The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) captured the realities of the conflict in eighty-two engravings known by the title The Disasters of War. Unpublished until the 1860s, they showed horrific scenes of rape, pillage, mutilation and butchery. In one of the engravings, a corpse is depicted rising from a coffin holding a sheet of paper inscribed with the word Nada, ‘Nothing’, the word that the painter chose to summarize the end result of the bitter years of conflict.

I'll see about this painting.

At the same time, events in the Americas also had a profound effect on Europe. For European liberals, radicals and revolutionaries, Latin America (with the exception of Brazil, where slavery continued virtually unchanged through the following decades) became a classic example of the success of movements of emancipation and liberation. Bolívar’s wars of liberation provided a new model of heroism that in due course was to find further embodiment in the charismatic figure of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), who was to return from exile in Uruguay and Brazil to lead the popular struggle for Italian unification.

The events of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era changed the balance of forces between the different parts of the globe. This was not the outcome of some long-term process whereby Europe was becoming superior to other parts of the world in terms of competitiveness, religious dedication, or culture. Far-flung, pre-industrial empires were nothing unusual in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century world.

Contrary to the thesis presented in Escape From Rome, which argues the west took over the world due to a long term process starting in Roman times.

Underlining the moral principles that the powers claimed had infused the Vienna Settlement, the Congress formally outlawed the slave trade.

Warfare had been a way of life in Europe for centuries by the time the Napoleonic Wars came to an end in 1815. At times it was truly devastating in its impact. The Thirty Years War, lasting from 1618 to 1648, is estimated directly or indirectly to have caused the deaths of anything up to a third of the entire population of Germany, for example, and in some areas such as Württemberg the proportion was even higher.

Altogether, the death rate of men in battle between 1815 and 1914 was seven times less than that of the previous century.

Moreover, the Upper House was nominated by the king, and the Chamber of Deputies was elected by men over forty who paid 300 francs or more in taxes per year. This had the effect of creating a very small electorate, numbering no more than 90,000 from a population of 28 million. In Britain, by comparison, with a population less than half this size, the electorate numbered 440,000 even before the 1832 Reform Act, which added another 216,000.

So there were elections in France even during the reign of Louis XVIII

In October 1817 they celebrated the anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation at the Wartburg castle, where Luther had translated the Bible into vernacular German, by listening to fiery speeches extolling their Germanness. The festival earned subsequent notoriety through the burning of more than two dozen books and magazines, including the Napoleonic Law Code, German tracts from the Napoleonic period urging collaboration with the French, and contemporary pamphlets criticizing the students’ aims and activities.

The event was condemned by the young poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) as ignorant and medieval. However, his famous pronouncement, ‘That was only a Prologue: where books are burned, in the end people will be burned as well’, referred to the burning of the Qur’an by the Spanish Inquisition during the conquest of Granada in 1499, not to the Wartburg event.

Oh wow! Surprising!

The few who favoured constitutional reform and national unity began to call themselves ‘liberals’, picking up a term already used by reformers in Spain, but they were unable to agree on any kind of common programme.

Origins of the term "liberal".

The idea of ‘Enlightened Despotism’ had died in the French Revolution and could not be revived. Government was more broadly based; German states were run bureaucratically, not autocratically, and a rule-bound system of administration was widely regarded as a more effective limitation on the arbitrary power of the sovereign than representative assemblies were ever likely to be. Often, in any case, the same men belonged to both. As the young Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), who did not enjoy his early experience as a civil servant, remarked in 1838, ‘in order to take part in public life, one must be a salaried and dependent servant of the state, one must belong completely to the bureaucratic caste’.

First mentioning of Bismarck in the book.

Among other things the Pope got rid of street lighting and vaccination against smallpox as objectionable modern innovations.

Authoritarian reaction was now the order of the day. In the Papal States, the new Pope, Leo XII (1760–1829), banned Jews from owning property and strengthened the power of the Jesuits over education.

Nicholas I (1796–1855) had a well-deserved reputation as a reactionary, which strengthened the conspirators’ determination to act. Made aware by an informer of the conspiracy, he hurriedly had himself proclaimed tsar, on 14 December 1825, thus trumping the revolutionaries’ attempt to forestall his succession by staging a coup. Mustering 3,000 troops on the Senate Square in Moscow, the revolutionaries shot dead an intermediary sent by the tsar, who then ordered his own troops, some 9,000 in number, to open fire. The revolutionary forces fled the scene. Another, smaller uprising further south was dispersed on 3 January 1826. The so-called ‘revolt’ was over. Nicholas set up a commission of inquiry, which examined 600 people and put 121 on trial, condemning five of them to death, including Pestel, thirty-one to exile with hard labour in Siberia, and eighty-five to shorter terms of imprisonment. The rebels went down in history as the ‘Decembrists’.

The most widespread rioting of the Restoration years, the ‘Hep-Hep’ disturbances of 1819, had, it is true, involved members of the educated classes as well as artisans and other members of the lower classes, but the antisemitic focus of these disturbances repelled many liberals, and the rioters’ attacks on property alarmed Metternich, who saw them as a serious threat to public order: wherever they broke out, he wrote in 1819, ‘no security exists, for the same thing could arise again at any moment over any other matter’. Middle-class liberals largely shared this view. Their fear of the unruly masses was to reappear later in the century, with serious repercussions for revolutionaries.

I wasn't familiar with the term The Restoration Years.

The Third Department of the Imperial Chancery, responsible for state security, was run by the former cavalry general Count Alexander von Benckendorff (1781–1844), a Baltic German nobleman and brother of the international socialite Dorothea von Lieven (1785–1857), who had once enjoyed notoriety in a much-publicized affair with Metternich.

Metternich was running the show in the early 19th century...

Organizational and technological improvements in western armies and navies meant they were starting to outperform Ottoman forces. The corruption characteristic of eighteenth-century government and administration had been curtailed in most of Europe, but it continued among the Ottomans. In Constantinople (Istanbul), the Ottoman capital, the sultans found it increasingly difficult to impose their authority. Local and regional leaders were gaining increasing autonomy in many parts of the empire.

Initially the campaign did not go well – Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712–86) had described wars between Russia and Turkey as the one-eyed fighting the blind

Exactly how Russia is now fighting against Ukraine.

A key figure in these events, and one with a wider European significance, was Ioannis Kapodistrias (1776–1831).

The debates on the extension of the franchise gave birth to a new concept: ‘the middle classes’, as Earl Grey (1764–1845) the Prime Minister, put it, ‘who have made wonderful advances in property and intelligence’, and who ‘form the real and efficient mass of public opinion, and without whom the power of the gentry is nothing’.

Freedom in art and liberty in society are the twin goals to which all consistent and logical thinkers should march in step.’ In 1827 the French art critic August Jal (1795–1873) declared that Romanticism was ‘the echo of the cannon shot of 1789’, and as if to prove his point, Eugène Delacroix produced in 1830 what is probably the most famous representation of revolution in any artwork, Liberty Leading the People. For many Romantic poets and writers, the Greek uprising was a turning point, symbolized by Byron’s death at Missolonghi.

The legacy of two and a half decades of war, and the example of Napoleon, had brought to the fore a new social force not much in evidence in 1789: the officer corps, or to be more precise, the junior and middle ranks of the officer corps, a social grouping that was also to play a major role in ‘Third-World’ revolutions in the second half of the twentieth century. Young army officers who had served in the Napoleonic Wars had been politicized by the experience, and felt sidelined by the hierarchical restorations of 1815. In many countries they took the lead in fomenting revolution, reinforced by the spread of conspiratorial organizations of one kind and another.

‘The common folk of the northern provinces lived almost entirely on rye bread and grey vegetable soup,’ wrote Purlevsky. ‘Everything the peasant household produced – dairy products, beef, lamb, eggs, and so on – was sold out of necessity. People lived on peas, oats, and steamed turnips. Our village was an exception. Trade and crafts brought us money and made us richer than other villages.’

Purlevsky had even heard of a seigneur who punished a peasant boy for throwing a stone at one of his hunting dogs by stripping the lad of his clothes, which he showed to his borzois to sniff, then putting him in a field and loosing the dogs from their leads to hunt him down. (Fortunately the dogs did not harm him, and the emperor, on hearing this story, had the landlord arrested; there were limits even under serfdom, and he had clearly transgressed them.) Nevertheless, the serfs, not just educated ones like Purlevsky, keenly felt their overwhelming impotence in the face of seigneurial demands.

Serfs were not slaves (although there were slaves in Europe, notably the gypsies of Romania, who were treated as chattels and bought and sold on the open market until their emancipation by both Church and state in the 1840s, and altogether in 1848); serfs had rights as well as duties. But neither were they free agents.

In addition, increasing numbers of serfs (like Savva Purlevsky) were abandoning their villages and fleeing to the cities or to regions where they could conceal their servile status and find work as free men. In 1856 it was reported that more than 100,000 servile Romanian peasant families had abandoned their holdings and left for Bulgaria, Serbia and Transylvania since 1832 in search of freedom. By the 1860s some 300,000 runaway Russian and Ukrainian serfs were said to be living in Bessarabia, where serfdom had recently been abolished.

The workhouse, with its minimal level of support, its harsh discipline, its uniforms, its degrading delousing sessions, and its social stigma, was popularly regarded as something to be avoided if at all possible. Its reputation was made even worse by the 1832 Anatomy Act. This was a response to the growing price of corpses supplied to the Anatomy Schools, which encouraged ‘resurrection men’ to dig up newly interred bodies to sell them to the medical schools, and the grisly Burke and Hare murders in 1829, in which two criminals in Edinburgh, William Burke (1792–1829) and William Hare (1807–1829) killed people in order to make money by selling their corpses to the anatomists. From 1832 the bodies of paupers were assigned free of charge to the medical schools if they were unclaimed by relatives. In a religious age when most people believed in the physical resurrection of the body, this was probably even more disturbing than the workhouse itself.

WTF

Its mean-spiritedness and its potential for corruption were memorably pilloried in the early novel by Charles Dickens (1812–70), Oliver Twist, where the eponymous orphaned boy creates an uproar in the workhouse by asking on behalf of the starving inmates for a second helping of gruel. Written in 1837–9, the novel caricatured the pomposity and hypocrisy of the parish board members responsible for running the workhouse, described the painful and pointless work the inmates had to perform, and condemned the ineffectiveness and cruelty of the system.

Oliver Twist as a critique on the workhouse.

In Germany the ‘Elberfeld System’ of poor-law administration, involving the division of a municipality into districts each with a volunteer poor-law overseer who applied stringent conditions for relief and reviewed cases on a regular basis, began to spread following Prussian municipal administrative reforms in 1823. In the eyes of Political Economy and its followers, there was no reason for anyone to starve except in the most extreme cases of illness or decrepitude: if the able-bodied were destitute, it was because they were idle. This doctrine was to have calamitous consequences, above all in Ireland, in the economic crisis of the late 1840s.

Prussian and German welfare state?

In the summer of 1845 warm and humid weather conditions across Europe caused the infection of potatoes everywhere by a fungal blight that turned them into a foul-smelling, soggy brown mess in the ground. The blight was worst where winters were mild and summers wet, as in Ireland and the west of Scotland, but it affected almost all of Europe in one way or another.

Potato hunger in Ireland

The Cotton Mills and Factories Act of 1819 banned the employment of children under the age of nine, and restricted the hours of work for those under sixteen years of age to sixteen hours a day. Such legislation was difficult to enforce, but in 1833 a new Factory Act not only further limited the hours of work for children and required them to have at least two hours of education a day, it also set up a Factory Inspectorate.

In 1816 there were 259,000 masters and 145,000 journeymen and apprentices in Prussia; by 1846 their numbers had increased to 457,000 and 385,000 respectively, signifying the growing difficulty of journeymen and apprentices in obtaining a mastership. This, not the peasantry or the landless labourer class, was the reservoir of labour that early industrialization tapped.

Since I have known the English proletariat, I no longer think that slavery is the greatest human misfortune: the slave is sure of his bread all his life, and of care when he is sick; whereas there exists no bond between the worker and the English master. If the latter has no work to give out, the worker dies of hunger; if he is sick, he succumbs, on the straw of his pallet . . . If he grows old, or is crippled as the result of an accident, he is fired, and he turns to begging furtively for fear of being arrested.

Similar ideas were propounded by the lawyer and journalist Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), a man of humble origins who had taken part in the 1830 Revolution and served as an oppositional deputy in the early 1830s. More determinedly egalitarian than Fourier, he envisaged in his famous Voyage to Icaria (1840) a community where everyone worked equally and received the same rewards, everyone would have the vote, and all property would be held in common. This was ‘communism’, a word he invented. The downside of his Utopian prescription was that everyone would have to obey the community’s laws, and there would only be one newspaper, whose function was to express the common opinion of the community’s members.

His ideas also informed the writings of Louis Blanc (1811–82), tutor to the son of an ironmaster. In 1839, Blanc published an immensely popular book, The Organization of Labour, which proposed factories based on profit-sharing among the workers, financed initially by loans. Blanc rejected the hierarchical aspects of Saint-Simon’s philosophy and replaced his slogan ‘To each according to his works’ with a new one: ‘To each according to his needs’.

So that's where that phrase was originated. 'His' refers to Enfantine and San-Simone.

Owen found the workers dissolute and degraded, so he set up schools for the children and opened the first ever co-operative store, selling goods cheaply to the workers and sharing out the profits with them. New Lanark became famous as a model factory community, and led Owen to declare in 1827 that it could become the basis for the establishment of co-operatives across the industrial world. His mission was to overcome industry’s ‘individualization’ of the human being and replace this atomized society with what he called a ‘socialist’ one – the first time the term had been used in English.

The dilemmas of moderate liberalism were nowhere better illustrated than in France, where its representatives had come to power in the 1830 Revolution. Overcoming the chronic political instability of the 1830s, François Guizot, a Protestant historian whose father had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror, managed to establish a stable ministry in 1840, which lasted until 1848. He became more conservative over time. ‘Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of a want of heart,’ he remarked: ‘to be one at 30 is proof of a want of head.’

So that's the origin of that phrase! Francois Guizot!

Another victim was Robert Blum (1807–48), a worker from Cologne who had been employed as a gardener, a goldsmith and an operative in a lamp factory. Blum’s talent for oratory had won him a seat in the Frankfurt Parliament, which had sent him to Vienna to support the revolution; he was arrested for treason and executed on 9 November (the first but far from the last time that this date marked a major turning point in German history).

Napoleon III has some claim to be the first modern dictator. He realized that his legitimacy depended on popular support, not on some old-established religious or secular principle or tradition. Thus his coup and later the Senate resolution declaring him emperor were both put to a national vote. Other votes followed on other issues. This was, in other words, a plebiscitary dictatorship. Behind the scenes, the emperor managed and manipulated elections and referendums by a mixture of bribery and intimidation in order to get the right result, whether a yes vote for his policies, or an obliging, pro-government majority in the legislature.

An opportunity soon presented itself. For much of the nineteenth century there had been a simmering conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Russia desired to expand its influence in the Balkans, most of which was still ruled by the Ottomans, and to gain an ice-free port in the Mediterranean. The increasingly rickety Ottoman Empire, dubbed by Tsar Nicholas I ‘the sick man of Europe’, still controlled much of the region, as well as the Middle East.

On arriving at the von zur Mühlen estate in Estonia, she found only two books in her husband’s country house, ‘the Bible and a pornographic work, The Memoirs of a Singer’.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the economy of Europe and indeed the entire world was dominated by Britain.

So closely were German banking and industrial enterprises interwoven by this time that some historians have even spoken of ‘organized capitalism’ in which open-market competition became increasingly controlled by large conglomerates, often with close links to the government. Certainly, by 1907 cartelization covered 90 per cent of the German market in paper, 74 per cent in mining, and 50 per cent in crude steel. By 1900 there were 275 cartels in operation in Germany, in all branches of industry, some 200 of them created between the years 1879 and 1890.

But at least, gradually, the streets began to be lit properly at night. Gas lights were already in use in the late eighteenth century, and they illuminated Westminster Bridge and Pall Mall as early as 1815; after the end of the Napoleonic Wars they became more common, spreading quickly to British provincial towns and cities. It was not until the 1840s that gas lighting became generally accepted in Paris, and even in 1860 London alone consumed twice as much gas as the whole of Germany. The first public gas lamp was lit in St Petersburg in 1819, and by mid-century there were 800 of them lighting up the streets and squares of the Russian capital.

On the discussion when streets first were lit

It was constantly at risk; in an earlier generation the dramatist Antonio Gil y Zárate (1793–1861) noted cynically that ‘a government job is nothing more than a way of having an income without doing anything . . . talent is irrelevant and . . . the whole business is reduced to whether the person who has the job is a friend or not’.

Many would argue it still holds true today

Over the decades, political systems everywhere, even in reluctant tsarist Russia, had adjusted to the new world of the middle classes. Yet there was also a sense in some quarters that their heyday was over by 1900. In the first year of the new century the German writer Thomas Mann (1875–1955) published his great novel of upper-middle-class life, Buddenbrooks, in which a mercantile family gradually falls apart over the decades as its members abandon their core values and sink into self-indulgence and decadence in a process symbolized in the progressively worsening tooth decay suffered by the men of each generation.

Thomas Mann's book buddenbrooks.

The lengthy series of realist novels, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), published by the popular writer Émile Zola (1840–1902), charted the influence of hereditary weakness on a bourgeois family. Moral hypocrisy forms the core of Professor Unrat (1905) by Thomas Mann’s elder brother Heinrich (1871–1950), which satirizes the double standards of the outwardly respectable German professoriate. The middle classes, in all their variety, were still socially and in many ways also politically dominant at the beginning of the century, but increasingly they had to share their power with competitors lower down the social scale.

Other novels about the bourgeois at the end of the 19th century.

This was little more than the average earnings of most clerks, of whom there were said to be around 129,000 in England and Wales in 1871 but 461,000 in 1901. Before the age of the typewriter, theirs was a male profession, augmented by scribes, copyists and similar employees in banking, the law, insurance, and the lower ranks of the civil service. ‘Clerks as clerks,’ wrote one of them in response to a British inquiry about employment in 1870, ‘are at a discount. There are swarms of them glad to engage at £180 a year and less. Clerks as clerks never will be in a better position.’

The emerging of clerks as a profession.

As cities grew, and people crowded into them looking for work, getting fresh food in from the countryside and keeping it from going rotten became ever more difficult. Icehouses, storing blocks of ice imported from glaciers and snowfields in the mountains or the far north, were used only by the very wealthy. The Scottish engineer James Harrison (1816–93), based for most of his life in Australia, patented the first vapour-compression refrigeration machines in the 1850s, using them mainly to cool beer. It was not until 1911, however, that the first domestic refrigerators became available, manufactured by the General Electric Company in the USA. They sold for $1,000 each, twice the price of a motor car. Not surprisingly, the great mass of ordinary people had to do without them.

Invention of refrigerators.

In London skilled artisans looked down on the unskilled; and among the latter, shipworkers looked down on shore workers, and the permanently employed despised the casually hired. English workers felt superior to the Irish, just as in the Ruhr German workers looked down on Italians and Poles. These differences often reflected differences in earnings. In France in the late nineteenth century, glassblowers earned around 10 francs a day, whereas weavers only earned 1 franc 65 centimes. Yet such differences paled beside the gulf that existed between all these manual, waged workers on the one hand, and the far smaller number of the better off and the wealthy in the middle and upper classes on the other. The experience of poverty, oppression, social disadvantage and, in much of Europe for most of the period, lack of basic rights was common to all these workers and helped bind them together into a single social class, much as Marx had predicted.

Was Marx right here?