AP European History

## Learning Outcomes

- Understand what **Realism** meant in 19th-century European art and literature
- Explain how Realism reacted against **Romanticism**
- Identify how industrialization, urbanization, and class tensions shaped realist works
- Recall major artists, writers, works, and dates linked to Realism
- Distinguish between **Realism** and **Naturalism**
- Use specific evidence from art and literature in SAQ, DBQ, and LEQ responses

## AP European History Syllabus

For the AP European History, you are expected to understand how Realism and related trends reflected 19th-century social change, with a focus on the following syllabus points:

- Know that **Realism** became prominent in the mid-19th century, especially from the **1840s to 1850s**
- Identify Realism as a reaction against **Romantic idealization** and heroic subject matter
- Explain how realist artists and writers portrayed **ordinary people**, **everyday life**, and **social problems**
- Understand how industrialization and urbanization encouraged cultural criticism of poverty, labor, and inequality
- Recognise major artistic examples such as **Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers (1849)**, **A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850)**, and **Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857)**
- Recognise major literary examples such as **Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854)** and **Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856)**
- Explain the difference between **Realism** and **Naturalism**, especially through **Émile Zola**
- Understand how this topic connects to AP themes such as **Objective Knowledge and Subjective Visions**, **Poverty and Prosperity**, and **Individual and Society**

## Test Your Knowledge

_Attempt these questions before reading this article. If you find some difficult or cannot remember the answers, look more closely at that area during your revision._

1. How did Realism differ from Romanticism in subject matter and tone?
2. Why did industrialization help encourage realist art and literature?
3. Name two realist paintings and explain what social problem each highlighted.
4. How did writers such as Dickens and Flaubert use ordinary characters to criticise society?
5. What is the difference between Realism and Naturalism?

## Introduction

In AP European History Unit 7, Realism matters because it shows how culture responded to the major changes of the 19th century. Europe was becoming more urban, more industrial, and more divided by class. Artists and writers increasingly turned away from heroic myths, dramatic emotion, and ideal beauty. Instead, they looked at workers, peasants, middle-class boredom, urban suffering, and the hard facts of modern life.

Realism was not just a style. It was also a social choice about what deserved attention. When painters gave laborers the large scale once reserved for kings and saints, or when novelists centred factory workers and unhappy provincial wives, they were making an argument about society. That is why Realism fits AP themes so well: it connects culture to poverty, prosperity, class, and the changing place of the individual in modern Europe.

> **Key Term: Realism**
> A mid-19th-century artistic and literary movement that aimed to portray ordinary life truthfully, often focusing on contemporary social conditions and problems.

### Realism as a reaction against Romanticism

To understand Realism, start with what it rejected. **Romanticism** had valued emotion, imagination, drama, and the exceptional. Romantic artists often focused on heroic struggle, the supernatural, exotic settings, or intense feeling. Realists thought this approach could distort modern life by making it seem grander or more exciting than it really was.

Realism shifted attention from the extraordinary to the ordinary. That does not mean realist works were dull. It means they found serious meaning in common experiences: work, marriage, poverty, disappointment, aging, and social pressure. This was a major cultural change. For centuries, high art often elevated saints, nobles, rulers, or mythological figures. Realism treated peasants and workers as worthy subjects in their own right.

> **Key Term: Romanticism**
> A cultural movement that emphasized emotion, imagination, nature, and dramatic or heroic subject matter.

A useful contrast for exams is this:

- **Romanticism**: emotion, heroism, exotic or dramatic subjects, idealization
- **Realism**: observation, ordinary people, everyday settings, social reality

This contrast is especially important in SAQs and LEQs. If a prompt asks how culture reflected 19th-century society, you should show that Realism did more than change style. It changed what artists considered important enough to show.

Realism also matched wider intellectual trends. The 19th century saw growing interest in observation, statistics, and the social sciences. Governments collected data on populations; thinkers studied society more systematically. Realists brought a related spirit into art and literature: close attention to the visible world and suspicion of fantasy.

> **Test Tip:** In an SAQ, do not just say “Realism showed real life.” Explain what it rejected and what it replaced. A stronger answer says that Realism rejected Romantic heroism and instead depicted workers, peasants, and middle-class problems shaped by industrial society.

### Why industrial society encouraged realist art and literature

Realism did not appear by accident. It grew out of the upheavals of **Period 3 (c. 1815–1914)**, especially industrialization, urban growth, and class tension. Factories, railways, polluted cities, wage labor, slums, and new middle classes created a Europe that looked very different from the agrarian world of earlier centuries. Artists and writers increasingly asked: if this is modern life, should culture still focus on myths and heroes?

> **Key Term: industrialization**
> The expansion of machine-based production and factory work that reshaped European economies, cities, and class relations in the 19th century.

Industrialization changed not only working conditions but also what people could see around them. In rapidly growing cities, the misery of the poor became harder to ignore. In rural areas, peasants still worked under harsh conditions, but now their lives could be contrasted sharply with the prosperity of the middle class. Realism often made this contrast visible.

Take **Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers (1849)**. The painting shows laborers doing exhausting manual work. There is no heroic glow, no symbolic victory, no suggestion that poverty is uplifting. The subjects are ordinary workers, and the labor looks repetitive and punishing. The point is not simply that poor people existed. The point is that their work was physically destructive and socially invisible, yet central to the economy.

Similarly, **A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850)** gave an ordinary provincial funeral monumental scale. That mattered. Earlier painters often saved large canvases for biblical or royal themes. Courbet instead used that scale for common people. This was a quiet but radical statement: ordinary lives had historical and artistic weight.

**Jean-François Millet** did something similar with peasants. In **The Gleaners (1857)**, peasant women gather leftover grain after the harvest. Gleaning was associated with poverty because it meant collecting what others had left behind. Millet’s painting gives the women dignity, but not comfort. They are bent over in labor, and the social gap between them and landowners is implied by the broader setting of agricultural production. Millet did not paint peasant life as picturesque happiness. He showed it as hard, necessary, and unequal.

> **Key Term: social critique**
> The exposure or criticism of social problems such as poverty, inequality, exploitation, or injustice through art or literature.

Realism also reached the urban middle class. Writers noticed that modern life produced not only material suffering but also frustration, boredom, and moral emptiness. That is why realist literature includes both workers and unhappy bourgeois families. Modern society created different kinds of problems for different classes.

A final factor was **photography**. As photography developed in the mid-19th century, painters faced a challenge: if machines could capture likeness and detail, what should painting do? Some painters responded by moving toward new techniques, but realists answered by choosing new subjects and a sharper honesty about contemporary life.

> **Test Tip:** If an LEQ asks how culture mirrored social change, build a cause-and-effect chain: industrialization and urbanization created visible poverty and class conflict, which encouraged artists and writers to focus on ordinary people and present social criticism.

### Realism in painting: workers, peasants, and modern society

Realist painting is best understood through subject choice and treatment. Subject choice tells you who matters. Treatment tells you whether the artist is idealizing them.

**Courbet** is the clearest anchor example for AP Euro. In **The Stone Breakers**, the workers are not individual heroes with neat identities and triumphal poses. They are laboring bodies, almost worn down by work itself. This matters because it shifts attention from personal glory to structural hardship. The painting suggests that labor is exhausting, repetitive, and socially unromantic.

In **A Burial at Ornans**, Courbet applies a grand format to local, provincial life. That choice elevates ordinary society to historical importance. Students often miss this point. The painting is realist not just because it shows common people, but because it refuses the old hierarchy of subject matter.

Millet’s peasant scenes also matter because they challenge the comforting myth that rural life was simple and contented. **The Gleaners** shows poverty after harvest, the very moment when plenty should exist. This creates a sharp contrast between production and deprivation: food is being produced, yet some people survive on leftovers.

**Honoré Daumier** adds another angle. He is known for exposing corruption and social strain. His later work **The Third Class Carriage** presents poor passengers in an uncomfortable rail compartment. Railways were symbols of modern progress, but Daumier shows that modern progress did not erase hardship. Realism often worked this way: it placed suffering inside supposedly advanced society.

These works connect strongly to AP themes:

- **Poverty and Prosperity**: who benefited from economic change, and who did not
- **Individual and Society**: how ordinary people lived within class structures
- **Objective Knowledge and Subjective Visions**: the cultural turn toward observation and contemporary reality

When using painting in essays, avoid describing only what is visible. Always explain what the image implies. A peasant bending over grain is not just “a peasant working.” It may show rural poverty, unequal land ownership, or the refusal to sentimentalise labor.

### Realism in literature: social problems, marriage, and disillusionment

Realist literature did for readers what realist painting did for viewers: it brought them into contact with ordinary lives and social pressures.

**Charles Dickens** is a major AP example because he used fiction to criticise industrial society. In **Hard Times (1854)**, Stephen Blackpool is a workingman trapped by forces he cannot control. He suffers not only from factory conditions but from legal and class inequalities. He cannot escape an unhappy marriage because divorce is effectively reserved for the wealthy. He is also treated unfairly in the workplace. Dickens therefore links personal suffering to broader social structures: labor, law, and class privilege.

Students sometimes oversimplify Dickens as just “writing about poor people.” The stronger point is that he used individual stories to expose the institutional failures of industrial Britain. His work helped middle-class readers confront forms of suffering they might otherwise ignore.

**Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856)** shows a different side of modern discontent. Emma Bovary is not a factory worker. She is trapped in provincial middle-class life and deeply disappointed by the gap between romantic fantasy and reality. This is realism because Flaubert strips away illusion. Marriage is not a fairy tale; it is shaped by boredom, debt, and social emptiness.

**George Eliot’s Middlemarch** similarly explores provincial life, idealism, and frustration. Dorothea Brooke wants a meaningful life, yet her ambitions are restricted by marriage and social expectations. Eliot’s realism lies in showing how good intentions collide with actual institutions and limitations.

In Russia, **Leo Tolstoy** and **Fyodor Dostoyevsky** broadened Realism further. Tolstoy’s **War and Peace** shows how ordinary people are swept into large historical events. Realism here does not mean small subject matter only; it means showing history through lived experience rather than heroic myth. Dostoyevsky focused more on psychological and moral struggle, but still grounded his work in the pressures of modern life.

> **Key Term: Naturalism**
> A later form of realism that emphasized how heredity, environment, and social conditions shape human behavior in more deterministic ways.

This leads to **Émile Zola**, the key bridge from Realism to Naturalism. Zola treated the novel almost like a social investigation. He stressed environment and heredity as forces shaping people’s lives. In AP terms, the distinction is:

- **Realism**: accurate depiction of ordinary life and social problems
- **Naturalism**: a more deterministic version of realism, stressing heredity and environment

Zola’s **Germinal (1885)**, though slightly later, is a very useful example because it centres on miners and harsh industrial conditions. It shows how social environment can trap whole communities. This makes it ideal evidence if you are asked to connect culture to industrial society.

### How to use Realism in AP exam answers

For AP European History, Realism is rarely tested as isolated art history. It is usually tested as evidence for broader developments and themes.

In an **SAQ**, you may be asked to identify how a painting or text reflected industrial society. A strong answer should name the work, describe the subject, and explain the social meaning. For example: Courbet’s **The Stone Breakers** reflected industrial-era concern with labor because it portrayed workers performing exhausting manual work without idealization, drawing attention to class hardship.

In an **LEQ**, Realism can support arguments about how culture responded to social change. A strong thesis might argue that 19th-century culture increasingly criticised modern society by turning from Romantic heroism to realist depictions of workers, peasants, and disillusioned middle-class life.

In a **DBQ**, if a document includes a realist image or literary excerpt, use sourcing and context. Ask why this creator chose ordinary subjects. What audience was meant to see them? What social issue is being made visible?

A strong comparative point is also useful:
Realism did not celebrate industrial progress uncritically. It often exposed the human cost of that progress.

## Key Point Checklist

_This article has covered the following key knowledge points:_

- Realism became prominent in the mid-19th century, especially in the **1840s–1850s**
- Realism reacted against **Romanticism’s** emotion, heroism, and idealization
- Realist artists and writers focused on **ordinary people**, **everyday life**, and **social problems**
- Industrialization and urbanization helped encourage Realism by making poverty, labor, and inequality more visible
- **Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers (1849)** is a major example of working-class realism
- **A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850)** treated ordinary provincial life on a grand scale
- **Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857)** highlighted peasant labor and rural poverty
- **Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854)** criticised industrial society and class injustice
- **Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856)** exposed middle-class disillusionment and romantic illusion
- Realism and **Naturalism** overlap, but Naturalism placed greater stress on **environment** and **heredity**
- **Émile Zola** is the key Naturalist writer for AP European History
- Realism is strong evidence for AP themes such as **Poverty and Prosperity**, **Individual and Society**, and **Objective Knowledge and Subjective Visions**

## Key Terms and Concepts

- Realism
- Romanticism
- industrialization
- social critique
- Naturalism


19th-Century Culture and Arts - Realism depicted ordinary lives and problems