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The young thus "educated" by the emotions took stage center in the romantic era, when the glorious dreams of the French Revolution—and their bloody, reactionary demise —turned youth toward an eccentric sentimentality. "They found satisfaction in ideals," wrote Madame de Staël, "because reality offered them nothing to satisfy their imaginations." Goethe intended his Werther as a warning to this mooning generation, but the young character who committed suicide for unrequited love became the hero of romanticism. The dirty speech movement of that day was suicide. It was, as Princeton Historian James Billington points out, the first major appearance of alienated youth.
Just as Rousseau had provided the ideological basis for adolescence, the industrial revolution provided the practical one: the factories needed the young as workers. Compulsory education was sold to the House of Commons largely as a device to keep the growing number of unemployed agricultural workers under 15 from "idling in the streets and wynds; tumbling about in the gutters; selling matches, running errands; working in tobacco shops, cared for by no man." The time spent in school fitted them for jobs in the new industrial world, and the young acquired greater economic importance than ever before. On the Continent, they also began to perform an entirely new political role in the liberal revolutions of 1848. They manned the barricades—against Louis Philippe in France, against King Frederick William in Prussia, against Metternich in Austria. They set up a quasi-revolutionary government at the University of Vienna, issued proclamations and organized an Academic Legion uniformed in blue coats, red-black-and-gold sashes and scarlet-lined cloaks.
Although the young rebels were brought back into line quickly enough, the European student remained a political force that reached a climax in the youth movements, both Fascist and Communist, between the world wars. Yet throughout all this, Europe refused to take the young more seriously than absolutely necessary. Until after World War II, the European social pattern closely resembled the ancient Chinese formula, according to which a man married at 30 and continued his learning, was first appointed to office at 40, promoted, if successful, at 50, and retired at 70. Disraeli might proclaim that "almost everything that is great has been done by youth." But the vast majority agreed instead with Lord Chesterfield, who remarked, "Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough."