A Tale of Two Revolutions

Context is the background surrounding a subject. The context for the 19th and 20th centuries are the French and Industrial Revolutions

• Industrial Revolution
  • Background Information
    • Defined as the change from hand-based tools to mechanical tools.
    • Happened to Great Britain in 1750 with urbanization after the agricultural tools, then spread to France, Northern Spain and Italy, Western Germany, and New England.
    • Agriculture was made more efficient by a monk named Gregor Mendel who created eugenics
    • Less rural labor as a result of an agricultural revolution causes increase in mobile, wage-earning, urban labor
  • Urban Centers
    • Small urban centers sprang up almost overnight. Most of these cities can be found in Midlands: Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, London explode in size.
    • there was basically a bunch of poop in the street all the time
    • Urbanization, concentrated populations, housing, sanitation, problems with working conditions etc. The working hours went from 14 hours a day 6 days a week to 8 hours a day 5 days a week
    • The close proximity led to urban riots in Paris 1789 and St. Petersburg 1905 and 1917
  • Economics
    • Capitalism started to emerge with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Invisible Hand, Natural Law guides markets and government should stay out of business.
    • Laissez faire: the rightful role of government is defined by Locke
    • Sir Thomas Malthus created the iron law of wages which gave the urban poor a raise. It was either raise the pay and or increase government benefits. Malthus says that it would hurt the poor to pay them more. They would work less and reproduce more and it would be a bad cycle. The solution was to pay the workers a subsistence wage, just enough to live on
• French Revolution
  • What happened?
    • Emergence of individual rights over the privileges of aristocracy
    • The three ideas are Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité
    • The Declaration of the Rights of Man was based of off the American Declaration of Independence. Had the same idea that rights are inalienable
    • Equality both civil and legal were achieved during the French Revolution, but not social and economic equality was not attained.
  • French Revolution conflated with the Napoleonic Wars, so by 1815 people were quite fed up and rejected French things and ideas.
    • Instead of Liberal Progressive ideas ruling, forces of Reaction: conservative, established monarchies double down on their control of government and human rights.
    • Metternich
    • Absolute Monarch in Europe at the time:
      • Russia
      • Austria
      • Germany becomes unified in 1871 with a Kaiser, or emperor
      • Italy with a few checks and balances becomes unified with a monarch
      • The Ottomans (the Turks)
    • The more liberal countries are separated from the conservative ones by the Rhine River
      • Great Britain
      • The low countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg