The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)
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The formation of a provisional national government on 26 September was followed on 4 October by a Belgian declaration of independence and then by the calling of a national Congress. Demonstrating the enduring influence of the American Revolution in European political thought, the Congress issued a ringing condemnation of the Dutch government for reducing Belgium to the status of a colony, accompanied by ‘the despotic imposition of a privileged language’ and ‘taxes, overwhelming in their amount, and still more in the manner in which they were apportioned’.
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The reactions of the Great Powers to this imbroglio were contradictory and confused. The Russians issued sabre-rattling declarations and mobilized their troops, while the south German states argued for non-intervention. The French, despite powerful voices urging a partition of Belgium, with the southern, French-speaking part falling to themselves, eventually took a back seat in view of the precarious situation of their own newly established government.
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the French government put its own stability above everything else, and this meant going along with whatever the British wanted to do. Besides, an independent Belgium would be a weaker anti-French buffer state than a powerful united Netherlands. Metternich, realizing that the Belgians could not be stopped in the long run, sent an ambassador to the inevitable conference in London with instructions to mobilize the Concert of Europe in favour of a moderate, monarchical and independent Belgium. Skilfully led by the newly appointed British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), the ...more
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Leopold had spent most of his life as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army, leading his cavalry with distinction against Napoleon’s forces at the Battle of Kulm in 1813 and ending his career just two years later at the age of twenty-five as a lieutenant-general. Although German, he was actually a British subject, having married the Prince Regent’s only legitimate offspring, Princess Charlotte (1796–1817), in 1816, an alliance that brought him British citizenship and the rank of field-marshal in the British Army and, some time later, official membership in the British Royal Family with the ...more
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Overcoming all these obstacles, Leopold was crowned King of Belgium in July 1831, marrying Louis-Philippe’s eldest daughter Louise-Marie the following year. This did not quite end the affair, since King Willem of the Netherlands proved obdurate and tried to involve the German Confederation early in 1831 when the Belgians invaded the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a member state of which he was titular head.
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Resentment in Holland boiled over, and Willem invaded Belgium on 2 August 1831. Leopold quickly called in a French army, which expelled the Dutch forces, leaving them still in charge of the fortress garrison in Antwerp.
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The stubborn Dutch were still refusing to leave Antwerp a year later, however, so in November 1832 the French invaded again and besieged the town, while the British Navy blockaded the river Scheldt to coerce the Dutch into surrender, which they did in December 1832. It was to take until 1839 before the outstanding issues were finally settled. Luxembourg, or rather its German-speaking eastern half, remained under the Dutch king until the succession of Queen Wilhelmina (1880–1962) to the Dutch throne in 1890 caused it to pass to the nearest male heir, since the Grand Duchy was governed by the ...more
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As the London conference declared in its protocol issued on 19 February 1831, Europe’s rights, derived from its obligation to preserve the international order, took precedence over those of individual states. Even Nicholas I was only prepared to take action as part of a general European intervention. This proved to be a major reason why the revolutions of 1830 did not develop into major conflicts or pose a serious threat to the social order.
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Meanwhile in Spain, the repressive regime of King Fernando VII continued unchanged into the early 1830s until the monarch succumbed to a fatal attack of gout in September 1833. With his infant daughter enthroned as Queen Isabella II (1830–1904), steered from behind the scenes by Fernando’s widow Maria Cristina (1806–78), the liberals were able to take advantage of the government’s weakness by forcing through a moderate liberal constitution in 1834.
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Everywhere in Germany liberal opponents of the Restoration were emboldened not only by events in Paris but even more, perhaps, by the revolution in Poland.
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In the capital in 1830, crowds objecting to the creation of the new, uniformed Metropolitan Police the previous year – itself a sign of increased anxieties about law and order – shouted slogans such as ‘No police! No Polignac!’
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Wellington’s intransigence brought his government down. A reforming ministry, led by the aristocratic Whigs, came into office towards the end of 1830, determined to defuse the escalating crisis before it caused an explosion.
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The new British government introduced a Reform Bill to get rid of scandals such as ‘rotten boroughs’, where depopulated villages sent one or even two deputies to the House of Commons, ‘pocket boroughs’ where the local grandee nominated the member, the effective lack of representation for new industrial towns such as Manchester or Birmingham, and the widespread corruption resulting from the public nature of voting and its continuation over a period of several days.
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As radical orators stoked the fires of popular outrage, the king agreed reluctantly to create enough new Whig peers to overcome the Lords’ resistance, and Wellington and his supporters caved in. The Bill was passed by both Houses of Parliament and became law in 1832, eliminating anomalies and abuses, but only extending the electorate by about 45 per cent, to just under 5 per cent of the population, in a reform comparable to parallel changes in the political systems of France and Belgium.
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In the 1820s the Turin chamber of commerce summed up the change by noting that the French Revolution had caused ‘a total confusion among the different classes’ in society: ‘Everyone dresses in the same manner, the noble cannot be distinguished from the plebeian, the merchant from the magistrate, the proprietor from the craftsman, the master from the servant; at least in appearances, the woeful principle that created the revolutions is regrettably maintained.’ The genie was out of the bottle, and it was impossible to put it back.
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Religious faith, human instinct and emotion, tradition, morality, and a new, self-consciously historical sense of the past, were to replace Enlightenment rationalism as the basis of the social and political order.
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In this conservative view, a society governed by traditional hierarchies was the only guarantor of order. Reason was the enemy: only faith and feeling could be relied upon.
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Russian noble landowners frequently lived away from their estates. They spent much of their time and money in St Petersburg or in French resorts and central European spas, running up enormous debts at the gambling table. Even if they were not indebted or mortgaged up to the hilt, they often saw their estates as little more than sources of income to sustain their lifestyle in the big city.
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(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.
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Across many western and central parts of Europe the formal institution of serfdom had come to an end under the egalitarian impact of the French Revolution of 1789, including Baden, Bavaria, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Schleswig-Holstein, Swedish Pomerania and Switzerland. In Württemberg, and in Latvia and Estonia, it was abolished in 1817. But in other areas it remained in force, including the Kingdoms of Hanover and Saxony, where the institution of serfdom was not abolished until the early 1830s; in Austria, Croatia and Hungary; in Prussia, where it continued in a weakened form until ...more
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In Bulgaria serfdom was not abrogated in practice until 1880, and in remote Iceland, where about a quarter of the population worked in effect as serfs, it lasted until the legal compulsion for anyone without land to provide labour for a farmer was formally ended in 1894. Only in Bosnia, seized by Austria-Hungary from the Ottomans in 1878 and formally annexed in 1908, did serfdom remain until the First World War;
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Popular resentment in the Bosnian countryside at this failure to end serfdom stored up a legacy of bitterness that was to find dramatic expression in 1914. Standing trial for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863–1914), heir to the Austrian throne, the young Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918) declared: ‘I have seen our people being steadily ruined. I am a peasant’s son and know what goes on in the villages. This is why I meant to take my revenge and I regret nothing.’ The shadow cast by serfdom across nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe was long indeed.
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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. Because serfdom had evolved gradually over the centuries and depended for its implementation on local or regional custom, it appeared in many thousands of variants that make it difficult to generalize about the way it functioned. Fundamentally, however, it obliged the peasant ...more
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In the Habsburg Monarchy it was estimated that the average serf farmer paid 17 per cent of his income to the state and 24 per cent to the seigneur in money, labour or produce, totalling over 40 per cent altogether. This left very little room for keeping the family going even in good times, and almost none at all for improving its
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Encompassed as they were by a web of rights and duties, serfs could still be bought and sold along with the land they rented or owned. If the seigneur sold an estate, the serfs on it passed to the new owner. The state often gave tacit approval to the practice of selling serfs on their own without land, as implied in a Russian law that banned the use of the hammer at public auctions of serfs, or in a regulation of 1841 that made it illegal to sell parents and their unmarried children separately from one another.
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The first and most important of these was the growing discontent of the serfs themselves. Especially during times of hardship they found the exactions imposed on them unbearable.
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In Russia historians have counted nearly 2,000 violent peasant disturbances between 1826 and 1840, with troops called out to restore order in 381 of these cases. The number of disturbances increased dramatically after the Crimean War (1854–6), as serfs began to anticipate a measure of emancipation, with riots spreading rapidly between 1857 and 1861, necessitating the use of troops on 903 occasions.
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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.
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International factors could also play a role. Thus, for example, the Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War in 1856 led to the emancipation of the serfs in the Danubian Principalities not least because Britain and France wanted a viable state – Romania, created by the unification of the two Principalities in 1858 – to act as a buffer against Russian expansionism.
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The peasants, it was generally if rather inaccurately assumed, were conservative, pious, monarchist, anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, and would form the ultimate bulwark of order in the face of the liberal advance. Therefore, acceding to their demands for the ending of serfdom could be seen as constituting a vital element in the preservation of the existing political order. So there were political forces of many kinds acting in favour of emancipation.
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In the Habsburg Monarchy the value of servile labour was set at one-third of that of hired wage labour, an indication of how little effort serfs were thought to put into their work.
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In some areas, such as Württemberg, Baden, Romania or the Habsburg Monarchy, the state helped the peasants with their redemption payments, even meeting them in full in Habsburg-ruled Hungary and Bukovina. Usually, however, the former serfs had to bear the entire burden themselves. In Romania the instalments had to be paid over a period of fifteen years, in Saxony twenty-five, in Russia forty-nine, so that redemption payments to the tsarist authorities resulting from the Emancipation Edict of 1861 were not scheduled to end until the year 1910.
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In Russia peasants on state land were given limited title to it, later converted into freehold in return for a redemption fee payable according to a schedule that envisaged payments on an annual basis all the way up to 1931. In parts of Germany, peasants were still making redemption payments in the early 1920s.
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The scale of these measures was vast. In East-Elbian Prussia, 480,000 peasants became free proprietors in the wake of the emancipation edicts of the early nineteenth century. Even in a small country such as Romania, more than 400,000 peasants received ownership of their land, and another 51,000 households were given land enough for a house and garden. Nearly 700,000 peasants in Poland became landowners. In the German and Slav provinces of the Habsburg Empire, the emancipation involved more than two and a half million peasant households indemnifying nearly 55,000 landowners for the loss of 39 ...more
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Nevertheless, everywhere the measures were put into effect relatively quickly, with a minimum of fuss. In principle this was the greatest single act of emancipation and reform in Europe during the whole of the nineteenth century.
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The lords lost their exclusive hunting and fishing rights, and were no longer able to hunt on other people’s land. Seigneurial monopolies were ended, though the sole right to distil and sell liquor was retained in the Habsburg Monarchy until the end of the 1860s. The feudal status of the lords came to an end, though not the social deference that came with it.
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Prince Alfred zu Windischgrätz (1787–1862), a large landowner and leading military figure in the Habsburg Monarchy, protested to Emperor Franz Joseph about the emancipation in 1850. ‘The most outstanding of communists,’ he declared, ‘has not yet dared to demand what Your Majesty’s government has carried through.’ Such extreme views were less common in areas where large landowners already farmed for profit.
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In all, an estimated 11,000 people were killed in what was the largest and most violent peasant uprising in Europe anywhere in the period between 1815 and 1914.
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A more thoroughgoing liberal revolution in 1868, bringing about the deposition of Queen Isabella II and the proclamation of a republic in 1875 after the brief interlude of Amadeo I’s unsuccessful reign, was the signal for peasants across the south to occupy and divide seigneurial and common lands. Illegal grazing, occupations, theft, and all kinds of low-level agrarian protest rumbled on in parts of Spain beyond the end of the century.
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Brigandage was such a major problem in the 1860s that the newly created Italian state sent a large military force to the south, making up at one point two-thirds of the entire Italian Army, during the so-called ‘brigand wars’.
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Sicily was brought under control, but peasant discontent was considerably more widespread than this, and far from appeased; it found expression in the revolt of the Siclian Fasci at the beginning of the 1890s. Numbering 300,000 sharecroppers, agricultural labourers and small farmers, they named themselves Fasci, ‘bundles’, because while anyone can break a single stick nobody can snap a whole bundle. They mingled socialist ideas with religious millenarianism,
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In view of the Church’s inability to deal with the mounting problem of pauperism, secular voluntary associations across Europe were playing a growing role in poor relief.
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Orphans and the elderly and infirm were expected to be cared for by their families, or by more distant relations. 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.
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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. Not surprisingly, the New Poor Law was widely criticized as a denial of traditional English rights.
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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.
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By far the most important of the new crops imported into Europe after the colonization of America, however, was the potato. It took a long time to find acceptance among the European peasantry. In Russia in the 1830s, peasants called potatoes ‘apples of the Devil’, and government attempts to make state serfs plant them sparked a series of violent disturbances known as the ‘potato revolts’. In 1834 the English radical William Cobbett (1763–1835) dubbed the potato ‘this nasty, filthy hog feed’, while in one French district, the Sologne, it was reported ten years later that the local inhabitants ...more
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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. In 1845 potato crops collapsed by a catastrophic 87 per cent in Belgium, 71 per cent in the Netherlands, 50 per cent or more in Denmark and the south-west German state of Württemberg, and 30 per cent in Ireland.
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Population growth in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands came to a standstill in the late 1840s, as people died from malnutrition-related diseases, succumbed to epidemics (notably cholera in 1849, and malaria on the Dutch coast), fled to the towns, and stopped having children.
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The situation was far worse in Ireland, for a variety of reasons in addition to the population’s uniquely heavy dependency on the potato. Poor relief was not decentralized as it was in Belgium. Moreover, unlike in Scotland, absentee landlords had little direct contact with their tenants and were not bound to them by ties of nationality, nor were they able to call on industrial and financial wealth to underpin any charitable activities. During the crisis, mortality rose in Ireland by a staggering 330 per cent, compared to a more modest but still grim rise of 40 per cent in Flanders.
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The most important of these were the Corn Laws, which protected British agriculture by favouring exports while imposing extremely steep import duties on grain from outside the country. Their existence reflected the domination of landowning, grain-producing aristocrats in British politics, and they were not going to abandon them without a fight. They made it difficult if not impossible to import food to relieve the situation in Ireland.