YEAR OF THE REVOLUTIONS

Europe Moves Towards Popular Freedom

The attempted despotism of Charles I of England had not appealed to his subjects and they had decided to have none of it. Though in 1649 it never occurred to the people of England that here, as in so many aspects of the relationship of the individual to national life, they were pioneering, it was precisely what they were doing.

That a people could execute its monarch shocked Europe; and although it might be difficult to prove that England’s example of regicide was a factor in delaying the revolt against despotism elsewhere, when they could stand the tyrant’s trampling of individual liberty no longer, the French at least found it a useful precedent a century and a half later, and it was they who, henceforward, were to take over the mantle of revolt-leadership against monarchical absolutism.

The great French Revolution of 1789 differed from the English revolution of 1642 in many of its aspects and particularly in its aftermath. This was due to the fact that for four centuries before their uprising the English had been developing and consolidating a powerful instrument for the expression of the popular will; and to the fact that the strongest component of this instrument, the House of Commons, was comprised of a category of Englishman who had no true counterpart anywhere else. They came of a solid middle class composed of smaller landowners, gentlemen farmers and merchants who could lay no claim to being magnates, but who, nevertheless, could collectively wield a power equal to, and often exceeding, that of the magnates. It was these men, solid, stolid, calm in their ruthlessness, the Cromwells, the Fairfaxes, the Wallers, who, with one or two sympathetic lords, led the revolt in 1642.

It was parliament against the king, not the mob against the king; and when the King was at length defeated and rendered permanently harmless, it was the instrument of government which took up the reins of government, and the same processes which had operated before continued to operate.

In France there was no institution comparable with the English parliament. There it was the mob against not only the king, but the petty despots of the aristocracy as well; and when the despots had been eliminated, France had no instrument of government which could take their place. And because there was no tradition of administration which by any stretch of the imagination could meet the new circumstances, the results were inevitably chaotic, and produced just the right atmosphere and conditions for the generation of a new despotism imposed by a man strong enough to inject the chaos with order by the force of his outstanding genius.

But when the imperial Napoleon overreached himself in the furtherance of his country’s aggrandizement, which was secondary to his own personal ambition, he left France once more resting on shaking foundations of government. By the decision of the European powers who had resisted the Napoleonic hegemony of Europe, she was provided once more with the spectacle of a king and a Court. But the old regime had gone for ever. The Codes and the Napoleonic University, which had operated to produce a society which was more egalitarian than one might have expected to emerge from despotic rule, had grafted on to them a restored monarchy that was absolutist and clerical by tradition, yet a monarchy which, it was intended by the restorers, should be constitutional in its nature.

The position of Louis XVIII, viewed from any angle, was a very difficult one, and did not improve as the years passed. Though he weathered it by his pleasant, easy-going approach to his trials for close on a decade, his successor Charles X was much more autocratic by nature and desire. “I would rather chop wood than rule after the fashion of the King of England,” Charles declared at the beginning of his reign, and shutting his ears to the demands of the future he harked back to the old regime, with the result that soon both king and people were planning action, each according to his lights.

The king struck first. On 25 July, 1830, he issued ordinances limiting the freedom of the Press, dissolving the Chambers and changing the electoral laws. But he had counted without the people of Paris, who responded sharply, and after three days of fighting drove the king from his throne.

The regime which followed was one which might have appeared in England, but nowhere else. It was neither a republic nor an empire but a bourgeois monarchy. Louis Philippe was a man of the new world, simple and homely in his ways, and, so it seemed, just the man to lay the foundations of a democratic state. During his eighteen years’ rule, his prudence, experience and hard work allowed France to transform herself into a prosperous trading nation. But to the logical Frenchman, despite the benefits undoubtedly bestowed upon them by it, a monarchy which was not a true monarchy, nor yet an empire, nor a republic, represented a fundamental flaw in the regime, and the kind bourgeois king, whose hall-mark was an obtrusive domestic virtue, the ordinary citizen found to be a crashing bore.

These factors undoubtedly played a part in his ultimate downfall, but the more serious reasons were similar to those before which the British Government had bowed in 1832, when the first Reform Bill had been passed. While England was advancing rapidly, under the influence of this Bill, along the path of liberal legislation, Louis Philippe’s chief minister Guizot firmly resisted all, even the most moderate, demands for an extension of the franchise, which was still far more restrictive than the British one which had provoked similar demands in England. Guizot’s policy from 1840 to 1848 was one of flat negation, and it could only end in disaster.

Despite the confusion which attended the development of the First Republic in the immediate post-Revolution period, the philosophy on which it had been based was egalitarian in its concept of the political and personal rights of the individual. But though the Revolution had set men free from the bondage of privilege, what developed was not Socialism, however one might look at it. The problem of poverty was still as formidable as ever it had been and was no nearer solution.

Now, however, men began to consider it more closely, and the question that presented itself was whether or not it would be possible to reorganize society so that fairer shares all round might eliminate poverty. The basic principle accepted, there began to emerge almost as many ideas on how it could be effected as there were articulate Socialist-inclined men, and one result of all the writing and the talk was that among the lower strata of Paris society there began to spread a notion that an imminent upheaval would make it possible for “the valet to drink his master’s wine, and the femme de chambre to put on her mistress’s finery”. This was not the Fabian concept of the transformation of society, but one of violent political revolt.

Once more it was in the capital that the revolt came. On 23 February, 1848, the barricades went up and behind them surged a violent mob, clamouring for La Republique. Losing his nerve, the old, tired king abdicated in favour of his grandson and fled to Surrey. The demands of the mob were excessive, but the assembly gave way on one point, universal suffrage; and when all the excitement and violence were over the Republic which emerged had a President and a single Chamber elected on this principle. Though the Republic lasted only three years, the great movement of the human spirit which was to characterize Europe for the remainder of the century and after had been set in irresistible motion in France.

The February Revolution of 1848 had the look of being the touch-paper for a series of popular revolts which were to break out all over Europe within the next few months. In the spring, for example, the smouldering tinder of uprising burst into flames in Italy. Here, instead of being concentrated in one city, it touched most of the larger centres, Rome, Turin, Leghorn, Pisa, Florence and Milan.

It was fanned into activity primarily by the desire of the people to possess those elementary political and civil liberties obtained by the English and now accorded to the French. The restrictive modus vivendi to which the Italians were subjected, police espionage, arbitrary imprisonment, censorship of newspapers and books, restrictions on travel, had given rise to a widespread discontent with the form of despotic government under which they lived, split up among the kingdoms and autonomous dukedoms of the Italy before the days of unity.

Among the Italians, as among the inhabitants of Paris, there had come into being a notion that representative government would cure all ills. This belief affected rich and poor alike, but there were many differences of opinion as to how the common aim could best be achieved. This, added to the lack of cohesion which marked Italy, as it did contemporary Germany, rendered a concerted effort difficult; and it was probably this fragmented character of early-nineteenth-century Italy which differentiated the revolution here from that in France and elsewhere. While all might have their sights fixed on the same target, they lacked the deadliness of concerted fire.

The revolts of 1848 aimed for the most part, then, at remedying local grievances. Only in the north did larger aims emerge, and even there the rebellion had been in progress for some time before the leaders hit upon the idea of uniting northern Italy under the crown of Piedmont.1 Nevertheless, almost everywhere certain limited gains towards constitutional government were made, and the rebellions of 1848 gave an impetus to the Risorgimento, the movement for national unity, which despite the collapse of the short-lived Republic of Rome set up by Mazzini and Gioberti in 1849, was not to be slowed down until union was achieved.
The 1848 revolt of Paris had an even more immediate response in Austria, where the Hapsburg dominions had, in 1835, fallen into the hands of a half-wit, whose incapacity had caused the government to drift into a state of inertia, finances into chaos and police control increasingly haphazard. Censorship also grew more lax, with the result that subversive literature was easy to come by.

Since 1815, Vienna had nearly doubled its population, mainly by an influx of impoverished peasants from the surrounding countryside who sought employment in the new textile and paper factories. The fact that employers preferred cheap labour and employed women and children rather than men, and that there were not enough jobs to go round, in conjunction with bad harvests in 1845 and 1846, had produced an overwhelming number of starving wretches who were prepared to follow anyone who promised them a fair deal.

Yet, when the news of the Paris Revolution reached Vienna, though these revengeful men and women provided the instrument of threat, every section of the population clamoured for action. In the face of disturbances, the decrepit monarch and court panicked. The one man who might have saved the situation for the old regime, the Chancellor, Metternich, he had been the most ardent resister of nationalism, was dismissed. This event was greeted with popular acclaim, but when it was rumoured that the emperor intended to turn the army on the city, the result was even more violent outbreaks of revolt, to quell which, on 15 March, Ferdinand granted freedom of speech, set up a council of ministers and promised a constitution.

Unfortunately, the feeble-minded Ferdinand, who was universally beloved, was unable to fulfil the promises he had made, and a fresh revolt was needed to secure the promulgation of the new constitution. On 15 May workers armed with shovels and forks flocked into the city to join the students, and confronting the administration they compelled it to agree to the election of a Parliament by universal suffrage. But the army were firm supporters of counter-revolution, and after a summer and autumn of internecine clashes the revolution and its complementary uprising in Hungary, the “other half” of the Empire, led by Kossuth, were brought to an end by superior force, with little to show for all the struggle, though once again the experience gained was to prove invaluable to the nationalists later on.

Though the Industrial Revolution had reached Germany later than it had begun to change the face and life of England, when it did begin it progressed at a rapid pace. In 1827, Alfred Krupp was already building his great industrial empire at Essen, and ten years later August Borsig founded his famous machine works in Berlin. Mechanization came most quickly to textiles and mines. But when the 1848 Revolution also took fire in Germany it cannot be said that the country was an industrial one, for three-quarters of her population of thirty-five millions still lived by agriculture.

However, it was among the factory workers, the best off of the working classes, that revolt started. Owner-profiteering, unhealthy and often degrading conditions of work, much the same causes which had prompted the demand for reform in England twenty years earlier, had given rise to a desire for a more liberal form of government. In this the workers were joined by the new class of businessmen who were beginning to consider themselves the elite of the nation, and who complained of the backwardness and prejudices of governments wedded to aristocracy and agriculture.

Much the same political situation obtained in Germany as existed in Italy. The unified Germany was still thirty years off, and the many petty autonomous states which formed the quasi confederacy, which the term ” Germany” represented, again made concerted action impossible.

Albeit, when the news of the Paris revolt reached the country, widespread artisan riots broke out. In Westphalia and the Rhineland mills were fired and the houses of their owners stoned. In Nassau railway lines were torn up, while steamships on the Rhine were attacked, and in Baden peasant mobs stormed castles. This was the pattern all over Germany.

In their solitary weakness the princes bowed before the storm. Liberal ministers were appointed and elected assemblies were summoned. In Prussia, after the barricades had been raised in Berlin, King Frederick William was compelled to grant freedom of the Press, the formation of a liberal ministry and the summoning of a united assembly.

Presently the princes in concert undertook to call a central Pre-Parliament to draw up a constitution for all Germany. It meant well, but was ineffectual because it possessed no executive powers. Nevertheless, before it broke up, it had drawn up a list of civil liberties which were to become the foundation stone of the new Germany.

Taken all in all, the many revolutions which in 1848 disturbed the great countries of Europe, Great Britain and Russia proper excepted, appeared at first sight to have been vox et praeterea nihil, “noise but nothing else”. In actual and immediate results this was true; but the new spirit among the masses which the new industrial era had engendered took root then, and was never to die, though it might periodically droop. Inevitably the natural rights of man were to exert an ever-increasing demand for recognition, and for this reason 1848 must be regarded as the true beginning of the individual freedom which the large proportion of mankind enjoys today.