Recap

So this blog is to serve kind of as a recap of the course. I personally really enjoyed it. I haven't taken a survey course since high school, and I enjoyed it much more than I anticipated, especially since I'm used to the more specific history classes. One of the things that I have enjoyed the most about this course is being able to observe and analyze the change over time in Europe over the course of 500 years.
I never really studied Europe that much; I've mainly stuck to American history. That said, studying Europe has helped me gain a better understanding of where America stands in the grand scheme of world and European history. It's helped me understand America much better, which I really appreciate, switching gears and understanding America in the context of European history rather than vice versa. It was interesting to hear different dates and events in European history and being able to line them up to occurrences in American history.
I learned so much in this class which has broadened and deepened my understanding of history in general, but particularly of French history. As a French major, I have had some experience with French history, particularly dealing with Haussman and Violet-le-Duc, but because much of these classes were language-based, much what little history we discussed was cursory at best. I feel a lot better knowing that I have the knowledge of the history of a people whose language I speak.
Overall, I found this course to be extremely rewarding and will take much of the knowledge I acquired with me in my graduate study. I orignally took this course to satisfy credit so I can graduate next week, but I ended getting so much more out of it.

Well-behaved women rarely make history

This past week, we read an article on women and their resistance to the imposed communist culture in Russia. This article, to me, was one of the most interesting we have read during the course. I'm not a mega-feminist or anything, but it does truly bother me how historians tend to overlook women in their research and writing. During my four years of historical study, almost everything that I have read has been written by white males about white males, with very few exceptions; this is intensely frustrating to me, especially since there is more to the history of this planet than this perspective and this subject.
Recently, however, it seems as if this pervading monopoly over scholarly articles and books is being broken up; by recently, I mean within only the past couple decades or so. The problem is that graduate students of history would more often than not follow the same scholarship as their advisors, who likely followed the scholarship of their advisors, and so on and so forth. Therefore, the study of history remained static, not undergoing much change. Starting in the 60s and 70s, however, one sees a turning point where scholarship began to shift and focus on women and minorities, shedding light on contributors to human history that had been theretofore ignored, their voices kept silent (as an example, pervading scholarshuip up until the 1960s touted that slaves actually enjoyed being enslaved. Obviously not the case). African Americans and women had broken onto the scene and started researching and writing about the history of their race and gender, respectively. This strongly influenced the kind of scholarship being published, permanently and significantly changing the face of historical study forever, and for the better. It is this shift that allows us to read things like that published by Brovkin who likely came out of this time of change, whose book from which our reading was taken having been published in 1998.
Knowing that the impact of women in history is being taken seriously helps me feel a touch better about how my sex has been supressed and oppresed for the past few hundred years, that we are making our comeback slowly but surely by these historians showing how we have been significant, not just in Soviet Russia, but also as we discussed with the womens' march on Paris that helped trigger the French Revolution, or the women actively pushing for suffrage in Britain, changing social dynamics, the women who bolstered the Enlightenment through their salons, being key contributors to the success and strength of the movement itself. I am very thankful for this new scholarship and I see it as a sign of things to come, that massive holes in our history as the human race will be filled by people shedding light on more than just white, male history. It is almost like an Enlightenment in and of itself.

An army lead by the Bourgeoisie?

One of the most interesting things to me about World War I is the class dynamic about which we spoke in class. As we discussed, the officers in the armies of Britain, France and Germany were largely composed of people who came from the middle and upper classes. In this sense, it seems as if the officer corps of all nations involved, but especially France, were extensions of the Bourgeoisie into the Great War. The interesting thing about this, also, is the fact that many people saw World War I as a way for them to escape the bourgeois classes and culture; the outbreak of a war, however, does not change the fact that the same people some are trying to escape become the leadership under which they must fight, the people to whose orders they must conform.
Additionally, within the rank and file, one can also find much of the class resentment that existed before the war between Marx's Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. There is much resentment for the officer corps (which embodies the upper classes) emanating from the enlisted/conscripted soldiery. This is understandable; officers Captain and lower would often share the trenches and the battles with their men, some of them, especially in Germany (ex. Ernst Junger), having been promoted to being officers from the enlisted corps. Higher than this (major and above), however, one sees the power of money, that title and wealth can buy a ticket out of the trenches and safely on a hill miles away from no-man's-land despite whether one deserved to be there.
In regular society, it is this kind of subversion and taking advantage of the work of the lower class, according to political philosophers like Marx and Engels, that lead to revolutions. While not so much in Britain and Germany, this becomes evident in France as many soldiers mutiny their officers, a small revolution of the Proletariat against the Bourgeoisie in the trenches of World War I. So the question is how successful were the people of this time in escaping/destroying the rule and influence of the Bourgeoisie? Was the war upon which they relied to fix their social problems simply extending and prolonging them?

Ahead of its time

In our study of the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848, I could not help but think about how far behind the United States the European powers were. My key area of study as a history major here at Georgia is 19th century America. In 1830, the United States was on its seventh president in Andrew Jackson, and in 1848, James K. Polk. Granted, they were marching down the road to Civil War, but the nation was still on the large stable, and its last revolution fought 1776-1783. After that, there was next to no violent civil unrest, no domestic revolutions (save for slave revolts, but none to subvert the federal government).

As we have discussed, the revolutions in Europe had a myriad of stimuli, ranging from agricultural and financial crises to the presumed theft of rights from the people by the government, especially said rights which pertained to land and other private property. In the United States, rights like these found strong protection from not only state law, but also federal.

There are several likely causes for America being farther ahead than the European powers. The United States did not have to worry about other powers right next door interfering in their affairs, foreign and domestic. Furthermore, a large cause of many of the revolts between 1830 and 1848 was overpopulation and disease because too many people were being cramped into too small of space. In the United States, there were copious amounts of land into which they could expand, allowing for their growing population to expand westward. Because of this, the health and political problems that plagued Europe were able to be dispersed in America. Also, Americans during this time period (save for certain groups in the South), felt that they and their rights were being protected by the federal government, which for the most part is true. The Constitution had yet to fail them, and they had, most importantly, FAITH in their government. It is this intrinsic feeling of trust and faith that Europeans seem to lack (and for good reason). So, they turned to revolt.

It is interesting to me just how far ahead of its time America appears to be in comparison to Europe. I wonder why the governments in Europe did not follow the American example, seeing the political/social stability and economic prosperity (save for the panics that occurred during the 1830s) that the country was experiencing and enjoying. Perhaps it was a power play, perhaps it was that last fight to maintain tradition; I'm not entirely sure. The comparison, however, is an enthralling one.

You know, it kind of makes sense...

Sometimes the only way to truly and utterly reform one's government is to do much of what the Revolutionary Frenchmen did during the Revolution. We might look at the deeds done by the French from the American perspective and think of it as overkill, both literal and figurative. But when one stops to think for a moment, it is difficult to truly compare the two revolutions. In what would become the United States, many towns, cities, nay, even entire colonies made their laws largely according to some semblance of democracy, may it be representative or direct. Americans began using democratic practices starting with the arrival of the first colonists in the first half of the seventeenth century; in short, before the American Revolution truly broke out, the colonies, if not well-versed in, had copious amounts of practice in the execution of democracy. Not so in France.
For the French, the idea of true democracy/representative democracy was only something they had read, heard and talked about, not that they had actually used themselves. In my last post, I referred to the fact that the ideas about which the Enlightenment philosophers spoke could only come about through Revolution and complete social/cultural upheaval. That is more or less what happened in the French Revolution. By loss of percentage of population, the American Revolution was the bloodiest war in American history; the French had much farther to climb than did the Americans, therefore the revolution required to reform their system of government and their society as a whole required more time, and, unfortunately, more lives. Making a move from an absolute monarchy to a democracy is no small task. So, the French, to enforce the New Order, had to take away more rights and police the enforcement of their laws with more force, again, because they were doing a 180 degree turn in their government. While it is unfortunate, they were able to accomplish, at least for the most part, what they wanted to do with their government (until Napoleon threw a little bit of a wrench in the system by becoming Emperor).
My point and purpose is to suggest that we should not be so shocked or so critical of the French for what they did during their Revolution, that we should not allow our perception of the French Revolution be too impacted or shaped by our knowledge and understanding of our own Revolution in the British colonies. The French had much more work and change to accomplish than did the revolutionary Americans, and they did the best they could with what they had. Granted, the loss of life and rights is tragic, but for the French, they were doing the best they could with what they had.

On the Philosophes and the Nature of their Thoughts

The Enlightenment presented new and incredible ways of thinking about society and the people within it. An interesting point brought forth, and one of the most radical and novel, treated the change in view of the hierarchy, particularly in France. An interesting point, however, is that the people meeting in the salons and so forth seemed interestingly focused on themselves looking from their position up towards those above them, pondering their own particular inferiority to them, not wanting to ponder how their ideas would apply to those yet below themselves and their own tyranny over them. This thought goes hand in hand with the point about fear of the mob.
People like the Philosophes, while speaking of social reform, do not seem to have had the intention of engaging the majority of the population: the middle and lower classes. I understand that this would have proven difficult, considering the main means of spreading their ideas was the press and the majority of the population was illiterate; by the same token, though, it is interesting that they would have thought the king would entertain the thought of intentionally removing power from himself for the abstract ideas offered by men like Voltaire, of the social contract and things of that nature. Though the situation is much different from Europe, the American elites of the Revolution, according to scholars like Gary Nash, attempted to engage the people in the back-country of the United States, the poor farmers and the lower-class artisans, because they understood that the ideas of “liberty” and the “rights of man” needed to spread, that the Revolution would become possible only through a the participation of a majority of the population. It seems the contrary in Europe, that they preferred to keep these ideas confined within the middle and upper classes, rather than allowing the ideas so spread. .
Reforms such as these are radical and indeed quite revolutionary. I do not mean to suggest that the reform-minded individuals of the Enlightenment were short-sighted, but it is interesting that they, in all of their understanding of practicality and reason, did not understand that their ideas, by being so drastically revolutionary, would not inherently spark revolution as they would do in 1776 with the American Revolution and in 1789 with the French Revolution. Perhaps I am wrong in this suggestion, that they saw the potential of these thoughts, but they did not have the power themselves at the time to enact a Revolution or were not prepared for that radical of a change. But to suppose that their government would reform itself on its own, and reform itself in such a way that would reduce its own power, seems quite idealistic and, contrary to what they claimed to be, rather unreasonable. Changes like those, drastic changes in government, in society, and in an entire way of life, are things that come out of revolutions, true revolutions, not the idealistic hope of “reform.”