AP Euro 19th-Century Political Perspectives — Questions and Answers
Question 1: At the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), the principle of "legitimacy" championed by Talleyrand and Metternich was chiefly used to justify which outcome?
- Dividing France into several smaller states to prevent future aggression
- Restoring hereditary ruling dynasties displaced by the French Revolution and Napoleon (Correct answer)
- Establishing constitutional republics in the liberated territories
- Granting self-determination to national groups within the Habsburg lands
Correct answer: Restoring hereditary ruling dynasties displaced by the French Revolution and Napoleon
Legitimacy meant returning the rightful hereditary monarchs, such as the Bourbons in France, to their thrones. This was meant to restore stability after two decades of upheaval.
The Congress of Vienna was dominated by conservatives who wanted to undo the revolutionary changes of the previous quarter-century. Talleyrand, representing defeated France, appealed to legitimacy to secure a place for France at the table and to restore Louis XVIII. Metternich used the same idea to defend the established monarchies and a balance of power. The settlement did not break up France, nor did it embrace republicanism or national self-determination, which conservatives saw as dangerous.
Question 2: The Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, issued under the influence of Klemens von Metternich, were primarily intended to do which of the following?
- Create a unified German parliament elected by universal male suffrage
- Establish a customs union among the German states
- Suppress liberal and nationalist agitation by censoring the press and monitoring universities (Correct answer)
- Guarantee religious toleration for Protestants in Catholic German states
Correct answer: Suppress liberal and nationalist agitation by censoring the press and monitoring universities
The decrees, adopted in the German Confederation, imposed press censorship and supervision of universities and banned radical student societies (Burschenschaften). They were a conservative response to liberal and nationalist activism.
After the murder of the conservative writer August von Kotzebue by a student radical in 1819, Metternich persuaded German rulers to adopt repressive measures. The decrees dissolved the Burschenschaften, placed university professors and students under surveillance, and tightened press censorship. They illustrate the Concert of Europe-era effort to contain liberalism and nationalism. A customs union, the Zollverein, was a separate and later economic development led by Prussia.
Question 3: Which of the following best describes the Zollverein, established under Prussian leadership beginning in 1834?
- A military alliance of German states against France
- A customs union that removed internal tariffs among German states and increased Prussian economic influence (Correct answer)
- A parliament of German states that drafted a national constitution
- A treaty that required German states to adopt a common currency and legal code
Correct answer: A customs union that removed internal tariffs among German states and increased Prussian economic influence
The Zollverein eliminated tariff barriers among participating German states, promoting trade and economic integration. Because it excluded Austria, it enhanced Prussia's leadership in Germany.
Prussia built on its 1818 tariff reforms to form a customs union that gradually attracted most German states. It facilitated trade, supported railroad-driven industrialization, and created economic ties that predated political unification. Austria was left out, which strengthened Prussia's position in the later rivalry for leadership of Germany. It did not itself create a national government or parliament.
Question 4: The Frankfurt Parliament of 1848–1849 failed to unify Germany in part because
- France invaded the German states to prevent unification
- Frederick William IV of Prussia refused the imperial crown offered by an assembly of elected representatives (Correct answer)
- the delegates voted to make Austria's emperor the head of a unified state and Austria declined
- Bismarck dissolved the assembly after it voted against military funding
Correct answer: Frederick William IV of Prussia refused the imperial crown offered by an assembly of elected representatives
Frederick William IV rejected the crown offered in 1849, saying he would not accept a crown from the people rather than from the princes. Without Prussian support, the assembly collapsed.
The liberal delegates at Frankfurt drafted a constitution for a German state under a constitutional monarchy and offered the crown to the Prussian king. He refused because he considered it tainted by revolution and was unwilling to antagonize Austria and the other princes. The refusal, combined with the revival of conservative power, ended the liberal attempt to unify Germany from below. Unification was later achieved from above under Bismarck through "blood and iron."
Question 5: Which statement best characterizes Camillo di Cavour's approach to Italian unification?
- He relied on popular guerrilla warfare and a republican uprising led by Giuseppe Mazzini
- He used diplomacy and alliances, including cooperation with Napoleon III, to expand Piedmont-Sardinia's power in Italy (Correct answer)
- He sought a federation of Italian states led by the pope
- He insisted that Austria be allowed to retain its Italian territories in exchange for a constitution
Correct answer: He used diplomacy and alliances, including cooperation with Napoleon III, to expand Piedmont-Sardinia's power in Italy
Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, pursued pragmatic diplomacy and secured French help against Austria, leading to Piedmont's gains in 1859–1860. This contrasted with the revolutionary republicanism of Mazzini.
Cavour modernized Piedmont's economy and army and sought great-power support. At Plombières in 1858 he reached an understanding with Napoleon III, and the 1859 war with Austria brought Lombardy into Piedmont. Garibaldi's expedition to southern Italy in 1860 then added further territory, and the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861 under Victor Emmanuel II. Mazzini's republican vision of unity through popular uprising had failed in 1848–1849.
Question 6: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that
- history is driven by competing national spirits that eventually merge into a world state
- private property and free markets would produce harmony between social classes
- the central dynamic of history is class struggle, and the bourgeoisie would be overthrown by the proletariat (Correct answer)
- industrialization should be halted to preserve traditional rural communities
Correct answer: the central dynamic of history is class struggle, and the bourgeoisie would be overthrown by the proletariat
The Manifesto opens by claiming that the history of existing society is the history of class struggles, and it predicts that the proletariat will overthrow the capitalist bourgeoisie.
Marx and Engels analyzed industrial capitalism as a system in which the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, exploited the wage-earning proletariat. They believed this conflict would end in revolution and eventually a classless society. Their view rejected both liberal faith in harmony through free markets and conservative attempts to preserve traditional social order. The Manifesto appeared in 1848, shortly before revolutions swept across Europe.
Question 7: Which of the following is most consistent with nineteenth-century classical liberalism as advocated by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill?
- Strong state control of the economy to ensure social equality
- Hereditary aristocratic rule as a defense against mass politics
- Protection of individual liberties, representative government, and limited state interference in the economy (Correct answer)
- Abolition of private property and collective ownership of industry
Correct answer: Protection of individual liberties, representative government, and limited state interference in the economy
Classical liberals stressed individual rights, constitutional and representative government, and economic freedom with limited state intervention. Mill's On Liberty defended individual freedom of thought and expression.
Liberals of the early and mid-nineteenth century were often middle-class advocates of constitutions, civil liberties, free trade, and laissez-faire economics. Mill's On Liberty argued that society should interfere with an individual's freedom only to prevent harm to others. Later in the century, some liberals, including Mill himself in some respects, became more open to social reform. Conservatives favored hereditary authority, and socialists favored collective ownership.
Question 8: The Ems Dispatch incident of 1870, edited by Otto von Bismarck, was significant because it
- provoked France into declaring war on Prussia, helping bring the southern German states into a unified German Empire (Correct answer)
- ended the Austro-Prussian War and excluded Austria from German affairs
- convinced Britain to join Prussia in an alliance against Russia
- led to the creation of the North German Confederation
Correct answer: provoked France into declaring war on Prussia, helping bring the southern German states into a unified German Empire
Bismarck released an edited version of a telegram about talks between King William I and the French ambassador, which angered the French public. France declared war, and the resulting nationalist enthusiasm brought the southern German states into the Prussian-led union.
The immediate issue was the candidacy of a Hohenzollern prince for the Spanish throne, which France opposed. Bismarck edited the Ems telegram so that it appeared that the king had snubbed the French ambassador and vice versa. France declared war in July 1870, and the southern German states joined the northern ones against the French. After the German victory, the German Empire was proclaimed in January 1871 at Versailles. The North German Confederation had been created earlier, in 1867, after the defeat of Austria.
Question 9: The Dreyfus Affair in France (beginning in 1894) most directly illustrated which broader development in late nineteenth-century Europe?
- The decline of nationalism following the Franco-Prussian War
- The persistence of antisemitism and its political use, which also helped inspire Zionism (Correct answer)
- The success of conservative monarchists in restoring the Bourbon dynasty
- The triumph of socialism in French electoral politics
Correct answer: The persistence of antisemitism and its political use, which also helped inspire Zionism
Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain, was wrongly convicted of treason, and the controversy exposed deep antisemitism in French society. Theodor Herzl, who covered the case as a journalist, was among those prompted to promote political Zionism.
Dreyfus was convicted on forged and flimsy evidence, and the army and conservative Catholic forces resisted reopening the case. Defenders such as Émile Zola, whose article "J'Accuse" appeared in 1898, argued for justice and republican principles. The affair deeply divided France between anti-Dreyfusards and Dreyfusards and underscored the strength of modern political antisemitism. Herzl's Zionist movement, which sought a Jewish homeland, grew in the same period, reflecting the sense that Jews might remain insecure in Europe.
Question 10: Tsar Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was motivated in large part by
- pressure from a newly elected Russian parliament
- the Russian defeat in the Crimean War, which exposed the weakness of Russia's economy and military (Correct answer)
- a peasant revolution that had overthrown the nobility
- the desire to follow the example of Napoleon's Civil Code
Correct answer: the Russian defeat in the Crimean War, which exposed the weakness of Russia's economy and military
Russia's defeat in the Crimean War convinced Alexander II and his advisers that serfdom was holding back the country's modernization. Emancipation was a reform from above intended to strengthen the state.
The Crimean War (1853–1856) demonstrated that Russia lagged behind Britain and France in industry, transportation, and military technology. Alexander II concluded it was better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for it to be abolished from below by revolt. The emancipation gave peasants personal freedom, but they had to pay redemption payments for land, and many remained poor and tied to village communes. Russia had no elected parliament at the time, and the reform did not result from a peasant revolution.
AP Euro 19th-Century Political Perspectives
At the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), the principle of "legitimacy" championed by Talleyrand and Metternich was chiefly used to justify which outcome?
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