charles agreed to the Peace of Augsburg, which officially recognized Lutheranism. Each prince was permitted to determine his territory’s religion.
Politics, Religion, and War (pp. 490-502)
● In France, the population losses cause by the plague and the Hundred Years’ War had created such as labor shortage that serfdom almost disappeared. Cash rents replaced feudal rents and servile obligations, benefitting the peasantry. This declining buying power of money hurt the nobility.
● Francis I and his son Henry II governed through a small, efficient council, and great nobles held only titular authority in the provinces. The whole of France was under the jurisdiction of the royal law, and French was the language of those courts—a powerful centralizing act.
● The Concordat of Bologna established Catholicism as the state religion.
● The feebleness of the French monarchy under Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III was the seed from which the weeds of civil violence sprang. The French nobility took advantage of this monarchical weakness. Just as the German princes in the Holy Roman Empire had adopted Lutheranism as a means of opposition to Emperor Charles V, so French nobles frequently adopted the reformed religion as a religious cloak for their independence.
● The Reformation thus led to a resurgence of feudal disorder. Armed clashes between Catholic royalist lords and Calvinist antimonarchical lords occurred in many parts of France.
● The Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre led to fighting called the War of Three Henrys, a civil conflict among factions led by the Catholic Henry of Guise, the Protestant Henry of Navarre, and King Henry III.
● A small group of moderates of both faiths called politiques believed that only the restoration of strong monarchy could reverse the trend toward collapse, and favored accepting the Huguenots as an officially recognized and organized pressure group.
● Protestant Henry of Navarre, who above all wanted a strong and united France, was received into the Roman Catholic Church because the majority of the French were Roman Catholic.
● Henry IV published the Edict of Nantes, granting freedom of public worship to 150 fortified towns in France and restoring internal peace in France.
● Each of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands possessed historical liberties: each was self-governing and enjoyed the right to make its own laws and collect its own taxes. In addition to important economic connections, only the recognition of a common ruler in the person of Emperor Charles V united the provinces, giving them a limited sense of federation.
● Charles V abdicated and gave Spain and the Low Countries to his son Philip, who could speak neither French nor Flemish, and Netherlanders never forgot that Philip was Spanish.
● In most of the cities of the Netherlands there was a strong, militant minority of Calvinists. The seventeen provinces possessed a large middle-class population, and the reformed religion had a powerful appeal to the middle class because of its intellectual seriousness and emphasis on labor.
● From Madrid Philip II sent twenty thousand Spanish troops under the duke of Alva to pacify the Low Countries. Alva interpreted this to mean the ruthless extermination of religious and political dissidents, and opened his own tribunal, called the Council of Blood.
● For ten years civil war raged in the Netherlands between Catholics and Protestants and between the seventeen provinces and Spain. The seventeen provinces united under the leadership of Prince William of Orange, called ‘the Silent.’
● Philip II then sent his nephew Alexander Farnese to crush the revolt once and for all. He fought by patient sieges, and one by one the cities of the south fell. The seven northern provinces, led by Holland, formed the Union of Utrecht and declared their independence from Spain. In these provinces the commercial aristocracy possessed the predominant power.
● The war in the Low Countries badly hurt the English economy. The murder of William the Silent eliminated not only a great Protestant leader but also the chief military check of the Farnese advance. Third, the collapse of Antwerp appeared to signal a catholic sweep through the Netherlands. For these reasons Queen Elizabeth pumped money and troops into the Protestant cause in the Low Countries.
● On the issues of the Inquisition and religious toleration, Philip II was completely inflexible. He identified toleration with the growth of heresy, civil disorder, violence, and bloodshed, and he was determined to crush heresy in the Low Countries.
● In England, Mary, Queen of Scots, became implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Philip, hoping to reunite England with Catholic Europe, gave the conspiracy his full backing. Mary was discovered and beheaded. Pope Sixtus V promised to pay Philip 1 million ducats the moment Spanish troops landed in England.
● The Spanish Armada met an English fleet in the Channel, and a combination of storms and squalls, spoiled good and rank water, inadequate Spanish ammunition, and English fire ships gave England the victory.
● This defeat prevented Philip II from reimposing religious unity on Western Europe by force. He did not conquer England, and Elizabeth continued her financial and military support of the Dutch.
● Beginning with the defenestration of Prague, the Thirty Years’ War was characterized by civil war in Bohemia between the Catholic League and the Protestant Union; the Lutheran victories under Gustavus Adolphus; and French support of German Protestant princes.
● The Peace of Westphalia ended conflicts over religious faiths, recognizing the sovereign, independent authority of more than three hundred German princes. The imperial power of the Holy Roman Empire was severely limited, but it continued to function as a federation.
Absolutism
● Absolutism was a political theory that absolute power should be vested in one or more rulers.
● This system followed the general trend of a strong, absolute monarch who controlled the entire state by the use of an appointed bureaucracy solely accountable to the king.
Absolutism (pp.532-547)
● In the absolutist state, kings claimed to rule by divine right, meaning that they were responsible to God alone. Kings became legislators—they made law—and because of that sovereignty was embodied in the person of the king.
● Absolute rulers tried to control competing jurisdictions, institution, or interest group in their territories. They regulated religious sects. They abolished the liberties long held by certain groups or areas.
● Absolute kings also secured the cooperation of the one class that had posed the greatest threat to monarchy, the nobility. Medieval governments, restrained by the church, the feudal nobility, and their own financial limitations, had been able to exert none of these controls.
● The absolutist solution to financial problems was the creation of new state bureaucracies that directed the economic life of the country in the interests of the king, either forcing taxes even higher or advising alternative methods of raising revenue
● Bureaucracies were appointed by and solely accountable to the king, sometimes drawn from the middle class, sometimes from the nobility.
● Absolute monarchs also maintained permanent standing armies. Medieval armies had been raised by feudal lords for particular war or campaigns, after which the troops were disbanded. Later, monarchs alone recruited and maintained armies, in peacetime as well as wartime. Armies became basic features of absolutist states.
● Absolute rulers also invented new methods of compulsion, concerning themselves with the private lives of potentially troublesome subjects, often through the use of secret police.
● Henry VI inherited an enormous mess. Civil wars, poor harvests, and low commercial activity left nobles, officials, merchants, and peasants wanting peace, order, and stability. Henry inaugurated a remarkable recovery.
● Henry VI converted to Catholicism, but kept Protestant confidence by issuing the Edict of Nantes and by appointing the devout Maximilien de Bethune of Sully as his chief minister. Henry also kept France at peace, sharply lowered taxes on the peasants and compensation with a fee on royal officials.
● Sully proved to be an effective administrator. He increased revenue with the revival of trade while lowering the number of taxes. Together, Henry and Sully restored public order in France and laid the foundation for economic prosperity.
● Marie de Medici headed the government for the child-king Louis XIII, and appointed Cardinal Richelieu to the council of ministers. He became the president of the council and later the first minister of the French crown.
● Richelieu used his strong influence over King Louis XIII to exalt the French monarchy as the embodiment of the French state.
● Richelieu’s policy was the subordination of all groups and institutions to the French monarchy. The French nobility had long constituted the foremost threat to the centralizing goals of the Crown and to a strong national state. He succeeded in reshuffling the royal council, eliminating potential power brokers, and proceeded to level castles, long symbols of feudal independence, and crush aristocratic conspiracies.
● Richelieu extended the use of the royal commissioners called intendants, dividing France into thirty-two districts and assigning a royal intendant to each. These were appointed directly by the monarch, to whom they were solely responsible. They recruited men for the army, supervised the collection of taxes, presided over the administration of law, and checked up on the local nobility.
● Henry IV’s lawyers had written the Law of Concord, known as the Edict of Nantes. However, it was temporary. All French people were theoretically still united under the king’s religion, Roman Catholicism.
● Louis XIII, with the unanimous consent of the royal council, decided to end Protestant military and political independence.
● Louis XIII and Richelieu faced serious urban protests due to real or feared unemployment, high food prices, grain shortages, new taxes, and oppressive taxation. Officials who attempted to collect taxes were seized and beaten to death.
● At first municipal and royal authorities responded feebly, lacking the means of strong action, and thus allowed the crowds to burn themselves out. Later on, municipal governments were better integrated into the national structure, and local authorities had the prompt military support of the Paris government. Those who publicly opposed government policies and taxes received swift and severe punishment.
● Richelieu’s foreign policy was aimed at the destruction of Habsburg power, and consequently he supported their enemies.
● According to Richelieu, a state secures its revenue through taxation, but the political and economic structure of France greatly limited the government’s ability to tax. France was still a collection of local economies and local societies dominated by local elites. Richelieu solved this problem by securing the cooperation of these elites. However, it was limited in this way.
● Richelieu’s raison d’etat was “Where the interests of the state are concerned, God absolves actions which, if privately committed, would be a crime.”
● Richelieu’s successor as chief minister and then regent was Cardinal Mazarin. He continued Richelieu’s centralizing policies, but his attempts to increase royal revenues led to the civil wars known as the Fronde. The state’s financial situation steadily weakened because entire regions of France refused to pay taxes. Popular rebellions led by aristocratic factions broke out in the provinces and spread to Paris. Civil order broke down completely. A vast increase in the state bureaucracy, representing an expansion of royal power, and new means of extracting money from working people incurred the bitter opposition of peasants and urban artisans.
● Louis XIV, the Sun King, achieved the cooperation of the nobility. Throughout France the nobility agreed to participate in projects that both exalted the monarchy and reinforced the aristocrats’ ancient prestige.
● Louis XIV installed his royal court at Versailles and required all the nobility of France to come live there for at least part of the year. The art and architectures of Versailles served as fundamental tools of state policy under Louis XIV. The king used it to overawe his subjects and foreign visitors. Also, French became the language of polite society and replaced Latin as the language of international learning.
● Louis utilized several councils of state, which he personally attended, and the intendants, who acted for the councils throughout France. Councilors of state came from the recently ennobled or the upper middle class.
● Louis XIV never called a meeting of the Estates General, and therefore the nobility had no means of united expression or action. Louis didn’t have a first minister either. He also made use of spying and terror with a secret police force and a system of informers.
● Finance proved the grave weakness in Louis XIV’s administration. The expanding professional bureaucracy, the court at Versailles, extensive military reform, and war cost a great deal of money.
● In many parts of France the method of collecting taxes consistently failed to produce enough revenue. Tax farmers pocketed the difference between what they raked in and what they handed over to the state. Also, an old agreement between the Crown and the nobility stated that the king could freely tax the common people as long as he didn’t tax the nobles. This meant that the nobles could not say how these taxes were to be used—however, Louis lost enormous potential revenue. The middle class also secured many tax exemptions.
● Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s central principle was that the wealth and the economy of France should serve the state, and he applied mercantilism rigorously to France. He attempted to accomplish self-sufficiency through state support for industries. He set up a system of state inspection and regulation. He also organized craftsmen into guilds and gave the masters absolute power over their workers. He encouraged foreign craftsmen and built roads and canals. He also abolished many domestic tariffs and enacted high foreign tariffs to protect French goods. He created a powerful merchant marine for the transportation of French goods. Colbert also worked to utilize the vast resources of Canada by sending four thousand French peasants to inhabit it.
● The absolutist state also attempted to control religion, and Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. The French monarchy had never intended religious toleration to be permanent. Louis XIV considered religious unity to be politically necessary. Also, the permission of religious liberty was not a popular policy, and its revocation won him enormous praise.
● Louis XIV appointed Francois le Tellier secretary of state for war, who created a professional army that was modern in the sense that the French state, rather than private nobles, employed the soldiers. The king himself took command and directly supervised all aspects and details of military affairs.
● Louis XIV continued the expansionist policy begun by Cardinal Richelieu. Encouraged by his successes in Flanders, Louis continued his aggression. However, the military revolution involving the reform and great expansion of the army required funding that the state could not meet.
● To raise revenue for the war effort, Louis published a declaration ordering that all the nation’s silverware be handed over to the mint. The weight of taxation, however, fell on the overburdened peasants.
● Rising grain prices, new taxes for war, and the constant pillaging of troops meant that France wanted peace at any price.
● The War of Spanish Succession started when Louis XIV acquired Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. Therefore, the English, Dutch, Austrians, and Prussians formed the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV.
● The war was concluded with the Peace of Utrecht, which represented the balance-of-power principle in operation, setting limits on the extent to which any one power could expand. It also marked the end of French expansionist policy.
The Rise of Austria and Prussia (pp. 569-576)
● Strong kings did, however, begin to emerge, war and threat of war aiding rulers in their attempts to build absolute monarchies. In this atmosphere of continual wartime emergency, monarchs reduced the political power of the landlord nobility. Leaving the nobles as masters of their peasants, the absolutist monarchs of Eastern Europe gradually gained and monopolized political power.
● The kings imposed and collected permanent taxes without consent, and also maintained permanent standing armies.
● In Austria, the Bohemian Estates—the representative body of different estates—had risen up in defense of Protestant rights. This revolt was crushed at the Battle of White Mountain, allowing Ferdinand II to drastically reduce the power of the Estates and confiscate the landholdings of many Protestant nobles and gave them to Catholics.
● A large portion of the Bohemian nobility as of recent foreign origin and loyal to the Habsburgs. With their help, the Habsburgs established strong direct rule over reconquered Bohemia. The condition of the peasantry worsened, and Protestantism was also stamped out.
● After the Thirty Years’ War Ferdinand III centralized the government and created a permanent standing army ready to put down internal opposition.
● The Turkish wars and the great expansionist strength of Austria strengthened the Habsburg army and promoted some sense of unity.
● The Habsburg state was composed of the territories of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, tied together primarily by their common rulers. Each had its own laws and political life.
● The Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VI stated that the Habsburg possessions were never to be divided and were always passed intact to a single heir.
● The Hungarian nobility, despite its reduced strength, effectively thwarted the full development of Habsburg absolutism. Hungarian nobles, many remaining Protestants, were determined to maintain as much independence and local control as possible. They rose in patriotic rebellion under Francis Rakoczy, who was defeated. However, the Habsburgs had to restore some of the traditional privileges of the Hungarian aristocracy.
● Eastern German princes lost political power and influence, while a revitalized landed nobility became the undisputed ruling class. The Hohenzollern family had little real princely power.
● The elector of Brandenburg had the right to help choose the Holy Roman emperor, but had no military strength whatsoever. He was a helpless spectator in the Thirty Years’ War. However, this war dramatically weakened the political power of the Estates—the representative assemblies of the realm.
● Each of the three provinces were inhabited by Germans, but each had its own Estates, who power had increased as the power of the rulers declined. They still however had the power to levy taxes.
● To pay for the permanent standing army he established, Frederick William forced the Estates to accept the introduction of permanent taxation without consent, and the Great Elector gained both financial independence and superior force. The size of the army leaped about tenfold.
● As in the formation of every absolutist state, war was a decisive factor. Also, the nobility had long dominated the government through the Estates, but it was unwilling to join the representatives of the towns in a consistent common front and was focused on its own rights and privileges.
● Frederick William I, the Soldiers’ King, created the best army in Europe for its size, and infused strict military values into a whole society. He also created a strong centralized bureaucracy, while the last traces of the parliamentary Estates and local self-government vanished.
● The king’s grab for power brought him into conflict with the noble landowners, the Junkers. The Prussian nobility, instead of being destroyed, was enlisted into the army.
Russia
● why the east was so far behind the west
● weak monarchs, ineffective empires, strong nobility
● few towns, high landed nobility,
● ineffective simple agrarian economy
● less productive human labor
● no middle class
● increasing serfdom
● Boyard nobility, had power over peasants
● Mongols- once ruled most of russia, brutally, eventually forced out,
● Mongol Yoke- ruling eastern slavs for 200 years, capital in Saray on lower Volga
● Autocracy- having power of sovereignty, government
● “Third Rome” Russia seen as third Rome by the tsars with their total power,
● Service Nobility- held tsar’s land with condition they serve in his army.
● Ivan the Terrible- 1533- 1584 transformed all nobility into service nobility, struck down ancient Muscovite boyars and their families,
● Cossacks- peasants who fled to the east and south and were out of tsar’s reach, free groups and outlaw armies,
● “Time of Troubles” 1598- 1613 after Ivans son theodore died with out an heir, russia fell into a time of war and stuggle for power, before Ivans nephew Michael Romanov elected
● Michael Romanov, peasants put back in serfdom but the nobility had much less military requirements
● “Old Believers” - people who spilt with the church for desire to be reunited with the greek orthodox tradition
● Peter the Great - part time army but had only 1 of 36 years at peace, had smaller more specialized army, obsessed with expansion and tsarist rule, got foreigners to make gov more effective, total absolute monarch
● made interlocking civilian and military bureaucracy, everyone started at bottom
● drafting was widespread, drafted for life,
● serfs mostly worked in gov. owned facotries for the military
● built navy
● educated russians began to evolve
● split between peasentry and elite widened
● selective westernization- Peter would bring back people from west to build stuff but teach russians so he could send them back and not expose russia to liberalism.
● Baroque- culture thrived in eastern europe
● used large building to show power, superiority
● St. Petersburg- built as modern baroque city by peter with thousands drafted to work on it, nobles required to built large houses there
● peasentry went down, elite went up
Constitutionalism
● Constitutionalism was the belief that a government should be based on a constitution.
Issue of Sovereignty
● Who gives the government is power?
● Monarch?
● Parliament?
● People? (John Locke- theory of people’s right to establish a government for their needs. If it failed they had the right to change it.)
Beginning of Constitutionalism - England
● 1603- Elizabeth I dies- religious flexibility ends
● 1603- James I ascends to throne- Scottish, bold, insisted on Divine Right, hated by people.
● 1629- Charles I disbands parliament- Gives himself rule over all including courts which upheld all his arbitrary non-parliamentary measures.
● 1637- Scottish Protestant Uprising- Scots revolt, Charles brings back parliament and Charles cannot get money from Parliament because he ticked them off and they do not trust him with army.
● 1641- Irish Catholic Uprising- Irish rebel to harsh rule since 1121 and ultimately this leads to English Civil War because of the fragmentation already rooted in Parliament.
● 1642- English Civil War- King Charles army of rural people and mercenaries begin fighting Parliaments militia. Stemmed from Charles ruling without Parliament.
● 1653-1658- Oliver Cromwell Protectorate- Military Government started divided into 12 districts each with a general. Economy similar to absolutism only time England ever had military government. Ends when cromwell dies.
● 1660- Charles II restored to monarchy- Both houses of parliament restored and invite Charles to take over. Church of England forced on people. Charles summoned parliament often so they would help him out with revenue.
● 1668-74 CABAL- middle men between king and parliament and secured rapport between them. gave way to royal ministries must answer to Commons
● 1670- Charles II secret agreement with Louis XIV- Charles relax persecution of Catholics in return for 200,000 pounds annually. He (charles would recatholocize England, help France vs. Dutch and convert himself.
● 1673?- James II violates Test Act- James appoints catholics to lots of government positions and courts who ruled in his favor. Issued declaration of religious freedom to save himself, didn’t work.
● 1688-1689- Glorious Revolution- William and Mary brought to throne, recognized superiority of Parliament, Bill of Rights Passed. Shared power with king-courts-parliament
● 1690- John Locke Second Treatise of Civil Government- people set up gov. and give it its sovereignty and you must obey if it is good, but if not you can change it.
● Bill of Rights-
● law made in parliament, could not be revoked by crown
● parliament had to be called atleast every 3 years
● no standing army in peacetime
● judges could not be threatened with removal
● natural rights preserved
● parliamentary discussions were free
● religious freedom but the monarch must always be protestant
● Cabinet System of government evolved
Dutch Constitutionalism
● 7 northern provinces of Netherlands fought for and won their independence from Spain as the Republic of United Provinces of the Netherlands confirmed by Peace of Westphalia 1648
● ‘golden age’ of the netherlands due to intellectual surge
● fishing, shipping, manufacturing, banking (protestant work ethic)
● Dutch East India Company, trade and global empire
● highest standard of living in europe, avoided famine
● strong middle class
● religious toleration (invited others)
● internationalism (led to colonial empire and banking)
● constitutional republic
● confederation of independent provinces led by Holland
● government controlled by oligarchy of merchants and bankers (Regents)
● States General- federal assembly, only power over foreign affairs
● Stadholder- represented each province to States General; governor
● Calvinist but tolerance attracted foreign capital and investment
Parliamentarianism
● Parliamentarianism is a system of democratic governance of a state in which the executive branch derives its legitimacy from the legislature, or parliament.
● Eighteenth-century British society was dominated by the landowning aristocracy. The Tory party, controlled by landed aristocracy, was fearful of radical movements and the same intense conservatism motivated the Tory government (balance). After 1815 the aristocracy defended its ruling position by repressing popular protest.
● In 1815, they began with the Corn Laws, which had regulated the foreign grain trade before (shortages of grain had occurred and agricultural prices skyrocketed but peace meant that grain could be imported again and prices went down). The new regulation prohibited the importation of foreign grain unless the price at home rose above 80 shillings per quarter (class-based interpretation). The Corn Laws led to protests and demonstrations by urban laborers and were supported by radical thinkers who campaigned for a reformed House of Commons.
● In 1817, government responded by temporarily suspending the rights of peaceable assembly and habeas corpus; two years later, Parliament passed the Six Acts controlling heavily taxed press and practically eliminated all mass meetings. These acts followed an orderly protest at Saint Peter’s Fields (‘Battle of Peterloo’).
● Ongoing industrial development strengthened the upper middle class. In the 1820s the Tory government moved in the direction of better urban direction, greater economic liberalism, and civil equality of Catholics (heavy tariff). The Whig party introduced an act to amend the representation of people.
● The Reform Bill of 1832 allowed the House of Commons to emerge as the all-important legislative body and new industrial areas of the country gained representation in the Commons and electoral districts were eliminated.
● The principal radical program was embodied in the “People’s Charter” of 1838 and Chartist movement (core demand was universal male suffrage, not female suffrage).
● Parliament rejected petitions for male suffrage and many working-class people joined with middle-class manufacturers in the Anti-Corn Law League (1839). The climax of the movement came in 1845, the year of the Ireland’s famine and to avert catastrophe Robert Peel and the Whigs repealed the Corn Laws in 1846.
● In 1847, the Tories passed the Ten Hours Act of 1847, which limited the workday for women and young people in factories to ten hours and healthy competition between the aristocracy and strong middle class was a factor in the peaceful evolution.
● Great Britain was under an effective two-party parliament that skillfully guided the country from classical liberalism to full-fledged democracy. The right to vote was granted to males of the solid middle class in 1832 but people, like John Stuart Mill (On Liberty), were uncertain about future extension. In 1867, Disraeli and the Conservatives extended the vote to all middle-class males and best-paid workers in order to gain new supporters.
● Third Reform Bill of 1884 gave the vote to almost every adult male. While the House of Commons drifted toward democracy, the House of Lords, between 1901-1910 ruled against labor unions in two important decisions. After the Liberal party came to power in 1906, the Lords vetoed several measures passed by the Commons, including the People’s Budget (Lords finally gave in).
● Extensive social welfare measures were passed in a rush between 1906 and 1914. The Liberal party between those years, inspired by David Lloyd George, raised taxes on the rich as part of the People’s Budget and this income helped the government pay for national health insurance, unemployment benefits, and old-age pensions.
Republicanism
● Republicanism is the ideology of governing a state where the head of state is a representative of the people who hold popular sovereignty.
● Louis XVIII’s Constitutional Charter of 1814 was basically a liberal constitution. Louis appointed moderate royalists his ministers who sought to obtain the support of a majority of the representations elected to the lower Chamber of Deputies. Louis’s charter allowed only about 100,000 of the wealthiest people to vote for deputies, who with the king and his ministers, made the laws of the nation.
● Charles X, Louis’s successor, wanted to re-establish the old order in France. Charles repudiated the Constitutional Charter in 1830, issued decrees stripping much of the wealthy middle class of its voting rights and censored the press.
● The immediate reaction was an insurrection in capital by printers and in “three glorious days,” the government collapsed and the upper middle class skillfully seated Charles’s cousin, Louis Philippe, duke of Orleans on the vacant throne.
● Louis Philippe accepted the Constitutional Charter of 1814. The wealthy notable elite actually tightened its control as the old aristocracy retreated. For the upper middle class, there had been a change in dynasty in order to protect the status quo and narrowly liberal institutions of 1815.
● Pre-Revolutionary” outbreaks occurred all across Europe (revolution in Paris). Louis Philippe’s “bourgeois monarchy” was characterized by stubborn inaction. Lack of social, legislation, and politics was dominated by corruption. The king’s chief minister in the 1840s, Francois Guizot, was personified and satisfied with the electoral system were only rich could vote for deputies.
● Barricades went up on the night of February 22, 1848 and by February 24, Louis Philippe had abdicated in favor of his grandson but refusal led to the proclamation of a provisional republic, headed by a ten-man executive committee supported by public. A generation of writers had praised the First French Republic and revolutionaries were firmly committed to a republic as opposed to any form of constitutional monarchy and they immediately set about drafting a constitution for France’s Second.
● Government truly wanted the forces of the common people (could reform society). Revolutionary compassion and sympathy for freedom were expressed in the freeing of all slaves in French colonies, the abolition of the death penalty, and the establishment of a ten-hour workday for workers in Paris
● The revolutionary coalition were the moderate, liberal republicans of the middle class. They viewed universal male suffrage as the ultimate concession; but they opposed any further radical social measures but on the other hand, were radical republicans. The radical republicans were committed to socialism (various degrees). Worsening depression and rising unemployment raised issues.
● On June 22, the government dissolved the national workshops in Paris, giving the workers the choice of joining the army or going to workshops in the provinces. The result was a spontaneous and violent uprising and barricades sprang up. Class war had begun and working people fought with the courage of utter desperation but the government had the army and the support of peasant France.
● After three terrible “June Days” and the republican army stood triumphant. In place of a generous democratic republic, the Constituent Assembly completed a constitution featuring a strong executive; allowed Louis Napoleon to win election.
● In 1848 Louis Napoleon had a positive “program” for France, which guided him throughout most of his long reign (Napoleonic Ideas and The Elimination of Poverty). Louis Napoleon believed government should represent the people (economically).
● When politicians ran a parliamentary government, they stirred up class hatred because they were not interested in helping the poor and Louis believed that the answer was a strong, authoritarian, national leader, who would serve the people. The leader would be linked by direct democracy and universal male suffrage. These ideas accompanied his vision of national unity and social progress.
● Elected to a four-year term, President Louis Napoleon had to share power with a conservative National Assembly; Louis also signed a bill to increase greatly the role of the Catholic church in primary and secondary education.
● Louis also signed another law depriving many poor people of the right to vote because he wanted the Assembly to vote funds to pay his personal debts and he wanted it to change the constitution so he could run for a second term.
● In 1851 Louis Napoleon began to organize a conspiracy and on December 2, 1851, he illegally dismissed the Assembly and seized power in a coup d’etat.
● Restoring universal male suffrage Louis Napoleon called on the French people to legalize his actions (92 %) and a year later, 97 % agreed in a national plebiscite to make him hereditary emperor and Louis Napoleon was elected to lead France.
● His greatest success was with the economy, particularly in the 1850s. His government encouraged the new investment banks and massive railroad construction that were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution on the Continent. The government fostered general economic expansion through a program of public works, which included the rebuilding of Paris to improve the environment.
● Political power remained in the hands of the emperor; Napoleon III chose his ministers and restricted but did not abolish the Assembly and members were elected by universal male suffrage every six years (parliamentary elections handled seriously). Government used its officials and appointed mayors to spread the word that the election of the government’s candidates was the key to roads, schools, and tax rebates.
● In 1857 and in 1863, Louis Napoleon’s system worked brilliantly; he won electoral victories but in the 1860s, France’s problems in Italy and the rising power of Prussia led to increasing criticism from Catholic and nationalist supporters back home. The middle-class liberals wanted a less authoritarian regime (denounced his rule).
● In the 1860s, he progressively liberalized his empire by giving the Assembly greater powers and the opposition candidates greater freedom and in 1870, Louis Napoleon granted France a new constitution, which combined a basically parliamentary regime with a hereditary emperor as chief of state.
● The Italian peninsula was divided in the Middle Ages into competing city-state, which led the commercial and cultural revival of the West with amazing creativity. Sought after 1494, Italy was reorganized in the 1815 at the Congress of Vienna. Between 1815 and 1848, the goal of a unified Italian nation captured the imaginations of increasing numbers of Italians and there were three approaches.
● The radical program of the idealistic Giuseppe Mazzini stated that Italy become a centralized democratic republic based on universal suffrage and will of the people. Vincenzo Gioberti, a Catholic priest, called for a federation of existing states under the presidency of a progressive pope. The third was the program of those who looked for leadership toward the autocratic kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, as Germans looked toward Prussia.
● The third alternative was strengthened by the failures of 1848, when Austria smashed and discredited Mazzini’s republicanism and Sardinia’s monarch, Victor Emmanuel, retained the liberal constitution granted under duress in March 1848. The constitution provided for a fair degree of civil liberties and real parliamentary government complete with elections and parliamentary control of taxes. To the Italian middle classes, Sardinia appeared to be a liberal progressive state ideally suited to achieve the goal of national unification but Mazzini seemed quixotic
● As for the papacy, the initial support by Pius IX for unification had given way to fear and hostility after he was driven from Rome during the upheavals of 1848.
● Cavour was the dominant figure in the Sardinian government (1850-1861). Cavour’s personal development was an early sign of coming tacit alliance between the aristocracy and the middle class under a strong nation-state. Cavour turned toward industry and entered the world of politics after 1848 and became chief minister in the liberalized Sardinian monarchy in 1852.
● Cavour’s national goals were limited and realistic and until 1859, he sought unity only for the states of northern Italy (moderate nationalist and aristocratic liberal). Cavour in the 1850s wishing to consolidate Sardinia as a liberal constitutional state introduced a program of highways and railroads, of civil liberties and opposition to clerical privilege, increasing support for Sardinia throughout northern Italy.
● Cavour worked for a secret diplomatic alliance with Napoleon III against Austria and in July 1858, he succeeded and provoked Austria into attacking Sardinia. Napoleon III came to Sardinia’s defense and after the victory of the combined Franco-Sardinian forces, Napoleon III did a complete turn around. Criticized by French Catholics for supporting the pope’s declared enemy, Napoleon III abandoned Cavour and made a compromise peace with the Austrians at Villafranca in July 1859 (Sardinia received Lombardy, around Milan).
● Cavour’s plans were salvaged by popular revolts and Italian nationalism; while war against Austria had raged in the north, nationalists in central Italy and driven out their rulers and nationalist fervor seized the urban masses (called for fusion of Sardinia). The other Great Powers opposed this but the nationalists held firm and Cavour returned to power when the people of central Italy voted to join Sardinia.
● For patriots such as Garibaldi, the job of unification was only half done. Sentenced to death in 1834 for his part in an uprising in Genoa, Garibaldi escaped to South American where he led a guerrilla band in Uruguay’s independence. Returning to Italy to find fight in 1848, he led a corps of volunteer against Austria and in 1860, Garibaldi had emerged as a powerful force in Italian politics. Cavour secretly supported Garibaldi’s bold plan to liberate the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (to use him and to get rid of him) and in May 1860, Garibaldi’s band of thousand “Red Shirts” outwitted the twenty-thousand royal army of Austria.
● Garibaldi then prepared to attack Rome and the pope but Cavour sent Sardinian forces to occupy most of the Papal Sates (to intercept Garibaldi). Cavour realized that an attack on Rome would bring about war with France and immediately organized a plebiscite in the conquered territories; Garibaldi did not oppose Cavour and the people of the south voted to join Sardinia.
● When Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel rode through Naples, they sealed the union of the north and south, of the monarch and the people of Italy. Cavour had controlled Garibaldi and turned popular nationalism into conservatism; the parliamentary monarchy under Victor Emmanuel with the liberal Sardinian constitution of 1848, only a small minority of Italian males had the right to vote.
● In 1871, the patriotic republicans who proclaimed the Third Republic in Paris after the military disaster at Sedan, refused to admit defeat, defended Paris for weeks but were eventually starved into submission by the German armies in January 1871. When national elections send a majority of conservatives and monarchies to the National Assembly, the Parisians exploded and proclaimed the Paris Commune.
● In March 1871, the leaders wanted to govern without the conservative peasants. The National Assembly led by Adolphe Thiers ordered the French army into Paris and crushed the Commune; twenty thousand people died in the fighting.
● The monarchists could not agree who should be king and the compromise Bourbon candidate refused to rule except under the white flag of his ancestors (unacceptable). President Thiers showed the Third Republic might be moderate/socially conservative.
● Another stabilizing factor was the skill and determination of the moderate republicans. The most famous was Leon Gambetta who preached a republic of truly equal opportunity; Gambetta was instrumental in establishing absolute parliamentary supremacy between 1877 and 1879, when deputies forced MacMahon to resign.
● By 1879, the majority of members of both the upper and lower houses of the National Assembly were republics, the Third Republic had firm foundations. Trade unions were fully legalized and France acquired a colonial empire; under the leadership of Jules Ferry, the moderate republicans passed a series of laws between 1879-1886 establishing free compulsory elementary education for children.
● The government expanded the state system of public tax-supported schools; free compulsory elementary education in France became secular republican education. Unlike most western countries, the Third Republic encouraged young teachers to marry and guaranteed that both partners would teach in the same location.
● French Catholics rallied to the republic in the 1890s after the educational reforms. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely convicted of treason. His family fought to reopen the case and the case was split in 1898 into two sides of which was the army, joined by anti-Semites, and the other side which stood the civil libertarians and most of the more radical republicans. After Dreyfus was declared innocent, it revived republican feeling against the church and between 1901 and 1905, the government severed all ties between the state and the Catholic church (Catholic schools lost a third of their students).
Totalitarianism
● Totalitarianism is the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute state authority.
● The traditional form of anti democratic government in European history was conservative authoritarianism (leaders of such governments tried to prevent major changes that would undermine the existing social order). Authoritarian leaders depended on obedient bureaucracies, vigilant police departments and trustworthy armies; liberals, democrats, and socialists prosecuted. The old-fashioned authoritarian government were preoccupied with the goal of mere survival and limited their demands to taxes, army recruits, and passive acceptance.
● The parliamentary regimes that had been founded on the wreckage of empires in 1918 fell one by one and by early 1938 only economically and socially advanced Czechoslovakia remained true to liberal political ideals. The lands lacked a tradition of self-government, with restraint and compromise. Many of these new states were torn by ethnic conflicts that threatened existence. Dictatorship appealed to nationalists and military leaders as a way to repress such tensions and preserve national unity (middle class weak in Eastern Europe).
● Although some of the conservative authoritarian regimes adopted certain Hitlerian and fascist characteristics in the 1930s, their general aims were limited. They were more concerned with maintaining the status quo then with forcing society into rapid change or war; this tradition has continued into our own time.
● While conservative authoritarianism predominated smaller states of Europe by the mid-1930s, radical dictatorships emerged in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy. Leaders of the radical dictatorships rejected parliamentary restraint and liberal values; they exercised unprecedented control over the masses and sought to mobilize them for constant action (three main approaches to understanding radical dictatorships).
● The first approach relates the radical dictatorships to the rise of modern totalitarianism and the second focuses on the idea of fascism as the unifying impulse. The third stresses the limitations of such generalization and uniqueness of regime. The concept of totalitarianism emerged in the 1920s and the 1930s and in 1924 Mussolini spoke of the “fierce totalitarian will” of his movement in Italy; in the 1930s many exiled writers used the concept of totalitarianism to link Italian and German fascism with Society communism under a common antiliberal umbrella
● Lenin showed how institutions and human rights are subordinated to the needs of a single group and its leader and provided a model for single-party dictatorship. Modern totalitarianism reached maturity in the 1930s in the Stalinist U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany, according to this school of interpretation. The grandiose vision of total state control broke decisively not only with conservative authoritarianism but also with nineteenth-century liberalism and democracy; indeed, totalitarianism was a radical revolt against liberalism as classical liberalism had sought to limit the power of the state and to protect the sacred rights of the people.
● Liberals stood for rationality, peaceful progress, economic freedom, and a strong middle class and the totalitarianism believed in will power, preached conflict, and worshiped violence (individual was infinitely less valuable than the state). Modern totalitarianism was based not on an elite but on people who had become engaged in the political process, most notably through nationalism and socialism; real totalitarian states built on mass movements and possessed boundless dynamism.
● Totalitarianism was in the end a permanent revolution, an unfinished revolution, in which rapid, profound change imposed from on high went on forever (Trotsky). A second group of writers approached radical dictatorships outside the Soviet Union through the concept of fascism; a term of pride for Mussolini and Hitler, who used it to describe the supposedly “total” and revolutionary character of their movements, fascism was severely criticized by these writers.
● Fascism was linked to reactionary forces, decaying capitalism and domestic class conflict and Marxists argued that fascism was the way powerful capitalists sought to manipulate a mass movement capable of destroying the revolutionary working class and thus protect eh profits to be reaped through war and territorial expansion. Less doctrinaire socialists saw fascism as only one of the several possible ways for the ruling class to escape from a general crisis of capitalism. Fascist movements all across Europe showed that they shared many characteristics, including extreme, often expansionist nationalism; an antisocialism aimed at destroying working-class movements; alliances with capitalists and landowners; mass parties appealing to the middle class and peasantry; a dynamic and violent leader, and glorification of war and the military
● European fascism remains a product of class conflict, capitalist crisis, and postwar upheaval in these more recent studies but interpretation has become convincing. Historians often adopt a third approach which emphasizes the uniqueness of developments in a country (challenge interpretations of totalitarianism and fascism). Four tentative judgments concerning these debates seem appropriate.
● The concept of totalitarianism retains real value (Germany and Soviet Union made an unprecedented “total claim” on the belief and behavior of their citizens. Antidemocratic, antisocialist movements sprang up all over Europe but only in Italy and Germany (and some would say Spain) were they able to take power
● By the spring 1921 after Lenin and the Bolsheviks had won the civil war, in southern Russia drought combined with the ravages of war to produce one of the worst famines; the Bolsheviks had destroyed the economy as well as their foes. In the face of economic disintegration, riots by peasants and workers, and an open rebellion by previously pro-Bolsheviks sailors at Kronstadt changed Lenin’s course.
● In March 1921 Lenin announced the New Economic Plan, which re-established limited economic freedom in an attempt to rebuild agriculture and industry. With the NEP, Lenin substituted a grain tax on the country’s peasants producers, who were permitted to sell their surpluses in free markets; peasants were encouraged to buy as many goods as they could afford from private traders.
● Heavy industry, railroads, and banks, however, remained wholly nationalized. The NEP was shrewd and successful both politically and economically. It was a necessary but temporary compromise with the Soviet Union’ peasantry. Flushed with victory after the revolutionary gains of 1917, the peasants would have fought to hold onto their land (Lenin realized that in 1921, his government was not strong enough to take land from the peasants) Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
● The NEP brought rapid recovery and in 1926 industrial output surpassed levels of 1913 and Soviet peasants were producing almost as much grain as before the war. Counting shorter hours and increased social benefits, workers were living better than they had lived in the past (as the economy recovered and the government relaxed its censorship and repression, intense struggle for power began within the Communist party between stolid Stalin and the flamboyant Trotsky (after 1924).
● Joseph Dzhugashvili, later known as Stalin, joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and after engaging in many revolutionary activities in the southern Transcaucasian area during the WW I, including a daring bank robbery to get money for the Bolsheviks. This raid gained Lenin’s attention and approval; Stalin in his early writings focused on the oppression of minority peoples in the Russian Empire (good organizer)
● Trotsky, a great and inspiring leader who had planned the 1917 takeover and then created the victorious Red Army, appeared to have all the advantages. Stalin succeeded Lenin because Stalin was more effective at gaining the all-important support of the party, the only genuine source of power in the state.
● Rising to general secretary of the party’s Central Committee just before Lenin’s first stroke in 1922, Stalin used his office to win friends and allies with jobs and promises and Stalin also won recognition as commissar of nationalities, a key position in which he governed many of the minorities of the vast Soviet Union. The “practical” Stalin also won because he appeared better able than the brilliant Trotsky to relate Marxian teaching to Soviet realities in the 1920s.
● As commissar of nationalities he built on Lenin’s idea of granting minority groups a certain degree of freedom in culture and language while maintaining rigorous political control through carefully selected local communists (multinational state). Stalin developed a theory of “socialism in one country” that more appealing to the majority of communists than Trotsky’s doctrine of “permanent revolution”.
● Stalin argued that the Russian-dominated Soviet Union had the ability to build socialism on its own while Trotsky maintained that socialism in the Soviet Union could succeed only if revolution occurred quickly throughout Europe. Trotsky’s views seemed to sell their country short and to promise risky conflicts with capitalist countries by recklessly encouraging revolutionary movements.
● Stalin’s willingness to break with the NEP and push socialism at home appealed to young militants (provided the party with a glimmer of hope against NEP). Stalin achieved absolute power between 1922 and 1927.
● First, Stalin allied with Trotsky’s personal enemies to crush Trotsky, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and eventually murdered in Mexico in 1940. Stalin aligned with the moderates, who wanted to go slow at home, to suppress Trotsky’s radical followers and third, having defeated all the radicals, he turned against his allies, the moderates, and destroyed them as well. Stalin’s final triumph came at the party congress of December 1927, which condemned all “deviation from the general party line” formulated by Stalin
● The party congress of 1927, which ratified Stalin’s seizure of power, marked the end of the NEP and the beginning of the era of socialist five-year plans; the first five-year plan had staggering economic objectives (total industrial output increases by 250%). Heavy industry, the preferred sector, was to grow even faster (steel production). Agricultural production was slated to increase by 150 percent and one-fifth of the peasants in the Soviet Union were scheduled to give up private plots and join socialist collective farms (by 1930 economic and social change swept the country).
● Stalin unleashed his “second revolution” for a variety of interrelated reasons. There were ideological considerations and since the country had recovered economically and their rule was secure, they burned to stamp out the NEP’s private traders, independent artisans, and few well-to-do peasants. A new socialist offensive seemed necessary if the economy were to grow rapidly. There were political considerations and internationally, there was the old problem of catching up with the advanced and capitalist nations of the West.
● Domestically, there was what communist writers of the 1920s called the “cursed problem”—the problem of the peasants; for centuries, the peasantry had wanted to own the land and finally they had it and sooner or later, the communists reasoned that peasants would become conservative capitalists and pose a threat to regime. Therefore, Stalin decided on a preventive war against the peasantry (absolutism).
● The war was collectivization—the forcible consolidation of individual peasants farms into large, state-controlled enterprises and beginning in 1929, peasants all over the Soviet Union were ordered to give up their land and join these collective farms.
● As for the kulaks, the better-off peasants, Stalin instructed party workers to “liquidate them as a class” and stripped of land, the kulaks were generally not permitted to join the collective farms and many starved or were deported to forced-labor camps; the term kulak soon meant any peasant who opposed the new system.
● Forced collectivization of the peasants led to economic and human disaster. Large numbers of peasants slaughtered their animals and burned their cops in sullen, hopeless protest, and between 1929 and 1933, the number of livestock fell by at least half; nor were the state-controlled collective farms more productive. The output of grain barely increased between 1928 and 1938 (identical to 1913).
● Communist economists had expected collectivized agriculture to pay for new factories but instead, the state had to invest heavily in agriculture and was unable to make any substantial financial contribute to industrial development at first. Collectivization created human-made famine in 1932 and 1933 (many perished). Collectivization was a political victory of sorts for the Soviet Union government.
● Regimented and indoctrinated as employees of the all-powerful state, the peasants were no longer even a potential political threat to Stalin and the Communist party. The state was assured of grain for bread for urban workers, who were much more important politically than the peasants (collective farmers had to meet quotas). The industrial side of the five-year plans was more successful—quite spectacular. The output of industry doubled in the first five-year plan and doubled in the second; No other major country had ever achieved such rapid industrial growth.
● Heavy industry led the way, consumer industry grew slowly, and steel production (Stalin means “man of steel”) increased roughly 500 percent from 1928 to 1937. Industrial growth also went hand in hand with urban development and more than twenty-five million people migrated to cities during the 1930s in the Soviet Union. The great industrialization drive was achieved at enormous sacrifice and the creation of new factories required a great increase in total investment and a sharp decrease in consumption (few nations had ever invested more than one-sixth of their net national income); Soviet planners decreed more than one-third of the net income be devoted and that meant money being collect by hidden sales taxes. There was therefore no improvement in average standard of living and average wages apparently purchases only about half as many goods in 1932 as in 1928.
● Two other factors contributed to rapid growth: labor discipline and foreign engineers. Between 1930 and 1932, trade unions lost most of their power and the government could assign workers to any job and individuals could not move. Foreign engineers were hired to plan and construct many of the new factories and highly skilled American engineers were particularly important until newly trained Soviet experts began to replace them after 1932 (surge of socialist industry).
● The aim of Stalin’s five-year plans was to create a new kind of society and human personality as well as a strong industrial economy and a powerful army for the state. Once everything was owned by the state, they believed, a socialist society and a new kind of human being would inevitably emerge and this had both good and bad aspects. The most frightening aspect of society was brutal, unrestrained police terrorism; first directed against the peasants after 1929, terror was increasingly turned on leading Communists, powerful administrators, and ordinary people for no reason.
● In the early 1930s, the top members of the party and government were Stalin’s obedient servants but there was some grumbling in the party. After Stalin’s wife complained at a small gathering in November 1932, she died that same night, apparently by her own hand and in late 1934 Stalin’s number-two man, Sergei Kirov, was suddenly and mysteriously murdered. In August 1936, sixteen prominent old Bolsheviks confessed to all manner of plots against Stalin in spectacular public trials in Moscow and then in 1937 lesser party officials and newer henchmen were arrested; in addition to party members, union officials, managers, intellectuals, army officers, and citizens were struck. In all, at least eight million people were probably arrested.
● Stalin’s mass purges were baffling and many explanations have been given for them. Possibly Stalin believed that the old Communists, like the peasants under NEP, were a potential threat to be wiped out in a preventative attack.
● Some prisoners were cruelly tortured and warned that their loved ones would also die if they did not confess (Stalin’s bloodbath weakened the government/army). Others see the terror as an aspect of the fully developed totalitarian state, which must by its nature always be fighting real or imaginary enemies (message).
● Another aspect of life in the 1930s was constant propaganda and indoctrination. Party activists lectured workers in factories and peasants on collective farms, while newspapers, films, and radio broadcasts endlessly recounted achievements. Art and literature became highly political (“engineers of human minds”). Writers who could effectively combine creativity and political propaganda often lived better than top members of the political elite (glorified Russian nationalism). Stalin seldom appeared in public, but his presence was everywhere and although the government persecuted religion and turned churches into “museums of atheism,” the state had both Marxism-Leninism and Joseph Stalin.
● Life was hard in Stalin’s Soviet Union and mass of people lived primarily on black bread and wore old, shabby clothing (constant shortages in the stores and in housing). A relatively lucky family received one room for all its members and shared both a kitchen and a toilet with others on the same floor as that family (average 4 per room). Idealism and ideology had real appeal for many communists, who saw themselves heroically building the world’s first socialist society while capitalism crumbled.
● On a more practical level, Soviet workers did receive some important social benefits, such as old-age pensions, free medical services, free education and day-care centers. The keys to improving one’s position were specialized skills and technical education. Industrialization required massive numbers of train experts, such as skilled workers, engineers and plant managers (state provided tremendous incentives). The technical elite joined with the political and artistic elites in a new upper class, who members were rich, powerful, and insecure, especially during the purges
● Marxists had traditionally believed that both capitalism and the middle-class husband exploited women and the Russian Revolution of 1917 immediately proclaimed complete equality of rights for women (in the 1920s divorce and abortion available). Women were encouraged to work outside the home and liberate themselves sexually. After Stalin came to power, sexual and familial liberation was played down and the most lasting changes for women involved work and education. Young women were constantly told that they had to be fully equal to men, that they could and should do anything men could do (peasant women enjoyed equality on collective farms with the advent of the five-year plans).
● Most of the opportunities open to men through education were also open to women and determined women pursued their studies and entered the ranks of the better-paid specialists in industry and science (medicine became women’s job). Stalinist society gave women great opportunities but demanded great sacrifices. The vast majority of women simply had to work outside because wages were so low that its was almost impossible for a family to live only on the husband’s wages. Most of the Soviet men in the 1930s still considered the home and the children the woman’s responsibility (men continued to monopolize the best jobs).
● In the early twentieth century Italy was a liberal state with civil rights and a constitutional monarchy and on the eve of WW I, the parliamentary regime finally granted universal male suffrage but serious problems existed in Italy. Much of the Italian population was still poor and many peasants were more attached to their villages and local interests than to the national state. The papacy, many devout Catholics, conservatives, and landowners remained strongly opposed to liberal institutions and to the heirs of Cavour and Garibaldi, the middle-class lawyers and politicians who ran the country for their own benefit. Class differences were also extreme and a revolutionary socialists movement developed and only in Italy did the radical left win go the Socialist party gain the leadership as early as 1912 (Socialists party from Italy opposed war in beginning). The war worsened the political situation (having fought on the side of the Allies for purposes of territorial expansions, the parliamentary government bitterly disappointed Italian nationalists with Italy’s modest gains at Versailles; no social and land reform)
● The Russian Revolution inspired and energized Italy’s revolutionary socialist movement and the radical workers and peasants began occupying factories and seizing land in 1920, scaring and mobilizing the property-owning class. After the war, the pope lifted his ban on participation by Catholics in Italian politics and a strong Catholic party quickly emerged and thus by 1921 revolutionary socialists, antiliberal conservatives, and property owners were all opposed—through for different reason—to the liberal parliamentary government
● Into the crosscurrents of unrest and fear stepped Benito Mussolini (1883-1945). Influenced by antidemocratic cults of violent action, the young Mussolini urged that Italy join the Allies, or which he was expelled from the Socialist party. Returning home after being wounded at the front in 1917, Mussolini began organizing bitter war veterans into a band of fascists (“a union of forces”). Mussolini’s program was a radical combination of nationalists and socialists demands, including territorial expansion, benefits for workers, and land reform
● It competed directly with the well-organized Socialist party and failed to get off; when Mussolini saw that his violent verbal assaults on rival Socialists won him growing support from conservatives and middle classes, he shifted gears in 1920. Mussolini and his growing private army of Clack Shirts began to grow violent; typically fascists would sweep down on a few isolated Socialist organizers but soon socialist newspapers, union halls and local Socialist headquarters were destroyed. Mussolini’s toughs pushed Socialists out of the city governments of northern Italy. Mussolini allowed his followers to convince themselves that they were not just opposing the “reds” but also making a real revolution of their own (dynamic).
● With the government breaking down in 1922, Mussolini stepped forward as the savior of order and property and striking a conservative note in his speeches and gaining the sympathetic neutrality of army leaders, Mussolini demanded the resignation of the existing government and his own appointment by the king. Victor Emmanuel II asked Mussolini to form a new cabinet, Mussolini seized power “legally” and was granted dictatorial authority for one year by king and parliament.
● Mussolini became dictator on the strength of Italians’ rejection of parliamentary government coupled with fears of Soviet-style revolution (power not clear until 1924) Some of his dedicated supports pressed for a “second revolution” but Mussolini’s ministers included conservatives, moderates, and reform-minded Socialists. A new electoral law was passed giving two-thirds of the representatives in the parliament to the party that won the most votes, a change that allowed the Fascists and their allies to win an overwhelming majority in the elections of 1924. Shortly after, five of Mussolini’s fascist kidnapped and murdered Giacomo Matteotti, the leader of the Socialists in the parliament (opposition demanded violence cease).
● Declaring his desire to make the nation Fascist, he imposed a series of repressive measures; freedom of the press was abolished, elections were fixed, and the government ruled by decrees (Mussolini arrested his political opponents) and moreover, he created a fascist youth movement, fascist labor unions/organizations. By the end of 1926, Italy was a one-party dictatorship under Mussolini’s leadership but Mussolini did not complete the establishment of a modern totalitarian state. His Fascist party never destroyed the old power structure, as the communists did in the Soviet Union, or succeeded in dominating it, as the Nazis did in Germany.
● Interested primarily in personal power, Mussolini was content to compromise with the old conservative classes that controlled the army, the economy, and state. Mussolini never tried to purge these classes and controlled and propagandized labor but left big business to regulate itself (no land reform occurred in Italy). Mussolini also drew increasing support from the Catholic church and in the Lateran Agreement of 1929, he recognized the Vatican as a tiny independent state and he agreed to give the church heavy financial support (pope urged Italians to support).
● Mussolini abolished divorce and told women to say at home and produce children and to promote that goal, he decreed a special tax on bachelors in 1934 and in 1938 women were limited by law to a maximum of 10 percent of the better-paying job in industry and government (no change in attitude toward Italian women under fascism). Mussolini’s government did not pass racial laws until 1938 and did not persecute Jews savagely until late in the Second World War, when Italy was under Nazi control. Nor did Mussolini establish a ruthless state police (never a totalitarian government).
● Nazism grew out of many complex developments: extreme nationalism and racism; these two ideas captured the mind of the young Hitler who dominated Nazism. Adolf Hitler was born in Austria but after dropping out of high school following the death of his father he left for Vienna to become an artist. Denied admission to the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, the dejected Hitler stayed in Vienna and found many beliefs that guided his later life.
● In Vienna Hitler soaked up extreme German nationalism (Austro-German nationalists believed Germans to be a superior people and natural rulers of central Europe; advocated union with Germany and expulsion of “inferior people”). Hitler was deeply impressed by Vienna’s mayor, Karl Lueger (“Christian socialist”). With the help of the Catholic trade unions, he had succeeded in winning the support of the little people of Vienna for an attack on capitalism and liberalism.
● Lueger showed Hitler the potential of anti-capitalist and antiliberal propaganda. From Lueger and others, Hitler absorbed virulent anti-Semitism, racism, and hatred of the Slavs (particularly inspired by racism of Lanz von Liebenfels). Liebenfels stressed the superiority of Germanic races, the inevitability of racial conflict, and the inferiority of the Jews (anticipated policies of the Nazi state).
● Anti-Semitism and racism became Hitler’s most passionate convictions; the Jews, he claimed, directed an international conspiracy of finance capitalism and Marxian socialism against German culture, German unity, and the German race.
● After he moved to Munich in 1913 to avoid the draft, Hitler greeted the outbreak of the First World War as salvation and the struggle and discipline of war gave life meaning and Hitler served bravely as a dispatch carrier on the western front. When Germany was suddenly defeated in 1918, Hitler’s world was shattered as war was his reason for living; convinced that Jews and Marxists had “stabbed Germany in the back,” he vowed to fight on and his speeches began to attract attention.
● In later 1919 Hitler joined a tiny extremist group in Munich called the German Workers’ party and in addition to denouncing Jews, Marxists, and democrats, the German Workers’ party promised unity under a German “national socialism” which would abolish injustices of capitalism and create a “people’s community”.
● By 1921 Hitler had gained absolute control of this small but growing party and Hitler was already a master of mass propaganda and political showmanship. Hitler’s most effective tool was the mass rally, a kind of political revival meeting and when he arrived he would work the audience with attacks on the Versailles treaty, the Jews, the war profiteers, and Germany’s Weimar Republic. Party membership multiplied tenfold after early 1922 and in late 1923 Hitler decided on an armed uprising in Munich; Hitler found an ally in General Ludendorff.
● After Hitler had overthrown the Bavarian government, Ludendorff was supposed to march on Berlin with Hitler’s support but the plot was poorly organized and it was crushed by the police and back up by the army, in less than a day. Hitler was arrested, tried, and sentenced to five years in prison.
● At his trial, Hitler violently denounced the Weimar Republic and skillfully presented his own program and in doing so, gained enormous publicity and attention; Hitler concluded that he had to undermine, rather than overthrow, the government, that he had to used its democratic framework to intimidate the opposition and come to power. Hitler forced his more violent supporters to accept his new strategy and he used his brief prison term (released in less than a year) to dictate Mein Kampf. There he expounded on his basic themes: “race,” with a stress on anti-Semitism; “living space,” with a sweeping vision of war and conquered territory; and the leader-dictator (Fuhrer) with unlimited, arbitrary power.
● In the years of prosperity and relative stability between 1924 and 1929, Hitler concentrated on building his National Socialist German Workers’ party, or Nazi party. By 1928 the party had 100,000 highly disciplined members under Hitler’s absolute control and to appeal to the middle classes, Hitler de-emphasized the anti-capitalist elements of national socialism and vowed to fight Bolshevism.
● The Nazi were still a small group in 1928 and only received 2.6 percent of the vote in the general elections and twelve seats in the Reichstag (parliament). There the Nazi deputies pursued the legal strategy of using democracy to destroy democracy (Hitler’s talented future minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels).
● In 1929 the Great Depression began striking down economic prosperity as unemployment jumped from 1.3 million in 1929 to 5 million in 1930; industrial production fell by ½ between 1929 and 1932 (by 1932, 43 percent unemployed); No factor contributed more to Hitler’s success than the economic crisis (promises). Hitler pitched his speeches especially to the middle and lower middle class business people, office workers, artisans and peasants (left conservative/moderate parties). Simultaneously, Hitler worked hard to win the support of two key elite groups. Hitler promised big business leaders that he would restore their depression-shattered profits, by breaking Germany’s labor movement even reducing wages. He reassured top army leaders that the Nazis would overturn the Versailles settlement and rearm Germany (successfully followed Mussolini’s fascist recipe). Hitler won at least the tacit approval of powerful conservatives.
● The Nazis appealed strongly to German youth (mass movement of young Germans). Hitler and most of his top aides were much younger than other leading German politicians (“National Socialism is the organized will of the youth”). National recovery, exciting and rapid change, and personal advancement: these were the appeals of Nazism to the millions and millions of German youth. In the election of 1930, the Nazis won 6.5 million votes and 107 seats, which made them second in strength only to the Social Democrats, the moderate socialists; as economic and political situation deteriorated, Hitler and the Nazis kept promising that they would bring economy recovery/national unity (largest party in Reichstag 1932).
● Another reason Hitler came to power was breakdown of democratic government as early as May 1930; unable to gain support of a majority in the Reichstag, Chancellor Heinrich Bruning convinced the president General Hindenburg, to authorize rule by decree (before, only used in emergency but Bruning intended to use it indefinitely). Bruning was determined to overcome the economic crisis by cutting back government spending and forcing down prices and wages (intensified economic collapse and convinced lower middle classes that the republican country’s leaders were corrupt).
● After President Hindenburg forced Bruning to resign in May 1932, the new government, headed by Franz von Papen, continued to rule by decree. The continuation of the struggle between the Social Democrats and Communists was another aspect of the breakdown of democratic government. The Communists refused to cooperate with the Social Democrats even after the elections of 1932; German Communists were blinded by the hatred of Socialists and by ideology: the Communists believed that fascism was reactionary.
● Hitler’s rise represented the last agonies of monopoly capitalism and that a communist revolution would soon follow his taking of power. Socialist leaders pleaded for at least a temporary alliance with the Communists to block Hitler but to no avail and perhaps the Weimar Republic had gone too far.
● Finally, there was Hitler’s skill as a politician and as a master of mass propaganda and psychology, he had written in Mein Kampf that the masses were the “driving force of the most important changes in this world” and were driven by fanaticism. To arouse such hysterical fanaticism, he believed that all propaganda had to be limited to a few simple, endlessly repeated slogans (passionate, irrational oratory).
● At the same time, Hitler continued to excel at dirty, back-room politics and in the complicated in-fighting in 1932, he succeeded in gaining additional support from key people in army and big business (thought they could use Hitler for own advantage)
● There would be only two other National Socialists and nine solid conservatives as ministers, and in such a coalition government, they reasoned, Hitler could be used and controlled; on January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg
● Hitler moved rapidly and skillfully to establish an unshakable dictatorship. His first step was to continue using terror and threats to gain more power while maintaining legal appearances; he immediately called for new elections and applied the enormous power of the government to restrict his opponents. In the midst of a violent electoral campaign, the Reichstag building was partly destroyed by fire and Hitler screamed that the Communist party was responsible. On the strength of this accusation, he convinced President Hinenburg to sign dictatorial emergency acts that practically abolished the freedom of speech and assembly as well as most of the basic personal liberties. When the Nazis won only 44 percent of the vote in the elections, Hitler quickly outlawed the Communist party and arrested its parliamentary representatives.
● On March 23, 1933, the Nazis pushed through the Reichstag the so-called Enabling Act, which gave Hitler absolute dictatorial power for four years (only Social Democrats voted against this bill, for Hitler blackmailed the Center Catholic party). Hitler and the Nazis moved to smash or control all independent organizations. Hitler and his propagandists constantly proclaimed that their revolution was legal and constitutional and this stress on legality, coupled with divide-and-conquer techniques, disarmed the opposition until it was too late for effective resistance. The systematic subjugation of independent organizations and the apparent creation of a totalitarian state had massive repercussions; the Social Democratic and Center parties were soon dissolved and Germany became a one-party state.
● Only the Nazi party was legal, elections were shams, Hitler and the Nazis took over the government bureaucracy that was intact, and created a series of overlapping Nazi part organizations responsible solely to Hitler. The resulting system of dual government was riddled with rivalries, contra-dictions, and inefficiencies; Nazi state lacked the all-compassing unity. The fractured system suited Hitler as he could play the established bureaucracy against his personal “party government” and maintain his freedom of action.
● In the economic sphere, on big decision outlawed strikes and abolished independent labor unions, which were replaced by the Nazi Labor Front. Professional people—doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers—saw their previously independent organizations swallowed up in Nazi organizations; publishing houses were put under Nazi control, and universities and writers were quickly controlled. Democratic, socialist, and Jewish literature was put on ever-growing blacklists. Modern art and architecture were prohibited and life became anti-intellectual.
● Only the army retained independence, and Hitler moved brutally and skillfully to establish his control there, too; he realized that the army as well as big business was suspicious of the Nazi storm troops (SA), the quasi-military band of three million toughs in brown shirts who had fought communists and beaten up Jews.
● The storm troopers expected top positions in the army and even talked of a “second revolution” against capitalism; Hitler decided that the SA leaders had to be eliminated and on the night of June 30, 1934, Hitler’s elite personal guard (SS) arrested and shot without trial a thousand SA leaders and political enemies. Army leaders and President Hindenburg responded to the purge with congratulatory telegrams and shortly thereafter army leaders whore a binding oath. The SS grew rapidly and under its methodical, inhuman leader, Heinrich Himmler, the SS joined with the political police, the Gestapo, to expand its network of special courts and concentration camps; no one was safe.
● From the beginning, Jews were a special object of Nazi persecution and by the end of 1934, most Jewish lawyers, doctors, professors, civil servants, and musicians had lost their jobs and the right to practice their professions; in 1935 the infamous Nuremberg Laws classified as Jewish as anyone having at least one Jewish grandparent and deprived Jews of all rights of citizenship (by 1938 ¼ of Germany’s Jews had left). Following the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish boy trying desperately to strike out at persecution, the attack on Jews accelerated. A well-organized wave of violence destroyed homes, synagogues, and businesses, after which German Jews were rounded up and made to pay for the damage. It became very difficult for Jews to leave Germany; many Germans went along or looked the other way reflecting strong popular support Hitler’s government enjoyed.
● Hitler had promised the masses economic recovery—“work and bread”—and he did. Breaking with Bruning’s do-nothing policies, Hitler immediately launched a large public works program to pull Germany out of the depression. Work began on superhighways, offices, gigantic sports stadiums, and public housing; in 1936 Germany turned toward rearmament, and government spending began to concentrate on the military (unemployment dropped steadily). By 1938 there was a shortage of workers, and women eventually took many jobs previously denied them by the antifeminist Nazis (everyone had to work and between 1932 and 1938 standard of living for the worker increased moderately. The profits of business rose sharply and economic recovery was tangible evidence in their daily lives that the excitement and dynamism of Nazi rule was positive.
● For masses of ordinary German citizens, who were not Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, or homosexuals, Hitler’s government meant greater equality and more opportunities (position of traditional German elites strong). Barriers between classes were generally high and Hitler’s rule introduced changes that lowered barriers (stiff educational requirements favoring well-to-do relaxed).
● The new Nazi elite included many young and poorly educated dropouts and Nazis tolerated privilege and wealth only as long as they served the needs of the party. Millions of modest middle-class and lower-middle-class people felt that Germany was becoming more open and equal, as Nazi propagandists constantly claimed. It is significant that the Nazis shared with the Italian fascists the stereotypic view of women as housewives and mothers (pressure of war mobilized German women).
● Hitler’s rapid nationalism continued to appeal to Germans after 1933 and since the wars against Napoleon, many Germans had believed in a special mission for them. When Hitler went from one foreign triumph to another and a great German empire seemed within reach, the majority of the population was delighted.
● Not all Germans supported Hitler, however, and a number of German groups actively resisted him after 1933 (tens of thousands of political enemies were imprisoned). Opponents of the Nazis pursued various goals and under totalitarian conditions they were never unified (communists and social democrats in the trade unions); after 1935, a second group do opponents arose in the Catholic and Protestant churches; finally in 1938, some high-ranking army officers plotted against him, unsuccessfully.