THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Comeback of the Conservatives
From the time of the defeat of Napoleon and the attempt to restore the old regime in France in 1815, the Catholic church played a leading role in fighting democratic reforms--even liberal thought itself.
In France the very religious peasants had been as alienated from aspects of the French Revolution as the nobility had -- and looked to the church to protect them from further fanaticism.

In England Christian conservatives also reacted to the drift of English culture into the liberal-industrial order, retreating into an almost mystical affection for deep tradition. Indeed at Oxford a conservative movement of the 1830s led prominent Anglicans (Newman and Manning) involved in the High Church movement to take the full step of converting to Roman Catholicism in the 1840s.

The pinnacle of Catholic conservatism seemed to be reached in 1869-1870 with Vatican I -- led by pope Pius IX (pope: 1846-1878) -- where, among other things, the doctrine of papal infallibility was affirmed.

On-Going Liberalism
Indeed, the intellectual spirit of the Enlightenment was not slowed up by the French Revolution -- but instead challenged to new heights of critiquing Western civilization. "Liberals" had not given up the idea of a government made up not of kings (or peasants) but of educated, industrious "enlightened" new leaders.
Liberals dreamed of rule by national assemblies and parliaments--made up of national patriots like themselves. They dreamed noble thoughts of taking political control and reforming their nations into well run, prosperous societies.

Popular Nationalism
But the spirit of nationalism was stirring up the common people into something of a third force--so that there would be a three-way pull of king, liberals and commoners in the determination of the political direction of Europe.

Starting back in the later 1700s, new technologies were rapidly developing in the areas of the manufacture of cotton thread, the mining of iron and coal and the manufacture of iron products, shipbuilding, and in the laying out of new roads and turnpikes--especially in England which lead the West in the development of new industry.
The Napoleonic Wars, by war-time necessity, merely speeded up the process of developing new industrial technologies in Europe.

The English tried to keep their monopoly on industrial processes by forbidding their spread abroad. But the secrets slipped out--to France, to Belgium, to Germany, to America--though the English managed to keep well ahead of most other industrialists for most of the 1800s.

The discovery of the steam engine was very important to the industrial revolution for it opened up manufacture in areas not well served by water power. It permitted deeper mining for iron and coal, resources which it also called for in massive amounts in its own manufacture and operation. It increased human productivity. It also displaced it.

Other inventions also began to redraw the picture of human productivity. Factory-powered looms rapidly replaced the older procedures of hiring out weavers to make cotton cloth in their homes or cottages, putting weavers out of work or driving them into factories to make them overseers of the power-looms.

The pay for industrial and mine workers was low, making manufacture cheap (and profitable for the entrepreneurs). In part this was due to the oversupply of unskilled labor: the English population doubled from the mid 1700s to early 1800s, despite emigration abroad. Farm families were pushed by dire economic circumstances out of the countryside and into the new industrial cities in the quest for work.

There were farm relief programs, though hardly adequate to the size of the need of the times (and targets of Liberal animosity, for Liberals liked the flow of cheap labor into their factories). There were also experiments in establishing new factory communities around principles of human treatment of workers and their families. But these efforts were few. Most entrepreneurs looked upon their workers as they did any other manufacturing resource--something to be kept as cheap as possible.

Working class consciousness (as well as alcoholism) thus began to grow up as workers faced the perpetual insecurity of their system.

America avoided most of the kinds of social strains that accompanied industrialization in Europe-- only because the ample supply of land to the West served as a ready alternative to the New England factory or Appalachian coal mine for young families looking for a livelihood. Thus America had a different attitude than Europe about the industrial revolution--seeing in it the same promise of a good future that they saw in the frontier. Indeed, towns were proud of their industrial standing, vying for railroads, canals and factories as a mark of civic stature.

Germany's industrial revolution developed later in the century--much of it under the direction of Prussian Chancellor Bismarck, and the new breed of aristocrat entrepreneurs which he had subsidized in his effort to turn Germany into an industrial powerhouse. Also, the Rhine, the nearby Saar with its coal and Ruhr with its iron were ideally situated for industrial development. In fact, by the end of the 1800s, Germany was pressing hard in its challenge to England as industrial power in Europe.

France, once the major power of Europe, slipped behind in the competition--in great part because it possessed no great amounts of natural mineral wealth or great rivers (having lost such territory to Germany in 1870) to carry its good to the growing international market. Consequently, France remained mostly an agrarian society, not that much different in appearance from what it had been in previous centuries.

Nearby Belgium, with its wealth in natural resources and rivers, might have played that role for France--but was given to the new Dutch monarchy in the post-Napoleonic settlement in 1815, and then became independent (as a neutral "buffer state" situated between England, France and Germany) in 1830. Thus the Belgians developed their own industrial society--one however culturally divided between Dutch-speaking (and rural) Northerners and French-speaking (and industrial) Southerners.

The Revolutions of 1830-1832
Within 10-15 years of the Vienna settlement there were uprisings all over Europe as kings and liberals clashed--with nationalists generally siding with the liberals. The struggles were bitter and cruel--and in some places (Poland, Spain, Austria, Germany) the kings, princes or emperors were able to hold on to their positions only through extreme repression.
But in France a moderate, nationalist monarchy (ruling with a liberal National Assembly) came to power in the Revolution of 1830. And in England, in 1832 the liberals took control of Parliament and put into place a number of reforms of the English political system.

Even in the young republic of America there was something of a revolution of 1830--actually begun in 1829, as the (Democratic) party of Andrew Jackson, representing the interests of the rural and frontier farmer, took control of Congress from the (liberal) party of Thomas Jefferson, representing more the interests of the educated, urban upper-middle class.

The Revolutions of 1848
Only in America did the events of the early 1830s seem to play to the benefit of the common rural or newly industrial worker. In Europe the plight of the commoner only seemed to worsen--as the population rapidly increased and there was no land to distribute. In some areas, such as Ireland, the people starved, or lived on the edge of starvation.
Further, the liberals were closely tied to the new industrial revolution--which seemed to exploit rather than benefit the commoners. Soon to be heard were a rising chorus of critical voices (Charles Dickens is a well-known example; Karl Marx is another) aimed at the callousness of the liberals who seemed interested only in protecting their industrial wealth--earned by the sweat of underpaid workers.

Interestingly some of the monarchical party began to join in the chorus--putting themselves on the sides of the somewhat religiously and socially conservative commoners. This was a heady brew, whose main ingredient was a spirit of fired-up nationalism.

Tensions exploded in 1848 all through Europe--with, again, the worst of it on the European continent. Young intellectuals stirred up central and eastern Europe (Germany, Italy, Poland) with a program that was essentially nationalistic in character: freedom for their peoples against reactionary monarchies. These revolutions were not yet strong enough to carry forward their programs, and they were crushed, one by one. But the issues they raised would not go away.

In France, however, Louis Napoleon (a grand-nephew of Napoleon) exploited the nationalist fervor stirred by events and set aside a feeble Liberal 2nd Republic to put himself in power as a new "emperor"--instituting a regime which tried to serve simultaneously the nationalist interests of both the liberal bourgeoisie and the very conservative peasants. Truly, under him Paris was transformed into the beauty that it is today--and French art blossomed during his reign.

In general, in the wake of the failures of the 1848 revolutions in Germany and Italy, liberalism got forgotten and a spirit of romantic nationalism became the rallying points of younger visionaries.

The Nationalist Upheavals of 1860-1870
In Italy this mood exploded in 1860, producing, under the direction of Mazzini, Cavour and Garibaldi, a series of escapades which drummed the small Italian states into a new national union. Italy was united and set free as a nation.
At about the same time, a very conservative Prussian Chancellor, Bismarck, began to co-opt this nationalist spirit widespread in Germany and included it as the center-piece of a rapidly expanding Prussian hold over the rest of Germany. Bismarck offered a number of social reforms to Germany in exchange for the support of German nationalists for his Prussian policy.

But most importantly, in drawing France into a war in 1870 and then humiliating the French, Bismarck put the final touches on a nationalist spirit which delivered all of Germany into his hands. Germany was thus finally united as a single nation and a single state under the Prussian monarchy.

Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 toppled the regime of Louis Napoleon in France. In the effort to find a new ruler of France, a stalemate occurred among the various monarchical parties--and so a Third Republic was instituted as a "temporary" compromise (it lasted until the 1940s!).

Empiricism/Positivism
The intellectual push of the 18th century Enlightenment merely gained momentum in the 19th century.
True, David Hume, mid-way in the 1700s, had pointed out some profound contradictions in the kind of scientific mindset that was growing up in the West, and Immanuel Kant, in his effort to answer Hume, only tended to raise up more questions about the logic of Western thought.

But in general no one was paying much attention. This was the age of empiricism and positivism. The path to human wisdom or knowledge was beginning to be understood more and more to be a matter of gathering "facts" about the natural world we lived in. Technology dealt with "facts." Science, since Newton and Locke, dealt with "facts." It seemed that everyone was looking to add to the rapidly expanding body of factual knowledge about our world--with the idea in mind of bringing all Truth (as "fact") under human dominion.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
There is no question that the greatest impact on 19th century thought came from Charles Darwin. Darwin was a naturalist, a "fact" gatherer, who not only contributed to our understanding of many new details about natural life--but also developed a hypothesis about why nature seemed to take the shape she did. His facts seemed to point to the evolution of all living species through a process of competition for survival which led, by accidental causes, to "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest." The impact of his hypothesis on the Western intellect cannot be overestimated--for his theory still underpins most modern thinking about life today!
But note: Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution--for it had been a very big element of Western thought since the on-set of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution for instance was quite certain that it was about not only social justice--but also development, growth of human society and the human intellect.

George Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and German Idealism
Indeed, while the English were pushing ahead an empirical doctrine of evolution through accidental natural causes, the Germans were developing, through the primary inspiration of Hegel, an "idealist" doctrine of evolution through the will of some great transcendent will (the world Spirit). Hegel was clearly a Platonist--seeing all history, all human events as "guided" by this powerful spirit. This task of learning or of science was to Hegel (and the Hegelians after him) therefore not just to collect facts, but to discern the particular movement of this guiding hand in the midst of such facts.
German scholarship (indeed much of all European scholarship) after Hegel was fairly single-minded in this quest. Things were studied in order to draw out the hidden pattern of the world Spirit--so as to enable man to work in cooperation with such divine destiny. This was a powerful idea, affecting the new sciences of anthropology (F.M. Müller, E.B. Taylor) and sociology (E. Durkheim, M. Weber).

But it also touched on group pride, as nations or classes came to see themselves as being under the special anointing of the world Spirit to take the lead to direct history into the next era. This fed powerfully into German nationalism, with its sense of special German historical destiny. This also fed powerfully into the working class movement which came to view the workers of the world as the true moral underpinning of the world to come.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Thus in typical German fashion, the sociologist Karl Marx picked up on Hegelian Idealism to project a special destiny for the European working classes.
But Marx moved more to the middle ground between Hegel and Darwin in projecting how the working classes would come to power. Not by accident (as per Darwin) nor by some unseen spirit (as per Hegel) but through the necessary logic of the forces of production: the world belonged to those who owned the material forces of production (factories, mines, etc.). The industrial workers would inevitably wield the power of their vastly greater numbers, to seize the forces of production from the liberal entrepreneurs and institute a new society based on worker values--where all would live voluntarily and communally (owning no property but sharing everything in common) according to a high spirit of brotherly love. Thus communism or Marxism was born.

Catholic Conservatism
From the time of the defeat of Napoleon and the attempt to restore the old regime in France in 1815, the Catholic church played a leading role in fighting democratic reforms--even liberal thought itself.
In France the very religious peasants had been as alienated from aspects of the French Revolution as the nobility had--and looked to the church to protect them from further fanaticism.

In England Christian conservatives also reacted of the drift of English culture into the liberal- industrial order, retreating into an almost mystical affection for deep tradition. Indeed at Oxford a conservative movement of the 1830s led prominent Anglicans (Newman and Manning) involved in the High Church movement to take the full step of converting to Roman Catholicism in the 1840s.

The pinnacle of Catholic conservatism seemed to be reached in 1969-1870 with Vatican I-- led by pope Pius IX (pope: 1846-1878)--where, among other things, the doctrine of papal infallibility was affirmed.

Biblical Criticism and Protestant Conservatism
There were also Protestants that were unnerved by the modernization of Western society--though their focus was more on matters of theology than church order, especially the question of the status or authority of Holy Scripture.
Biblical text-criticism had been making the claims (e.g., T. Woolston and H.S. Reimarus) since even the early 1700s that Scripture included a great number of "facts" which couldn't possibly be true, most particularly some of the miracle stories. Further, Jean Astruc published a work in 1753 which claimed that linguistic analysis of Genesis revealed multiple authorship--challenging the idea that it was written by Moses (under the direction of God).

By the 1800s the voices of criticism grew as the Bible came under scrutiny as "ancient literature" (Bauer, Wellhausen)--studied for the way it revealed the thought processes of a people living long ago (thus not as a repository of eternal truth).

Also, some scholars (Schleiermacher, Strauss) came to the "rescue" of scripture--by distilling out the "essential" or "historical" Jesus from the obvious "myth" that had been added by Jesus' overly impressionable early followers.

Then came Darwin's theory of evolution--which suggested that the creation account of Genesis was pure myth.

There to answer these claims were the voices of the Princeton conservatives (Alexander, Hodge [father and son], Warfield) who dedicated themselves to the task of affirming the infallibility or inerrancy of scripture.

Schweitzer. Then at the end of the century came a hard-hitting response of J. Weiss and Albert Schweitzer to certain aspects of Biblical criticism. They pointed out the impossibility of extracting a "true" or "historical" Jesus from the scriptural account of the early church--for what was given there was not a "factual" description of Jesus at all, but rather the reflections of the faithful as to the ultimate meaning of Christ.

Evangelicalism and the Social Gospel
While theologians debated the finer points of scripture others of the faith went about their business of being Christian. Christian welfare was still the primary source beyond the family of care for the sick and the poor.
To some, the evangelicals, that meant in particular care for the souls of the sick and the poor. Evangelicals believed that people could be reformed or brought out of their poverty of body and mind only through the hearing of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Efforts to reform people through any other means than the power of the gospel were destined to failure--for the heart had to be converted before the rest of the person could be brought to health, strength and wisdom.

That meant that, like the Salvation Army, their "call" was to go into the hurting places of the newly emerging urban order and seek out the poor and sick--to bring them in to their shelters, to be fed and cared for and--most importantly--be presented with the gospel message of hope.

To others, (Gladden, Rauschenbusch) the Christian "call" was to dispense mercy and justice on behalf of the poor--pushing for education, housing and labor reform. Theirs was a "social gospel" which tended to emphasize the responsibility of the Christian to follow the example of Jesus in working with the poor in improving their economic and social conditions. The social gospel tended to work more effectively in inspiring the Christian worker in his or her charity--than in inspiring the recipient of that charity. The poor supposedly could not take hold of the gospel until the economic and social conditions holding them in poverty had been eliminated.

Millennialism and the "New Revelation" Religions
The difference between the evangelical Christian and the social gospel or "liberal" Christian was closely related to another theological difference that held the 19th century in fascination: millennialism. Millenialism pointed to the Return of Jesus--as he had promised almost 2000 years earlier. But there were strong divisions within millennialism as to exactly how that was to happen.
The pre-millennialists (evangelicals) felt that Jesus was coming according to God's timing and only after he came would the millennium arrive in which the world be delivered from sin and sickness. The task of the Christian was to prepare the world spiritually (through the propagation of the gospel) for his coming.

The post-millennialists (social gospel and liberals) believed quite the opposite: that the return of Christ would come only after the millennium was ushered in--requiring the faithful to work to rid the world of sin and sickness (build the millennium) so that the Lord might come.

There were others who felt that they were living in "prophetic" times. Voices were being heard and new revelations were being issued from God--which were having the effect of creating new Christian (or quasi-Christian) movements: 7th Day Adventists and Mormons in the early part of the century; Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witness in the later part of the century.

Western Imperialism: An Overview
We often think of Queen Victoria of England when we try to get a picture of the times. In a way, she represented the tensions between the explosive power of European science and industrial technology and the awesome spirit of the European heart. It was an expansive time for Europe--and America. It was a heady time to be Western.
This dominant Western spirit seemed to be justified not only by the great achievements of its industrial technlogy--but also by the relative ease by which it seemed to expand itself into the cultural life of the rest of the world. Missionaries, both Christian and commercial (oftentimes one and the same), poured out of Europe to Africa and Asia, sweeping away before them all local political and cultural resistance.

India was consumed--principally by the English. China and Japan were "opened up"--mostly by a consortium of European (and American) powers. And Africa was "carved up" into a patchwork of English, French, German, Portuguese, Belgian and Italian colonies. Only the Muslim Middle East was able to offer, through Turkish protection, some degree of resistance to Western imperial designs--until toward the end of the century when the Turkish Sultan gradually began to show increasing weakness as the "Sick Man" of Europe.

This carving up of the world into a number of European national empires was a friendly game--as long as there was plenty of overseas territory to compete for. But once the world was pretty much apportioned out (Latin America going to the United States--with British backing), problems arose. There was no longer a safely removed playing field for the players to compete on. They began rubbing up against each other.