The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans

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.

by the end of the 1830s British expenditure on poor relief had been halved, doubtless to the satisfaction of ratepayers. The Act’s harsh spirit of utilitarianism, in which ideals of charity and benevolence were replaced with a rational calculation of rewards and (more obviously) punishments as incentives to work,

In the eyes of Political Economy and its followers, 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.

Acting in the spirit of the New Poor Law, the authorities insisted that only those who worked were entitled to relief. A bureaucracy sprang up to enforce this principle with work-books, inspectors and meal-tickets.

Charles Trevelyan (1807–86), who was in charge of relief in both Scotland and Ireland, insisted that ‘next to allowing the people to die of hunger, the greatest evil that could happen would be their being habituated to depend upon public charity’.

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.

Corn Laws

ports remained open for the export of Irish grain, in ‘a quantity nearly adequate to feed the entire people of Ireland’.

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

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 Ireland, uniquely, most deaths occurred as a result of actual starvation.

In other areas death toll was mostly due to epidemic illness that went along with the famine.

By the mid-1850s, a quarter of all survivors born in Ireland had moved abroad.

In Russian-ruled Finland there was an almost complete crop failure in 1856. By the spring of 1857, the poor were eating bread made of bark and straw mixed with a small amount of barley or rye meal,

By the end of the 1870s, improved transportation and greater governmental and administrative vigilance ensured that bad harvests seldom led to famine anymore. The spread of the railways to rural areas made it possible to transport food supplies to districts affected by poor harvests,

India, meanwhile, was sent headlong into industrial decline, to be followed by Egypt, where the attempts of the local pasha, Muhammad Ali, to develop a cotton industry were undermined by the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1838.

as Egypt was flooded with cheap British cotton products, the domestic industry collapsed.

British domination of the seas guaranteed a virtual monopoly for cotton sales to Latin America,

In 1830, moreover, the ‘self-acting mule’ came into operation, invented by Richard Roberts (1789–1864) after factory owners had approached him in an effort to procure a technological means of dealing with the problem of strikes by reducing the number of workers.

Note motivation.

the firm was unpopular not only because of its introduction of machinery but also because it had responded to a strike in November 1829 by locking the workers out, hiring twenty-five spinners from France, and getting several of the strikers sent to prison. In 1831 the workers spread a rumour that the company was concealing weapons on its premises; they broke in and during their search they also, not coincidentally, smashed the factory machines.

‘Any spinner being sick and cannot find another spinner to give satisfaction must pay for steam per day 6 s[hillings].’

Needs daily wages for comparison.

Workers were widely assumed to be engaged in their chosen occupation out of free choice and at their own risk. Employers frequently accused injured workers of negligence.

The covered Davy Lamp, introduced in 1816, gradually replaced the far more dangerous candles, but also encouraged the exploitation of deeper, more remote and more difficult seams, leading to an increase in the number of accidents.

in 1798 the Belgian (at the time, French) engineer Liévin Bauwens (1769–1822)

"at the time" weird framing since he died before 1830

the export of machinery was punishable by death.

Britain pre-free-trade

In English and French the terms ‘worker’ and ‘working class’ gradually came into use to describe the poor single master, the factory worker, the miner and the urban wage labourer, indeed all those who lacked property and were forced to live entirely off their own physical labour and that of their families.

Proudhon was vehemently opposed to female equality. If women obtained equal political rights, he declared, men would find them ‘odious and ugly’, and it would bring about ‘the end of the institution of marriage, the death of love and the ruin of the human race’.

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.

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 Finland the Fennoman movement, led by Johan Vilhelm Snelmann (1806–81), a teacher and philosopher who advocated the use of Finnish rather than Swedish in the schools (although he himself only spoke the latter), did not raise any demand for independence from Russia.

nationalism for many was as much a means to an end as an end in itself, a means to bring about liberal political and constitutional reform in the face of the conservative order

Balzac described the July Monarchy as an ‘insurance contract drawn up between the rich against the poor’.

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!’

the Duchy of Schleswig, with a Danish-speaking majority, had been joined to the German Duchy of Holstein, within the German Confederation, since the Middle Ages, under the personal rule of the Danish king.

union of Schleswig with Denmark on 5 June 1848 with all parts of the Kingdom voting for a national parliament on a broad franchise.

What happened in Paris in June had a major impact on events elsewhere in Europe, emboldening moderate liberals and diehard conservatives alike and bringing them closer together in a shared fear of the masses.

The Austrians roused Ruthenian (that is, Ukrainian) peasants in eastern Galicia against their Polish nationalist landlords by freeing them from serfdom, allowing them a representative Ruthenian Council and permitting the publication of the first-ever periodical in the province written in Ukrainian.

Nationalist Serbs living in the southern area of the Kingdom of Hungary, encouraged by the neighbouring Principality of Serbia, proclaimed the autonomy of their province, the Vojvodina, in March 1848.

Does this contribute to modern complexity of Balkans? Various ethnic groups with own nation-states but also as significant minorities within the other nation-states.

Conservative Croatian landlords were unhappy about the abolition of serfdom, which the Magyar liberals were advocating.

Czech and German nationalists began to form separate Czech and German militias in Prague, and the middle classes, many of whose members were bilingual, began to take sides.

the Field Marshal withdrew his troops and bombarded the city from the surrounding hills until the insurgents surrendered on 17 June. A committee of the Frankfurt Parliament gave full support to Windischgrätz.

Prague

the more the democrats turned to the masses for backing, the more the moderate liberals were driven to invoke the military support of established authority.

Francesco Crispi (1818–1901), a radical member of the Sicilian Parliament, complained, ‘the moderates were more afraid of the people’s victory than that of the Bourbon troops’.

Louis-Napoleon seemed to be so marginal a figure that the Assembly, on Lamartine’s prompting, had no qualms about passing a Constitution that provided for a popularly elected President even though it was clear he would be a candidate.

oh no

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte dissolved the National Assembly and secured a conservative majority in the elections of May 1849, building on the right-wing inclinations of the countryside.

Marx: 18. Brumaire

A petition with 1.5 million signatures demanding the revision of the Constitution to extend his term of office as President failed to win the required two-thirds majority in the Assembly, so Louis-Napoleon began preparing a coup d’état,

Saxony was the most industrially advanced part of Germany at this time, and the revolution there was more radical than most; the commitment of these workers to republican and democratic revolution was testimony to the depth of the economic crisis that had overtaken them.

The revolutions of 1848 have sometimes been dismissed by historians as half-hearted, timid affairs, but the violence of the crowds, the lynching of hated royal officers, ministers and bureaucrats, and the storming of palaces and offices all over Europe, showed little evidence of reluctance to use force. Yet the ruthlessness and lack of inhibition shown by the armed forces of the old order far outweighed the violence of the crowds, in the face of which moderate liberals in most parts of Europe, with the notable exception of Hungary, gravitated towards the traditional forces of order.

Moderate liberals, including landowners, were keen to privatize the countryside, abolishing common grazing rights and introducing a free market to override customary practice. This did not endear them to the peasantry either.

it had become clear to many German nationalists in particular that a German nation state would have to be constructed outside the empire, without Austria or Bohemia. This would require strong action to expel these Habsburg lands from the German Confederation, and that in turn would require the leadership of Prussia.

When asked on his deathbed whether he wished to forgive his enemies, he replied: ‘I have no enemies: I have shot them all.’

Narváez

new generation of intelligent and flexible conservative politicians who emerged in the post-revolutionary situation. Men like Cavour, Bismarck, Napoleon III or Disraeli recognized that the preservation of order and stability required radical measures to co-opt the masses into support for the state. They also realized that nationalism was becoming increasingly powerful, indeed unstoppable, and in their different ways they were determined to exploit it for their own purposes.