AP European History

## Learning Outcomes

- Understand why Romanticism developed as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and Neoclassical order
- Identify the main Romantic themes of emotion, nature, individuality, imagination, and the supernatural
- Recall major Romantic writers, artists, and composers, including Rousseau, Wordsworth, Goethe, Delacroix, and Beethoven
- Explain how Romanticism connected to nationalism through folklore, national histories, and heroic pasts
- Distinguish Romanticism from Neoclassicism and from later Realism
- Apply specific examples in ways useful for SAQs, DBQs, and LEQs

## AP European History Syllabus

For the AP European History, you are expected to understand 19th-century Romanticism in culture and the arts, with a focus on the following syllabus points:

- Know that Romanticism emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and Neoclassicism
- Identify the main Romantic emphases: emotion, nature, individuality, intuition, imagination, the supernatural, and national histories
- Explain how Rousseau helped prepare the way for Romantic thought through his stress on emotion and nature
- Understand how Romanticism appeared across literature, painting, and music rather than in one art form only
- Recognise key examples such as Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Delacroix, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, and Chopin
- Explain how Romanticism supported nationalism through folklore, peasant culture, medievalism, and shared historical memory
- Distinguish Romanticism from the restraint of Neoclassicism and from the later social focus of Realism

## 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. Why is Romanticism often described as a reaction against the Enlightenment?
2. What did Romantic artists and writers mean by valuing nature?
3. Name two Romantic writers and two Romantic artists or composers.
4. How did Romanticism help support nationalism in 19th-century Europe?
5. What is the difference between Romanticism and Realism?

## Introduction

Romanticism was one of the most important cultural developments of the 19th century in Europe. It shaped literature, painting, music, religion, and ideas about history. For AP European History, it matters because it shows how Europeans responded to industrial change, political upheaval, and the limits of Enlightenment reason.

Romantics did not reject thinking altogether. Instead, they argued that reason alone could not explain the full range of human experience. Feeling, imagination, intuition, memory, awe, terror, and personal vision also mattered. That is why Romanticism is tied so closely to **objective knowledge and subjective visions**, one of the core AP themes.

> **Key Term: Romanticism**
> A late 18th- to mid-19th-century European cultural movement that reacted against Enlightenment rationalism and Neoclassical restraint by emphasizing emotion, nature, imagination, individuality, and subjective experience.

### Romanticism as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism

To understand Romanticism, start with what it opposed. Enlightenment thinkers stressed reason, universal principles, order, clarity, and confidence in human rationality. In the arts, Neoclassicism preferred balance, symmetry, discipline, and models drawn from Greece and Rome. Romanticism challenged this by claiming that human beings are not moved by reason alone.

This reaction had deep roots. **Jean-Jacques Rousseau** helped prepare the way for Romanticism before the 19th century fully began. In _Émile_ (**1762**), he argued that education should develop feeling through contact with nature rather than just memorisation and formal discipline. That idea was not yet full Romanticism, but it pushed in that direction: the child, the emotions, and the natural world became sources of truth.

> **Key Term: Enlightenment rationalism**
> The belief that reason and logical inquiry are the best guides to understanding human life and improving society.

Rousseau’s influence mattered because he questioned a central Enlightenment assumption: that rational control naturally leads to a better life. Romantics often thought that overreliance on reason could flatten human experience. Industrial cities, bureaucracy, and mechanical routines made this concern stronger. If Enlightenment and industry seemed to reduce life to calculation, Romanticism restored intensity and inwardness.

This does not mean all Romantics were politically conservative. That is a common mistake. Some admired the Middle Ages, old legends, and monarchy, but many were politically rebellious. **Percy Bysshe Shelley** attacked established authority. **Lord Byron** died fighting for Greek independence. So Romanticism could look backward culturally while still pushing against the present political order.

> **Key Term: Neoclassicism**
> An artistic and intellectual style that stressed order, balance, harmony, and models from ancient Greece and Rome.

A good AP comparison is this:

- Enlightenment: reason, universality, order, restraint
- Romanticism: emotion, subjectivity, imagination, intensity

That contrast is often the core of the correct answer in multiple-choice questions and strong contextualisation in essays.

> **Test Tip:** If a source stresses emotion, intuition, wild nature, heroic rebellion, or inner suffering, think Romanticism. If it stresses order, balance, universal rules, or classical restraint, think Enlightenment or Neoclassicism.

### Emotion, nature, and the individual in Romantic literature and art

Romanticism first appeared strongly in literature and music, then spread more broadly. In literature, Romantics rejected formal restrictions and valued authentic feeling. **William Wordsworth** and **Samuel Taylor Coleridge**, in _Lyrical Ballads_, broke with older poetic rules and made ordinary language, emotion, and nature central. That was not just a stylistic change. It reflected a belief that truth could be found in lived feeling, not only in polished elite forms.

**Wolfgang von Goethe** is one of the strongest examples for AP Euro. In _The Sorrows of Young Werther_, intense personal feeling becomes the whole center of the story. Werther’s emotional life overwhelms rational self-control. That is exactly the kind of inward, subjective focus Romanticism prized. Goethe’s _Faust_ also shows another Romantic interest: the supernatural and the restless individual who pushes beyond normal limits.

> **Key Term: subjectivity**
> An emphasis on personal feeling, individual perception, and inner experience rather than universal rules or detached reason.

Romanticism also idealised nature. Nature was not just scenery. It was treated as spiritually powerful, morally serious, and often overwhelming. This is why Romantic depictions of natures are so important. Artists and writers used mountains, storms, oceans, forests, and ruins to express the scale of human emotion and the limits of human control.

A central idea here is the **sublime**.

> **Key Term: sublime**
> A feeling of awe, wonder, fear, and beauty at once, often produced by vast or powerful natural scenes.

The sublime helps explain why Romantics loved cliffs, storms, ruins, and lonely figures facing huge natural sceness. A painting such as **Caspar David Friedrich’s** _Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog_ presents a solitary individual confronting immense nature. Even when you do not need that exact work on the exam, the pattern matters: individual self plus overpowering nature equals a very Romantic image.

In Britain, **J. M. W. Turner** explored the power of nature in ways that often made humans seem fragile. In works such as _The Slave Ship_ and _Rain, Steam, and Speed_, the world is unstable, moving, and difficult to control. Turner is also useful because he links Romantic nature to modernity. He did not simply ignore industrial change; he showed how nature, speed, and technology could clash.

In France, **Eugène Delacroix** translated Romantic energy into political painting. _Liberty Leading the People_ (**1830**) is highly useful for AP Euro because it ties Romantic style to the **July Revolution of 1830**. The painting is dramatic, crowded, emotional, and full of movement. It does not calmly record events. It turns revolution into a charged, heroic scene.

Romanticism also celebrated individuality in the figure of the outsider, rebel, or genius. Byron helped create the image of the **Byronic hero**: proud, intense, alienated, and resistant to society. George Sand challenged gender expectations through both her writing and public life. Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_ joined Romantic emotion and imagination to anxiety about science, isolation, and ambition.

A common student mistake is to define Romanticism as “art about love.” Love can appear in Romantic works, but the movement is much broader. Its real focus is emotional depth, imagination, rebellion, and subjective truth.

### Nationalism, folklore, and Romantic music

Romanticism mattered politically because it helped nourish nationalism. Enlightenment thought often stressed universal human principles. Romantics, by contrast, became interested in what made each people distinct: language, folk tales, songs, customs, and memories of the past. This was especially useful in regions that were not yet unified nation-states.

The **Brothers Grimm** collected German folk tales from oral tradition. On the surface, that looks literary. Politically, it helped define a common German cultural identity before German unification in **1871**. If Germans shared stories, heroes, and inherited traditions, then nationalists could argue they also formed one people.

> **Key Term: nationalism**
> The belief that people sharing a common language, culture, history, or identity should form or support their own nation.

This is why Romanticism and nationalism often worked together. Romantics treated peasant life and folklore as more “authentic” than elite urban society. Peasants seemed closer to nature, tradition, and the nation’s past. Writers such as **Sir Walter Scott** used medieval settings and historical memory to give nations emotionally powerful stories about themselves. **Victor Hugo** did something similar in France through dramatic historical writing.

Romantic interest in the Middle Ages also mattered. Medieval ruins, Gothic churches, and ancient legends gave people a sense that the nation had deep historical roots. That could strengthen patriotism. Even when the medieval past was idealised rather than accurate, it was politically useful.

Music expressed the same tendencies. **Beethoven** forms a bridge from Classical to Romantic style. He expanded musical form, increased emotional force, and made the composer appear as an individual creative power rather than a servant of aristocratic patrons. Works such as the _Eroica_ orchestral work (**1803–1804**) and the Ninth choral masterpiece (**1824**) project heroic struggle, intensity, and personal vision.

> **Key Term: lied**
> A German art song for solo voice and piano, associated especially with Romantic music.

**Franz Schubert** developed the **lied**, which made intimate personal feeling central to music. **Hector Berlioz** pushed emotional and imaginative storytelling further in works such as _Symphonie fantastique_ (**1830**), which is openly dramatic and highly personal. **Frédéric Chopin** brought in national feeling through Polish musical influences, while **Franz Liszt** drew on Romani musical traditions.

Music is especially important for AP because it shows that Romanticism was not just a painting style. In music, the same themes recur:

- emotion over restraint
- originality over formal limits
- national tradition over universal models
- individual expression over inherited rules

This also helps with comparison to Realism. Romantic composers often sought heightened feeling and imagination, while later Realists in painting and literature turned more sharply toward ordinary social life and material conditions.

> **Test Tip:** In an SAQ or LEQ, do not leave Romanticism abstract. Pair the definition with one concrete example, such as Delacroix and the 1830 Revolution, Wordsworth and nature, or Beethoven and emotional individualism.

### Romanticism compared with Realism and how to use it in AP answers

Students often confuse Romanticism with the movement that followed it most clearly: Realism. The distinction is simple but important.

Romanticism focused on the extraordinary, the emotionally charged, the heroic, the sublime, and the visionary. Realism, especially after **1848**, shifted attention toward ordinary people, labour, poverty, class, and unidealised social life.

**Gustave Courbet** and **Jean-François Millet** are good examples of that later turn. Courbet’s _The Stone-Breakers_ rejected Romantic drama in favour of workers and hard labour. Millet painted peasants without pretending their lives were idyllic. This helps show change over time within Unit 7: culture moved from Romantic emphasis on emotion and imagination toward Realist concern with social facts.

That said, Romanticism did not disappear neatly. Some of its features carried forward into later literature, music, and art. **Vincent van Gogh**, though later than the main Romantic moment, still reflects the power of emotional intensity and subjective vision. So for AP, the best phrasing is usually that Realism reacted against Romantic idealisation, not that Romanticism simply vanished overnight.

When using this topic in essays, frame it historically:

- Context before: Enlightenment, Neoclassicism, French Revolution, industrial change
- Main development: Romantic emphasis on feeling, nature, individuality, and national pasts
- Wider significance: helped shape nationalism, challenged purely rational views of human life, influenced literature, art, and music across Europe

A strong LEQ or DBQ sentence might sound like this: Romanticism emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a reaction against Enlightenment reason and Neoclassical order, stressing emotion, nature, and individual expression, as seen in Goethe’s literature, Delacroix’s revolutionary painting, and Beethoven’s emotionally expansive music.

## Key Point Checklist

_This article has covered the following key knowledge points:_

- Romanticism emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and Neoclassicism
- Romanticism emphasized emotion, imagination, individuality, intuition, nature, the supernatural, and national histories
- Rousseau helped prepare the way for Romanticism through _Émile_ and his stress on feeling and nature
- Romantic literature often focused on intense inner experience, as in Goethe’s _The Sorrows of Young Werther_
- Wordsworth and Coleridge rejected older formal literary rules and stressed feeling, nature, and ordinary language
- The sublime was a central Romantic idea, expressing awe and terror before powerful nature
- Delacroix’s _Liberty Leading the People_ linked Romantic style to the July Revolution of 1830
- Romanticism supported nationalism through folklore, peasant traditions, medievalism, and national histories
- Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, and Chopin show how Romanticism also shaped music
- Romanticism differed from Neoclassicism by favouring emotion over order and from Realism by favouring the extraordinary over ordinary social reality

## Key Terms and Concepts

- Romanticism
- Enlightenment rationalism
- Neoclassicism
- subjectivity
- sublime
- nationalism
- lied


19th-Century Culture and Arts - Romantics emphasized emotion nature individuality