The Transformation of the World (118 page)

Britain occupied a unique place in the Atlantic arena of revolution, being the strongest military power since at least 1763. The attempt to bring its willful colonials to heel was what originally unleashed the chain reaction of revolutions. Britain was involved everywhere: it waged war against all the revolutions of the age except in Latin America, and even there at least one early British military action, the occupation of Buenos Aires in June 1806, had far-reaching consequences. Yet the British political system survived throughout, unshaken by social protest and subversion in either the countryside or the new cities of the Industrial Revolution, achieving between 1775 and 1815 the largest military and economic mobilization before the First World War, and operating a leadership selection that brought to power uncommonly able politicians such as William Pitt the Younger (prime minister almost without a break from 1783 to 1806 and the most dangerous of all Napoleon's adversaries). Was Britain, for all its rapid social-economic change, therefore a pole of conservative quiescence in a world of upheavals?

The United Kingdom participated in the European revolutionary movement of 1830. Between summer 1830, when news of the July Revolution in France came hard on the heels of the death of King George IV, and June 1832, when Parliament finally passed the package of reform laws amid the most dramatic tension, the country lived through its greatest internal political crisis of the nineteenth century. Its vulnerability to revolution peaked neither in the 1790s nor in 1848, but at a point fifteen years after the end of a conflict that had lasted more than two decades. Uncontrolled aftereffects of the Napoleonic Wars came together with early industrialization to raise dissatisfaction with the prevailing order to extreme heights. Between 1830 and 1832 disturbances broke out in large parts of southern and eastern England and Wales; the port city of Bristol suffered considerable destruction; Nottingham Castle was burned down; both workers and the middle classes formed themselves into guards, militias, and unions. If the Duke of Wellington, the leading Conservative politician, had sought with the backing of a reactionary king to face down the public mood in spring 1832 (in the style of Prince Polignac two years earlier in France), then the House of Hanover might well have gone the way of the French Bourbons.
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In the end, however, the duke helped the reform-minded Whig prime minister, Charles Grey (Second Earl Grey), to put together a majority in favor of the Reform Bill.

More important than the content of this legislation—which cautiously widened the male franchise and improved the parliamentary representation of the growing industrial cities—was the fact that it was adopted at all.
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Reform from above preempted revolution from below. This added a new policy recipe for stability, while at the same time the conservative oligarchic regime for which Pitt had stood was replaced with a greater cross-party willingness to listen to the mood of the country, even of those still barred from elections. This was not enough for some. Disappointment with the limits of the Reform gave rise to the intellectually fertile Chartist movement. It failed politically in 1848 because it neither took the leap into violent revolution nor found sufficient reformist allies among the middle classes.

Another kind of British revolution had meanwhile had its first success in 1807, when a huge civil movement against the slave trade had secured the outlawing by Parliament of that monumental crime. In 1834 followed the suppression of slavery throughout the British Empire. This amounted to a revolution in morals and people's sense of justice, radically spurning an institution that had been taken for granted in Europe for centuries and regarded as conducive to its various national interests. The origins of this distinctively British revolution, which may be dated to 1787, lay with small numbers of religious activists (mostly Quakers) and humanitarian radicals. Its most tenacious and successful organizer was an Anglican priest, Thomas Clarkson, and its most prominent spokesman in Parliament the evangelical gentleman-politician William Wilberforce. At its height, abolitionism was a countrywide mass movement using a wide range of nonviolent techniques. It was the first broadly based protest movement in
Europe in which noble renegades played scarcely any role and the main leaders were businessmen (such as the pottery manufacturer Joseph Wedgwood).
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Although abolitionism did not destroy the political system of a territorial state, it swept away a form of bondage and accompanying laws and ideology that had been part of the bedrock of the early modern Atlantic world.
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The revolutions did not impact on one another only through books and abstract discourse. Future revolutionaries learned on the spot. Between 1776 and 1785 Benjamin Franklin, the best-known American of the age by virtue of his scientific experiments and the incredibly broad range of his activities, embodied the new America as an envoy in Paris. The Marquis de Lafayette, the “hero of two worlds” who fought alongside many other European volunteers in the North American war of independence and was deeply marked by US constitutional principles, friendship with George Washington, and personal instruction from Thomas Jefferson, went on to become one of the leading moderate politicians in the early phase of the French Revolution. Soon he had to be told that France would not “slavishly” follow the American model. Fleeing abroad, he saw the inside of Prussian and Austrian dungeons as an allegedly dangerous radical and finally became for many—such as the young Heinrich Heine, who met him as a sprightly old man in Paris—the embodiment of the pure ideals of the revolution.
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Of course, individual revolutions went their own way. The French, for example, placed much less emphasis on checks and balances between different parts of the body politic, and much more on the articulation of an undivided national will in a Rousseauan sense. Here the North Americans were better disciples of Montesquieu, whose French compatriots lastingly embraced liberal democracy only in the 1870s. Yet the constitution adopted by the Directorate in 1795 was closer than its revolutionary predecessors to American political ideas, and General Bonaparte was celebrated by many as a second George Washington.
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Moreover, the two revolutions continued to be mirrored in each other, until a wide mental gulf gradually opened between America and Europe in the nineteenth century.

The late Restoration period still showed signs of the experience of the revolution, many of its figures being directly linked to it by their biography. The age of the French Revolution, from the Tennis Court Oath to Waterloo, had lasted just twenty-six years. For someone like Talleyrand, who served each of the French regimes in a high capacity, they coincided with the active years of the middle of his life; others such as Goethe or Hegel followed the period as observers from beginning to end. Alexander von Humboldt heard Edmund Burke speak in London even before the revolution, held scientific discussions with Thomas Jefferson, was personally introduced to Napoleon, solicited sympathy in Europe for the Latin American independence struggle, and in March 1848 attended revolutionary gatherings in Berlin as an octogenarian.
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The Age of the Revolutions has presented itself as a great paradox since economic historians began to date industrialization to later in the nineteenth century. The plausible thesis of a dual revolution—political in France, industrial in
England—which was popularized by Eric Hobsbawm, is no longer sustainable.
Political
modernity begins with the great texts of the revolutionary age: above all, the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the US Constitution (1787), the Declaration of Human and Civil Rights (1789), the French decree on the abolition of slavery in the colonies (1794), and Bolívar's speech in Angostura (1819). These come from a time when even in Britain the Industrial Revolution was scarcely having a revolutionary impact. The dynamic of the Atlantic Revolution was not driven by the new social conflicts associated with industrialization. If there was in it anything “bourgeois,” it had nothing to do with industry.

3 The Great Turbulence in Midcentury

There would be no second age of revolutions—if we leave aside the stormy years from 1917 to 1923 when revolutions and uprisings shook Russia, Germany, Ireland, Egypt, Spain, Korea, and China, and a number of new states came into being in Europe and the Middle East. In midcentury there were large-scale outbreaks of collective violence in various parts of the world; the most important were the revolutions of 1848–49 in Europe, the Taiping Revolution in China (1850–64), the Great Rebellion or the “Mutiny” in India (1857–58), and the Civil War in the United States (1861–65).
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The fact that all these happened within a period of seventeen years suggests a revolutionary cluster; it looks as if the world as a whole was passing through a severe crisis. One might assume that, as global interconnections had been increasing since the age of the Atlantic revolutions, the revolutionary events in different parts of the world were more intertwined. Such was not the case. The midcentury cluster lacked the spatial unity of the revolutionary Atlantic. Each of these revolutions remained limited to part of a continent, although they were not national events: the 1848 Revolution immediately jumped across national boundaries; India and China were not nation-states at the time; and in the United States a precarious national unity was being openly called into question. The individual crises must therefore first be described separately from one another.

1848–49 in Europe

The course of the European revolutions of 1848–49 repeated the pattern of the French July Revolution of 1830: protests leaping between different political milieux with uncommon speed, only this time in many parts of Europe.
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Historians used to like the naturalistic image of the wildfire, which of itself obviously explains nothing and cannot substitute for a more precise investigation of dispersion mechanisms. Anyway, this time the revolution did not spread abroad as in 1792 through the armies of the revolutionary state. Reports, often only rumors, summoned forth revolutionary action as a response to objective problems in each of the countries concerned. This happened so quickly because an outbreak of revolution had been widely expected since autumn 1847 and because a repertoire of
rhetoric, dramaturgy, and actions—with barricades, for example, as the emblem of urban insurrectionary warfare—had been present since 1789, and reactivated by 1830, in the political culture of western and southern Europe. The forces of the established order also now thought they knew how a revolution “functioned,” and they made their preparations accordingly. To be sure, the sensitivity of the different revolutionary centers to one another did not last very long; each one became localized, acquiring a distinctive power constellation and ideological coloration and following its course without any significant mutual assistance. Yet they remained parts of a synchronous epochal context within which they can be compared with one another.
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In 1848–49 the individual revolutions did not flow into a single great European Revolution, but to a degree last seen in the Napoleonic Wars, Europe did become a “communications space,” a “wide-ranging arena of action.”
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Particular theaters and events, though often only imbued with local meaning, became embedded in European contexts and horizons; political ideas, myths, and heroic images circulated all over the continent.
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The active participants in the events were Switzerland (which in 1847 went through a veritable civil war between Protestant and Catholic cantons), France, the German and Italian states, the whole of the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, and Balkan borderlands of the Ottoman Empire. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Scandinavia were affected insofar as ongoing reform processes were accelerated. All in all, this was the most violent and the most extensive (numerically and geographically) political movement in nineteenth-century Europe, often mobilizing large sections of the population. It is advisable to differentiate four components: peasant protests, civil rights movements, actions by the urban lower classes, and national-revolutionary movements sometimes involving a broad social alliance.
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Farmers who illegally took wood from the forest did not always have a lot in common with urban notables who turned festive banquets into political forums.
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The example of wood theft is not chosen at random: it shows that in 1848 nearly all latent conflicts became virulent. Access to forest resources was an especially heated issue: “Everywhere that there were forests, there were forest riots.”
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And Europe had plenty of forests.

If we look at events from the vantage of spring 1848, when power seemed to lie in the streets in a number of countries, we may find it surprising that all the revolutions ended in failure, in the sense that no group of actors lastingly imposed their objectives. But it is important not to rush to a blanket judgment, since in reality the “failures” varied in degree and form. A
socially
differentiated picture shows the peasantry winning the most: it shook off its servile status in the Habsburg Empire, where the earlier “emancipation” had failed to leave any mark, as well as in some of the German states. Where the legal situation of the peasantry had already improved, the process of emancipation accelerated toward completion; redemption payments, for instance, were reduced to realistic proportions.
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Achievement of these aims meant that the peasantry generally lost interest in revolution; its discontent had anyway been directed only against the
landowners, not the late absolutist monarchs whose power the civil rights movements sought to restrict. The lower levels of the peasantry, who received no concessions from the government, were among the losers from the revolution, like the urban poor who bore the full brunt of the repression. But it is still striking how many winners were to be found among those who failed on the surface. The nobility (if it was not, as in France, already emasculated) largely defended its position in society; the state bureaucracies learned much about how to handle a politicized population and the media; and the economic bourgeoisie found growing official understanding at least for its business interests.
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