The Romantic age grew out of the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. As these spread across Europe, so there developed a modern sense of nationhood and popular freedom that was expressed according to each country's historic and political needs through their particular cultural traditions. However, a characteristic of Romanticism was its shared themes and the close relationship between all the arts, in particular music, poetry, painting and theatre.

Revolution and war

Eighteenth-century Sentimentality had begun to value the importance of emotional response, reflected in the German Sturm und Drang (Storm and stress). But a major change came from an increasing sense that the Enlightenment's belief in rationalism had failed. The rationalist project had sought to control nature, both within and without the individual, to create an ordered world. But by the last decades of the century it was clear that poverty, crime, disease, war – all the blights of mankind – were still its major condition. At the same time, whatever its merits, the project had depended upon centralist, aristocratic imposition. But as the century advanced so did the power of the bourgeoisie, who increasingly became the real driving force of the European economies. Despite this they were excluded from the machinery of state, able neither to advise upon nor influence the laws that regulated their role. This ultimately exploded first in the American and then the French Revolutions which had in common the struggle against unbalanced and inept financial management, taxation policy and legislation.