The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans

Of the 2,280 prosecutions undertaken in France during the so-called ‘White Terror’ of the post-Napoleonic years in France, the vast majority concerned offences such as enforcing lower grain prices, preventing shipments of grain, resisting tax collectors, or cutting down trees in privately owned forests. Counter-revolutionary politics played only a marginal role.

Not convinced that these are apolitical crimes.

In China and Madagascar, Napoleon was worshipped by some as a god.

?

Wherever the threat of revolution seemed imminent, the great powers of Europe were now clearly prepared to join forces to quash it before it became a reality.

Everywhere that Napoleon ruled he had replaced encrusted custom and privilege with rationality and uniformity.

the assertion of British sea power in the drive to open up mercantilist-controlled areas of South America to free trade;

Napoleon reintroduced slavery into Haiti after its abolition by the rebel leader Toussaint L’Ouverture (c.1743–1803), who was himself inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution.

The wars, in the end, were seen as being fought not between nations but between regimes, even, in a way, between ideologies, which led a separate existence from nations and peoples.

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

Even more than their counterparts in Britain, Spain or Italy, the Russian Decembrists, for all their egalitarian ideals, were largely cut off from the rest of society, aristocratic in origin but democratic in spirit, looking to broaden the basis of politics but unable to gain the support that would enable them to do so.

where a public sphere had emerged in the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the involvement of civilian members of the educated classes – lawyers, doctors, teachers, merchants – in revolutionary activity was greater than in Russia.

What the rebels really needed was to rouse the peasantry, that is, the overwhelming mass of the population. Some of them realized this. But an attempt to introduce land reform into the legislature disappeared without trace in the face of the indifference of the landowning majority.

committed supporters of the political principles of the French Revolution also backed the Greeks, including, most notably, the ex-slaves running the Caribbean republic of Haiti, who had already formally recognized Greek independence in 1821.

Metternich, for his part, described Kapodistrias as ‘a complete and utter fool, a miracle of wrong-headedness … He lives in a world to which our minds are often transported by a bad nightmare.’

Where ordinary people in town and country did rise up against established authority, it was usually in their own interests, and they seldom shared the ideals of national freedom and liberal reform proclaimed by the educated revolutionaries.

Prioritising their class interests over ideals? Or prioritising their own class interests over another class's interests (the latter being portrayed as universal ideals).

Charles sought to bolster his prestige by declaring war on Algeria, nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire, where the governor had caused a diplomatic incident by hitting the French ambassador with a fly-whisk in a fit of pique. Not for the last time, a French sovereign was attempting to shore up his position at home by emulating Napoleon abroad.

the conservatism of the age was something essentially new. Thinkers and politicians alike thought of 1815 as a new start, marking the end of an era of rationalistic excess. 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.

By spreading the principle of popular sovereignty across Europe while at the same time bringing repression, extortion and alien rule, Napoleon had stimulated among educated elites the belief that freedom from oppression could only be achieved on the basis of national self-determination.

only in exceptional cases, most notably in Belgium, did the bourgeois professional classes join forces with them. Almost everywhere, the latter were too scared of the rowdy violence of ‘the mob’. In one country after another, they mobilized citizens’ militias to restore order, or watched with anxious passivity while the old authorities brought in the troops.

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.’

Re: serfdom

Only the seigneurs were allowed to hunt, a privilege that not only deprived peasants of access to important sources of food and clothing but also caused serious damage to their crops. Deer and wild boar could roam unchecked across their land, and noble hunts sometimes charged through the fields in pursuit of their quarry, trampling on the crops in the process.

cf hunting in Britain still? the 'sport' takes priority over other uses of the land even when those other uses are claimed as justification for the sport.

Of course, serfdom had two sides to it.

...???

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.

serfs began to anticipate a measure of emancipation, with riots spreading rapidly between 1857 and 1861, necessitating the use of troops on 903 occasions.

By the 1830s seigneurs in Silesia were complaining that the peasants were sending their youngest son, often a child, to perform labour service, while in Austria they were paying dues late, sending stringy chickens, addled eggs and mouldy honey as tribute, working slowly and with reluctance, and in some areas keeping an especially old and decrepit horse for work on the seigneur’s demesne. In Poland and Russia, when a serf decided to take his time over a job, he said he was going to ‘work as you work on the demesne’.

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.

Grand statements declaring peasants to be free men were followed by a maze of legal technicalities that often heavily qualified the principle on which the legislation rested.

In Hungary, for example, as in many other parts of Europe, the original revolutionary decree ended serfdom without compensation for the seigneurs, but by the time it came to be implemented, compensation had become a central part of the deal.

‘The nobleman,’ complained one Austrian aristocrat ‘with thirty-two or sixty-four ancestors, has to bow to that vulgar local council … The ignorant peasant who often cannot write … becomes the superior of his cultured and wealthy lord.’

‘The most outstanding of communists,’ he declared, ‘has not yet dared to demand what Your Majesty’s government has carried through.’

Accusing even the most conservative of reforms of being communism dates back to at least 1850. (re: Austrian emperor)

In East-Elbian Prussia some 7,000 large peasant holdings and more than 14,000 smallholdings were bought out by the larger noble estates between 1816 and 1859, furthering the creation of a landless rural proletariat.

From 1750 to 1870 landless or semi-landless labourers and their families in Sweden increased from around a quarter to a half of the population, a class extremely vulnerable to dearth and economic crisis.

They objected violently to ‘a kind of liberty that leaves us just as before under the authority of the Count, our landlord’.

the key role was usually played by peasants who had a degree of literacy and some experience of the world outside the village, along with peasant soldiers and sailors returning from military service holding the strong conviction that they should be rewarded for their sufferings.

Re: peasant uprisings

Stolypin’s intention of destroying the influence of the peasant commune was widely frustrated by peasant resistance, reflecting widespread attachment to collective methods of exploiting the land.

Implying a degree of popular support for collectivisation in later decades, contra liberal historians? At least in principle?

After 1848, as the liberals failed to deliver improvements to their lot, landless labourers in the south turned to anarchist ideas, which exercised a strong appeal to people who felt the state, with its taxation, military conscription and de facto support of the landowning class, was a hostile and alien institution that had to be swept away.

Including e.g. state-backed enclosure of commons.

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.

If a sharecropper left the farm without permission, he was in breach of contract and guilty of a criminal offence.

They could be dismissed and evicted simply for disobeying the proprietor’s orders.

legal documents and their authors, the instruments of their dispossession, were targeted in the belief that the natural right to common land outweighed the letter of the law that had assigned it to the former feudal landowners as their private property.

Conscious of his need to win the support of the local landowners, Garibaldi quickly had the revolt put down.

quintals

Love to use an obscure unit of measurement with multiple wildly different meanings. Dictionary says either 100lb or 112lb or 100kg. (Would assume metric but Evans uses fahrenheit elsewhere.)

acres

A few pages ago he was using hectares ffs.

When this traveller drew a map, he was arrested by a group of armed men and charged with sorcery.

Poverty was everywhere, even in the towns he visited in England, where he thought attitudes towards it far harsher than on the Continent.

the growth of pauperism was highly alarming to middle-class urban elites, who increasingly thought that the Church was encouraging it. Poverty in this view was the result of idleness,

Britain operated a system of relief in which those capable of work were provided with it, unless they refused, in which case they were imprisoned or whipped.

Malthus and others thought the system of allowances for the poor based on the price of bread and the size of their family – the so-called Speenhamland system – encouraged irresponsible breeding

???

Poor Law Unions, run by Boards of Guardians elected by ratepayers (with larger landowners having plural votes).

the provision of work for the poor – was abolished. If any able-bodied man wanted relief he had to find it in a workhouse, where the conditions were deliberately made unpleasant,

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.

Anecdotally: old peoples homes in former workhouses still inspired dread decades later.