Political Parties; Elites; Ideologies; Mass Politics - AP European History

The Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. It outlined the beliefs of communism and socialism, providing a unique approach to historical study. Marx portrayed history as a battle of the classes, with the merchant and middle class finally overcoming the landed aristocracy in the nineteenth century; Marx predicted that the working class would shortly overcome the middle and upper classes.

Reactionary, as a political term, means opposed to reform or intent on returning to an even less progressive period in the past. On the European nineteenth-century spectrum, reactionary is as far to the right as you can go, further past conservative, and the polar opposite of radical. Reactionaries in nineteenth-century Europe were the absolute monarchs and nobles who opposed any political or social reform to improve the conditions and power of the lower classes.

The Third French Republic was inaugurated after the overthrow of Emperor Napoleon III. It reinstated a parliamentary-based Republican form of government to France in 1871. Despite its Republican nature, the Parliament actually was composed mainly by a majority of various Royalists rather than Republicans, although they were split between the rival Orleanist, Legitimist, and Bonapartist groups. As the Third Republic moved towards the twentieth century, more liberal groups, including Socialists and Communists, would find a place in French politics.

Henry VII was the founder of the Tudor dynasty in England, and his son was Henry VIII. In turn, Edward VI and Elizabeth I were both children of Henry VIII who ruled over England. Elizabeth I had no heirs upon her death, and the throne passed to James I, who inaugurated the Stuart dynasty.

In the famous 1902 pamphlet What is to be done?, Lenin outlined his vision of the "vanguard," a dedicated group of effective and professional revolutionaries that educated the workings class on class issues and effected political mobilization. Lenin believed that labor organizations such as unions were, on their own, insufficient to effectively bring about revolution. The revolution needed elites or intellectuals who understood how society worked outside of the narrow views available to the members of one particular class.

William of Orange was one of the lords that ruled over various parts of the Netherlands. His wife Mary was daughter of the King of England, and they were asked by parliament to force May's father from the throne and take it for themselves.

Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party was founded in 1921; it was the first European fascist movement that came to power after Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922. Though fascism would later come to influence movements in many other countries, the ideology's roots lay in Italy. Mussolini's party formed from a split in the Italian Socialist Party. Mussolini and the other future fascists supported Italian intervention in the war in order defeat the traditionalist regimes in Germany and Austria. Fascism was heavily influenced by the left wing of turn-of-the-century European politics, despite the fact that the movement later came to be seen as a far-right movement. Fascism held on to its radical roots, but it came to criticize the class-based view of society of left-wingers. Fascists came to view history as a struggle of nations or races, and most fascist movements came to argue for class cooperation in order to benefit the state or the race.

Queen Anne was the last of the Stuart monarchs, and while she gave birth multiple times, none of her children survived into adulthood, leaving no clear heir. Parliament feared that there would be an attempt by Catholic members of the Stuart family to take the throne after her death, which would have resulted in a great deal of violence and bloodshed. In order to ensure that the monarchy stayed with a Protestant, the Act of Settlement of 1701 was passed, which stated that the heir to the throne was to be Sophia of Hanover, a German noblewoman who was the granddaughter of James I of England, and that the line of succession would extend through her descendants as long as they were not Catholic. Sophia died before Anne did, and then upon Anne’s death, Sophia’s son, George, became King George I of England.

Mary I, eldest child of Henry VIII, came to power after the death of her brother, Edward VI. Mary had been displaced in the line of succession when Henry had his marriage with her mother annulled so that he could marry again and father a male heir. This, combined with the fact that she was a devout Catholic, made Mary bitter at her family. When she became queen in 1553, she reinstated Roman Catholicism as the official religion of England, although she declared that people did not have to practice her religion. Mary then went about arresting and trying many Protestant leaders for heresy in helping England break away from the Church and for helping to implement the new religion. Overall around two hundred and eighty “heretics” were sentenced to death as a result of these trials, giving Mary I the infamous nickname of “Bloody Mary.” Upon her death in 1558, she was succeeded by her sister, Elizabeth I.

The acceptance of Protestant beliefs in the sixteenth century, even by monarchs, was rarely uniform and often quite complicated. England, Scotland, and Denmark, all of which became firmly Protestant, had Protestant monarchs briefly ascend to the throne in the middle of their reformations, while Catholic France had a Protestant on the throne in Henry IV, until he converted to Catholicism in 1593. The Holy Roman Empire, while being the home of Martin Luther and many other reformers, was always ruled in the era by the staunchly Catholic Habsburg dynasty.

The above quotation, excerpted from V.I. Lenin's The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913), expresses the communist idea that the world's workers must eventually triumph over the capitalists who exploit their labor for personal gain.

Mussolini's Fascist government used many methods to subdue the Italian population including the establishment of leisure organizations, propaganda about race and the return to the glory of the Roman Empire, and a violent secret police force. The state did not give the people the right to vote for government representatives.

Edward VIII became King of the United Kingdom on January 20, 1936, following the death of his father, George V. After becoming the sovereign he began to dislike some of the aspects of court and eventually proposed to Wallis Simpson, a divorced American. This caused a crisis, as the monarch of the United Kingdom cannot be married to someone who has been divorced. The monarch is the head of the Church of England and so being married to a divorcée would have been very problematic and would have caused a lot of turmoil within Parliament. Edward decided to abdicate rather than try to continue as a monarch who had upset the Parliament and the people. Edward was succeeded by his brother, George VI, and was later created the Duke of Windsor.

Conservative ideology developed as a response to the political upheaval of the French Revolution. This is best demonstrated in the ideas of Edmund Burke. Liberals took the defense of individual liberties as one of the cornerstones of their ideology. The abolition of slavery took place after Conservative ideology began developing. Socialists, rather than Conservatives, responded most directly to the social changes caused by the Industrial Revolution.

Monarchs are most associated with absolutism. This is because monarchs often claimed the divine right of kings in order to justify and maintain absolute power over the nation they ruled. The underlying logic of the divine right to rule lends itself to an absolutist approach to leadership, as opposed to, say, a republic, which is not based on an absolute divine right but on communal human principles. Oligarchs are not monarchs, and anarchy is, by definition, the state of having no government or ruler.

Monarchs argued that they had the right to absolute power because God had determined that they should be the ruler, as evidenced by their birth into the royal family. Divine right held, basically, that monarchs represented God's will on earth.

Charles thought the Hapsburg empire had become too large given its possession of Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, the Holy Roman Empire, and colonies around the world. He decided it would be better to split the empire in two. His brother Ferdinand becoming the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Austria, and his son Philip Becoming King of Spain.

Oliver Cromwell rose to the position of Lord Protector following the declaration of a Commonwealth, and was tasked with suppressing the revolts of Ireland and Scotland against the new Parliamentarian rule.

James was an open Catholic, but his daughters from his first marriage were Protestant, thus the people of England thought his Catholic eccentricities would be short lived; however, he granted religious freedom to Catholics, allowing them to take public office in 1687, and in 1688 his second wife gave birth to a son who would be raised Catholic, thus meaning there could be a permanent Catholic dynasty ruling over England. These two events caused many influential members of Parliament to invite William of Orange to invade England and take the throne.