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Seeking to create a coherent and centralized medium-sized European state, Willem discriminated against the Catholics who formed the majority in Brussels and most other parts of the region, forcing them to pay higher taxes, making them contribute to the upkeep of Protestant schools, and denying them proper representation in the central administration.
Nobody had asked people in Brussels whether they wanted to be ruled by the Dutch; now they were making their views felt, and their answer was clearly no.
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.
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 Salic Law, which banned succession through the female hire.
French remained the common language of educated elites, still used as the lingua franca of European diplomacy, and news spread by travellers, journalists, diplomats and traders.
She had become the ruler of a country that years of conflict had plunged into deep indebtedness and renewed subservience, this time economic, to the British.
While living in Italy, Louis-Napoleon had joined the carbonari and taken part in a plot to seize power in Rome, easily unmasked by the authorities.
Hanover, still ruled by the British monarch,
Revolution here brought together different levels of the social order: it had left the smoke-filled rooms of Freemasons and conspirators, come out into the open, and was taking the road of legal and constitutional reform, not that of violent upheaval.
In Switzerland an ideology of freedom had provided legitimacy for the self-assertion of a Confederation of autonomous cantons in defiance of the Holy Roman Empire since the sixteenth century; this sense of a separate national identity was cemented by resistance to Napoleon’s curbing of independence and the enforced conscription of young Swiss men for his armies.
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’.
‘The French Revolution and the doings of Napoleon,’ a Greek bandit was heard to say, ‘opened the eyes of the world.’ They made it ‘more difficult to rule the people’.
Thinkers like Chateaubriand, who had been prompted by the excesses of the revolutionary era to convert back to Catholicism after initially sharing in the rational scepticism of the Enlightenment, saw in Christianity the faith that alone could guarantee contentment and subservience to authority.
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.
What was destroyed almost everywhere, apart from in the great imperial states of central and eastern Europe, was the principle of absolutism.
Above all, however, there was one major social force that was almost entirely absent from the revolutionary stage in 1830: the peasantry.
By Purlevsky’s time, European Russia contained the vast majority of serfs who lived on the Continent.
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.’
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.
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.
In Romania similarly the Crown, in its determination to create a loyal peasantry as a counterweight to the nobility, promised every former serf some land, though the promise was never fully honoured.
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.
Legally prescribed social distinctions now came to an effective end. Encrusted status and privilege had been swept away and every adult male was now in almost every respect equal before the law and free to dispose over his person and his property. The last significant legal vestiges of the society of social orders assailed by the French Revolution of 1789 had now left the stage of history.
By 1851, 68 per cent of French peasants were independent farmers.
The main problem was that emancipation did little to improve agricultural production in Russia.
Peasants everywhere considered that unfarmed land was communal property, so they paid no attention to the landlords’ enclosure of forests.
Encouraged by the leading minister Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin (1862–1911), a new class of substantial peasant farmers began to emerge in the following years, the famous kulaks later so reviled and persecuted under Stalin.
Rural protest coalesced around the figure of King Fernando’s younger brother Carlos (1788–1855), who rejected the 1830 abolition of the Salic Law and the accession of Fernando’s daughter Isabella II (1830–1904), a mere infant, in 1833.
By the time of the First World War, much of southern Europe too had evolved into a rural wage-labour economy; but poverty and exploitation had already driven hundreds of thousands to emigrate to the New World.
The great exception was Britain, where fully 50 per cent of people lived in towns in 1850, the consequence of the rapid growth of the industrial economy.
The typical European for most of the century was a peasant living on and from the land.
By far the most important fertilizer in the first half of the century was guano, or seabird dung, which had accumulated over millennia in enormous mountains on the Chincha islands off the coast of Peru, where the arid climate prevented the nitrates they contained from being dissolved by rainwater.
After achieving independence from Spain in the 1820s, Peru needed new sources of income, and guano exports started to provide it from the early 1840s onwards. Chinese coolies were imported to excavate the mountainous deposits, while Peruvian merchants signed export contracts with British shippers. This inaugurated something of an economic boom in Peru, the so-called Guano Age, which only came to an end in the 1870s as artificial fertilizers began to take over. In Europe it helped achieve a sharp increase in productivity in market-oriented agriculture.
On a visit to the main prison in St Petersburg in 1837, Tsar Nicholas I was shocked to find beggars mingling with common criminals, and he set up a Supreme Committee for Differentiation and Care of Beggars in St Petersburg, as well as a similar institution in Moscow.
In the period 1829 to 1854 an average of 25 per cent of the entire population of Amsterdam was in receipt of poor relief on a regular basis. Some 90 per cent of the relief consisted of work. Three out of every four paupers were still supported by the Reformed Church, as was also the case in the bustling port of Rotterdam, where in 1859 some seventeen out of every hundred people were in receipt of poor relief.
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.
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.
By far the most important of the new crops imported into Europe after the colonization of America, however, was the potato.
Potatoes gained a particular importance in Ireland, where rural overpopulation made their intensive cultivation irresistibly attractive. By the early 1840s, nearly a third of arable land on the island was devoted to growing potatoes, a proportion more than twice that of the next most potato-friendly country, Belgium. Daily per capita consumption of potatoes in Ireland was estimated at more than two kilos, meaning that many people were effectively using it as their only means of nutrition.
Local and national elites in Belgium had a strong interest in overcoming the crisis, especially in view of the very recent advent of national independence.
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.
Altogether the Irish potato famine killed a million people, or around a fifth of the entire population of the island.
Witte was supposed to be a modernizer, but opinions such as these indicated a deep lack of understanding of Russian society that was to prove fatal in the end for the regime he served.
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.
Linen and wool had long formed the basis of the textile industry. What was new in the late eighteenth century was the arrival of cotton, previously used mainly for printed fabric or calico, for mass consumption.
But very quickly steam became the key source of power. This was the decisive breakthrough. From now on, society was free from the tyranny of the elements and the limitations of human, elemental and animal strength in the creation of industrial power.
Of course, it is indeed odd for a captain of the hussars to take three hours of instruction from not just mechanics but their assistants, in both theory and practice, and to be covered in wood oil in the morning and eau du Rasumovsky in the evening.
A case in point was the celebrated German iron and steel firm Krupp, whose owner Alfred Krupp (1812–87) (his English first name was a deliberate homage to English industrial superiority) travelled to England in 1838 (lightly disguised as ‘Herr Schropp’). He returned to Germany but every now and then sent agents over to England to learn the latest factory designs and industrial techniques.
