1. An Age of Revolutions in Europe and the Americas (Volume E)

2. A New Vocabulary “the ordinary man” factory journalism middle class
liberal
capitalism
conservative
industry
The list represents new words that described the social world post-1765, during which the world became increasingly urbanized. Workers moved to cities; conditions of filth, disease, and hunger often led to violent protest. Orators denounced tyranny and demanded new rights and freedoms. The “ordinary man” (largely inspired by Napoleon, who as an ordinary soldier rose to conquer most of Europe) in guise of the underdog was more inspired to reach beyond his allotted station in life.

3. Industrial Revolution
England
end of an agricultural economy
colonization
slavery
cotton, textile industry
factory working conditions
The Industrial Revolution began in England, and other nations emulated English innovations as its commercial and military power imperialized vast portions of the world. Landowners lost legal control over serfs in Russia, and farmers in Europe developed new entrepreneurial roles for themselves as the peasantry working for them acquired more autonomy or moved into factory labor in the textile industry (which was often worse for their health and pockets). Colonialism allowed for market development, both in gathering new resources from territories that were conquered and in procuring goods from those lands to sell in Europe. Cotton was the primary product, harvested by slaves and shipped to textile factories in England.

4. Political Revolution: Democracy
A government’s power is derived only from the consent of the governed (p. 6).
“Man is born free, yet everywhere is in chains” (Rousseau).
Revolutionaries in France and America argued that ordinary people should take political decision making into their own hands. In North America, colonial subjects were resentful of the English king, whose politics and economic policies led the American colonies to declare independence in 1776, not only from English rule but also from the practice of hereditary monarchy, and to instead favor an elected president with power “vested in the people.” The idea of democracy—that the general will of the people shaped politics more than an individual’s will—evolved from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writing.
The image is a portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1753) by Maurice Quentin de la Tour Antoine Lecuyer. Museum, Saint-Quentin.

5. French Revolution
French people also rejected an absolutist monarchy, with peasants rejecting the excessive tithes and taxes they paid during periods when harvests were low and bread’s cost was doubled. On July 14, 1789, peasants stormed the Bastille—a symbol of royal power—and demanded liberation. The French National Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which asserted equality and freedom of all men and abolished the notion of aristocratic or hereditary privilege, separating church and state, abolishing slavery in the colonies, and granting equal rights to everyone (including, for the first time, Jews).
The image is the painting Storming of the Bastille (1789) by Jean-Pierre Houel. The caption notes that Bernard Rene Jourdan, marquis of Launay, is being arrested in the center of the painting. National Library of France.

6. Reign of Terror
Weakened by civil revolt and by wars with neighboring European countries (who feared that French revolutionary sentiments were contagious), French rule was seized by the radical Jacobins, who established a centralized dictatorship and mass executed groups of people suspected of treason. The period was known as the Reign of Terror for the ruthlessness and extremism of this new government, which eventually ceased and was replaced, in 1790, with a new dictator—Napoleon.
The left image is a drawing titled The Last Cart (18th century) by Auguste Raffet. The caption reads that it depicts the Reign of Terror before the Thermidorian Reaction. The right image is a portrait of Andre Antoine (1795) by Jacques-Louis David (one of the Jacobins who led the Reign of Terror). J. Paul Getty Trust.

7. Napoleon eEmperor, 1804 self-crowned Battle of Waterloo, 1815
Napoleonic Code
South America
In 1799, Napoleon established a new dictatorship in France, reinstated slavery, and crowned himself Emperor in 1804 (prior to this event, the Pope crowned kings and emperors), now showing that divine right and hereditary monarchy under God’s will were irrelevant. After numerous failed attempts at world conquest, Napoleon was defeated by the British at the Battle of Waterloo in1815. Napoleon famously established the Napoleonic Code, a new legal system modeled after that of ancient Rome: it abolished hereditary principles, promoted employment based on skill rather than social connection or status, and established freedom of religion. Napoleon directly influenced South American countries to gain independence from Spanish rule.
The image is titled Coronation of Emperor Napoleon I and of Empress Josephine in Notre-Dame de Paris, December 2, 1804 (1805–07) by Jacques-Louis David and Georges Rouget. The caption notes that Josephine is kneeling before Napoleon during his coronation, while behind him sits Pope Pius VII. Louvre Museum.

8. Proletariat
Workers who had been exploited mobilized, organizing strikes and protests against economic and political inequalities. They called themselves the “proletariat” or “working class” for the first time. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto, which ended with “workers of the world, unite!” These words inspired change internationally.
The left image shows Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with Marx’s family. The right image is a mural by Diego Rivera (Mexico City), showing the history of Mexico, focused on Karl Marx here. Photographed by Wolfgang Sauber.

9. 1848: Springtime of the Peoples
This year marked a period of international revolutions in France, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Italy, Denmark, and Romania. The French abolished slavery permanently in this year, and women’s rights activists in the United States organized their first convention at Seneca Falls.
The image (1794), by Charles Thevenin, shows revolution in the French colonies. The caption reads: “Insurrection of the slaves from Saint-Domingue, lasting in Paris.” Freed colored men storm the convention and demand the abolition of slavery from the colonial empire of the Ancien Regime. One sees Jeanne Odo in the tribune with a young lady.

10. Revolutionary Writers
William Blake
Edmund Bruke
Heinrich Heine
William Wordsworth
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Samuel T. Coleridge
Charles Dickens
Andrés Bello
Victor Hugo
José Martí
Percy Shelley
Much of Blake’s nonesoteric poetry exposes church and government corruption and demands fair labor rights for women and children. Heine supported a worker’s uprising stemming from economic and political inequality, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning used poetry to persuade contemporaries to limit child labor in factories. Bello, the “artistic liberator,” inspired Latin Americans to use their own themes and ideas in writing, and Martí established himself as a national poet, revolutionary fighter, and political prisoner. Burke reflected on the vagaries of the French Revolution, while Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on the Lyrical Ballads, which reflected the language of the common man. Dickens, in The Tale of Two Cities (1859) exposed poverty in England and France, as did Hugo, whose work in French poetry, novels, and theater represents a quintessential Romanticism heralded by the French Revolution. Shelley saw modernity in the French Revolution, while Tolstoy and Melville set their respective novels, War and Peace and Billy Budd, in Napoloeonic history. Artists increasingly created art “for the people” rather than for didactic purpose or under the patronage of an aristocrat.

11. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
This map depicts one the most unfortunate and devastating periods in human history: the transatlantic slave trade between Europe (whose industries and wealth depended on slave labor); Africa (the source of some twelve million slave laborers, as indicated centrally on the map); and the New World, including North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean (where slaves were put to work on sugar plantations, in mines, and in the fields). The sheer number of people captured and sold into slavery is staggering in total, but equally horrifying is how many millions of slaves were traded under the auspices of individual European powers, including Great Britain and Portugal. Slaves were transported across the Atlantic like so much cargo; profits could be maximized by transporting as many slaves as a ship would hold. Once they arrived from Africa, slaves were sold to owners at slave markets. Many writers—both European and non-European alike—voiced their outrage and argued to abolish the slave trade. British Parliament finally passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

12. Revolutionary Europe
The American and French revolutions had an immediate impact for those living through them, but each also had a long-lasting effect, inspiring people across the globe with the possibility of democratic equality. Such revolutionary ideals are never easy to achieve, nor do the realities of the revolutionary spirit always live up to the dream, but by the mid-nineteenth century the world was full of places where social change was happening in a profound way. This map shows major revolutionary centers in Europe in 1848, a year that came to be known as the “Springtime of the Peoples.” Revolutions were happening from Lisbon (in Portugal) to Ireland (in the United Kingdom) to Budapest (in Hungary). It seemed that everywhere the working class was rising up to fight for their equality and for what they saw as a fair share of the wealth and power that their hard work had made possible. “Workers of the world unite!” wrote Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto (NAWOL, Volume E)—a rallying cry heard around the world.

13. Test Your Knowledge
Which good was initially responsible for England’s industrial boom?
a. grain b. whiskey c. corn d. cotton
Answer: D
Section: The Industrial Revolution
Feedback: Cotton, the basis of the textile industry, was the primary (though not the only) good that drove the industrial revolution.

14. Test Your Knowledge Who declared independence in 1776?
a. Britain b. France c. United States d. all of the above
Answer: C
Section: Democratic Revolutions
Feedback: In 1776, English colonists in North America declared their independence from British rule.

15. Test Your Knowledge
What event marked the beginning of the French Revolution?
a. the storming of the Bastille b. the invasion of France by the British c. the Declaration of the Rights of Man d. the execution of the French king
Answer: A
Section: Democratic Revolutions
Feedback: The 1789 storming of the Bastille—a French prison that was a symbol of monarchic power—marked the beginning of the French Revolution.

16. Test Your Knowledge
In what work can you find this typically revolutionary expression: “Workers of the world, unite!”?
a. the Napoleonic Code b. the Declaration of the Rights of Man c. the Declaration of Independence d. the Communist Manifesto
Answer: D
Section: Democratic Revolutions
Feedback: “Workers of the world, unite!” is from Marx and Engels 1848 Communist Manifesto. This expression reflects how the spirit of revolution had permeated cultures around the globe and how workers—the basis of the industrial revolution itself, though also its long-time victims—were arguing for equality.

17. Test Your Knowledge
In 1798, who authored a work that was to break with poetic tradition by employing “language really used by men”?
a. William Blake b. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge c. Elizabeth Barrett Browning d. Leo Tolstoy
Answer: B
Section: Literature in the Age of Revolutions
Feedback: In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on a volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads. In the preface to that work, Wordsworth and Coleridge expressed their intentions to develop a new kind of poetry, one that featured “language really used by men.” The explicitly revolutionary character of the preface, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetic aims and ideals, reflects the grander revolutionary spirit of the age.

18. This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for The Norton Anthology
Of World Literature