Hierarchy and Social Class - AP European History

In the medieval feudalist system, the king allowed barons to preside over parts of his land, with knights underneath them for protection. At the bottom of the hierarchy, peasants farmed the land, giving a percentage of their crops to the higher ranks in return for protection.

The Patricians was the name of the ruling class in the Roman Republic, so that would be the correct answer. The Plebeians was the name of the citizen-commoners in the Republic, so that would not be the correct answer. Aristocracy was not a term that denoted a social class in the Republic, so that would not be the best answer here. The Fourth Estate is a moniker given to the free press, so that would also not be a good answer. Lastly, the Third Estate referred to the French working class before the French Revolution, so that too would not be the best answer here.

Under feudalism, the nobility owned the land, and the common people (serfs) were required to work their lords' land. The end of feudalism allowed the common people to own their own land and pursue trades, which led to the growth of a middle class.

The system of Feudalism starts from the top. A king or liege lord, who has a large amount of land, gives off portions of his land to lesser lords and nobles. These lesser lords and nobles now have a land of their own, protection from the King, and the means to raise their own army; in exchange they become “vassals.” They owe their allegiance to the King and must come to his aid to protect him from would-be challengers.

The English Civil War, which raged from 1642 to 1649, was fought between the royalists on one side (supporting the King) and the parliamentarians on the other side (supporting Parliament). The conflict arose primarily from two sources of disagreement. First, Charles I believed that Parliament was there to serve him, whereas Parliament believed it was there to serve the people and itself. Second, Parliament was overwhelmingly Protestant, and many believed that Charles planned to return the English Kingdom to the Catholic fold. When the Parliamentarians defeated Charles, he was tried in what we would probably call a “show trial” and promptly executed.

For much of the Early Modern Period, Europe was governed by absolute monarchs who believed and contended that their rule was divinely ordained by God and that therefore to criticize their rule was to criticize God. This belief is referred to as the Divine Right of Kings. Louis XIV famously highlighted this belief with his four word summary “L'Etat, c'est moi.”

The Tudors, Stuarts, and Plantagenets are all historical British ruling families. The Bourbons were a very notable French ruling family. The Hapsburgs were the ruling family of Austria, Austro-Hungary, and the Holy Roman Empire. They are perhaps the most important ruling family in European history in terms of longevity, impact on European and global life, and territorial size.

"Hacienda” is a term for a large plantation that was run by Spanish colonists in the New World. The “hacienda” system was prevalent throughout much of the New World and was particularly prominent in Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, where raw resources and native labor were both abundant.

The Reform Bill of 1832 was designed to extend voting privileges to the urban middle class by restructuring the representatives in the British Houses of Parliament. Prior to the Reform Bill, there were many so-called “rotten boroughs” where one wealthy aristocrat controlled the election of the official for a district that contained very few actual people. Many urban centers were excluded. The Reform Bill created new districts to match up with the population redistribution brought about by urbanization and the Industrial Revolution. The eligible electorate nearly doubled, and the people who benefitted the most were the urban middle class.

The Emancipation of the Russian serfs took place in 1861 during the reign of Tsar Alexander II.

Under the French Ancien Regime and other European feudal systems, the administrators and officials of the Catholic church, the clergy, were endowed with incredible political power and many special rights and privileges. Church officials were given disproportionate representation in many political institutions. They were also often exempt from most taxes and for a long time had a monopoly on the education system of France and other Catholic countries.

At the same time that young Americans were actively protesting against their nation's military involvement in Vietnam, young French students were protesting the strict and outdated teaching practices of university professors. Both of these movements can be seen as part of a wider social trend taking place at the time in the Western world— the growing levels of empowerment and political radicalism among young people.

Nicholas I assumed the throne of Russia in 1825, but in order to do so, he had to first crush the Decembrist Revolt in St. Petersburg. The Decembrist Revolt occurred when a group of army officers and nobles in Russia’s capital supported the claim of Constantine, Nicholas’ younger brother, believing he would be more likely to implement social and political reforms. When Nicholas I defeated this rebellion, he instituted a reactionary policy of “Autocracy, orthodoxy, nationalism” that would reemerge at various points in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the rallying cry of the Tsarist regime. It was vehemently applied after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881.

It was actually Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks and later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who mandated that schooling be carried out in whichever native language was familiar to the students in that part of the wide-ranging Soviet empire. During Putin’s reign the gap between the wealthy and the poor has widened dramatically. Putin has, infamously, enriched the oligarchs of Russia at the expense of the rest of society. In fairness though, we might note that the gap between the wealthy and the poor has also widened in the United States in recent years. Universal healthcare has been in place in the Russian Federation since 1996, three years before Putin took office.

In 1989, the Congress of People’s Deputies replaced the Soviet legislature as the dominant governing body of Russia. It lasted for less than two years and served as the primary Russian government during the short-lived Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). It guided Russia, politically, during the transition from the Soviet Union to the independent Russian state.

All of these countries have democratically elected a female political leader in either the twentieth or twenty-first century, except Italy. Margaret Thatcher served as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom during the 1980s; Tansu Ciller was Prime Minister of Turkey during the 1990s; Angela Merkel is the current Prime Minister of Germany; Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo served as Prime Minister of Portugal in 1979. Italy has never elected a female political leader. The same is true of Spain, Sweden, and Greece.

Since the end of the colonial era the economic disparity between the Western world and the developing world has widened significantly. It is tempting to look at the billions of dollars in aid and investment and wonder at how that is possible, but that ignores much of the picture. The developing world is still routinely abused by the Western world that still follows the same mantra of “markets and resources” that guided it during the colonial era. Massive growth in the wealth of the financial elite of Europe has not seen a commensurate increase in the wealth of developing nations.

All of these leaders are closely associated with charisma and many of them were beloved by large sections of the population of the countries they ruled; however, the “cult of personality” is only intimately associated with Josef Stalin. By a “cult of personality,” we mean that Stalin took on a larger-than-life nature (think of the North Korean leader today)—his decisions were unquestionable, his character treated as infallible. After Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev took over as General Secretary, he gave a speech in which he lamented and derided Stalin’s “cult of personality.”

It is certainly true that the allied powers were fearful of the expansion of Communism and the Soviet Union, but they were less fearful of direct invasion than they were of ideological revolution. The Ruhr Valley was the industrial center of Europe (and in many ways still is). It was a vital cog in the wheel of Western Capitalism and the fear was that Germany, as well as much of the rest of Western Europe, would be consumed by Soviet expansion if West Germany were left to deal with the destruction of World War II alone.