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

by Richard J. Evans

The government of Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) in London announced in January 1846 its intention to repeal the Corn Laws, a triumph for a lengthy campaign waged by the liberal, mostly middle-class proponents of free trade; but the passage of the Bill in June 1846 came too late for Ireland, since it only provided for a gradual reduction of import duties until their final abolition in 1849. By this time the damage had been done.

Underlying the whole crisis in Ireland was a widespread feeling in the British political and social elite that the Irish had brought their fate upon themselves by being lazy and having too many children (precisely the complaint made by Malthus about the supposed effects of the Old Poor Law). They had a fatal tendency, one critic declared, to ‘loiter about upon the land’, doing nothing.

Altogether the Irish potato famine killed a million people, or around a fifth of the entire population of the island. This made it the greatest of all European famines in the nineteenth century. In absolute terms it stood with the famine of 1816–17, but most deaths then had been from epidemic diseases, notably bubonic plague in the Balkans, which can best be seen as a side effect of the harvest failure.

In Ireland, uniquely, most deaths occurred as a result of actual starvation. And this was not the end of it. There were longer-term effects as well. Many children and adolescents who survived suffered from stunted growth: in the Netherlands, for instance, the proportion of army recruits under 5 feet 2 inches tall increased by 20 per cent in the years after 1847.

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Britain had forged ahead economically, leaving the European Continent far behind. Per capita industrial production in Britain in 1830 was almost twice that of Switzerland or Belgium, more than twice that of France, and three times that of the Habsburg Empire, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark or the Netherlands.

Britain’s industrial advantage over the rest of the world was not the product of British ingenuity or inventiveness or other domestic factors. More than anything else, the explosion of cotton production in Britain was driven by world trade. In 1814, Britain was already exporting more cotton cloth than it sold at home; by 1850 the disparity had increased,

British domination of the seas guaranteed a virtual monopoly for cotton sales to Latin America, which took a quarter more cotton cloth than the European Continent in 1820 and nearly half as much again twenty years later.

Cotton products made up nearly half the value of all British exports between 1816 and 1850. The growth of a new industrial economy in Britain after 1815 was not just the product of scientific or technological superiority, it was also the product of global empire.

Early industrial cotton mills were dangerous places. Workers suffered from bronchitis, indigestion, varicose veins and deafness, caused respectively by working long hours in an environment filled with fluff and dust, by standing for lengthy periods of time, and by spending their days amid the enormous noise of machinery.

Hair or clothing could be caught between belt and shaft, pulling a worker in and twirling her around the shaft until she was beaten to death; shuttles could fly off the loom, spiking a worker in the face. Workers could be caught in machinery, like the young ‘scavenger’ Patrick Noon of Stalybridge, whose job was to clean the floor underneath a spinning mule; in March 1846 his head became trapped in a space only four inches wide, and the whirling machinery flayed the skin from his head, revealing the bone.

In 1829 over 40 per cent of employees in Ghent cotton mills were female, a figure that increased to 48 per cent in the highly mechanized Voortman mill. Male workers in the mill actually went on strike in 1832 in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent a further increase in the employment of women.

The industrial revolution was not confined to textile manufacture, but was in the longer run of even greater significance in the production of coal and iron. Here what marked out Britain from the rest of Europe in the industrial sphere was above all its early use of coal as a source of energy and its continued domination of coal production well into the second half of the century. Between 1815 and 1830 coal output in Britain virtually doubled, from 16 million tons a year to 30 million. As late as 1860, Britain was still producing more than twice as much coal as the whole of the rest of Europe put together.

The need to pump water out of coalmines was a key factor in the development and refinement of the steam engine, but the actual cutting of coal from the seam was done by hand.

The growth of the coal industry was paralleled by rapid expansion and technological change in ironmaking. Here, innovation was driven by the high cost of charcoal in the absence of abundant supplies of wood. In Britain, too many trees had been felled to build the ships of the Royal Navy and provide land for ploughing and pasturage, so a new method had to be found.

In 1750, France and Sweden had dominated European iron production, while the British imported much of what they needed. By 1860, Britain was producing 60 per cent of all pig iron manufactured in Europe, basing the industry around iron ore and coal mines in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and other areas of the country.

The long capitalist industrial tradition of the region, its rich natural resources, the lack of a strong agrarian political interest, and the concentration of banking and financial resources, strengthened by heavy government investment, all made Ghent and the southern part of Belgium the pioneering centre of industrialization on the Continent, not only in textiles but also in coal and iron.

The resulting Coal Mines Act of 1842 and the Factory Act of 1844 established an inspectorate and banned women and children from working underground, continuing initiatives begun in the previous decade. The 1844 legislation reduced the limit to nine hours a day for nine-to-thirteen-year-olds. It required guard rails to be put around equipment. Owners could be fined if a worker was injured by unsafe machinery.

More significant still was the lead taken by Prussia in dismantling onerous tariff barriers, first through a reform passed in 1818 and then through the German Customs Union founded in 1834, soon to be joined by South German

Industrial growth depended not least on cheap, rapid and effective means of communication, carrying raw materials to the factories and finished goods to the markets. In the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, major improvements had been made to Europe’s roads and waterways, though their impact was uneven.

By mid-century the French were investing more than 13 per cent of their gross domestic capital formation in railways, while the railway shares issued in Prussia from 1845 to 1849 amounted to the equivalent of a third of the national budget each year. This had become, in other words, the leading sector of the economy.

While they may have ensured that high standards were maintained, however, the guilds’ ingrained respect for tradition meant that they had no interest in pioneering new methods, least of all if these pointed towards producing for a mass market. By keeping out interlopers they prevented the development of free trade and free enterprise.

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.

Just as Cabet invented the word ‘communism’, so Fourier invented the word ‘feminism’.

An atheist, he replaced the concept of God with the idea of the ‘World-Spirit’ of rationality, which he believed was working out its purposes through history in a process he called ‘dialectical’, in which one historical condition would be replaced by its antithesis, and then the two would combine to create a final synthesis. As he became more conservative, Hegel began to regard the state of Prussia after 1815 as a ‘synthesis’ requiring no further alteration.

But his core idea of ineluctable historical progress held a considerable appeal for radicals in many parts of Europe.

Alexander Herzen, author of Who is to Blame? (1845–6), one of the first Russian social novels, later remembered, Hegel’s writings were discussed deep into the night.

Hegel’s dialectic sharpened vague perceptions of the differences between East and West and forced Russian intellectuals to take sides.

However, Hegel’s philosophy of history convinced others that Russia was on a preordained trajectory towards a liberated future by acquiring the freedoms common in the West.

But it ended with a chilling prophecy of the violent, anarchist extremism of which Bakunin was the founding father: ‘The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.’ These sentiments expressed the influence of a group of German philosophers known as the Young Hegelians, whose atheism led to their expulsion by the pious King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV (1795–1861),

It was also in Paris that Bakunin met another Hegelian, Karl Marx (1818–83), who was to be his rival in the small and intense world of revolutionary activists and thinkers for most of the rest of his life. The two men disliked each other on first sight. Marx, as Bakunin later recalled, ‘called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right. I called him morose, vain and treacherous; and I too was right.’

It is common to define nationalism as the demand for a state respondent to the sovereign will of a particular people, but many nationalists in the first half of the nineteenth century stopped well short of embracing this radical principle. Some sought to free their own nation from a foreign yoke.

But most other nationalists of this type only wanted greater autonomy within a larger political structure, or simply the official recognition of their language and culture. In the Habsburg Monarchy, distinctive national groups like the Czechs and Hungarians fell into this category; none actively campaigned for the dissolution of the monarchy itself.

A second type of nationalism sought to bring together a single nation split into a number of different independent states – notably German and Italian – and here, the demand from the beginning was for complete sovereignty.

It would also be unwise to read back into the 1830s and 1840s too much of the later aggressiveness and egoism of European nationalism. Giuseppe Mazzini, the best-known European nationalist of his age, believed in a United States of Europe, composed of free and independent peoples in a voluntary association with each other.

Under the leadership of Metternich, the Habsburg Empire continued indeed to be the major obstacle that lay in the path of nationalist movements – in Italy, Bohemia, Germany, Hungary and – along with Russia and Prussia – in Poland.

for thirty years, from 1815 to 1845, Austrian dominance in Europe was unquestionable.

In the Habsburg Monarchy, Metternich’s refusal to relax the censorship rules in 1845 had no effect since nationalist and liberal literature poured in from outside, including French, English and German newspapers.

In Switzerland, reforms passed by moderate liberals whose strength was in the towns and cities of the Protestant cantons ran into fierce objections from the largely Catholic, more rural parts of the Confederation. When the liberals passed a centralist constitution and began closing Catholic monasteries, the conservative cantons reacted by forming a ‘special league’ in 1843, the Sonderbund, in violation of the Federal Treaty of 1815. Both sides began to mobilize, and in November 1847 hostilities commenced. Federal troops captured the Sonderbund stronghold of Fribourg and installed a liberal government, which promptly expelled the Jesuits, as liberal and reforming governments everywhere were wont to do. In the Battle of Gislikon, the last pitched battle ever to involve the Swiss Army, thirty-seven soldiers were killed and one hundred wounded.

What impressed European liberals was the ability of the British political system to avoid revolution through timely concessions to liberal demands. In power from 1832 to 1841, the Whigs passed legislation reforming the Poor Law (1834), reshaping the criminal law, and creating a new, uniform system of municipal government based on elected councils (the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835).

When the Whigs were finally ousted in the General Election of 1841, a new kind of Tory came to power as Prime Minister – the efficient, hard-working Sir Robert Peel, who as Home Secretary under both Lord Liverpool (1770–1828) and the Duke of Wellington had simplified the criminal law and famously, in 1829, established London’s blue-uniformed Metropolitan Police Force, popularly dubbed ‘Bobbies’ or ‘Peelers’. Reticent, undemonstrative, upright and rationalist in character and approach, Peel was nonetheless animated by a powerful Evangelical conscience – one which, for example, had caused him to oppose equal rights for Catholics in the 1820s. Peel’s administration set up a uniform currency with notes issued by the Bank of England.

Peel also put the national finances in order by introducing an income tax, grudgingly accepted by the political class.

Unlike the Jacobins or the Cato Street conspirators or the Utopian Socialists, the Chartists believed in the parliamentary system, but they wanted the House of Commons to be elected on a democratic vote with a secret ballot and equal electoral districts.

Chartism was undercut by an improvement in the economy and by Peel’s demonstration through his reforms of the integrity of the political Establishment. Moderate liberals, incorporated both in the English Whigs and in Peel’s reformist Tories, had clearly seen off the democrats and radicals for the time being.

In Britain, by contrast, the electorate was already proportionately larger even before the reform of 1832 (3.2 per cent of the British population as against 0.5 per cent of the French), and the fear of revolution, sparked in London by events in Paris two years before, had brought about a substantial widening of the electorate that for many years defused the campaign for democracy.

The first sign of a renewal of revolutionary violence was in Poland. The crushing of Polish autonomy by Russia in the early 1830s had driven many Polish nationalists abroad, where the national-democratic ideologies and secret societies of the post-Napoleonic era focused their energies and gave them a purpose.

While 1789 was in everybody’s minds during these events, the revolution of 1848 differed from its predecessor in many respects. Most obvious was its European dimension. In the 1790s the French revolutionaries had spread their ideas across large swathes of the Continent by force of arms. In 1848 they did not need to do this; revolutions broke out in many different countries almost simultaneously. A large part of the reason for this lay in the vastly improved state that communications had reached by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Improved rates of literacy went along with a huge increase in the number of urban-industrial workers to provide a ready market for revolutionary ideas. Industrialization and the spread of capitalist institutions, compounding the Continent-wide economic crisis of the late 1840s, meant that distress and discontent impacted on the whole of Europe, not just on relatively isolated areas. Thus the French revolution of 1848 was paralleled by similar upheavals elsewhere.

The ousting of Metternich, perhaps more than any other event, signalled the profound breadth and depth of the upheaval. He had succeeded, more or less, in keeping the lid on protest and revolution for more than thirty years. Now the lid had been blown off in an explosion of popular rage.

These events put enormous pressure on Pope Pius IX to join the war against Austria. The Pope sent an armed force to the northern border of the Papal States, where it was joined by 10,000 young Roman men, inflamed by nationalist passion. Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany was forced to contribute 8,000 troops, and King Ferdinando Carlo of Naples reluctantly sent a naval force to break the Austrian blockade of Venice,

Safely away from the capital, Ferdinand issued a proclamation condemning the actions of an ‘anarchical faction’ and calling for resistance; or rather, it was issued for him, since, though not unintelligent, he was incapable of ruling. He had a severe speech impediment, and suffered up to twenty epileptic fits a day (he had five when he tried to consummate his marriage, and not surprisingly, had no children). One of his few known coherent remarks was a reply to his cook, who had told him that he could not have apricot dumplings because apricots were out of season: ‘I’m the Emperor,’ Ferdinand was said to have replied, ‘and I want dumplings!’