Slide 1 · National Identity & European Movements
Conservatism, Liberalism & Nationalism Collide
After Napoleon's defeat, conservatives sought to restore traditional monarchy and aristocracy, while liberals demanded constitutional government and individual rights, and nationalists pushed for unified nation-states along cultural and linguistic lines.
Slide 2 · Cultural & Intellectual Developments
Romanticism Rejects Reason
Writers, artists, and composers like Goethe, Wordsworth, and Beethoven rebelled against Enlightenment rationalism and industrial society, celebrating emotion, individualism, and an idealized vision of nature instead.
Slide 3 · National Identity & European Movements
The Revolutions of 1830 and 1848
Liberal and nationalist uprisings swept across France, the German states, the Austrian Empire, and Italy, briefly toppling governments before being crushed — yet their demands for constitutions and national unity shaped the rest of the century.
Slide 4 · National Identity & European Movements
Cavour, Garibaldi & the Risorgimento
Camillo di Cavour's diplomacy and alliances combined with Giuseppe Garibaldi's volunteer military campaigns in Sicily and southern Italy to unify the Italian peninsula into the Kingdom of Italy by 1861, completed by 1871.
Slide 5 · States & Other Institutions of Power
Bismarck, Realpolitik & German Unification
Otto von Bismarck rejected idealistic nationalism in favor of realpolitik, engineering three calculated wars — including the decisive Franco-Prussian War — that united the German states and led to the proclamation of the Second Reich under Kaiser Wilhelm I.
Slide 6 · National Identity & European Movements
The Eastern Question
As the Ottoman Empire's power in Europe declined, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Britain, and Balkan nationalist movements competed over its territory, creating one of the era's most persistent diplomatic crises.
Slide 7 · Social Organization & Development
Mass Politics, Suffrage & the Dreyfus Affair
Voting rights gradually expanded and political parties began organizing mass constituencies, while early feminist movements demanded greater rights for women and France's Dreyfus Affair exposed deep anti-Semitism in European society.
Slide 8 · Cultural & Intellectual Developments
Darwin, Social Darwinism & Realism
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution reshaped science and was controversially extended into Social Darwinism, while Realist and Naturalist artists and writers reacted against Romantic idealism by depicting everyday life with unsentimental accuracy.