1848
Page 4
This was perhaps to be expected in the absolute monarchies, but it was also true in liberal France. This was because the July Monarchy did not meet the expectations of a wide section of French society. King Louis-Philippe had solid liberal credentials: as ‘Général Égalité’ (as he was briefly known), he had distinguished himself in the opening campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792, before fleeing to Belgium at the end of the year, as Louis XVI was put on trial for his life. After being persuaded (above all by his strong and devoted sister, Adélaïde) to take the throne in 1830,33 Louis-Philippe initially held fast to his liberal convictions. When he arrived in Paris, he symbolically embraced the aged Lafayette, hero of both the American and French Revolutions, on a balcony at the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of the capital’s municipal government. The July Monarchy also reconnected with France’s revolutionary heritage by restoring the tricolour: never again would the Bourbon white banner flutter as the national flag. There was no lavish coronation, but a simple ceremony in which the new ‘Citizen King’, dressed in National Guard uniform, promised to uphold the Charter of 1814, albeit with some changes, including a mild extension of the suffrage, the expunging of the crown’s emergency powers and the deletion of phrases in the preamble making reference to divine right monarchy.
Yet these moderately liberal reforms did little to please those Parisian artisans who had done most of the fighting on the barricades in 1830. For them, Louis-Philippe’s Orléans dynasty was no better than the Bourbons who had just been deposed. During the insurrection, cries of both ‘Long live Napoleon!’ - meaning the Emperor’s ailing son, Napoleon II, living in gilded captivity in Vienna - and ‘Long live the Republic’ were heard above the rattle of musketry. With Louis-Philippe’s enthronement, the artisans now received very little in return for shedding their blood, for the new order wanted to avoid what it saw as the extremes of democracy (which evoked memories of the braying Parisian mob of the 1789 Revolution) and Bourbon absolutism. Among the people, however, there was a strong sense that ‘their’ revolution had been ‘filched’ (escamotée) by the complacent rich landowners, industrialists and financiers. There were, moreover, other powerful undercurrents in French society resentful at their exclusion from political life, including middle-class professionals, officials, lesser landowners and entrepreneurs whose fathers or grandfathers had been the backbone of the 1789 Revolution. This opposition found expression either in republicanism, which looked back nostalgically to the democratic days of the First Republic of the 1790s, or in Bonapartism, which wanted to restore the dynasty that, while preserving some of the heritage of the Revolution, also recalled the glorious days when Napoleon took Europe by storm. This nationalist vision of a France exporting the libertarian principles of 1789 to the wider world had widespread appeal. The opposition to the July Monarchy bore with impatience the humiliation of the peace treaties of 1815, which had reduced France (after more than twenty years of warfare) back to its frontiers of 1792.
Yet the July Monarchy by and large sought to avoid foreign adventures; in fact, it tried very hard to be unheroic and rather boring. This was because, quite reasonably, it wanted peace abroad and stability at home so that France could prosper. The regime would therefore do little to try to reverse the 1815 peace settlement, but it succeeded in prodding France into some of the fastest economic growth in its history. In the late 1830s it expanded and improved the road system. In 1842 the government embarked on the construction of a railway network, laying some nine hundred miles of track, which made new demands on heavy industries like coal, iron, steel and engineering, so that they expanded in turn. For this reason, some economic historians identify the 1840s as the period of ‘take-off’ in French industrialisation.34 Karl Marx would describe the July Monarchy scathingly as a joint stock company for the exploitation of French national wealth. Indeed, the stolidly ‘bourgeois’ nature of the regime was represented by Louis-Philippe himself, who usually appeared in public not in royal regalia, but in a plain suit, a black frock coat and carrying that ultimate symbol of middle-class respectability, an umbrella. This was precisely the safe image that the monarchy wanted to display to the world, but it did not impress the republicans, who seethed at both the regime’s unadventurous foreign policy and its resistance to wider political participation. Republican uprisings in 1832 in Paris and two years later in both the capital and Lyon were crushed. The Parisian insurrection of April 1834 - the inspiration for the uprising in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables - ended with a massacre on the rue Transnonain, when enraged soldiers clearing revolutionary snipers from a tenement room by room indiscriminately slaughtered twelve civilians whom they found sheltering there.
The killing of innocents left an indelible stain on the July Monarchy, but at least the regime had the support of the well-heeled electorate, which was petrified by the prospect of another revolution. The government therefore felt strong enough to prosecute republican newspapers and imposed restrictions on political associations and workers’ unions. Among the organisations proscribed was the paramilitary Society of the Rights of Man, which was founded in 1832 and recruited from workers. It was divided into small revolutionary cells called ‘sections’ - a term recalling the old Parisian districts that had been the hotbeds of popular militancy during the 1789 Revolution. This was not an organisation devoted to peaceful persuasion: rather, it sought to drill and discipline its artisanal membership in preparation for an insurrection to establish a democratic republic. It planned the Parisian uprising of 1834, and so it suffered accordingly in the repression: no fewer than 1,156 arrests were made in the initial swoop by the police, although 736 were released within five months.35 The republicans reacted with more violence, including, in 1835, a truly horrific assassination attempt on the King by a twenty-five-barrelled gun, dubbed an ‘infernal machine’, in which some fourteen people were killed - but not Louis-Philippe, who escaped with a single bruise. This was one of eight efforts on his life, a frequency that prompted the satirical magazine Charivari to quip on one occasion that the King and his family had returned from an outing ‘without being in any way assassinated’.36
The years 1834-5 represented the start of a cycle of violence and repression, in which the republicans became increasingly embittered by the regime, while the monarchy had abandoned its original liberal principles and became ever more repressive. The September Laws of 1835 imposed press restrictions: newspapers could be prosecuted for proposing another system of government or for insulting the King - although that did not stop the bold caricaturist Honoré Daumier (who was prosecuted for his cartoons) from transforming Louis-Philippe’s jowly features into a pear shape, an image which stuck. Legal procedure was also changed to make it easier to pursue political prosecutions.37 The liberal monarchy had, despite the King’s own misgivings, abandoned some of the very principles that had differentiated it from the Bourbons. This transformation seems to have been encapsulated in the slogan used in support of the September Laws: ‘Legality will kill us’.38
At the same time, the violence and repression split the republican opposition into the moderates, who wanted to use legal methods to persuade the regime to grant political reforms (this tendency took its name from its newspaper, le National ), and the radicals, who wanted to destroy the monarchy by revolution. On the extreme fringe of this militant tendency Louis-Auguste Blanqui and his friend Armand Barbès forged the insurrectionary Society of Seasons, so-called for the way in which it was structured. To keep the identities of its members secret from the prying eyes of the police, its cells consisted of seven revolutionaries, each named after a day of the week. Four weeks were bound into a month and three months were grouped into the largest unit of all - a season. The catechism to which its members had to subscribe condemned all society as ‘gangrened’, which justified ‘heroic remedies . . . to achieve a healthy state’, by which was meant not only a revolution, but also a period of ‘revolutionary power’ - that is to say, a form of authoritarian rule until the ‘people�
� were ready for democracy and the old ruling elites were exterminated. This was an early, grisly herald of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Indeed, Blanqui started to insist that ensuring all citizens the ‘right to existence’ would involve some redistribution of wealth.39 The Seasons was on the extreme left of the republican movement and was responsible for an abortive uprising in May 1839, in which Barbès fell wounded, bleeding from a head wound. Despite the failure - and the captivity that followed - Blanqui remained convinced that revolutions could be made by acts of will: insurrection alone was enough to begin the process of extirpating the old order and of building the world anew. The rest of the republican left was not so sure: in 1843 the left-wing newspaper La Réforme was founded, backed with the money of Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, who was rich enough to have been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, but whose sympathies were with the left. The journal’s editors and contributors saw themselves as ‘the General Staff’ of the coming revolution, but their main thrust was persuasion through propaganda. Réforme advocated not only political democracy (as did the National ), but social reform. In 1845 it denounced what it called ‘communism’ (whereupon Blanqui and his followers castigated the paper as ‘aristocratic’), but it certainly entertained socialist ideas.
In Italy, Germany and the Habsburg Empire, liberalism coincided with nationalism. The idea of Italian unification had developed under the ideological impact of the French Revolution of 1789 and the practical experience of Napoleonic rule, under which previously separate states had been lumped and administered together. Yet there were divisions between the moderates, who wanted to ensure the survival of the existing princes within an Italian confederation, and the republicans, like Giuseppe Mazzini, who sought a unitary, democratic state. Others still, devoted to their native city or region, envisaged a republican revolution in their own state, which they hoped would then co-exist with all the others - whether monarchist or republican - in a loose federation. Among the proponents of this solution was the Milanese teacher and intellectual Carlo Cattaneo. Perhaps the leading intellect behind the moderate, monarchist vision was Vincenzo Gioberti, who in 1843 published an influential book, entitled Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians, which by 1848 had sold no less than eighty-thousand copies, making it a bestseller by nineteenth-century standards. The title alone could not fail to appeal to a people who in various ways were squirming under foreign domination. For Gioberti, the model for the Risorgimento - Italy’s ‘resurgence’ - was not the French Revolution. Indeed, French influence in the shape of Napoleon Bonaparte had disrupted, not nurtured, Italy’s national development. The French, in fact, were not the great people many took them to be, for (Gioberti argues crushingly) ‘France is not inventive, not even in the ranks of error’. Italy’s primacy stemmed not from imported ideas of nationhood, but from the Pope, for religion by its very nature dominated all that was human. Gioberti therefore proposed a federation of the existing Italian states led by the political and moral authority of Rome: this would give Italy, ‘the most cosmopolitan of nations’, its rightful place in the world.40 The unitary, republican vision was of course expressed by Mazzini, who in explaining Young Italy’s goals declared:
Young Italy is republican and unitarian - republican because theoretically every nation is destined, by the law of God and humanity, to form a free and equal community of brothers; and the republican government is the only form of government that ensures this future: because all true sovereignty resides essentially in the nation, the sole progressive and continuous interpreter of the supreme moral law . . . Young Italy is unitarian, because, without unity there is no true nation; because, without unity there is no real strength; and Italy, surrounded as she is by powerful, united, and jealous nations, has need of strength above all things.41
German nationalism was also divided between liberal and radical wings, as became eminently clear at the Hambach Festival in 1832. There, republican orators proclaimed, under streaming black, red and gold banners, the goal of a unitary, democratic German republic. This horrified liberals, who, like their moderate Italian counterparts, wanted to persuade the existing German states to grant constitutions and join a German federation, which would guarantee individual and political liberties. This vision was driven in part by a sincere belief that this was the best way of reconciling freedom with unity. As one Baden liberal put it in a tongue-tied turn of phrase, ‘I desire unity only with liberty, and I would prefer liberty without unity to unity without liberty.’42 For the liberals, the radical vision of a unitary republic would lead to such an uncertain future that constitutional and individual freedoms would be put at risk. Many of them sought simply to develop the Prussian-sponsored customs union, the Zollverein (in existence since 1833 and which excluded Austria), into something more than just a common German market. The divisions between radicals and liberals would prove to be among the gravest weaknesses of both the Italian and the German nationalist movements in 1848.
In the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, Metternich had initially encouraged the local elites to engage in literary activities, to explore the language of their people and to research their national past, because it seemed like a harmless diversion from political activity. 43 It transpired that he was playing with fire, for it was precisely such cultural life among the Magyars, Czechs, Croats, Serbs, Romanians and others that fed into a developing sense of national identity. Sooner or later, these identities would be given political expression, and in 1848 they would endanger the very fabric of the Habsburg Empire. Metternich started to understand this sometime before the cataclysm. He fell particularly hard on the Hungarian liberals. The lawyer and nobleman Lajos Kossuth, elected to the Diet of 1832-6, had circulated in manuscript form his ‘parliamentary reports’ which argued for a root-and-branch reform of both Hungarian society and the Habsburg monarchy in general. He was arrested in 1837 and was imprisoned for three years. Undeterred, he went on to publish his own newspaper, the Pest News, from 1841 and emerged as one of the fiery leaders of the Hungarian revolution. To counterbalance the Magyar opposition, in 1835 Metternich gave government support to the Croatian intellectual Ljudevit Gaj in publishing the journal Danica (Morning Star), which argued in favour of the ‘Illyrian ideal’, or a united kingdom of southern Slavs (Serbs, Croats and Slovenians). Yet, by 1842, southern Slav nationalism itself became sufficiently worrying for Metternich to change his mind and withdraw his support for Gaj.
Liberalism and radicalism may well have been confined in each country to a few thousand intellectuals and the alienated gentry and middle classes, but opposition to the conservative regime was popularised by one of the most pressing issues of the age: the ‘social question’. This meant the problem of poverty and the dislocation caused by the painful economic transformation that was under way. Pauperism stemmed mostly from the sustained rise in population, which had begun in the mid-eighteenth century and continued relentlessly ever since. Ultimately, economic growth, stimulated by industrial capitalism, would ease the pressure by creating a wide range of different types of jobs and by raising standards of living, but in most parts of Europe these benefits became apparent only after 1850, primarily in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The decades prior to 1848 certainly saw the onset of industrialisation (defined as the application of large-scale technology to manufacturing processes concentrated in factories, bringing sustained economic growth). Indeed, the European landscape across which Alexander Herzen and his family travelled in 1847 was in the first stages of a transformation that would only accelerate in later decades: factories on the outskirts of cities belched fumes into the air, mingling with the more familiar smoke rising from the chimneys of the increasingly crammed working-class tenements. Telegraph wires were just beginning to thread their way across the landscape and railway tracks, with their engines travelling at speeds hitherto unthinkable to most people, were spreading across Europe like an incipient spider’s web.
The boom in the heavy indu
stries that supported the railways and the mechanisation of textile manufacturing (which experienced the first phase of industrialisation in the west) were particularly intense in isolated pockets, namely in Britain, Belgium, parts of northern and south-eastern France, some regions of Germany (particularly the Rhineland and Silesia), and in the enclaves in the Czech lands of the Habsburg Empire and around Vienna. Even so, artisans and craft workers, who had formerly enjoyed existences as small-scale producers, found that their skills and independence were being threatened not only by the introduction of machinery, but by new ways of organising production, in which unskilled or semi-skilled workers - including women - could produce the same goods in greater numbers and at lower cost, although (the beleaguered artisans argued) of poorer quality. Desperation pushed some craft workers into revolt. In June 1844 the Silesian hand-weavers, sinking underneath the tide of competition from both the British textile industry and recently established Polish mills, rose up against the merchants who were profiting from the situation by driving down the prices of their homespun wares. Roughly three-quarters of the forty thousand weavers simply did not have enough money on which to feed their families. Factories were sacked, but no one was hurt until the Prussian army stepped in to crush the weavers, killing ten of them.44 Moreover, artisans and craft workers faced with the prospect of succumbing to the factory system found little to recommend life in service to the machine. The working day, which previously had followed gentler rhythms, was now relentlessly timed by the clock. The introduction of gas lighting may have been a boon in a domestic setting, but for European workers it meant that they regularly spent fourteen to fifteen hours a day at the machine, since there was no longer any reason to knock off when daylight faded.45
Industrialisation was not sufficiently widespread to create a middle class or bourgeoisie that owed its wealth primarily to large-scale capitalism. Such bourgeois did exist, of course, but the European middle classes were a much more variegated and a far from socially united group of people. Many of them were landowners, often pretentiously imitating aristocratic lifestyles. In France the wealthiest landed bourgeois fused with the older nobility to form a fifteen-thousand-strong class of super-rich notables who dominated political life under the July Monarchy. In Prussia over 40 per cent of landed estates were held by non-nobles. Beneath this stratum of bourgeois landowners, there was a plethora of smaller proprietors, professionals, officials and businessmen, as well as a lower middle class of retailers and master-craftsmen. The main problem facing the middle class was that while many of them had enjoyed a good standard of education, there were not enough positions in the professions and the government to provide them all with employment. So the middle classes experienced the population pressure in the shape of ‘an excess of educated men’. As one French satirist put it, there must have been a population explosion because ‘there were twenty times more lawyers than suits to be lost, more painters than portraits to be taken, more soldiers than victories to gain, and more doctors than patients to kill’.46