by Mike Rapport
In social terms, therefore, the collapse of the conservative order in 1848 was a crisis of ‘modernisation’ in the sense that the European economy and society were changing, but they had not yet been adequately transformed to absorb the intense pressures of population growth and, above all, to address the desperation of artisans, craft workers and peasants. In the countryside overpopulation threatened to create a crisis of Malthusian proportions in some parts of Europe, leaving much of the population living on the margins of existence and especially vulnerable to famine when poor harvests struck. Landless labourers saw their wages driven down by proprietors who could draw from an ever-increasing pool of rural workers desperate for jobs: the growth of the rural population was such that between the Napoleonic Wars and 1848, the number of landless agricultural workers in Prussia grew at almost double the rate of the overall population. Even peasants who had some land struggled to scratch out a living: dividing what fields they owned among their children meant that their holdings were ever more subdivided and unproductive, until there was nothing left to do but to sell to a landowner rich enough to buy up these parcels of land. It has been estimated that a hundred thousand Prussian landowning peasants disappeared in this way, joining the struggling masses of the landless rural labourers. 47 Such pressure on the land was also acute in France, where from around the 1820s the population outstripped the countryside’s capacity to feed all French families, making imports of food essential and workers and peasants particularly vulnerable to price rises.
There was also the problem of the downtrodden peasantry of Central and Eastern Europe. They were either serfs (as in the Russian Empire and Austrian-ruled Galicia) or were obliged to pay heavy dues to their landlords while also being forced to perform compulsory labour services (the robot) on their lord’s land, as in Bohemia and Hungary. Besides the robot, Czech peasants were also weighed down by payments in money and kind to their landlords - and this was in addition to taxes owed to the state and the tithe paid to the Church. Moreover, peasants were meant to be subservient in their behaviour: right up to 1848 they had to address state officials as ‘gracious lord’ and landlords could strike a peasant with a fist at will, although beating with a cane required the formal approval of the district government official.48 Outside the Russian Empire, the Ukrainians of Galicia almost certainly bore the worst conditions of all European peasants. On average, more than a third of all the days of the year were spent performing the robot on their (usually Polish) landlords’ estates, but they also had to work for the government repairing roads and using their draught animals for transportation. Serfdom (for such it was) was enforced through violence: since 1793 landlords were not permitted to use cudgels with which to batter their serfs, but the prohibition was almost universally ignored; so much so that the government had to reiterate the ban repeatedly, the last time in 1841. A Polish democrat despaired on seeing the way in which his aristocratic compatriots treated their Ukrainian subjects: ‘The peasant in the eyes of the magnate was not a man, but an ox, destined to work for his comfort, whom it was necessary to harness and thrash with a whip like an animal.’49
Compared with some of the peasantry, workers were much better off, but they, too, had reasons to be fearful. The growth of industry was fitful, rather than sustained, so there were ‘boom and bust’ trade cycles, in which production overtook demand, causing a collapse in prices and commerce, leading to unemployment and despair. One such crisis arose prior to the 1830 revolutions. The worst of them struck in the years before 1848. Even outside these periods of crisis, the conditions in which the poorest people lived shocked observers. Rural poverty meant that many peasants either had to face hunger - and perhaps starvation - in the countryside, or take their chances in emigration to North America (some 75,000 left Germany in the crisis year of 1847)50 or to the cities. Neither course was an easy option. While manufacturing offered wages higher than those gleaned by rural labourers, the costs of living were also greater. One estimate suggests that food and drink for a working-class family swallowed up between 60 and 70 per cent of its income, which left little for rent and clothing.51 Indeed, studies conducted by worried middle-class philanthropists in the 1840s suggested that German workers did not have half the income required to live decently: some noted that they survived essentially on potatoes and on hard spirits, providing a standard of living below that of convicts in prisons - an observation that was echoed by similar studies in Prague. German workers also wore the same clothes in the summer as they did in the winter, with no additional layers against the bitter cold.
The towns and cities were teeming with poverty-stricken masses crammed into hideously overcrowded tenements. The building of affordable housing, the provision of sanitation and the delivery of a clean water supply did not keep pace with the migration of the rural poor from the countryside. People were stunned at the sight of half-naked children playing in filthy, narrow streets: close to half did not live to see their fifth birthday, while those who survived could expect, on average, to live until their fortieth.52 In 1832 a report on the northern French industrial town of Lille described the squalor in which the poorest workers lived: ‘In their obscure cellars, in their rooms . . . the air is never renewed, it is infected; the walls are plastered with garbage . . . If a bed exists, it is a few dirty, greasy planks; it is damp, putrescent straw . . . The furniture is dislocated, worm-eaten, covered with filth.’53 A resident of the slums in one crowded Parisian district could expect to have on average some seven square metres of living space in the dark, dirty and damp housing of the city centre. ‘No where else’, declared one newspaper, ‘is the space more confined, the population more crowded, the air more unhealthy, dwelling more perilous and the inhabitants more wretched.’54 These were the days before the reconstruction of the city by the Baron Haussmann, Emperor Napoleon III’s Prefect of the Seine, who from the 1850s was responsible for slum clearance and the construction of the airy, elegant boulevards for which the French capital is still famous. Miserable lodgings, a contaminated water supply and open sewers running down the middle of narrow streets provided the unsanitary conditions in which a ghastly new disease, cholera, made its first appearance in western Europe in 1832. The urban squalor also persuaded moralists and reformers that cities were breeding grounds for vice and criminality. In Berlin, a city of 400,000 people by 1848, there were no less than 6,000 paupers being helped by the state, 4,000 beggars, 10,000 prostitutes, 10,000 ‘vagabonds’ (meaning people of no fixed occupation) and, it was thought, a further 10,000 engaged in criminal activity. Collectively, these people living on the margins outnumbered the established burghers of the Prussian capital by two to one.55 Since poverty was seen by liberals and conservatives alike as a sign not of economic circumstance but of idleness, vice and even stupidity, there was no welfare state or safety net of social security. There was some relief provided by public works in times of dire emergency, but otherwise paupers had to rely on assistance in the harsh conditions of the workhouse or on handouts, both of which were organised at parish rather than state level, so were dependent on the willingness of local communities to pay for them. Otherwise, paupers could beg for help from private charities.
Some intellectuals therefore pondered the question of poverty and emerged with a wide range of ideas which collectively came to be known as ‘socialism’. This term, first used by the French radical Pierre Leroux in 1832, arose because its adherents gave priority to resolving the ‘social question’ rather than to political reform. Some ‘utopian’ socialists, such as Etienne Cabet and Charles Fourier, envisaged ideal communities that would erase inequalities of wealth, but there were other, ‘scientific’ socialists, such as Karl Marx and Henri de Saint-Simon, who tried to analyse society as it was and to offer a practical vision for the future. Poverty - and the fact that there were people willing to exploit it for political purposes - deeply alarmed anyone who had something to lose from a social revolution. In the 1840s a British observer issued the stark warning of the masses
in Hamburg that their ‘lack of well-being encourages the pathological lust for destruction which . . . turns against the possessions of the better-off’.56 Such psychological fears among the well-to-do were given material evidence by some serious outbursts of working-class violence. In 1844 - the same year as the Silesian uprising - the cotton printers of Prague rose up and the authorities lost control of the city for four days until they were crushed by troops under General Alfred Windischgrätz, an act that shrouded him in notoriety and was still remembered by the Czechs four years later.
These workers were driven to such extremes because the mid- 1840s was a period of dire economic distress. A cyclical trade slump combined with harvest failures ensured that the bleak era would be remembered as the ‘hungry forties’. The crisis began in earnest in 1845, but then continued unabated until almost the end of the decade. The great tragedy was that, while the grain harvests failed, so too did the potato, which was the main back-up crop. It was afflicted by a fungus, popularly called the ‘blight’, which turned the tubers into a rotten mush. The disease affected almost all of Europe, from Ireland to Poland. It was in the former that the results were the most tragic, for the blight unleashed the Potato Famine, during which up to 1.5 million people died. In Germany there was a wave of food riots and hunger marches,57 while in France the price of bread, the main staple of the bulk of the population, rocketed by close to 50 per cent, provoking angry scenes at the bakeries, and food riots. Furthermore, since people had to spend an even greater proportion of their earnings on food, unemployment in the industrial and artisanal sectors spiralled dangerously upwards, as demand for manufactured goods slumped. In the northern French textile manufacturing towns the numbers of jobless reached catastrophic proportions: in Roubaix some eight thousand out of thirteen thousand workers were thrown on to the street; in Rouen, people endured wage cuts of 30 per cent to stave off the calamity of unemployment. 58 In Austria ten thousand workers were laid off in 1847 in Vienna alone, which, at a time when food prices were reaching all-time highs and there was no government help for the poor, was disastrous. To compound the misery, there were outbreaks of typhoid in many of the cities of the empire.59
In January 1847, surveying the deep and widespread distress, a Prussian minister wrote, ‘the old year ended in scarcity, the new one opens with starvation. Misery, spiritual and physical, traverses Europe in ghastly shapes - the one without God, the other without bread. Woe if they join hands!’60 The possibility of the opposition to the conservative order harnessing the economic despair was not just a phantom conjured up by conservative imaginations. Popular anger focused, not unnaturally, on the conservative order - and the liberals were quick to capitalise on this. Economic despair, which had always simmered threateningly beneath the delicate surface of the social order, now reached an intensity which the political structures of the old regime were scarcely equipped to contain. The first months of 1848 would be a fleeting but crucial moment in which the distress of the masses fused with the long-nourished frustrations, anxieties and aspirations of the liberal opposition to the conservative system. Metternich’s Europe, which had seemed so triumphant in 1815 and which had weathered so many storms since, suddenly seemed extraordinarily vulnerable and the liberals smelled blood. The confluence of the acute social crisis with the sense that political change was now possible led even the more cautious opponents of the old order to press for reform, if not for revolution.
In France the hostility to the July Monarchy was channelled by the republican movement into a campaign for parliamentary reform, demanding universal male suffrage. Since 1840 the French political landscape had been dominated by the figure of François Guizot, whose ministerial portfolios had at various times included education, the interior and foreign affairs but who in 1848 was effectively prime minister. A historian, he was Protestant, bourgeois, eloquent, bright and rather arrogant: when pressed with demands to extend the right to vote, he famously replied, ‘Enrichissez-vous’ - ‘Get rich’ - in order to qualify for the suffrage. Yet an indication of the extent to which civil society was excluded from formal political life was the fact that in Paris for every man who had the right to vote, there were ten who subscribed to a newspaper. In other words, a great many people had political opinions, but could not participate directly in the parliamentary system. Guizot’s intransigence therefore did much to alienate the July Monarchy from the mass of public opinion. In 1847 the government’s opponents - both republicans and members of the ‘dynastic opposition’ (the latter meaning those who did not want to topple the monarchy, but rather wished to take the existing ministry’s place) - pressed their demands. They avoided an official ban on political meetings by arranging a series of banquets across the country. At these frequently massive gatherings, speakers would harangue the revellers with calls for reform. In Britain such an activity might have seemed harmless, but in France, where there was such a chasm between government and public opinion, it was explosive.61 Among the more sought-after speakers was the historian and poet Alphonse de Lamartine, whose History of the Girondins, a narrative of the 1789 Revolution published in 1847, had tapped into the zeitgeist and become a bestseller. At a packed, rain-drenched banquet at Mâcon in July that year, Lamartine addressed the people who also happened to be his constituents (for he was their representative in the Chamber of Deputies). With a reference to the great revolution of 1789, he declared, ‘It will fall, this royalty, be sure of that . . . And after having had the revolution of freedom and the counter-revolution of glory, you will have the revolution of public conscience and the revolution of contempt.’62 Thus, Lamartine expressed what many people felt about the July Monarchy and the fate it deserved.
Elsewhere in Europe the liberal opposition tested the strength of the conservative order, sometimes with tragic consequences. In the Habsburg province of Galicia in 1846, Polish nobles tried to raise the standard of patriotic revolt against Austrian rule. Although they promised in their proclamation to free their serfs, the mostly Ukrainian peasantry did not listen. Instead, they killed and mutilated some 1,200 Polish nobles - men, women and children alike - and set ablaze or plundered some 400 manor houses. The serfs’ loyalties remained fixed on the Habsburg Emperor who, it was said, had used his divinely ordained authority to suspend the Ten Commandments, allowing the peasants to kill their hated landlords with impunity.63 The upshot of this abortive Polish insurrection was the annexation by Austria of the last candle that burned for Polish independence, the free city of Kraków, which was the epicentre of the revolt.
More positively for European liberals, in 1847 a civil war in Switzerland between the liberal and conservative cantons ended. The conservatives had formed themselves into a league, the Sonderbund, which Metternich had supported with Austrian money and weapons, but the liberals emerged victorious in the struggle. In Italy patriotic enthusiasm was aroused with the election of a ‘liberal’ Pope, Pius IX, in 1846. ‘Pio Nono’ was known to have read Gioberti’s popular book, and when he took power in Rome he immediately relaxed censorship, freed all political prisoners and promised to look into political reform. For Italian nationalists, here was a figurehead who could unite all strands of Italian opinion, provide moral leadership for the campaign to free Italy from Austrian domination and give the country some sort of political unity. Metternich responded in 1847 by reinforcing the Austrian garrison at Ferrara, but this merely gave Pius the chance to show off his liberal and patriotic credentials by protesting vehemently; his star among Italian liberals soared even higher. In northern Italy the opposition engaged at first in a ‘lawful struggle’, the lotta legale, seeking to work within the limits of the Congregations to secure political reforms from the Habsburgs. Metternich’s intransigence, however, would ensure that the Italian patriots would be forced to choose between abandoning the struggle or plotting a revolutionary course. In Lombardy this opposition was led by the nobility frustrated by the lack of opportunity for status and position in the viceregal court and bureaucracy in Milan, but w
hich was also the backbone of the liberal movement in the various societies that had been formed in the city. Foremost of these was the ‘Jockey Club’, an imitation of a British club, which also had a serious political and cultural purpose.
Elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire, the elections to the Hungarian Diet in 1847 returned a parliament which included radical liberals like Kossuth and was willing to debate peasant emancipation and the abolition of the nobles’ tax privileges. In Austria the cash-strapped monarchy summoned the Estates of Lower Austria for March 1848. This became the focus of the hopes of liberals who pored over one of the few permitted foreign newspapers, the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, for news of the outside world, and who met in Vienna’s Juridical-Political Reading Club, among others. In Germany, where nationalism had reached boiling point with an anti-French war scare in 1840 (provoked by one of the July Monarchy’s rare bouts of sabre-rattling), membership of liberal organisations had swollen dramatically: the ‘gymnastic societies’ by 1847 could claim 85,000 members in 250 branches, while choral clubs boasted 100,000 adherents, who met annually in national festivals between 1845 and 1847. In constitutional states such as Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria, the liberals began to flex their parliamentary muscles, but it was in Prussia that their resurgence would have the most dramatic effect. King Frederick William IV needed money to pay for one of his pet schemes, the development of the railways, but a law of 1820 stated that, if the monarchy wanted to raise new loans, the estates of the whole kingdom would have to be consulted. In 1847, therefore, the United Diet met, chosen from among members of the provincial estates. This assembly became a platform from which Prussian liberals could press for permanent constitutional reform, and the irritated King dismissed it in June. Yet public interest had been aroused and the question of the Prussian estates and of constitutional reform became the subjects of excited and expectant conversations in cafés and social clubs across the country. In September the radical wing of the opposition, pressed by the expansive and eloquent figure of Friedrich Hecker and the renegade aristocrat (and vegetarian) Gustav von Struve, gathered other democrats together at a meeting in Offenburg in the grand duchy of Baden. They stopped short of calling for a unitary German republic, but called for (among other things) the repeal of all repressive laws passed by the diet of the German Confederation, the abolition of censorship and an elected assembly for a federal Germany. The moderate liberals - including the stalwart Heinrich von Gagern - responded the following month with a gathering at Heppenheim in the grand duchy of Hesse. They proposed that the already extant Zollverein, the customs union, be converted into a political body, with the people having a say through elected representatives, so that over the course of time it would bring greater German unity.
