Europe Between the Revolutions 1815-1848

"There were indeed many other revolutions. He’s talking about that period from the end of the French Revolution in 1815, with the defeat of the Napoleonic Empire, and 1848, which was called the ‘Spring of European peoples’. The ‘ Arab Spring ’ of 2011 was a term taken from the Spring of European peoples in 1848. No one has really acknowledged the origin of this term. This is an important book because it is by an author who made his name mostly as a historian of anti-fascism in the interwar period. He’s a well established name in French scholarship, now forgotten in the English-speaking world. This book is very interesting because, again, he has a basic conceptualization of a struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class. This is the framework. He takes the story up to the revolution of 1830 in France, which saw the overthrow of the legitimate line of the Bourbons and the establishment of the citizen-king, Louis-Philippe, who was himself overthrown in 1848. But 1830 was important because it saw the accession of two new states in Europe, Greece and Belgium. 1830 was not only about France. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What I find most interesting in this book is that Droz devotes a considerable part of the narrative to a subject that historians often don’t really take very seriously—church history. He talks about how the churches in Europe—the Roman Catholic Church primarily, but also the Protestant churches, the Anglican Church in Britain, the other evangelical churches and so forth—tried to respond to the challenge of reform. I learned a great deal from just reading those chapters on the church. Pius IX, the new Pope, elected in 1846, was not exactly a liberal, but he understood that the church had to come to terms with and respond to the need for reform in European society. Droz is good on the struggle over reform within the Catholic Church during this period. Of course, finally, all the reform attempts failed and we had to wait until the middle of the 20th century, and the Second Vatican Council , for the Roman Catholic Church to modernize. But there was the acknowledgment that society was changing, and that the church must take initiatives not to lag behind the process of change in European society, if it was to maintain its influence. Droz is very good on that and also on the spiritual renewal within the churches, both the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, that came from reflecting on the need for change. That’s why this book is on my list. Droz discusses the Greek Revolution as an international problem but he does not refer to the Orthodox Church. The question of the church is a very complicated issue and is becoming polemical again, in the lead up to the anniversary. I recently saw an announcement by the Orthodox Church of Cyprus that the church was in the foreground of resistance to Ottoman rule and of the revolution. It’s not as simple as that. The church was the major institution left after the destruction of the Eastern Roman Empire, around which the Orthodox people in the broad area of southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean cohered. The church worked primarily to sustain the faith, to help the people survive under conditions of conquest, and so forth, but didn’t have a national agenda. Its agenda was the preservation of the faith. There have been many debates around this, but they are fruitless. The work of the church is to cultivate the faith, not to work for political revolution. But the church feels a little embarrassed on that account. So they try to explain how they contributed to the revolution. And, of course, they did contribute, but in their own domain of competence. I think the whole debate is beside the point. What happens in 1821 is that many individual clergymen, prelates, members of the hierarchy, especially in the revolutionary territories, down south in the Peloponnese, the islands and so forth, participated actively. They fought, and many of them died, fighting against the invasion of the Egyptian armies in the Peloponnese in 1825. “The ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 was a term taken from the Spring of European peoples in 1848” In Constantinople itself, the Patriarch, who had disowned the revolution, was executed by the Turks along with a number of other senior prelates. The same happened to the Archbishop of the Autocephalous Church of Cyprus, Kyprianos, and the whole hierarchy in Cyprus. The same happened in Crete and in many other places. So the church offered its own hecatomb to the revolution. The Church did not plan the revolution, originally, but they were held responsible by the Ottoman authorities for the disobedience and the disloyalty of the people and that, of course, gave a national aura to the church. Later, in elaborating a new national ideology, the church became part of the new understanding of what had happened. Now, coming back to the two other points, yes, the Greek Revolution started in 1821, and continued until about 1830 or 1832. The Acropolis in Athens was in the hands of an Ottoman garrison until the year 1833. So we can say the war of independence lasted for more than ten years. The main reason for the initial success of the revolution was that the main body of the Ottoman armies was caught up in northwestern Greece, trying to put down the revolt of Ali Pasha, who wanted to create his own state, independent from the Sultan. The Ottoman government was mostly preoccupied with that, which gave the Greeks some leeway to revolt. Then the Ottoman armies came down in 1822 into the Peloponnese, but they were defeated by the Greeks. This allowed the revolution to survive and spread, although there was a civil war, as tends to happen in most revolutions, in 1824-1825. Later, the great powers—Britain, France and Russia—to secure their own interests, intervened and decided to bring some kind of pacification. On the 20th of October 1827, at the naval battle of Navarino, their navies destroyed the Turkish-Egyptian fleet, setting in process the liberation of Greece. That was the military aspect. The effect of this was to keep the revolution going. The revolutions that had started in Italy in 1820-1821 had been crushed by the Austrians, so the flame of revolution seemed to be extinguishing in Europe. But the Greeks were determined not to give up until they got their independence. There was international support for Greece from Europe and the United States and, so, with the international Philhellenic movement putting pressure on governments, especially in Britain and France, the revolution managed to survive and act as a kind of new hope for liberal revolutionaries everywhere in Europe, that something could happen for their countries, too."