In the wake of the French Revolution, Romanticism emerged as the preeminent cultural force.  This chapter discusses Romanticism and the influence it exerted on politics, society, and the arts during the first half of the nineteenth century.

After the fall of Napoleon, three political and cultural ideologies emerged: conservatism, favored by traditional European rulers appalled at the upheavals of the French Revolution; liberalism, promoted by the bourgeoisie who favored limited democracy based on wealth; and nationalism, which called on peoples to identify themselves with their shared cultural heritage.  Conservatives hoped to reverse the advances of the Revolution and reestablish a hierarchical society.  Liberals tried to preserve its moderate gains while neutralizing its radical tendencies.  Neither were successful, as revolutionary achievements were too deeply entrenched and contained within themselves the seeds of further democratization.  Initially, nationalists were liberals for whom the struggles for national and individual rights were bound together; later, nationalism took a conservative turn with disastrous results in the twentieth century.

These ideologies helped shape the major political events of the period.  Conservatives sought to advance their aims through the Congress of Vienna and the resulting Concert of Europe.  The French Revolution of 1830 replaced a reactionary monarchy with a moderate one that represented bourgeois liberal values.  Nationalists fought for national liberation in Italy, Greece, and elsewhere.  Liberals and nationalists rose up in the revolutions of 1848, seeking to realize more radical aims.  Most of these revolutions failed in the short term, most notably in France where Louis Bonaparte seized power from the Second Republic and proclaimed himself emperor.

Linking these social and political movements was Romanticism.  Rejecting Enlightenment rationalism and the views of nature, God, history, and art that grew from it, Romanticism valued individual creativity, spontaneous emotion, and freedom from constraining rules.  The Romantic values fed liberalism, pushing it from bourgeois moderation to embracing the rights of even the poorest, most disempowered groups.  The Romantics' interest in uniqueness of the historical past both laid the foundation of modern historical scholarship and fueled nationalism in both its liberal and conservative forms.

As an intellectual and artistic movement, Romanticism rose first in Germany in the forms of idealist philosophy and Sturm und Drang literature.  The latter's leading figure was Goethe, whose most important work, Faust, explores the efforts of a spiritual and intellectual seeker to transcend limitations.  The English Romantic poets—including Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley—proclaimed the freedom of poetry from classical rules, asserted the primacy of imagination, explored the healing beauty of nature, and criticized social conventions that bind the human spirit.  The Gothic novel—exemplified by the Brontës, Mary Shelley, and Hugo—articulated the Romantic preoccupation with the supernatural, the experience of terror, obsessive desire, and humanitarian concerns.

A distinctly American literature developed during this period.  Inspired by American history and landscape, Irving established the short story form, and Cooper created the first frontier hero.  Poe's Gothic stories and poetry explored the supernatural and psychological terror, and Hawthorne's novels defined a new type of romance, one in which detailed atmospheres reflect the characters' spiritual turmoils.  Led by Emerson and Thoreau, the Transcendentalists created an American version of Romanticism distinguished by optimistic self-reliance, moral responsibility, and active participation in social reform movements.  Rejecting Transcendentalist beliefs, Melville maintained religious doubt, which he expressed through the obscure moral world of Moby Dick.

Romantic visual artists also rejected received aesthetic norms, pioneering new modes of self-expression.  In England, Constable and Turner painted visionary landscapes in which the natural and human worlds fuse into luminous wholes.  In France, Géricault broke decisively with Neoclassicism, adapting Michelangelo's techniques to depict extremes of human action, suffering, and psychology.  Condemned by Neoclassicists, Delacroix used rich, sensual colors to create intense, dynamic scenes drawn from literature and his travels in Africa.  The leading Romantic sculptor was Rude, whose dramatic figures of revolutionary troops decorate the Arc de Triomphe.  The most enduring architectural style of the period was Gothic Revival that reflected both the Romantic passion for the Middle Ages and the English belief that the Gothic embodied Britain's democratic past.  The style chosen for the new Houses of Parliament, it also became an important style of church architecture in America.

Emphasizing individual genius, Romantic composers adapted existing forms to the needs of self-expression and developed new forms.  Trained in conservatories, these composers sought the support of middle-class patrons or the public at large.  Romantic composers devised innovative ways to express emotions, philosophical ideas, and nationalist sentiments, ways that included experiments with tone color and dynamics, dissonant harmonies, and freer tempos.  The most distinctive new form was the art song in which piano and voice, music and words intertwine into a deeply expressive whole.  The leading composers were Schubert, who composed notable symphonies and pioneered the German lied; Robert Schumann, who developed the lied further and composed orchestral works that combined Romantic lyricism and formal experimentation with Classical symmetry; Clara Schumann, who promoted her husband's works and composed memorable lieder and solo piano works; Mendelssohn, the most Classical of the Romantics, who established the form of incidental music and composed choral works in the tradition of Bach and Handel; Berlioz, who transformed the symphony into a fully dramatic form and developed program music that reflected his influential approach to instrumentation; and Chopin, who expanded the range of the piano and expressed his Polish nationalism through works based on the folk music of his homeland.

Romanticism left an enduring and ambiguous legacy to Western civilization.  As an artistic movement, Romanticism inspired future experimental movements such as modernism.  Further, the Romantic values of feeling and free individuality continue to influence humanitarian movements.  However, Romantic nationalism contributed to modern conservatism and the extreme nationalism that fueled the world wars of the twentieth century.