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| 3. Culture and Popular Culture |
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(See Intellectual Developments)| The most important cultural school to emerge from early-19th-century Europe was romanticism (1790s–1840s). Built upon earlier cultural developments, romanticism took on new fervor after the French Revolution. Romantics decried the emphasis placed on reason by the philosophes and held that human beings were more than just the product of natural laws. Romantics stressed the diversity of individuals, a uniqueness based mainly on their emotions and imaginations. In art and literature, the lone individual was the protagonist, and emotions guided his or her actions. This philosophy inspired poetry, which flourished in this period. | 1 |
| Because of their emphasis on the inner being, most romantics also stressed the place of religion in human society. Finally, romantics also broke the rules of cultural form and technique, valuing free expression above all else. Sometimes this resulted in riots, as in the case of Victor Hugo's innovative play Hernani (1830), where the first performance degenerated into fist fights. Because of its emphasis on emotion, history, tradition, and “simple” peasant culture, romanticism was more often linked to conservatism and nationalism than to liberalism, but romantics found their way into all of the major schools of political thought. | 2 |
| Romantics also linked with popular culture, helping to further the sentimental novel as a staple of middle-class reading. Romantic nationalism expressed in music and art as well as essays, also won wide appeal. | 3 |
| Some of the major proponents of romanticism included Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), John Keats (1795–1821), George Gordon Lord Byron (1788–1824), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), Victor-Marie Hugo (1802–85), A. W. Schlegel (1767–1845), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), John Constable (1776–1837), Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Robert Schumann (1810–56), and Frédéric Chopin (1810–49). | 4 |
| The drastic changes brought on by industrialization translated into similar change for popular culture. With urbanization, workers lost ties to their villages. Communal traditions and festivals no longer supplied avenues for recreation. Moreover, employers actively suppressed the transfer of such “frivolous” activities to the city. Yet this suppression came at a time when leisure needs increased. Industrialization made work more difficult and monotonous. Individual workers were now expected to work at a steady rhythm—the machine's rhythm. Meanwhile, workers were no longer directly involved in the creation of a product. Division of labor meant that they worked on only one aspect of the product. To counter this monotony, workers sought recreation in the growing number of bars and cafés. Dislocated workers also formed clubs to ease the separation from their villages and regions. Yet in general, the working class's pursuit of leisure suffered from the inability of the workers themselves to afford many leisure diversions and from employer and government suppression. Only in the latter half of the century did this change. | 5 |
| For the middle classes, with the separation of work and home brought on by industrialization, the home took on new value. It became the center of middle-class leisure, becoming, in the words of one historian, a haven in a cruel world. Families were imbued more with emotional, rather than economic, value. Consequently, the middle-class woman's position in society changed. Restricted to the home and family, women came to represent morality and purity, untainted by public entanglements, especially in Britain. This became a key element in middle-class culture (Victorianism in Britain). Similarly, middle-class children became a great expense, as education began to play a larger role in social status. At the same time, they were given new emotional value. This helps to explain why middle-class couples began to have fewer children. These changes affected the working classes only indirectly, as middle-class reformers stressed their view of the family in their push for social reform, especially the regulation of child and female labor. (See Culture and Popular Culture) | 6 |
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