Extension of French Revolutionary ideals

• Napoleonic conflicts:-

The Napoleonic Wars were wars which were fought during the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte over France. They started after the French Revolution ended and Napoleon Bonaparte became powerful in France in November 1799. War began between the United Kingdom and France in 1803. This happened when the Treaty of Amiens ended in 1802.

These wars changed European military systems. Cannons became lighter and moved faster. Armies were much larger, yet had better food and supplies. They were very big and destructive, mainly because of compulsory conscription. The French became powerful very fast, and conquered most of Europe. The French then lost quickly. The French invasion of Russia failed. The Napoleonic Wars ended with the Second Treaty of Paris on 20 November 1815. This was just after the Battle of Waterloo, a big battle that Napoleon lost. Napoleon’s empire lost the wars. The Bourbon Dynasty ruled France again.

Some people call the time between April 20 1792 and November 20 1815 “the Great French War”. On one side was the First Empire of France, Kingdom of Italy, and others. On the other side was Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Sicily, and others.

1.Battle of the Pyramids (21 July 1798)

This battle actually took place five years before the Napoleonic Wars are generally considered to have started but it was one of the fights that would set the stage for Napoleon’s confrontations against various coalitions of nations between 1803 and 1815.

Also known as the Battle of Embabeh, this significant military engagement saw Napoleon — then a general in the French military — and his troops claim Cairo, a major victory in the invasion of Egypt. Napoleon’s implementation of the divisional square, one of his great military innovations, proved decisive in the battle and the Egyptian expedition would help to propel him to political power.

2. Battle of Marengo (14 June 1800)

A narrow and hard fought victory, the Battle of Marengo occurred during the War of the Second Coalition — a precursor to the coalitions that France would fight in the later Napoleonic Wars.

It pitted 28,000 of Napoleon’s men against 31,000 Austrian troops and was considered by Napoleon — by now the head of the French government — to be one of his finest triumphs. Victory helped to secure both his military and civilian authority in Paris.

3. Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805)

 This famous naval battle took place at Cape Trafalgar off the south-western coast of Spain, between the British Royal Navy, led by Admiral Lord Nelson, and the fleets of France and Spain. The Royal’s Navy’s resounding victory established Britain’s naval domination but came at the cost of Lord Nelson’s life.

4. Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805)

This confrontation was also known as the “Battle of the Three Emperors”.

Perhaps the most significant and decisive battle of the Napoleonic Wars, Austerlitz ranks as one of Napoleon’s greatest victories. Fought near Austerlitz in Moravia (now the Czech Republic) and also known as the “Battle of the Three Emperors”, this confrontation saw 68,000 French troops defeat nearly 90,000 Russians and Austrians.

Victory for France led to the Treaty of Pressburg, which aimed to establish “peace and amity” and secured Austria’s withdrawal from the Third Coalition of countries fighting France.

5. Battle of Jena-Auerstädt (14 October 1806)

An important French victory in the War of the Fourth Coalition, the Battle of Jena-Auerstädt was fought between 122,000 French troops and 114,000 Prussians and Saxons at Jena and Auerstädt in Saxony. Napoleon’s troops decimated the Prussian army at Jena as France’s Marshal Davout defeated the main Prussian force further north at Auerstädt.

6. Battle of Rolica (17 August 1808)

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Although not a particularly big battle, Rolica is noteworthy as the first major action of the British Peninsular War, which saw Britain challenge Napoleon’s French forces for control of the Iberian peninsular.

Rolica became the setting for the conflict’s opening clash when Sir Arthur Wellesley’s Anglo-Portuguese troops met 4,000 rear-guard French forces en route to Lisbon. Wellesley’s army outnumbered the French three to one and eventually forced them into a withdrawal.

7. Battle of Borodino (7 September 1812)

An especially bloody fight between 130,000 French troops with more than 500 guns and 120,000 Russians with more than 600 guns, the Battle of Borodino saw General Kutuzov’s Russian troops attempt to block Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. A fierce, attritional battle ensued before Kutuzov eventually retreated. A week later, Napoleon occupied Moscow unopposed.

8. Battle of Leipzig (16–19 October 1813)

 Undoubtedly one of Napoleon’s most significant defeats, this battle inflicted brutally severe losses on the French army and more or less concluded France’s presence in Germany and Poland. Also known as the “Battle of the Nations”, this bloody engagement was fought at the city of Leipzig in Saxony.

Napoleon’s forces were effectively surrounded by 300,000 allied soldiers (including Austrian, Prussian, Russian, and Swedish forces) who converged on the city’s perimeter. It was a crushing defeat for Napoleon who would be forced to abdicate six months later following Paris’ capitulation to the allies.

9. Battle of Ligny (16 June 1815)

The last victory of Napoleon’s military career, Ligny could nonetheless be considered a strategic failure. Though Napoleon’s troops defeated Field Marshal Prince Blucher’s Prussian army, many of the Prussian soldiers survived and joined the Duke of Wellington’s British troops at Waterloo.

10. Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815)

The battle that changed the face of Europe. An Anglo-Allied army under the Duke of Wellington faced Napoleon’s forces in Belgium. With Prussian reinforcements, the allies defeated the French — though Wellington proclaimed it was “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”.

• Liberalism in Europe:-

In general, liberalism in Europe is a political movement that supports a broad tradition of individual liberties and constitutionally-limited and democratically accountable government. These European derivatives of classical liberalism are found in centrist movements and parties as well as some parties on the centre-right and the centre-left.

Liberalism in Europe has a different meaning from the signification it has in contemporary politics in the US. In America, liberals might be confused with leftists which advocate for a larger government, some forms of protectionism and more economic interventionism; whereas European liberals usually favor limited government, free-trade and adhere to economic liberalism.

European liberals also usually support the federalisation of the EU.

• Liberal practice:-

Liberal political parties have specific policies, which the social scientist can either read from party manifestos, or infer from actual actions and laws passed by ostensibly liberal parties. The sources listed below serve to illustrate some of the current liberal attitudes in Europe.

The policies of liberal parties in government, including those in coalition arrangements (taking into mind that coalition partners make compromises), since they show what liberals are prepared to accept as well as the policies of liberal parties in opposition

The positions of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe faction in the European Parliament and the Electoral Manifestos of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party.

The forum of the German FDP,which is relatively unmoderated, and illustrates grassroots liberal concerns. Sites of other Liberal parties, e.g. the British Liberal Democrats and the Netherlands’ Democrats 66, are more heavily moderated and therefore more representative for the policy of liberal parties.

The Belgian website / think tank Liberals . be which has longer essays on new liberal policies

The views and policies of the Open Society Institute, since they explicitly claim to derive from the principles of a major liberal philosopher, Karl Popper.

The Lisbon Strategy of the European Union, since it is strongly supported by the liberal parties, and sets out a vision of a future Europe.

Additionally, liberal value preferences can be inferred from the liberalisation programmes and policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The liberalism visible in these sources emphasizes in comparison with other ideologies more belief in individual development as a motor for society and the state providing a social safety net. The liberal policies differ from country to country and from party to party.

• European Union:-

European liberalists tend to support the European Union such as Emmanuel Macron, President of France who campigned against Marine Le Pen a National Rally candidate a far right nationalist anti EU party. Some European liberalists support Federalisation of the European Union such as prominent European Liberalist politicians such as Guy Verhofstadt (Prime Minister of Belgium 1999 to 2008), Viviane Reading (Vice-President of the European Commission),and Matteo Renzi (Prime Minister of Italy 2014 to 2016).

• Romanticism:-

Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.

• Visual Arts:-

In the 1760s and ’70s a number of British artists at home and in Rome, including James Barry, Henry Fuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and John Flaxman, began to paint subjects that were at odds with the strict decorum and classical historical and mythological subject matter of conventional figurative art. These artists favoured themes that were bizarre, pathetic, or extravagantly heroic, and they defined their images with tensely linear drawing and bold contrasts of light and shade. William Blake, the other principal early Romantic painter in England, evolved his own powerful and unique visionary images.

In France the chief early Romantic painters were Baron Antoine Gros, who painted dramatic tableaus of contemporary incidents of the Napoleonic Wars, and Théodore Géricault, whose depictions of individual heroism and suffering in The Raft of the Medusa and in his portraits of the insane truly inaugurated the movement around 1820. The greatest French Romantic painter was Eugène Delacroix, who is notable for his free and expressive brushwork, his rich and sensuous use of colour, his dynamic compositions, and his exotic and adventurous subject matter, ranging from North African Arab life to revolutionary politics at home. Paul Delaroche, Théodore Chassériau, and, occasionally, J.-A.-D. Ingres represent the last, more academic phase of Romantic painting in France. In Germany Romantic painting took on symbolic and allegorical overtones, as in the works of P.O. Runge. Caspar David Friedrich, the greatest German Romantic artist, painted eerily silent and stark landscapes that can induce in the beholder a sense of mystery and religious awe.

Romanticism expressed itself in architecture primarily through imitations of older architectural styles and through eccentric buildings known as “follies.” Medieval Gothic architecture appealed to the Romantic imagination in England and Germany, and this renewed interest led to the Gothic Revival.

Musical Romanticism was marked by emphasis on originality and individuality, personal emotional expression, and freedom and experimentation of form. Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert bridged the Classical and Romantic periods, for while their formal musical techniques were basically Classical, their music’s intensely personal feeling and their use of programmatic elements provided an important model for 19th-century Romantic composers.