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Period: to
Modern Europe
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Peace of Westphalia
Otto von Guericke gives an account of the horrors of the Sack of Magdeburg, when the Catholic League and the Holy Roman Empire plundered and massacred the inhabitants of the mainly Protestant city during the Thirty Years' War, illustrating how vicious the battle between the faiths had become. -
Reign of Terror
Robespierre gave a speech on February 5, 1794 to the National Convention, justifying the Reign of Terror and the mass executions that entailed. The views he expressed are proof of his radical thinking and extremism. He is shown in the cartoon engraving here guillotining the executioner, as there was no one else left in Paris. This underlines the astronomical number of 16,594 people who were sent to the guillotine whilst the Jacobins where in power, with 2,639 of those having been in Paris alone. -
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte became Emperor of France on 18 May 1804. He was a renowned political and military leader whose personal presence, ambition and endless plans for conquest were remarked upon by many of his contemporaries, including Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne and Charles de Rémusat. As shown in the painting here by Adolph Northen, however, this would lead him to be overzealous and overextend his reach, leading to defeat in Spain and in Russia, ultimately ending his reign. -
Communist Manifesto
Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it was produced with the purpose of outlining the Communist League’s political agenda. The document itself, though divergent from the dominant ideology of the time, was not an act of extremism or fanaticism in itself. Rather, it was the interpretations and applications of it made by others such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao at a later time that would be. It presented a new way of approaching politics and economics, but did not explicitly call for revolution. -
Easter Rising of 1916
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/newspapers/
The Irish Republican Brotherhood, established in 1913, were behind the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, when they declared Ireland a republic. Newspaper articles from the time indicate that the general public did not share the revolutionaries’ point of view and perceived them as betrayers and radicals. -
Adolf Hitler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N3lWi_EYLA</a>
After becoming dictator of Germany in 1934, Hitler became the center of the Nazi movement and the emblem for its ideology. In his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, not only did he broadcast his skills as an orator and strong leader, but he also explicitly expressed his views on the Jewish question, proving his radical thinking and fanatic approach to the superiority of the Aryan race.
