To What Extent Did Empire Affect Lives of Continental Europeans - Coursework Example

The Empire: Achievement and Excesses I. Introduction There had, as assumed, been continuing influences behind the emergence of a German Empire. But unification, which is a natural quality of an Empire, meant guiding the cultural and economic trends into a more workable political channel. From the later period in the nineteenth century, the influence of Prussia increased. The thrust picked up the pace rapidly through Wilhelm I of Prussia who started to think with regards to Prussian dominance over Germany in 1861. This meant doubling the Prussian army, and guaranteeing the approval of the Prussian Parliament for an additional 400,000 men. The resulting constitutional conflict was prevailed over by Otto Van Bismarck, the Minister President of Prussia in 1862 (Gooch, 1960, 58). Over the course of the latter part of the nineteenth century Bismarck involved Prussia in three wars, at some stage which the smaller German states were taken away from the presidency of Austria, the German Confederation was disbanded and Prussia developed to form a new and more entirely integrated Germany (ibid). France, on the other hand, became more centralized and liberal society during and after the Empire. The leaders in Paris confronted a few restrictions, and businessman took advantage of the freedom of commerce. Urban labourers and landless peasants, on the contrary, could stage only weak rebellions against their landowners. Even though the nobility had been dispossessed of its privileged and several of its owned land, the social hierarchy persisted; over the next five decades the nobility would unite with the upper bourgeoisie to form a new ruling class, which is known as the notables. The Church had lost its important role in society, yet it lingered on as a powerful force. A British blockade throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods had weakened the once flourishing Atlantic imperial economy. During these twenty-five years, England had surpassed the French economy in industrialization (ibid). II. The German Empire: A History of Organization and Discipline The Empire in Germany symbolized success. Strengthened by the three victorious wars, she had replaced the nation of France as the first military power in continental Europe. The Prussian character was perceived to be equalled by remarkable progress in other directions. In almost all sectors of education and scientific innovations, the German Empire did not stand second to another. In manufacturing, German industry and commerce improved leaps and bounds. This success has been attributed by several of the historians and other scholars to the Prussian genius for organisation, orderliness and self-discipline of her diligent and hardworking citizenry. There were millions of them, too; approximately 67 million in 1900, which made the Germans the second-largest nation in Europe, far ahead of France and Britain, and a little behind to the massive population of Russia (Menzel & Horrocks, 1971, 83). By 1890, Germany had become primarily an industrial nation, with big urban areas. On the advent of the First World War, for every German tilling the land, two were employed in manufacture. The nineteenth century witnessed the dramatic leap of in the productivity of Germany which equalled the economic prosperity of Britain and the United States during the period. Moreover, it became the third industrial power in the world. Germany, during the Empire, challenged the position of Great Britain as the leading nation in Europe at the time through producing large quantities of coal, iron and steel (Pinnow & Brailsford, 1993). Yet, most importantly, the Empire in Germany has something to do with the German character, not merely the nation’s physical resources. The German character at the time of the Empire is a gift for method and it has an innate sense of self-discipline, which established Germany as a nation of best teachers and intellectuals in the world, which then impressed a status to the Empire as a huge schoolhouse in which all age and social classes teaches and is taught. Far and wide within the national frontier positions dominate the order and uniformity of the exemplar school with its scheme of merit and demerit, of supreme rule and absolute submission, varied by aggressive and immature oppositions, which in finality consistently leads to improved guidance of order and discipline (ibid). This affinity towards order, the endowment for discipline and submission of individual will, the respect for the conventional, all of which discover their expression politically in the obedience of a citizenry of the highest moral growth residing in the summit of modern culture to an administration which remained conformists and semi-feudal, demonstrate a brilliant overturn in the competence of the nation’s social and business organization. The massive military structure with its automated order, the well-organised administration of every formation of associative attempt from the city of Berlin to the meekest countryside consumers’ confederacy in Pomerania or Silesia, the constitution of industry and commerce which brought the German nation in not more than a century to second place among leading exporting nations, all obtained their efficiency from the German skill to receive training, all echo in a manner the methods of the school, as certainly all are intimately related with Germany’s large school system (Turk, 1999). The school is never not as much of knitted with the nation’s current conditions than with its history. Every portion of Germany’s system is reliant on the school and intertwined with it; as well as the highest origin and paramount wealth are uncertain to achieve genuine place in the complex system of the nation’s political institution or industry unless the possessor has at least undergone a regular training or preparation in the higher institutions or technological schools. Akin to the army, the school prohibits special rights and privileges to those who are located high above the social hierarchy and wealth, but similar to the army it is also impartial and liberal in allowing nobody, whatever his birthright or means, to break out from its discipline (Berghahn, 1994). Moreover, as the Germans sense that the army assures their national survival from without, so the school is the base and pillar of Germany’s greatness as a nation. Germans are not simply compelled to attend school, but every one aims to be more than an ordinary worker or unnoticeable figure in the nation’s development must establish school the solemn endeavour of life, for throughout life an individual is marked with the outcomes of his schooling. It has been habitually claimed that the life of the German boy of high status is a barrier footpath of examinations, each of them no prescribed paper examination, but the decent highlight of years of efforts (Palmowski, 1999). The complexity of the German school system is natural in perspective of its maturity and of the intricate motives to be addressed. School organization and governance is conservative at all aspects, and in a nation like Germany, where, as has been declared, by no means humorously, one half of the people are preoccupied teaching and administering examinations to the other half, the schools are extremely interlaced with the national life that they are indispensably integrated to long-established social and racial dilemmas, a number of which must hang around yet many generate a solution. The consequence is that the educational system in Germany is comparable to traditional edifice, which had a wing attached here and a windowpane stroked, with scratches still remaining from the elimination of unpleasant parts, so that the entire creates in the spectator the image of a structure that is exceptionally efficient, though dull in form and in places much in requirement for repair (ibid). II. The Empire: France’s Unstable Period The restoration after Napoleon’s abdication created relief but not resolution to the turmoil let loosed by the French Revolution. Nevertheless, on closer look, the fruitful upheavals generate modernizations in political and intellectual life that remained to be the powerful forces throughout the globe. The germs of contemporary thoughts and movements such as socialism, feminism and modernism in arts and literature all thrived during this period of the emerging Second Empire. Underneath the surface unrest and upheaval, the French society lingered on remarkably stable after the revolution. Legal equal opportunity as indicated by economic prospects for the talented and the skilled, the new administrative system which gave rise to prefects, and the Bank of France which preserved a steady currency, remained stable while regimes emerged and declined (Davis, 1919). The classes that had benefited the most from the historical revolution, the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy, and the well-off sharecroppers or peasants, made extremely certain that these privileges and advantages would not be overturned (ibid). In spite of the impressive growth of Paris, France was not experiencing the same pace of urbanization as England. Emerging under the July Monarchy, whose tolerant economic regulations gave thrust, industrial revolution in the country accelerated under the Second Empire, in which the government contributed a large input to the economy, but still trailed second to Britain. In one essential domain of social and economic behaviour, nevertheless, the French were in front line. The country’s fertility rate, including those of the referred to as primitive peasants, began a significant collapse as a consequence of the peasants’ fear that big families would lead to the disintegration of their farms (Maurois & Binsse, 1960). By the final decades of the nineteenth century, France had transformed the first nation in the contemporary world to achieve a population symmetry hence providing another fundamental source of stability (ibid). However, the impact of territorial expansion and modernizing economy was most felt by the three socioeconomic classes, namely, the bourgeoisie, the peasantry and the emerging urban proletariat. It has been assumed that originally the bourgeoisie supported the Empire, at least until the signing of the Free Trade Treaty with Great Britain in January 1860. The French bourgeoisie sensed that it could not profitably compete with the more established and more powerfully organized British industry and that, by signing the agreement, Napoleon III was abandoning them (Cramsie, 2008). On the other hand, the small but growing proletariats in such areas as the towns of Paris and Lyon, from the beginning of the Empire, by no means completely trusted or approved of ‘Saint Simon on horseback’ (ibid, 1) as Napoleon III was occasionally fashioned. There were two good rationales for this. The moment he first seized power in 1851, the Prince-President led to the arrest or exile of a large number of participants of the Revolution of 1848, as well as labour leaders. Moreover, Napoleon III appeared to bestow upon the workers from the 1860s onward such as the privilege to form credit associations, charitable societies, and the right to dispatch delegations to the convention of the International, while he simultaneously prohibited unions including small-sized labour assemblages. With respect to both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the emperor unsurprisingly failed to please either faction because he attempted to be all things to these socioeconomic classes; such is at all times is an unattainable goal (ibid). Only the peasantry class remained essentially faithful to the regime. Even here, the population of peasants who advocated the liberal empire in the 1870 Plebiscite, even though still numerically overpowering, was on no account what it had been before. The justification for this fundamental support is that the Empire witnessed moderately high prices for agricultural produce, and this, consequently, implied that landless peasants could get hold of some land, whereas small-holding peasants could supplement to their possessions (Hanotaux, 1903). In either instance, most of the peasantry felt that the Emperor had cultivated this, and they were hence indebted to him. Moreover, the conclusion of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars generated an intellectual and artistic uproar that would persist all the way through the nineteenth century. Royalism evolved into a political philosophy in the scholarly works of renowned French intellectuals. Even aristocrats predicted a future in which technologically-skilled people such as engineers and scientists would govern society, given the premised for technocratic and socialistic assumptions that emerged later in the century. In literary works, France developed its own version of the artistic movement Romanticism, after it started in the German nation as well as England. Painters created masterpieces that explored intense and out of the ordinary themes (Davis, 1919). Observers of course will eventually realize that there was more to France than the external brilliance of Paris. However, few of them could understand an Empire so diverse, so divided and so individualistic. Governments regularly changed than in any other nation in the 1890s. Yet, in everyday life France was a stable country, with a strong currency and well-organized. IV. Conclusion The Empire had significantly affected the lives of peoples in continental Europe, particularly Germany and France. Akin to the Roman Empire, these Empires established in both countries have achievements and excesses at the same time. For Germany, the Empire had granted it a strong position in the global economy in the 1890s through the improvement in its industrial foundations and characteristics of its labour pool. The growth in production and manufacturing, particularly the coal industry, strengthened the German Empire. These improvements then had a profound impact on the German people, specifically with regard to the educational institution. The school system of the country started to become intensive because of the need for individuals who could provide skilled and valuable work to the flourishing industries. This expansive school system encouraged orderliness and discipline in a strict sense which then can be assumed as a preventing mechanism against liberalism and radicalism. The German Empire’s conservatism remained strong up until the reign of the Third Reich. Likewise, France underwent the similar rise and fall in its administration and economic institution. Because of the Napoleonic and French Revolution, the Empire became inevitably liberal both in its political and intellectual life. The people became subdivided into socioeconomic hierarchies which harboured different opinions towards the Empire. Hence, even the intellectual arena was duly affected by this societal ferment which then gave rise to extremist and exotic literary works. Thus, it can be concluded that the influence of the Empire between Germany and France was varied. While Germany underwent a conservative transformation in its economic and social institutions during the Empire, France was experiencing a radical revolution in its political and intellectual life. Works Cited Berghahn, V. (1994). Imperial Germany, 1871-1914: Economy, Society, Culture and Politics. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books. Cramsie, J. (2008). A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperialism in Britain and France. The Historian , 173+. Davis, W. S. (1919). A History of France from the Earliest Times to the Treaty of Versailles. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gooch, G. (1960). The Second Empire. London: Longmans. Hanotaux, G. (1903). Contemporary France. New York: G.P. Putnam. Maurois, A. & Binsse, H.L. (1960). An Illustrated History of France. New York: Viking Press. Menzel, W. & Horrocks, G. (1871). The History of Germany: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time. London: Bell & Daldy. Palmowski, J. (1999). Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinnow, H. & Brailsford, M.R. (1933). History of Germany: People and State through a Thousand Years. New York: MacMillan Company. Turk, E. L. (1999). The History of Germany. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Read More