Nineteenth-Century Europe

Abstract

This volume is published as part of Palgrave Macmillan's ‘History of Europe’ series. Chronologically, it is concerned with the ‘long nineteenth century’, stretching from the French Revolution of 1789 to the outbreak of the First World War. Two qualities distinguish this book from recently published general histories of the period: the prominence accorded to politics, and the geographical breadth with coverage extending to the peripheries as well as western and central Europe. The rise of mass politics is the central theme adopted by Rapport, and this lends cohesion to a book that is otherwise characterised by complexity, nuance and indeed qualification. The emergence of mass politics is followed in eighteen chapters grouped into four chronological parts with 1815, 1850 and 1879 selected as breaks. Rapport's coverage of the Napoleonic period in particular provides an indicator of the book's overall quality for this reviewer. Rapport handles it well: a book such as this must be selective and engage in simplification in order to provide an accessible overview, but without creating distortion. Rapport succeeds in this when writing on Napoleonic Europe, where he draws on recent work and arrives at a fair conclusion that recognises the complexities of this ambiguous regime. As noted, a feature of this book is nuance—though in the positive sense of challenging existing assumptions rather than refusing to take sides. For example, with respect to 1789, Rapport unambiguously supports the revisionist interpretation in playing down the significance of the social transformation that occurred in France at this time. Instead, he rightly stresses social continuity, giving due weight to modernising impulses under the Old Regime, while highlighting the durability of the old noble élite that, as late as 1846, accounted for a quarter of the French legislature.