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In 1815 the first steamboat appeared on the Neva at St Petersburg, and by the 1820s steamboats could be seen on the Volga and Dnieper, but they remained uncommon until around 1900, and most barges were pulled by horses on a riverbank towpath, or indeed by teams of men (the source of the famous ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’, which became popular across Europe).
But on the Continent railway-building preceded industrialization, and so either the investment had to come from the British or it had to be provided by the state.
German states also saw railways as a way of expressing their statehood, centring the network on their respective capital cities and ignoring links with the outside world;
Matters were made worse by the fact that they were often drunk; gangmasters were paid a commission by brewers to supply beer to their men, and even one British contractor who refused to allow the sale of beer at the workings conceded that ‘a man has a right to bring a gallon with him if he likes in the morning’.
Travelling by train at night in the late 1830s, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) thought it the ‘likest thing to a Faust’s flight on the Devil’s mantle; or as if some huge steam night-bird had flung you on its back, and was sweeping through some unknown space with you’.
This was a vital development that was to provide an essential communicative basis for the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848, which would not have occurred in so many countries virtually simultaneously without it.
Guildsmen had a large range of ceremonies and ‘mysteries’ with which they cemented their corporate identity; frequently they wore a particular kind of clothing, amounting almost to a uniform, that could distinguish a mason from a carpenter, a draper from a haberdasher.
When he had satisfied the master that he could make a good-quality product, the apprentice was given a letter or certificate from his guild that advanced him to the grade of journeyman, in which he was obliged to travel for up to three years, seeking work from masters in other towns and gaining as wide a range of technical experience as he could. Finally, the journeyman would be obliged to produce a ‘masterpiece’, a complicated product demanding advanced skills in his trade.
By keeping out interlopers they prevented the development of free trade and free enterprise.
The decisive blow had come with the French Revolution, when guilds had been formally abolished in France.
Only in luxury goods did guilds retain any influence.
This, not the peasantry or the landless labourer class, was the reservoir of labour that early industrialization tapped.
The more the numbers of guild artisans grew, the poorer they became, and the more the primary purpose of the guilds, to ensure a decent living for all their members, was undermined.
Apprentices rebelled against the tyranny of the journeymen, while the journeymen themselves began to abandon the tour de France as railways robbed it of its excitement and industrialization undermined what was left of the guilds.
The future lay with trade unions.
‘A new epoch of world history is beginning,’ noted the poet Heinrich Heine on the occasion of the opening of the railway line from Orléans to Paris in 1843, ‘and our generation can be proud to say it was there.’
The ‘social question’ of the era was dramatized in a number of ‘social novels’, of which one of the most influential was Sybil: Or the Two Nations, published in 1845 by the Tory politician and future British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
‘wretched tenements . . . with the water streaming down the walls, the light distinguished through the roof, with no hearth even in winter’, fronted by ‘open drains full of animal and vegetable refuse’ or ‘spreading into stagnant pools’.
Lamenting the death of traditional paternalistic relations between the classes, Disraeli saw British society disintegrating into ‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy . . . THE RICH AND THE POOR’.
Social criticism permeated the popular novels of Charles Dickens, most notably Oliver Twist, with its portrayal of the neglected pauper boy drifting into the sinister London criminal underworld,
In the first half of the century, the most popular of all the books written about poverty was, however, not an earnest social tract, but The Mysteries of Paris. It was written by Eugène Sue (1804–57), who served as a military surgeon in the French invasion of Spain in 1823, and was present at the Battle of Navarino in 1827 during the Greek War of Independence.
The worker was of course a German nobleman in disguise, one of many ‘mysteries’ that permeated the story; the novel pilloried the indifference of the upper classes to the plight of the workers.
The French novelist Léon Cladel (1834–92) called the peasants ‘quadrupeds on two feet . . . Greedy, envious, hypocritical, crafty, cynical, cowardly, and brutal’. Russian literature is full of complaints about the dullness of the muzhik, mired in drink and superstition, hostile to any kind of agricultural improvement, stubbornly sticking to tried and tested methods of cultivation and suspicious of anything newfangled.
Her daughter Aline married Clovis Gauguin, a republican journalist, in 1846, but he died en route to Peru three years later. Their son Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), who stayed with Aline in Peru for seven years, supported by her family, later became an artist whose own global peregrinations perhaps owed something to his upbringing in two continents.
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.
founded by Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), who had had a career more adventurous than most: he had served under Washington at Yorktown in 1781, narrowly escaped the guillotine during the Revolution of 1789, and been incarcerated as a lunatic with the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) at the asylum in Charenton.
Saint-Simon’s secretary was Auguste Comte (1798–1857), later the founder of sociology, author of Industry (1816–18) and Of the Industrial System (1821–2).
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’.
The Welshman Robert Owen (1771–1858), born in humble circumstances, rose to become a factory manager and assumed control of the New Lanark cotton mill in Glasgow after marrying the owner’s daughter and organizing a consortium to buy him out. 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.
However, few of the Utopians had roots in the artisanal world, let alone the world of the new industrial working class.
Thrown out of work in 1830, Proudhon embarked on a career as a writer, putting forward in a long series of books and pamphlets what he called ‘a people’s philosophy’. In his book What is Property?, published in 1840, he famously answered the question posed in the title by declaring: ‘Property is theft’.
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.
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.
Born on the western fringes of Germany, in the small, declining provincial town of Trier, in the Rhineland, Karl Marx gravitated towards the Young Hegelians at the University of Berlin, one of whom, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), was the source of Marx’s famous statement ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world: the point is to change it.’
Socializing with radicals in Paris also brought Marx for the first time into contact with Friedrich Engels (1820–95), who became his lifelong collaborator.
More immediately, however, in the 1830s and 1840s, it was the ideas of nationalism that had the greatest and most disruptive impact.
Soon the members of Young Italy numbered thousands, inspired by Mazzini’s tireless campaigning, his incessant pamphleteering, and the fact that he was apparently the ‘most beautiful being, male or female’ that people who encountered him said they had ever seen.
Working through correspondence, conducted after 1837 from London, Mazzini created individual national movements under the aegis of Young Italy: Young Austria, Young Bohemia, Young Ukraine, Young Tyrol and even Young Argentina came briefly into being.
insurrections were unlikely to succeed by themselves, and that the formation of secret societies was not leading anywhere: nationalists needed a programme and a formal organization, equipped with a propaganda apparatus and aimed at securing democratic support.
But change in Italy seemed to be heralded by the election of Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti (1792–1878) as Pope Pius IX on 16 June 1846.
In 1837 the lawyer and journalist Lajos Kossuth (1802–94), who published Hungary’s first parliamentary reports, was arrested for sedition. This sparked a serious crisis, as Kossuth’s supporters in the Diet forced Metternich to climb down and release him and other imprisoned liberals in May 1840.
For the first time in military history, horse-drawn ambulances arrived on a battlefield and took away the wounded.
Seven professors at Göttingen University, including the brothers Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), compilers of the famous folk tales, refused to swear the oath and were dismissed from their posts.
Soon she had become the king’s mistress.
The model polity that inspired such men was the liberal state in Britain,
Sir Robert Peel,
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.
An Austro-Russian Treaty signed on 16 November 1846 abolished the status of Cracow, the centre of the revolt, as a free city and merged it into Galicia.
The centres of the events of 1848 were all in areas affected by British industrial competition, which was undercutting continental manufactures.
