Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  In 1848 Quinet urged the Italians ‘not to resurrect a nation but TO CREATE ONE’. An Italian nation had to end Austrian domination but could not, as some Italians advised, found one around the reactionary leadership of the Papal States. Although the French had themselves occupied Italy, they should be trusted to liberate it.10 In 1859–60 Italy was duly liberated and united by a French army which, in alliance with Piedmont, drove out the Austrians from Lombardy and triggered a national movement which ultimately deprived the pope of the Papal States and toppled the Bourbons of Naples. At the beginning of the campaign Napoleon III told his troops that as they passed the former battlefields of Lodi and Marengo they would be ‘marching on a sacred road, amid glorious memories’. Liberating the Italians was what the French were good at, and they had little fear that a united Italian nation would turn its force against them. Hippolyte Taine, travelling in Italy in 1864, called it ‘a backward France, like a younger sister who is growing up and closer to its elder sister’.11 Under French patronage, Italy was receiving the gift of modern civilization from the French seventy years after their Revolution, transforming ‘a feudal people into a modern people’, the educated and commercial bourgeoisie on the side of progress, the old nobles and the clergy on the other, fighting for the loyalty of the peasantry. The new Italian state was creating a new army, a national guard, a new system of justice, and above all schools to unite and enlighten the population, with old rivalries between cities and provinces dissolving in the solvent of fraternity. The main area of resistance to change, the former Kingdom of Naples, where monks had been thrown out of their monasteries, where the feudal nobility sulked behind closed doors and where peasants took to the hills as brigands to avoid conscription into the new army, was just like an Italian Vendée, but would soon be brought under control.12

  GERMANY: FROM DREAMS TO

  AWAKENING

  The relationship of the French with Germany was never so easy. While for Stendhal, crossing the Alps to Milan was joy, for Madame de Staël, crossing the Rhine on a cloudy and cold day in 1803, anxious about her small children in tow, was a penance.13 Admittedly, she was going into exile at the command of Napoleon, but Germany was always much stranger to the French visitor than Italy, and the French were much less able to patronize it. Although the French were inclined to use the same rhetoric of bringing liberty and civilization to Germany as they were to the Italians, Germans promptly took it up to use as a weapon against the French, at the service of the German nation and German culture.

  Despite her reluctance to go to Germany, in 1813 Madame de Staël published On Germany, the single most influential account of Germany for the French reader in the first half of the nineteenth century. Germany, she explained, was a young civilization, much of it still buried under forests and uninhabited. Whereas France and Italy were marked by the Roman Empire, Germany was shaped by the Middle Ages: it was Gothic, feudal, chivalrous. The ‘spirit of chivalry’ had been destroyed in France by Richelieu and replaced by a ‘spirit of vanity’ which sought to ruin the reputations of women; in Germany, it remained, and the honour of women was safe. The persistence of feudalism meant that ‘the separation of classes was more pronounced in Germany than elsewhere’, but this went along with the ‘pre-eminence of the military state’ and habits of obedience to government. The great difference between France and Germany was thus liberty. ‘The love of liberty has not developed among the Germans,’ said Madame de Staël. ‘They have not learned how dear it is either by enjoying it, or by having to do without it.’ This did not mean that there was no intellectual life in Germany. On the contrary, there was, but the thinking of intellectuals was not directed to calling into question the feudal or militaristic political system, rather it was confined to philosophical speculation and literary creation. There was no German Voltaire or Rousseau, but there was Kant, and there were Goethe and Schiller. She quoted one German writer to the effect that ‘the English had the empire of the sea, the French the empire of the land and the Germans the empire of the air’.14

  Like Italy, the Germany that Madame de Staël knew was divided up into a multitude of small states, controlled by secular or ecclesiastical rulers, or cities enjoying a great deal of autonomy. This meant that just as there was little love of liberty, there was little love of the fatherland. Germans were divided among themselves, belonging not only to different states but to different religions, and these divisions were often exacerbated by foreign powers becoming mixed up in German affairs. ‘This division of Germany, fatal for its political strength,’ she explained, ‘is very conducive to all kinds of experiments that genius or imagination might attempt.’ Because there was no capital city where society congregated, like Paris, the pressure to conform to a certain accepted taste was much less powerful. ‘Most writers and thinkers work in solitude, or surrounded only by a small circle that they dominate.’ In that way, though Germany lacked national strength, it was a hive of cultural activity.15

  Madame de Staël’s work may have been influential, but it did not agree with the views of Napoleon, whose police minister had the first edition of the work seized in 1810. The explanation given was that the French had no cause to look for models elsewhere and that the book was thus anti-French. Napoleon may have had a point: there is no mention in On Germany of the country’s transformation under French authority after his military victories: the absorption of a mass of free cities and prince-bishoprics into secular states such as Prussia and Bavaria in 1803, the alliance of sixteen German states of western and southern Germany in the Confederation of the Rhine in July 1806, or the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire the following month, as the Austrian emperor realized he had no more authority over the German states. Napoleon may well have taken the view that he had brought liberty and civilization to the feudal, church-encrusted, small-state Germany that Madame de Staël described but which he was busily modernizing. He might also have taken offence at her suggestion that at least in Germany writers were free to write and women were treated with dignity, neither of which, she would claim, obtained in Napoleon’s France.

  Whereas the French could claim to be patrons of liberty in Italy after the restoration of 1814–15, the liberty that was appropriated by the Germans in 1813 was turned against French power in an attempt to found a free and united people. The restoration of 1814–15 reimposed Austrian power in Germany through thirty states gathered in the German Confederation, but the dream of a free united Germany now haunted the German educated class. Edgar Quinet, who studied at Heidelberg in 1826–8, noted in 1831 that the Germany of Madame de Staël, ‘a country of ecstasy, a continuous dream… no centre anywhere, no ties, no ambition, no public spirit, no national strength’, was now gone. While the invasion of 1814 had induced a desire for peace and reconciliation in France, in Germany it had created ‘the love and taste for political action’. Austria, traditional and Catholic, based on the Danube and Italy, had lost influence to Prussia, which prided itself on helping defeat Napoleon at Waterloo and was troubled by an ‘irritable and angry nationalism’. The French Revolution of 1830 had echoes in certain German states which were forced to concede constitutional government, but more significant was a growing desire for the ‘territorial unity of the German nation’. The Prussian government had not itself conceded a constitution but the ‘demagogic party’ had made a tacit agreement with the government ‘to postpone liberty, and together augment the fortune of Frederick [the Great]’. Most worrying of all for France, popular nationalism criticized the Prussian government for not having taken Alsace and Lorraine, lost to France in 1648, back again in 1815.16

  Earlier than most Frenchmen, Quinet spotted that the Germans, far from being able to sponsor liberty and national sentiment in their own country, would use liberty and nationalism to challenge France for great-power status in Europe. France itself felt constrained by the limits imposed on it by the Treaty of Vienna, and its subordination to British, Russian and Austrian power. Then, in 1840, during the diplomatic crisis in the
Near East, demands arose in France for a recovery of the Rhine frontier lost in 1815 and Prussia mobilized its troops on the Rhine, which it had been granted as a barrier to French expansion in 1815. France suffered another diplomatic defeat, and Quinet ranted, ‘The Revolution surrendered its sword in 1815; it was thought that she would take it up again in 1830, but it was not so.’ Now, in 1840, the monarchy had blustered but been humiliated. The only chance, in Quinet’s view, was for France to become a republic, and on that basis assert its national strength against Germany.17

  Despite Quinet, there was an enduring sense in France that the Germany of Madame de Staël was not dead, that it was still a country of small states and cosmopolitan ideas. The journalist Edmond About wrote in 1860 that the German philosophy of Kant and Hegel was taught in French schools, that Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Heine were admired writers, that French scientists prided themselves on corresponding with Liebig or Graefe, that Haydn, Gluck, Mozart and Beethoven were considered gods of music. Wagner’s Tannhäuser was booed three performances in a row when it was staged in Paris in March 1861, but less because Wagner was German than because it was felt to be imposed on the Paris Opéra by the wife of the Austrian ambassador, Princess Metternich; if there was a political dimension, it was felt that this was revenge for Austria’s defeat in Italy. Edmond About had no objections to German unification under Prussia, and indeed saw it as a triumph of ‘religious reformation, commercial progress and constitutional liberalism’ over Catholic, feudal, divine-right Austria. The only provisos were that Prussia should itself choose constitutional government over divine-right monarchy, and that it should not claim French territory, in particular Alsace-Lorraine. ‘We keep what belongs to us,’ he said, ‘we ask no more.’18 Unfortunately for the French, Germany under Bismarck, who became Prussian minister-president in 1862, was united by ‘blood and iron’, a series of wars against Denmark in 1864, against Austria in 1866 and, finally to eliminate French influence in south Germany and to recover Alsace-Lorraine, against France in 1870. Liberty and culture were sacrificed to despotism and militarism. ‘Germany was my mistress,’ recalled Renan in 1871. ‘Think how much I suffered when I saw the nation that taught me idealism forsake all ideals, when the fatherland of Kant, Fichte, Herder and Goethe decided to pursue only the goal of an exclusive nationalism… A nation that confines itself to pure self-interest has no further universal role.’19

  GREAT BRITAIN: NO FREEDOM,

  NO EQUALITY

  France, of course, was locked in a struggle for European supremacy with Great Britain long before it had to worry about Germany. Peace almost broke out between France and Britain in 1800, after Bonaparte came to power, and survived for just over a year under the Peace of Amiens in 1802, but mutual suspicion, rivalry, fears for security and the sense that Europe was not big enough for both powers led to the resumption of war in 1803.

  With war came propaganda. Napoleon hired a royalist journalist who had rallied to the new regime, Joseph Fiévée, to cross the Channel and write some Letters from England which would blow away the pro-British sentiments that persisted in some liberal circles and among royalist émigrés who had found refuge in England during the excesses of the French Revolution. Fiévée was keen to use England as a foil to exalt French liberty and French civilization. England was not free because there was no representative government, so corrupt was the system. There were three kinds of elections, ‘those that are bought, those that are given, and those that are contested’. The people thought they were sovereign, but only because they were plied with free drink at election time. As for civilization, England was not civilized because money tarnished everything. While France had a warrior nobility, a younger son of an English noble could trade without losing status. The only criterion of status was money: honour was ‘a French idea that had never fully been adopted into English customs’. Englishmen were not civilized because they disliked the company of women. They preferred to drink on their own after dinner, while their wives yawned upstairs in the drawing room. Worst of all, Fiévée unearthed the myth that an Englishman was entitled to put a rope around his wife’s neck and take her to market to sell her.20

  The victory of Great Britain in 1815 obliged the French to take the military and naval power of their rival seriously, but observers were quick to point to the price that had to be paid in terms of a Promethean work ethic. The economist Jean-Baptiste Say explained how Britain’s sea-power had enabled it to confiscate the trade of other countries and establish a virtual commercial monopoly, while its wealth enabled it to command vast amounts of credit to supply not only its own armies but those of its allies. On the other hand to create this wealth the British were condemned to ceaseless work. ‘There are no cafés filled with the idle from morning to night, and promenades are deserted every day except Sunday… those who slow down in the slightest are promptly ruined,’ and whereas ‘the greatest shame in France is to lack courage, in England it is to lack money’.21 Stendhal, visiting London in 1821, joked that the ceaseless work to which the English were condemned ‘avenges us for Waterloo’. Though he was enthralled to see Kean playing Othello at Covent Garden he said that most English people were obsessed by the fear of wasting time and reluctant to read anything not related to making money. In this sense the English were ‘the most obtuse, the most barbarous people in the world’.22

  Long before Marx and Engels, French visitors were aware that British wealth and power was derived not only from hard work but from the exploitation of one class by another sharpened by the industrial revolution.23 Describing a visit in 1810, Louis Simond reported that while the gun-makers of Birmingham were comfortably off, living in small three-bedroomed houses, Scottish cotton-workers suffered ‘extraordinary distress’, driven off the land by sheep-farming and earning a quarter of what they did twenty years before, while prices had doubled.24 Travelling in Britain in the early 1820s, Édouard de Montulé noted that while Liverpool was booming like an American town, in Manchester there were ‘a hundred thousand slaves of need, who breathe fetid air all the year round’.25 French observers were often keen to enter into dialogue with British experts on the social question. In 1835 Tocqueville debated with Nassau Senior whether the livelihood of the poor had been sacrificed to the wealth of the rich, with Senior defending the wages of industrial workers as adequate and Tocqueville arguing that ‘in England the rich have gradually monopolised almost all the advantages that society bestows upon mankind’.26 In 1843 the French political economist Léon Faucher visited the East End of London with the public health reformer Dr Southwood Smith and found that the French Huguenot weavers of Spitalfields were ‘in some ways the moral aristocracy of the area’ but that the Irish weavers of Bethnal Green had a child-labour market, ‘something not yet seen in a civilized country’.27 In 1840 the feminist and utopian socialist Flora Tristan was particularly struck by the young prostitutes on the Waterloo Road, and calculated that 80,000–100,000 girls were driven by poverty to live by prostitution in London.28 Stendhal, adrift in London in 1821 with a couple of Frenchmen, took a rather different view, visiting prostitutes on the Westminster Bridge Road.29

  If working-class poverty and exploitation struck French visitors at one end of the social spectrum, at the other they were impressed by the dominance of the aristocracy, both socially and in political terms. They were keen to draw a distinction between Britain as an aristocracy and France, following the French Revolution which had abolished the corporate privileges of the French nobility and sold much of its land, as a fundamentally democratic society. Baron d’Haussez, a Norman noble who had been navy minister in 1829 but was forced to flee to England after the July Revolution, argued that primogeniture and entails, now unknown in France, ensured the continuity of large landed fortunes, and that these were translated into aristocratic influence and corruption which ensured that the landed classes controlled not only the House of Lords but the Commons too.30 Léon Faucher observed that the Reform Bill of 1832 had made little difference, since
the middle class aped the aristocracy and gentry rather than acting as a revolutionary class, as it had in France in 1789, and that 1832 witnessed a compromise between ‘the lower classes, the middle class and a part of the aristocracy’.31

  What French observers were not able to fathom, however, given the gross inequalities of British society and the aristocratic nature of its constitution, was why Britain was not more vulnerable to revolution than France. Part of the answer may have lain in the British relationship with sport, something that aroused some confusion in the French. Flora Tristan, for example, noted that social hierarchy was upheld even at the races, with the queen, aristocracy and lower classes all in their rightful places. She went as far as to suggest that whereas in France women were the most honoured creatures, in England it was the horse.32 What she failed to register, however, was that horse-racing was a sport that brought together all levels of British society in a common spectacle. The other British sport that obsessed the French was one unknown in France: boxing. While the upper classes settled differences among themselves with the sword or pistol, an English gentleman who was offended by a man of the people would resort to fisticuffs, so that boxing for Édouard de Montulé was a means to ‘re-establish social equilibrium’.33 The socialist Louis Blanc, in exile in England under the Second Empire, and remarking that it ‘sweated aristocracy from every pore’, attended a boxing match in December 1862 between the American champion John Heenan and the English champion Tom Sayers. He was appalled that men could fight only for money, whether prize money or bets, and that the public included MPs and ministers of the Church, so that the fight brought together ‘the vices of the upper class and the vices of the lower class’. The social significance of the fact that boxing was ‘a passion that has invaded all classes’ and that a colonel told him that he preferred boxing to the opera, however, seemed to pass him by.34