Europe VII - Modern Europe 1815-1990

German Confederation 1815-1866

Congress of Vienna 1814-1815

It is an assembly that reorganized Europe after the Napoleonic Wars.  It began in September 1814, five months after Napoleon's first abdication and completed its "Final Act" in June 1815, shortly before the Waterloo campaign and the final defeat of Napoleon.  The settlement was the most-comprehensive treaty that Europe had ever seen.

Its objective was to provide a long-term peace plan for Europe, not simply to restore old boundaries but to resize the main powers so they could balance each other off and remain at peace.  France lost all its recent conquests, while Prussia, Austria and Russia made major territorial gains.

Russia was given most of the Duchy of Warsaw and was allowed to keep Finland (which it had annexed from Sweden in 1809).  The rest of the Duchy of Warsaw was incorporated as a Kingdom of Poland under the Russian emperor's sovereignty.  

Prussia was given three fifths of Saxony, parts of the Duchy of Warsaw (the Grand Duchy of Posen), Danzig, and extensive additions in Westphalia and on the left bank of the Rhine River.

Russia gave back Galicia to Austria.  Austria was also compensated by Lombardy and Venice, regained control of the Tyrol and Salzburg, and parts of the Bavaria.  Hanover gained former territories of the Bishop of Münster and of the formerly Prussian East Frisia.

German Confederation 1815-1866

The outline of a constitution, a loose confederation, was drawn up for Germany.  The German Confederation was created by the 9th Act of the Congress under the presidency of the Austrian Emperor; only 39 Germanic states remained of the over 300 that formed the previous Holy Roman Empire.

Only portions of the territories of each of Austria and Prussia were included in the Confederation.  They were the largest and the most powerful members of the Confederation and they each had one vote in the Federal Assembly.  Other major states had one vote each: the Kingdoms of Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover and Württemberg; the Grand Duchies of Baden and Hesse.

Name	Title	House	Began	Ended
Francis I, Emperor of Austria	President of the German Confederation	Habsburg-Lorraine	20 June 1815	2 Mar 1835
Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria	President of the German Confederation	Habsburg-Lorraine	2 Mar 1835	12 July 1848
Archduke John of Austria	Imperial Vicar	Habsburg-Lorraine	12 July 1848	20 Dec 1849
Frederick William IV, King of Prussia	Emperor of the German	Hohenzollern	Elected “Emperor of the Germans”by the Frankfurt National Assembly on 28 Mar 1849, but refused the crown on 3 April 1849
	President of the Erfurt Union		26 May 1849	29 Nov 1850
Francis Joseph I, Emperor of Austria	President of the German Confederation	Habsburg-Lorraine	1 May 1850	24 Aug 1866

The confederation was weakened by rivalry between the Austria and Prussia (German dualism), the revolutions of 1848, and the inability of the multiple members to compromise.

German dualism 1740-1866

Austria and Prussia had a long-standing conflict and rivalry for supremacy in Central Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, termed Deutscher Dualismus in the German language area.  It was also a race for prestige to be seen as the legitimate political force of the German-speaking peoples.

The rivalry is largely held to begun when upon the death of the Habsburg Emperor Charles VI in 1740, King Frederick the Great of Prussia launched an invasion of Austrian-controlled Silesia, starting the First Silesian War against Maria Theresa.

At the time, Austria still claimed the mantle of the Empire and was the chief force of the disunited German states.  Maria Theresa was able to regain the Imperial crown from her Wittelsbach rival Charles VII by occupying his Bavarian lands in 1745.  However, despite her Quadruple Alliance with Great Britain, the Dutch Republic and Saxony, she failed to recapture Silesia.

They both would fight France in the Napoleonic Wars; after their conclusion, the German states were reorganized into a more unified 37 separate states of the confederation.  German nationalists began to demand a unified Germany, especially by 1848 and its revolutions.

German revolutions 1848-1849

The revolutions of 1848 were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848-49.  The revolutions were essentially democratic and liberal in nature, with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures.  The first revolution began in January in Sicily.  Revolutions then spread across Europe after a separate revolution began in France in February.

The uprisings had in common a rejection of traditional, autocratic political structures in the independent states of the German Confederation.  The middle-class and working-class components of the Revolution split, and in the end, the conservative aristocracy defeated it, forcing many liberals into exile.

In Heidelberg of the state of Baden, a group of German liberals began to make plans for an election to a German national assembl.  This prototype parliament met in March 1848 in Frankfurt.

In the south and west of today Germany, the March Revolution took place with large popular assemblies and mass demonstrations.  Led by well-educated students and intellectuals, they demanded German national unity, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly.

Frankfurt Parliament

Finally on May 18 1848, the National Assembly opened its session in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt.  Of the 586 delegates of the first freely elected German parliament, so many were professors (94), teachers (30) or had a university education (233) that it was called a "professors' parliament.

Archduke John of Austria was chosen as a temporary head of state (imperial vicar).  This was an attempt to create a provisional executive power, but it did not get very far since most states failed to fully recognize the new government.

The National Assembly lost reputation in the eyes of the German public when Prussia carried through its own political intentions in the Schleswig-Holstein question without the prior consent of Parliament.  A similar discrediting occurred when Austria suppressed a popular uprising in Vienna by military force.

Nonetheless, discussions on the future constitution had started.  The main questions to be decided were:

1.  Should the new united Germany include the German-speaking areas of Austria and thus separate these territories constitutionally from the remaining areas of the Habsburg Empire ("greater German solution", Großdeutschland), or should it exclude Austria, with leadership falling to Prussia ("smaller German solution", Kleindeutschland)?

Finally the question was settled when the Austrian Prime Minister introduced a centralized constitution for the entire Austrian Empire, thus delegates had to give up their hopes for a "Greater Germany".

2. Should Germany become a hereditary monarchy, have an elected monarch, or even become a republic?

3. Should it be a federation of relatively independent states or have a strong central government?

By late 1848, the Prussian aristocrats and generals had regained power in Berlin.  They had not been defeated during the incidents of March 1848, but had only retreated temporarily.  General von Wrangel led the troops who recaptured Berlin for the old powers, and King Frederick William IV of Prussia immediately rejoined the old forces.

In December 1848 the "Basic Rights for the German People" proclaimed equal rights for all citizens before the law.  The new Germany was to be a constitutional monarchy, and the office of head of state ("Emperor of the Germans") was to be hereditary and held by the respective King of Prussia.  The latter proposal was carried by a mere 290 votes in favour, with 248 abstentions.  The constitution was recognized by 29 smaller states but not by Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Hanover and Saxony.

The Prussian King refused to accept the office of emperor on the grounds that such a constitution were an abridgment of the rights of the princes of the individual German states.  Instead a short-lived union of German states under a federation, the Erfurt Union, was proposed by the Prussians at Erfurt in 1849-50.

The achievements of the revolutionaries of March 1848 were reversed in all of the German states and by 1851, the Basic Rights had been abolished nearly everywhere.  In the 20th century, however, major elements of the Frankfurt constitution became models for the Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany of 1949.

Monarchy Restorations in France, Spain and Portugual 1815-1848

Bourbon Restoration in France 1814-1830

Following the fall of Napoleon in April 1814, the brothers of the executed Louis XVI came to power and reigned as Louis XVIII in highly conservative fashion.  There was an interlude in spring 1815 (the Hundred Days) when the return of Napoleon forced the Bourbons to flee France.  The Bourbons returned to power in July 1815 when Napoleon was again defeated.

The new king, Louis XVIII, accepted the vast majority of reforms instituted from 1792 to 1814.  Continuity was his basic policy, he did not try to recover land and property taken from the royalist exiles.  It also saw the reestablishment of the Catholic Church as a major power in French politics.  He was succeeded by his brother, the Comte d'Artois, as Charles X.

Name	King From	King Until	Relationship with Predecessor	Title
Louis XVIII	11 April 1814 7 July 1815	20 Mar 1815 16 Sept 1824	Younger Brother of Louis XVI	King of France and of Navarre
Charles X	16 Sept 1824	2 Aug 1830	Younger Brother of Louis XVI and Louis XVIII	King of France and of Navarre
Louis-Philippe I the Citizen King (Orléans)	9 Aug 1830	24 Feb 1848	Sixth generation descendant of Louis XIII in the male line. Fifth cousin of Louis XVIII and Charles X	King of the French

There is still considerable debate among historians as to the actual cause of the downfall of Charles X.  Though, a series of economic downturns combined with the rise of a liberal opposition within the Chamber of Deputies between 1820 and 1830, ultimately felled the conservative Bourbons.  The popular uprisings of the Revolutions of 1830 brought to an end the Bourbon monarchy.

July Monarchy 1830-1848

The French Revolution of 1830, also known as the July Revolution marked the shift from one constitutional monarchy, the House of Bourbon, to its cadet branch, the House of Orléans.

On 2 August, Charles X and his son the Dauphin abdicated their rights to the throne and departed for Great Britain.  Although Charles had intended that his grandson, the Duke of Bordeaux, would take the throne, the politicians who composed the provisional government instead placed on the throne a distant cousin, Louis Philippe of Orléans, who agreed to rule as a Constitutional Monarch.

Louis-Philippe ruled, not as "King of France" but as "King of the French", marking the shift from the principle of hereditary right to national sovereignty.

This period became known as the July Monarchy.  Supporters of the exiled Bourbon dynasty became known as Legitimists, and supporters of Louis Philippe Orléanists.

In February 1848, the climaxing banquet was scheduled in Paris but the government banned it.  In response citizens of all classes poured out onto the streets of Paris in a revolt against the July Monarchy.  Demands were made for abdication of "Citizen King" and for establishment of a representative democracy in France.  Louis-Philippe abdicated, and the French Second Republic was proclaimed.

Bourbon Restoration in Spain 1813-1868

King Ferdinand VII of Spain ascended the throne in 1808 and that year Napoleon overthrew him and kept him under guard in France for six years.  He linked his monarchy to counter-revolution and reactionary policies that produced a deep rift in Spain between his forces on the right and liberals on the left.

Back in power in December 1813, he re-established the absolutist monarchy and rejected the liberal constitution of 1812.  A revolt in 1820 forced him to restore the constitution thus beginning the Liberal Triennium: a three-year period of liberal rule.  In 1823 the Congress of Verona authorized a successful French intervention restoring him to absolute power for the second time.

Name	Lifespan	Reign start	Reign end	Notes
Ferdinand VII The Desired and the Felon King	14 Oct 1784 - 29 Sept 1833	11 Dec 1813	29 Sept 1833	Son of Charles IV
Isabella II The One with the Sad Destinies	10 Oct 1830 - 10 April 1904	29 Sept 1833	30 Sept 1868 (deposed)	Daughter of Ferdinand VII

He ruled in the authoritarian fashion of his forebears.  The government, nearly bankrupt, was unable to pay her soldiers.  There were few settlers in Florida and it was sold to the United States for 5 million dollars.  Spain lost all of its American colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, in a complex series of revolts 1808-26.

Upon his death. the accession of his three-year-old daughter as Queen Isabella II of Spain sparked the First Carlist War (1833-39).  Under the regency of her mother, Spain transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy adopting the Royal Statute of 1834 and Constitution of 1837.

She was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1868, and formally abdicated in 1870.  Her son, Alfonso XII, however, became king in 1874.

Monarchy Restoration in Portugal 1816-1826

With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, there were calls for the return of the Portuguese Monarch to Lisbon, however, the Portuguese Prince Regent John VI (r. 1816-1826) enjoyed his life in Rio de Janeiro, where the monarchy was at the time more popular and he thus unwilling to return to Europe until 1821.

The United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves continued to exist for about one year after his return to Europe, being de facto dissolved in 1822, when Brazil proclaimed its independence.  The dissolution of the United Kingdom was formalized de jure in 1825, when Portugal recognized the independent Empire of Brazil, following a liberal revolution in Portugal.

The Liberal Wars, also known as the Portuguese Civil War, was a war from 1828 to 1834, between progressive constitutionalists and authoritarian absolutists in Portugal over royal succession, after the death of King John VI in 1826 created a dispute over royal succession.

United Kingdom of the Netherlands 1815-1839

The kingdom was created in the aftermath of French Emperor Napoleon I's defeat in 1815.  The great powers of Europe, who united against Napoleonic France, had decided in the secret treaty of the London Protocol to establish a single state in the territories that were previously the Dutch Republic/Batavian Republic/Kingdom of Holland, the Austrian Netherlands and the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, awarding rule over this to William, Prince of Orange and Nassau and son of the last Stadtholder William V, as King William I of the the Netherlands.

The new king was also made Grand Duke of Luxembourg, a part of the Kingdom that was, at the same time, a member state of the German Confederation.

Kingdom of the Netherlands 1815-1839

The newly created United Kingdom in 1815 had two capitals: Amsterdam and Brussels.  The north (Netherlands proper) had 2 million people.  They spoke chiefly Dutch but were divided religiously between a Protestant majority and a large Catholic minority.

The south (which would be known as "Belgium" after 1830) had a population of 3.4 million people.  Nearly all were Catholic, but it was divided between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings.  The upper and middle classes in the south were mostly French-speaking.

This 1830 French Revolution sparked an August uprising in Brussels and the Southern Provinces, leading to the collapse of the United Kingdom after the 1830 Belgian Revolution.  William I, King of the Netherlands, would refuse to recognize a Belgian state until 1839.

William was determined to create a united people, even though the north and south had drifted far apart in the past three centuries.  Protestants were the largest denomination in the North, but formed a quarter of the population in the overwhelmingly Catholic South, an they dominated William's government and army.

The French-speaking elite in the Southern Netherlands now felt like second-class citizens.  The French-speaking Walloons strenuously rejected his attempt to make Dutch the universal language of government.  While the Flemings in the south who spoke a Dutch dialect welcomed the encouragement, other Flemings, notably the educated bourgeoisie, preferred to speak French.

House of Orange-Nassau 1815-Present

Name	King From	King Until	Notes
William I	16 March 1815	7 October 1840 Abdicated	Son of the last Stadtholder William V
William II	7 October 1840	17 March 1849	Son of William I
William III	17 March 1849	23 November 1890	Son of William II
Wilhelmina	23 November 1890	4 September 1948 Abdicated	Daughter of William III

Independent of Belgium and Luxembourg 1839

The outbreak of revolution in France in 1830 was a signal for action, at first on behalf of autonomy for Belgium, as the southern provinces were now called, and later on behalf of total independence. William dithered and his half-hearted efforts to reconquer Belgium were thwarted by the efforts of the Belgians themselves and by the diplomatic opposition of the great powers.

At the London Conference of 1830, the chief powers ordered an armistice between the Dutch and the Belgians.  The first draft for a treaty of separation was rejected by the Belgians.  A second draft (June 1831) was rejected by William I, who resumed hostilities.

Franco-British intervention forced William to withdraw Dutch forces from Belgium late in 1831.  In 1833 Belgium was effectively independent but William’s attempts to recover Luxembourg and Limburg led to renewed tension.  The London Conference of 1838-39 divided Luxembourg and Limburg between the Dutch and Belgian crowns.

Kingdom of the Belgium 1830-Present

When the Belgians became independent in 1830 the National Congress chose a constitutional monarchy as the form of government.  In February 1831, the Congress nominated Louis, Duke of Nemours, the son of the French king Louis-Philippe, but international considerations deterred Louis-Philippe from accepting the honor for his son.

Following this refusal, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was designated as King of the Belgians by the National Congress and swore allegiance to the Belgian constitution in front of Saint James's Church at Coudenberg Palace in Brussels on 21 July.  This day has since become a national holiday for Belgium.

Unification movement in Italy 1815-1848

The Risorgimento was the political and social movement that consolidated different states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of the Kingdom of Italy in the 19th century.  The process began with the Congress of Vienna.

The Habsburg rule in Italy came to an end with French Revolutionaries in 1792-97, when a series of client republics were set up.  The Napoleon conquest of Italy in 1797-99 destroyed the old structures of feudalism and introduced modern ideas and efficient legal authority; it provided much of the intellectual force and social capital that fueled unification movements for decades.

Napoleon, who was himself of Italian-Corsican descent, pushed the Italian language into a lingua franca used among clerks, nobility and functionaries in the Italian courts but also by the bourgeoisie.  In 1797, the first official adoption of the Italian tricolour as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, took place.

The Congress of Vienna restored the pre-Napoleonic patchwork of independent governments. Italy was divided between Austria (the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia) in the north-east; the Bourbon (Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) in the south; House of Savoy (Kingdom of Sardinia) in the north-west; Tuscany, the Papal States and other minor states in the center.

However, old republics of Venice and Genoa were not recreated (Venice went to Austria).  The King of Sardinia (House of Savoy) was restored in Piedmont, Nice and Savoy, and was given control of Genoa (often called Piedmont-Sardinia in this period), with Turin as its capital.

The 1820 revolution began in Sicily and in Naples, against the Bourbon King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, who was forced to make concessions and promise a constitutional monarchy.  This success inspired Carbonari (one of the most influential revolutionary groups) in the north of Italy to revolt too.  In 1821, the Kingdom of Sardinia obtained a constitutional monarchy as a result of Carbonari's actions.

Savoy Piedmont-Sardinia 1814-1850

The restored Piedmont-Sardinia (1814-1861) industrialized from 1830 onward.  In 1848 revolutionary riots broke out in numerous places of Italy and Europe.  With Vienna itself in revolt, both Milan and Venice, the main cities of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, revolted in March 1848.

King Charles Albert of Sardinia-Piedmont decided to exploit the apparently favorable moment, and declared war on Austria, in alliance with the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicily and attacked the weakened Austria in her Italian possessions.  Though the initial success, Charles Albert was defeated at the Battle of Custozza in July 1848.  The war marked the failure of Sardinia to defeat Austria singlehandedly.

Meanwhile, a Roman Republic was declared, and the Pope Pius IX had to flee the city.  The revolution was suppressed with French help in 1850 and Pius IX switched to a conservative line of government.

After a disastrous renewal of the war with Austria in 1849, Charles Albert abdicated in favor of his son Victor Emmanuel II.

Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi

Meanwhile, many leading revolutionaries wanted a republic, two of the most prominent being Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi.  Mazzini's activity in revolutionary movements caused him to be imprisoned soon after he joined.  While in prison, he formulated a program for establishing a free, independent, and republican nation with Rome as its capital.  Following his release in 1831, he went to Marseille in France, where he organized a new political society called La Giovine Italia (Young Italy).

Garibaldi, a native of Nice (then part of Piedmont), participated in an uprising in Piedmont in 1834 and was sentenced to death.  He escaped to South America, though, spending fourteen years in exile, taking part in several wars, and learning the art of guerrilla warfare before his return to Italy in 1848.

Revolutions of 1848

The Revolutions of 1848 were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848-49.   It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history.

The revolutions were essentially democratic and liberal in nature, with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures and creating independent nation-states.  Over 50 countries were affected, but without significant coordination or cooperation among their respective revolutionaries.

Background

Technological change was revolutionizing the life of the working classes.  A popular press extended political awareness, and new values and ideas such as popular liberalism, nationalism and socialism began to emerge.

Large swaths of the nobility were discontented with royal absolutism or near-absolutism.  In 1846, there had been an uprising of Polish nobility in Austrian Galicia, which was only countered when peasants, in turn, rose up against the nobles.  Additionally an uprising by democratic forces against Prussia, planned but not actually carried out, occurred in Greater Poland.

The uprisings were led by temporary coalitions of reformers, bourgeoisie and workers; however, the coalitions did not hold together for long.  Many of the revolutions were quickly suppressed, as tens of thousands of people were killed, and many more were forced into exile.  Significant lasting reforms included the abolition of serfdom in Austria and Hungary, the end of absolute monarchy in Denmark and the introduction of representative democracy in the Netherlands.

Sequence of main trends

The first major outbreak in Palermo, Sicily in January 1848.  There had been several previous revolts against Bourbon rule, this one produced an independent state that lasted 16 months before the Bourbons came back.

In France the monarchy was once again overthrown and replaced by a republic in Februray 1848.  The new government was headed by Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The world was astonished in spring 1848 when revolutions appeared in so many places and seemed on the verge of success.  In a number of major German and Italian states, the old leaders were forced to grant liberal constitutions.

From March 1848 through July 1849, the Habsburg Austrian Empire was threatened by revolutionary movements.  The empire, ruled from Vienna, included Austrians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks, Ukrainians/Ruthenians, Romanians, Serbs and Italians, all of whom attempted in the course of the revolution to achieve either autonomy or independence.  The nationalist picture was further complicated by the simultaneous events in the German states, which moved toward Greater German national unity.

The center of the Ukrainian national movement was in Galicia.  A group of representatives led by the Greek Catholic clergy launched a petition to the Austrian Emperor in April 1848.

The Hungarian revolution of 1848 was the longest in Europe, crushed in August 1849 by Austrian and Russian armies.  Finally Austria gave Hungarians and Czechs liberal grants of autonomy and national status.

As part of plan to end the Revolutions of 1848 in Hungary, Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria abdicated in December 1848 and he was succeeded by his nephew as Francis Joseph I.

Emperors of Austria 1935-1916

Name	Lifespan	Reign start	Reign end	Notes
Ferdinand I the Benign	19 April 1793 - 29 June 1875	2 March 1835	2 December 1848 (abdicated)	Son of Francis I
Francis Joseph I	18 August 1830 - 21 November 1916	2 December 1848	21 November 1916	Nephew of Ferdinand I
Charles I the Blessed	17 August 1887 - 1 April 1922	21 November 1916	11 November 1918 (resigned)	Great-Nephew of Francis Joseph I

The revolutions suffer a series of defeats in summer of 1849.  Reactionaries returned to power and many leaders of the revolution went into exile.  Some social reforms proved permanent, and years later nationalists in Germany, Italy, and Hungary gained their objectives.

French Second Republic and Empire 1848-1870

Second Republic 1848-1852

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president on 10 December 1848 by a landslide.  His support came from a wide section of the French public.  Various classes of French society voted for him for very different and often contradictory reasons.  Louis Napoleon, himself encouraged this contradiction by "being all things to all people".

The new National Constituent Assembly was heavily composed of royalist sympathizers of both the Legitimist (Bourbon) wing and the Orleanist (Citizen King Louis Philippe) wing.  Because of the ambiguity surrounding Louis Napoleon's political positions, his agenda as president was very much in doubt.  For prime minister, he selected Odilon Barrot, who had led the "loyal opposition" under Louis Philippe. Other appointees represented various royalist factions.

The Pope had been forced out of Rome as part of the Revolutions of 1848, and Louis Napoleon sent a 14,000 man expeditionary force of troops to the Papal State under General Nicolas Charles Victor Oudinot to restore him.  In June 1849, demonstrations against the government broke out and were suppressed.  The government banned several democratic and socialist newspapers in France; the editors were arrested. Karl Marx was at risk so he moved to London in August.

As 1851 opened, Louis Napoleon was not allowed by the Constitution of 1848 to seek re-election as President of France.  Instead he proclaimed himself President for Life following a coup in December that was confirmed and accepted in a dubious referendum.

House of Bonaparte, Second Empire 1852-1870

In 1852 he proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III of the French. He took the imperial title and held it until his downfall in 1870.  He oversaw the modernisation of the French economy and filled Paris with new boulevards and parks, and expanded the French overseas empire and made the French merchant navy the second largest in the world.

Name	King From	King Until	Relationship with Predecessor(s)	Title
Napoleon III	2 December 1852	14 September 1870	Nephew of Napoleon I	Emperor of the French

In 1854, the Second Empire joined the Crimean War, which saw France and Britain defeated the Russian Empire at Sevastopol in 1854-55 and at Inkerman in 1854.  In 1856 France joined the Second Opium War on the British side against China; to take interests in southwest Asia in the Treaty of Tientsin.  When French imperial ambitions revived, Africa and Indochina would be the main targets, and commercial incentives, which had driven the creation of the pre-revolutionary empire, were secondary.

When France was negotiating with the Netherlands about purchasing Luxembourg in 1867, the Prussian Kingdom threatened the French government with war.  This "Luxembourg Crisis" came as a shock to French diplomats as there had been an agreement between the Prussian and French governments about Luxembourg.  Napoleon III suffered stronger criticism from Republicans.

Rising tensions in 1869 about the possible candidacy of Prince Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen to the throne of Spain caused a rise in the scale of animosity between France and Germany.  Prince Leopold was a part of the Prussian royal family and he had been asked by the Spanish Cortes to accept the vacant throne of Spain.

Relations between France and Germany deteriorated, and finally the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) broke out. German nationalism united the German states, with the exception of Austria, against Napoleon III.  The French Empire was defeated decisively at Metz and Sedan. Emperor Louis Napoleon III surrendered himself and 100,000 French troops to the German troops in September 1870.

German and Italian Unifications 1849-1871

Italian Unification 1849-1870

King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia (r. 1849-1861) saw a great vision of a unified Italy.  He wanted Piedmont-Sardinia to be a model for the unification of Italy.  He started public works, projects and political reforms.  Piedmont-Sardinia was soon recognized as an emerging power and the next step was to get Austria out of the Italian Peninsula.

With the Crimean War breaking out in 1853 between France and Britain on one side, and Russia on the other, Piedmont-Sardinia saw a chance to earn some respect and make a name for it.  Britain and France proved victorious, and Piedmont-Sardinia was able to attend the peace conference.  As a result it gained the support of French Emperor Napoleon III.

Italian Wars of Independence 1859-1866

In 1859, the Second Italian War of Independence (also known as the Austro-Sardinian War) between the Second French Empire allied with the Kingdom of Sardinia against the Austrian Empire.  Sardinians and Napoleon III of France defeat an army commanded by Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph himself at the Battle of Solferino in northern Italy.  On July 11, Franz Joseph, faced with the revolution in Hungary, meets Napoleon III at Villafranca to sign an armistice.

The central Italian states, Duchies of Parma and Modena, Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Papal Legations, were annexed by the Piedmont-Sardinia.  France would take its deferred reward, Savoy and Nice.

At the same time, Garibaldi was appointed major general by Victor Emmanuel II, and formed a volunteer unit named the Hunters of the Alps.  Thenceforth, Garibaldi abandoned Mazzini's republican ideal of the liberation of Italy, assuming that only the Piedmontese monarchy could effectively achieve it.  He and his volunteers won victories over the Austrians at Varese, Como, and other places.  In 1860 they successfully conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicily, and incorporated the territory into the new Kingdom of Italy.  Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia had been crowned King of Italy on March 17, 1861.

In 1866 Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck offered Victor Emmanuel II an alliance with the Kingdom of Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War.  In exchange Prussia would allow Italy to annex Austrian-controlled Venice.  King Emmanuel agreed to the alliance and the Third Italian War of Independence began, resulted in annexation of Venice from the Austrians.  Hence the major obstacle to Italian unity remained Rome.

Capture of Rome 1870

The Italian government could not take its seat in Rome because the French garrison was maintained in the city by Napoleon III in support of Pope Pius IX.

In July 1870, the Franco-Prussian War began.  In early August, the French Emperor Napoleon III recalled his garrison from Rome, thus no longer providing protection to the Papal State. Widespread public demonstrations illustrated the demand that the Italian government take Rome.

The Italian government took no direct action until the collapse of the Second French Empire at the Battle of Sedan.  King Victor Emmanuel II sent Count Gustavo Ponza di San Martino to Pius IX with a personal letter offering a proposal that would have allowed the peaceful entry of the Italian Army into Rome.

Under the guise of offering protection to the pope, Italian troops entered Rome in September 1870 and more than 1,000 years of Papal temporal power came to the end.

German Unification 1861-1871

William I was King of Prussia from January 1861 and the first German Emperor from January 1871 to his death, of a united Germany.  In 1862, he appointed Otto von Bismarck as Minister President of Prussia, a position Otto von Bismarck would hold until 1890.

Under the leadership of William and his Minister President Otto von Bismarck, they dominated German and European affairs from the 1860s and Prussia finally achieved the unification of Germany in 1871.

Kings of Prussia 1840-1871

Name	Reign start	Reign end	Notes	Family
Frederick William IV	7 June 1840	2 Jan 1861	Son of Frederick William III; President of the Erfurt Union (1849-1850)	Hohenzollern
William I the Great	2 Jan 1861	9 Mar 1888	Brother of Frederick William IV; President of the North German Confederation (1867-1871); Emperor of Germany from 1871	Hohenzollern

Unofficially, the transition of most of the German-speaking populations into a federated organization of states had been developing for some time through alliances between princely rulers.  The process was beginning in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, which prompted the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.

The Holy Roman Emperor had been often called "Emperor of all the Germanies"; higher nobility were referred to as "Princes of Germany" for the lands once called East Francia had been organized after the rise of Charlemagne in 800.  In the mountainous terrain of much of the territory, isolated peoples developed cultural, educational, linguistic, and religious differences over such a lengthy time period.

By the 19th century, transportation and communications improvements brought these regions closer together.  In the 1860s, Otto von Bismarck engineered a series of wars that unified the German states, significantly and deliberately excluding Austria, into a powerful German Empire under Prussian leadership:

1. Third Italian Wars of Independence 1866
2. Austro-Prussian War 1866
3. Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871

The Second Italian War of Independence saw the French Second Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia defeated the Austrian Empire in 1859, and King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia crowned as King of Italy in March 1861.

In concert with the newly formed Italy, Bismarck created a diplomatic environment in which the Austria/Prussia rivalry finally erupted and Austria declared war on Prussia.  In 1866 he offered Victor Emmanuel II of Italy an alliance with Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War.

The Austro-Prussian War was fought between the German Confederation under the leadership of the Austrians and its German allies on one side and the Prussians with its German allies and Italy on the other.

Austro-Prussian War 1866

Although several German states initially sided with Austria, they failed to take effective initiatives against Prussian troops.  The Austrian army therefore faced the technologically superior Prussian army with support only from Saxony.  Complicating the situation for Austria, the Italian mobilization on Austria's southern border required a diversion of forces away from battle with Prussia to fight the Third Italian War of Independence on a second front in Venetia and on the Adriatic Sea.

The Prussians defeated the Austrians on 3 July 1866 and the resulting Peace of Prague settled the German Question in favour of Prussia, which prevented the unification of Germany from occurring under the House of Habsburg.  Italy ceded Venetia and Milan  Prussia annexed Hanover, Schleswig-Holstein, Hesse, Frankfurt and Nassau.

This seven-week war saw the abolition of the German Confederation and its partial replacement by the North German Confederation that excluded Austria and other southern German states.  The Habsburgs were permanently excluded from German affairs.

Austro-Hungarian Compromise 1867

Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which inaugurated the empire's dual structure in place of the former unitary Austrian Empire (1804-1867), originated at a time when :

1.  Austria had declined in strength and in power—both in the Italian Peninsula (following the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859) and among the states of the German Confederation (following the Austro-Prussian War of 1866). 

2.  The continued Hungarian dissatisfaction with rule from Vienna and increasing national consciousness on the part of other nationalities of the Austrian Empire.

The Kingdom of Hungary had always maintained a separate parliament, the Diet of Hungary.  The administration and government of Hungary remained largely untouched by the government structure of the overarching Austrian Empire, until the Hungarian parliament were suspended after the Hungarian revolution of 1848. 

By the late 1850s, a large number of Hungarians who had supported the 1848-49 revolution were willing to accept the Habsburg monarchy.

To secure the monarchy, France Joseph made negotiations for a compromise with the Hungarian nobility to ensure their support.  They demanded and received the Emperor's coronation as King of Hungary and the re-establishment of a separate parliament at Pest with powers to enact laws for the lands of Holy Crown of Hungary.

North German Confederation 1867-1871

The Confederation was initially a military alliance.  However, the following year it adopted a new constitution which envisioned a much more unified nation, including the free movement between states, the single postal system and common passports.  Since Prussia comprised almost 80% of the nation, the leadership fall to the Prussian King, Wilhelm I.

Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871

The Franco-Prussian War was caused by Prussian ambitions to extend German unification and French fears of the shift in the European balance of power that would result if the Prussians succeeded.  Some historians argue that Otto von Bismarck deliberately provoked a French attack to draw the independent southern German states into an alliance with the North German Confederation.

A series of swift Prussian and German victories in eastern France, culminating in the Siege of Metz and Battle of Sedan, with the French army decisively defeated.

When the news arrived at Paris of the surrender at Sedan of Napoleon III on 1 September 1870, the Second Empire was overthrown by a popular uprising in Paris, which forced the proclamation of a Provisional Government and a Third Republic on 4 September.

German forces fought and defeated new French armies in northern France, besieging the capital of Paris for over four months.

During the war, in November 1870, the North German Confederation and the south German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden united to form a new nation state.  It was originally called Deutscher Bund (German Confederation), but on 10 December 1870 the Reichstag of the North German Confederation adopted the name Deutsches Reich (German Empire) and granted the title of German Emperor to the King of Prussia.

The unification of Germany into a politically and administratively integrated nation state officially occurred on 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in France.   Princes of the German states, excluding Austria, gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor after the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War.

British Empire and Victoria Era 1837-1917

Victoria Era 1837-1901

Victoria became queen in 1837 at age 18.  Her long reign until 1901 saw Britain reach the zenith of its economic and political power.  Exciting new technologies such as steam ships, railroads, photography, and telegraphs appeared, making the world much faster-paced.  Britain again remained mostly inactive in Continental politics, and it was not affected by the wave of revolutions in 1848.  The Victorian era saw the fleshing out of the Second British Empire.

Name	King From	King Until	Claim	Death
William IV	26 June 1830	20 June 1837	Son of George III	Aged 71
Victoria	20 June 1837	22 January 1901	Granddaughter of George III Daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld	Aged 81
Edward VII	22 January 1901	6 May 1910	Son of Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha	Aged 68
George V	6 May 1910	1917	Son of Edward VII and and Alexandra of Denmark	20 January 1936 aged 70

Although Edward VII was the son and heir of Victoria, he inherited his father's names and is therefore counted as inaugurating a new royal House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1901-1917).

Great Britain became a powerful empire because it was the birthplace and leading force in the Industrial Revolution in Europe, which was a cultural and economic shift from home-based production, traditional agriculture, and manual labor to a system of factory-based manufacturing that included complex machinery, continual technological growth, new energy sources, and developments in transportation.

As the Industrial Revolution took hold, Great Britain turned its attention from the rural home to the urban factory and from human power to mechanical power, and it grew so wealthy (the national income per person grew by half) that it was able to extend its worldwide network of trade and engineering that produce profits for British merchants and experts from across the globe.

Textiles Lead the Way

The British population was growing fast by the mid-18th century, and the nation needed more textiles to make more clothing for more people.  Inventors got to work and soon developed a series of machines that helped meet the ever-growing demand.  These advanced rapidly and included:

The flying shuttle, which allowed one weaver to do the work of two.

The spinning jenny, invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, which could produce several spools of thread at the same time.

The water frame, created by Richard Arkwright in 1769, which used water power to spin 91 spools of thread at once.

The spinning mule, which combined spinning and weaving into one machine.

The power loom, which used steam power to weave cloth.

The textile industry embraced this new technology, built factories, hired thousands of workers, produced cloth at ever-increasing rates, enjoyed massive profits, and essentially led the way in Britain's industrialization.

British Empire

Australia

Forced to find an alternative location after the loss of the 13 Colonies in 1783, the British government turned to the newly discovered lands of Australia.  The western coast of Australia had been discovered by the Dutch explorer Willem Jansz in 1606 and was later named New Holland by the Dutch East India Company.  In 1770 James Cook discovered the eastern coast of Australia while on a scientific voyage to the South Pacific Ocean, claimed the continent for Britain, and named it New South Wales.

The Australian colonies became profitable exporters of wool and gold, mainly because of gold rushes in the colony of Victoria, making its capital Melbourne the richest city in the world and the largest city after London in the British Empire.

French Colonies

The Napoleonic Wars were the ones in which Britain invested large amounts of capital and resources to win.  Overseas colonies were attacked and occupied, including those of the Netherlands, which was annexed by Napoleon in 1810.  France was finally defeated by a coalition of European armies in 1815.  Britain was again the beneficiary of peace treaties: France ceded the Ionian Islands, Malta, Mauritius, St Lucia, and Tobago.

Canada

In 1867, Britain united most of its North American colonies as the Dominion of Canada, giving it self-government and responsibility for its internal affairs.  Britain handled foreign policy and defense.

India

The British East India Company formed in 1600 and operating under a charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I, established a factory on the Hooghly River in Bengal in 1650 and founded the city of Calcutta in 1690.  Although the initial aim of the company was to seek trade under concessions obtained from local Mughal governors, the steady collapse of the Mughal Empire enticed the company to take a more direct involvement in the politics and military activities of the subcontinent.  Capitalizing on the political fragmentation of South Asia, the British ultimately rose to supremacy through military expeditions, annexation, bribery, and playing one party off against another.

Following the Anglo-Maratha war in 1818, the Mughal emperor became a pensioner of the British Raj, its power now limited to Delhi, lingered on until 1857, when it was effectively dissolved after the fall of Delhi during the Indian Rebellion that happened same year.  The British emerged victory and India come directly under the British crown.  From May 1876, Queen Victoria used the additional title of Empress of India.

South East Asia

The East India Company drove the expansion of the British Empire in Asia.  The Company's army had first joined forces with the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, and the two continued to co-operate in arenas outside India: the eviction of Napoleon from Egypt (1799), the capture of Java from the Netherlands (1811), the acquisition of Singapore (1819) and Malacca (1824) and the defeat of Burma (1826).

China

The Company had also been engaged in an increasingly profitable opium export trade to China since the 1730s.  This trade, illegal since it was outlawed by the Qing dynasty in 1729, helped reverse the trade imbalances resulting from the British imports of tea, which saw large outflows of silver from Britain to China.  In 1839, the confiscation by the Chinese authorities at Canton of 20,000 chests of opium led Britain to attack China in the First Opium War, and resulted in the seizure by Britain of Hong Kong Island, at that time a minor settlement.

Russian Empire 1815-1881

Alexander I (r.1801-1825) became known as the "saviour of Europe".  He presided over the redrawing of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1815).  Although the Russian Empire played a leading political role in the next century, its retention of serfdom precluded economic progress to any significant degree.

As Western European economic growth accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, Russia began to lag ever farther behind, creating new weaknesses for the Empire seeking to play a role as a great power.  Following the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I had been ready to discuss constitutional reforms, but though a few were introduced, no major changes were attempted.

Emperors of Russia 1801-1917

Name	Reign Start	Reign End	Notes
Alexander I the Blessed	23 March 1801	1 December 1825	Son of Paul I and Maria Feodorovna; First Romanov King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland
Constantine	1 December 1825	26 December 1825	Younger brother and heir presumptive of Alexander I; Proclaimed emperor in capital, abdicated
Nicholas I	26 December 1825	2 March 1855	Younger brother of Alexander I and Constantine
Alexander II the Liberator	2 March 1855	13 March 1881	Son of Nicholas I; Assassinated
Alexander III the Peacemaker	13 March 1881	1 November 1894	Son of Alexander II
Nicholas II	1 November 1894	15 March 1917	Son of Alexander III; Abdicated the throne during the February Revolution

Alexander I was replaced by his younger brother Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855), who at the beginning of his reign was confronted with an uprising.  A number of well-educated Russian officers travelled in Europe in the course of military campaigns, where their exposure to the liberalism of Western Europe encouraged them to seek change on their return to autocratic Russia.

The revolt was easily crushed, but it caused Nicholas to turn away from the modernization program begun by Peter the Great and champion the doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

When Alexander II (r. 1855-1881) ascended the throne, the desire for reform was widespread.  A growing humanitarian movement attacked serfdom as inefficient.  In 1859, there were more than 23 million serfs in usually poor living conditions.  Alexander II decided to abolish serfdom from above, with ample provision for the landowners, rather than wait for it to be abolished from below by revolution.

Alexander was proposing additional parliamentary reforms to counter the rise of nascent revolutionary and anarchistic movements when he was assassinated in 1881.  His grandson, Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917), was the last Emperor of Russia, King of Congress Poland and Grand Duke of Finland.

Independence of Balkan States from Ottoman Empire 1832-1878

The 19th century saw the rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire which resulted in the establishment of an independent Greece in 1821 and Serbia in 1835.  The Empire never fully integrated its conquests economically and therefore never established a binding link with its subjects.  From 1828, the Empire tried to catch up with industrialization and a rapidly emerging world market by reforming state and society.

Decline of Ottoman Empire

Economic difficulties began in the late 16th century, when the Dutch and British completely closed the old international trade routes through the Middle East.  As a result, the prosperity of the Middle Eastern provinces declined.  The Ottoman economy was disrupted by inflation, caused by the influx of precious metals into Europe from the Americas and by an increasing imbalance of trade between East and West.

Functioning under strict price regulations, the guilds were unable to provide quality goods at prices low enough to compete with the cheap European manufactured goods that entered the empire without restriction because of the Capitulations agreements.  In consequence, traditional Ottoman industry fell into rapid decline.

Those conditions were exacerbated by large population growth during the 16th and 17th centuries, part of the general population rise that occurred in much of Europe at that time.

Ottomanism, originating from Young Ottomans who were inspired by the French Revolution social contract theorists Montesquieu and Rousseau, promoted equality among the millets (confessional communities for each religion of the Empire) and stated that every subject was equal before the law.

Independence of Greece 1821-1832

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, most of Greece had come under Ottoman rule.  There were several revolt attempts by Greeks to gain independence from Ottoman control.  In 1814, revolts in the Peloponnese, the Danubian Principalities, the Constantinople and its surrounding areas were launched.  In March 1821, the Maniots in the southern Peloponnese declared war on the Ottomans.  This declaration was the start of a spring of revolutionary actions from other controlled states against the Ottoman Empire.

The Peloponnese was in open revolt and by October 1821, the Greeks under Theodoros Kolokotronis had captured Tripolitsa.  It was quickly followed by revolts in Crete, Macedonia, and Central Greece, which would soon be suppressed.  Meanwhile, the makeshift Greek navy was achieving success against the Ottoman navy in the Aegean Sea and prevented Ottoman reinforcements from arriving by sea.

Following years of negotiation, three Great Powers-Russia, Britain and France-decided to intervene in the conflict and each nation sent a navy to Greece.  The allied fleet intercepted the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at Navarino which were going to attack the Greek island of Hydra, ending in the destruction of the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet.  By 1828 the Greeks proceeded to the Ottoman-controlled part of central Greece.  As a result of years of negotiation, Greece was finally recognized as an independent nation in the Treaty of Constantinople of May 1832.

Crimean War 1853-1856

The immediate cause of the war involved the rights of Christian minorities in Palestine, which was part of the Ottoman Empire.  The French promoted the rights of Roman Catholics, and Russia promoted those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Longer-term causes involved the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the expansion of the Russian Empire, and the British and French preference to preserve the Ottoman Empire to maintain the balance of power in the Concert of Europe.

The Crimean War was one of the first conflicts in which military forces used modern technologies such as explosive naval shells, railways and telegraphs.  The war was one of the first to be documented extensively in written reports and in photographs.

Russia was forced to withdraw from the Danubian Principalities.  The war marked a turning point for the Russian Empire and it weakened the Imperial Russian Army and undermined Russia's influence in Europe.  The empire would take decades to recover.

The Treaty of Paris on 30 March 1856 brought an end to the Crimean War between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain, the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia.  Moldavia and Wallachia were recognized as quasi-independent states under Ottoman suzerainty.

Independent of Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania 1877-1882

In the late 1870s Russia and the Ottoman Empire again clashed in the Balkans.  From 1875 to 1877, the Balkan crisis intensified with rebellions against the Ottoman rule by various Slavic nationalities.  This was seen as a political risk in Russia, which similarly suppressed its Muslims in Central Asia and Caucasia.  Russian nationalist opinion became a major domestic factor in its support for liberating Balkan Christians from Ottoman rules and making Bulgaria and Serbia independent.

In early 1877, Russia intervened on behalf of Serbian and Russian volunteer forces in the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78).  Within one year, Russian troops were nearing Istanbul and the Ottomans surrendered.  Russia's nationalist diplomats and generals persuaded Alexander II to force the Ottomans to sign the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878, creating an independent Bulgaria that stretched into the southwestern Balkans.

In the aftermath of the Russian victory in 1878, the major powers restructured the map of the Balkan region by the Treaty of Berlin in July 1878.  They reversed some of the extreme gains claimed by Russia in the preliminary Treaty of San Stefano, and the Ottomans lost their major holdings in Europe.

Serbia, Montenegro and Romania (Moldavia and Wallachia) had all secured their independenceby by the Treaty of Berlin.

Kingdoms of Italy, German Empire and Austria-Hungary 1861-1914

Italy became a nation-state belatedly on 17 March 1861, when most of the states of the peninsula were united and King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia was proclaimed King of Italy.

In 1870, France started the Franco-Prussian War and brought home its soldiers in Rome, where they had kept the pope in power.  Italian troops entered Rome to take over the Papal State in 1871.  Italian unification was completed and the capital was moved from Florence to Rome.

Kingdom of Italy 1861-1946

The Kingdom of Italy was theoretically a constitutional monarchy.  Executive power belonged to the monarch, as executed through appointed ministers.  Two chambers of parliament restricted the monarch's power: an appointive Senate and an elective Chamber of Deputies.

A major challenge for the prime ministers of the new Kingdom was integrating the political and administrative systems of the different major components into a unified set of policies.  The different regions were proud of their own historic patterns and could not easily be fitted into the Sardinian model.  They practically followed the Napoleonic precedent.

By 1860s, Italy lacked a single national language, Tuscan, which is what we now know as Italian, was only used as a literary language and in Tuscany, while outside other languages were dominant.  Even the kingdom's first king, Victor Emmanuel II, was known to speak almost entirely in Piedmontese and French.

House of Savoy, Kings of Italy 1861-1946

Name	King From	King Until	Notes
Victor Emmanuel II	17 Mar 1861	9 Jan 1878	Last King of Sardinia and first king of united Italy
Umberto I	9 Jan 1878	29 July 1900	Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, assassinated in 1900
Victor Emmanuel III	29 July 1900	9 May 1946	King of Italy during the First World War and during the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini
Umberto II	9 May 1946	12 June 1946	Last King of Italy who was pressured to call a referendum on whether Italy would retain the monarchy

Liberal Period 1870-1914

Italy had very few public schools upon unification, so the Italian government in the Liberal Period (1870–1914) attempted to increase literacy by establishing state-funded schools to teach the official Italian language.  Italian society throughout most of the Liberal Period was sharply divided along class, linguistic, regional and social lines.

German Empire 1871-1918

The German Empire was founded during the Franco-Prussian War, when the south German states, except for Austria, joined the North German Confederation.  On 1 January 1871, the new constitution came into force that changed the name of the federal state and introduced the title of Emperor of German for Wilhelm I, King of Prussia from the House of Hohenzollern.  Berlin remained its capital, and Otto von Bismarck remained Chancellor, the head of government.

It consisted of 26 states, most of them ruled by noble families.  They included four kingdoms, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, three free Hanseatic cities, and one imperial territory.

After 1850, the states of Germany had rapidly become industrialized, with particular strengths in coal, iron (and later steel), chemicals, and railways.  In 1871, Germany had a population of 41 million people; by 1913, this had increased to 68 million.  A heavily rural collection of states in 1815, the now united Germany became predominantly urban.

House of Hohenzollern, Emperors of German 1871-1918

Name	Reign Start	Reign End	Notes
Wilhelm I	18 January 1871	9 March 1888	King of Prussia since 1861; Monarch of Germany since 1866
Friedrich III	9 March 1888	15 June 1888	Son of William I
Wilhelm II	15 June 1888	28 November 1918	Son of Frederick III; abdicated

During its 47 years of existence, the empire was an industrial, technological, and scientific giant, gaining more Nobel Prizes in science than any other country.  By 1900, Germany was the largest economy in Europe, surpassing the United Kingdom, as well as the second-largest in the world, behind only the United States. 

From 1867 to 1878, Otto von Bismarck's tenure as the first and to this day longest reigning Chancellor was marked by relative liberalism, but it became more conservative afterwards.  Bismarck's chief concern was that France would plot revenge after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

In October 1873, Otto von Bismarck negotiated the League of the Three Emperors between the monarchs of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany.  This agreement failed because Austria-Hungary and Russia could not agree over Balkan policy, leaving Germany and Austria-Hungary only in an alliance formed in 1879.

Germanisation

One of the effects of the unification policies was the gradually increasing tendency to eliminate the use of non-German languages in public life, schools and academic settings with the intent of pressuring the non-German population to abandon their national identity in what was called "Germanisation".  These policies often had the reverse effect of stimulating resistance, usually in the form of home schooling and tighter unity in the minority groups, especially the Poles.

The policies were targeted particularly against the significant Polish minority of the empire, gained during the partitions of Poland.  Poles were treated as an ethnic minority even where they made up the majority, as in the Province of Posen, where a series of anti-Polish measures was enforced.

Wilhelm II 1888-1918

Wilhelm II wanted to reassert his ruling prerogatives at a time when other monarchs in Europe were being transformed into constitutional figureheads.  The old chancellor had hoped to guide Wilhelm as he had guided his grandfather, but the emperor wanted to be the master in his own house. 

A key difference between Wilhelm II and Bismarck was their approaches for handling political crises, especially in 1889, when German coal miners went on strike in Upper Silesia.  Bismarck demanded that the German Army be sent in to crush the strike, but Wilhelm II rejected this authoritarian measure, responding "I do not wish to stain my reign with the blood of my subjects."   The fractious relationship ended in March 1890 with Bismarck's resignation.

With Bismarck's departure, Wilhelm II became the dominant ruler of Germany.  Wilhelm II wanted to be fully informed and actively involved in running Germany, not an ornamental figurehead.

Austria-Hungary 1867-1918

The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 re-established the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hungary, which was no longer subject to the Austrian Empire, and bore the official name Austro-Hungarian Monarchy/Realm in its international relations.  Francis Joseph I of Habsburg ruled as :

1. Emperor of Austria over the western and northern half of the country that was the Austrian Empire ("Lands Represented in the Imperial Council", or Cisleithania) ; 

2. King of Hungary over the Kingdom of Hungary ("Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen", or Transleithania).

Francis Joseph I 1848-1916

Francis Joseph I (German: Franz Joseph Karl) was Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary (1848-1916).  He was the longest-reigning ruler of Habsburg as well as emperor and the sixth-longest-reigning monarch of any country in history.

Francis Joseph was troubled by nationalism during his entire reign.  He acceded to the throne during the Revolutions of 1848 and spent his early reign resisting constitutionalism in his domains (Second Italian War of Independence in 1859, Third Italian War of Independence and Austro-Prussian War in 1866).

He ruled peacefully for the next 45 years after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, but personally suffered the tragedies of the execution of his brother Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico in 1867, the suicide of his son Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889, the assassination of his wife Empress Elisabeth ("Sisi") in 1898, and the assassination of his nephew and heir-presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

The Austro-Hungarian economy changed dramatically during the Dual Monarchy.  The capitalist way of production spread throughout the Empire during its 50-year existences.  Technological change accelerated industrialization and urbanization.  Many of the state institutions and the modern administrative system of Hungary were established during this period.  Economic growth centered on Vienna and Budapest, the Austrian lands (areas of modern Austria), the Alpine region and the Bohemian lands.

As the twentieth century started to unfold, the greatest problem facing the dual monarchy was that it consisted of about a dozen distinctly different ethnic groups, of which only two, the Germans and Hungarians (who together accounted for about 44% of the total population), wielded any power or control.  The other ethnic groups, which were not involved in the state affairs, included Slavic (Bosniaks, Croats, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes and Ukrainians) and Romance peoples (Italians, Romanians).

The United States of Greater Austria was a proposal, conceived by a group of scholars surrounding Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria that never came to pass.  This specific proposal was conceived in 1906 and aimed at federalizing Austria-Hungary to help resolve widespread ethnic and nationalist tensions.

French and Spanish Republics 1868-1930

Spanish Revolution of 1868

In 1866, a revolt was suppressed in Spain, but in 1868 there was a further revolt known as the Glorious Revolution.  The Spanish generals Francisco Serrano and Juan Prim revolted against Isabella and defeated her moderado generals at the Battle of Alcolea in 1868.  Isabella was driven into exile in Paris.

Two years of revolution and anarchy followed, until in 1870 the Cortes declared that Spain would again have a king.  Amadeus of Savoy, the second son of King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, was selected and duly crowned King of Spain in 1871.

A provisional government and a regency headed by Francisco Serrano Domínguez was established from October 1868 until January 1871.  Amadeus of Savoy was faced immediately with the incredible task of bringing the disparate political ideologies of Spain to one table.

First Spanish Republic 1873-1874 and Bourbon Restoration 1874-1931

Following the Hidalgo affair and an army rebellion, Amadeus famously declared the people of Spain to be ungovernable, abdicated the throne, and left the country in February 1873.

In his absence, a government of radicals and republicans was formed that declared Spain a republic.  The First Spanish Republic (1873-74) was immediately under siege from all quarters.  The Carlists were launching a violent insurrection after their poor showing in the 1872 elections.  There were calls for socialist revolution from the International Workingmen's Association, revolts and unrest in the autonomous regions of Navarre and Catalonia, and pressure from the Catholic Church against the fledgling republic.

Although the former queen, Isabella II was still alive, she recognized that she was too divisive as a leader, and already abdicated in 1870 in favor of her son, Alfonso.  Alfonso XII of Spain was duly crowned on 28 December 1874 after returning from exile.  After the tumult of the first republic, Spaniards were willing to accept a return to stability under Bourbon rule.

Name	Lifespan	Reign start	Reign end	Notes
Alfonso XII The Peacemaker	28 Nov 1857 - 25 Nov 1885	29 Dec 1874	25 Nov 1885	Son of Isabella II
Alfonso XIII The African	17 May 1886 - 28 Feb 1941	17 May 1886	14 April 1931 (abdicated)	Son of Alfonso XII

Cuba rebelled against Spain in the Ten Years' War beginning in 1868, resulting in the abolition of slavery in Spain's colonies in the New World.  American business interests in the island, coupled with concerns for the people of Cuba, aggravated relations between the two countries.  The explosion of the USS Maine launched the Spanish-American War in 1898, in which Spain fared disastrously.  Cuba gained its independence and Spain lost its remaining New World colony, Puerto Rico, which together with Guam and the Philippines were ceded to the United States for 20 million dollars.

French Third Republic 1870-1940

The French Third Republic was the system of government adopted in France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed, until 1940, when France's defeat by Nazi Germany in World War II led to the formation of the Vichy government in France.

The early days of the Third Republic were dominated by political disruptions caused by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.  Issues over the re-establishment of the monarchy dominated the tenures of the first two presidents, but the growing support for the republican form of government in the French population and a series of republican presidents during the 1880s quashed all plans for a monarchical restoration.

The Third Republic established many French colonial possessions, including French Indochina, French Madagascar, French Polynesia, and large territories in West Africa during the Scramble for Africa, all of them acquired during the last two decades of the 19th century.

World War I 1914–1919

The war drew in all the world's economic great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances:  Triple Entente of the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Background

German industrial and economic power had grown greatly after the foundation of the German Empire.  From the mid-1890s on, the government of Wilhelm II used this base to devote significant economic resources for building up the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial German Navy), in rivalry with the British Royal Navy for world naval supremacy.

Austria-Hungary precipitated the Bosnian crisis of 1908-1909 by officially annexing the former Ottoman territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which it had occupied since 1878.  This angered the Kingdom of Serbia and its patron, the Pan-Slavic and Orthodox Russian Empire.

The trigger for the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie of Austria, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by Yugoslavist  group Gavrilo Princip, at the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

Austria-Hungary believed that Serbian officials were involved in the plot to murder the Archduke, and wanted to finally end Serbian interference in Bosnia.  This set off a diplomatic crisis when Austria-Hungary delivered the July Ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia, and entangled international alliances formed over the previous decades were invoked.

Start of the War 1914

On 28 July, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia.  As Russia mobilized in support of Serbia, Germany invaded neutral Belgium and Luxembourg before moving towards France, leading the United Kingdom to declare war on Germany.

The strategy of the Central Powers suffered from miscommunication.  Austro-Hungarian leaders believed Germany would cover its northern flank against Russia. Germany, however, envisioned Austria-Hungary directing most of its troops against Russia, while Germany dealt with France.  This confusion forced the Austro-Hungarian Army to divide its forces between the Russian and Serbian fronts.

Austria invaded and fought the Serbian army at the Battle of Kolubara beginning on 12 August.  Over the next two weeks, Austrian attacks were thrown back with heavy losses, which marked the first major Allied victories of the war and dashed Austro-Hungarian hopes of a swift victory.

German advance to bypass the French armies concentrated on the Franco-German border, defeat the French forces closer to Luxembourg and Belgium and move south to Paris.  Initially the Germans were successful, particularly in the Battle of the Frontiers (14-24 August).  By 12 September, the French, with assistance from the British Expeditionary Force, halted the German advance east of Paris at the First Battle of the Marne (5-12 September) and pushed the German forces back some 50 km.

In the east, Russia invaded with two armies. Germany defeated Russia in a series of battles collectively known as the First Battle of Tannenberg (17 August–2 September).  While the Russian invasion failed, it caused the diversion of German troops to the east, allowing the Allied victory at the First Battle of the Marne.  This meant Germany failed to achieve its objective of avoiding a long, two-front war.

Progress of the War 1915-1917

Neither side proved able to deliver a decisive blow for the next two years.  In April 1915, Italy joined the Triple Entente and declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May.  Fifteen months later, Italy declared war on Germany.  German and Austro-Hungarian diplomats scored a coup by persuading Bulgaria to join the attack on Serbia.

Bulgaria declared war on Serbia on 12 October 1915 and joined the Austro-Hungarian army.  The Serbs suffered defeat in the Battle of Kosovo. Montenegro covered the Serbian retreat towards the Adriatic coast in the Battle of Mojkovac in 6-7 January 1916, but ultimately the Austrians also conquered Montenegro.  After conquest, Serbia was divided between Austro-Hungary and Bulgaria.

Ending of the War 1918

The Central Powers launched a crushing offensive on 26 October 1917, spearheaded by the Germans, and achieved a victory at Caporetto (Kobarid).  The Italian Army was routed and retreated more than 100 kilometres to reorganize, stabilizing the front at the Piave River.

Serbian and French troops finally made a breakthrough in September 1918, after most of the German and Austro-Hungarian troops had been withdrawn.  The Bulgarians were defeated at the Battle of Dobro Pole, and by 25 September British and French troops had crossed the border into Bulgaria proper as the Bulgarian army collapsed.

The Austro-Hungarians failed to break through in a series of battles on the Piave and were finally decisively defeated in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in October 1918.  On 1 November, the Italian Navy destroyed much of the Austro-Hungarian fleet stationed in Pula, preventing it from being handed over to the new State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.

On 3 November, Austria-Hungary sent a flag of truce to ask for an armistice.  The terms, arranged by telegraph with the Allied Authorities in Paris, were communicated to the Austrian commander and accepted.  The Armistice with Austria (Armistice of Villa Giusti) was signed on 3 November.  Austria and Hungary signed separate armistices following the overthrow of the Habsburg Monarchy.

German Revolution 1918-1919

The German Revolution or November Revolution was a civil conflict in the German Empire at the end of the First World War (November 1918) that resulted in the replacement of the German federal constitutional monarchy with a democratic parliamentary republic that later became known as the Weimar Republic (August 1919).

The first acts of revolution were triggered by the policies of the German Supreme Command of the Army and its lack of coordination with the Naval Command.  In the face of defeat, the Naval Command insisted on trying to precipitate a climactic battle with the British Royal Navy by means of its naval order of 24 October 1918. 

The battle never took place.  Instead of obeying their orders to begin preparations to fight the British, German sailors led a revolt in the naval ports of Wilhelmshaven on 29 October 1918, followed by the Kiel mutiny in early November.  These disturbances spread the spirit of civil unrest across Germany and ultimately led to the proclamation of a republic on 9 November 1918.  Shortly thereafter, Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated his throne and fled the country.

On 11 November, an armistice with Germany was signed in a railroad carriage at Compiègne. At "11 am on 11 November 1918", a ceasefire came into effect.  The revolutionaries, inspired by socialist ideas, did not hand over power to Soviet-style councils as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia.  Fearing an all-out civil war in Germany between militant workers and reactionary conservatives, the Social Democratic Party did not plan to strip the old German upper classes completely of their power and privileges.

Instead, they sought an alliance with the German Supreme Command.  This allowed the army to quell the communist Spartacist uprising of 4-15 January 1919 by force.  The same alliance of political forces succeeded in suppressing uprisings of the left in other parts of Germany by late 1919.

Republic of German-Austria 1918-1919

The Republic of German-Austria (Republik Deutsch-Österreich) was the initial rump state for areas with a predominantly German-speaking population within what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  In Habsburg Austria-Hungary, "German-Austria" was an unofficial term for the areas of the empire inhabited by Austrian Germans.

On 12 October 1918, Emperor Charles I met with the leaders of the largest German parties.  German Nationalists wanted a constitutional monarchy of free nations; Christian Socialists wanted to maintain monarchy and a federation of nations; Social Democrats wanted a republic that would either be a part or federation of nations or join Germany.

On October 16, Charles I published a manifesto which offered to change Austria-Hungary into a federation of nationalities.  This came too late as Czechs and Southern Slavs were well on their way to creating independent states.  With the impending collapse of the empire the 208 ethnic German deputies to the Cisleithanian Austrian parliament met on 21 October and proclaimed itself to be a "Provisional National Assembly for German-Austria" representing the Germans in Cisleithanian lands.

On November 11, 1918, Emperor Charles I abdicated, by relinquishing his right to take part in Austrian affairs of state.  The next day, the National Assembly officially declared German-Austria a republic.

On March 12, 1919 Constituent Assembly re-confirmed earlier declaration that German-Austria is a constituent part of German republic.  This was grounded in the view that Austria had never been a nation in the true sense.  While the Austrian territory had existed in one form or another for over 700 years, its only unifying force had been the Habsburgs.  Apart from being German inhabited, these Lands had no common "Austrian" identity and there had never been an Austrian state before.

Pan-German and Social Democrats supported the union with Germany, during spring and summer of 1919, unity talk meetings between German and Austrian representatives continued.  However, all this changed after June 2, 1919 when the draft treaties were presented and it demonstrated that Western Allies were opposed to the union of Germany and Austria.

Treaties of Saint-Germain and Versailles 1919

The Treaty treaties of Saint-Germain (for Austria) and Versailles (for Germany) at the end of World War I ended the state of war between Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Allied Powers.

Austria-Hungary was partitioned into several successor states, including Republic of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), largely but not entirely along ethnic lines.  Transylvania was shifted to Greater Romania.

The rump state of German-Austria was given reduced borders which ceded German-populated regions in Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia, German-populated South Tyrol to Italy and a portion of Alpine provinces to the Yugoslavia.  The Republic of Austria was created by the will of Allies who did not want the union of Germany and Austria.

In Western Europe, Germany was to cede Alsace-Lorraine to France, and Eupen-Malmédy was allotted to Belgium.  In the Schleswig Plebiscites, the Danish-speaking population in the north voted for Denmark while the German speaking population in the south voted for Germany.  Schleswig was thus partitioned and Holstein remained in Germany.

In Eastern Europe, Germany was to cede parts of the Upper Silesia to Czechoslovakia.  Germany had to recognize the independence of Poland and renounce "all rights and title over the territory".  Portions of Upper Silesia and the province of Posen were to be ceded to Poland.  Pomerelia (Eastern Pomerania), on historical and ethnic grounds, was transferred to Poland.

World War I aftermath in France, Italy and Spain 1919-1939

France

After the war, the Third French Republic (1870-1940) regained Alsace-Lorraine, and the German industrial Saar Basin, a coal and steel region, was occupied by France.  The German African colonies, such as Kamerun, were partitioned between France and Britain.  The flow of reparations from Germany played a central role in strengthening French finances.  The government began a large-scale reconstruction program to repair wartime damages, and was burdened with a very large public debt.

Italy

Public opinion in Italy was sharply divided, with Catholics and socialists recommending peace.  However, extreme nationalists saw their opportunity to gain their "irredenta": the border regions that were controlled by Austria.  The Treaty of Saint-Germain awarded the victorious Italian the southern half of the County of Tyrol, Trieste, Istria, and the city of Zadar.

Spain

Spain's neutrality in the war allowed it to become a supplier of material for both sides to its great advantage, prompting an economic boom in Spain.  The late 1920s were prosperous until the worldwide Great Depression hit in 1929.  In early 1930 bankruptcy and massive unpopularity forced the king to remove Primo de Rivera.

Alfonso XIII’s multiple repeated mistakes discredited the king and ruined the monarchy, while heightening social tensions that led in 1936 to a full-scale Spanish Civil War.  Urban voters had lost faith in the king, and voted for republican parties in the municipal elections of April 1931.  The king fled the country without abdicating and the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) was established.

Europe 1920

Collapse of Russian Empire and Ottoman Empire 1917-1922

Tsar Nicholas II and his subjects entered World War I with patriotic enthusiasm, with the defense of Russia's fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Serbs.  In August 1914, the Russian army invaded Germany's province of East Prussia and occupied a significant portion of Austrian-controlled Galicia in support of the Serbs and their allies (France and Britain).  Military reversals and shortages among the civilian population soon soured much of the population.  German control of the Baltic Sea and German-Ottoman control of the Black Sea severed Russia from most of its foreign supplies and potential markets.

By the middle of 1915, the impact of the war was demoralizing.  Food and fuel were in short supply, casualties were increasing, and inflation was mounting.  Strikes rose among low-paid factory workers, and there were reports that peasants, who wanted reforms of land ownership, were restless.  The tsar eventually decided to take personal command of the army and moved to the front, leaving his wife, the Empress Alexandra, in charge in the capital.  She fell under the spell of a monk, Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916).  His assassination in late 1916 by a clique of nobles could not restore the tsar's lost prestige.

The Tsarist system was overthrown in the February Revolution in 1917.  The Bolsheviks declared "no annexations, no indemnities" and called on workers to accept their policies and demanded the end of the war.  The main events of the revolution took place in and near Petrograd (present-day Saint Petersburg), where long-standing discontent with the monarchy erupted into mass protests against food rationing on 23 February.

The revolutionary activity lasted about eight days, involving mass demonstrations and violent armed clashes with police and gendarmes, the last loyal forces of the Russian monarchy.  On 27 February, the garrison forces of the capital sided with the revolutionaries. Three days later Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, ending Romanov dynastic rule and the Russian Empire.

A Russian Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov replaced the Council of Ministers of Russia.  However, the failures of the Provisional Government led to the October Revolution by the Communist Bolsheviks later that year, resulting in the Russian Civil War and the eventual formation of the Soviet Union.

The Ottoman Empire disintegrated, and much of its non-Anatolian territory was awarded to various Allied powers as protectorates.

The occupation of Istanbul and Izmir by Greece and the Allies in the aftermath of World War I prompted the establishment of the Turkish National Movement.  The Turkish War of Independence was waged with the aim of revoking the terms due to the World War I.  By September 1922 the occupying armies were expelled.  On 1 November 1922, the Turkish Parliament in Ankara formally abolished the Sultanate, ending 623 years of monarchical Ottoman rule.

The Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 led to the international recognition of the sovereignty of the newly formed "Republic of Turkey" as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire.

Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany 1919-1939

The Weimar Republic is an unofficial designation for the German state from 1919 to 1933.  The name derives from the city of Weimar, where its constitutional assembly first took place.  The official name Deutsches Reich (2nd empire) remained unchanged since 1871.

In its fourteen years, the Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism as well as contentious relationships with the victors of the First World War.  The people of Germany blamed the republic rather than their wartime leaders for the country's defeat and for the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

The growing post-war economic crisis was a result of lost pre-war industrial exports, the loss of supplies in raw materials and foodstuffs due to the continental blockade, the loss of the colonies, and worsening debt balances, exacerbated by an exorbitant issue of promissory notes raising money to pay for the war.  Military-industrial activity had almost ceased.

Germans had no real experience with democracy and many wanted a return to monarchy: or at least the strong rule they associated with it.  Although Weimar eventually solved the problem of hyperinflation, the mainstream political parties squabbled and many Germans yearned for strong rule.  Many Germans looked to the ideas of German thinker Karl Marx as the answer, and supported a Communist takeover, like what had happened in 1917 in Russia.

Others looked to the far right National Socialist German Workers Party, who combined socialist rhetoric with extreme German nationalism.  Unlike the Communists, they also had a charismatic leader: Adolph Hitler.  They came to be known as the Nazis.

Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party 1921-1934

Adolf Hitler was the leader of the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP), Chancellor of Germany (1933-1945) and Führer ("Leader") of Nazi Germany (1934-1945).

Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in a town in Austria-Hungary (in present-day Austria), close to the border with the German Empire.  He was raised near Linz.  After the sudden death of his father in January 1903, Hitler's performance at school deteriorated and his mother allowed him to leave.

In 1907 Hitler left Linz to live and study fine art in Vienna, financed by orphan's benefits and support from his mother.  He applied for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna but was rejected twice.  On 21 December 1907, his mother died of breast cancer at the age of 47.  In 1909 Hitler ran out of money and was forced to live a bohemian life in homeless shelters and Meldemannstraße dormitory.

During his time in Vienna he pursued a growing passion for two interests, architecture and music.  It was here that Hitler first became exposed to racist rhetoric. German nationalism had a particularly widespread following in the district where Hitler lived.  Hitler read local newspapers such as Deutsches Volksblatt that fanned prejudice and played on Christian fears of being swamped by an influx of Eastern European Jews.

Hitler received the final part of his father's estate in May 1913 and moved to Munich, Germany.  Hitler was called up for conscription into the Austro-Hungarian Army, so he journeyed to Salzburg in February 1914 for medical assessment.  After he was deemed by the medical examiners as unfit for service, he returned to Munich.  Hitler later claimed that he did not wish to serve the Habsburg Empire because of the mixture of races in its army and his belief that the collapse of Austria-Hungary was imminent.

During World War I, Hitler was allowed to enter the Bavarian Army, he continued to put forth his German nationalist ideas which he developed from a young age.  After the war, he returned to Munich in 1919, when he joined the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP), the precursor of the NSDAP, and was appointed leader of the NSDAP in 1921.

In 1923, he attempted to seize power in a failed coup in Munich and was imprisoned.  While in jail he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf ("My Struggle").  After his release from prison in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-semitism and anti-communism with charismatic oratory.  He frequently denounced international capitalism and communism as being part of a Jewish conspiracy.

The stock market in the United States crashed on 24 October 1929.  In Germany, millions were thrown out of work and several major banks collapsed.  Hitler and the NSDAP prepared to take advantage of the emergency to gain support for their party.  They promised to repudiate the Versailles Treaty, strengthen the economy, and provide jobs.

The Great Depression provided a political opportunity for Hitler.  Germans were ambivalent about the parliamentary republic, which faced challenges from right- and left-wing extremists.  The moderate political parties were increasingly unable to stem the tide of extremism, and the German referendum of 1929 helped to elevate Nazi ideology.

The elections of September 1930 resulted in the break-up of a grand coalition and its replacement with a minority cabinet.  Its leader, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning of the Centre Party, governed through emergency decrees from President Paul von Hindenburg.

By 1933, the Nazi Party was the largest elected party in the German Reichstag, but did not have a majority, and no party was able to form a majority parliamentary coalition in support of a candidate for chancellor.  This led to former chancellor Franz von Papen and other conservative leaders persuading Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor on 30 January 1933.

Hitler and his supporters successfully conned the leaders of the Center Party into agreeing to hand over all government power to Hitler as chancellor by passing the Enabling Act of 1933 (the power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag). 

The Nazis quickly used their new power to outlaw other parties, kill Communist Party supporters and leaders, and imprison or drive most of the leaders of the other parties into exile.  On 14 July 1933, the NSDAP was declared the only legal political party in Germany.  These events brought the republic to an end with democracy collapsed.

On 2 August 1934, Hindenburg died.  The previous day, the cabinet had enacted the "Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich", which stated that upon Hindenburg's death, the office of president would be abolished and its powers would merge with those of the chancellor.  Hitler thus became head of state as well as head of government, and was formally named as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor).

As head of state, Hitler became commander-in-chief of the armed forces.  Immediately after Hindenburg's death, the traditional loyalty oath of soldiers was altered to affirm loyalty to Hitler by name, rather than to the office of commander-in-chief or the state.

Nazi Germany 1933-1939

Nazi Germany is the period (1933-1945) when Germany was governed by a dictatorship under the control of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party (NSDAP).  Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a fascist totalitarian state.  Its official name was Deutsches Reich (the 3rd Third Reich, 1933-1943) and Großdeutsches Reich ("Greater German Reich", 1943-1945).

A national referendum held 19 August 1934 confirmed Hitler as sole Führer (leader) of Germany.  All power was centralized in Hitler's person, his word became above all laws, which controlled nearly all aspects of life.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment by using heavy military spending.  Extensive public works were undertaken.  Hitler oversaw one of the largest infrastructure improvement campaigns in German history, leading to the construction of dams, autobahns, railroads, and other civil works.

The return to economic stability boosted the regime's popularity.  Unemployment fell from six million in 1932 to one million in 1936.  In January 1935, over 90% of the people of the Saarland, then under League of Nations administration, voted to unite with Germany.

In March, Hitler announced an expansion of the Wehrmacht to 600,000 members: six times the number permitted by the Versailles Treaty.  Britain, France, Italy and the League of Nations condemned these violations of the Treaty, but did nothing to stop it.

Germany reoccupied the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland in March 1936, also in violation of the Versailles Treaty.

Propaganda in Nazi Germany

On 13 March 1933, the Third Reich established a Ministry of Propaganda, appointing Joseph Goebbels as its Minister.  Its goals were to establish enemies in the public mind: the external enemies which had imposed the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, and internal enemies such as Jews, Romani, Bolsheviks and cultural trends including "degenerate art".

Adolf Hitler and Nazi propagandists played on widespread German anti-Semitism.  The Jews were blamed for things such as robbing the German people of their hard work while themselves avoiding physical labour.  Hitler declared that the mission of the Nazi movement was to annihilate "Jewish Bolshevism".

In 1935, anti-semitic laws were introduced known as the Nuremberg Laws.  The laws were based on notions of racial purity and sought to preserve the Aryan race, who were at the top of the Nazi racial hierarchy, and to teach the German nation to view the Jews as subhumans.  As a results, fifty thousand German Jews had left Germany by the end of 1934, and by the end of 1938, approximately half the German Jewish population had left.

Annexation of Austria 1938

Anschluss was the Nazi propaganda term for the annexation of Austria in March 1938.  This was in contrast to the Anschluss movement attempted in 1918 when the Republic of German-Austria attempted union with Germany to form a "Greater Germany".

The Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain signed in 1919 explicitly prohibited the political inclusion of Austria in the German state.  This measure was criticized by the Weimar Constitution, who saw the prohibition as a contradiction of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination of peoples.

The constitutions of the Weimar Republic and the First Austrian Republic included the political goal of unification, which was widely supported by democratic parties.  In the early 1930s, popular support in Austria for union with Germany remained overwhelming.

In Austria, the new state was difficult to control, as much of the former empire's important economic regions had been taken away with the foundation of new nation-states.  The matter was further complicated by the fact that a number of these new nation-states were still dependent on Vienna's banks, but business was hampered by the newly erected borders and tariffs.

The landlocked Austria was barely able to support itself with food and lacked developed industrial basis.  Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Italy had imposed trade blockade and refused to sell food and coal to Austria, which eventually was saved by aid and support from the Western Allies.  By 1922 half of the population was unemployed.

The Nazis aimed to re-unite all Germans either born or living outside of the Reich to create an "all-German Reich".  Hitler had written in his 1925 autobiography (Mein Kampf) that he would create a union between his birth country Austria and Germany by any means possible ("German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland" "People of the same blood should be in the same Reich").  Earlier, Nazi Germany had provided support for the Austrian National Socialist Party (Austrian Nazi Party) in its bid to seize power from the Austrian government.

In February 1938, Hitler emphasized to Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg the need for Germany to secure its frontiers.  Schuschnigg called a referendum regarding Austrian independence in March, but Hitler demanded that it be cancelled.  On 11 March, Hitler threatened invasion of Austria, demanded Chancellor Schuschnigg's resignation.  On 12 March, the German Wehrmacht crossed the border into Austria.  The troops were greeted by cheering Austrians with Nazi salutes.

Occupation of Czechoslovakia 1938-1939

It began with the German annexation of Czechoslovakia's northern and western border regions, formerly being part of German-Austria known collectively as the Sudetenland, under terms outlined by the Munich Agreement.  The agreement stipulated that Czechoslovakia must cede Sudeten territory to Germany by 10 October 1938.  An international commission representing Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Czechoslovakia would supervise a plebiscite to determine the final frontier.

Hitler's pretext for this action was the alleged privations suffered by the ethnic German population living in those regions.  The incorporation of the Sudetenland into Germany left the rest of Czechoslovakia weak, and it became powerless to resist subsequent occupation.  On 15 March 1939, the German Wehrmacht moved into the remainder of Czechoslovakia and, from Prague Castle, Hitler proclaimed Bohemia and Moravia the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

The Czechs demonstrated against the occupation on 28 October 1939.  The death of a medical student precipitated widespread student demonstrations, and the Reich retaliated.  Politicians were arrested, as were an estimated 1,800 students and teachers.  On 17 November, all universities and colleges in the protectorate were closed; further arrests and executions of Czech students and professors took place during the occupation.

Invasion plan for Poland 1939

Hitler's own idea to invade Poland and create puppet states economically subordinate to Germany.  As part of this long-term policy, he pursued a policy of rapprochement with Poland, trying to improve opinion in Germany, culminating in the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934.

The population of the Free City of Danzig (separated from Germany after the treaty of Versailles) was strongly in favor of annexation by Germany, as were many of the ethnic German inhabitants of the Polish territory that separated the German exclave of East Prussia from the rest of the Reich.

By 1937, Germany began to propose an extraterritorial roadway, part of the Reichsautobahn system, be built in order to connect East Prussia with Germany proper, running through the Polish Corridor (a strip of land that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany).  Poland rejected this proposal, fearing that it would become increasingly subject to the will of Germany and eventually lose its independence as the Czechs had.

In March 1939, Hitler demanded the return of the Danzig and Polish Corridor.  The British announced they would come to the aid of Poland if it was attacked.  Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, arranged in negotiations with the Soviet Union a non-aggression pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was signed in August 1939.  The treaty also contained secret protocols dividing Poland and the Baltic states into German and Soviet spheres of influence.

British Empire 1921-1939

The British Empire reached its greatest extent in 1921 after the World War I.  The colonies of Germany and the Ottoman Empire were distributed to the Allied powers as League of Nations mandates.  Britain gained control of Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, parts of Cameroon and Togoland, and Tanganyika.  

The Dominions themselves also acquired mandates of their own: the Union of South Africa gained South-West Africa (modern-day Namibia), Australia gained New Guinea, and New Zealand gained Western Samoa.

King George V changed its House name during World War I in 1917, because of wartime anti-German sentiment in the United Kingdom.  The name Windsor has since been used.

House of Windsor 1917-Present

Name	King From	King Until	Claim	Death
George V	6 May 1910	20 January 1936	Son of Edward VII	Aged 70
Edward VIII	20 January 1936	11 December 1936 (abdicated)	Son of George V	28 May 1972 aged 77
George VI	11 December 1936	6 February 1952	Son of George V Younger brother of Edward VIII	Aged 56
Elizabeth II	6 February 1952	Present	Daughter of George VI	Living

Division in Irish nationalism 1919-1923

The Irish Home Rule movement was a movement that agitated for self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was the dominant political movement of Irish nationalism from 1870 to the end of World War I. The rise of Irish nationalism and republicanism eventually culminated in the Irish War of Independence (1919-21).

On 6 December 1922, Ireland formed a new dominion named the Irish Free State. As expected, "Northern Ireland" (six counties in Ulster), immediately exercised its right under the Anglo-Irish Treaty to opt out of the new state. This treaty created a division in Irish nationalism and resulted in the Irish Civil War (1922-23).

The union of Great Britain with most of Ulster was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and is known by this name to the present time.

Edward VIII

Edward VIII showed impatience with court protocol.  Only months into his reign in 1936, he caused a constitutional crisis by proposing marriage to Wallis Simpson, an American who had divorced her first husband and was seeking a divorce from her second.  The prime ministers of the United Kingdom and the Dominions opposed the marriage, arguing that a divorced woman with two living ex-husbands was politically and socially unacceptable as a prospective queen consort.

When it became apparent that he could not marry Wallis and remain on the throne, Edward abdicated.  He was succeeded by his younger brother George VI.  With a reign of 326 days, Edward was one of the shortest-reigning monarchs in British history.

After his abdication, he was made Duke of Windsor.  He married Wallis in France on 3 June 1937, after her second divorce became final.  Later that year, the couple toured Germany, and against the advice of the British government, met Adolf Hitler at his Obersalzberg retreat in October 1937.  The visit was much publicized by the German media and the Duke gave full Nazi salutes.

Some historians have suggested that Hitler was prepared to reinstate Edward as king in the hope of establishing a fascist Britain.  The former Austrian ambassador, Count Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, who was also a second cousin once removed and friend of George V, believed that Edward favored German fascism as a bulwark against communism, and even that he initially favored an alliance with Germany.

English Language

British Empire had facilitated the spread of English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language. English also facilitated worldwide international communication. As England continued to form new colonies, these in turn became independent and developed their own norms for how to speak and write the language. English was adopted in North America, India, and parts of Africa, Australasia, and many other regions.

Soviet Union 1922-1939

The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, 1922-1991), was a socialist state that spanned Eurasia during its existence.  It was nominally a federal union of multiple national republics; in practice its government and economy were highly centralized until its final years.  The country was a one-party state (prior to 1990) governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government that had earlier replaced the house of Romanov of the Russian Empire.  They established the Russian Soviet Republic, the world's first constitutionally guaranteed socialist state.

Tensions escalated into a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and many anti-Bolshevik forces across the former Empire, among whom the largest faction was the White Guard.  The White Guard engaged in violent anti-communist repression against the Bolsheviks and suspected worker and peasant Bolsheviks known as the White Terror.  The Red Army expanded and helped local Bolsheviks take power, establishing soviets, repressing their political opponents and rebellious peasants through Red Terror.

By 1922, the balance of power had shifted and the Bolsheviks had emerged victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics.  Upon the conclusion of the civil war, Lenin's government introduced the New Economic Policy, which led to a partial return of a free market and private property; this resulted in a period of economic recovery.

Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power.  Stalin suppressed all political opposition to his rule inside the Communist Party and inaugurated a command economy.  Through mass arrests of military leaders and Communist Party members, many of them were then sent to correctional labor camps or sentenced to death.

As a results, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, which led to significant economic growth, but also led to a man-made famine in 1932-1933.

On 23 August 1939, after unsuccessful efforts to form an anti-fascist alliance with Western powers, the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.

Nationalist Spain and Italy 1920-1939

Fascist Italy and Benito Mussolini 1920-1939

The Biennio Rosso, an intense social conflict, took place in 1919-1920 following the first world war in a context of economic crisis, high unemployment and political instability.  It was characterized by mass strikes, worker manifestations as well as self-management experiments through land and factories occupations.  In Turin and Milan, workers councils were formed and many factory occupations took place under the leadership of anarcho-syndicalists.

Thenceforth, the National Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini successfully exploited the claims of Italian nationalists and the quest for order and normalization of the middle class.  In October 1922, Mussolini took advantage of a general strike to announce his demands to the Italian government to give the Fascist Party political power or face a coup.

Although the Italian Army was far better armed than the Fascist militias, the liberal system and King Victor Emmanuel III were facing a deeper political crisis.  The King was forced to choose which of the two rival movements in Italy would form the government: Mussolini's Fascists, or the marxist Italian Socialist Party.  He selected the Fascists.

Upon taking power, Mussolini formed a coalition with nationalists and liberals.  His coalition passed the electoral Acerbo Law in 1923, which assigned two thirds of the seats to the party.  The Fascist Party used violence and intimidation to achieve the threshold in the 1924 election, thus obtaining control of Parliament.  Socialist deputy was assassinated after calling for a nullification of the vote because of the irregularities.

Mussolini and his followers consolidated power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship.  Within five years, he had established dictatorial authority and aspired to create a totalitarian state.

Mussolini's foreign policy aimed to restore the ancient grandeur of the Roman Empire by expanding Italian colonial possessions and the fascist sphere of influence.  In the 1920s, he ordered the Pacification of Libya and established a protectorate over Albania.  In 1936, Ethiopia was conquered and merged into Italian East Africa with Eritrea and Somalia.

In 1939, he ordered the successful Italian military intervention in Spain in favor of Francisco Franco during the Spanish civil war.

Second Spanish Republic and Francisco Franco 1931-1939

The Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931 after the deposition of King Alfonso XIII in Spain.  Power seesawed back and forth between 1931-36, as the complex coalitions formed and fell apart  The end came in a devastating Spanish civil war (1936-1939).

In October 1936 General Francisco Franco was proclaimed Leader of Spain in the parts of Spain controlled by the Nationalists after the civil war broke out.  The Nationalists, supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, defeated the Republican coalition of liberals, socialists, anarchists, and communists, which was backed by the Soviet Union.

At the end of the war on 1 April 1939 General Franco took control of the whole of Spain.  The Francoist regime resulted in deaths and arrests of hundreds of thousands of people who were either supporter of the previous Second Republic of Spain or potential threats to Franco's state.

World War II 1939-1945

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939.  Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later, but they failed to provide any meaningful support.  World War II in Europe was under way.

Polish forces abandoned the regions of Pomerelia (the Polish Corridor), Greater Poland and Polish Upper Silesia in the first week.  The Polish plan for border defense was proven a dismal failure.  By 12 September all of Poland west of the Vistula was conquered, except for the isolated Warsaw.  Poland fell quickly, as the Soviet Union attacked from the east on 17 September.

Starting from the first day of invasion, the German air force (the Luftwaffe) attacked civilian targets and columns of refugees along the roads to terrorize the Polish people, disrupt communications, and target Polish morale.

The Holocaust

The Polish Campaign was the first action in Adolf Hitler's attempt to create Lebensraum (living space) for Germans.  Nazi propaganda was one of the factors behind the German brutality directed at civilians which had worked relentlessly to convince the German people into believing that the Jews and Slavs were Untermenschen (subhumans).

Germany gained control of about 2 million Jews in the occupied territory.  Poland was divided into two segments: one, which was already Germanized and occupied by hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans moving eastward, and the other which was where the ethnic Poles would be forcibly resettled, and millions of Poles would be at best enslaved.  The first of those segments was the Reichsgau–areas absorbed into and administered as a part of the Greater Germany; the other was called the General Government.

The Germans initiated a policy of sending Jews from all territories they had recently annexed (Austria, Czechoslovakia, and western Poland) to the General Government region.  There the Jews were concentrated in ghettos in major cities, chosen for their railway lines to facilitate later deportation.  Food supplies were restricted and they were often subjected to forced labour.

Conquest of Europe 1940-1941

From the start of the war, a British blockade on shipments to Germany affected the Reich economy.  The Germans were particularly dependent on foreign supplies of oil, coal, and grain.  To safeguard Swedish iron ore shipments to Germany, Hitler attacked and invaded Norway and Denmark by April 1940.

Hitler ordered an attack on France and the Low Countries, which began in May 1940.  They quickly conquered Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium.  Within days, it became clear that French military forces were overwhelmed and that military collapse was imminent.  Government and military leaders wanted to move the government to French territories in North Africa, and continue the war with the French Navy and colonial resources.

While this debate continued, the French government was forced to relocate several times, to avoid capture by advancing German forces and reaching Bordeaux.  Finally the Armistice with France agreement was signed on 22 June 1940.  The armistice divided France into occupied and unoccupied zones: northern and western France was occupied by Germany, and the remaining two-fifths of the country were under the control of the French government with the capital at Vichy.  The unexpectedly swift defeat of France resulted in an upswing in Hitler's popularity and an upsurge in war fever.

Hitler made peace overtures to the new British leader Winston Churchill, which was rejected in July 1940.  Hitler ordered a series of aerial attacks on Royal Air Force airbases and radar stations, as well as nightly air raids on British cities, including London, Plymouth and Coventry.

On 6 April 1941, Germany launched the invasion of Yugoslavia and the battle of Greece.  German efforts to secure oil included negotiating a supply from their new ally, Romania, who signed the Tripartite Pact in November 1940.

On 22 June 1941, contravening the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 5.5 million Axis troops attacked the Soviet Union.  In addition to Hitler's stated purpose of acquiring Lebensraum, this large-scale offensive (codenamed Operation Barbarossa) was intended to destroy the Soviet Union and seize its natural resources for subsequent aggression against the Western powers.  The reaction among Germans was one of surprise and trepidation as many were concerned about how much longer the war would continue or suspected that Germany could not win a war fought on two fronts.

The banner in Nazi party reads "Bolshevism is the greatest enemy of our civilization".  The invasion conquered a huge area, including the Baltic republics, Belarus, and West Ukraine.  After the successful Battle of Smolensk, Hitler ordered Army Group Centre to halt its advance to Moscow and temporarily divert its Panzer groups to aid in the encirclement of Leningrad and Kiev.

This pause provided the Red Army with an opportunity to mobilise fresh reserves.  The Moscow offensive, which resumed in October 1941, ended disastrously in December.  On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  Four days later, Germany declared war on the United States.

France, Spain and Italy 1940-1942

Paris fell to the Germans on 14 June 1940.  The new French government, Vichy France, was established on 10 July to govern the unoccupied part of southern France and its colonies.

However, in practice, most local government was handled by the traditional French officialdom.  By November 1942 all of the Vichy France was occupied by German forces.  Vichy continued in existence but it was closely supervised by the Germans.

In Spain, Franco had cautiously decided to enter the war on the Axis side in June 1940, and to prepare his people for war, an anti-British and anti-French campaign was launched in the Spanish media that demanded French Morocco, Cameroon and Gibraltar.

On 23 October 1940, Hitler and Franco met in Hendaye in France to discuss the possibility of Spain's entry to the war.  Franco's demands, including supplies of food and fuel, as well as Spanish control of Gibraltar and French North Africa, proved too much for Hitler.  Hitler may not have really wanted Spain to join the war, as he needed neutral harbors to import materials from countries in Latin America and elsewhere.

In Italy, Mussolini chose to stay non-belligerent, although he declared his support for Hitler.  Mussolini and the Fascist regime decided that Italy would aim to annex large portions of Africa and the Middle East to be included in its colonial empire.

As France's defeat was obviously inevitable, Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, fulfilling its obligations towards the Pact of Steel.  Mussolini hoped to quickly capture Savoy, Nice, Corsica, and the African colonies of Tunisia and Algeria from the French.

Soviet Union 1940-1942

The Soviet Union had invaded the portions of eastern Poland assigned to it by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact two weeks after the German invasion of western Poland, followed by co-ordination with German forces in Poland.

Initial Soviet occupations of the Baltic countries had occurred in mid-June 1940, when Soviet NKVD troops raided border posts in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, followed by the liquidation of state administrations and replacement by Soviet cadres.

The annexations resulting in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), Latvian SSR and Lithuanian SSR.  The international community condemned this initial annexation of the Baltic states and deemed it illegal.

Turning point and collapse 1943-1944

Germany and Europe as a whole was almost totally dependent on foreign oil imports.  In an attempt to resolve the persistent shortage, in June 1942 Germany launched Fall Blau (Case Blue), an offensive against the Caucasian oilfields.  The Soviet Red Army launched a counter-offensive on 19 November and encircled the Axis forces, which were trapped in Stalingrad on 23 November.

Hitler's refusal to allow a retreat led to the deaths of 200,000 German and Romanian soldiers; of the 91,000 men who surrendered in the city on 31 January 1943, only 6,000 survivors could returned to Germany.  After the failed German offensive at the Battle of Kursk, the Soviet Union began to push German forces westward on the Eastern Front.  By December 1943 the Germans had lost most of their Eastern territorial gains.

The Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943 and in Italy in September.  Meanwhile, American and British bomber fleets based in Britain began operations against Germany and many sorties were intentionally given civilian targets in an effort to destroy German morale.  Soon German aircraft production could not keep pace with losses, and without air cover the Allied bombing campaign became even more devastating.  By targeting oil refineries and factories, they crippled the German war effort by late 1944.

By 1943 Italy was losing on every front: half of the Italian forces fighting in the Soviet Union had been destroyed; the African campaign had failed; the Balkans remained unstable; and Italians wanted an end to the war.

On 6 June 1944, American, British, and Canadian forces established a front in France with the D-Day landings in Normandy.  On 20 July 1944, Hitler narrowly survived a bomb attack.  The failed Ardennes Offensive (December 1944-January 1945) was the last major German campaign of the war as Soviet forces entered Germany on 27 January 1945.

Hitler's refusal to admit defeat and his repeated insistence that the war be fought to the last man led to unnecessary death and destruction in the war's closing months.  In many areas, people surrendered to the approaching Allies in spite of exhortations of local leaders to continue to fight.

Ending of the War 1945

During the Battle of Berlin (April 1945-May 1945), Hitler and his staff lived in the underground Führerbunker while the Red Army approached.  On 30 April, when Soviet troops were within two blocks of the Reich Chancellery, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide .  On 2 May, General Helmuth Weidling unconditionally surrendered Berlin to Soviet General Vasily Chuikov.  On 4-8 May 1945, most of the remaining German armed forces surrendered unconditionally.  The German Instrument of Surrender was signed 8 May, marking the end of the Nazi regime and the end of World War II in Europe.

During the final weeks of the Third Reich and the war in Europe, many civilians, government officials and military personnel throughout Nazi Germany committed suicide.  In addition to high-ranking Nazi officials like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Philipp Bouhler and Martin Bormann, many others chose Selbstmord (German: Self-murder) rather than accept the defeat.

In Italy, Mussolini was captured on 27 April 1945, by communist Italian partisans near the Swiss border as he tried to escape Italy.  On the next day, he was executed as sentenced in absentia by a tribunal of the National Liberation Committee.  Finally, a transition to a republic was established following the abdication of King Victor Emmanuel III on 9 May 1946.

In France, the Provisional Government of the French Republic was an interim government between 1944-1946 following the liberation of continental France, and lasted until the establishment of the French Fourth Republic.

Post War Period 1945-1990

The aftermath of World War II was the beginning of a new era for all countries involved, defined by the decline of all European colonial empires and simultaneous rise of two superpowers; the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US).  

Allies during World War II, the US and the USSR became competitors on the world stage and engaged in the Cold War, so called because it never resulted in overt, declared total war between the two powers but was instead characterized by espionage, political subversion and proxy wars.

In February 1945, at the conference at Yalta in Crimea, meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the USSR to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe, Stalin demanded a Soviet sphere of political influence in Central Europe.  Stalin eventually was convinced by Churchill and Roosevelt not to dismember Germany.

Stalin stated that the Soviet Union would keep the territory of Poland they had already taken via invasion in 1939, and wanted a pro-Soviet Polish government in power remained in Poland.  

The Soviet Union took over the Polish provinces east of the Curzon (from which 2 million Poles were expelled), north-east Romania and parts of eastern Finland.  The three Baltic States (SSRs) were also incorporated into the USSR.

In June 1947, after the Soviets had refused to negotiate a potential lightening of restrictions on German development, the United States announced the Marshall Plan, a comprehensive program of American assistance to all European countries wanting to participate, including the Soviet Union and those of Eastern Europe.  The Soviets rejected the Plan and took a hard-line position against the United States and non-communist European nations.

The Western Europe were rebuilt through the American Marshall Plan whereas Central and Eastern Europe fell under the Soviet sphere of influence and led to establishment of Communist-led regimes, with full or partial support of the Soviet occupation authorities.

Allied-occupied Germany 1945-1950

The four powers (United States, United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union) divided Germany into four occupation zones for administrative purposes; creating what became collectively known as Allied-occupied Germany.

This division was ratified at the Potsdam Conference (July to August 1945).  All of the Eastern Europe was under Soviet occupation.  This included most of the Soviet occupation zone in eastern Germany, the historical German settlement area.  Germany subsequently lost territories east of the Oder-Neisse Line, when international recognition of its right to jurisdiction over any of these territories was conditionally withdrawn.

The city of Berlin was jointly occupied by the Allied powers and subdivided into four sectors.  All four occupying powers were entitled to privileges throughout Berlin that were not extended to the rest of Germany.

Flight and expulsion of Germans

The original plan to govern Germany as a single unit through the Allied Control Council broke down in 1946-1947 due to growing tensions between the Allies, with Britain and the US wishing cooperation, France obstructing any collaboration in order to unwind Germany into many independent states, and the USSR unilaterally implementing from early on elements of its political-economic system.

Another dispute was the absorption of post-war expellees.  Germans fled or were expelled from Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia, and the former German provinces of Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia, which were annexed by Polandand the Soviet Union.

During the German occupation, the Czech resistance groups demanded the deportation of Germans from Czechoslovakia.  The decision was adopted by the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile which, beginning in 1943, sought the support of the Allies for this proposal.  Czechoslovak President on October 28 1945 called for the "final solution" which would have to be solved by deportation of the ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia.

France generally had not agreed to the expulsions approved by the Potsdam agreement and strictly refused to absorb war refugees who were denied return to their homes in seized eastern German territories, into the French zone.

By 1950, a total of approximately 12 million Germans had fled or been expelled entered into the Allied-occupied Germany and Austria:  about 7 million came from preexisting German territories ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union, and about 3 million from Czechoslovakia.

French Republics 1946-Present

The French Fourth Republic saw an era of great economic growth in France and the rebuilding of the nation's social institutions and industry after World War II, and played an important part in the development of the process of European integration which changed the continent permanently.  The greatest accomplishments of the Fourth Republic were in social reform and economic development.

The trigger for the collapse of the republic was the Algiers crisis of 1958.  France was still a colonial power, although conflict and revolt had begun the process of decolonization.  French West Africa, French Indochina, and French Algeria still sent representatives to the French parliament under systems of limited suffrage in the French Union.  Algeria in particular, being the colony with the largest French population, saw rising pressure for separation from the Métropole.

The situation was complicated by those in Algeria, such as the Pied-Noirs (people of French and other European origin who were born in Algeria), who wanted to stay part of France.  The Algerian War was fought between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front from 1954 to 1962, which led to Algeria winning its independence from France.  The conflict also became a civil war between the different communities and within the communities.

The French Fifth Republic is the current republican constitution of France, introduced on 4 October 1958.  It emerged from the collapse of the Fourth Republic, replacing the prior parliamentary government with a semi-presidential system.

Italian Republic 1946 to Present

In Italy, Umberto II, son of King Victor Emmanuel III, was pressured to call a referendum to decide whether Italy should remain a monarchy or become a republic.  The one-month-long reign of Umberto II and the Constitutional Referendum abolished the monarchy in Italy.

The aftermath of World War II left Italy with a destroyed economy and a divided society.  On 2 June 1946, the republican side won 54% of the vote and Italy officially became a republic.  All male members of the House of Savoy were barred from entering Italy, a ban which was only repealed in 2002.  Under the Treaty of Peace with Italy in 1947, the eastern border area was annexed by Yugoslavia causing the Istrian exodus, while Italy lost all its overseas possessions.

The General Elections of 1946, elected 556 members of a Constituent Assembly, of which 207 were Christian Democrats, 115 Socialists and 104 Communists.

Allied occupation and Austrian Republic 1945 to Present

Following an extended period of Allied occupation, Austria was re-established as a sovereign and self-governing democratic nation known as the Second Austrian Republic.

The Allied occupation of Austria started on 27 April 1945 as a result of the Vienna Offensive and ended with the Austrian State Treaty on 27 July 1955.

Similar to Germany, Austria was divided into four occupation zones.  Vienna was similarly subdivided but the central district was collectively administered by the Allied Control Council.

Whereas Germany was divided into East and West Germany in 1949, Austria's status became a controversial subject in the Cold War until the warming of relations known as the Khrushchev Thaw.  After Austrian promises of perpetual neutrality, Austria was accorded full independence in 1955.

Split of Germany 1949-1990

Tensions between the Soviets and the western allies began to intensify.  The Soviets stopped cooperating with the other allied powers, and attempted to force them out of their zones in Berlin by cutting off road and rail access.

Stalin headed a group of nations on his Western border, the Eastern Bloc, which he wished to maintain alongside a weakened Soviet-controlled Germany.  As early as 1945, Stalin revealed to German communist leaders that he expected to slowly undermine the British position within the British occupation zone, that the US would withdraw within a year or two, and that nothing would then stand in the way of a united communist Germany within the bloc.

The allied powers increasingly believed that repairing Germany's economy was the key to economic recovery in all of Europe.  They responded by increasing their cooperation in their zones, introducing a new currency known as the Deutsche Mark and encouraging the state leaders.  A uniform administration of the western zones evolved, known first as the Bizone (the American and British zones merged as of 1 January 1947) and later the Trizone (after inclusion of the French zone).

The complete breakdown of east-west allied cooperation in Germany became clear with the Soviet imposition of the Berlin Blockade that was enforced from June 1948 to May 1949, preventing food, materials and supplies from arriving in West Berlin.

The Soviets mounted a public relations campaign against the Western policy change, while 300,000 Berliners demonstrated for the international airlift to continue.  In May 1949, Stalin lifted the blockade, permitting the resumption of Western shipments to Berlin.

The three western zones were merged to form the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) in May 1949, and the Soviets followed suit in October 1949 with the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) in their zones of occupation.

East Germany GDR

By a secret treaty, the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs accorded the East German state, administrative authority, but not autonomy.  The Soviets permeated East German administrative, military and secret police structures and had full control.

Their economy was centrally planned, and increasingly state-owned.  Although the GDR had to pay substantial war reparations to the Soviets, it became the most successful economy in the Eastern Bloc.

With the closing of the inner German border officially in 1952, the border in Berlin remained considerably more accessible then because it was still administered by all four occupying powers.  Accordingly, Berlin became the main route by which East Germans left for the West.  On 11 December 1957, East Germany introduced a new passport law that reduced the overall number of refugees leaving Eastern Germany.

The Berlin Wall (Berliner Mauer) was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin.  Constructed by the East Germany, starting on 13 August 1961, the Wall cut off (by land) West Berlin from virtually all of surrounding East Germany and East Berlin.  The vast majority of East Germans could no longer travel or immigrate to West Germany.  Many families were split, while East Berliners employed in the West were cut off from their jobs.

West Germany FRG

It was established from eleven states formed in the three Allied Zones of occupation, and US and British forces remained in the country throughout the Cold War.  Its population grew from roughly 51 million in 1950 to more than 63 million in 1990.  The city of Bonn was its (provisional) capital.

Initially the FRG claimed an exclusive mandate for all of Germany, considering itself to be the democratically reorganized continuation of the 1871-1945 German Reich.  It took the line that the GDR was an illegally constituted puppet state.

The foundation for the influential position held by Germany today was laid during the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) of the 1950s when West Germany rose from the enormous destruction wrought to become the world's third-largest economy.

Eastern Bloc 1947-1991

The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe under the control and influence of the Soviet Union and its ideology (Marxism–Leninism) imposed upon them that existed during the Cold War (1947-1991) in opposition to the capitalist Western Bloc.

In Western Europe, the term generally referred to the USSR and its satellite states in the Comecon (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania).

The Polish People's Republic (1947-1989) was the second most-populous communist and Eastern Bloc country in Europe. Having a unitary Marxist–Leninist government, it was also one of the main signatories of the Warsaw Pact alliance.

The Fourth Czechoslovak Republic existed between 1948 and 1960. The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic existed between 1960 to 1990, when the country was under Communist rule.

The Hungarian People's Republic was a one-party socialist state (1949-1989).  It was governed by the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party.

The Socialist Republic of Romania was a one-party communist state that existed officially in Romania from 1947 to 1989.  From 1947 to 1965, the state was known as the Romanian People's Republic.

The People's Republic of Bulgaria was a socialist republic (1946-1990) ruled by the Bulgarian Communist Party.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies.  It was the first major threat to Soviet control since the USSR's forces occupied Eastern Europe.  Despite the failure of the uprising, it was highly influential, and came to play a role in the downfall of the Soviet Union decades later.

The Prague Spring of 1968 was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union.  It began on 5 January when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and continued until 21 August when the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the country to halt the reforms.

Decolonization 1945-1975

The reasons why decolonization took place are many and complex, varying widely from one country to another. Three key elements played a major role in the process: colonized peoples' thirst for independence, the World War II which demonstrated that colonial powers were no longer invulnerable, and a new focus on anti-colonialism in international arenas such as the United Nations.

Following the Second World War, the colonial system was subject to growing unrest, and many countries quickly acquired their independence.

India and Pakistan 1947

Clement Attlee, the Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who replaced Winston Churchill in July 1945, soon realised that independence for India was inevitable.  Gandhi had declared a "Quit India" movement in 1942, urging the British to withdraw from India or face nationwide civil disobedience.

However, disagreements among the Indian politicians made the negotiations very difficult.  In 1940 the Muslim League in India passed what came to be known as the Pakistan Resolution, which demanded separate states in the Muslim-majority areas of India (in the northwest centered on Punjab, and in the east centered on Bengal) at independence.

Gandhi once again put his belief in nonviolence into play.  He went on his own to a Muslim-majority area of Bengal, placing himself as a hostage for the safety of Muslims living among Hindus in western Bengal.  Finally in June 1947 Congress and Muslim League leaders, against Gandhi's wishes, agreed to a partition of the country along religious lines, with predominantly Hindu areas allocated to India and predominantly Muslim areas to Pakistan.

Malaysia and Singapore 1963-1965

Following the defeat of Japan in the World War II, anti-Japanese resistance movements in Malaya turned their attention towards the British, who had moved to quickly retake control of the colony, valuing it as a source of rubber and tin.

The Malayan Emergency, as it was called, began in 1948 and lasted until 1960.  By 1957, Britain felt confident enough to grant independence to the Federation of Malaya within the Commonwealth.

In 1963, the eleven states of the federation together with Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo joined to form the Malaysia.  However, in 1965, the Chinese-majority Singapore was expelled from the union following tensions between the Malay and Chinese populations.  Brunei, which had been a British protectorate since 1888, declined to join the union and maintained its status until independence in 1984.

Indonesian and New Guinea 1949-1963

A direct consequence of Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies during the World War II was the emergence of Indonesian nationalism.  Nevertheless, at the end of the war, the Netherlands was opposed to their independence.

Nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesian independence.  A four and a half-year struggle followed as the Dutch tried to re-establish their colony; although Dutch forces re-occupied most of Indonesia's territory, a guerrilla struggle ensued with the majority of Indonesians.  Ultimately, international opinion favoured Indonesian independence.

In December 1949, the Netherlands formally recognised Indonesian sovereignty with the exception of the Netherlands New Guinea.  With pressure from the United States, the Netherlands agreed to the New York Agreement which ceded the territory to Indonesian administration in May 1963.

Indochina, Vietnam and Cambodia 1945-1953

The Communist Party led by Ho Chi Minh took advantage of the Japanese occupation of Indochina during the World War II to launch the Viet Minh Independence Movement.  Vietnam declared independent by the withdrawal of the Japanese in September 1945.

However, the failure to create an Indochinese federation in 1946 as part of the French Union led to a long war of independence.1950 was the turning point of the war.  Ho Chi Minh's government was recognised by the fellow Communist governments of China and the Soviet Union.

In October 1950, the French army suffered its first major defeat.  Cambodia proclaimed its independence in November 1953.  Fighting lasted until May 1954, when the Viet Minh won the decisive victory against French forces.

African colonies of Italy, UK and France 1945-1960

Independence for Italy's African colonies (Ethiopia, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia) came as a direct consequence of Italy's downfall during the World War II.

The United Kingdom launched the process of decolonization in Africa in the early 1950s.  Some countries achieved independence peacefully.  Others, however, became embroiled in inter-community rivalries or faced opposition from the British colonial settlers.

Algeria was considered by France to be an extension of its national territory (the French North Africa) and only obtained its independence after a long, drawn-out conflict which lasted 8 years.  Finally, most of the French colonies in Black Africa became independent in 1960.

African colonies of Belgium, Portugal and Spain 1959-1975

The immense Belgian Congo was one of the richest colonies in Africa. After bloody riots in 1959, the Belgian Government quickly yielded to demands for independence in 1960.

Portuguese colonies in Africa gained their independence only after the "Carnation Revolution" which took place in Lisbon in April 1974.

North of Morocco, Spanish Guinea and Western Sahara gained their independence from Spain between 1956 and 1975.

Spainish State 1969-Present

The latter years of Franco's rule saw some economic and political liberalization, the Spanish miracle.  Spain began to catch up economically with its European neighbors.

In 1969, Franco declared that Juan Carlos, Prince of Spain, Grandson of Alfonso XIII, would be his successor.  After Franco's death in 1975, Juan Carlos succeeded him as the King of Spain.

The Spanish transition to democracy or new Bourbon restoration was the era when Spain moved from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco to a liberal democratic state.  The transition is usually said to have begun with Franco's death in November 1975, while its completion is marked by the electoral victory of the socialist PSOE on 28 October 1982.

Portuguese Republic 1910-present

The kingdom of Portugal under the House of Braganza was a constitutional monarchy from the end of the Liberal Civil War in 1834 to the republican revolution of 1910, which led to the establishment of the first Portuguese Republic.

Collapse of Soviet Union, Germay Re-unification 1991

Collapse of Soviet Union 1991

The Cold War period of 1985–1991 began with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union, after the deaths of three successive elderly Soviet leaders since 1982.  The USSR, facing massive economic difficulties, was also greatly interested in reducing the costly arms race with the U.S.  After a series of revolutions in Soviet Bloc states, and a failed coup by conservative elements opposed to the ongoing reforms, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

The Revolutions of 1989 were part of a revolutionary wave that resulted in the Fall of Communism in the Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe.  The period is sometimes called the Autumn of Nations.  One feature common to most of these developments was the extensive use of campaigns of civil resistance demonstrating popular opposition to the continuation of one-party rule and contributing to the pressure for change.

In 1989, Solidarity won an overwhelming victory in a partially free election in Poland leading to the peaceful fall of Communism in that country in the summer of 1989.  Hungary physically dismantled its section of the Iron Curtain leading to a mass exodus of East Germans through Hungary and destabilizing East Germany.  This would lead to mass demonstrations in cities such as Leipzig and subsequently to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which served as the symbolic gateway to German reunification in 1990.

The Soviet Union was dissolved by the end of 1991, resulting in 15 countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan) declaring their independence from the Soviet Union in the course of the years 1990-91.

Communism was abandoned in Albania and Yugoslavia between 1990 and 1992, the latter country split into five successor states by 1992: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (later renamed Serbia and Montenegro, and later still split into two states).

Czechoslovakia too was dissolved three years after the end of communist rule, splitting peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992.

Germay Re-unification 1991

The German reunification (German: Deutsche Wiedervereinigung) was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic (East Germany, Deutsche Demokratische Republik) became part of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany, Bundesrepublik Deutschland) to form the reunited nation of Germany, and when Berlin reunited into a single city.  Following the reunification on 3 October 1990 (German Unity Day), Berlin was once again designated as the capital of united Germany.

With the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, the East German regime started to falter in May 1989, when the removal of Hungary's border fence with Austria caused an exodus of thousands of East Germans fleeing to West Germany and Austria via Hungary.

The turning point in Germany, called "Die Wende", was marked by the Peaceful Revolution (a series of protests by East Germans, leading to the removal of the Berlin Wall), with East and West Germany subsequently entering into negotiations toward eliminating the division that had been imposed upon Germans more than four decades earlier.

On 28 November 1989—two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall-West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced a 10-point program calling for the two Germanys to expand their cooperation with a view toward eventual reunification.

The East German Declaration of Accession to the Federal Republic, as provided by article 23 of the West German Basic Law, was approved by the President of the East German on 23 August, and formally presented by its President to the President of the West German by means of a letter dated 25 August 1990.  Germany was officially reunited on 3 October 1990.  East Germany joined the Federal Republic as the five states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. 

The united Germany is the enlarged continuation of the Federal Republic and not a successor state.  As such, the Federal Republic of Germany retained all its memberships in international organizations including the European Community (later the European Union) and NATO, while relinquishing membership in the Warsaw Pact and other international organizations to which only East Germany belonged.