5 Steps to a 5TM AP European History

(^148) › STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
dom had been progressively curtailed by industrialization and larger, more centralized
governments. Anarchy had the greatest appeal in those areas where governments were
most oppressive; in the nineteenth century, that meant Russia. There, Mikhail Bakunin,
the son of a Russian nobleman, organized secret societies whose goal was to destroy the
Russian state forever. Throughout Europe, nineteenth-century anarchists engaged in
acts of political terrorism, particularly attempts to assassinate high-ranking government
officials.

Cultural Ideologies in the Nineteenth Century

Other ideologies developed in the nineteenth century that sought to reach beyond “mere

politics.” Two of the most influential were Romanticism and nationalism.

Romanticism

Romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment and industrialization. The nineteenth-

century Romantics rebelled against the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and urged the

cultivation of imagination and emotion. They suggested that knowledge was reached through

intution. Fittingly, Romantics tended to avoid political tracts and expressed themselves mostly

through art, music, and literature, which frequently captured history in creative ways. They

stressed the purity of nature, as compared to the corruption of society.

The roots of Romanticism are often traced back to the works of Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, because in Émile (1762), he had argued that humans were born essentially

good and virtuous but were easily corrupted by society, and that the early years of a child’s

education should be spent developing the senses, sensibilities, and sentiments. Another

source of Romanticism was the German Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) move-

ment of the late eighteenth century, exemplified by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The

Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which glorified the “inner experience” of the sensitive

individual.

In response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment (and to some degree, of liberalism),

the Romantics offered the solace of nature. Good examples of this vein of nineteenth-century

Romanticism are the works of the English poets George Gordon, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe

Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the last two of whom extolled the

almost mystical qualities of the lake country of northwest England.

Romantic painters, like John Constable in England, Francisco Goya in Spain, and Karl

Friedrich Schinkel in Germany, offered inspiring landscapes, a record of historical events,

and images of a romanticized past. Beethoven, Chopin, and Wagner expressed the imagina-

tive, intuitive spirit of Romanticism in music.

Nationalism

In the nineteenth century, nationalism was the ideology that asserted that a nation was a

natural, organic entity whose people were bound together by shared language, customs,

and history. Nationalists argued that each nation had natural boundaries, shared cultural

traits, and a historical destiny to fulfill. Accordingly, nineteenth-century nationalists in

existing nation-states like Britain and France argued for strong, expansionist foreign poli-

cies. Nationalists in areas like Germany and Italy argued for national unification and the

expulsion of foreign rulers.

In the early nineteenth century, nationalism was allied to liberalism. Both shared a

spirit of optimism, believing that their goals represented the inevitable, historical progress

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