I was hailed by a mod. I have barely posted here in years, but this is fun and I love this stuff. Forgive my rustiness, I am in another career field now.

Let's go!

All this socially acceptable crying is part of a movement called Romanticism.

Romanticism comes to us on the heels of the Napoleonic challenge; Napoleon Bonaparte has gone and overthrown the balance of Europe, and the region is righting itself again after war. Decades of it. Three million people in Europe are dead because of the French Revolution and Napoleon's grab for power, you've got conservatism rising to denounce revolution as anarchy, you've got a demand to return to "property rights, prejudice, and tradition." (Thanks, Edmond Burke.) And you know what prejudice is? Old traditions. Burke says things based on thousands of years of tradition deserve respect! The throne and the altar are important pillars of strength, and by going against them, you've undermined all of society! If we're going to restore the countries of Europe to some sort of stability and power, let the old traditions be our moral compass!

You know what that means?

Constitutional monarchy is back! So the monarchies have been restored, most based on legitimacy, including the French one.

Do we have the order that everyone wanted?

No! It's never that easy!

The British aristocracy doesn't want to loosen its grip; they suspended habeas corpus so they could war with France, suppressing their own population with the abolishment of rights of man and freedom of expression, as well as the criminalization of demands for political reform. (This is where the Peterloo Massacre happens.) And over in France, Napoleon has left a power vacuum of censorship, and the revamped education system has kicked out any trace of liberalism, giving the Church serious power. And if you keep going East, it gets harsher; Austria is laying down the Metternich system in the Germanic states, which will rule for the next forty years, blacklisting anyone who speaks in the behalf of nationalism, and blacklisting means you'll never find a job in any German state. University students and professors are by far hit the hardest, particularly as the tiny educated minority group. Russia has Alexander wiping out any trace of liberalism to the point that liberal roots still haven't taken much in Russia even today. The more East-ward you go, the more authoritarian and tight the regime.

Please, God, who will help us in this age of stodgy, unthinking, unfeeling tradition that wants to shove us all back in our little boxes after years of revolution had promised us FREEDOM?!

ARTISTS!

Artists become the main social voice criticizing social order, and they make up Romanticism. And Romanticism is liberalism; it's fighting all the things that tie down literature and art and society, and well, it's romantic –– it's about feelings, one's mood!

Think of the artists from this time period. Musicians like Beethoven, Chopin, Rossini, Liszt. Writers like Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Byron, Hugo! And the visual arts –– Friedrich, Turner, Delacroix! Art can be passionate in any time period, but now the Feelings are out. It's dialed up to 11 at all times. Even a painting of a shipwreck is actually about destiny and what nature decides and how no man can guarantee his actions because life is unexpected! (The Shipwreck by Turner.) And you're not just marching to liberate your country, you're marching with Liberty herself, a beautiful naked woman who is the purity of your revolution, your demand for a better society! Everything is dramatic! (Liberty Leading The People by Delacroix.)

And literature! One particularly popular piece of literature is "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Goethe. It is exactly as the title suggests, about how crap poor Werther's life is, particularly due to unrequited love, and then he –– spoiler alert! –– kills himself and nobody even goes to his funeral! This book is an immediate success, to the tune of inspiring hundreds (if not thousands) of young men to kill themselves because of their own tortured love affairs. It even prompts a fanfic in response that rewrites the ending so Werther lives, and lives happily at that, and Goethe isn't very pleased and it's all crazy. Crazy passionate.

And Byron –– oh lord, Byron. Despite Britain being home to some of the coldest and stiffest lips, Byron and his crowd make up the best of the Romantic writers, and Byron writes with feeling, and he demands open hearts of young men. He writes his teenage boys with emotional turmoil, and the love letters pour in from fangirls; imagine that, men with feelings! And when Byron's passion leads him to sleeping with people you weren't supposed to be sleeping with in that time period, he has to flee to avoid execution, and he decides to just make lemonade out of lemons and travels to Italy and Greece to take up the cause of liberalism! (He died doing this; tragic and romantic in life and death, which netted him a massive funeral attended mostly by young women.) And his good pal Percy Bysshe Shelley, also an incredible poet, has decided to denounce the church and promote atheism, and write essays criticizing British society! He dies in a shipwreck, hunted out of Britain, tragic and romantic.

And Beethoven, Beethoven who had liked Napoleon, until Napoleon decided to go and declare himself emperor, the ultimate of selfish power grabs. Beethoven scratches out the dedication to Napoleon on his symphonies. Fuck megalomania, right?

And Chopin, a man of Polish descent when Poland is now largely under Russian control; he felt the only way he could keep his prestige and the spirit of Poland was to bring Polish elements into his music, and so his music includes those elements to piss off the Russians as a rebellion.

And have you ever heard of that song, Lisztomania by Phoenix? It's great, and very catchy. It's referencing Lisztomania, a hysteria for the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, whose mere presence could drive people into an emotional mania. Even the fellow who coined this term, writer Heinrich Heine, noted this hysteria to be politically motivated: "I shrugged my shoulders pityingly [...] [I] looked on it as a sign of the politically unfree conditions existing beyond the Rhine..." And yet he, too, was swept up in the audience's applause and outpouring of emotions at the concert.

So that's what you're seeing: art meet politics often, and it offered a new interpretation for life. Enlightenment promoted the mind, but without a heart you’re a robot. And at this point in history, you might as well throw everything to the wind and put all your feelings out there. Fucking cry, Werther!

TL;DR: Nothing is more manly than crying during a revolution.

Sources:

• John Merriman, Modern Europe vol.2

• T.C.W. Blanning, The Nineteenth Century

• Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders, Europe 1800-1914

• And some old-ass lecture notes from the wonderful V. Dimitriadis of the University of Toronto's Department of History. :')

Hopefully it is acceptable to ask for context? Which characters and novels specifically are you thinking of?

Lots of interesting comments here.

I wonder what a proponent of the Strauss-Howe Generational theory would make of this? I've heard one of them in an interview once comment on something of this type to the effect that men become what women wish for them to be, and that it fit into their generational cycle theory.