Continuity and Change in 18th-Century States

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how the developments and challenges to the political order produced change between 1648 and 1815 (LO J; Skill 5.A; KC-2.1).
• Identify the principal substantial changes the late-eighteenth-century revolutionary crisis produced (KC-2.1.IV French Revolution, KC-2.1.V Napoleon, KC-2.1.III.D British rise) and the principal substantial continuities (Bourbon Restoration, persistence of monarchy, Russian serfdom).
• Account for the connections among the political (KC-2.1.IV-V), economic (KC-2.2.III), intellectual (KC-2.3.VI), and cultural threads of Unit 5.
• Use Skill 5.A (Making Connections) to identify patterns connecting Unit 5's diverse developments into a coherent continuity-and-change argument.
• Connect Unit 5's late-eighteenth-century crisis to Unit 4's Enlightenment background and to Unit 6's nineteenth-century industrial transformation.

Topic 5.9 closes Unit 5 by asking students to construct a continuity-and-change argument across the unit's principal threads. The unit covered the late-eighteenth-century European political and intellectual crisis. KC-2.1 captures the broad framing: different models of political sovereignty shaped the relationship among states and between states and individuals. Across 1648-1815, those models came under sustained challenge: the French Revolution mounted a fundamental challenge to Bourbon ancien-régime political and social order; Napoleon's empire spread revolutionary legal codes across Europe; Britain rose to global maritime and commercial primacy; Romanticism and religious revival challenged Enlightenment rationality; the Vienna settlement attempted to restore the older dynastic system while accommodating substantial revolutionary transformation.

The substantial changes ran along multiple axes. Politically: the Bourbon ancien régime collapsed in 1789 (KC-2.1.IV.A); feudal privileges and seigneurial obligations were legally abolished in France on 4 August 1789 and across Napoleonic Europe (KC-2.1.IV.B); the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man articulated natural-rights doctrine that overturned divine-right absolutism; the 1791 and 1793 Constitutions established (briefly) constitutional monarchy and (then) republic; the radical Jacobin Republic and Reign of Terror (KC-2.1.IV.C) produced the first modern citizen-army through the August 1793 levée en masse (KC-2.1.IV.D); Napoleon's 1804 Civil Code (KC-2.1.V.A) codified revolutionary legal principles for adult men across Napoleonic Europe; the Holy Roman Empire dissolved in 1806 and was replaced by the German Confederation in 1815. Economically and commercially: the Anglo-French rivalry ended with British global maritime primacy (KC-2.1.III.D); the Atlantic slave-labor system began to be challenged by abolitionism (the British 1807 abolition of the slave trade; the Haitian Revolution producing the only successful slave revolt in modern history, KC-2.1.IV.F).

Continuing the inventory of substantial changes: religiously, the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy nationalized the French Catholic Church; the 1801 Concordat reconciled state and Roman Catholic Church on new terms; the 1781 Edict of Toleration in Habsburg Austria and the French 1787 Edict of Versailles extended religious toleration; the Methodist religious revival under John Wesley produced a new working-class Protestant movement (KC-2.3.VI.C). Nationally: nationalism emerged as a new political force in Spain (Peninsular War), the German states (Fichte's Addresses; Prussian reforms), Russia (1812 patriotic resistance), and (later) Italy and Greece (KC-2.1.V.C); the basic vocabulary of modern political ideology (liberalism, conservatism, socialism, republicanism) emerged from the French Revolution and the debate over its meaning (KC-2.1.IV.G). Culturally: Romanticism challenged Enlightenment rationality in literature, music, religion, and political thought (KC-2.3.VI); the modern autobiographical tradition (Rousseau's Confessions); the modern historical novel (Walter Scott); and the modern cultural-nationalist movement (Fichte, the Romantic poets) all emerged in this period.

The substantial continuities ran alongside these changes. Most European monarchies were restored after 1814-1815: the Bourbons in France (Louis XVIII, then Charles X, then the July Monarchy of 1830), Spain (Ferdinand VII), and the Two Sicilies; the House of Savoy in Sardinia-Piedmont; the Italian dynasties; the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov dynasties continued their rule. The 1815 Vienna settlement (KC-2.1.V.D) explicitly invoked legitimacy as a settlement principle. Serfdom persisted in Russia until 1861 and in many eastern and central European territories well into the nineteenth century. Even where Napoleon had abolished serfdom in his satellite kingdoms (the 1807 Prussian reforms; the Habsburg Joseph II's 1781 Patent), the underlying landlord-peasant relations often continued in modified form. The Atlantic slave-labor system continued in the British and French Caribbean (until 1833 and 1848 respectively) and in Brazil and Cuba into the late nineteenth century. Most European peasants in 1815 still farmed under traditional obligations modified but not eliminated.

Other substantial continuities: the Catholic Church remained a major political and cultural force even after the Concordat; the post-1815 Catholic revival (Chateaubriand, the papal politics of Gregory XVI and Pius IX) reasserted Catholic authority across Catholic Europe. The European balance-of-power diplomatic system, ratified at Westphalia in 1648 and refined at Utrecht in 1713 (Topic 3.6), continued to organize post-Vienna international politics through the Concert of Europe (Topic 5.7). Patriarchal authority over women in the legal-civil sphere actually intensified under the Napoleonic Civil Code (Topic 5.6); Wollstonecraft's and de Gouges's revolutionary-era arguments for women's political equality (Topics 4.3 and 5.4) did not produce institutional change in the Napoleonic period or under the post-Vienna restored monarchies. Atlantic and European commercial structures continued: most overseas trade still moved through pre-industrial sail-and-cart infrastructure; the British Industrial Revolution had begun in late-eighteenth-century Lancashire but had not yet transformed the broader European economy.

The connections among Unit 5's developments — what Skill 5.A asks students to identify — run in several specific directions. The Anglo-French rivalry (Topics 5.2-5.3) produced both the British 1763 victory and the French fiscal collapse that contributed to the 1789 Revolution (Topic 5.4). The French Revolution (Topic 5.4) produced both the Haitian Revolution (Topic 5.5) and the Napoleonic empire (Topic 5.6). Napoleonic empire-building (Topic 5.6) produced the nationalist responses (Topic 5.6) and the Vienna settlement (Topic 5.7) responding to its collapse. Romanticism (Topic 5.8) was both a response to Enlightenment rationality (Unit 4) and a parallel cultural development to the political crisis. The Vienna settlement (Topic 5.7) explicitly attempted to contain the revolutionary and nationalist forces the Revolution and Napoleon had unleashed; its partial success and partial failure shaped post-1815 European politics through 1848.

Topic 5.9's central message is that the late-eighteenth-century European political and intellectual crisis produced both substantial transformation and substantial continuity. The post-Vienna European order of 1815 differed substantially from the European order of 1648 in legal codes, political institutions, intellectual frameworks, and international relations; it also retained substantial continuities in monarchy, ecclesiastical authority, social hierarchy, and gendered legal status. Unit 6's nineteenth-century industrialization and Unit 7's nineteenth-century political developments will trace how the post-Vienna settlement gradually broke down across the nineteenth century, producing the modern European order through the 1848 revolutions, the unification movements, and the rise of mass politics.

Three sources framing Unit 5's continuity-and-change argument: the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, Napoleon's 1804 Civil Code, and the 1815 Holy Alliance. Read together, the three documents trace the unit's arc from revolution through Napoleonic codification to conservative restoration.

1. (Continuity and Change, Skill 5.A) Construct an argument: how did the developments and challenges to the political order produce change between 1648 and 1815, and what persisted? What specific evidence drawn from across Unit 5 best supports your continuity-and-change thesis?
2. (Continuity and Change) Account for the principal substantial changes Unit 5 traces (KC-2.1.IV French Revolution, KC-2.1.V Napoleon, KC-2.1.III.D British rise, KC-2.3.VI Romanticism). Identify three changes that lasted into the post-1815 European order.
3. (Continuity and Change) Account for the principal substantial continuities. Identify three features of European life in 1815 that persisted relatively unchanged from 1648 (the persistence of monarchy after the Bourbon Restoration; serfdom in Russia and central Europe; the Catholic Church's institutional presence; patriarchal civil law; Atlantic slave-labor system in colonial holdings).
4. (Continuity and Change, Skill 5.A) Compare the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, the 1804 Civil Code, and the 1815 Holy Alliance. What does each source claim about the basis of legitimate political authority, and how does the trajectory from one to the next illustrate Unit 5's continuity-and-change pattern?
5. (Continuity and Change) Connect Unit 5's late-eighteenth-century crisis to Unit 4's Enlightenment background and to Unit 6's nineteenth-century industrial transformation. How did the Enlightenment intellectual conditions produce the late-eighteenth-century crisis, and how did the post-Vienna settlement set the stage for nineteenth-century developments?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.