Answer
Flashcards · 9489 · AS Topic 1
European option: Modern Europe, 1774–1924 (AS Level) flashcards
21 cards on AS Topic 1, subtopics 1 to 3. Pick a subtopic or study them all.
Study mode needs JavaScript. Every card is listed below, so you can still cover the answers and test yourself.
Choose your cards
Session complete
Worth another look:
All 21 cards
For a quick read-through or printing. Cover the right-hand side to test yourself.
1 France, 1774–1814
- What were the long-term causes of the French Revolution?
- The estates system, which put the tax burden on the Third Estate; Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality and popular sovereignty; a financial crisis made worse by the cost of the American war; poor harvests and high bread prices; and the weakness of Louis XVI.
- Why is the financial crisis seen as the trigger of 1789?
- Royal bankruptcy forced Louis XVI to call the Estates-General in 1789, its first meeting since 1614. That gave the Third Estate a platform and turned a money problem into a constitutional one.
- Put in order: storming of the Bastille, Tennis Court Oath, flight to Varennes, execution of Louis XVI
- Tennis Court Oath (June 1789) → storming of the Bastille (14 July 1789) → flight to Varennes (June 1791) → execution of Louis XVI (January 1793).
- How is the Terror (1793-94) usually explained?
- By a mix of circumstance and ideology: foreign invasion, counter-revolution in the Vendée, economic crisis, and the ideology of the Committee of Public Safety. A strong answer weighs circumstance against ideology. It ended with Robespierre’s fall at Thermidor (July 1794).
- What were Napoleon’s main domestic reforms?
- The Napoleonic Code, the Concordat with the Catholic Church (1801), the Bank of France, the lycée school system, and centralised administration through prefects.
- Was Napoleon the heir or the betrayer of the Revolution?
- Heir: he kept legal equality, careers open to talent and the end of feudal privilege. Betrayer: he ended political liberty, censored the press, created a new hereditary nobility and crowned himself Emperor (1804). Use both sides, then judge.
- Why did Napoleon fall by 1814?
- The Continental System failed and alienated allies; the Peninsular War drained resources; the 1812 Russian campaign destroyed the Grande Armée; and the nationalism he had helped awaken turned against him. He abdicated in April 1814.
2 Liberalism and nationalism in Germany, 1815–71
- What was the German Confederation of 1815?
- A loose league of German states created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, presided over by Austria. It was not a nation state, and Metternich used it to hold back liberal and nationalist movements.
- What was the Zollverein and why does it matter to German unification?
- A Prussian-led customs union formed in 1834 that excluded Austria. It tied the economies of many German states to Prussia, an argument that unification was driven by forces already in motion, not by Bismarck alone.
- Why did the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament fail to unify Germany?
- It had no army or power of its own, was divided over a greater (with Austria) or smaller (without Austria) Germany, and in 1849 Frederick William IV of Prussia refused the crown it offered him. The princes then recovered control.
- What were Bismarck’s three wars of unification?
- Against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870-71). Each was fought only after the opponent had been diplomatically isolated, and each stopped once its objective was secured.
- What was the significance of the Ems Telegram (1870)?
- Bismarck edited the report of the King’s meeting with the French ambassador so that it read as an insult. France declared war, so the southern German states joined Prussia against an apparent aggressor rather than being absorbed.
- When and where was the German Empire proclaimed?
- In the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871, with Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor.
- What is Realpolitik?
- Politics based on practical power and national interest rather than ideology or principle. It is the usual label for Bismarck’s methods, such as his 1862 "blood and iron" speech.
3 Russia from autocracy to revolution, 1881–1924
- What event opens the Russia topic in 1881, and why does it matter?
- The assassination of Alexander II in 1881. His son Alexander III turned to repression and Russification and reversed many of his father’s reforms, setting the autocracy’s response to unrest up to 1917.
- What happened on Bloody Sunday (January 1905)?
- Troops fired on a peaceful petitioning crowd led by Father Gapon in St Petersburg. It set off the 1905 Revolution, alongside defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.
- What did the October Manifesto (1905) promise?
- Civil liberties and an elected Duma. It split the opposition and helped the Tsar survive the 1905 Revolution, but the Fundamental Laws of 1906 kept most power with him.
- What were Stolypin’s land reforms meant to achieve?
- To build a loyal class of peasant landowners by letting peasants leave the commune and consolidate their own farms, so that the countryside would support the regime.
- How did the First World War lead to the February 1917 Revolution?
- Military defeats, economic strain and food shortages undermined army morale and the Tsar’s legitimacy, especially after Nicholas II took personal command in 1915. Strikes and mutiny in Petrograd forced his abdication in March 1917.
- Why did the Provisional Government lose power in October 1917?
- It continued the war and delayed land reform, shared power with the Petrograd Soviet, and was weakened by the Kornilov affair. The Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917.
- War Communism vs the New Economic Policy
- War Communism (1918-21): state control of industry and forced grain requisitioning during the Civil War. NEP (from 1921): allowed private trade and small business and replaced requisitioning with a tax in kind, after unrest such as the Kronstadt rising.