The Romantic Revolution Season 1 Episode 1 Passions of the People

The Romantic Revolution season 1 episode 1 titled "Passions of the People" is a riveting and enlightening introduction to a new and exciting chapter in modern Western history. The episode takes us on a journey from the end of the 18th century into the early 19th century, and unfolds within an atmosphere of upheaval and change during which art, literature, philosophy, and politics were undergoing a radical transformation.

We are introduced to a crew of some of the most influential and dynamic thinkers of the era including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Wollstonecraft. They embody a group known as the Romantic poets and intellectuals who challenged the prevailing social norms and values of their time. We join these luminaries as they seek to create a new world order, one based on imagination, intuition, and feeling - granting emotions value over reason.

The episode explores the upheavals sweeping Europe as the old orders crumble and opens with the French Revolution of 1789. Its initial optimism soon gave way to bloodshed and terror as violent radicalism became the favored revolutionary method. But as we see, this same fervor for real change swept across Europe at that time, radically changing the meaning of what it meant to be human and what it meant to be alive.

The episode shows how the new social order that arose from the Revolution, coupled with the dramatic transformations brought about by industrialization, created a sense of fragmentation and dislocation in the lives of regular people. Societal norms and traditions were dissolving, and the poets and intellectuals of the period sought a way to create a new, more liberating sense of self.

We are shown how the Romantics rejected the rationalism and empiricism that characterized the Enlightenment. They believed that rationality alone could not explain the complexity of human existence and could not satisfy the deep yearning of the soul. The thinkers we meet in this first episode saw themselves as different from their predecessors, striving to rekindle the spiritual dimension of human life that had been lost in the pursuit of material progress.

Finally, we are introduced to the idea that the power of art could create a unified, meaningful human experience to heal the divisions wreaked on people's lives by the social upheavals of the period. The poets believed that art could serve as a bridge between people's subjective experience of the world and the larger movements of history.

Overall, the first episode of The Romantic Revolution season 1, "Passions of the People," is a must-watch for anyone interested in the evolution of Western European culture, art, politics, and philosophy. It carefully explains the cultural shifts and upheavals that transformed Europe during a significant period of history, and how the Romantics sought to restore the lost unity of human existence in the face of those massive changes.