The female suffrage movement really took off in the middle of the nineteenth century, but was unable to gain much ground in European society until early in the twentieth century. The turning point was the outbreak of World War One, when so many men were forced away from their workplaces to fight, and die, on the battlefield. After the women of this time period were given new responsibilities, they demanded new rights to go with them, and many governments found that they no longer could withhold the right to vote from women. The majority of European governments extended the right to vote to women either during or shortly after World War One; however, notable late adopters include France in 1944, Italy in 1947, and Switzerland in 1971.

Under Napoleon’s Civil Code, the gains made by the previous generations of women were reversed and women were deprived of many of the rights they had temporarily enjoyed, such as the right to freely divorce and own property. France returned to the extremely patriarchal society of the Ancien Regime.

Protestantism did not take quick and dramatic root in France, as it did in many other European countries during the Protestant Reformation; however, by the middle of the sixteenth century, roughly an eighth of the French population was a “Huguenot,” or a French Calvinist. A series of proclamations encouraging, then revoking, toleration of religious freedom came to a head at the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when the Catholic population of the city, urged on by certain members of government, massacred the Huguenot population.

Throughout much of the seventeenth century, the relationship between Parliament, the people, and the monarchy was fraught to say the least. It first came to a head in the 1640s with the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I; however, when the English people tired of Cromwell and his Puritan government they invited the monarchy back into power. Once again the monarch (this time James II) managed to offend the people and Parliament by attempting to encourage toleration of Catholics in the Kingdom. This led Parliament to effectively “invite” William to invade (somewhat peacefully) from the Netherlands and take the English crown for himself. As James II fled and there was almost no bloodshed, it is called The Glorious Revolution in British parlance. Once William and Mary were established as ruling monarchs of England, Parliament was in no mood to court the absolute power of Kings again and insisted on the establishment of the English Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights limits the power of the Crown and describes the powers reserved for Parliament.

Throughout 1848, revolutions spread through France, the German States, Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Denmark. While all stemming from different internal causes, the revolutionaries were largely arguing for universal suffrage, liberal governments, and widespread democratic ideals. The revolutions ended a number of monarchies and enacted some reforms, but were largely reversed by reactionary movements within just a few years.

All of these theories emerged during the Enlightenment except for the Divine Right of Kings, which had its origins in the autocratic monarchies of the centuries that preceded the Enlightenment. The Divine Right of Kings stated that the right of the king to rule was divinely ordained by God and that to resist the king was therefore to resist the will of God.

Deism is the belief in a “watchmaker god,” a god who created the universe with a series of natural laws and then sat back and allowed the development of the universe to unfold. Deism emerged during the Enlightenment as a theocratic application of Enlightenment theories on natural law. It was widely embraced by Enlightenment thinkers, including Newton, Thomas Jefferson, and Voltaire and involved the rejection of the established Christian order in Europe.

For centuries, Spain had been a region divided into various kingdoms, and had a famously wealthy polyglot society. Beginning with the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand over a united Spain, however, the Jews and Muslims were persecuted and forced to flee the country. The primary motivation was to centralize power under the new Spanish monarchs and develop a cohesive Spanish national identity that was centered around Catholicism.

King Louis XIV’s many wars and extravagant building works (like the palace at Versailles) contributed to the “golden era” of France, but they also mired the whole country in exorbitant debt. In French society in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, only the Third Estate (the peasantry and the lower middle class) was subject to taxation. As the debt kept climbing, so did the rate of taxation of the poorest in French society. This would directly contribute to the outbreak of the French Revolution.

During the English Civil War, the Irish forces primarily supported the crown, the nobility, and Catholicism. In trying to suppress this support, Cromwell and his forces committed numerous atrocities and massacres in Ireland that would have dramatic ramifications in the next three hundred years of British-Irish relations. Some historians would contend that these atrocities are still very influential today.