A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

582 Ch. 15 • Liberal Challenges To Restoration Europe

including regulations concerning safety and child labor. They considered
their factories to be their castles, in which they could do what they pleased.
British liberals believed that a strong state compromised political free­
dom. The French Revolution had, after all, culminated in Jacobin state cen­
tralization and Napoleonic despotism. Continental liberals remained more
“statist,” accepting a more active role by government, particularly in the Ger­
man states, and in Spain, where they relied on a powerful state to counter­
act the influence of nobles and clerics.

Romanticism

Romanticism, emphasizing imagination and emotion in personal develop­

ment, began to emerge as a literary, artistic, and musical movement in the

late eighteenth century. In 1798, the English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(1772-1834) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850) penned a manifesto

calling on poets to abandon the classical style based on Greek and Roman

models that characterized eighteenth-century court and aristocratic life and

instead express their emotional response to nature. During the romantic era,

swooning and fainting came into vogue because they seemed to be honest

expressions of emotion.

Conservative Origins

Romanticism first contributed to the conservative revival. After initially

being intrigued by the French Revolution’s apparent victory over the stric­

tures of the Old Regime, the early romantic writers had become disillu­

sioned by its violent turn. Coleridge had been among the first to sing the

praises of the Revolution, but turned against it when French armies began

pouring across the frontiers more as conquerors than as liberators.

Many of the early romantic writers were individuals of religious faith who

rejected Enlightenment rationalism. “I wept and I believed,” wrote the

French writer Frangois-Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), relating his

re-conversion to Catholicism after the turmoil of the revolutionary and

Napoleonic eras. Disillusionment with the French Revolution helped Ger­

man romantic writers discover in nationalism a means of individual fulfill­

ment. Nationalism, too, marked a reaction against Enlightenment rational

tradition. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744—1803), the son of a Prussian

schoolteacher, was one of the impassioned leaders of the Sturm und Drang

(Storm and Stress) movement, a rebellion by young German writers against

Enlightenment thought. Calling for the study and celebration of German lit­

erature and history, Herder argued that it was through the passionate identi­

fication with the nation that the individual reached his or her highest stage

of development. All Germans would be bound together by an awareness of