by Kevin Reilly
Politics and War
European political life also changed as a consequence of industrialization. Governments found themselves increasingly drawn into the economic life of their countries as they developed policies to enhance economic growth, to organize a growing educational system, to regulate industrial working conditions, and to moderate the disruptive social consequences of industrialization. Industrial development also played a growing role in the endlessly competitive relations of European states, especially as its military implications became apparent. By the end of the nineteenth century, a naval arms race between Germany and Great Britain fueled the instability of European international relations and helped to pave the way for World War I in 1914. That conflict disclosed the immense new destructiveness of industrialized warfare as barbed wire, machine guns, poison gas, tanks, and submarines took their place in the arsenals of the Great Powers and traumatized an entire generation as 10 million people perished in a few years. Further “progress” in the application of industrial and scientific techniques to military affairs in the twentieth century reached the point at which a global war with nuclear weapons raised the possibility of extinguishing human life—and perhaps all life—on the planet.
The Political Revolution
Accompanying Europe’s industrialization was yet another revolutionary process, centered in the political arena and unfolding all around the Atlantic basin between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Central to this upheaval was the French Revolution of 1789, but it was preceded by the English Civil War and the American Revolution of 1776 and followed by a massive uprising of slaves in Haiti in the 1790s and by Latin America struggles for independence in the early nineteenth century. Together, these revolutions gave the Western world of the nineteenth century a distinctive character and created societies unique in world history.
Kings and Commoners
At the core of the political revolution that swept Western societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the replacement of monarchies by representative governments. In some cases, the monarch was removed and killed, as in the English Civil War of the 1640s and the French Revolution. In other cases, as in the establishment of the United States and most new Latin American republics, monarchy was denounced and ignored. But even when kings returned to more limited or “constitutional monarchies”—in England in 1689, in France briefly from 1814 to 1848, and in Brazil after 1822—the building of representative government continued.
The principles of this political revolution were enshrined in the declarations and political philosophies of the period. Initially calling for the “rights of subjects” and the need of monarchs to “consult” with parliament, as in the English Bill of Rights (1689), they broadened to protect “the rights of man and the citizen” in the French Declaration (1789) and to ensure the sovereignty of the people. All citizens were to be subject to the rule of law. Government and laws were to be created by representative assemblies of the people. The French Declaration and the U.S. Bill of Rights called for freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and freedom from arbitrary arrest. In practice, representative government meant political parties, elections, rules of procedure, and methods for determining the public, national, or majority will.
This political revolution was largely the act of the new middle class of merchants, producers, bankers, and capitalists with their wide range of supporters and allies—lawyers, doctors, writers, accountants, political leaders, and officials. The French called them the “bourgeoisie” and the German’s “burgers” because they lived in the “burgs,” the cities, both large and small. They were the urban money people—a “middle class” between the old landed aristocracy and the small rural peasants and farmers. In opposition to kings, aristocrats, and sometimes clergy, they claimed to represent all the people. But until the nineteenth century, they meant all the freeborn men with property. To secure life, liberty, happiness, and property, they pledged their lives and sacred honor but also their fortunes.
Revolutions are inherently destabilizing affairs. When one class of people demands power from another, the struggle can unleash the aspirations of those beneath both of them. In the English Civil War of the 1640s, the parliamentary party’s demands of the king led to a civil war that not only resulted in the execution of King Charles I but also engaged landless laborers, calling themselves Levelers and Diggers, who were not satisfied by the replacement of the old rural propertied class by a new urban propertied class. The political revolution of emerging capitalist society created not only the political conditions for a successful industrial revolution but the aspirations of a more socialist or communal world as well.
The American Revolution was also about property and principles. Opposition to the crown, while not universal, was as old as the colonies themselves. Some early settlers even returned to England to fight in the Civil War of the 1640s. But the more prosperous colonists of the eighteenth century were aggrieved by a British crown that seemed to them increasingly remote and unnecessary. The immediate cause was new taxation, made necessary, in British eyes, by the growing expenses of war and empire but bitterly resented in the North American colonies. The result was independence for the new United States of America, the first in a series of anticolonial struggles that would continue well into the twentieth century. Accompanying its independence was a selfconscious effort to create a “new order for the ages” based on a republican constitution and at least partially democratic principles.
The French Revolution of 1789, on the other hand, began as an internal affair, taking aim at a domestic monarchy and the ruling class of aristocrats who supported it. The French government was bankrupt, partly because of its support of the American Revolution and its many European wars. The French king, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were increasingly unpopular, and their court was widely viewed as basking in luxury and debauchery while ordinary people suffered terribly from various taxes, feudal payments, and a series of poor harvests, leaving many in hunger. Members of the emerging bourgeoisie resented the remaining privileges of the aristocracy, while many leading intellectuals had already lost confidence in the old regime. And the American example of republican revolution was contagious. In these volatile circumstances, the calling into session of an ancient assembly, the Estates General, for the purpose of raising taxes, served to trigger revolution.
In its most radical actions, that revolution executed the king and queen, abolished the ancient privileges of the nobility and the Catholic clergy, confiscated much of the Church’s land, and unleashed a reign of terror against suspected enemies of the revolution, sending about 40,000 of them to the guillotine. In efforts to create a new society based on “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” French revolutionaries such as Robespierre tried to replace Christianity with a secular “cult of reason” and, seeking to break decisively with the past, even promoted a new calendar for a new age. It was a far more revolutionary process than the Americans had undertaken.
The radical phase of the French Revolution came amidst a European wide war that required the revolutionary government to draft the first modern citizen army and establish the first modern procedures to confiscate and distribute food to the urban poor. Known as sans-culottes (those who wore long trousers rather than the knee-length breeches of the upper classes), they pushed the revolution into an increasingly radical and egalitarian direction and celebrated their differences from the dominant nobility and the propertied middle class. A pamphlet written in 1794 conveys something of their sense of themselves and of the class conflict that marked the French Revolution:
A Sans-Culotte18 is a man who goes everywhere on his own two feet, who has none of the millions you’re all after, no mansions, no lackeys to wait on him, and who lives quite simply with his wife and children, if he has any, on the fourth or fifth floor.19 He is useful, because he knows how to plow a field, handle a forge, a saw, or a file, how to cover a roof or how to make shoes and to shed his blood to the last drop to
save the Republic. And since he is a working man, you will never find him in the Cafe de Chartres where they plot and gamble. . . . In the evening he is at his Section, not powdered and perfumed and all dolled up to catch the eyes of the citoyennes in the galleries, but to support sound resolutions with all his power and to pulverize the vile factions [of anti-revolutionaries]. For the rest, the Sans-Culotte always keeps his sword with a sharp edge, to clip the ears of the malevolent. Sometimes he carries his pike and at the first roll of the drums, off he goes to the Vendee,20 to the Army of the Alps, or the Army of the North.21
Making New Societies
The “Enlightenment.” Revolutionaries in both North America and France shared a novel idea derived from eighteenth-century European thinkers—that it was both possible and desirable for people to reconstruct their societies in a deliberate and self-conscious way. Such ideas grew out of an intellectual movement known as the “Enlightenment,” in which scientific thinking spread to broader circles of the population and was applied to human affairs as well as nature. The Scottish professor Adam Smith, for example, found natural laws that explained the operation of the economy and argued that allowing them to operate freely would produce a good and prosperous society. Others addressed problems of politics and government. While they came to various conclusions, all believed that human reason, applied to human society, would generate unending progress. “The day will come,” wrote the French thinker Condorcet, “when the sun will shine only on free men, born knowing no other master but their reason; where tyrants and their slaves, priests and their ignorant hypocritical writings will exist only in the history books and theatres. . . . [T]he perfectibility of humanity is indefinite.”22
Such criticism of European intolerance, superstition, and oppression flew in the face of conventional thinking in almost all of the world’s large-scale agrarian civilizations. Human societies, it was widely held, were hierarchical, consisting of distinct, fixed, and unequal groups in which individuals would live and die. These societies and the kings or emperors who ruled them were ordained by God, an idea expressed in Europe as the “divine right of kings.” Against this conception of society, American and especially French revolutionaries hurled their ideas of freedom from traditional beliefs and practices, the equality of all persons, and popular sovereignty, which meant that the right to rule derived from the consent of the people. The violent upheavals of the French Revolution were eventually tamed by military dictator Napoleon Bonaparte in the early nineteenth century, but his military campaigns and conquests throughout Europe spread the ideas of the revolution far beyond France. Those ideas came to define distinctively “Western” political and social values, often labeled “liberalism.”
Liberalism . Rooted in the ideas of the Enlightenment, the core value of liberalism was the individual, and it sought to further individual liberation in every domain of life. Politically, liberals opposed arbitrary royal authority and the domination of society by privileged aristocracies. Intellectually, they sought liberation from ancient superstitions and religions, believing that human rationality was sufficient to understand the physical world and guide public affairs. Economically, liberals sought an end to restrictions on private property, believing that the public good would be best served by individuals pursuing their own economic interests. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these indeed were revolutionary ideas.
Who Benefited? Initially, these ideas and the legacy of the American and French revolutions benefited primarily white men of the professional and business classes, which capitalism and industrialization were simultaneously strengthening. In that sense, the political revolutions helped to create societies in which industrial capitalism could flourish. The beheading of the French king Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, put more than a little dent in the divine right of kings, while the end of feudalism with its legal privileges for the aristocracy opened the way for wealthier and more prominent members of the rising middle classes to share in political power and to acquire a greater measure of social prestige.
The expansion of the franchise or voting rights to men of property—and briefly during the French Revolution to all men—began a long process of political democratization but did not include women (except in a few places, like New Jersey during the American Revolution), people of color, or colonial subjects until the twentieth century. The idea of “careers open to talent” established the principle of merit rather than birth as the basis for social mobility, though those with education and property could more easily demonstrate their merit than those without. And the abolition of artisan guilds and internal trade barriers, together with development of commercial law and uniform weights and measures, facilitated the growth of industrial capitalism by allowing both workers and goods to move freely. More generally, the idea that human societies could be reshaped by human hands was an attractive and useful notion in a world where capitalism and industrialization were eroding the old system and creating the need for some new principles on which social order might be based.
The Revolution beyond
America and France
Slave Rebellion and Independence Movements . In fairly short order, others found the ideas of the French and American revolutions useful in their own struggles as “liberalism” came to have a global impact. Slaves on the French island colony of Haiti in the Caribbean invoked the idea of human equality in a successful revolt in the 1790s. Unlike the revolt of the North American colonies, it was both a struggle for political independence from colonial rule and a violent social upheaval, shattering the illusion that slaves were a content and docile labor force and striking fear into slave owners throughout the Americas. Latin American revolutionaries in the early nineteenth century likewise found inspiration in the American and French experience as they pursued independence from Spain and Portugal. And Napoleon’s occupation of those two countries during the wars that followed the French Revolution provided the occasion for launching independence struggles. But the violence of the French Revolution and the bloody slave uprising in Haiti made the elite leaders of these revolts very reluctant to encourage the participation of the masses and unwilling to extend the benefits of independence to them. Their societies were little altered when independence was achieved, though the ideas of liberalism echoed frequently in the politics of independent Latin American states in the nineteenth century.
Challenging Old Oppressions . Aristocratic army officers in Russia, also influenced by the French example, attempted unsuccessfully to install a constitutional monarchy in 1825, thus challenging Europe’s most autocratic state. “The Russian people is not the property of any one person or family. On the contrary, the government belongs to the people,” declared one of their leading figures.23 In places as far apart as Brazil, Japan, the Malay states, India, and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth-century reformers who challenged old hierarchies of power and privilege found inspiration and support in the ideas of European liberalism. So too did reformers in Europe and the United States. Abolitionists seeking the end of slavery, democrats demanding an extension of the franchise, and women hoping to escape their age-old subordination to men were all acting on the basis of new ideas of freedom and equality. These ideas were revolutionary because they suggested that ancient inequalities and oppressions were neither natural nor inevitable; radical change was both possible and desirable.
Variations on a Theme
The British and French Paths . The industrial and French revolutions worked themselves out in different ways in different countries. England, of course, was the first center of industrial development, and those who followed sought to imitate the British example, borrowing or stealing its technology. Britain gradually extended democratic rights to ever-larger groups of men (but not to women) and after the Civil War did not experience the periodic violent upheavals that rocked France for almost a century after the revolution of 1789. Partly because of these political and social upheavals, French industrialization took place more slowly
and gradually than in Britain. The absence of large coal fields also slowed industrial growth in France, as did the continued existence of small-scale peasant agriculture and relatively slow population growth.
The German Path . German industrialization, which took off after 1850, was far more rapid than the French, and it focused from the beginning on heavy industry—metals, chemicals, and electricity—rather than textiles, which had earlier led the way to industrialization in England. Germans organized their industries in very large companies or cartels rather than the smaller family-owned firms more common in England and France. By the end of the nineteenth century, Germany had taken the lead in the newer high-technology fields of chemicals and electricity. But this rapid economic progress took place in a society and a state that retained many of its earlier features—authoritarian government, militarism, and the continued prominence of aristocratic landlords. The democratic outcomes of the French Revolution had less impact in Germany than in France or Britain. Thus, Germany had fewer political outlets for the social strains of industrialization.
The Path of the United States . Like Germany, the United States industrialized rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century and moved quickly toward large-scale business organizations. More so than elsewhere, these companies came to separate management from ownership, and without the pressure of family interests, managers were more free to innovate both production and marketing. A little later, Americans pioneered techniques of assembly-line mass production using interchangeable parts. They also applied industrial technology to agriculture more extensively than European countries and became a major exporter of agricultural goods. Furthermore, the United States depended quite heavily on Europe for capital investment. Because of its earlier involvement in the slave trade and massive immigration in the nineteenth century, the American labor force was far more diverse, racially and ethnically, than those of Europe. The divisions of race and ethnicity, in addition to the open frontier to the West, meant that workers’ protests took a different form than in Europe. Socialist parties with their emphasis on class solidarity grew strong in Europe but found it far more difficult to take root in the United States. American labor protest was no less militant than in Europe, but it was less socialist.
