Europe 1700-1914

Towards 1914 (2)

2011-03-19T18:07:00.000Z

The first Moroccan crisis
The Entente had not been aimed at Germany, but it created problems for German policy makers. In March 1905 Wilhelm II made a deliberate attempt to break it. He paid a state visit to Tangier in which he made a speech emphasizing Germany’s commercial interests in Morocco and the importance of maintaining the independence of its Sultan. This was diplomatic bluster on Wilhelm’s part. Germany had no economic interests in Morocco and certainly did not want war. But it caused French and British diplomats to discuss the military possibilities of the Entente in the event of a war with Germany. The immediate outcome was the resignation of the French Prime Minister, Delcassé, in June, 1905.

Germany succeeded in having an international conference called at Algeciras in 1906.
The conference confirmed the integrity of the sultan's domains but sanctioned French and Spanish policing of Moroccan ports and collection of the customs dues. There was now no hope of a Franco-German rapprochement and the Anglo-French entente was solidified. The crisis revealed to British statesmen the importance of France and was the effectual end of the policy of isolation. It also revealed Germany’s isolation, with only Austria-Hungary supporting its position.

The naval race
From 1897 Germany embarked on a drive for world power (Weltpolitik) which upset the relative stability of late nineteenth-century politics and posed a direct challenge to Britain.
This drive expressed itself in naval policy, which was in part a response to a campaign whipped up by the Navy League. In 1898 the German Navy law announced their intention to build a battle fleet. A law of 1900 decreed that this fleet was to be strong enough to challenge the British in the North Sea. This committed Germany to a continuous, and expensive programme.

This did not mean that the German government was envisaging an offensive naval war against Britain. Admiral Tirpitz was following contemporary strategic thinking when he calculated that if Germany had two battleships for every three floated by Britain – which meant a German North Sea fleet of some sixty battleships - then the German navy stood a good chance of victory in a defensive war.

The Liberal government would have preferred spending on social reform, but it was pushed by events. British naval thinking, exemplified by Sir John Fisher the First Sea Lord from 1904, was driven by the ‘two-power standard’ whereby the Royal Navy was to be stronger than the combined fleets of the next two maritime powers.

In 1906 HMS Dreadnought was launched. She was 1,500 tons heavier than the last pre-dreadnought built for the Royal Navy and three knots faster and had ten 12 inch guns. This meant that she could outgun and outsail all other battleships, rendering them obsolete until the Germans build their own dreadnoughts.

By 1909 it was suddenly realized that the Germans were going to be building 10 Dreadnoughts against the 4 British ones that had been ordered up to then. The ‘We Want Eight’ panic then ensued, and six battleships and two battlecruisers were ordered in the 1909 program. After that, the pace was kept up. Germany would only give up her naval plans in return for a British promise of unconditional neutrality in a Franco-German conflict, and after Algeciras, such a compromise was impossible.

The Anglo-Russian entente
On 31 August 1907 Britain and Russia concluded the Anglo-Russian Entente in St. Petersburg. It ended decades of hostility by defining their respective spheres of interest in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet, with Russia taking the northern areas of Persia and Britain taking the Persian Gulf area in the south. Its primary aim was to check German expansion into the area.
Along with the Franco-Russian alliance and the Entente Cordiale, this formed the Triple Entente between the UK, France and Russia.

Crisis in the Balkans
In 1903 the pro-Austrian King Alexander of Serbia and his wife, Queen Draga were murdered. His successor King Peter was a pro-Russian pan-Serb, who wanted to unite all Serbian lands, including those within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This led to Austrian fears that Serbia would become 'the Piedmont of the Balkans'.

In 1908 Balkan issues re-emerged to destabilize Europe. Germany’s growing political and economic influence in Turkey concerned Russia in particular. In spite of the promises of reform Abdul Hamid continued to misgovern his empire and this had particular repercussions for Macedonia, which had been confirmed as a Turkish possession in the Berlin Congress. The province was in a continued state of turbulence and this gave encouragement to the other Balkan states to stir up trouble there.

In 1908 the Young Turks, a nationalist and westernizing group, led a successful revolution forcing Abdul Hamid to issue a new constitution. (He was deposed in a counter coup in the following year in favour of his brother and died in captivity in 1918.)

The instability in the Balkans convinced the Austrian foreign minister Aehrenthal, that the status quo was not in the Habsburg interest as the weakening of Turkey was stirring up the South Slavs within the Empire and also outside it. In October 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia- Herzegovina, taking Russia by surprise as it pre-empted negotiations over the Balkans that were already taking place between the two powers. In spite of misgivings Germany backed Austria-Hungary, mainly because of their annoyance over the Anglo-Russian entente - even though, as in Morocco, she had no direct interest in the question. Wilhelm subsequently asserted that he stood beside his ally, Austria-Hungary, ‘in shining armour’, while von Bülow declared that the ‘German sword had been thrown into the scale of European decision’.

The annexation was a humiliation not only for Russia but also for Serbia which regarded itself as the protector of all South Slavs (‘Greater Serbia’ or ‘Yugoslavia’) including the Bosnians. There were massive demonstrations in Belgrade, where parliament voted emergency funds for war.
The crisis ended in March 1909 when the Treaty of Berlin was revised. The annexation was reluctantly accepted and Austria made formal amends to the Turks by agreeing to pay for crown property in the provinces but the damage had been done. There was now a distinct possibility of open conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans.

The recognition of the annexation was followed by a secret treaty between Austria and Bulgaria. But Serbia was now implacably hostile to Austria and it began to support openly the South Slav revolutionary movements. Meanwhile Russia began to step up her arms programme.

The second Moroccan crisis
After 1908 the central powers and the Entente grew ever further apart. The next conflict arose (again) over Morocco. Like China and Turkey, it was a crumbling state and a pretty to the interference of the European powers. When a Berber rebellion took place in 1911 the French sent an expedition to occupy Fez, the capital, thus putting central Morocco under direct French control. The French remained in Fez after the crisis had died down. On 1 July the Kaiser ordered the gunboat Panther to Agadir on the grounds that German nationals in Morocco needed protection (even though there weren’t any!).

This stirred up alarm in Britain, forcing Lloyd George to state publicly that Britain could not be treated as of no account in a question that affected her interests. This was read as a declaration of support for France in a war against Germany. In November France and Germany reached a compromise (Morocco would become a French protectorate in return for economic concessions to German interests and a slice of territory in the French Congo) but the French Prime Minister Caillaux fell from power and was replaced by the more hawkish Poincaré who accurately reflected the revised revanchisme. In Germany too public opinion was inflamed. The Kaiser and Tirpitz resisted Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s (right) urgings to accommodate Britain and increased their dreadnought programme. The British then stepped up their production.

In September 1911 Italy declared war on Turkey and landed troops in Tripoli. When the Italians bombarded the Dodecanese the Turks closed the Straits, and this launched a new crisis in the Balkans.

The First Balkan War
Above is a picture of Bulgarians attacking a Turkish position.

With Turkey embroiled in a war with Italy, the Balkan states moved in. In March 1912 Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro formed the Balkan League under Russian auspices to take Macedonia away from Turkey. The war began when Montenegro declared war on Turkey, on 8 October 1912, to be followed by Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. The league was able to field a combined force of 750,000 men was soon victorious.

The Turkish collapse was so complete that all parties were willing to conclude an armistice on Dec. 3, 1912. A peace conference was begun in London, but after a coup d'état by the Young Turks in Constantinople in January 1913, war with the Ottomans was resumed and again the Turks were routed. Under a peace treaty signed in London on May 30, 1913, the Ottoman Empire lost almost all of its remaining European territory, including Macedonia and Albania. The creation of an independent Albania was a coup for Austria-Hungary as it cut off Serbia from the sea.

The Second Balkan War
This began when Serbia, Greece, and Romania quarreled with Bulgaria over the division of their joint conquests in Macedonia. On June 1, 1913, Serbia and Greece formed an alliance against Bulgaria, and the war began on the night of June 29/30, 1913, when King Ferdinand of Bulgaria ordered his troops to attack Serbian and Greek forces in Macedonia. The Bulgarians were defeated, however, and a peace treaty was signed at Bucharest between the combatants on August 10, 1913. Under the terms of the treaty, Greece and Serbia divided up most of Macedonia between themselves, leaving Bulgaria with only a small part of the region.

[Above is a photograph of Serbian soldiers.)

The war was a foretaste of what was to come. For the first time a military aircraft (Romanian) was seen flying over a large civilian centre (Sofia). There were appalling atrocities on both sides. 21% of the Bulgarian troops were killed or wounded or died from disease.

The political consequences of the wars were considerable. An enlarged Serbia was now the prominent Balkan power and Russia’s only ally in the region. The Austrians were deeply anxious about Serbia’s ability to stir up trouble among their Slav subjects.

The coming of war
In 1913 the European powers were preparing for a possible war in what has been called ‘the great acceleration’ of the arms race. In March the German government introduced a new army bill designed to provide superiority over Russia in the following year. In confidence the party leaders in the Reichstag were told that the increases were justified by the expectation of the ‘coming world war’. The French urged on the Russians the necessity of completing the railways which would enable them to present Germany with a war on two fronts. The British government was proceeding with its naval programme. Russia was so fearful of the implications of the Berlin-Baghdad railway that she began a huge expansion of her forces and even contemplated seizing the Straits.

Yet none of the powers wanted a world war, and right up to 1914 imperial difficulties were negotiated on a case by case basis. Less than two months before the war broke out an agreement was signed between Britain and Germany over extending the Baghdad railway to Basra. But it has been argued that the Junker elites wanted a war and that Germany wished to be the dominant power in Europe.

Germany was prepared to fight a limited land war while it still had the military and economic advantage over Russia and was prepared to encourage Austria-Hungary to bring it about. On 8 December 1912 the Kaiser told Moltke, Tirpitz and two senior admiralty officials that if Russia was ready to defend Serbia against Austria, then Germany would consider war unavoidable. Moltke: ‘the sooner the better’. On the other hand, it has been argued that all the European states had expansionist ambitions and that the 8 December meeting did not come out with detailed war plans.

The answer to the question of who is to blame for the war? (if there is an answer) does not answer the question of why the war happened. J. M. Roberts argues that the war arose ‘from the incapacity of Austria-Hungary to solve its domestic problems’. The over-riding factor was Austrian fear of Serbia. Because of the Magyars’ power in the Dual Monarchy Austria could not make concessions that might stave off conflict and instead its policy was to show the Serbs that they could not rely on the Russians to defend them. This meant being prepared to go to war with Russia in order to make this point. Austria was willing to go this far because she could rely on German support and Germany was prepared to back Austria because of her new interest in Turkey and her calculation that if there had to be a war, it should come sooner rather than later.

The entry of France into the war was made inevitable by the plan drawn up in 1905 by the German chief of staff, Alfred von Schlieffen and arouse out of his concern that Germany could be ‘encircled’ by simultaneous attacks from France and Russia (as Frederick the Great had been). This required that if war broke out with Russia, France should be eliminated by a pre-emptive knock-out blow. Since this attack was to come through Belgium, it risked bringing Britain into the war, since Belgian independence was guaranteed by treaty.

Sarajevo and after
On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife were murdered in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip. Princip was a member of the Young Bosnians, one of a group that sought an independent Yugoslav state. Though the Serbian government was not responsible, the bombs and bullets had been provided by the head of the Serbian Intelligence Bureau, who was also head of an ultra-nationalist organization called the Black Hand.

The assassination gave the Austro-Hungarians the excuse needed to deal with Serbia. On 23 July, egged on by Berlin, the Vienna government presented an ultimatum to Serbia that was designed to be humiliating and to be rejected. At this stage Britain tried to mediate and Russia told the Serbs not to resist but they could not force the Serbs to accept the ultimatum. In support of Serbia, the tsar ordered the partial mobilization of Russian forces. Serbia then accepted most though not all of the terms.

On 28 July the Austrian minister Berchthold declared war, which meant that the Russians felt bound to support their ally. They then began a slow mobilization. Russia mobilized against Austria-Hungary on 30 July.

On 31 July the Germans began to mobilize. On 1 August Wilhelm was told by his generals that the forces that had been prepared for a war in the west could not be redeployed on the Russian front - the Schlieffen plan had to go ahead- Germany now had to attack France. On the same day Germany declared war on Russia. On 2 August, fearing a Russian attack, Turkey joined the Triple Alliance. On 3 August it declared war on France.

At this stage British opinion was too divided for their government to act, but on the same day the Germans invaded Belgium and on 4 August Britain declared war in Germany. On 6 August Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia. J.M. Roberts sees this as final indication that the real decisions were made in Berlin.

Towards 1914 (1)

2011-03-12T08:01:00.001Z

For the complicated politics of the European alliances before 1914, I have been especially indebted to J. M. Roberts Europe 1880-1945, 2nd edition (Longman, 1989) and to Michael Rapport, Nineteenth-Century Europe (Palgrave, 2005).

'In the approach to the outbreak of the First World War, four factors were crucial: first, the ambitions and strategies of the great powers; second, the system of alliances, the danger of which was less to drag allies into the abyss than to make them concerned lest their opposite numbers renege on their commitments at the last moment; third, the balance of power in the decision-making process between military men and civilian politicians; last, the pressure of both nationalist and socialist anti-militaristic opinion, and the opportunity offered by the war to achieve the ultimate in national integration'. Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 2003), 429.

Between the Berlin Congress of 1878 and 1900 the Concert of Europe in effect came to an end as new occasions of conflict arose.

The condition of the military
Among the great powers of 1880 only Britain was not a land power. To continental countries armies were more important than navies. Military thinking was still obsessed with the idea of winning a decisive battle soon after the outbreak of war. It was assumed that wars would be short (as they had been in 1866 and 1870) and the five year experience of the American Civil War was discounted.

The success of Prussia in the 1870 war led to a rethinking of strategy. The ‘Moltkean Revolution’ involved compulsory military service to provide a short-service army with a large trained reserve and the creation of a permanent highly trained general staff. The ideal, except in Britain, was the ‘nation in arms’. The railway became an indispensable part of military strategy, but once away from the railway lines the army was still the Napoleonic cavalry, infantry and artillery.

Navies had changed much more than armies. By 1880 warships were armoured, steam-driven and screw-propelled. The British Royal Navy was the strongest in the world. Lord Salisbury told a German, ‘Nous sommes des poissons’. However, the extent of the British Empire presented it with the problem of over-stretch.

The system of the 1880s
Between 1880 and 1890 international relations were dominated by the system Bismarck built on the Berlin settlement of 1878, which was to collapse in 1914. The two great factors in the new geopolitics were

(a) the ‘German question’ (the place of Germany in the new world order) and
(b) the persistent Eastern Question and the resultant rivalry between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans.

The classical British attitude towards Europe was to intervene decisively only when there was a danger of one Power threatening the independence of others. But concern over the Straits of Constantinople and India made her suspicious of Russia.

Bismarck was the major player in the geopolitical game. He saw Germany as a ‘saturated’ power. She was the leading continental nation but in order to consolidate her position, he was determined to isolate France. In 1873 he formed the Dreikaiserbund, a conservative alliance designed to maintain good relations with Russia and Austria-Hungary and to prevent them from coming into conflict in the Balkans.

France was obsessed with Germany’s demographic and military superiority. French politicians were divided between revanchists and those who wanted to abandon the lost provinces and seek an overseas empire.

Excluded from Italy and Germany, Austria-Hungary had become a south-eastern power. The dominating concern of the Dual Monarchy was the need to check Russian influence in the Balkans, an area that was becoming increasingly disturbed because of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

Following Russia’s humiliation at the Congress of Berlin, Russian nationalists (Panslavists) were gaining in influence. Russia felt let down by Germany and relations between Berlin and St Petersburg cooled in an atmosphere of mutual recrimination.

Bismarck’s alliances
Bismarck saw the integrity of the Habsburg Empire as essential for the stability of Europe, so his policy was to back Austria-Hungary in any conflict with Russia. In October 1879 he persuaded the reluctant Kaiser Wilhelm I to agree to the secret Dual Alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Its terms were that if one of the signatories were to be attacked by Russia the other was to come to her support. Yet Germany was in no conceivable danger from Russia, so the assumption is that Bismarck’s aim was to attach Austria-Hungary to Germany so that he could prevent her from going to war with Russia. His over-riding aim was peace because he feared the unpredictability and revolutionary potential of war. The alliance was also a statement that the kleindeutsch solution of the German problem was permanent. There would be no re-run of the Austro-Prussian War.

Bismarck followed this up by making overtures to Britain, but nothing came of it. In 1881 and 1884 he renewed the Dreikaiserbund. In May 1882 Italy, furious at the French occupation of Tunis, came into the Dual Alliance, which then became the Triple Alliance. Germany and Austria-Hungary promised to help Italy against a French attack and vice versa.

Bismarck seemed to have made Europe more peaceful because he had contained the rivalries between Austria-Hungary and Russia and neutralized and isolated France. At the same time France was becoming more hostile to Britain because of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. This destroyed the chance of Anglo-French co-operation for twenty years.

The Bulgarian crisis
The Balkans continued unstable after the Congress of Berlin. In September 1885 the ruler of Bulgaria, Alexander of Battenberg brought Turkish-controlled Eastern Rumelia into Bulgaria. Russia refused to approve this independent action and Alexander III ordered the withdrawal of all Russian officers and advisors in the Bulgarian army. Later in the year Serbia declared war on Bulgaria, on the grounds that the balance of power in the Balkans was upset by Bulgarian unification. The Serbs were heavily defeated but the Bulgarians were stopped in their pursuit by Austrian intervention. In April 1886 the Powers recognized the new state under the ‘personal union’ of Alexander. A major war had been avoided but the 1878 settlement had been undermined.

In August Alexander was kidnapped by Russian officers and bullied into abdicating. The newly elected Bulgarian assembly turned out to be very anti-Russian, opening up the threat of a direct Russian invasion. Yet it was obvious that Austria-Hungary would not allow this to happen. Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary had become allies.

This crisis made the renewal of the Dreikaiserbund impossible. Instead Bismarck negotiated a Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887 though he knew this was a feeble substitute. His attempt at bridge-building between Russia and Austria-Hungary had failed. The Russians felt angry and resentful towards both Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria.

The Bulgarian crisis showed that Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans was now the great destabilizing factor in eastern Europe. Bismarck was acutely aware of this fact. An even greater problem (from his point of view) was how to keep France isolated. Would he be able to prevent a Franco-Russian rapprochement? In 1888 the first Russian loan was floated in Paris and the dependence of Russia on the French capital market began.

The fall of Bismarck
In 1888 Emperor William I died and was succeeded by his son Frederick III, Queen Victoria’s son-in-law. But within three months he was dead of throat cancer and his son Wilhelm II became Kaiser. He wished to pursue his own policies both at home and abroad and saw Bismarck as a hindrance. In 1890 he forced his resignation over social policy. Punch saw this as 'dropping the pilot'.

Bismarck’s fall did not immediately change German foreign policy but it opened the way for the transformation of the European system which he had dominated since 1870. His achievements were thrown away in the next decade. German foreign policy became confused and dependent on the Kaiser’s unstable character.

The Dual Entente
The idea was not new as it had been advocated by panslavists and French nationalists, but it remained insignificant so long as Bismarck nursed Russia and encouraged France overseas. As Russo-German relations cooled, the Reinsurance Treaty was allowed to lapse.

This did not mean an alliance was inevitable as there was considerable dislike in Russia of France’s republican constitution. However, the two powers were becoming increasingly close economically and hostile to what they saw as Britain’s expansionism.

In July 1891 the French fleet paid a symbolic visit to Kronstadt and diplomatic notes were exchanged. In August 1892 Russia promised to go to war if France were attacked by Germany alone and in return France promised to come to Russia’s help if she were attached by Germany (but not if she were attacked by Austria-Hungary). This agreement was full of significance for the future: Europe was now on the way to being organized into two armed camps. At the end of 1893 a diplomatic convention was signed (and ratified in 1894) to reinforce the military one. In 1894 Nicholas II paid a state visit to Paris. So secret was this alliance that the public did not become aware of it until 1897 and most French ministers did not know its precise terms until war broke out.

Britain and Turkey
How did Britain come to abandon the support for Turkey that had been the keystone of its policy throughout the 19th century?

The deaths of Alexander of Battenberg in November 1893 and of Alexander III in 1894 eased Russian relations with Bulgaria. In 1895 another Balkan crisis loomed when a series of officially instigated massacres of Armenians took place in Turkey. Public opinion was greatly agitated in Britain though not in the rest of Europe. The British government wished to condemn the massacres but at the same time not allow a repeat of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877. Britain had now become thoroughly disillusioned with Abdul Hamid II who had failed to implement the promised reforms. It now seemed morally impossible to defend Turkey. At the same time the old strategic arguments for defending the access to the Mediterranean seemed out of date:

(1) the Straits could no longer be defended successfully against the combined Franco-Russian fleets;
(2) the route to India could be better secured by maintaining control of Egypt and was no longer dependent on the balance of power in south-east Europe.

On 19 January 1897 the British Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Lord Salisbury spoke in the Lords in the debate on the Queen’s Speech. This speech marked a dramatic reversal of British foreign policy by condemning the entry into the Crimean War.

‘The parting of the ways was in 1853 when the Emperor Nicholas’s proposals were rejected. Many members of the House will keenly feel the nature of the mistake that was made when I say that we put all our money on the wrong horse.’

But this remarkable change in policy did not have an immediate practical outcome. In 1897 Britain was isolated. She was at odds with France over the Sudan and relations with Germany were worsening.

Britain and Germany
By the end of the nineteenth century Kaiser Wilhelm II's unpredictable behaviour was causing great concern in Britain.

In 1893 Britain had protested against German railway building in Asia Minor, which had begun in 1888 when a German syndicate obtained a concession from Turkey.

Germany took the side of Britain’s opponents in colonial disputes and wars. From 1889 Britain and Portugal were at odds over Delagoa Bay (Maputo Bay, Mozambique) which arose when the Portuguese seized the railway running from the bay to the Transvaal. In 1894 Germany sent two warships to) as a demonstration against British pressure on Portugal.

(The dispute was referred to arbitration, and in 1900 Portugal was condemned to pay nearly 1,000,000 pounds in compensation to the shareholders in the railway company.)

On 2 January 1895 news of the Jameson Raid, an excursion by British freebooters into the Transvaal, reached Berlin. On the following day the Kaiser sent a telegram to President Paul Kruger congratulating him on its suppression. British public opinion was outraged.

In July 1897 Bernard Heinrich von Bülow became secretary of state (and chancellor in 1900) and Alfred von Tirpitz (left) became head of the Admiralty.

This marked a new turn in German politics, the abandonment of Bismarck’s contention that Germany was a ‘satiated’ power. It coincided with increased anti-German feeling in Britain as newspapers whipped up a campaign against German goods.

In 1898 Wilhelm visited Abdul Hamid II and secured a Turkish concession to Germany to extend the Berlin-Baghdad Railway to Basra, thus giving Germany access to the Persian Gulf.
During the Boer War Britain’s sense of isolation increased. The one consolation was her naval supremacy which enabled her to ride out world opinion.

The world c. 1900
Was the First World War inevitable?
In some respects the world was more orderly than it had ever been. Much had been done to mitigate the disorder of international competition. Colonial disputes had gone to arbitration and had been peacefully resolved. More questions were decided by arbitration between 1880 and 1900 than in the previous eighty years. Many people believed, with reason, that the world was becoming more peaceful.

There was also acceptance of the need to limit armaments, however difficult this might be to achieve in practice. The first Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded in 1901.

In 1899, at the instigation of Nicholas II, a conference met at the Hague, where it was decided that a permanent court of arbitration should be set up to which disputes could be referred and the International Court was set up in the same year. It was agreed to prohibit some modern weapons such as dum-dum bullets and poison gas.
A second Hague Conference met in 1907.

The enhanced prestige of the United States can be seen in the success of the Spanish-American War and Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation which ended the Russo-Japanese War in August1905. The treaty recognized Japan’s paramount interest in Korea and marked the formal abandonment by Tsarist Russia of her Far-Eastern dreams.

Britain’s alliances
In 1902 Britain ended its long period of isolation, which the Boer War had so strikingly demonstrated, by entering into an alliance with Japan. It was strictly limited and was inspired by concerns over Russian and German influence in China and Manchuria and was only to last for five years. This gave the Japanese the assurance of Britain’s neutrality if Japan went to war with Russia. But it did not address British concerns about Russian activities in Afghanistan and Tibet.

Relations with France were bad after the Fashoda incident and mutual hostility was inflamed by the Dreyfus affair and the Boer War. But Britain and France also had common concerns over Germany and the British and French Foreign Ministers sought ways to ease hostilities. In 1903 Edward VII visited France and tensions eased. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 made the need for an agreement even more urgent.

In April 1904 the Entente Cordiale was signed.
Britain was allowed to consolidate its hold on Egypt and France was allowed to establish a protectorate over Morocco; Siam would be left an independent buffer between Burma and Indochina This did not, in practice, give Britain a great deal. Nevertheless, it was a diplomatic turning point.

Memories of Queen Victoria and Kaiser Bill

2011-03-08T09:24:00.003Z

Princess Alice of Athlone remembers her grandmother, Queen Victoria, and her cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Imperialism

2011-03-07T12:06:00.006Z

Above is Punch's cartoon of Cecil Rhodes striding the map of Africa. This is a comment on his projected Cape to Cairo Railway.

Reasons for imperialism

By the end of the nineteenth century European national prestige came to be associated with imperial dominions. The great age of imperialism was 1880-1914 when France, Germany, Russia, Italy and Belgium contested Britain’s role as the world’s major imperial power. Though some intellectuals such as J.A. Hobson (Imperialism, 1902), were strongly hostile to imperialism, politicians could find themselves under pressure from public opinion to gain territories overseas. This happened to Bismarck in 1884 and to the Italian Prime Minister Giolitti when in 1911 he succumbed to nationalist pressure and seized Libya from Turkey. Politicians did not always control events. It was the people on the ground, thousands of miles from home (people like Cecil Rhodes (left), Karl Peters and Pierre de Brazza) who set the pace and governments were forced to acquiesce in their annexations.

Politicians were vulnerable to the failures of imperialism. Jules Ferry’s government fell in March 1885 over their annexation of Tonkin, which most French regarded as wasteful and unnecessary. Gladstone’s government fell in the same year over the death of General Gordon. Crispi the Italian prime minister, fell over the humiliating defeat at the hands of the Ethiopianst Adowa in 1896.

Some historians now argue that imperialism was stirred less by the prospect of overseas dominion over non-Europeans than by a defensive reflex to national humiliation and defeat. But those who argued for a consistent imperialist policy were extremely influential and often had the ear of government. These included Rhodes in Britain and the firms of Krupp and Siemens in Germany.

The European powers openly competed with each other for colonies. In 1885 the French minister Jules Ferry warned that

‘in today’s Europe, in this competition of the many rivals whose power we see growing round us … abstention is very simply the road to decadence’.

This attitude created a knock-on effect: nations believed that they would miss the bus if they did not colonize quickly. In Germany in particular there was a panic that they were being left behind in the race. In 1883 the German newspaper the Korrespondent argued that Germany could not watch ‘other nations appropriate great tracts of territory and the very rich natural resources that go with them’.

Imperialism was also seen as a safety valve for societies undergoing huge social and economic changes. In 1895 Cecil Rhodes argued

‘in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population’.

In 1910 the Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini argued that if the Italians emigrated to Africa they would not lose their national character as they were (unfortunately) doing in the United States.

At a time when Europeans were losing faith in free trade and were turning to protectionism, colonies came to be seen as sources of raw materials and as opportunities for investment. The Germans imported palm oil, rubber, ivory, cotton and peanuts from Africa. By 1914 Portugal was shipping wine and cotton fabrics to its colonies; the French empire accounted for 9.4% of its imports and 13% of its exports. Between 1898 and 1902 the European powers moved in on the collapsing Chinese empire and forcibly opened China’s markets, securing trade privileges and the exclusive use of Chinese ports. But Lenin’s famous argument that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism can be over-done. The French found that the European market (especially the Russian) was more lucrative than the colonial. Up to 1914 colonial trade accounted for only 1 % of Germany’s imports and exports.

Imperialism can be seen as a result of perceived weakness. In Britain there were worries that the nation was falling behind the United States, which by the beginning of the twentieth century already had a population of 77.5 million and was providing formidable economic competition. Following their defeat in 1870 the French were trying to compensate for their national humiliation. Like Britain Germany feared for the loss of export markets and therefore sought new territory.

But imperialism was also a mark of European confidence in their civilization – and their race. Racial superiority was taken for granted and used to justify rule over colonial peoples. The British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury identified Maoris, Aborigines, ‘Hottentots’ and Native Americans as ‘dying nations’. When the Commons debated Britain’s administration of Egypt in June 1910 the future Viceroy Edward Wood spoke conventionally of ‘the white man’ ruling ‘inferior races’ of ‘black people’.

The view, prevalent in the eighteenth century that human nature was everywhere uniform and that therefore cultures could easily be transformed was slowly relinquished in favour of a belief in the underlying reality of permanent racial divisions. This view was often set out in a social-Darwinist fashion - for example the argument of the ‘social efficiency’ of the Anglo-Saxon race. Contemporaries attributed many imperial achievements to the progressive tendencies of their race.

Social Darwinist ideas also circulated widely in Germany. In 1881 the Hamburg lawyer Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden published a book arguing that international competition was a struggle to the death between races and only those peoples who managed to spread their culture over wider areas of the earth would survive. It was commonly argued that the peoples of the tropical regions were childlike and would benefit from white rule.

There were thus two contradictory motives behind imperialism: a sense of weakness and of superiority.

The culture of imperialism
This was especially intense in Britain. The novels of G. A. Henty sold in huge numbers. Poets laureate penned imperial verses. The makers of Pears soap were especially fond of the imperial leitmotif, proclaiming their product a ‘potent factor in brightening dark corners of the earth as civilization advances’. Imperialism inspired two great novels, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (first published in serial form in 1899) and Kipling’s Kim (1901).

It was above all through the popular press that the Empire reached a mass audience at home. Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, popularized the Empire through the Evening News and then the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. In 1899, the year the Boer War broke out, the Mail sold a million copies. In 1879 the Boys’ Own Paper was founded by the Religious Tract Society. Along with its sister title, the Girls’ Own Paper, it reached a circulation of half a million. An even stronger imperial message was proclaimed in Boys of the Empire (1909) which sought to indoctrinate its readers with articles like ‘How to be Strong’ and ‘Empire Heroes’. A specific model of masculinity was being set up, mirrored with an image of femininity which stressed the importance of physical health and team games.

Asia
After 1857 the administration of India with its 250 million inhabitants passed from the East India Company to a Secretary of State in London to whom the Governor-General and the Viceroy were subject. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the completion of a submarine cable to India in 1870 brought the Viceroy and his Council under more control from London. In 1876 Queen Victoria was made Empress of India.

The Suez Canal, built between 1859 and 1869 with mainly French capital and expertise, increased French economic interests in the Far East. In 1867 Cochin-China, the southern part of present-day Vietnam, was brought under French rule in 1867 and protectorates were established over the local rulers of Cambodia in 1863 and Annam, central Indo-China, in 1874. In 1885 China ceded Tonkin (north Vietnam) as a protectorate.

The (British) India Office saw this as a potential upsetting of the balance of influence in south-east Asia. As a result Burma was annexed to the British Empire in January 1886.

The scramble for Africa
Late 19th century imperialism is mainly (though not exclusively) associated with the 'scramble for Africa', as the continent was opened up to traders and explorers.

In Germany the Colonial Society was founded by Carl Peters in 1882 to argue for Germany’s ‘place in the sun’. Between May 1884 and February 1885 Germany joined the imperial club announcing its claims to territory in South-West Africa, Togo, the Cameroons and part of the East African coast opposite Zanzibar. Bismarck had initially been sceptical about colonialism but he had come round to the view that colonies would provide markets and raw materials for German exports. But after this brief excursion into colonialism he lost interest in the project and this was one of the reasons for his dismissal in 1890.

France’s rule in Algeria was established between 1830 and 1847. From the 1880s France was acquiring territory in West Africa.

Bismarck allowed the French to occupy Tunisia in 1881-2 because he wanted to channel their energies away from revanchism.

But French public support for imperialism was elusive in the 1880s, with only the small parti colonial arguing for an aggressive policy. French nationalists argued that the main priority should be the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine.

Italy also dreamed of an African empire. Political unity alone had not forged a strong sense of nationhood and many veterans of the Risorgimento, such as Francesco Crispi, believed that this sense would only come from a common imperial purpose in a ‘baptism of blood’. With their position in Egypt shaky after the Mahdists had conquered the Sudan, the Italians were encouraged to take over the British garrison of Massawa on the Red Sea. In 1889 Italy established a protectorate in Ethiopia under King Menelik.

The Conference of Berlin, 1884-5
In 1876 Leopold II of the Belgians had invited geographers from all over the world to Brussels to talk about Africa. The meeting that followed set up an ‘International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Africa’.

In the 1880s, European interest in Africa increased dramatically as Henry Morton Stanley's discovery of the Congo River Basin (1874–1877) removed the last bit of terra incognita from the maps of the continent. The vast Congo basin had already aroused Leopold’s interest and he had acquired large parts of the area under cover of the International Association of the Congo. From 1879 to 1884, Stanley returned to the Congo, this time not as a reporter, but as an envoy from Leopold with the secret mission to organize a Congo state, which would become known as the Congo Free State. He made hundreds of treaties with native chiefs and established many stations in the Congo basin.

But between 1875 and 1885, the French marine officer Pierre de Brazza had travelled into the western Congo basin and raised the French flag over the newly-founded Brazzaville in 1881, in the modern Republic of Congo. In the following year, without the authorization of the French government, ‘Moyen Congo’ was ceded to France. Portugal was also claiming the area on the grounds of old treaties with the native Kongo Empire.

To settle the dispute Bismarck called an international conference in Berlin from November 1884 to March 1885. This was the last time the great powers met in congress to regulate a matter of common interest. The United States also attended.

The Conference accepted Leopold’s claims, giving him a vast territory named the Congo Free State south of the river Congo. This became his personal fiefdom and when it became a by-word for brutality (see the picture of amputated Congolese young people), the Belgian government took it over in 1908. France’s claims to the right bank of the Congo were recognized, as was the German seizure of the Cameroons and South-West Africa and the Portuguese occupation of Angola.

The results of the Conference
The Conference failed to satisfy the European hunger for expansion or to relieve the underlying tensions which seem to have increased in the last decade of the century. Some historians have seen an intensification of popular imperialist sentiment in the 1890s.

Between 1888 and 1890 Carl Peters explored Uganda and Tanganyika, and seemed to be encroaching on British territory on the Nile. When Britain protested, the Germans withdrew their claims in return for British withdrawal from Heligoland.

In the 1890s Britain and Portugal were again at odds as Cecil Rhodes’ dream of the Cape to Cairo Railway was an attack on the Portuguese ambition to link Mozambique with Angola. In 1890 the Portuguese were forced to back down.

In 1890 the French Africa Company was founded to protest against what it saw as French subservience to British imperial ambitions. Its aim was to extend French influence eastwards from the Congo to the upper Nile to prevent the completion of the Cape to Cairo route and to force the British to reconsider their position in Egypt. In June 1896 an expedition under Captain Marchand set out for Africa. However, the French were forced to climb down at Fashoda in September 1898. Earlier in the month Kitchener had decisively defeated the Mahdist army at Omdurman.

Within a few years of the Conference, Africa was divided up south of the Sahara. By 1895, only the settlements in Liberia and the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal remained independent. Abyssinia was able to fend off an Italian invasion from Eritrea, which lasted from 1889-1896, in what is known as the first Italo-Abyssinian War, remaining the only free native state; but this was an exception in the continent of Africa. By 1902, 90% of all the land that makes up Africa was under European control. A large part of the Sahara was French, while after the quelling of the Mahdi rebellion and the ending of the Fashoda crisis, the Sudan remained firmly under joint British–Egyptian rule.

The Boer states were conquered by Great Britain in the Boer War (the South African War) from 1899 to 1902. Morocco was divided between the French and Spanish in 1911, and Libya was conquered by Italy in 1912. The official British annexation of Egypt in 1914 ended the colonial division of Africa. By this point, all of Africa, with the exceptions of Liberia and Ethiopia, were under European rule.

The zenith of imperialism
Imperialist fever reached a peak in the 1890s. In contrast to the earlier decade, public opinion now applauded imperial conquests and imperialism was taking on religious connotations. Britain’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 were celebrations of imperialism. Kipling’s ‘White Man’s Burden’ was published in 1899.

Paradoxically, this occurred at the moment when European dominance was being challenged. 1898, the year of the Spanish American War, marked the beginning of the United States’ rise to globalism.

By this time nationalist movements were beginning. The Indian Congress Party was founded in 1885. In 1912 the African National Congress was founded.

Russia in the nineteenth century

2011-02-28T09:30:00.001Z

The extent of the country
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia was geographically the world’s most extensive country and its empire was expanding. From 1809 Russia controlled Finland and in 1815 the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was subsumed into Russia. In 1800 Georgia was annexed. In 1859 the rest of the Caucasus was conquered and the Chechen hero Imam Shamil (right) captured. In 1860 the Amur and Maritime provinces were acquired from China and Turkestan from Persia in 1875. Turkmenistan was annexed in 1881. The Pacific port of Vladivostok was founded in 1860. The only territory lost was Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1867 for $8 million.

Below is a map of the Russian Empire in 1914.

The economy
This vast area was sparsely populated with only two major cities, St Petersburg the capital, and Moscow but the population grew from 68 million in 1850 to 124 million in 1897 and nearly 170 million in 1914 (compare with just under 143 million in 2006).

Agriculture remained primitive with the three-field system still the norm, though Russia was exporting grain to pay for the manufactures she needed. The Russian iron-smelting industry dated from the eighteenth century. The second major industry was cotton-spinning

Repression
Russia was officially an autocracy headed by a tsar who ruled by divine right. There was no tradition of opposition or protest. Alexander I (1801-25) was for a while greeted as a reforming tsar. He founded a state school system, granted a constitution to Poland, abolished torture and lessened censorship. But towards the end of his reign he revoked many of his reforms.

He was succeeded by his younger brother, Nicholas I (1825-55), who savagely put down the Decembrist and Polish uprisings. He increased the powers of the police and tightened censorship, though he also alleviated some of the conditions of the serfs by prohibiting their sale without land. It was he who described Turkey as ‘the sick man’. He died in the middle of the Crimean War.

Reform

Alexander II (1855-81), photographed above with his wife, the Empress Maria, and his son, the future Alexander III, succeeded his father during the war. His reign witnessed wide-ranging attempts to modernize and reform Russia.

In 1856 he resolved to emancipate the serfs, telling the nobility of Moscow in March 1856,

‘it is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below’.

The main work of reform was carried out in the ministry of the interior, where the most able officials, headed by the deputy minister Nikolay Milyutin, were resolved to get the best possible terms for the peasants. But the bulk of the landowning class was determined, if it could not prevent abolition of serfdom, to give the freed peasants as little as possible. The settlement, proclaimed on Feb. 19 (March 3, New Style), 1861, was a compromise. Peasants were freed from servile status, and a procedure was laid down by which they could become owners of land. The government paid the landowners compensation and recovered the cost in annual ‘redemption payments’ from the peasants.

In many respects, the terms were unfavourable. In the north, where land was poor, the landowners were compensated not only for the loss of their serfs and also for the loss of the share that they had previously enjoyed of the peasants’ earnings from non-agricultural labour. In the south, where land was more valuable, the plots given to the peasants were very small, often less than they had had for their own use when they were serfs. Emancipation was a huge reform but at the same time it fell short of the hopes of the idealists.

Further important reforms followed the emancipation. A new system of local elected assemblies (zemstvos) was introduced in 1864. The zemstvos were empowered to levy taxes and to spend their funds on schools, public health, roads, and other social services, but their scope was limited by the fact that they also had to spend money on some of the tasks of the central government.

In 1864 Russia also received a system of law courts based on European models, with irremovable judges and a proper system of courts of appeal. Justices of the peace were instituted for minor offenses; they were elected by the county zemstvos. A properly organized, modern legal profession now arose.

During the first years of Alexander II's reign there was some demand from a liberal section of the nobility for representative government at the national level. The tsar and his bureaucrats refused to consider this: there was to be no challenge to the principle of autocracy. The decision against a national assembly deprived Russia of the possibility of public political education such as that which existed, for example, in contemporary Prussia, and it deprived the government of the services of hundreds of talented men.

Foreign policy
Alexander II’s foreign policy was a continuation of his father’s, with the advance into Asia proceeding. After Austria’s refusal to help Russia in the Crimean War relations were very strained. However the friendship seemed restored when Bismarck secured the foundation of the Three Emperors’ League (Dreikaiserbund) in 1873.

The Russo-Turkish War
Twenty years after defeat in the Crimea, Russia was back in the Balkans. The opening was provided by three simultaneous revolts in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria. In May 1876 following the murder of 136 Turkish officials in Bulgaria over 20,000 Christians were massacred by Ottoman soldiers in what became known as the Bulgarian Horrors. This inspired a furious pamphlet from the British politician W. E. Gladstone, who demanded that the Turks depart ‘bag and baggage’ from the provinces they had profaned. Tsar Alexander II felt he had to protect the Christians of the Balkans.

The new sultan, Abdul Hamid II promised a constitution. Nevertheless in April 1877 the Russians invaded Ottoman territory on the Danube and in Armenia. By January 1878, in spite of stiff Turkish resistance, they had reached Constantinople. The Turks were forced to accept the Treaty of San Stefano which created an independent ‘Big Bulgaria’ which would clearly be under heavy Russian influence.

The terms of the treaty alarmed Britain, where there was an outbreak of ‘jingoism’, and Austria. In response the Congress of Berlin was called, with Bismarck as ‘honest broker’ to revise the treaty and curtail Russian ambitions. It was the last occasion when the great met to settle their differences. The treaty’s terms were:

Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over to Austrian occupation.
Bulgaria was split in three.
The independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania was recognized.
In a secret agreement with Turkey Britain was allowed to occupy Cyprus.

The Congress postponed war for a generation but helped to create the tensions that led to the First World War. Russia was humiliated and the aspirations of the Balkan peoples were not fully realized. The Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina was to be a hugely significant event.

More repression
Alexander’s reforms aroused fierce opposition from conservatives and revolutionaries while the suppression of the Polish revolt in 1863 alienated liberals. In 1866 there was an unsuccessful attempt on his life which led to a clamp down on reforms. On 1 March 1881 Alexander was assassinated by a terrorist group called the People’s Will. You can hear a discussion of this on Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time'. All the main leaders of the group were caught by the police, and five of them were hanged.

The magnificently restored Church of the Spilt Blood stands on the site of Alexander's assassination.

His son, Alexander III (1881-94) was a reactionary, devoted to autocracy, Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church, who undid his father’s policies. The universities lost their autonomy, the independence of the courts was sapped and the zemstvos were remodelled and lost many of their powers. This reactionary policy was continued by his son Nicholas II 1894-1917).

The census of 1897 revealed that there were over 100,000 policemen and 50,000 men in the security gendarmerie, deploying a formidable range of spies and informers. In 1880 there were 8,000 people in ‘administrative exile’ in Siberia.

All religious minorities came under attack, but the Jews most of all. In 1880 about 4 million of them lived in the Pale, the tract of Poland and western Russia to which they were confined by law. 700.000 more were driven into it in the next ten years. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century 2 million Jews left Russia. A series of pogroms between 1903 and 1906 left 2,000 Jews dead and increased the number of emigrants.

In 1891 Leah and Moses Baline left for the United States with their three year old son Israel Isadore. He became very famous!

Industrial growth
In 1892 Sergei Witte became Finance Minister. Believing that ‘a great power cannot wait’ he abandoned liberal economics for direct state intervention in order to prime the country’s industrialization. Between 1894 and 1902 two thirds of government expenditure went into economic development. Russia’s industrial production increased dramatically becoming the fifth largest in the world by 1914. The government encouraged private banks and its decision to adopt the gold standard kept the economy stable.

In 1891 construction began on the 5,000 mile long Trans-Siberian Railway. This enabled Russia to export cheap grain to the west.

Much of the money for investment came from abroad. In 1900 one third of the capital of private industry in Russia was in foreign hands. By 1914 French investors held 80 % of government debt securities. The British invested most heavily in mining and new oilfields.

In spite of this, most Russians grew poorer. There was a famine in 1891-2 followed by a series of crop failures. There was widespread discontent in the countryside and in the industrialized areas. And with no indigenous liberal tradition in Russia many of the disaffected intelligentsia turned to extreme parties like the Marxist Social Democrats.

Nicholas II
Nicholas succeeded his father in April 1894. In November he married the German princess Alix of Hesse (Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna). His reign was a disaster for himself and for Russia.
In 1904 she gave birth to a male heir after four daughters.
The painting depicts Nicholas in 1914 after the outbreak of war. He is represented as a military hero and the defender of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Dumas
In January 1904 Russia went to war with Japan. The most dramatic event of the war the Battle of Tsushima, 27 May–28 May 1905 when the Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo, numerically inferior but with superior speed and firing range, shelled the Russian fleet mercilessly, destroying all eight of its battleships.

The news of the fall of Port Arthur in January 1905 led to a strike in St Petersburg, which in turn led to a petition to the tsar asking for political as well as economic reform. On 9 January the security forces opened fire on a peaceful crowd, killing 130 people. The result of ‘Bloody Sunday’ (photographed above) was a series of riots and strikes which forced Nicholas into concessions. On Witte’s advice he issued on 17 October a manifesto announcing a Duma (Parliament) the extension of the franchise and the granting of real civil liberties. Witte became Chairman of the Council of Ministers. A constitution was issued on 23 April, providing for two chambers, but it came from the tsar who retained ‘supreme autocratic power’. Witte was kept on until he had secured a huge international loan to bail out the government and then dismissed before the Duma.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the Dumas were a disappointment. The first two were dissolved by the tsar because he saw them as too radical. After the 1907 electoral reform the third Duma, elected in Novermber 1907, was largely made up of members of the upper classes and radical influences in the Duma had almost entirely been removed. The fourth Duma was in session at the outbreak of war.

Whatever their limitations, however, the Dumas introduced the idea of constitutional and representative government. Russia was less repressive and more economically advanced in 1914 than in 1800.

Austria-Hungary

2011-02-27T09:28:00.002Z

Before 1867
In 1806 the Holy Roman Empire was brought to an end following Napoleon’s victories over the Austrians. The last of the Holy Roman Emperors, Francis II, was now Francis I of Austria. After the fall of Napoleon (1814-15), Austria became once more the leader of the German states but following the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 she was expelled from the German Confederation.

The Ausgleich
Austria’s defeat at the hands of Prussia caused Emperor Franz Joseph (above; photographed in 1910) to reorient his policy toward the east and to consolidate his multi-national empire. Austrian liberals, too realized that the dream of Großdeutschland. was over. Even before the war the Hungarians had been restive; now they had their opportunity.
.
In May and June 1867 the Ausgleich (‘Compromise’) was ratified by the Austrian and Hungarian Parliaments. This brought into being the new state of Austria-Hungary, also known as the Dual Monarchy. The other peoples of the Empire were never consulted.

The new state consisted of Hungary and Cisleithania ('the lands outside the kingdom of Hungary'). Hungary received full internal autonomy, together with a responsible ministry, and, in return, agreed that the empire should still be a unitary state for purposes of war and foreign affairs. Franz Joseph thus surrendered his right to decide Hungarian domestic policy including his earlier responsibility to protect the non-Magyar peoples of Hungary in exchange for the maintenance of dynastic prestige abroad. The so-called common monarchy consisted of the emperor and his court, the Foreign and Finance Ministers and the War Minister. There was no common Prime Minister (other than the Emperor himself) and no common cabinet. The common affairs were to be considered at the Delegations, composed of an equal number of representatives from the two parliaments. There was to be a customs union and a sharing of accounts, which was to be revised every 10 years.

The arrangement suited Hungary, which was now an equal partner with Austria. The kingdom was expanded to include Transylvania while the old Croatian-Slavonian military frontier was abolished and absorbed by Hungary. Franz Joseph was crowned King of Hungary on 8 June 1867. The Hungarians always insisted that he was not their Emperor and that his official title was Kaiser und König. But the rest of the Empire had no clear unity and was technically known as ‘the kingdoms and lands represented in the Reichsrat’ or, more shortly, as ‘the other Imperial half’. All that united these scattered lands and varied ethnic groups was the House of Habsburg. The justification for the monarchy was foreign policy.

Ethnic tensions
Austria formed the northern borders of the monarchy. Its major peoples were Germans, Czechs and Poles. The Germans believed they possessed a superior culture and their attempts to ‘Germanise’ other races brought them into conflict with the Czechs and Poles. The Czechs, the inhabitants of the old Kingdom of Bohemia, were the only Slav peoples within the monarchy. They resented the dominance of the German language and the favourable treatment given to the Hungarians. In Illyria in the southern borders of Austria there were Italians, Croats and Slovenes.

Racial divisions were more embittered in Hungary where the Magyar ruling class insisted on maintaining their ascendancy. The Hungarian minister, Count Gyula Andrássy declared,

'the Slavs are not fit to govern; they must be ruled.' Quoted Michael Rapport, Nineteenth-Century Europe (Palgrave, 2005, p. 210).

The Nationality Law, passed by the Hungarian Diet in 1868 made Magyar the official language of state. In the old Hungarian kingdom, there were minorities of Rumanians, Ruthenes, Slovaks and Germans, all ignored by their Hungarian rulers. Hungary also included Croatia-Slavonia, with their majority Croat and Serb populations. In 1913 less than half the total Hungarian population was Magyar, but over 80% of all students graduating from high school in Hungary were Magyars and over 95% of government officials.

Economic life
Outside the sophisticated cities of Vienna, Prague and Budapest, the Dual Monarchy was an agrarian society, almost as backward as Russia, with extreme contrasts of wealth and poverty. In Hungary most peasants were landless wage labourers on the great estates of the nobility. They were technically free, but their lives were no better than those of serfs. Illiteracy was the norm and infant mortality was high.

Politics
As a major concession to the German liberals and as a reward for their co-operation, the Fundamental Laws had been adopted in December 1867. They became known as the December Constitution and lasted until 1918. They guaranteed an independent judiciary, freedom of belief and education. However ministers were answerable to the Emperor rather than to the Reichsrat (the Austrian Parliament).

To many foreign observers, Hungary with its lively Parliament, looked like a proper constitutional monarchy – more so at least than Austria. In 1873, the old capital Buda and Óbuda were officially merged with the third city, Pest, thus creating the new metropolis of Budapest. But the appearance of constitutionalism was a façade. The Hungarian Parliament had the right to initiate legislation but the monarch had to give his assent to a bill before it was debated. The rights of minorities in Hungary were ignored, the freedom of the press was often under attack and judges lacked independence. In both halves of the Dual Monarchy, ministers served the Crown rather than the constitution.

Franz Joseph had come to power in the turmoil of 1848. He believed in the need for a strong monarchy and as he grew older he lost what little touch he had ever had with his people. His reign saw two personal tragedies: the suicide of his son and heir Rudolf (left) and his mistress at Mayerling in 1889 and the assassination of his wife, Elisabeth, in 1898. From 1889 his heir was his nephew, Franz Ferdinand.

The most successful of his ministers was Eduard von Taafe, who governed from 1879 to 1893. He saw himself as the Emperor’s man and controlled the Reichsrat through patronage and compromises. He placated the Czechs by making Czech as well as German the administrative language of Bohemia, though this did not satisfy the radical splinter group, the Young Czechs, who in 1891 won all the Bohemian seats in the Reichsrat. In October 1893 he resigned, having failed to stem the tide of Czech nationalism. By 1900 the Reichsrat was paralyzed by the Czech-German conflict, with government functioning through the bureaucracy. Pressure from the various groups within the Empire led to the adoption of manhood suffrage in Austria in 1907. In the elections of that year Ruthenians, Poles, Czechs and Slovenes all won more seats.

Foreign policy
Foreign policy was dictated by the attempt to preserve the Dual Monarchy. From the 1870s Austria-Hungary saw itself as under threat from the South Slav nationalism of the Croats and Serbs. Hungary in particular believed it had to crush this nationalism whether the South Slavs were in the Ottoman or Habsburg Empires and the Foreign Minister Andrássy began reluctantly to contemplate the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to prevent future trouble.

Rat du jour

2011-02-25T09:27:00.000Z

'Along with the carrier-pigeon, the rat was to become the most fabled animal of the Siege of Paris [1870-1], and from December the National Guard spent much of its time engaged in vigorous rat-hunts. Even so, the number actually consumed was relatively few: according to one contemporary American calculation, only 300 rats were eaten during the whole siege, compared with 65,000 horses, 5,000 cats and 1,200 dogs. The elaborate sauces that were necessary to render them edible meant that rats were essentially a rich man's dish - hence the notorious menu of the Jockey Club, which featured such delicacies as "salmis de rats" and rat pie.'

From Alistair Horne, The Seven Ages of Paris (2002)

The view from 1865 - and now

2011-02-25T09:24:00.001Z

There is a fascinating Guardian article from Martin Kettle pointing out that during the American Civil War the Manchester Guardian and many other liberal voices supported the Confederacy (the south) rather than the Union (the north) and thought Abraham Lincoln. There was a respectable argument for this position: if it was OK for the Italians to secede from Austrian rule (and the Belgians from Dutch and the Greeks from Turkish rule) why should the southern states be forced against their will to remain in the Union.

The moral? Things can look very different a hundred and fifty years on.

'Propaganda by deed'

2011-02-23T21:53:00.003Z

You might be interested in the Sunday Times review of Alex Butterworth's history of anarchism, The World that Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents.

Here is a striking quotation from the review.

The leaders of 19th-century anarchism were wild-bearded agitators who moved through the fog of Europe’s radical underworld, their endless (and sometimes hopeless) schemes for insurrection and assassination motivated by a volatile blend of prophetic passion and political despair. At riotous meetings, activists shouted, “Long live dynamite”, and vowed to follow the “black flag of mourning”, not the red one of revolution.
The anarchists were a disparate and disputatious lot, united only by their refusal to wait for the better world promised by their cousins, the communists. As the Russian anarchist Andrei Zhelyabov put it, “History moves too slowly. It needs a push.” The anarchists called their new terrorist ideology “propaganda by deed”, and even developed a quasi-religious martyrology.

Feminism, socialism, anarchism

2011-02-22T21:51:00.000Z

For this post I have used Michael Rapport's Nineteenth-Century Europe (Palgrave, 2005) and A Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century History, ed. John Belchem and Richard Price (Penguin, 1994). I have found the latter a very useful work of reference though the entry on Bismarck is disappointingly short.

Feminism

The nineteenth century saw the advancement of political rights for men but the emancipation of women was hampered by the doctrine of separate spheres and by the double standard of sexual morality. This was attacked in John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), the key feminist text of the 19th century.

However, in many parts of Europe women gained more rights in the family. The Custody of Infants Act in Britain (1839) allowed a separated wife to claim custody of a child under seven. From 1857 women in England and Wales were allowed to divorce their husbands, though not for adultery alone. From 1870 a series of Married Women’s Property Acts recognized the independent legal existence of married women. Similar laws were passed in France and Germany. From 1912 French women were able to sue fathers for financial support.

The sexual double standard received official sanction in a series of acts regulating prostitution. The Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain provided for the compulsory examination of prostitutes (or women thought to be prostitutes) in naval and garrison towns. They were only abolished after a prolonged campaign in 1885. There was a similar campaign in Germany in the early 1900s.

In 1867 John Stuart Mill introduced an unsuccessful clause in the Reform Act of that year that would have allowed women to be given the vote on the same terms as men. In 1897 Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929) (left) founded the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies to campaign peacefully through books, pamphlets and public meetings. Her work is commemorated today in the Fawcett Society.

However, from 1903 the suffragists (as they were called) were outflanked by the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (named 'the suffragettes' by the Daily Mail).

There was much less pressure for women's suffrage in France, where politicians of Right and Left were united in their desire to prevent women getting the vote: the Right because they believed that woman's place was in the home, the Left because they saw women as priest-ridden and innately conservative. However, in 1883 Hubertine Auclert (1848-1914) formed Women’s Suffrage, which urged women to go on a tax strike. In 1909 the French Union for Women’s Suffrage was established.

In Germany the Union of German Women’s Organizations was formed in the 1890s to campaign for the vote and against the regulation of prostitution.

In the 1905 Revolution in Russia women became involved in political meetings and in organizing strikes.

But women’s suffrage was not widely supported. Many women were opposed and formed anti-suffrage organizations. The movement for women’s suffrage was especially weak in France where politicians of the Left and Right argued (for different reasons) against giving the vote to women.

However in many areas women were gaining more rights. Millicent Fawcett’s sister, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, was the first woman doctor to practise in England. British women could vote in local elections from 1907. Technology opened new occupations for women as typists and telephone operators. The expansion of primary education provided a significant career opening for women.

Socialism
The term emerged as popular usage during the 1830s though the genesis can be seen during the later years of the French Revolution with Gracchus Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals. Socialist ideals were propagated by the manufacturer Robert Owen, the owner of the mills at New Lanark, the count de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837). Their idealistic doctrines were a response to the harshness of industrialization. They envisaged a new type of society organized along collectivist and communal lines.

These thinkers were labelled ‘Utopians’ by the two founders of ‘scientific socialism’, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In his works, notably The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867) Marx argued that the nature of society was determined by man’s relationship to the means of production. Through the process known as the dialectic, aristocratic society is replaced by bourgeois society, but this is overthrown by the proletarian revolution. Marx believed that as Britain was the most advanced bourgeois capitalist society at the time, it would be the first to fall to the proletarian revolution.

In 1864 delegates from across Europe founded the First International, an attempt to organize international co-operation among working-class organizations. Although it included liberals as well as socialists, it soon came under the influence of Marx and Engels and became more openly socialist. In 1872 it transferred to New York and ceased to be effective in Europe.

From 1873 the European economies suffered a series of slumps and this enabled socialist ideas to gather support among the working classes, especially in Germany. On 23 May, 1863 Ferdinand Lassalle founded a party under the name Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV, General German Workers' Association). In 1869, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht founded the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP, Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany), which merged with the ADAV in 1875, taking the name Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD).

The party was outlawed in 1878 by Biskmarck’s anti-socialist law which outlawed socialist newspapers, shut down socialist societies and arrested leading socialists. But its thriving subculture of reading groups, sports and leisure societies ensured its survival in strongholds such as Berlin, Frankfurt and Leipzig. In 1890 the laws were relaxed and at the Erfurt Congress in 1891 it adopted the name Social Democratic Party (SPD) and committed itself to a Marxist analysis of society and the pursuit of revolutionary goals. In1890 it attracted close to 1.5 million votes and elected 35 representatives to the Reichstag.

In 1912 it had over a million members and the support of a third of the electorate, making it the largest party in the Reichstag. By this time it was the largest socialist party in the world. This seemed to show that socialists could reach the threshold of power by legal means. By 1914 also Germany had the largest trade union movement in the world, with a quarter of the workforce unionized. Not all unions were socialist – some were Catholic.

The first French socialist party was founded in 1879 in Marseille but divisions between the moderate Proudhonists and the Marxists were too deep to enable unity to be sustained. However in 1881 the first socialist was elected to the National Assembly, which had a 12-strong labour group by 1889. Socialists were able to work with radicals in promoting secularization and income tax reform. But following a wave of strikes in 1900-2 the Socialists split again.

The dispute was between reformists under Jean Jaurès (above left) and revolutionaries. But in 1914 Jaurès tried to adopt the anarcho-syndicalist tactic of the general strike in order to stop the war. This contrasted with the Socialist deputies in Germany who voted to support the war, which they saw as a crusade against repressive Tsarist Russia.

The British labour movement predated the spread of socialist ideas and its character was reformist rather than ideological. In the 1870s British trade unions were organizations of skilled craftsmen who regarded themselves as the ‘aristocracy of labour’. In 1871 and 1875 Liberal and Conservative governments allowed peaceful strikes and gave protection to the funds of trade unions.

The 1880s saw the spread of the ‘new unionism’ which recruited from the unskilled and was more socialist in ideology. The great triumph of the ‘new unionism’ was the London Dock Strike of 1889, which secured the ‘dockers’ tanner’.

The Marxist Social Democratic Federation was founded in 1884, but the bulk of British trade unions did not adopt Marxist theory. In the same year the Fabian Society, composed of middle-class radicals, advocated gradual and peaceful reform. In the election of 1892 Keir Hardie and two others won seats for ‘labour’. In 1993 the Independent Labour Party was founded. On 27 February 1900 delegates from the socialist societies and several trade unions founded the Labour Representation Committee. After winning 29 seats in the general election of 1906 the party changed its name to the Labour Party.

Russia’s main socialist party was the peasant-based Socialist-Revolutionaries. But they were challenged by Marxists, many of them in exile. In 1903 Russian Marxists held a conference in London. The delegates split between those who advocated a broadly based party (Mensheviks –' minority') and the Bolsheviks ('majority') who argued for a small cadre of committed revolutionaries. From 1912-14 the Mensheviks played a role in organizing a wave of strikes in the Lena gold fields. On the eve of war St Petersburg workers demonstrated against the brutal suppression of a strike in the Baku goldfields. The strike was defeated by lock-outs and police action in the middle of July.

On 14 July 1889 the socialist parties across Europe gathered in Paris to found the Second International (a title given to it by historians), which continued to meet every year until July 1914.

From 1889 to 1914 socialist parties grew in strength in every country, benefiting from the expanding trade union movement and the extension of the franchise.

For an English translation of the Socialist anthem the Internationale, see here. For the history of the anthem see here.

Anarchism
[Above is a depiction of the assassination of President McKinley in 1901: see below.)

Anarchism is the theory that conceives of society without government. Late 19th century anarchism was the product of a debate about the inherent nature of man: did he need government in order to restrain his unruly impulses or did government disrupt the naturally harmonious relationships between people? Although it came to be associated with bomb-throwing and terrorism, in essence it sprang from the optimistic belief that human beings were innately good and peaceful. Two of its leading exponents were the Russian pacifists, Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) and the novelist, Tolstoy.

Anarchists differed from liberals because they did not believe in market forces or private property. Like socialists, anarchists rejected capitalism but they did not share the socialist belief that the state was a necessary agent of social and political emancipation. Divisions between socialists and anarchists were to divide the left at the end of the 19th century.

The first person to propound a theory of anarchism was William Godwin (1756-1836) in his Political Justice (1793). The most important anarchist thinker was the French Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-65), who in his What is Property? (1840) popularized the phrase ‘property is theft’ and was the originator of the idea of workers’ control of industry. He became a journalist during the Second Republic and attempted to form a popular bank in 1849 but this collapsed after his imprisonment for press offences.

The revolutionary strain in anarchism was represented by Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), who argued that the control of the state could only be broken by violence. In his Reaction in Germany (1842) he coined the anarchist slogan: ‘The passion for destruction is also a creative one’. He had played a leading part in the 1848 revolutions, had been arrested and sentenced to death, had been exiled in Siberia from where he escaped via Japan and America to western Europe. In 1868 he quarrelled with Marx and was expelled from the First International.

His successor as a leading anarchist was Kropotkin . He was arrested and imprisoned in the 1860s, escaped to Switzerland from where he was deported in 1881 for spreading revolutionary propaganda, and settled in England. He rejected Bakunin’s violence and returned to Proudhon’s concept of mutual aid and co-operative labour.

At the end of the century anarcho-syndicalists, drawing on the thinking of the revolutionary socialist August Blanqui, argued the necessity of direct action and general strikes. France saw a wave of strikes in the early years of the twentieth century. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau responded to the general strike threat in May 1906 by massing 35,000 troops in Paris and arresting the leaders of the syndicalist CGT (Confédération géneral du travail). Following this membership of the anarcho-syndicalist unions declined. This was only partly due to government action. France was still a country of farmers and small shopkeepers and traders and trade unionism was weaker than in the more highly industrialized Britain or Germany. But anarchists mounted bomb attacks in Paris in 1893 and assassinated President Carnot at Lyon in 1894

Anarchism was especially strong in Italy where many artisans drew inspiration from the Paris Commune. In 1878 there was a failed assassination attempt on King Umberto and two people were killed by a bomb in Florence. In 1900 Umberto was finally assassinated.

In Spain more than twenty people were killed at a theatre bombing and ten at a religious procession. In Barcelona’s ‘Tragic Week’ in 1909 anarchists burned 50 churches, monasteries and Catholic schools. Government troops restored order killing over 100 people and arresting 2000. Seventeen people were executed including the innocent Francisco Ferrer Guardia, ‘the Spanish Dreyfus’. In June 1912 the Spanish Prime Minister José Canalejas was assassinated.

Violent anarchists advocated the ‘propaganda of the deed’. A good example was the attempt to bomb the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. This was immortalized in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the first novel I know of to figure a potential suicide bomber.

A prominent victim of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ was the beautiful Empress Elizabeth of Austria. On September 10, 1898, she was stabbed to death in Geneva with a needle file by a young anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. who afterward said,

‘I wanted to kill a royal. It did not matter which one.’

In September 1901 President William McKinley was shot by the Polish anarchist Leon Frank Czolgosz while attending the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. He died on 14 September eight days after the attack. The newly-developed X-ray machine was displayed at the fair, but doctors were reluctant to use it to search for the bullet because they did not know the side effects. The assassin was executed by the electric chair. His last words were

I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.'

Mass politics and democracy.

2011-02-18T21:50:00.002Z

A democratic world?
The later 19th century has been seen as a period of modernization in which, according to the sociologist Max Weber (left), traditional authority increasingly gave way to legal-rational authority organized bureaucratically through impersonal institutions. In 1885 Sir Henry Maine pointed out in his book Popular Government

‘Russia and Turkey are the only European states that completely reject the theory that governments hold their power by delegation from the community.’

In other words, they were the only large states that did not have some kind of parliamentary institutions.

Those states that had representative government were extending the franchise. Both France and Germany had adult male suffrage. In Britain (male) heads of urban households got the vote in 1867 and in 1884 the vote was extended to rural householders. This still left 40% of men without the vote. Spain obtained universal male suffrage in 1890 and Norway in 1898. Austrian men obtained the vote in 1907. From 1906 Russia had a parliament (the Duma) elected on a propertied franchise. The Ottoman Empire acquired a parliament in 1908. Mass politics meant the growth of political parties, and well attended political meetings.

As Weber noted, this change towards accountable government and mass politics was accompanied by the growth of bureaucracy. Germany’s civil service grew from 450,000 in 1881 to 1.8 million in 1911; Britain’s from 81,000 to 644,000. The burden of government expenditure also rose and with it the spread of some form of income tax.

These trends were accompanied by the spread of primary education, wider literacy and urbanisation.

Monarchy
Monarchy was the apex of the social hierarchy, and remained the rule in most of Europe, with France and Switzerland the only two republics that mattered in 1880 (Portugal became a republic in 1910). When new states appeared, they were given kings. Deference and hierarchy still appealed. Monarchies became more ritualistic with weddings and funerals public events (see also Queen Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees and the celebrations in Russia in 1913 commemorating the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. Monarchs used the railways to make state visits and the image of the monarch was widely distributed through cheap engravings and press photographs. Monarchs also played a political role. Even the constitutional monarch, Queen Victoria, had a political motive for marrying her daughter into the Prussian royal family and for encouraging her granddaughter, Alex, to marry the heir to the Russian throne, the future Nichols II (right). One of the most blatant examples of royals engaging in politics can be seen in the ‘Willy-Nicky’ correspondence between the Tsar and Kaiser Wilhelm II. (The Kaiser and the Tsarina were first cousins, both grandchildren of Queen Victoria.)

Yet monarchs were under pressure as never before. They faced the threat of assassination and revolt.

Nationalism
Nationalism was on the increase in late nineteenth-century Europe. In 1905 Norway separated from Sweden. Nationalist movements fed off each other. Sinn Fein was founded in 1905 and was partly inspired by the example of the Magyars. Frustrated nationalists included the Poles in Russia, the Armenians in Turkey and the south Slavs of the Dual Monarchy (Austria-Hungary). In Ireland political nationalism took the form of a search for cultural identity with the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and the revival of the Irish language. On the left is a poster for the first night: a performance of W. B. Yeats' Kathleen ni Houlihan.

Racial theories
The downside of much nationalism was racism, partly inspired by corrupted Darwinism and was most influential in Germany. In 1899 the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner's son-in-law, published The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which argued that northern Europeans were superior to all other humans. Joseph Chamberlain dreamed of a world dominated by the (racially similar) British and Germans. Slav nationalists propagated the ideology of pan-Slavism.

Anti-Semitism revived in intensity. In 1880 a German anti-Semitic league was formed. The influx of Jewish emigrants to Vienna increased anti-Jewish feeling there encouraged by the socialist mayor, Karl Lueger. The Dreyfus case exposed anti-Semitism in France. The new anti-Semitism was often a lower middle-class phenomenon and was fiercest in eastern and central Europe.

Welfare measures
In the new age of mass politics, government intervention increased. This was seen as a move from individualism to collectivism. The British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury:

‘We have got, as far aw we can, to make this country more pleasant to live in for the vast majority of those who live in it.’

In 1889 Bismarck introduced the first state-run social insurance programme paying retirement benefits. His system was funded with payroll taxes paid by the employee and the employer, along with contributions from the government. It also included a disability benefit. In 1908 Britain introduced old age pensions and a national insurance scheme in 1911.

These welfare measures show that governments believed they had to take the wishes of the electorate into account. But is accountable government the same as democracy? Women were largely excluded from the franchise and political power remained with elites who came from a narrow social band.

Literacy and mass communications
In the nineteenth century Europe advanced towards mass literacy though the spread was very uneven and literacy can be varyingly defined. A study of 50 million Germans in 1886 demonstrated different forms of literacy ranging from the 20 million who could read popular literature to 10 million who could read more demanding works.

This tied in with improvements in communications. The first railway telegraph seems to have been installed in the Great Western between Paddington and West Drayton and was operating by the spring of 1839. In 1842 and improved telegraph consisting of double-needle instruments and only two wires was ordered. The wires were suspended overhead on upright standards of cast-iron and at intervals of up to 150 yards. By 1848, 1,800 miles of railway were so equipped in the country as a while. This enabled Greenwich or ‘railway’ time to become standard in Britain by the 1850s. The first successful transatlantic telegraph cable was completed on July 27, 1866, allowing transatlantic telegraph communications for the first time.

In 1874 the Universal Postal Union was founded. The volume of items sent through the mail increased from 3 billion letters and postcards to 25 billion in 1913. The telephone was invented in 1876 though by 1913 there were still 100 letters for every 21 telephone calls.

The press played an important role in homogenising populations. Newspapers became cheaper and more varied. In Italy from the turn of the century dailies began to carry sports pages. The provincial press was especially important in France.

In 1896 the first issue of Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail appeared. It was based on the style of newspapers published in the USA. The eight page newspaper cost only halfpenny. Slogans used to sell the newspaper included 'A Penny Newspaper for One Halfpenny' and 'The Busy Man's Daily Newspaper'. The Daily Mail was the first newspaper in Britain that catered for a new reading public that needed something simpler, shorter and more readable than those that had previously been available. One new innovation was the banner headline that went right across the page. Considerable space was given to sport and human interest stories. It was also the first newspaper to include a woman's section that dealt with issues such as fashions and cookery.
Another innovation introduced by the Daily Mail was the publication of serials. Personally supervised by Harmsworth, the average length was 100,000 words. The opening episode was 5,000 words and had to have a dramatic impact on the readers. This was followed by episodes of 1,500 to 2,000 words every day.

The Daily Mail was an immediate success and circulation quickly achieved 500,000. With the strong interest in the South African War in 1899 sales went to over a million. Harmsworth encouraged people to buy the Daily Mail for nationalistic reasons making it clear to his readers that his newspaper stood "for the power, the supremacy and the greatness of the British Empire".
Harmsworth also used his newspapers to promote inventions such as the telephone, electric light, photography, motorcycles and motor cars. He was so passionate about cars that Harmsworth prohibited the editor of the Daily Mail from reporting automobile accidents.

In France the most popular newspaper (circulation 1.4 m.) was the Petit Parisien, which offered its readers ‘human interest’ stories. The Russian equivalent was the Gazeta Kopeika, which sold for one kopek.

Conservatives and liberals lamented the growth of a ‘trashy’ popular culture.

News agencies reported on national and international events. In October 1851 Paul Julius Reuter, a German-born immigrant, opened an office in the City of London which transmitted stock market quotations between London and Paris via the new Calais-Dover cable. Two years earlier he had used pigeons to fly stock prices between Aachen and Brussels, a service which operated for a year until the gap in the telegraph link was closed. Reuters, as the agency soon became known, eventually extended its service to the whole British press as well as to other European countries. It also expanded the content to include general and economic news from all around the world. The reputation of its service was enhanced by a succession of reporting scoops. For example, in 1865 Reuters was first in Europe with news of President Lincoln’s assassination.

As overland telegraph and undersea cable facilities developed, the business expanded beyond Europe to include the Far East in 1872 and South America in 1874. In 1883 Reuters began to use a ‘column printer’ to transmit messages electrically to London newspapers.

These developments enabled the public to engage with politics as never before. They did not necessarily make the world a safer place.

Religion and secularization

2011-02-12T08:18:00.000Z

Historians and sociologists have been interested in the phenomenon of ‘secularization’, which had usually been linked with ‘modernization’. The nineteenth century saw a continuous conflict (and sometimes attempts at reconciliation) between the forces of religion and those of ‘modernity’.

‘Throne and altar’: post Napoleonic Europe
In the early nineteenth century Enlightenment rationalism was challenged by a revitalized Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, which was a reaction to the French Revolution’s attack on the churches and the Christian religion. During the Napoleonic Wars, church property had been confiscated. In 1809 the Papal States were annexed and in 1812 the Pope was kidnapped and lodged in the château of Fontainebleau. Some former radicals like Wordsworth and Coleridge became strong supporters of the Church of England. In 1798 the French Romantic writer François-René de Chateaubriand was converted to the Catholicism of his childhood and defended Christianity in his La Génie du Christianisme (1802).

But at the same time anti-clericals and religious dissidents attacked the idea of a monopoly state religion. Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801 had recognized Catholicism as ‘the religion of the majority of Frenchmen’ rather than the religion of the state. The minority Protestant Church was allowed full legal privileges. In 1810 the Rome ghetto was thrown open. In Britain a parliamentary attempt in 1811 to restrict the privileges of Protestant Dissenters was blocked by a concerted campaign. Although religious toleration was not universal, the temper of the times was in favour of pluralism.

The views of the counter-Revolution were expressed by Joseph de Maistre, who asserted in 1797 that the Revolution had been a satanic conspiracy, but that it was also divine retribution for the sins of humanity. The same argument was put by the Spanish clergy in the War of Liberation.

The restoration of monarchies in 1814-15 heralded a wave of persecution of minorities deemed to be associated with revolution. Jews in Prussia were deprived of their rights. Ghettoes were reconstituted in many parts of Europe. In 1814 the Inquisition was brought back to Spain. In Catholic Europe religious congregations took over schools.

The Catholic Church in France embarked on a mission to rebuild its structures and authority. Missions were preached in towns, and new congregations of nuns were set up. In reaction, the July monarchy reduced the influence of the Church in education and removed bishops from the Chamber of Peers.

Religion was also a powerful force in post-Napoleonic Prussia. The situation in the Catholic Rhineland, which came under the rule of Protestant Prussia in 1815, was always extremely delicate. Increasingly, the Rhinelanders and other Catholics looked ‘beyond the mountains’ to Rome for support. Unlike his predecessor, Frederick William IV believed that he could use the conservatism of the Rhenish Catholics to his advantage and in 1842 he was present at a ceremony to begin the completion of the Gothic cathedral at Cologne. This building project coincided with a surge in popular pilgrimages, the most famous of which occurred in 1844 when half a million Catholics converged on Trier to view the ‘holy coat’. This was bound up with the Rhinelanders’ dislike of Prussian rule.

Catholicism could be both ‘liberal’ and ‘reactionary’. Liberal Catholic ideas were circulated in France through Félicité de Lammenais’ L’Avenir. In some parts of Europe Catholicism was often bound up with nationalism. Belgian and Polish Catholics had close contact with the revolutionaries. The MP Daniel O’Connell argued for the abolition of slavery and the ending of the parliamentary union with Britain.

Protestant revivalism
Protestantism witnessed a similar revival of faith. The roots of the revival can be traced back to German Pietism and the Moravians of the early eighteenth century. From the late 1730s the Methodist revival spread ‘vital religion’ throughout the British Isles. In Britain religious energies focussed on the campaign to abolish the slave trade, the foundation of missionary societies and the work of the Bible Society (founded 1804). In 1813 Evangelical missionary fervour acquired an imperial dimension when Parliament agreed to open up India to Anglican missionary work. The diocese of Calcutta was founded in 1814 and the Gothic St Paul's cathedral was begun by Bishop Daniel Wilson in 1839.

During the first decades of the century a religious revival swept Protestant north Germany which expressed itself in emotional manifestations and a variety of philanthropic works. For example, the Silesian nobleman Hans Ernst von Kottwitz set up a ‘spinning institute’ for the city’s unemployed and a new mission to the Jews was founded in Berlin in 1822. In Prussian Westphalia Count Adalbert von der Recke founded the Düsselthal Salvation Institute in 1817 to provide a refuge for orphaned and abandoned children.

Many Protestants held the premillennial belief that the last days were at hand (this was the rationalie behind attempts to convert the Jews). In Germany the liberal theology that was prevalent in the universities was challenged by apocalyptic preaching that declared that the victory at Leipzig was a prelude to the battle against the Antichrist.

Mid-century: challenges and opportunities
In the decade after 1848 organized religion, and especially the Catholic Church, was rehabilitated as a principle of order in a changing world. But the churches faced challenges from secular forces, from science and biblical criticism and from the alienation of the working classes from organized religion.

In Germany the biblical historian David Friedrich Strauss (right) launched an assault on orthodox Christianity in his Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835). He argued that the New Testament should be read as any other historical text rather than as the divinely inspired word of God. His argument was rejected by conservatives but welcomed by the seven British churchmen who wrote Essays and Reviews in 1860.

The English and Welsh religious census of 1851 revealed the alarming fact that only 50% of the population were in church on Sunday 21 March ('Census Sunday'). Of this 50% nearly half attended Nonconformist rather than Anglican places of workship.

A number of British intellectuals turned against Christianity. George Eliot, Strauss' English translator, abandoned her adolescent Evangelicalism. In 1869 T. H. Huxley coined the word ‘agnostic’.

The Roman Catholic Church enjoyed a revival in Britain winning some prominent converts from Anglicanism, notably the Anglican clerics John Henry Newman (right) and Henry Manning. The Church was divided between liberals who asserted the rights of the individual conscience and ultramontanes who asserted papal authority. The liberal Malines Congress of 1863 argued that the Church should not use the state as a crutch and should end its association with reactionary regimes.

Pius IX
However in 1864 Pius IX issued the Syllabus Errorum which condemned most trends in the modern world and declared it a heresy that ‘the Roman pontiff can and ought to reconcile and harmonize himself with progress, with liberalism and with modern civilization’. Napoleon III responded by banning it in France.

The pope reacted to Italian unification with an interdict forbidding Italian Catholics to vote or to stand in elections. The Italian state responded in 1867 with the expropriation of church land, the closure of religious orders, a ban on pilgrimages, civil marriage and the extension of equal political and civil rights to non-Catholics.

In the summer of 1868 Pius summoned the first General Council of the Church for three hundred years. Over 700 bishops convened at St Peter’s on 8 December 1869. In May 1870 the Council promulgated a constitution containing fundamental statements of faith. A separate constitution setting out the doctrine of papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals, was voted through on 18 July, though a minority of 150 refused to assent to the doctrine regarding it as either inopportune or untrue. The British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, Gladstone, a High Anglican with liberal Catholic friends, described the decree as

‘like some mummy picked out of its dusty sarcophagus’.

The following day France declared war on Prussia and the last French troops were withdrawn from Rome. Following the defeat of the French at Sedan, Italian troops under General Rafaele Cadorna launched a successful assault on Rome, which was incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy. Pius retreated into the Vatican. It was not until 1929 that an agreement was reached and Vatican City became an independent state.

Germany: the Kulturkampf
The term, meaning ‘struggle of cultures’ was coined by the Prussian Left-liberal Virchow, and subsequently adopted by historians to describe the conflict between the Roman Catholic Church and the Prussian and imperial German governments.

In the newly united Germany, Catholics formed a third of the population. They reacted to unification by forging the Centre Party in 1870 to protect the Church and Catholic schools. Under its leader Ludwig Windhorst, it also prompted social reform. For Bismarck, Catholicism was bound up with the regionalism of the south, potential separatism in Alsace and Lorraine and nationalism in the Prussian-ruled parts of Poland. When he failed to persuade the Pope and the German bishops to withdraw their support from the Centre Party, he stepped up his campaign against the Church. Across the Reich, the Jesuits were expelled. In Prussia the government claimed exclusive rights to inspect schools and the May Laws of 1873 obliged trainee priests to attend state universities; church appointments were to be vetted by the state and the registration of births, deaths and marriages was put under state supervision. In 1875 Prussia outlawed all religious orders.

But the Kulturkampf failed to destroy Catholicism as a political and social force and in the Reichstag elections of 1874 the Centre Party made significant gains. In 1878 Pio Nono died and was replaced by the more conciliatory Leo XIII, causing Bismarck to abandon most of his anticlerical legislation, in spite of his previous declaration that he would never 'go to Canossa'.

France: the Catholic revival
The bloodshed of the Paris Commune, especially the execution of the Archbishop of Paris and other priests by the Communards, revived the Catholic Church and led to a semi-revival of ‘throne and altar’ politics. In 1873 the right-wing National Assembly decreed that the basilica of the Sacré Coeur [above] should be built in Montmartre to atone for the crimes of the Commune and the sins that had led to France’s defeat by Germany. But this inspired a fierce anti-clerical revolt.

The Third Republic saw a clash over education between Church and State. In the 1880s the Ferry laws which made primary education free (1881) and compulsory (1882) replaced the teaching of the catechism with ‘moral and civic education’ in the primary schools. By the law of 1886 teaching staff at primary schools for boys were to be laicized within five years. In 1901 a law on associations led to the banning of all religious orders not authorized by the state. This led to the closure of thousands of schools.

From 1890 a Catholic movement, the Ralliement, led by Cardinal Charles Lavigerie and encouraged by Leo XIII, worked for reconciliation with the Republic. But this was ruptured by the Dreyfus affair. In 1902 the anti-clerical radical, Emile Combes, became Prime Minister. In 1903 Leo XIII was replaced by the less conciliatory Pius X. In December 1905 the French government passed the Law of Separation. This abandoned the concessions made by Napoleon’s Concordat, and brought about laïcité, the complete separation of Church and state.

The Churches and social reform
Faced with the problems of industrial society and the growth of socialism, the churches responded with projects for social reform: Protestant working men’s associations in Germany, Christian socialism in England. In 1889 Cardinal Manning successfully mediated in the London Dock Strike. The Salvation Army established food depots, night shelters and rescue homes for ‘fallen’ women.

Secularization
In the nineteenth century the power of the state advanced at the expense of the Church, particularly in education. In France, the chief educator was no longer the curé, but the instituteur. All the mainstream churches worried about declining numbers.

But it is difficult to generalize because religious practice varied from country to country and region to region. Men tended to be more anti-clerical and less inclined to attend church. For many women, religion, though institutions such as religious orders or the Anglican Mothers’ Union, provided a semi-public role outside the home. In Britain in the 1890s most children attended Sunday school at some time in their lives.

Possibly as an unconscious response to secularism, spontaneous local cults grew up, notably many manifestations of the Virgin to poor peasant girls (including La Salette, 1847; Lourdes (left) 1858; Marpingen, 1876; Knock, 1879). The clergy’s attitude was ambivalent; it instinctively distrusted these manifestations of popular piety, but it saw that, once in male, clerical hands, they could be used to restore the church’s authority. In 1908, three years after the Law of Separation in France, over a million people went on pilgrimage in Lourdes.

The 'secularization narrative' is thus highly contested and not all historians or sociologists see a straightforward linear progress towards a secular society.

The Man on Devil's Island

2011-02-06T08:07:00.001Z

Go here for the Telegraph's review of the excellent Ruth Harris's book on the Dreyfus case.

The Third Republic

2011-02-06T08:05:00.001Z

As well as using the standard textbooks I have consulted the Britannica 2001 CD-ROM and my undergraduate copy of my old professor Alfred Cobban's History of Modern France, vol 2, 1799-1945 (Penguin 1961). Still excellent after all these years! I have also used a more modern work, Colin Jones, Cambridge Illustrated History of France (CUP, 1999).

The Republic proclaimed

When the news of the French surrender at Sedan reached Paris on September 4, crowds filled the streets and demanded the proclamation of a republic. The imperial officials put up no serious resistance; the Revolution of September 4 was the most bloodless in French history. For an outline of the Third Republic see here.

The siege of Paris

A provisional Government of National Defence was set up, headed by General Louis-Jules Trochu and including leaders of the parliamentary opposition. Its first task was the continuation of the war against the invaders. The new government's most charismatic member was the new Minister of the Interior, Léon Gambetta (left) hero of the radical republicans. Gambetta, a young Parisian lawyer originally from the south, had been elected to the Legislative Corps in 1869 and had already made his mark through his energy and eloquence. He doubled the size of the National Guard bringing its numbers up to 360,000 men (virtually the whole male able-bodied population of Paris). In the meanwhile one of Louis-Philippe’s ministers, Adolphe Thiers, went on a fruitless mission round Europe in search of support from the other powers.

However by 23 September the Prussian forces had surrounded Paris, having already occupied all of France north and east of Orléans. The new government was deprived of its contact with the rest of the country. On 7 October Gambetta left the city by balloon to join several members of the government at Tours, where he assumed the functions of Minister of War as well as Minister of the Interior. During the next four months, Gambetta's makeshift armies fought a series of indecisive battles with the Prussians in the Loire valley and eastern France. These battles took the Prussians by surprise and greatly enhanced the prestige of the republicans, but the French forces were no match for Moltke’s army and the delegation at Tours was forced to withdraw to Bordeaux.

Resistance was now concentrated in Paris where the National Guard manned the defences of the city. But the Prussians had no intention of taking Paris by storm when it was easier to starve the city. Soon the Parisians were eating the animals from the zoo and cutting down the tress in the Champs Élysées for firewood. On 5 January in the middle of a terrible winter, the Prussians began to bombard Paris. By this time left-wing leaders were accusing Trochu’s government of treachery. While still at war with the Prussians, the Parisians were beginning to fight each other.

The armistice

On January, having defeated an abortive left-wing rising, the government accepted the inevitable armistice which was signed on 28 January over Gambetta's angry protests. By its terms Paris was to capitulate and there was to be a three-week suspension of hostilities to allow for the election of an assembly that would negotiate a peace.

The election, held on February 8, produced an assembly dominated by monarchists, more than 400 of them, compared to only 200 republicans and a few Bonapartists. Overwhelmingly, it was a vote for peace, though Paris and certain provinces, such as Alsace, voted heavily for republicans. On 13 February the National Assembly convened in Bordeaux and chose Thiers (in spite of his republicanism) as ‘chief of the executive power of the French republic’. Thiers had been the most outspoken critic of Napoleon's foreign policy and had repeatedly warned the country of the Prussian danger. He set out at once to negotiate a settlement with Bismarck.

The Treaty of Frankfurt

On March 1 the Treaty of Frankfurt was ratified by a large majority of the assembly. The terms were severe: France was charged a war indemnity of five billion francs plus the cost of maintaining a German occupation army in eastern France until the indemnity was paid. Alsace and half of Lorraine were annexed to the new German Empire. The German army was authorized to stage a victory march through the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile in Paris. After the assembly ratified the treaty, the deputies of the lost provinces (including Léon Gambetta) resigned their seats in protest.

The Commune

A few days later, the assembly transferred the seat of government from Bordeaux to Versailles (not Paris). This in itself was a provocation to many Parisians. Poorer Parisians were further angered by the assembly’s decision to end the wartime moratorium on debts and rents and the cutting off of further payments to the National Guard.

The crisis came on 18 March when Thiers ordered the 400 guns of the National Guard to be removed from the butte (mound) de Montmartre. A crowd gathered; a bloody encounter ensued; two generals were caught and lynched by the mob. As violence spread through the city, Thiers hastily withdrew all troops and government offices from Paris and went to Versailles to plan his strategy. He appealed successfully to Bismarck to release French prisoners of war in order to form a siege army that could eventually force Paris to capitulate. During the next two months, this governmental force was slowly assembled. Within Paris, meanwhile, initial chaos gradually gave way to an improvised experiment in municipal self-government.

On 26 March the Parisian rebels elected a municipal government known as the Commune (a name that went back to the Jacobin Terror), an event that even today inspires fierce controversy - see the (somewhat fractious) discussion on the Wikipedia entry. Was the Commune, as Karl Marx promptly declared, the first great uprising of the proletariat against its bourgeois oppressors? Or was it a much more varied movement comprising varied strands of left-wing and revolutionary thought? Some were Jacobins, some adhered to the revolutionary creed of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, others were disciples of Proudhon, who favoured a decentralized federation of self-governing communes throughout France. Not all the members of the Commune were working class – there were many more bourgeois and professional men.

These internal divisions prevented any vigorous or coherent experiments in social reform and also interfered with the Commune's efforts to organize an effective armed force. Communes on the Paris model were set up briefly in several other cities (Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse) but were quickly suppressed.

On 2 April (Palm Sunday) the second siege of Paris began, as under the noses of the Prussians, the (initially) poorly equipped Versailles army surrounded the city. On 8 May a general bombardment began. On 21 May the walls were breached while the Communards argued among themselves.

In the course of 'Bloody Week' (May 21-28) the Communards resisted, street by street, but were pushed back steadily to the heart of Paris. The Versailles army were initially far more ruthless than the Communards, systematically shooting their prisoners. In retaliation, the Communards executed a number of hostages (including the archbishop of Paris) and in the last days set fire to many public buildings, including the Tuileries Palace and the Hôtel de Ville. A final stand was made in Père-Lachaise Cemetery, where the last resisters were shot down against the Mur des Fédérés--ever since, a place of pilgrimage for the French left. Thiers’s government took a terrible vengeance. Twenty thousand Communards were killed in the fighting or executed on the spot (as opposed to 1,000 Versaillese); thousands of survivors were deported to the penal islands, while others escaped into exile. An assembly of monarchists headed by a conservative republican had ‘first provoked and then put to fire and the sword the people of Paris’. Below is a gruesome photograph of Communards in their coffins.

The results of the Commune

The repression of the Paris Commune left its mark on the emerging republic. The various socialist factions and the newly organized labour movement were left leaderless and Thiers’ ruthless law and order policies probably won many rural and small-town voters to his brand of conservative republicanism. In the by-elections to the assembly in July 1871 republicans won 99 of 114 vacancies. The voters were clearly willing to accept a republic so long as it was run by a man like Thiers.

The failure of the monarchists

The monarchists, however, still held a comfortable majority in the assembly and continued to hope and plan for a restoration. There were two candidates for the throne, the Legitimist Count de Chambord (the ‘miracle child’ born posthumously after the assassination of his uncle the duc de Berri in 1820) and the Orleanist pretender, Philippe, Count of Paris. Chambord was childless but the Count de Paris was young and had a family. A compromise solution was proposed: Chambord was to be restored but the Count of Paris was to be successor. But in July 1871 Chambord issued a manifesto stating that he would never abandon the fleur de lys for the republican tricolore. This seemed to rule out the prospect of monarchy and Thiers’ position was accordingly strengthened.

During the next two years, Thiers reorganized the army and worked to restore national morale; he successfully floated two bond issues that permitted the war indemnity to be paid off in 1873, thus ending the German occupation ahead of schedule. Late in 1872, however, he renounced his long-held Orleanist faith and declared his conversion to republicanism. The monarchists forced his resignation as provisional president (May 1873) and hastily substituted the commander of the army, Marshal Patrice de MacMahon. They hoped that this would give them the breathing space needed to secure the restoration of the monarchy. But in January 1875 the Assembly voted 353/352 (one vote!) to accept the existing republican government. The disheartened monarchists fell back on waiting for the Bourbon line to die out. But when Chambord died in 1883, it was too late for a restoration.

The republican constitution

The Third Republic never had a constitution, but there were a number of constitutional laws which provided the framework of government. There was a two-chamber legislature (with an indirectly elected Senate as a conservative check on the Chamber of Deputies); a Council of Ministers (Cabinet), responsible to the Chamber; and a president, elected for seven years by the two houses, with powers resembling those of a constitutional monarch. Because there was no formal constitution, there was always the theoretical possibility that the monarchy could be restored.

The constitution left untouched many aspects of the French governmental structure, notably the centralized administrative system inherited from Napoleon I, the hierarchy of courts and judges, and the Concordat of 1801, governing church-state relations. At the end of 1875 the National Assembly at last dissolved itself, and the provisional phase of the Third Republic came to an end.

The new Senate, which heavily overrepresented rural France, was safely monarchist from the outset; and the term of President MacMahon, a loyal monarchist, ran until 1880. But when the first Chamber of Deputies was elected in 1876, the republicans won more than two-thirds of the seats. A period of severe friction between Mac-Mahon and the Chamber followed. On 16 May 1877 Mac-Mahon dissolved the Chamber and called on the voters’ support, but again they opted for the republic, by a narrower but clear-cut margin. Léon Gambetta, who had returned to political life and had led the republicans during the campaign, called on Mac-Mahon to ‘give in or get out’. The president gave in, naming a premier acceptable to the republican majority. In January 1879 partial elections gave the republicans control of the Senate, and Mac-Mahon shortly found an excuse to resign. He was replaced by a ‘safe’ republican, Jules Grévy. The balance of the constitution had shifted in favour of the Chamber and against the Senate and the office of the President, who has been described as an elderly gentleman whose function it was to wear evening dress in the day-time.

The years 1877 to 1881 mark the real foundation of the Third Republic, with republicans winning local elections. Some of the characteristics of modern French life came into being. In 1879 the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies returned to Paris from Versailles. La Marseillaise became the national anthem and the 14th July a national holiday. In 1881 an amnesty was granted to the surviving Communards.

The Dreyfus affair

French public life continued to be obsessed by revanchism, the desire to recover the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The Right in particular developed an ideology of extreme nationalism. The writer Paul Déroulède formed a League of Patriots, which engaged in vaguely conspiratorial activities and was on the look-out for scapegoats, in particular Protestants, freemasons and Jews.

The conspiratorial atmosphere intensified in 1889 when the radical populist General Boulanger came near to mounting a coup against the government. The Panama Scandal, in which government ministers and many other parliamentarians were found to have taken bribes, was the largest corruption scandal of the nineteenth century. Two Jews were shown to have been in charge of distributing the money.

The most notorious incident of this period is the Dreyfus affair. In 1894 a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was dismissed and in the following year he deported to the French penal colony of Devil's Island off Guyana for allegedly passing classified military information to the Germans. In 1898 the writer Emile Zola published in the radical newspaper L'Aurore an open letter entitled J'Accuse to the president of the Republic, in which he attacked the army and asserted Dreyfus' innocence. In the poisonous debate that followed, France split into Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899 but only finally cleared in 1906.

See here for a review of the latest scholarly book on the subject, Ruth Harris' The Man on Devil's Island.

Listen here to the discussion on Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time.

Education

The Republic faced a bruising conflict with the Roman Catholic Church over education. The Loi Falloux of 1850 had given religious teaching communities greater freedom to operate, something deeply resented by anti-clerical politicians. Between 1881 and 1886 the education minister, Jules Ferry, introduced free primary education for children between six and thirteen and for the first time provided public secondary schooling for girls. The school programme was a major success. The profession of primary school teacher became firmly established and in many rural communities the teacher was an alternative source of authority to the parish priest.

In the early twentieth century the government stepped up its campaign against the Church's role in education. In 1901 it was decreed that all teaching orders had to be authorized by the state. In 1904 religious congregations were prohibited from teaching and in 1905 Church and State were formally separated, establishing the cherished French principles of secularité and laïcité. Thousands of religious schools were shut down.

For all its problems, the Third Republic survived until 1940. However its underlying tensions did not go away and were to re-emerge during the Vichy regime.

German unification

2011-02-06T08:05:00.000Z

The picture above is of the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles.

As well as the textbooks mentioned in previous posts, I have used the Britannica CD ROM (2001) and Christopher Clark's excellent Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947 (Allen Lane, 2006)

Update: Go here for an excellent discussion on Bismarck in Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time'.

King William I
The Italian war provided an impetus for the unification of Germany that was to take place under Bismarck's leadership. There were clear parallels between the perceived predicaments of Germany and Italy and between Prussia and Piedmont, both constitutional monarchies with modernizing agendas. There was also a renewal of the French threat as, like his uncle, Napoleon III had successfully challenged the established European order. His invasion of Italy led to the mobilization of 250,000 men in various German states under the authority of the Confederation Diet and an outburst of patriotic feeling across Germany. But there was a difference from 1848-9. German liberals now realized that unification could only take place under the leadership of Prussia.

In 1858 the 62 year old Prince William of Prussia became regent for his brother, Frederick William IV, who had been incapacitated by a series of strokes. A liberalizing ministry took office inaugurating a new era of ‘parliamentary monarchy, enabling the liberals to win a landslide in the Landtag (upper house) elections of November 1858.

In January 1861 Frederick William IV died and William became King William I of Prussia. He was dedicated to the Prussian army, whose uniform he had worn since the age of six. He was also a consistent enthusiast for some kind of German unity under Prussian leadership (though he had not worked out any details). In order to meet the challenges he planned to double the size of the army and to distance the regular army from the ‘people’s’ Landwehr. However this met with opposition from the liberals in the parliament and raised the question of the king’s constitutional position.

The military-constitutional conflict that resulted gradually brought the Prussian system to a standstill. William dissolved the parliament and called new elections but in the spring of 1862 he dissolved his new parliament and by September he appeared ready to abdicate in favour of his son, Crown Prince Frederick William, who was known to be sympathetic to the liberal position. (In 1858, he had married Queen Victoria’s daughter, Vicky, Princess Royal.) But in September he was persuaded by his minister of war, Albrecht von Roon to adopt a measure of last resort, the appointment of Otto von Bismarck, then ambassador in Paris, as minister-president of Prussia. This was the monarch’s last desperate effort to avoid parliamentary sovereignty over the military.

Bismarck: early career
Bismarck was born into the East Elbian Junker class, descended on his father’s side from five generations of landowners. However his mother’s family were academics and Bismarck was much more of an intellecutal than most junkers. As Prussian delegate to the Frankfurt diet of the German Confederation, he had become convinced of the incompatibility of Prussian and Austrian interests in Germany. From 1859-62 he was ambassador to St Petersburg. In May he was appointed ambassador to Paris until he was summoned to Berlin in September.

As a man and a politician he defied easy labelling. He was certainly not a liberal but he never really shared the views of the landed aristocracy. This made him extremely pragmatic and flexible in his policies.

‘Politics is no science, it is an art and anyone without the knack of it should leave it alone.’

Here is the historian, Christopher Clark on Bismarck:

The consequences of this understanding of his own place in the world can be observed in his demeanour as a public figure, and particularly in his tendency towards insubordination. Bismarck never behaved as if he had a boss. This was most glaringly apparent in his relations with William I. As chancellor, Bismarck frequently pushed policies through against the monarch’s will; and when the king created obstructions, Bismarck resorted to tantrums and fits of weeping, backing up by the threat…to resign and return to the comfort and peace of his estate. When Bismarck wanted to consolidate his relationship with the monarch, he generally did so but by endearing himself directly to his sovereign, but by engineering crises that highlighted his own indispensability, like a helmsman who steers into the storm in order to demonstrate his mastery of the ship.' (Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, Allen Lane, 2006, pp. 520-1)

At a meeting of the budget commission of the Prussian Parliament on September 30, 1862, Bismarck (1815-1898) delivered his famous ‘Blood and Iron’ speech.

‘Prussia must collect and keep its strength for the right moment, which has been missed several times already; Prussia’s frontiers as laid down by the Vienna treaties are not conducive to a healthy national life; it is not by means of speeches and majority resolutions that the great issues of the day will be decided – that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by blood and iron.’

This was a call for a ‘small German’ (kleindeutsch) nation-state dominated by Prussia.

Conflicts with the Liberals
Bismarck’s initial policy as minister-president was to secure an understanding with the deputies over the size of the army and the powers of the crown. But when compromise seemed to be getting nowhere, he abandoned the policy and switched to open confrontation, designed to demonstrate to the king his loyalty and indispensability. The military reforms were put in train and taxes collected without parliamentary approval and civil servants were threatened with the sack if they did not comply.

At first the policy seemed to be failing. The elections of 1863 reduced the number of pro-government deputies. The political stalemate undermined Prussia’s standing in the German Confederation just at the time when Austria was proposing reforms that would breathe new life into that body (and cement its own influence). It was not clear that Bismarck was going to last as a politician. But he hoped that a successful foreign policy would weaken the desire for political reform.

The Schleswig-Holstein question
The death of Frederick VII of Denmark in the winter of 1863 re-opened the very complex question of the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein which lay between Denmark and Germany. Most of the people of Schleswig spoke Danish but there was an area of ethnic and linguistic diversity in south Schleswig and the people of Holstein largely spoke German. Holstein was part of the German Confederation, Schleswig was not. The problems raised by the duchies involved the nationality rights of the German minority in Schleswig and the Danish minority in Holstein as well as the rights of succession of various branches of the Danish royal family.

See here if you have the brain power, stamina and mental stability to pursue the question. I haven't.

In January 1848 Frederick VII became king of Denmark and announced his intention to incorporate Schleswig into the Danish unitary state. On 21 March, Schleswig was annexed. On 23 April at the authorization of the Frankfurt Parliament, (largely) Prussian despatched troops into Schleswig in spite of protests from Britain. The war dragged on until 1850 when Prussian troops were withdrawn. In 1852 the London Protocol temporarily settled the dispute by demanding that the German Confederation return Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark and that Denmark keep the duchies together.

In November 1863 Frederick VII died - the last common male heir to both Denmark and the duchies. Prince Christian of Glücksburg became Christian IX . (His daughter Alexandra, had married the Prince of Wales six months earlier). The new king announced his intention to absorb Schleswig into the Danish unitary state (thus separating it from Holstein), a move which was denounced as a provocation by German nationalists.

The Danish-Prussian War
In December 1863 a small Confederation force occupied Holstein but was unable to proceed to the heavily defended Schleswig. Prussia and Austria then declared that they were prepared to invade Schleswig but in their own right as European powers. It was a rare show of unity, but in fact they wanted different things from the war. Austria wanted to reassert its dominance of the German Confederation and to prevent Prussia from annexing Schleswig; it was also demonstrating to France that in spite of its defeats in Italy it was still a great power.

Bismarck’s ultimate objective was to annex both duchies to Prussia. He was persuaded (probably by the Prussian Chief of Staff, Helmut von Moltke the Elder) that if the duchies were allowed to be independent they might become a Habsburg satellite. The agreement to work with Austria was therefore a temporary device.

On 1 August 1864 the Danes were forced to sue for peace. King Christian ceded all rights to the duchies to Prussia and Austria and they passed under joint Austro-Prussian military occupation pending a decision on their future by the German Confederation. But Bismarck’s objectives had not changed. He still planned to annex the duchies and offered many provocations to Austria over the next twelve months.

On 14 August 1865 Prussia and Austria signed the Convention of Gastein: there was to be joint Austro-Prussian sovereignty in the duchies, while placing Schleswig under Prussian and Holstein under Austrian control. But this was an interim arrangement – a papering over the cracks.

Below is a photograph of the three leaders of Prussia in the 1860s: Bismarck, Albrecht von Roon and Hermann von Moltke the elder.

The Austro-Prussian War (the ‘Seven Weeks War)
This is one of the most decisive wars in German history.

In 1864 Bismarck pursued a policy of renewing the Zollverein. By the summer the new free trade area included Thuringia, Brunswick, Baden and Hesse-Cassel. In September the pro-Austrian Bavaria, Württemberg, Hesse-Darmstadt and Nassau joined because they could not survive without access to the north German markets. Having expelled Austria economically from Germany, he was prepared to complete the task militarily. He repeatedly told the Austrians that their future lay in the south and that they would be wise to accept Prussian domination of the north. But Austria refused to listen. After the Treaty of Gastein, she supported a rival claimant to Schleswig-Holstein in an attempt to reassert her dominance within the Confederation. This gave Bismarck his excuse for war.

In April 1866 Bismarck concluded an alliance with Italy and entered into negotiations with Hungarian nationalists. It is possible that he bought French neutrality with the (vague) promise of compensations in Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of the Rhineland. Having made himself even more secure by the certainty of Russian neutrality, he mobilized the Prussian army.

On 9 June Prussian troops invaded Holstein, encountering no resistance from the Austrians, who withdrew into Hanover. On 14 June the Confederation Diet, fearful of Prussian expansionism, backed an Austrian motion denouncing the occupation of Holstein as illegal. The Prussian ambassador walked out declaring the Confederation dissolved. On 19 June Italy declared war on Austria.

Most informed commentators predicted an Austrian victory. Austria had reformed its armed forces following the disasters of 1859 and it enjoyed an important strategic advantage – most of the middling German states, notably Hanover and Saxony, opted to side with Vienna against Berlin, which forced Prussia to fight the war on several fronts. But though the Austrian army was well equipped, the armies of her allies performed poorly. The Italians were defeated at the second battle of Custozza, though their entry into the war provided an important diversion.

Moltke's strategy was to break up the Prussian forces into small mobile groups. It was a modern conception of warfare, requiring the sophisticated use of railways, roads and the telegraph. In addition, Prussian infantrymen were the best armed in Europe, and were equipped with the rapid-firing needle-gun.

The decisive battle of the war took place on 3 July 1866 between the river fort of Königgratz and the Bohemian town of Sadowa. On 22 July Franz Joseph capitulated to the Prussians. On the right is the memorial to the dead.

The North German Confederation
The Austrian Emperor was forced to pay an indemnity of 40 million florins, and to agree to the dissolution of the German Confederation and the creation of a new North German Confederation north of the river Main. Schleswig and Holstein were annexed along with Hesse-Darmstadt, Hanover, Nassau and the city of Frankfurt, all of which had fought against Prussia. Four and a half million people now came under Prussian dominance. These annexations were immensely popular. The old liberal-left opposition to Bismarck was in disarray and the nationalists were triumphant, with many liberals now converted to nationalism.

This marked the end of the long struggle between Prussia and Austria for the dominance of Germany.

The Confederation constitution was, on the surface, progressive as it established manhood suffrage with a secret ballot. But Bismarck allowed this because he believed that Prussian conservative voters greatly outnumbered liberals. The Lower House, the Reichstag, had the power to reject bills, but in practice its powers were circumscribed in the areas of military and foreign policy. Ministers were chosen by and responsible to the king not the legislature.

The Compromise of 1867 (the Ausgleich)
The war cost Austria its influence in Germany; she also lost Venetia. This forced her to turn her attention to the non-German parts of the Empire, especially the Hungarians, who previously had seen themselves as second-class citizens. In 1867 Franz Joseph reached an agreement with the Hungarian leadership to turn it into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. It was ratified by the Hungarian parliament in May 1867 and approved by the Austrian Reichsrat in December. Under the compromise only three ministries remained common to the Hungarian and Austrian halves of the Empire. There was also a customs union and a sharing of accounts. The compromise benefited Hungary as it secured Magyar control over Hungarian affairs.

The Franco-Prussian War
By 1867 only the south German states of Bavaria, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt and Württemberg remained outside the Confederation. Though Bismarck expressed doubts about whether German unification would occur in his lifetime, the southern states were increasingly tied into the Confederation when they were forced into new Zollverein treaties. The only obstacle, from Bismarck’s point of view, was that at this juncture the southern states were opposed to unification.

What were Bismarck’s aims at this stage? He recognized the dangers of a conquest of the south German states: it would alienate France and bring more Catholics into a predominantly Protestant state. However, he saw unification as necessary because otherwise these states might ally with Austria and France. His caution provoked nationalist impatience. In 1870 he provoked another war, this time with France.

The Luxembourg crisis: In August 1866 Napoleon III had privately proposed a French annexation of the independent duchy of Luxembourg in return for French acceptance of German unification and been given a vague encouragement. In the spring of 1867 Bismarck leaked news of the emperor’s designs to the German press, knowing these would provoke a wave of nationalist outrage.

The Hohenzollern candidacy: In 1868 a revolution in Spain deposed Queen Isabella and the victorious liberals were looking for a new monarch. (She abdicated in June 1870 in favour of her son, Alfonso XII.) Early in 1870 they invited Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a Catholic south German, related to the Prussian royal family and with a Portuguese wife to take the trhone. Bismarck knew that this would infuriate the French and would strengthen his hand domestically and so became an ardent supporter of the Hohenzollern candidacy. In June he persuaded a reluctant Leopold to accept.

The Ems Dispatch: This provoked a wave of nationalist outrage in France. In a bellicose speech the inexperienced new Foreign Minister, the Duc de Gramont, promised the French that Leopold would never ascend ‘the throne of Charles V’. The French ambassador Vincent de Beneditti, was despatched to the spa town of Bad Ems to confront William I. William responded in a conciliatory manner, and the whole business might have ended there if France had not overreached itself.

Gramont persuaded Napoleon to insist on a Prussian guarantee that no Hohenzollern would ever be put forward for the Spanish throne but when Benedetti accosted William again, the king told him that the affair was closed and that he would never accept an ultimatum. He then telegraphed Bismarck to inform him of the event.

On 13 Bismarck lightly edited the telegram and published it. In the revised version the king’s refusal was made to appear a rude rebuff. The wording caused great outrage in France and a wave of patriotic feeling in Germany including the south German states. On his return from Bad Ems, William was mobbed by cheering crowds.

As in 1864 and 1867 Bismarck showed his skill in exploiting dynastic politics and the growing forces of mass nationalism. But he was not completely in charge of events. He had been prepared to abandon the Hohenzollern candidature and to accept the French diplomatic victory. He did not plan the Franco-Prussian war though when it came he saw it as his great opportunity.

The defeat of France: On 15 July France declared war on Germany not realizing how isolated she had become in Europe. Austria had no desire for another war, Alexander II of Russia loathed Napoleon because of his support for the Poles, and he was won over by Bismarck’s promise that Prussia would support St Petersburg in revising the most burdensome stipulations of the Crimean peace settlement. Britain had come to accept the idea of a united Germany.

The war was a disaster for France and a triumph for the Prussian war machine under von Moltke. In August Prussia and its German allies launched an attack through Alsace and Lorraine trapping one French army round Metz and another on 1 September at Sedan. On 2 September General Patrice MacMahon surrendered at Sedan and Napoleon was taken prisoner along with 104,000 men. The news from Sedan brought the Parisians out on the streets. The Empress and the Prince Imperial fled to England. On 4 September the rump of republican deputies proclaimed a republic in France.

From 15 September Paris was besieged by German troops. On 29 October the French army at Metz surrendered. On 28 January the government signed an armistice with the Germans after a horrific four months in which 40,000 people died.

(Napoleon III accompanied William into Germany. He was released and died at Chislehurst, Kent, in 1873.)

The great symbolic moment was reached in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles on 18 January 1871, where the King of Prussia was pronounced Emperor (Kaiser) William I and the German Empire (map below) officially came into being, with Bismarck as imperial chancellor But united Germany had been in existence from the end of November by which time all four southern states had signed treaties joining the Reich.

On 10 May the final treaty was agreed at Frankfurt. Alsace and most of Lorraine were annexed and an indemnity of the equivalent of £200 m. was imposed on France. By the treaty France lost a population of nearly a million and a half and the iron mines and metallurgical industries of Alsace and Lorraine.

Disraeli (quoted Clark, p. 552):

‘The war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French. There is not a single diplomatic tradition that has not been swept away.’

Who could disagree with that?

Italian unification

2011-01-29T07:51:00.001Z

Perhaps you would like to learn more about the wonderfully operatic Italian national anthem, Fratelli d'Italia. Here is its history. You can hear it on youtube.

Cavour and Napoleon III

With Austria weakened by the Crimean War, Cavour, the Prime Minister of Piedmont (above), aimed at expelling the Austrians from Italy and annexing the northern provinces of Lombardy and Venetia under Victor Emmanuel II. But neither he nor the king wanted a united Italy, which would be harder to control and might fall prey to democrats and nationalists. The man they most feared was Mazzini (left) who commanded a revolutionary corps of conspirators, organizing a National Party in London in 1850.

Nationalists increasingly recognized that Austria still remained a great power and could only be removed from Italy by military force, and that this would have to be under Piedmontese leadership with French assistance. In 1857 the veteran nationalists Garibaldi and Manin established the Italian National Society which cut itself off from Mazzini’s doctrinaire republicans.

In January 1858 the Italian patriot (terrorist?) Felice Orsini tried to kill Napoleon III by hurling a bomb at his carriage outside the Opéra. Eight people were killed and 152 wounded. In spite of this Napoleon was moved by Orsini's plea on the scaffold for the emperor to liberate his country.

In July 1858 Cavour had a secret meeting with Napoleon III at the spa town of Plombières (click on the picture to enlarge).

Here they drew up a secret treaty. The details only became known after the publication of Cavour's correspondence.

Italy would be split into four different states
Piedmont would dominate a Kingdom of Upper Italy
most of the Papal States and Tuscany would form a central Italian kingdom under Piedmontese influence
the Pope would hold onto Rome and its surroundings
the Kingdom of Naples would remain untouched unless overthrown by a popular revolution
all four states would join an Italian confederation on the German model but under the presidency of the Pope.

These arrangements would forestall a unitary state with the potential to challenge France. The pact was sealed by the marriage of Victor Emmanuel’s daughter, Clotilde to Napoleon’s cousin, Prince Jérôme

What was in this for Napoleon III? His motives were very mixed. It was partly a sentimental regard for Italy, partly his incessant desire to make his dynasty respectable though a successful war. He had earlier declared that the Empire meant peace, but this was never true, as his intervention in the Crimean war proved. He had also secured the promise of Nice and Savoy from Cavour in return for the 200,000 troops who would join Piedmont against Austria.

Cavour then provoked Austria into a war by mobilising the Piedmontese army.

The Austro-Sardinian War
The war that followed is also known as the Second Italian Independence War or the Franco-Austrian War. But it is misleading to see it in straightforward terms of Italian nationalism. In the ensuing war 70,000 Lombards and Venetians fought in the Austrian army, while most of the fighting against Austria was undertaken by the French.

Austria found herself without allies. The Tsar offered France a benevolent neutrality and Prussia was ready to challenge Austria for hegemony within the German Confederation. Britain, under the short-lived premiership of the Conservative Lord Derby, was sympathetic to Austria but not prepared to intervene.

On 27 April 1859 the Austrians invaded Piedmont and were repulsed by French and Piedmontese forces back into Lombardy and defeated them at Magenta (4 June) and Solferino (24 June) (see picture above). After the triumphal French entry into Milan (a dramatic undermining of the Vienna settlement), the Austrians withdrew to the four northern fortresses of the 'Quadrilateral', from which they could not be dislodged. (The carnage at Solferino so appalled the Swiss doctor Jean Henri Dunant (right) that he helped to establish the Red Cross at the Geneva Convention in 1864.)

The defeat of the Austrians had a knock-on effect on the rest of Italy. On 27 April (the day of the Austrian invasion) Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany was overthrown by Mazzinian democrats. In June liberals seized power in Parma and Modena and the city of Bologna in the papal province of Romagna and called for their annexation by Piedmont. All this caused Cavour to rethink his aims and to go beyond the relatively modest programme of Plombières. He now aimed at the annexation of these territories by Piedmont.

Franz Joseph was now eager for peace (there was danger of an insurrection in Hungary). Napoleon did not believe he had the resources to take on the Austrians. He was embarrassed at the anti-clericalism of the Italian popular movements, was worried about Prussia’s intentions on the Rhine and fearful of a European coalition against him. (The British Prime Minister, Palmerston, stated that he was very anti-Austrian south of the Alps, but pro-Austrian north of the Alps.)

Napoleon therefore tried to derail Cavour’s plans by making a unilateral peace with Austria at Villafranca (near Verona) on 11 July. Franz Joseph agreed to cede Lombardy (except for the quadrilateral) to Piedmont; but there would be no further changes of rule and the deposed rulers would be restored. Villafranca was seen by many Italians as a betrayal in which Italian unification was sacrificed to French dynastic ambitions. When Victor Emmanuel accepted the terms, Cavour resigned angrily.

Peace, peace, peace, do you say?
What! With the enemy’s guns in our ears?
With the country’s wrong not rendered back?
What! While Austria stands at bay
In Mantua, and our Venice wears
The cursed flag of the yellow and black?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, First News from Villafranca.

Garibaldi and the Thousand

But events had now slipped out of the hands of the rulers. Ignoring Villafranca, the provisional governments in central Italy elected assemblies which persisted in demanding their annexation by Piedmont. In this they were supported by Britain, who regarded Piedmont as a useful bulwark against an expansionist France. Under pressure from Palmerston, Cavour was restored to office on 21 January 1860. He immediately set about making arrangements to annexe central Italy, including Tuscany. Skilfully organized plebiscites held in March in Tuscany and the Papal Legations, overwhelmingly backed annexation by Piedmont, though the French annexation of Savoy and Nice alarmed those who feared an expansionist France. All this was a snub to the conservative powers, Austria, Russia and the Papacy, which excommunicated Victor Emmanuel.

But Cavour’s diplomacy of give and take disgusted many left-wing nationalists, most notably Mazzini and Garibaldi (a native of Nice). On 4 April 1860 there was a peasant insurrection in Palermo. Though this was put down, it inspired Garibaldi to force the issue of unification by invading the south. He gathered a force of 1,000 ‘Red Shirts’. In May they sailed from Genoa, landed at Marsala in Sicily and entered Palermo on 2 June. The Sicilian landowners decided to support him. These events are brilliantly described in di Lampedusa's The Leopard.

This alarmed Cavour who saw that events were slipping out of his control: did he want Italian unification under the aegis of a radical democrat? What would happen to the House of Savoy? Trying to forestall a republican Italy, he sent agents to Naples to provoke a liberal insurrection and establish a pre-Piedmontese government. But on 18 August Garibaldi landed in Calabria, where he was greeted as a liberator by the peasants. On 6 September King Francis II fled Naples, and the following day, Garibaldi entered the city to a messianic welcome.

Cavour now recognized that

‘once the Bourbons have fallen, the choice is between annexation [by Piedmont] and revolution’.

A repetition of 1848 would turn all the European states against Piedmont. He therefore secured Napoleon III’s consent to send Piedmontese troops into the middle zone of the Papal States (Umbria and the Marches) in order to forestall Garibaldi. On 18 September 1860 Piedmontese troops defeated a papal army reinforced by Catholic volunteers at Castelfidardo. On 2 October Cavour told the Parliament at Turin that the revolution was at an end. This statement was a gamble as the former kingdom of Naples was in turmoil as the peasants turned to brigandage. Faced with the threats of disorder, Garibaldi’s radicals and Bourbon reaction the notables of Naples and Sicily agreed to annexation by Piedmont.

On 25 October 1860 Garibaldi surrendered his conquests to Victor Emmanuel at Teano (between Naples and Rome) and hailed him as King of Italy.

In October-November a plebiscite (open ballot) produced an overwhelming result in favour of ‘a single indivisible Italy with Victor Emmanuel as constitutional king’. On 17 March 1861 the new Italian parliament met at Turin and proclaimed Victor Emmanuel as King of Italy. The losers were the Pope and Napoleon III. Austria, Russia and Prussia – and French conservatives - were incensed by what they saw as a revolution. In response, Napoleon strengthened the garrison at Rome.

On 25 March 1861 Cavour told Parliament that one day Rome would be the capital of a united Italy, although not without negotiations with the pope and France.

The death of Cavour on 6 June 1861 and the continued presence of French troops in Rome paralysed the situation. In 1862 Garibaldi launched a madcap expedition of Sicilian volunteers to take Rome by force (‘Roma o morte!’). He was checked by government forces at Aspromonte on 30 August.

Under a convention signed with France in September 1864 the capital of Italy was moved from Turin to Florence on the understanding that there would be no invasion of the Papal States.
On 3 October 1866 Venice was added to the Kingdom of Italy as a reward for Italy’s alliance with Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War.

The ‘20 September’
In July 1870, the Franco-Prussian War began. In early August, Napoleon III recalled his garrison from Rome and could no longer protect the Papal State. Widespread public demonstrations demanded that the Italian government take Rome. The Italian government took no direct action until the French defeat at Sedan. King Victor Emmanuel II sent Count Ponza di San Martino to Pius IX with a personal letter offering a face-saving proposal that would have allowed the peaceful entry of the Italian Army into Rome, under the guise of offering protection to the pope.

The Pope’s reception of San Martino [10 September 1870] was unfriendly. Pius IX allowed violent outbursts to escape him. Throwing the King’s letter upon the table he exclaimed,

‘Fine loyalty! You are all a set of vipers, of whited sepulchres, and wanting in faith.’

He was perhaps alluding to other letters received from the King. After, growing calmer, he exclaimed:

‘I am no prophet, nor son of a prophet, but I tell you, you will never enter Rome!’

San Martino was so mortified that he left the next day.

The Italian Army, commanded by General Raffaele Cadorna, crossed the papal frontier on 11 September and advanced slowly toward Rome, hoping that a peaceful entry could be negotiated. The Italian Army reached the Aurelian Walls on 19 September and placed Rome under a state of siege. Pius IX remained intransigent to the bitter end and forced his Zouaves (right) to put up a token resistance. On September 20, after a cannonade of three hours had breached the Aurelian Walls at Porta Pia, the Bersaglieri entered Rome and marched down Via Pia, which was subsequently renamed Via XX Settembre. 49 Italian soldiers and 19 papal Zouaves died. Rome and Latium were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy after a plebiscite.

Initially the Italian government had offered to let the pope keep the Leonine City (the walled part of Rome on the opposite side of the Tiber from the Seven Hills of Rome). But the pope rejected the offer because acceptance would have been an implied endorsement of the legitimacy of the Italian kingdom's rule over his former domain. Pius declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican.

In July 1871 the capital was moved from Florence to Rome.

After 1870
The new Italian state had many flaws. The former Kingdom of Naples remained disorderly – with martial law, executions and hostage taking – until 1865, and after that date was poorly reconciled to rule by the Piedmontese. Yet the government believed that because the south – the mezzogiorno - was so backward and ungovernable there was no alternative to centralized rule on the French model. The secession of the southern states from the USA in 1861 did not make a happy precedent.

The Revolutions of 1848

2011-01-22T13:45:00.003Z

Much of the information for this post is taken from Jonathan Sperber, Revolutionary Europe, 1780-1850 (Longman, 2000) and Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2003). The pictures above are of the proclamation of the Roman Republic in the Piazza deo Popolo and the Frankfurt Parliament (see below).

The revolutions of 1848 ignited the countries of Europe in a way that would not be repeated until 1989. Violence broke out because legal and parliamentary movements for change were frustrated. The only countries were revolution was avoided were those were adequate concessions were made in time (Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands) of where opposition was negligible and repression total (Russia).

The earlier revolutions of 1830 had resulted in the replacement of the Bourbon monarchy by the Orleans monarchy in France and by Belgium’s independence from Holland; but the Polish revolt against Russian rule had failed. The overall result was the tacit partition of Europe into a western part dominated by the liberal powers, France and Britain, and a central, southern and eastern portion, dominated by the three conservative powers, Austria, Prussia and Russia.

Metternich

The dominant figure of Europe between 1815 and 1848 was Austrian Chancellor, Prince Klemens Metternich (1773-1859), the champion of post-Napoleonic conservatism. He had been made Minister of Foreign Affairs in October 1809, six days before the signing of the oppressive treaty of Schönbrunn. In this position he brokered the marriage between Napoleon and Marie-Louise. From a distance he observed the growth of German nationalism, which he disliked and he had no enthusiasm for the German national rising against Napoleon. He was now a strict exponent of the doctrine of the balance of power in Europe. Until the summer of 1813 Austrian policy was pro-French or neutral. However in August 1813 Austria declared war on France, though Metternich was always fearful of the ambitions of Russia and Prussia. In October he was given the hereditary title of prince (Fürst).

The Congress of Vienna (September 1814-June 1815) was the climax of his work of reconstruction. His aim was to secure Austrian predominance by forming two confederations, one German and the other Italian under Austrian dominance. With British support he sought to prevent the elimination of France, which he saw as a necessary counter-weight to Prussia, and he prevented Prussia’s annexation of Saxony.

Metternich’s role in Vienna shows his brilliant diplomacy but also the limitations of what he was able to achieve. He was unable to prevent the spread of nationalism (especially Italian and German) and liberal ideals. He had intended the Diet of the German Confederation to suppress revolutionary thought all over Germany. But in 1818 Bavaria and Baden promulgated constitutions that reflected not Metternich’s ideas but those of limited monarchy.

In the 1820s his influence waned. Britain abandoned his policy by insisting on the right of national self-determination for the South American colonists in revolt against Spain and for the Greek insurgents against Turkey. He was powerless to prevent the July Revolution in France. The death of Francis I and the accession of his feeble-minded son the archduke Ferdinand in 1835 further lessened his influence.

Before 1848
Britain: the Chartists
In 1832 the British parliamentary system had been partially reformed. More people were given to the vote and the previously unrepresented cities of Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham became parliamentary constituencies. But this still left the great majority of working men without the right to vote at a time of great economic uncertainty and hardship. In May 1838 the People’s Charter contained the famous Six Points, a manifesto for radical reform: manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, the secret ballot, payment of MPs, equal electoral districts, the abolition of property qualifications for parliament. By the end of 1838 the Chartist newspaper, the Leeds-based Northern Star (priced 4½d) was selling 50,000 copies a week. On 4 February 1839 about 50 delegates finally assembled in London for a National Convention (calling itself the People’s Parliament). In July they presented a National Petition to Parliament; it was three miles long and contained 1,280,000 signatures, but the House refused to consider it.

The Chartist leaders were divided over whether to use simply persuasion and argument (‘moral force’) or to use physical force. The most celebrated example of the latter was the Newport rising of 3/4 November 1839 when some 7,000 colliers and ironworkers led an armed march on Newport in South Wales. The Chartists were fired on by a company of the 45th Foot. 24 people were killed or died from their injuries (more than twice the death toll at Peterloo). On 2 May 1842 a second Chartist petition was rejected by the Commons. In the summer of 1842 the authorities rounded up the leading Chartist strikers and brought them to trial. .

Italy

Italy in the 1840s was what Metternich called a ‘geographical expression’. Following Guiseppe Mazzini’s failed insurrection in the 1830s, it lacked national unity, parliamentary representation or any guarantees of civil liberties. The most repressive part of the peninsula was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Only the small north-western Kingdom or Piedmont-Savoy was free of Austrian rule (or patronage).

In 1846 the arch-reactionary Pope Gregory XVI died. His successor, the bishop of Imola, took the title of Pius IX (‘Pio Nono’). He was reputed to be a man of liberal sympathies and he took cautious steps to reform the extremely reactionary government of the Papal States. Between July 1846 and July 1847 he released about 2,000 political prisoners, relaxed press censorship and invited provincial delegates to a consultative assembly. Much to the fury of Metternich, Charles Albert of Piedmont and Leopold of Tuscany responded by granting a freer press.

The German States
The thirty-nine states of the German Confederation presented a very diverse picture. Some of the states in the south had constitutions and elected legislatures, but Prussia and Austria were absolutist powers. Southern Germany became increasingly politicized in the 1840s, returning a growing number of liberal deputies at each election. Prussia lacked the public political space for the expression of dissenting views but unofficial liberal and/or nationalist associations flourished, many of them centred on the churches.

From 1 January 1834 the Zollverein, the All-German Customs Union, provided a model for national unity. It incorporated the majority of Germans outside Austria.

In 1840 the rigid absolutist Frederick William III of Prussia died, and was succeeded by Frederick William IV (right) a romantic conservative who dreamed of restoring the Holy Roman Empire.

In view of the dominance of conservative governments, radicals and liberals remained hard to tell apart in Germany. The main ideological difference was in economics. Liberals believed in laissez-faire while the radicals believed that government intervention was necessary to redress the balance between capital and labour. They also became impatient of gradualism and began to consider forms of political mass mobilization. Their disagreements took place against a background of economic hardship and declining standards of living.

The Austrian Empire

This was a very diverse territory comprising many groups of people and many nationalisms: Germans, Czechs, Italians, Hungarians, Croatians, Slovenes, Romanians, and Poles. In the rural eastern parts of the empire there was mass illiteracy and the institutions of civil society were poorly developed. In the larger cities with student populations such as Vienna, Prague, Milan, Venice, Budapest, Krakow, Ljubljana and Zagreb crypto- political associations developed. Whereas in many other parts of Europe the oppositionists were middle class (or even working class) in the Empire they comprised a large proportion of nobles. But the most noted abolitionist by the 1840s was the lawyer Lajos Kossuth, a member of the Hungarian Diet, a lawyer, journalist and talented public speaker.

The problems faced by liberal oppositionists in the Empire can be seen in the uprising of 1846 in the Polish province of Galicia. The noble conspirators called on the bulk of the population, the serfs, to join in them, but instead the serfs turned on the conspirators and murdered them.

France: the July Monarchy
In 1830 the deposed Charles X was succeeded by Louis-Philippe, the 57 year old head of the Orléanist family. His regime of Louis-Philippe was conservative but it lacked the legitimacy which was essential to true conservatives. It was not a divine right monarchy and Louis-Philippe was designated 'king of the French' not 'king of France'. The tricolore replaced the white flag of the Bourbons as a sign that Louis-Philippe, who had fought at Jemappes and was the son of the revolutionary Philippe Égalité was a ‘Citizen King’. ‘His raison d’être was to stand between France and a republic’. Censorship was abolished and the king had to share his power with a Chamber of Deputies. Only 2.8% of the male population had the right to vote by 1846. France was governed by the class of landed proprietors who had done well out of the Revolution.

The early years of Louis-Philippe’s reign were marked by social disturbances, royalist plots, a republican assassination attempt, and unstable ministries. But by 1840 the dynasty seemed secure. The former history professor, Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874), was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs and became the dominating figure in the government. Hopes of a Napoleonic restoration seemed to have ended with the death of the young duc de Reichstadt (Napoleon II), Napoleon’s son, in 1832. In 1836 and 1840 Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, son of Louis, king of Holland and Hortense de Beauharnais (Josephine’s daughter) attempted a coup at Strasbourg and Boulogne, but these were fiascos.

The July monarchy’s security turned out to be an illusion. Within the Chamber opposition mounted to what was seen as government corruption and there were renewed demands for the extension of the franchise. Guizot resisted this demand on the grounds that any extension of the right to vote would lead to universal (manhood) suffrage. In July 1847 the opposition organized the first of a series of political banquets, where tickets were sold for a nominal sum and equally nominal amounts of food and drink provided. Leading orators denounced government corruption and called for parliamentary reform. At a banquet in Lille on 7 November 1847 the left-wing politician, Ledru-Rollin, advocated manhood suffrage. In January 1848 the king and Guizot prohibited further banquets. The opposition backed down rather tamely but their newspapers took up the cause.

The ‘Hungry Forties’
The 1840s were a time of great hardship throughout Europe. Most of Western Europe had been affected by the bad harvest of 1845 and the potato blight. By 1847 food prices had doubled and though the harvest of that year was good, the European economies had slipped into recession. In April there were food riots in Berlin, nicknamed the ‘potato revolution’.

The Revolutions of 1848 (a very brief summary)
The first uprising was in the Bourbon kingdom of Sicily and Naples in January, forcing Ferdinand II to form a liberal ministry and authorize a constitution, modelled on the French constitution of 1830. In March the Sicilians deposed Ferdinand and set up a regency.

On 22-24 February a revolution broke out in Paris. Guizot’s ministry fell, and Louis Philippe, unable to form another ministry, abdicated and fled. On 25 February the moderate provisional government was forced by angry crowds to set up the Second Republic.

All the subsequent revolutions followed the same pattern: the news of revolution in France would attract excited crowds in the major cities, groups of men (mostly journalists, lawyers, and students) met to discuss the rumours. The government, in fear of revolution, would call out the army, which would begin to skirmish with the citizenry. Barricades would come up and mob action would ensue.

The most symbolic event was the flight of Metternich to exile in London in March, which was followed by an uprising in Berlin [right] that panicked Frederick William IV into abolishing censorship and introducing a constitutional system in Prussia. But it was only in France that the initial wave of revolution led to the proclamation of a republic.

Some aspects of the revolutions harked back to 1789. National or civic guards were formed, trees of liberty were planted and tricolore flags were raised. This revolutionary euphoria was described by contemporaries as the ‘springtime of the peoples’.

The mass movements of early 1848 were accompanied by an unprecedented wave of communication, organization and assembly. The newly installed liberal governments abolished censorship and newspapers circulated as never before. New voluntary associations of workers, professionals and even soldiers sprang up. The formation of political clubs was reminiscent of the French Revolution, though on a much larger scale.

Each country experienced the revolution in different forms. Some avoided revolution. In the Low Countries and Scandinavia, governments quickly introduced reforms. For entirely different reasons, Britain and Russia were both relatively untouched. Russia saw sporadic serf uprisings that were put down by the tsar’s troops. In Britain a Chartist rally on Kennington Common on 10 April passed off peacefully.

But even without Britain and Russia the Revolutions of 1848 covered an enormous area, ranging from the Atlantic to the Ukraine and the Mediterranean to the Baltic. It was the most widespread of all the waves of revolution from 1789 to 1989. The revolutions took many forms. In central and eastern Europe they were primarily serf riots against their lords and the burning of castles. With the disturbances, serfdom came to an end in the Austrian Empire and the German states. In Italy and in parts of the Austrian empire the peasants tried to gain control of the woods. In the more economically advanced parts of Europe the urban lower classes attacked new technologies: craftsmen and labourers destroyed machines and bargeman attacked steamships on the Rhine.

The development of the 1848 revolution can be divided into four parts:

1. January – March 1848: the initial struggles on the barricades (eg in Paris, Berlin and Milan) and the coming to power of liberal regimes;
2. Spring of 1848: the generally unexpected development of political conflicts in these regimes;
3. May-November: a series of violent confrontations ending in the defeat of the revolutionary forces;
4. 1849-51: a new round of organization and agitation but also of a growing political polarization.

Why did the Revolutions Fail?
Some of the seeds of the failure of the 1848 Revolutions lay in their success. Elections were held for constituent assemblies in France, Germany, Prussia, the Austrian Empire and Denmark. The franchise was broad and participation was high. The most prominent of the bodies that sprang up from the revolutions was the all-German Parliament at Frankfurt. But the bulk of the electorate was conservative and the resulting parliaments were opposed on principle to revolutions.

Liberals and radicals were unable to agree. Radicals pressed for manhood suffrage and social reform, but liberals simply wanted a wider franchise. Even the radicals were predominantly middle class and often out of touch with the working classes and the peasants. This can be seen in the ‘June Days’ in Paris. When the Assembly decreed that all unmarried workers in the National Workshops (which had been set up to provide work for the unemployed) should join the army and the remainder disperse to the provinces, the barricades went up again. In six days of bitter fighting, the army under the command of the conservative republican Cavaignac, reinforced by the National Guard, recaptured the city street by street. Thousands of prisoners were held in terrible conditions before being sent to Algeria. Victor Hugo said that in the June Days civilization defended itself with the methods of barbarism.

The revolutions were faced with clashes of nationalist demands. Both the new liberal government in Denmark and the German National Assembly at Frankfurt laid claim to Schleswig. The Assembly attempted to take over the conduct of a war with Denmark, but in August Frederick William IV, under international pressure, renounced German claims, and destroyed the credibility of the Assembly. Germans and Poles also contested Posen (Poznàn). The clashes were most severe in the Habsburg Empire: liberal Czech nationalists forcibly prevented the participation of Bohemia and Moravia into the German National Assembly; Poles and Ukrainians clashed over Galicia; Croatians refused to participate in the Hungarian National Assembly. The revolutions showed the complex interactions of the forces that had brought about the revolutions. In Transylvania nationalism clashed with feudalism. The noble landlords were Hungarian nationalists, the Romanian-speaking peasants supported Romanian nationalism. The Transylvanian civil war cost 40,000 lives, by far the greatest death toll in the revolutions.

The conservative rulers and army officers such as Radetsky (left) and Windischgrätz were able to exploit these divisions and complexities. Hungarian units fought with Radetsky against the Italians. Liberal nationalist movements in the Habsburg Empire turned on each other and thus preserved the Empire’s existence.

France played an important role. The Second Republic dissociated itself from the military policies of the Revolution and thus refused to support revolutionary movements. In 1849 President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte sent troops to suppress Garibaldi's Roman Republic and restore papal rule.

The Frankfurt Parliament was very significant for the future history of Germany. At the end of October 1848 the deputies voted to adopt a ‘greater German’ (grossdeutsch) solution to the national question: the Habsburg German (and Czech) lands would be incorporated in the new German Reich; the non-German Habsburg lands would be formed into a separate constitutional entity ruled from Vienna. But the Austrians had no intention of accepting this. In November Schwarzenberg, the new chief minister, announced that he intended the Habsburg monarchy to remain a unitary political entity. This forced the Frankfurt deputes to adopt the kleindeutsch solution, in which Austria would be excluded from the new German polity and the pre-eminence would inevitably pass to Prussia.

In April, delegates travelled to Berlin to offer the crown to Frederick William, but he refused the crown on the grounds that he would only accept it if the other German princes agreed. This sealed the fate of the Frankfurt Parliament. In 1850 Prussia and Austria agreed to work together. In 1851 the German Confederation was restored.

However, 1848 brought profound changes in Prussia. Frederick William’s constitution remained, though the franchise was altered and skewed towards men of property. The press was no longer censored though there was much surveillance of radical groups.

Conclusion
In the immediate reckoning, 1848 was a series of disasters for liberalism. But it can be argued that the reactionary regimes had triumphed at such a heavy cost that they could not bear a repeat performance. The basic liberal principle of government by consent could not be denied and one by one over the next two decades government by consent steadily gained widespread acceptance. Metternich’s Europe had gone for ever.

Britain: the first railway nation

2011-01-20T06:09:00.000Z

See here for a good site.

The first lines
The opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (Locomotion 1 depicted right) on 25 September 1825 is usually regarded as the symbolic start of the railway era. This was the first public railway worked by steam and it set the pattern for the development of railway systems across the world. The prime mover was George Stephenson (1781- 1848). He had developed the Locomotion, a pioneering mobile steam engine and it was the Locomotion 1 which pulled the freight train from Darlington to Stockton Quay.

The Stockton and Darlington line was followed by Stephenson’s second project, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. This was the first fully evolved railway as it was to carry passengers as well as freight and to rely on locomotive traction alone. The Rainhill locomotive trials were conducted in 1829 to assure that those prime movers would be adequate to the demands placed on them and that adhesion was practicable. Stephenson's entry, the Rocket (left), which he built with his son, Robert, won the trials owing to the increased power provided by its multiple fire-tube boiler. The rail line began in a long tunnel from the docks in Liverpool, and the Edgehill Cutting through which it passed dropped the line to a lower elevation across the low plateau above the city. Embankments were raised above the level of the Lancashire Plain to improve the drainage of the line and to reduce grades on a gently rolling natural surface. A firm causeway was pushed across Chat Moss (swamp) to complete the line's quite considerable engineering works. When it was opened in September 1830, the event was turned into a festival, with a reported 40,000 spectators lining the route. A trumpeter was appointed to every carriage or set of carriages and a full military band was stationed at the head of the procession. Unfortunately the event also saw the first casualty of the railway age- the death of the politician, William Huskisson.

The railways extended
In 1830 there were just under 100 miles of railway open in Britain. By 1852 there were some 6,000 and the main body of Britain’s railway system, comprising some 2,200 miles of line, was in place. ‘It is difficult to conceive how progress could have been faster’. By this time London was linked to Bristol and most of the Channel ports to London. Robert Stephenson’s London and Birmingham lines linked London with the Midlands and the North. The Great Northern Line had reached Doncaster (following the line of the old Great North Road).

The free market
This boundless energy was underscored by the free market. By 1844 Britain had 104 separate railway companies. But the great railway entrepreneurs aimed at monopoly through amalgamation. By 1848 the great Victorian railway companies were in place: the London and North-Western, the Great Western and the Midland. Between them they accounted for slightly more than half the mileage then open.

In the early 1840s there were tentative efforts at state control. Following a Select Parliamentary Committee in 1839 Acts were passed in 1840 and 1842, giving the existing legal powers of the state to a railway department of the Board of Trade. The department had the right of inspection, collected statistics of traffic and accidents, and could undertake legal proceedings for neglect or illegality. It also inspected new projects. But vested interests in Parliament were too strong and most of the provisions of the Railway Acts proved a dead letter. For practical purposes the work of the department ceased after 1845 though the Board of Trade retained a general responsibility for railway matters.

Reaction to the railways
Reaction to the railways could be one of fascinated horror. When Thomas Carlyle journeyed on the Grand Junction Railway in September 1839, he saw the railway as the devil’s mantle; a month earlier Lord Ashley, journeying from Manchester to Liverpool, remarked that if the devil had travelled he would have gone by train. Nothing in nature exceeded the speed of 30 mph. The railway companies had to alleviate people’s fears of travelling at ‘unnatural’ speeds through tunnels. This is why the interior of the Edge Hill tunnel was painted white and it was illuminated by gas jets at regular intervals. Dickens’s Mrs Gamp believed that the railways caused miscarriages.

As the navvies worked on the cuttings of Stephenson’s London and Birmingham trunk line (some of them 60 or 70 feet deep), they exposed fossils in the rocks and amateur geologists, already familiar with Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33) flocked to view the rock exposures. One of Lyell’s correspondents wrote to him in February 1838 of the fascinating sections uncovered in making parts of the Forfar-Dundee railroad. In July 1845 Joseph Hooker wrote to Darwin about the way cutting open railways caused a change of vegetation.

The construction of the railways had many political implications. The authorizing Acts gave the railway companies the novel right of compulsory purchase, which the Tory landowning class saw as an affront to their status. The Acts gave companies the authority

‘to enter, survey and even to excavate private land situated on a prescribed route’.

This was the most dramatic infringement of private property rights since the Civil War. Notices of intention to purchase were issued, and, failing a response from the landowner, the railway company were entitled to have the matter settled by a sheriff’s jury. The Illustrated London News of 1845 compared the powers granted under the Acts to a Russian ukase.

Landowners fought hard to block or frustrate the course of individual lines. For example, the earls of Sefton and Derby vigorously opposed the Stockton and Darlington Railway which was to run across their land. In the first survey of the line in 1822 the antagonism of the landed interest was such that the railway venturers resorted to hiring a prize-fighter to carry the theodolite. In subsequent surveys much of the levelling was done by moonlight and by torchlight. In one case, in the face of clerical opposition to the London and Birmingham Railway, the survey team had to carry out their work during the hours of church services when the opposition would be otherwise engaged. In many cases the landlords’ labourers and hired bullies fought pitched battles with the teams of surveyors. But George Eliot’s sensible Caleb Garth in Middlemarch says:

Now, my lads, you can’t hinder the railroad: it will be made whether you like it or not.’

When he saw the first train pass through the Rugby countryside, Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, remarked that feudalism had gone for ever. Wordsworth saw the railway capitalists as part of ‘the Thirst of Gold, that rules o’er Britain like a baneful star’

There was deep social unease about the fact that the railways were underpinned by industrial capital. The Doric portico entrance to Euston station (now much mourned!) was derided as the grandiose triumphalism of the new manufacturing class. It was also an engineering victory – celebrating the conquest of the engineers over the subterranean waters and quicksands of Kilsby.

The railway mania transformed the English stock market. A few made millions, but many more were ruined. In the early 1850s the Darwin family’s portfolio ran to some £14,000 or railway stock. Having initially opposed the railways many aristocrats began to invest in them. The earls of Leicester invested in lines in Norfolk and the earls of Yarborough in Lincolnshire.
The early railway companies formed their own police forces modelled on Peel’s Metropolitan Police. The government began to use the railways to transport troops to sites of political demonstrations. In 1842 they embarked from Euston on trains of the London and Birmingham Railway for destinations in the northern manufacturing districts.

Railways were initially viewed as the enemies of nature. Carlyle: they forced

‘a second or produced nature’.

Ruskin: the railways brutally amputated every hill in their path and raised mounds of earth across meadows faster than the walls of Babylon. Dombey and Son:

the railway ‘was defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle’.

When the London and Dover Railway Company’s works reached the Channel coast in February 1843, the engineers blew up part of a cliff and the nobility and gentry came to witness the event.

The railway telegraph
The ultimate representation of the railroad’s war with nature was in the clocks which observed railway time. Initially it was a cumbersome process, involving the carrying of a watch the length of the journey in order to standardize time. But after the setting up of the Railway Clearing House in 1842 this practice gave way to the observance of Greenwich Time at stations around the country, a practice made easier by the spread of the telegraph. The first railway telegraph seems to have been installed in the Great Western between Paddington and West Drayton and was operating by the spring of 1839. In 1842 and improved telegraph consisting of double-needle instruments and only two wires was ordered. The wires were suspended overhead on upright standards of cast-iron and at intervals of up to 150 yards. By 1848, 1,800 miles of railway were so equipped in the country as a while. This offered ‘a wholly novel simultaneity of experience’. It enabled Greenwich or ‘railway’ time to become standard in Britain by the 1850s.

The Great Western Railway
In March 1833, the 27 year old Isambard Kingdom Brunel was appointed chief engineer of the Great Western Railway. The strategy was to build a railway that would link London and Bristol. The first section of the track that went from London to Taplow (Maidenhead) was opened in 1838. The line was completed to Bristol in 1841 and helped to establish Brunel as one of the world's leading engineers. Impressive achievements on the route included the viaducts at Hanwell and Chippenham, the Maidenhead Bridge, the Box Tunnel and the Bristol Temple Meads Station.

Swindon was about halfway between London and Bristol and was chosen as the junction for the line to Gloucester. It was also the site of the Great Western Locomotive Works. Daniel Gooch, who had worked with Robert Stephenson in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was put in charge of production. Gooch was told by the company to produce a ‘colossal locomotive that should easily surpass anything that had gone before’.

In 1839 the Samuda Brothers had pioneered the Atmospheric System. This involved making the pressure of the atmosphere available as a propelling force, achieved by sucking air from a continuous line of pipe along the permanent way, so creating a partial vacuum. In September 1847 passenger trains began using it on the South Devon line and a maximum speed of 68 mph was recorded on a train of 28 tons.  The battle over the gauge

Early British development was not characterised by a uniform gauge. Most of the initial lines were built to a gauge of 4 feet 8 ½ inches (1422mm), which accorded with the track dimensions used by the Romans. It was the preferred choice of gauge for George and Robert Stephenson. But in 1835 Brunel convinced the Board of the Great Western that a gauge of 7 feet 0 ¼ inches (2140mm) was technically superior. As a result the ten years from the mid 1840s saw a dramatic struggle among railway proprietors. A Royal Commission tried to adjudicate. Though accepting the technical capabilities of the broad gauge, it viewed the narrow gauge as best suited to the general needs of the country and recommended the compulsory extinction of the broad gauge. But Parliament did not feel able to insist on this and the broad gauge continued to expand after the Gauge Act of 1846. The ‘break of gauge’ created problems for passengers and goods as they had to be transferred from one train to another, especially Gloucester where the Great Western met the Birmingham and Gloucester line. By 1866 there were thirty places where ‘break of gauge’ occurred. Queen Victoria, travelling from Balmoral to Osborne had to change trains at Gloucester and Basingstoke. One of the consequences of using the broad gauge was that Great Western locomotives could not use Euston and Brunel had to build its own station at Paddington, which was not completed until 1854. But although passengers preferred the broad gauge, Brunel lost the war and by the end of the 1860s he was forced to start the process that ended in the adoption of the narrow gauge.

Thomas Cook
In 1841 the Baptist Thomas Cook (1808-92) persuaded the Midland Counties Railway Company to run a special train between Leicester and Loughborough for a temperance meeting on July 5. It was believed to be the first publicly advertised excursion train in England. Three years later the railway agreed to make the arrangement permanent if Cook would provide passengers for the excursion trains. During the Paris Exposition of 1855, Cook conducted excursions from Leicester to Calais. The next year he led his first Grand Tour of Europe.

The process of industrialization

2011-01-15T11:38:00.003Z

'Coalbrookedale by Night', Philipp Jacob de Loutherbourg (1801)

Go here to listen to the discussion on the Industrial Revolution on Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' programme on Radio 4. The debate gets quite heated (Melvyn thumps the table at one point!), which shows how contentious and contested the subject is.

Industrialization and modernization
‘Modernization’ is the commonly used term for a series of transformations which communities undergo on their way from ‘backwardness’ to ‘modernity’. (See Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford, 1996, p. 764). Its starting point is an agrarian, peasant- based society and its destination is the urbanized, industrialized society where most people earn their livings in urban-based employment. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century is the most profound change in human history since the invention of agriculture in what is known as the 'neolithic revolution'.

Britain first
Not all historians believe that there was an ‘Industrial Revolution' - a term coined by Sir Arnold Toynbee in lectures published posthumously in 1884. They point out that (for example) in the 1840s over 75 per cent of manufacturing in Britain, the first industrial nation, remained in unmodernized industries and that most of the population still worked on the land. However, over all, industrialization should be seen as one of the great changes of history, and for a variety of complex reasons, Britain led the way. The census of 1851 revealed that the majority of British people were no longer living in rural areas. This had never happened before in human history.

Pre-Industrial Europe
In 1700 the economy of Europe was largely pre-industrial and such industry as existed was located in the countryside. Taxation documents from the late 17th century show that across north-western Europe between a sixth and a third of all men living in the countryside were primarily employed in non-agricultural jobs such as textile manufacture. These were both independent artisans producing for local markets and dependent employees whose work might reach international markets.

In 1700 the largest item in British exports (70% of total value) was wool and this had been the case since the Middle Ages. Production was household production. Weavers were usually men, working at looms in their homes, though most of them would not have owned their looms. At least four women and children, and perhaps as many as ten would be employed to prepare and spin enough flax or wool to keep a single loom at work. The advantage of cottage industry, or the domestic system, was that it was cheap and flexible, not bound by guild regulations. In major cloth producing areas such as Picardy or the English West Country, entrepreneurs bought raw wool or flax to be prepared and spun into yarn. They then gave the yarn to specialist weavers and bought back cloth which was then taken for finishing and finally for marketing. Urban specialists would dye the cloth and tailor it but most of the fabric was made in the countryside.

Alongside the capitalist entrepreneurs there were also master weavers who controlled their own production. These could be found in Leiden, Lille and Yorkshire. The heart of Leiden’s cloth industry was the Lakenhal. Clothmakers brought their work there to be inspected and a lead seal was fixed to the bales as a hallmark of quality. These seals have been found all over the world where Dutch goods were traded and where the Dutch were colonizers– Indonesia, South Africa and South America.

Pre-industrial Europe also produced minerals in large quantities. The Weals of Kent produced iron-ore though production was being overtaken by iron-ore from Liège and Sweden. Swedish iron ore was imported to Hull and reached the rest of England through the great river system of the Humber basin. Coal was mined in Fife, lead in the Mendips.

The demographic revolution
Industrialization coincided with a demographic revolution brought about more by a falling death rate than a rising birth rate caused by an improvement in the supply of food from 1740. The last great European famine took place in 1816-17, caused by an eruption in Indonesia that produced a mini ‘nuclear winter’. Later subsistence crises – even the devastating potato famine of 1846-7 - were either less severe or were confined to agriculturally backward regions.

The Agricultural Revolution
In western Europe the pressure of numbers meant that land had to be reclaimed and that all farmed land had to be made to produce food more efficiently. The way out of what the agricultural writer Arthur Young called the ‘thralldom of regular fallows’ was to cultivate new crops such as maize in southern France and the Danubian principalities, or potatoes on the North European Plain from Ireland to Russia. Another solution was crop rotation in which artificial grasses like clover rotated with cereals and rapidly restored nitrogen to the soil, while turnips both improved the soil and provided winter feed for animals.

Reform of agriculture was significant for two reasons: it prevented famine; and it enabled a higher proportion of people to leave the land.

The reform of agriculture involved enclosure, both of the common land and of open strips. From the end of the eighteenth century the enclosure movement spread from England to the Netherlands, Denmark, France and Germany. This came with a high social cost, involving the destruction of communal and collective traditions as small farmers were degraded into an agricultural proletariat.

The Industrial Revolution
Between 1750 and 1914 Europe experienced three major waves of industrialization.

One peaked in the period between the 1780s and the 1820s;
A second crest appeared in the decades between 1840 and 1870;
A third was in the last two decades before the First World War.

The process of the first wave of industrialization began in Britain for a set of complex geographical, economic, cultural and political reasons. It was centred upon relatively simple and cheap innovations in two leading sectors, iron-making and cotton textiles. This pioneer industrial revolution defined the requirements for its successors:

1. that new sources of power should be applied to production
2. that manufacturing should increasingly be organized in large-scale units or factories
3. that there should be structural change in the economy as the share in the national wealth contributed by agriculture dropped back and that derived from industry and trade moved into the lead.

Chronologically, the first step was the introduction for industrial purposes of the steam-engine. Steam engines were invented by Thomas Savery (1698) and Thomas Newcomen (1705) (whose engine is depicted left), and were rapidly adopted first for pumping water out of mines and then for winding. By 1733 there were 51 in existence, over 40 of them in Britain. By 1800 c. 500 engines designed by James Watt were in use in Britain, adapted not only to pumping and winding but also to driving machinery. In 1784 a Boulton and Watt steam engine (right) was first employed to drive the plant of a cotton mill.

Important innovations were made in metallurgy. In 1709 Abraham Darby I smelted iron from coke. In 1760 steam power was first employed to provide the blast for a coke furnace, but it was not until Henry Cort’s ‘puddling and rolling’ process was patented in 1784 that production was simplified and impurities were eliminated. All this revolutionized the geography of iron production. Furnaces were no longer found in scattered woodlands but they were concentrated on or near coalfields served by canals and navigable rivers.

This was accompanied by a textile revolution as by 1800 cotton had replaced wool as the major export. This transformation was made possible by a series of inventions: 1733 Kay’s flying shuttle which doubled the weaver’s output; 1768 Hargreaves’ spinning jenny which enabled a single operator to work up to 1,000 spindles; 1769 Arkwright’s water frame which spun yarn by water rather than manual power; 1779 Crompton’s ‘mule’ which worked several hundred spindles and within a few years had been adapted to steam power. Cartwright’s power loom of 1787 helped weaving to keep up with the spinning process.

This shifted textile production from the home to factories – a trend first seen in the silk industry with the Lombe brothers’ mill in Derby. In 1771 Arkwright’s spinning factory employed 300 people at Cromford; by 1781 it employed 900. Manufacturing towns such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds grew rapidly.

The British experience was spontaneous, individualistic, open-market and gradual and institutions above the level of the private firm played little part. Since banks were asked to provide little in the way of (fixed) capital for plant or buildings, they readily accepted the lower risk, and arms length strategy of providing (working) capital for the purchase of materials or payment of wages. Modest requirements in capital and technology in early industrial Britain permitted many small ventures to enter the market. These were often family firms and they created a tradition of atomistic competition and a suspicion of large-scale corporate enterprise that was long-lasting. Between 1750 and 1870 British governments had little incentive to do much about this. Arguably the seeds of later British decline were sown during the Industrial Revolution.

Parts of continental Europe began to emulate the British example quite early. France, though beset by an antiquated and fiscally inept state administration, possessed economic capabilities in the private sector which even in 1780 were not far behind Britain. Her output of coal, ships, and cottons was less than Britain’s, but she turned out more woollens, silks and pig-iron. However, the upheavals of revolution and war cost France some thirty years of industrial growth, decimated French European trade and left the economy stranded in a European market dominated throughout the 1810s and 1820s by British manufactured exports. But skills and structures remained and even during the war there was notable regional development in the north and east.

Between 1780 and 1820 Saxony, Silesia, Rhineland-Westphalia were able to exploit opportunities opened by the first generation of factory technology. The Prussian appetite for weaponry promoted an interest in the new metal processes. In other parts of Germany Bonaparte’s expansionism and his Continental System allowed the growth of regional specialisms in textile production. But these areas too suffered from British industrial supremacy after 1815.

Belgium was the other economy to achieve a sufficient combination of new technology, large-scale production and structural transformation. The centres were Ghent (cotton), Verviers (wool), Liège and Charleroi (metals).

The second Wave: railways
The second wave of industrialization began in the decades after 1840. By this period new entrants needed railways, engineering works and steel mills. Above all they needed railways (Britain was the only major economy to industrialize without them), the central innovation of the second industrial wave and their influence was huge.

For the British experience see other post.

The great period of the railway upswing was 1840-70. Before this, France remained backward in comparison with Britain. By 1836 although Britain had 2,000 miles of railways, France, in a much larger area had only 150 miles. But on 25 August 1837 Queen Marie Amélie opened the country’s first railway, from Paris west to the old court suburb of St Germain-en-Laye. In 1842 a national network was approved by the Chamber of Deputies, prompting railway fever on the Bourse. On 14 June 1846 to celebrate the inauguration of the Chemins de Fer du Nord, James de Rothschild took 1,700 male guests from Paris to lunch in Lille and dinner in Brussels. But between 1840 and 1848 the number of steam engines in operation in France doubled from 2,592 to 5,212 (Philip Mansel, Paris Between Empires, 885). British capital was eager to invest and by 1847 half the capital invested in French railways was British.

The costs of industrialization
The Industrial Revolution created new centres of production and saw the dramatic expansion of some urban communities: Manchester and Preston (cotton textiles), Bradford (woollens) and new European industrialized regions: northern France, Alsace, the Rhineland, Saxony. At the top of the social pyramid were the industrialists, described admiringly in Dickens’s Bleak House and disparaged in his Hard Times. The workers they employed were revealingly described as ‘hands’.
The lives of the ‘hands’ differed in three different respects from those of the pre-industrial workers:

1. their lives were dominated by the rhythm of the machine for twelve to fourteen hours a day
2. they were dependent solely on wages for their living
3. they lived in a separate world from their employers.

Contemporaries like Alexis de Toqueville and Friedrich Engels noted their living and working conditions with horror. See here for Engels' famous description of Manchester. In Britain legislation lessened the working hours of women and children in textile factories (Factory Acts, 1833, 1844) and forbade women and children to go down the mines (Mines Act, 1842). But it was against the prevailing ideology to legislate for the conditions of adult males who were assumed to have entered a free contract of labour.

Compared with agricultural workers, factory workers were well paid. Any debate on their standard of living has to take account of the nebulous ‘quality of life’ but it is difficult to draw up a balance sheet of the lives of farm hands and factory hands. A rural slum might have been less of a health hazard than an urban slum but low rural wages often meant miserable lives, particularly in times of agricultural depression. On the other hand, the mass British migration from the countryside to the towns does not really tell us how much choice the workers had in their employment. The overall verdict has to be that, all over Europe, the period 1780-1850 was a bad time in which to be poor.

The limits of industrialization
Industrialization was a long drawn-out process and was also a regionalized one. Urban Lancashire bore little resemblance to rural Spain.

‘In the course of the nineteenth century to distinct economic zones emerged: and advanced, predominantly modernized zone in the North and West, and a backward, industrializing, but largely unmodernized zone in the South and East’. Norman Davis, Europe, 765.

But this was only truly perceptible at the end of the nineteenth century. Britain’s industrial growth before 1830 was less than 2% pa. The nineteenth-century growth in net national product was from 0.5% pa in 1830-50 to 2.4% in 1850-70 and 3.1% in 1870-1900. The majority of British still lived in rural areas and Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’ are unlikely to have been factories as he never saw any!

The private firm itself was characteristically small. The largest class of cotton mill in late 18th century Britain boasted a fixed capital of no more than £10,000. Its finances were provided by the informal source of family, congregational, local or partnership funds.

Traditional sectors composed of agriculture and non-factory craft manufactures survived in all European economies down to 1914. France remained a country of market-town economies and widespread rural industry until late in the century.

Europe after the Congress of Vienna

2011-01-12T07:06:00.000Z

The two pictures above demonstrate the contradictory aspects of the period: the crushing of the Decembrist revolt in Russia in 1825 and the July Revolution in Paris in 1830.

The post-Napoleonic rulers committed themselves in practice to an attempt to turn the clock back or at least to preserve the status quo: an aristocratic society, supported by a middle class (enriched in France by the French Revolution and in Britain by the Industrial Revolution).
But could the clock be turned back? New ideas were striking at the roots of the traditional order. ‘Conservatism’ and ‘conservative’ were new words from France. ‘Liberal’ from Spain acquired a new currency as a noun. ‘Democrat’ and ‘democracy’ began for the first time to be used by some in a favourable way. ‘Left’ and ‘right’ acquired political meanings.

The main legacies of the period 1789 to 1815 were

(1) liberal ideas, particularly notions of civil rights, political constitutions, free political institutions and a free press, and
(2) the growth of national feeling.

In Italy, Germany, Ireland and Poland patriotism and nationalism became inseparably attached to revolution. Self-conscious `liberals’ included university students (especially in Germany), journalists, urban crowds, army officers and radical associations: (The Tugendbund (League of Virtue) and other Burschenschaften (student fraternities) in Germany, the Carbonari in Italy, and military clubs with constitutional ambitions in Russia). This is a period of secret societies and failed revolutions.

From 1821, the cause of Greek independence became a popular among liberals and nationalists elsewhere, including Byron and Delacroix (who painted the Turkish massacre at Chios 1821)

Italy
Austria, occupying or controlling much of northern Italy directly or through client states, intervened to crush liberal revolts in Piedmont and the kingdom of Naples in 1820. The restored Ferdinand I of Naples took his vengeance on the liberal revolutionaries. However in 1830 Guiseppe Mazzini (left) founded ‘Young Italy, a group that may have had as many as 50,000 clandestine members throughout the Italian peninsula.

Spain and Portugal
In 1812 the leaders of the Spanish resistance convoked a Cortes or national parliament. This was elected on a broad franchise. A majority of the delegates turned their backs on the king and the Church and drew up a constitution with a division of powers, basic civil liberties, equality under the law and a guarantee of property. These delegates were known as ‘liberales’ in opposition to the conservative ‘serviles’.

The restored Ferdinand VII reneged on his promise to respect this constitution. A coup by liberal army officers in 1820 forced him to swear allegiance to the constitution, but in 1823 France intervened militarily to oust the liberals and restore full power to Ferdinand. Ferdinand then unleashed a reign of terror against Spanish liberals. Hundreds were executed, and thousands were imprisoned or driven into exile.

In Portugal, the restored John VI accepted, then in 1822 repudiated, a liberal constitution. His son, Dom Miguel abolished the constitution in 1828, and persecuted liberals.

Germany
Prussia and Austria, the two Great Powers of the German Confederation, adopted a conservative authoritarian policy, in contrast to the (slightly) more liberal politics of the German states.

The German national movement of 1815-20 was largely made up of young men, many university students and many veterans of the War of Liberation. Its ideals were partly liberal and partly a nationalistic response to the French Revolution. At the Wartburg Festival of 1817, commemorating Martin Luther (depicted right)) students burned symbols of oppression: conservative books, the final act of the Congress of Vienna and sticks used by noblemen and army officers to beat their subordinates. In 1819 a deranged student fraternity member assassinated the playwright August von Kotzebue. In response Metternich inspired the German states to introduce the Carlsbad Decrees (1819) outlawing the Tugendbund and Burschenschaften, introducing strict press censorship and placing German universities under police supervision. In Prussia, the great Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of Berlin University, resigned in protest.

Russia and Poland
Alexander I, who had shown some liberal sympathies, became increasingly reactionary. From 1816 secret societies spread in the universities, but the political goals of the conspirators were vague and their numbers were small. On Alexander’s unexpected death in 1825, the `Decembrist’ revolt of liberal army-officers sought to introduce constitutional monarchy. After it was crushed, Nicholas I exiled hundreds of the Decembrists to Siberia and inaugurated thirty years of reaction in Russia.

`Congress’ Poland, the core Polish territory, was joined to Russia in 1815 as a `kingdom’ ruled by the tsar. Following the July Revolution, secret societies, whose members were mostly younger officers in the Polish divisions of the tsar’s armies, planned a coup in Warsaw. It took a campaign from February to October 1831 to suppress the revolt. After it was put down, Poland’s semi-autonomous status was revoked by Nicholas I and Poland was formally annexed to the Russian Empire.

Britain
Reaction and fear of unrest was also the pattern of rule by the Tory ministry of Lord Liverpool 1812–27. Dissenters and radicals campaigned against an unequal and corrupt parliamentary representation from `rotten boroughs’, Parliament suspended the Habeas Corpus Act for a year in 1816, outlawed public meetings and prosecuted radical journalists and publishers. In 1819 the `Peterloo massacre’ took place in Manchester, when demonstrators were cut down by the cavalry. Parliament passed further repressive legislation in 1819. But the repression eased during the 1820s and in 1832 a Whig government introduced the Great Reform Act, extending the franchise in the face of widespread conservative resistance.

For fear of a French descent from Ireland, Ireland had been annexed to Britain in 1800 to form the United Kingdom. Its Catholic population remained disenfranchised until 1821 and no Catholic could be a Member of Parliament until the Catholic Relief Act of 1829.

France
Louis XVIII, brother of the Louis XVI guillotined in 1793, was placed on the French throne in 1814. He fled during the `100 days’, and was again restored after Waterloo. In June 1814 he introduced a liberal constitution, the Charter, which recognized the fundamental principles of liberty, equality and property. There were to be two chambers: the House of Peers and the Chamber of Deputies. The former were to be appointed by the king and subsequently recognized as hereditary peers; the latter were to be elected by men, and from men, paying a set sum in direct taxes – a cens. Trial by jury and an independent judiciary were established. This constitutional experiment was cut short by the return of Napoleon from Elba. The result was a ‘White Terror’, the rounding up and murder of supporters of Napoleon and former Jacobins; Marshall Ney was executed by firing squad in December 1815. Under pressure from the Ultras (extreme royalists in the parliamentary bicameral chamber established under the Charter), Louis’ government took measures against ex-Bonapartists and reintroduced censorship. Nonetheless his subjects enjoyed more legal protection of their rights than did most other Europeans. The murder by a lunatic in 1820 of Louis’ nephew, the Duc de Berri (see Chateaubriand's account), however, sparked off fresh reaction under pressure from the Ultras. Censorship was intensified and the electoral franchise was restricted.

Louis was succeeded in September 1824 by his younger brother, the totally reactionary Duc d’Artois, Charles X, hero of the Ultras. His elaborate coronation at Rheims set the tone for his reign. His actions (such as the new law on sacrilege and compensation for émigrés) aroused a liberal opposition, resulting in the election of an unprecedentedly large number of deputies in 1827. In 1829 he appointed a government ministry consisting entirely of ultras, led by the Prime Minister, the Prince de Polignac.

At the beginning of 1830 Polignac sent an army to conquer Algeria – thus ensuring that the monarch’s best troops were out of the country. In the spring the king refused the demand of the majority of deputies that Polignac should be dismissed and instead dissolved Parliament and called new elections. But these elections returned a substantial majority of oppositionists. On 26 July the king issued four ordinances dissolving Parliament and imposing censorship of the press. This led to street demonstrations in Paris, the building of barricades and the unfurling of the revolutionary tricolour. The street fighting lasted from 27 to 29 July, the ‘three glorious days’ and is romantically portrayed in Delacroix' 'Liberty Leading the People' (see above). The king fled Paris. On 1 August he abdicated in favour of his grandson the duc de Bordeaux. A group of opposition deputies chose instead his cousin Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, the 'Citizen King', who described himself as 'King of the French' rather than 'King of France'.

Belgian independence

The kingdom of the Netherlands, consisting of Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg under the rule of William I of Holland, was an artificial creation set up in 1815 to form a bastion against France. This was deeply unpopular in Catholic Belgium. Following the July Revolution, street demonstrations in Brussels at the end of August turned into clashes between demonstrators and royal troops. By November there was a provisional government of the newly independent Belgium. Dutch rule was overthrown in 1830 and in 1831 the neutral kingdom of the Belgians was established by the Great Powers, with Leopold of Saxe-Coburg (left) as king. (He was allowed to keep his Protestant faith.) In 1832 he married Louise-Marie, eldest daughter of Louis-Philippe.

The Congress of Vienna

2011-01-10T09:20:00.000Z

‘The reconstruction of Europe at the Congress of Vienna is probably the most seminal episode in modern history. Not only did the congress redraw the map entirely. It determined which nations were to have a political existence over the next hundred years and which were not…It entirely transformed the conduct of international affairs.’ Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (HarperPress, 2007), p. xiii.

The Congress of Vienna was a conference between ambassadors from the major powers in Europe that was chaired by the Austrian statesman Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich (1773-1859), and held from September 1, 1814, to June 9, 1815. Its purpose was to redraw the continent's political map after the defeat of Napoleonic France the previous spring. The Vienna settlement was in two parts, interrupted by Napoleon’s return from Elba in 1815. The Congress's Final Act was signed on 9 June, nine days before Waterloo. Technically, the ‘Congress of Vienna’ never actually occurred, as the Congress never met in plenary session, with most of the discussions occurring in informal sessions among the Great Powers.

The Congress was concerned with determining the entire shape of Europe after the Napoleonic wars, with the exception of the terms of peace with France, which had already been decided by the Treaty of Paris (May 30, 1814). The treaties reflected the policies of the victorious powers that imposed it. The fact that the congress was held in Vienna was a personal triumph for Metternich the dominant political figure of the post-Napoleonic era.

At the congress, the United Kingdom was represented first by its Foreign Secretary, the Ulster aristocrat, Viscount Castlereagh (1769-1822) (left) and after Castlereagh's return to England in February 1815, by the Duke of Wellington; and in the last weeks, after Wellington left to face Napoleon in the Hundred Days, by the Earl of Clancarty. Austria was represented by Metternich, and by his deputy, Baron Wessenberg. Prussia was represented by Prince Karl August von Hardenberg (1750-1822), the Chancellor, and the distinguished diplomat and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt. Although Russia's official delegation was led by the foreign minister, Count Nesselrode, Tsar Alexander I (1777-1825) for the most part acted on his own behalf.

Louis XVIII’s France was represented by its wily foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838). His aims were modest and amounted to damage limitation. The weaknesses of his position were obvious but a balance of power in Europe necessarily involved a relatively strong France in order to achieve what he called a ‘just equilibrium’ and counter the potential threat of an over powerful Russia. (Russia and France had the largest populations at the time and also the largest armies.)

Britain: Britain refused to claim any territory in mainland Europe for fear of being drawn into future wars. It wanted the freedom to develop its empire and enhance its wealth through overseas trade. Castlereagh was cautiously in favour of more political liberalism in Europe but not at the expense of stability.

Austria: Metternich was a conservative, 'in every sense a product of the ancien régime, believing in the natural order of things, based on established religion, monarchy and a defined hierarchy. He viewed any change as potentially revolutionary ... [and saw] the French Revolution as the greatest catastrophe to afflict Europe'. (Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 39.) He was also the representative of a multinational empire without natural frontiers. He told a Russian diplomat:

‘My realm resembles a worm-eaten house. If one part is removed one can never tell how much will fall.’

He saw potential threats from Russia and France.

Russia’s foreign policy was the preserve of the tsar. Alexander was idiosyncratic, an authoritarian who gave the appearance of being a liberal and was increasingly under the influence of the mystical Baroness Juliana von Krudener. He was in a strong position because of his massive army, which had taken Paris. His priorities were (a) the annexation of Poland and (b) to take land from the Turks. These ambitions made Russia the most potentially threatening power once France was defeated.

Prussia was also expansionist, partly at least through fear of France and Austria. Her ambition was to gain Saxony.

France: Talleyrand aimed at limiting the punishment of France by exploiting differences among the allies. He was especially anxious about an enlarged Prussia. His views largely squared with those of Castlereagh and Metternich.

Although they did not necessarily like or trust each other, the powers were anxious to stick together. It was recognized that France’s previous dominance had been caused in part by her ‘divide and rule’ policy; this must never be allowed to happen again. Under the Treaty of Chaumont (March 1814) the powers had agreed not to make a separate peace with Napoleon and had joined forces in a Quadruple Alliance.

They also agreed to maintain the territorial integrity of France. The extremely lenient Treaty of Paris (30 May) returned France to the frontiers of 1792 (with the addition of Avignon) and she kept a number of colonies as well as trading rights in India. The Bourbons were restored in the name of legitimacy. But at the same time the allies surrounded France with buffer states. In June 1814 the Low Countries was established as a unitary state, the Kingdom of the Netherlands under William of the House of Orange-Nassau (r. 1813-40) incorporating Belgium (the former Austrian Netherlands). It was later agreed that Prussia should have the east bank of the Rhine and a large portion of the kingdom of Westphalia. South of the Rhineland were the larger south German states of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria. To the south east of France the monarchy of Sardinia-Piedmont recovered its territorial integrity and gained Nice and Genoa.

The treaties were ultimately directed against revolution and therefore against the nationalism that had been aroused by the wars – a phenomenon that greatly troubled Metternich. In the name of legitimacy, the Congress restored dynasties that had been ousted by Napoleon. In May 1814 Habsburg princes returned to Tuscany and Modena, while Napoleon’s wife, Marie-Louise, was made duchess of Parma. Pius VII recovered the Papal States including Umbria and the Marches. Ferdinand VII was restored to Spain and the Two Sicilies. Napoleon’s brother in law, Joachim Murat was initially allowed to retain his position as king of Naples, but in March 1815 he marched north and issued a proclamation to the Italian people calling on them to liberate themselves from foreigners. The great powers combined against him. Murat was shot and King Ferdinand was restored to Naples.

The situation was more complicated further east. Allied unity was potentially fragile. In 1813 Prussia and Russia had signed the Treaty of Kalisch in which Alexander proclaimed the liberation of Poland (with himself as king) and allowed Frederick William III to take possession of Saxony. In 1814 Prussian and Russian armies had surged across Europe and entered Paris. Both powers were enjoying a new lease of life and both Britain and Austrian felt apprehensive about new threats to European stability. In early January 1815, it looked as if the Allies might go to war with each other over Poland and Saxony, an apprehension that was brilliantly exploited by Talleyrand. On 3 January Britain and Austria signed a secret treaty with France, after which Alexander backed down. The solution was to buy off Russia by setting up a truncated Poland as the ‘Congress Kingdom of Poland’(above right) ,which would in practice be under Russian control. The majority of Poles, who lived outside the Congress Kingdom, lived either under Prussian or Austrian rule. Prussia was allowed part of Saxony and most of the Napoleonic kingdom of Westphalia on the left bank of the Rhine. This killed two birds with one stone as it provided another buffer state against France; in accepting this, Talleyrand created a serious future danger for France.

The Final Act was signed at Vienna on 9 June 1815. By it, the situation in Germany was settled. Castlereagh had wanted a strong Germany as a bulwark against France, Metternich a weak one that did not threaten Austria. The German Confederation, which replaced Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine, arose out of these contradictory aims. This was a very loose federation and Bavaria, Saxony and Hanover were allowed their own armies and foreign policies as a guarantee against Prussia. The Federal Act which set up the Confederation allowed constitutions to be set up – these were adopted by Baden, Bavaria and Württemberg. There was to be no elected Parliament, but a new Federal Diet at Frankfurt (under the presidency of Austria) consisted of representatives of the 39 German governments, including Austria and Prussia, though both of these states lay partly inside and partly outside the Confederation. German nationalism was, therefore, kept strongly under control.

Like the Poles, Germans and Italians, the Serbs also saw their nationalist aspirations suppressed when the revolt of their new ruler Milos Obrenovic was suppressed. In December 1815 the Ottoman Empire conceded them internal autonomy for fear of provoking intervention by Russia.

Gains and losses
You can read the details here.
Russia gained ‘Congress Poland’ except Posen, Thorn and Galicia. The Congress of Vienna confirmed her earlier gains of Finland (from Sweden) and Bessarabia (from Turkey).

Austria lost the Austrian Netherlands but kept Galicia and Lombardy and gained Venetia. Lombardy and Venetia were allowed some autonomy. Austria concentrated on being a central European power, but was vulnerable to conflicts with Prussia, Russia and Turkey. The multiplicity of nationalities within the Empire was a potential time-bomb.

Prussia moved westwards. She lost her previous Polish territory to Russia but gained the Rhineland, though this province was separated from the rest of her territories. In the east she gained 60% of Saxony but only 40% of its people. Nevertheless,

‘the Hohenzollern kingdom was now a colossus that stretched across the north of Germany…The consequences for Prussia’s (and Germany’s) nineteenth-century economic and political development were momentous’. (Christopher, Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, Allen Lane: 2006, p. 389.)

But the fundamental Prussian problem remained the lack of defensible frontiers.

Britain’s gains were outside Europe. She kept some West Indian conquests (including Trinidad, Tobago and St Lucia) and retained Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, which she had conquered from the Dutch.

By the second Treaty of Paris (November, 1815) France lost some frontier fortresses, had to pay an indemnity of 700m francs, lost Tobago and St Lucia to Britain, had to return the looted art treasures and suffer an army of occupation for five years.

Balance sheet
The Vienna settlement has been praised and criticized in equal measure. Henry Kissinger (1957) praised it because the Congress forged a new ‘legitimacy’ that lasted for a hundred years. But this is to ignore the numerous minor wars that Europe experienced throughout the nineteenth century. Adam Zamoyski argues that it brought into being a ‘pax Europaea’ of a sort, a Europe of expanding prosperity and technological advance, but at a high price.

‘The Vienna settlement…enshrined a particularly stultified form of monarchical government’ institutionalised social hierarchies as rigid as any that had existed under the ancien regime; and preserved archaic disabilities [including serfdom in Russia]. By excluding whole classes and nations from a share in its benefits, this system nurtured envy and resentment, which flourished into socialism and aggressive nationalism. And when, after the ‘Concert of Europe’ had fought itself to extinction in the Great War, those forces were at last unleashed, they visited on Europe events more horrific than the worst fears Metternich or any of his colleagues could have entertained.' Rites of Peace, p. 569.

The Congress System

2011-01-10T09:19:00.002Z

In September 1815 Tsar Alexander (who was still under the influence of Julie von Krüdener), Francis I and Frederick William III (and all European rulers except the pope, the sultan and the Prince Regent) signed a Holy Alliance (the countries depicted right) to deal with each other and other peoples on the basis of Christianity. The pragmatic Castlereagh described it as

‘a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’.

A more realistic treaty was signed in November – the Quadruple Alliance Treaty. This set up the ‘Concert of Europe’ by which Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia attempted to control events by regular consultation (summit conferences) among themselves. This is known as the Congress System.

At the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818 the French indemnity was revised, the occupation was ended and France was invited to join the Concert of Europe.

From this point the Congress System became a weapon for the conservative monarchies to stamp out revolutionary movements. Successive congresses were held at Troppau (1820) and Laibach (Ljubljana) (1821) to address the problems of revolution in Spain and Italy. Metternich urged that the system take concerted action against these movements but the British stood aside.

At the Congress of Verona in October 1822 the question of allied intervention in the Spanish and Greek revolutions was strongly opposed by Britain (represented by Wellington after Castlereagh’s suicide in August). Metternich was caught between his desire to maintain friendly relations with Britain and his inclination to suppress revolutionary movements. This meant there could be no common allied purpose. In 1823 French troops unilaterally invaded Spain to defeat the republicans and restore the monarchy.

And here's a trivial pursuits point. on 31 August 1823 French forces led by the Duc d'Angoulême, son of the future king, Charles X, captured the island of Trocadero inside the Bay of Cadiz, in the South of Spain, bordering the Spanish mainland.

The French intervention in effect marked the end of the Congress System and confirmed Britain's isolation in Europe.

How to write a brilliant history essay

2010-12-10T14:02:00.000Z

1. Select your title with care making sure it gives you plenty of scope for discussion. Check with me of you're not sure. Then look at the title you have chosen. What is it asking? Underline the key words. These should appear throughout the essay.
2. The aim is to get beyond simple narrative and produce an argument or analysis. Sort out your views before you start.
3. The opening paragraph should refer directly to the question and should state what your argument is going to be.
4. The middle (and longest) section of the essay will be a statement of the argument. You will be making (probably) three or four main points. Your paragraphs should link. Use words or phrases like, ‘Another example of ...’, ‘However, it can be argued that ...’, ‘Nevertheless ...’

5. Ideally you should refer to the work of historians - either to agree or disagree with them. (For referencing conventions, see below.)
6. Your concluding paragraph should be a summary of your argument.
7. You should include a bibliography.

Referencing conventions (examples)
The conventions I suggest aren't universally adopted. The point, however, is to be consistent.

There should be a clear distinction between bibliography and references. The bibliography is the final list of all the books you have consulted and is written at the end of the essay. The references refer to specific parts of these books and will usually occur as footnotes.

Bibliography
Book: Blanning, Tim, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (London: Penguin, 2000).
Article in a periodical: Blanning, T.W.C. 'The Abortive Crusade', History Today, 39 (1989): 33-8.
Article in a book: 'The French Revolution and Europe', in Colin Lucas (ed.), Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 183-206.

Note that titles of books and periodicals are in italic, titles of articles in Roman type. In articles in periodicals the abbreviation pp. isn't normally used. You will notice that Blanning uses a different name for his latest his book! You should use the author's name as given in the relevant publication.

References
These are found within the text of the essay. There are two referencing systems.
(a) Harvard: this is a system more favoured by scientists than historians, but it is perfectly valid to use and is very economical. An example would be: ‘It has recently been argued (Blanning, 2007, p. 190 ) that ......’. The bibliography then includes the full reference.
(b) Short title: ‘It has recently been argued...' then footnote the reference in full. Subsequent references to the same book are then shortened: (Blanning, Pursuit of Glory, p. 190).

Who defeated Napoleon?

2010-12-07T09:04:00.000Z

[Above is a picture of the Russian general Kutizov at Borodino in 1812.]

You might be interested in this review in the Spectator of Dominic Lieven's Russia against Napoleon (Allen Lane, 2009).

This quotation from the review gives a flavour of the whole:

What [Lieven] is keen to demonstrate is that because the campaigns of 1813-14 are generally buried, so to speak, beneath the snows of 1812, the real quality of the Russian army remains unseen. For here was an army that followed up its success by fighting through Prussia all the way to Paris, a considerable feat of logistics, command and control as well as of arms — and without the depredations of the Red Army the following century. Indeed, when they marched home again, Alexander’s troops were feted in many a German town.
In all this, Lieven makes a compelling case that Russia is the biggest gap in contemporary Western understanding of the Napoleonic era, and that study reveals a hitherto hidden military quality. The book stands, therefore, as an essential reference.

Napoleon: rise and fall

2010-11-28T17:53:00.001Z

You might enjoy this very schematic diagram, taken from my O Level text book, Denis Richards' An Illustrated History of Modern Europe (Longmans, 1950) to help you remember the main events of Napoleon's career. Click to enlarge.

He had to fail

2010-11-28T17:53:00.000Z

[Above: Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides, Paris.]

'Napoleon was bound to fail because his appetite for gloire was insatiable. Like the French Revolution, from whose culture he sprang, he never had any war aims beyond victory.'
From Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (Penguin, 2008), p. 669.

Napoleon: the downfall

2010-11-28T17:52:00.001Z

[The above picture is Goya's, The Second of May, 1808: The Charge of the Mamelukes, depicting the brutal suppression of the Spanish revolt.]

The first major test of Napoleon’s rule was the Spanish crisis of 1808. The military presence of the French in Madrid led to a popular revolt against French occupation on 2 May. Napoleon forced the abdication of Charles IV and his son Ferdinand and placed his brother Joseph on the throne. This triggered off the Spanish War of Independence, known in British history as the Peninsular War, a popular counter-revolution which was exploited by the British. In August British troops under Sir Arthur Wellesley landed in Portugal, and the ensuing war forced Napoleon to commit 300,000 troops to the country to fight the British and Portuguese armies and the Spanish insurgents.

Napoleon’s troubles in Spain inspired an Austrian invasion on French positions in Bavaria, the Tyrol, Venetia and the Adriatic in April 1809. But the French struck back, taking Pius VII prisoner and reaching Vienna in May 1809. After their defeat at Wagram on July, the Austrians signed the Treaty of Schönbrunn in October, and their new leader Metternich pursued a policy of co-operation with France. The policy of conciliation was seen most starkly in the marriage of the Emperor's daughter, Marie-Louise, to Napoleon in March 1810.

Prussia pursued a different policy. Inspired by the reformers Karl von Stein and Carl August von Hardenberg, the country reorganized itself militarily and politically. In an edict of 1808 Stein abolished serfdom in Prussia. His successor Hardenberg reformed secondary and university education and gave full civil rights to the Jews. Recognizing the force of nationalism in inspiring the French armies, writers and intellectuals espoused German nationalism. (You will revisit these themes in Block 6.)

Napoleon’s biggest mistake was his invasion of Russia in 1812, the result of Russia’s failure to enforce the Continental System against Britain. In the summer of 1812 the (by now multinational) Grande Armée of 650,000 men (an unprecedented size) marched into Russia. In September they occupied the evacuated and burned city of Moscow and in October Napoleon gave the order to retreat. By the time it reached the Prussian border, fewer than 100,000 soldiers were left. Napoleon abandoned his army and returned to France in December. At the end of the year the Russians advanced west and captured Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

On 2 February 1813 Johann Gottlieb Fichte ended his lecture at the University of Berlin with the words

‘This course will be suspended until the close of the campaign, when we will resume it in a free fatherland or reconquer our liberty by death’.

Young men from all over Germany flocked to join a Freikorps (a volunteer army) of at least 100,000, dedicated to the liberation of Germany. The weapons of the French Revolution were now turned against France in what the Prussians called the ‘War of Liberation’. At the ‘Battle of the Nations’ fought at Leipzig in October 1813 over half a million soldiers and 2,000 pieces of artillery were in action, the largest military engagement fought until the First World War. On the left is the memorial to the battle.

On the evening of 18 October the French retreated to the Rhine. Of the more than 300,000 men under Napoleon’s command three months earlier, only 40-50,000 remained. The allied victory was decisive. Metternich wrote to his wife:

‘I have just returned from the battlefield on which the cause of the world has been won (Quoted Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, Harper, 2007, p. 115.)

But the cost of victory was horrific. The British ambassador-extraordinary, Lord Aberdeen, wrote to his sister-in-law:

‘For three or four miles the ground is covered with the bodies of men and horses, many not dead. Wretches wounded unable to crawl, crying for water amidst heaps of putrefying bodies. Their screams are heard at an immense distance, and still ring in my ears. The living as well as the dead are stripped by the barbarous peasantry, who have not sufficient charity to put the miserable wretches out of their pain. Our victory is most complete. It must be a owned that victory is a fine thing, but one should be at a distance.’ (Quoted Zamoyski, p. 115.

At the end of 1813 the Allies reached Frankfurt, completed the liberation of Germany and the Prussian army under Blücher marched into France. In 1814 the French were driven out of Spain. In March Russian, Prussian, and Austrian soldiers entered Paris, and Napoleon was forced by his generals to abdicate. The count of Provence became king of France as Louis XVIII, and Napoleon was sent to rule the island of Elba.

In March 1815 Napoleon escaped from Elba and returned to France for his ‘Hundred Days’. After his final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 he was exiled to St Helena where he died in 1821. The Napoleonic Wars were brought to a final end by the Second Treaty of Paris of 20 November 1815.

Napoleon as administrator

2010-11-28T17:52:00.000Z

[Jacques-Louis David, The Emperor Napoleon in his Study (1812)]

Here are some thoughts about Napoleon's achievements in France.
Centralization: Napoleon created the agencies of centralized administration and the administrators to run them. These included the gendarmerie, the state-controlled paramilitary police force; the prefect, the head of departmental administration, appointed by the central government and accountable exclusively to it; a cadre of trained experts for the state, products of the École Polytechnique, founded in 1794; new state-run secondary schools, the lycées, whose curriculum centred on Latin and Mathematics.

Financial reform: In 1800 the Bank of France was founded and along with it the creation of a currency on the gold standard. A land register ensured that the propertied classes paid taxes and an efficient tax collecting system meant that the money actually reached the government.

The Church: Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801/1802 recognized the Catholic Church as ‘the religion of the great majority of French people’. The Church renounced its former privileges and property, but freedom of worship was restored. Pius VII was a (somewhat humiliated?) spectator at Napoleon’s coronation. Napoleon issued an amnesty to the émigrés (apart from the royal family) and many returned.

The law: The Code Napoléon codified the law of France. The civil code rationalized inheritance but entrenched masculine privilege. The Criminal Code did not take up the presumption of innocence or the right of habeas corpus as enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But torture was prohibited and jury trials remained in force.

The return of the old regime?
Napoleonic France became increasingly monarchical. ‘Equality meant the equal subjection of every citizen to the state power.’ In 1802 Napoleon proclaimed himself First Consul for life and he crowned himself emperor in Notre Dame in 1804. The creation of a ‘Legion of Honour’ was followed up by the re-establishment of nobility and an imperial court. Was the Revolution over?

The imperial regime brooked little opposition. The two-house legislature was powerless. Newspapers were censored and their numbers greatly reduced. Political clubs were banned. Under the direction of the minister of police Joseph Fouché (Duke of Otranto), potential opponents – both royalists and Jacobins - were closely surveyed.

However access to the new nobility was by merit not birth, and Protestants and Jews enjoyed equality under the law. This was part of the Enlightenment legacy.

Napoleon on the web.

2010-11-28T17:51:00.001Z

There's loads of material on Napoleon on the web.

Here, for example.

Wordsworth laments the end of a great city state

2010-11-28T17:51:00.000Z

Lodovico Manin, the last doge of Venice.

ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC (1797)
          ONCE did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;
          And was the safeguard of the west: the worth
          Of Venice did not fall below her birth,
          Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.
          She was a maiden City, bright and free;
          No guile seduced, no force could violate;
          And, when she took unto herself a Mate,
          She must espouse the everlasting Sea.
          And what if she had seen those glories fade,
          Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;
          Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
          When her long life hath reached its final day:
          Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
          Of that which once was great, is passed away.

Napoleon: the rise to power

2010-11-23T14:56:00.000Z

[Above is Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps, commemorating his campaign of 1800. Note the references to Hannibal and Charlemagne who also crossed the Alps on military campaigns. The rearing horse is highly unrealistic. Napoleon actually crossed the Alps on a mule!]

The posts on Napoleon are based on a wide range of reading. I have found Jonathan Sperber's Revolutionary Europe, 1780-1850 (Longman, 2000) especially helpful.

Napoleon institutionalized the changes brought about by the French Revolution and spread them throughout Europe. This makes him easily the most influential figure of the period. He was the heir both of the Revolution and the Enlightenment and the changes he brought about outlasted his military defeat.

He was undoubtedly a dictator, but he also issued constitutions and through plebiscites claimed to represent the will of the people. (The device of the plebiscite was of course copied by Mussolini and Hitler.)

How did he come to power?
Throughout the entire period of the war from 1792 to 1815 France faced two main enemies: the Austrians on land and the British at sea. The other two great powers, Prussia and Russia, came and went as did the smaller European powers.

The armies of the French Republic, created by the levée en masse of 1793, were composed of patriotic volunteers and newly drafted conscripts. Their numbers reached as high as 800,000, guaranteeing the French numerical superiority of almost 2:1 in important engagements. They did not fight in a line, but skirmished, breaking up into smaller groups to take advantage of the terrain and to fire, from cover, on the enemy, still standing neatly in rows. Following a new strategic doctrine, they abandoned the old regime armies’ slow pace of advance, and moved rapidly, living off the country – a convenient strategy for a bankrupt government!

Napoleon benefited from these changes. He distinguished himself in the war of the First Coalition (1792-7) by defeating the Austrians at Arcole and Rivoli in northern Italy in 1796-7. In the spring of 1797 he led his forces through north-eastern Italy into Austria, his vanguard coming within 74 miles of Vienna. Austria was forced to make peace and Italy was divided into French and Austrian spheres of influence. This campaign established Napoleon’s reputation as a liberator of peoples, but the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 1797) shows this claim to be spurious: France surrendered Venetia to Austria in return for Venice’s Adriatic Empire along the Dalmatian coast. These were useful stepping stones to the Levant.

For Wordsworth's lament over the extinction of the Venetian Republic see here.

In late 1797 the Directory endorsed a plan of Napoleon’s for a Mediterranean offensive against Britain. In May 1798 a French expeditionary force landed in Egypt, supposedly to threaten India (though a glance at the map might have shown that this was unlikely!). The French defeated the Turkish armies at the Battle of the Pyramids, but Nelson’s navy destroyed and sank the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, leaving the French army stranded in Egypt.

To forestall an Ottoman invasion, Napoleon invaded Syria, but, unable to take Acre in Palestine, his forces retreated on May 20, 1799. The French slaughter of the Turkish prisoners at Jaffa is a stain on Napoleon's reputation.

In November 1799 Napoleon deserted his army, took ship to France and overthrew the Directory in the coup d’état of 18-19 Brumaire in which he became First Consul. He consolidated his power by crossing the Alps (depicted here by David) and defeating the Austrians at Marengo in 1800. By the Treaty of Lunéville of 1801 the French annexation of Belgium, Luxembourg and the left bank of the Rhine was confirmed.
This involved a redrawing of the map of Germany. The number of petty states was drastically reduced and most of the free cities were abolished. The reduction of the number of imperial states from more than 300 to fewer than 100 severely diminished the authority of the Hapsburgs.

Napoleon as conqueror
Marengo ended the War of the Second Coalition and Napoleon was able to take advantage of Britain’s war weariness in the Peace of Amiens (1802). But the peace broke down in the following year, and Napoleon’s concentrated his energies on the invasion of Britain.

In 1804-5 Tsar Alexander I negotiated the Third Coalition: Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Britain.

The British victories of Cape Finisterre and Trafalgar in 1805 put an end to the attempt to invade England. However, in October Napoleon defeated the Austrians at Ulm in Bavaria and occupied Vienna. On 2 December he defeated a combined Austrian and Russian army at Austerlitz. The resulting Treaty of Pressburg (Bratislava) eliminated the Austrian position in Italy and turned most of Germany into a French protectorate. On 6 August 1806 Francis II bowed to the inevitable and resigned the title of Holy Roman Emperor which his ancestors had worn for almost four centuries. He retreated into being hereditary Emperor of Austria. A thousand years of history had come to an end.

Early in 1806 the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples was conquered and set up as a separate kingdom.
On 14 October 1806 the Prussians were defeated at Jena and Auerstädt. The French occupied Berlin and the royal family retreated to East Prussia. This was Napoleon’s sweet revenge for the Prussian defeat of the French at Rossbach in 1757. What were his feelings as he entered Frederick the Great’s city and viewed his tomb? Prussia’s old enemy Saxony allied with Napoleon and joined the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon created the Kingdom of Westphalia for his brother Jerome and pressurized all the German states except Austria to join the Confederation.

After several fierce battles in East Prussia in the first half of 1807 Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I signed the Treaty of Tilsit, marking the end of the War of the Third Coalition. It was an astonishing achievement. The Grande Armée had marched nearly 2,500 miles and fought five great battles. It had destroyed the armies of two Great Powers and defeated those of a third, a record of conquest not seen since the days of classical antiquity.

Britain was now left alone and in an attempt to defeat her by economic warfare, Napoleon (from Berlin) instigated his ‘Continental System’, an embargo on British goods in the entire European continent.

Spin doctoring à la française

2010-11-23T14:52:00.000Z

The battle of Arcola, 17 November 1796: a case study in propaganda

This is what happened as described in Philip Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769-1799 (Bloomsbury, 2007), 1-3, 248-58.

Arcola is a village in northern Italy, 32 kilometres east of Verona. French and imperial forces confronted each other there, separated by the river Alpone and a small wooden bridge. The countryside around was marshy and crossed by dykes as a defence against flooding. Napoleon believed he had to cross this bridge in order to take Arcola.

Facing the French were two battalions of Croatians who had positioned their cannon so that they could fire on anyone approaching the bridge. The French troops took cover behind the dykes. When some of Bonaparte’s leading generals – Lannes, Bon, Verdier and Verne tried to advance towards the bridge, they were wounded. But General Augereau rushed through the ranks of frightened soldiers, tore the flag from the standard bearer, and advanced towards the enemy. A few of his men tried to follow him, but when five or six of their number were killed, they retreated. Augereau escaped without injury.

According to one eye-witness account, Bonaparte then attempted to repeat Augereau’s heroic gesture. He dismounted, drew his sword, took the flag and rushed onto the middle of the bridge, while the troops looked on, afraid to follow him. The officers who surrounded him were killed or wounded.

When the Austrians opened fire again, Bonaparte withdrew and his troops followed him in a headlong retreat, only stopping when they were out of range of the cannon. In the confusion that followed Bonaparte was pushed into a ditch full of water and nearly drowned, but he was dragged to safety by his men.

Two more days of fighting followed and the French failed to capture the bridge. On the third day Bonaparte sent the trusted and competent General Masséna to cross the Alpone further north and take Arcola in the rear. He was now very disillusioned with his troops and he complained about their ‘unpredictable’ behaviour in a letter to the French government. His comments were echoed by General Joubert: ‘Never have we fought so badly, never have the Austrians fought so well.’ Others made similar derogatory remarks. The army had performed below par.

This is how it was described
Bonaparte sent a doctored account that was printed in the Moniteur on 2 December in which he noted Augereau’s action in seizing the flag and carrying it onto the bridge, and his own action in imitation. Shortly after this, however, another account reached the Council of Five Hundred. This time Augereau was described as following Bonaparte’s lead and the prudent (or cowardly) refusal of the troops to follow him was not mentioned. Neither was it made at all clear that the crossing had failed.

However, Arcola had fallen and the imperial flag had been captured, and on the basis of these two facts a myth was created. In the first engravings of Arcola to appear, Bonaparte is accompanied by Augereau. Both are portrayed side by side, crossing the bridge that was never crossed, each carrying a flag with the inscription ‘The French People’. But over time the representations give way to those of Bonaparte crossing the bridge alone, and the myth of his heroic capture of the bridge became the accepted story, represented in numerous paintings and engravings, of which Antoine-Jean Gros’ Bonaparte at the Bridge of Acole [above] is the most celebrated. But it is not the only one. Horace Vernet's Bridge of Arcole is another example.

Dwyer suggests,

‘It is just possible that Arcola represented a psychological turning point for Bonaparte…It was from this moment on that Bonaparte as an individual breaks away from the Army of Italy, which until then had always been portrayed collectively (p. 249-50).’

It is the start of Bonapartist propaganda.

Edmund Burke: counter-revolutionary

2010-11-22T14:27:00.001Z

There is a very scholarly post here on Burke's contribution to philosophy. The Wikipedia biography is also useful.

Paine on the web

2010-11-22T14:27:00.000Z

Thomas Paine is greatly revered in the United States and there are many American websites that deal with his life and writing. Here is one.

Mary Wollstonecraft

2010-11-22T14:26:00.001Z

Mary Wollstonecraft's biographer, Janet Todd, has posted an illuminating essay here.

Olympe de Gouges (1748-93)

2010-11-22T14:26:00.000Z

Olympe de Gouges was one of the more prominent victims of the Terror. She supported the Revolution but opposed the execution of Louis XVI. In 1793 she was guillotined for writing a piece critical of the government.

You can read about her life here. As you read it, you may enjoy - or not! - the splendidly misogynistic comment of the eminent French historian, Jules Michelet. Basically he believed she was troubling her pretty little head about matters she didn't understand.

You can read a translation of her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizeness here.

Two views of the French Revolution

2010-11-16T14:34:00.000Z

How did contemporaries view the French Revolution? As the crowning glory of the Enlightenment or as the herald of a new dark age? The answer is both.

Look at the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, promulgated in the late summer of 1789. Note the optimistic Enlightenment language of the Introduction:

'ignorance, neglect or contempt for the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments'.

The answer to misfortune and corruption is to instruct a potentially virtuous citizenry in its rights.

Note as well how the language of the Declaration is an amalgam of Rousseau's Social Contract and the American Declaration of Independence [italics mine].

'Men are born and remain free (Rousseau) and equal (Thomas Jefferson) in respect of their rights. Ibid.

Whereas the great British jurist William Blackstone had declared that sovereignty resided in the King-in-Parliament, the French revolutionaries were in no doubt that

'the fundamental source of all sovereignty resides in the nation'.

A year later however, the Dublin born British politican Edmund Burke surprised everyone when he broke with his fellow-Whigs and published his famous attack on the Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke begins with some embarrassingly gushing praise of Marie-Antoinette, couched in the language of chivalry and proceeds to attack the Revolution as the product of

'cold hearts and muddy understandings'.

This was an attack on what he saw as Enlightenment rationalism taken to extremes:

'On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied ... in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.'

In harking back to the age of chivalry, Burke was arguing for an organic society which, in the manner of an ancient tree, had grown slowly and changed gradually. He believed that people needed institutions that were rooted in history. The French revolutionaries, he argued, were vandals, seeing the constitution as a mere machine that could be tampered with.

Burke's book was mocked by many and produced eloquent replies from sympathizers with the Revolution, notably Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. But when the Revolution turned into terror, he argued that he had been proved right and had been extremely prescient.

The French Revolution: was it worth it?

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This post owes a great deal to William Doyle's The Old European Order, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1992) and also to a wide range of other works on the French Revolution.

What changed as a result of the French Revolution?

New ideologies
Following on from the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, the French provided a detailed programme for a new type of polity. The ideology of the French Revolution was spread by the revolutionary armies, who brought with them an agenda for the destruction of the old order. By 1800 Europe was ideologically divided in a way that had not been seen since the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Economic disruption
'Economically the Revolution was a disaster for France’ (Doyle, 362). The poor harvests were outside the control of the governments, but the crisis was worsened by government decisions. One was the decision to confiscate and sell church lands, which (Doyle argues) threw about a quarter of the land of France onto the open market. This land was bought by the bourgeoisie, who tied up their resources in landed property rather than in investment in industry.

The government depreciation of the paper currency, the assignat, caused inflation until the experiment was ended in 1797. The only real beneficiaries were the debtors who had been able to pay off their debts in depreciated currency. Public credit collapsed and precious metals were driven out of circulation.

The luxury and service sectors suffered from the Revolution. Urban unemployment soared and the population dropped.

However the unprecedented mobilization associated with the levée en masse provided a positive stimulus to the economy.

Overall, however, the Revolution did more economic harm than good, at a time when British productivity was soaring because of the Industrial Revolution. Was French industrialization delayed for a generation?

The people
The sans-culottes were ‘the first self-consciously political popular movement in history’ (Doyle, 366). In two important ways the ‘people’ benefited from the Revolution. Firstly, farmers and peasant proprietors were relieved of the burden of serfdom. Secondly, for a period ordinary men (and women?) had a voice in national decision-making. But this was a brief moment, permitted because of divisions within the Revolutionary governments, and by 1800 this power had been taken away from them. Political rights were still linked to property.

Only the richest peasants benefited from the transfer of land while the rural industries on which many depended were suppressed. Military conscription took a heavy toll of able-bodied farm hands. Unsurprisingly as many as a third of the émigrés were artisans or peasants.

Unemployment rose for the townspeople. The Le Chapelier law (14 June 1791) made unions of working men illegal. The break with the Church reduced the number of saints’ days and the working week was further extended by the (understandably unpopular!) introduction of the ten day revolutionary calendar in 1793.

The poor suffered most of all, as the Revolution destroyed the bulk of the revenue of hospitals and charitable institutions and dried up the stream of private charity. Women, children, the old and the sick suffered disproportionately.

Former nobles lost their privileges and the émigrés lost their lands. However, in spite of some spectacular and famous names, they were not the main victims of the Terror. Most did not emigrate but lived quietly in the country and emerged at the end of the 1790s with much of their prestige intact. During the Napoleonic period they enjoyed an Indian summer.

A quarter of the émigrés were clergy and 5,000 might have died during the Revolution. But the Catholic Church survived and the closing years of the 18th century saw a religious revival in France and throughout Europe papal authority revived. However the close link between Church and state had gone.

Historians have been unanimous that the French Revolution marked the triumph of the bourgeoisie, the former Third Estate (Doyle, 374-5). Thanks to their purchase of nationalized Church lands, their share of landed property increased dramatically. They gained more than any other group from the abolition of noble privileges and the career open to talents. The Revolution was a triumph for the property-owning classes.

What about women, a topic ignored by Doyle? Overall, they lost out in the Revolution. After a brief period of feminist writings and of the formation of female revolutionary clubs, they were denied a public voice. The good citizeness was the exemplary wife and mother, rather than the political activist. Look at what happened to Olympe de Gouges. Women religious suffered intense economic hardship. Some feminist historians have seen the French Revolution as a profoundly misogynistic movement, with Marie Antoinette the most prominent victim of this misogyny.
Question: Why did French women not get the vote until 1944?

Balance sheet
The French Revolution caused thousands of deaths - though even more people died in Poland and Ireland during the 1790s. It has been estimated that 40,000 died at the height of the Terror; those who were not guillotined were shot (as in Lyons) or drowned (as in Nantes). This isn't counting those who died in battle or of malnutrition. The Terror can be explained by the threats to France, both from anti-revolutionaries inside the country and from invading armies. But it also revealed some very uncomfortable facts about human nature - a self-righteous moral certainty that expressed itself in vicious cruelty.

The other side of the sheet is the doctrine of human rights (droits d'homme). The Declaration of the Rights of Man led eventually to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the UN in 1948.

The total break between Church and state was enshrined in the law of 1905 which established the principle of laïcité. This means that there can be no religious instruction in state schools. It is also the rationale for the banning of the hijab in state-run institutions.

Unlike France, Britain blurs the distinction between sacred and secular. Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey. French secular heroes are buried in the Panthéon, a deconsecrated church.

The revolutionary calendar

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Here is all you will ever need - or want - to know about the French Revolutionary calendar here. There's also a calculator which is fun!

Marat: martyr of the people

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You are probably familiar with David's portrayal of the dead Marat after his assassination by Charlotte Corday. It's an excellent example of how the theme of martyrdom was evoked to present the death of a pretty unsavoury character. Simon Schama's Citizens has an excellent discussion of this theme.

Thoughts on the French Revolution

2010-11-10T14:30:00.002Z

Here is an excellent website about the Revolution. Enjoy!

The French Revolution was undoubtedly a cataclysmic event. In many ways it was the culmination of Enlightenment Rationalism, in others it heralded (to many contemporaries) a journey into a dark unknown. We are still living with its repercussions.

If you want to address the paradox, you might decide that the French Revolution involved two contradictory forces:

(a) the doctrine of human rights (droits de l'homme) brought to Europe from America, so that for the first time Protestants and Jews were granted civil equality and the slave trade was temporarily abolished.
(b) a self-righteous totalitarianism represented by the Reign of Terror and the attempt to create a pure citizenry. What happened to those who were impure?

'Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons'.
[Let the impure blood water our furrows]

The Marseillaise is here referring to the Prussian and Austrian enemy, but the language of purity could easily be applied to those French people who opposed the Revolution. That's why they had to be eliminated.

The French Revolution (1)

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For an overview, see a fantastic site here. There is also lots of information here.

The death of the Ancien Régime

The ‘ancien régime’ is the name given to the French government before the Revolution. It was marked by privilege, inequality, injustice and economic inefficiency. With its population of 28 million (compared with 13 million in Britain) the country ought to have been prosperous, yet many of its inhabitants lived in terrible poverty,

The monarch was, in theory absolute, though in practice there were many constraints on his power. The nation was divided into three Estates: the First (the clergy); the Second (the nobility); the Third (the rest). The first two Estates had important tax privileges, notably exemption from the taille, the main direct tax. The Catholic Church exercised monopoly religious power and the nobility exercised feudal privileges. The burden of taxation fell unjustly on the peasants who paid a compulsory salt tax (gabelle) and owed feudal duties to their landowners. The whole tax-collecting mechanism of the ancien regime was inefficient as well as unjust.

Yet France was also the home of the Enlightenment, and philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot had challenged the privileges of the Church and the monarchy. Enlightenment thought, seen in popular literature such as Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, stressed liberty and equality.

Louis XVI was incapable of tackling the deep-rooted problems of the French state. His Austrian-born wife, Marie-Antoinette, was extremely unpopular and lurid stories about her private life undermined the authority of the monarchy. The portrait on the right, Madame Vigée Lebrun's attempt to create a more sedate and maternal image, failed in its purpose.

The immediate cause of the Revolution was the bankruptcy of the monarchy and a series of catastrophic harvests that led to food shortages and food riots. In 1778 France entered the American Revolution and played a major role in Britain’s defeat. But the cost of the war led to a financial crisis that successive ministers were unable to solve. In 1788 Louis XVI was advised to turn for help to the nation as a whole and summon a body that had not met since 1614: the Estates-General. On 5 May 1789 this body assembled at Versailles.

The Tennis Court Oath: On 20 June the deputies of the Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath. It called itself the National Assembly and vowed that it would not disperse until it had provided France with a new written constitution.

The Fall of the Bastille: In Paris, food shortages, combined with mistrust of the king’s intentions, created an extremely tense atmosphere. The Parisian electors raised a militia of 48,000 men, the National Guard, to protect the Assembly. The National Guard was short of arms. On 14 July, having ransacked the armoury, the Invalides, for muskets and cannons, the crowd marched on the ancient fortress of the Bastille in search of gunpowder. When the governor appeared to offer resistance, it stormed the prison. The governor and the chief city magistrate were lynched, and their heads stuck on pikes. Although only eight prisoners were found, the fall of the Bastille was rightly seen as a moment of great symbolic significance.

The Beginning of Reforms

On 9 July, the National Assembly renamed itself the Constituent Assembly and began to draw up a series of reforms In the summer of 1789 the French countryside was in the grip of the ‘Great Fear’ as the peasants stormed the châteaux, destroying the tax records. On 4 August the National Assembly agreed to abolish the privileges of the nobility and declared that all citizens were eligible for office. On 28 August it promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

The 5-6 October

In October a rumour reached Paris that the king’s personal guards had trampled on the tricolour.

With the support of the National Guard a crowd of women marched to the Assembly at Versailles to protest against the price of bread and forced the royal family to return to Paris. The king was now a virtual prisoner in the Tuileries. However, the great majority of the revolutionaries still wanted a constitutional monarchy.

The divide over the Church

In 1790 the Assembly instituted a series of reforms. Internal customs barriers were abolished and France was divided into departments.

On 12 July 1790 the Assembly introduced the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a complete reorganization of the Catholic Church, which turned the clergy into a salaried profession, appointed by popular election. In November the clergy were required to swear allegiance to the Constitution, Almost half refused. The non-jurors were imprisoned or went into exile. This was the first major rift in the unity of the Revolution.

The Flight to Varennes

As a devout Catholic, Louis was profoundly hostile to the Civil Constitution, while Marie-Antoinette opposed any compromise. On 20 June 1791 the royal family attempted to flee to the Austrian Netherlands, but were stopped at the frontier town of Varennes. There was now a deep suspicion of the king and a further division had opened within France.

On 27 August Leopold II of Austria and Frederick William II of Prussia issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, threatening retribution of the royal family were harmed.

On 30 September the Constituent Assembly met for the last time. It was replaced on 1 October by the Legislative Assembly.

War and the Fall of the Monarchy

By 1792 extremist pressures were building up. Outside the Assembly radical clubs were proliferating and the sans-culottes attacked the monarchy and the middle classes. Within the Assembly the dominant group were the Girondins, who pressed for war against Austria and Prussia. In April France declared war on Austria and invaded the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium).

On 20 June the sans-culottes invaded the Tuileries and forced Louis to put on the red cap of liberty. On 10 August the crowds again invaded the Tuileries and the royal family fled for their lives to the protection of the Assembly. The Assembly voted to suspend the king from the exercise of his legislative functions and to establish a National Convention elected on manhood suffrage.

Between 2 and 6 September the news of the fall of Verdun led to the September Massacres, the murder of over 1,000 prisoners in Paris. On 20 September the French defeated the Austrians and Prussians at Valmy. On 21 September the Convention met.

The execution of Louis XVI

In January 1793 Louis was tried by the Convention under the name of ‘Citizen Capet’ for crimes against the nation. He was found guilty by a narrow margin and guillotined on 21 January. Royalists promptly declared his young son to be ‘Louis XVII’.

On 1 February France declared war on Britain.

The French Revolution (2)

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The guillotine

In line with humanitarian Enlightenment thought, the French revolutionaries wished to reform the system of punishment. In 1791 by a narrow majority, the Legislative Assembly voted to retain the death penalty but to replace the penalty of breaking on the wheel wit a new humane method of execution, the guillotine. Named after Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a professor of anatomy and a member of the Constituent Assembly, it operated on the Newtonian law of gravity and, it was argued, would avoid the botched decapitations of the past.

The sans-culotte

The French Revolution was full of symbols and one of the most powerful was that of the common man, the artisan or sans-culotte. He wore trousers instead of knee-breeches, wooden clogs rather than buckled shoes, a short jacket known as the carmagnole, his natural hair and the tricolour cockade on the red cap of liberty. The sans-culotte was the militant defender of the Revolution, championed as such by the radical journalist, Jean-Paul Marat.

A nation under arms

By the spring of 1793 France was at war with Austria, Prussia, Britain and Spain. But it also faced civil war as rebels in the Vendée proclaimed ‘Louis XVII’ and formed the ‘Royal Catholic Army’. The revolt spread to other parts of France.

In April, the Committee of Public Safety was established, drawn from members of the Convention.

The decree of the Lévée en Masse of 23 August conscripted the whole nation into the war effort.

The Terror

What was the Terror?

It was the period beginning on 5 September 1793 and ending with the death of Robespierre in July 1794. Famous victims included Marie Antoinette, the Girondins and eventually the Dantonist faction, but the bulk of the victims were ordinary people. In the course of the Terror, around 16,000 people were formally condemned to death, most of them in the provinces. An unknown number died in custody or were lynched without trial. Nearly 2,000 were executed in Lyon after the city fell to the revolutionaries. Over 3,500 were guillotined when the revolt in the Vendée was finally suppressed after terrible loss of life on the battlefield and the murder of an estimated 10,000 rebels and civilians in retreat. The most horrific event of the provincial Terror occurred in Nantes, where counter-revolutionaries were drowned in the Loire. At a rough estimated 30,000 died (though it should be noted that more people died in Ireland in 1798 and in Poland in 1794). In Paris, the scene of these executions was the Place de la Révolution.

The creation of the Terror

By the summer of 1793 the revolutionaries in the Convention were divided into two factions: the more moderate Girondins led by Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and the radical Jacobins led by Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton. The assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday on 13 July created a martyr for the Revolution. It was a disaster for the moderate Girondins, who were accused of complicity in the murder.

On 5 September a decree of the Convention declared that ‘Terror is the order of the day’. Suspects were arrested and revolutionary committees purged.

In October the Girondin leaders and Marie-Antoinette were guillotined.

On 24 October (6 brumaire) the revolutionary calendar was introduced. On 23 November (3 frimaire) the Paris churches were closed. On 4 December (14 frimaire) all power was centralized in the Committee of Public Safety.

In the spring of 1794 the Jacobins fractured. The ‘Indulgents’ led by Danton wished to rein in the Terror but they were opposed by Robespierre. On 5 April (16 germinal) the Dantonists were executed.

On 7 May (18 floreal) a new religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, was initiated by Robespierre (left). This represented a triumph of the deistic philosophy of the Enlightenment The first festival of the Supreme Being was held in Paris on 8 June (20 prairial) with Robespierre as master of ceremonies.

The Law of Prairial (10 June) instituted the Great Terror. But on 27 July (9 thermidor) Robespierre and his associates were arrested and guillotined the following day. The Thermidor coup marks the end of the Terror, though the war continued and France endured a period of uncertain government.

The ideology of the Terror

The Terror was about establishing purity, patriotism and virtue. In September 1792 at the time of the first meeting of the Convention, Robespierre wrote:

‘It is not enough to have overturned the throne: our concern is to erect upon his remains holy equality and the imprescriptible Rights of Man. It is not in the empty word itself that a republic consists, but in the character of the citizens. The soul of a republic is vertu – that is love of la patrie, and the high-minded devotion that resolves all private interests into the general interest. The enemies of the republic are those dastardly egoists, those ambitious and corrupt men. You have hunted down kings, but have you hunted out the vices that their deadly domination has engendered among you? Taken together, you are the most generous, the most moral of all peoples…but a people that nurtures within itself a multitude of adroit rogues and political charlatans, skilled at usurpation and the betrayal of trust.’ [quoted Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Vintage, 2007, 219-10]

‘The point was to ensure the triumph of the good, pure, general will of the people – what the people would want in ideal circumstances – and this needed to be intuited on their own behalf until they received sufficient education to understand their own good.’ [Scurr, 211]

Louis Antoine de St Just, February 1794:

‘The republic is built on the ruins of everything anti-republican. There are three sins against the republic: one is to be sorry for State prisoners; another is to be opposed to the rule of virtue; and the third is to be opposed to the Terror.’

Mapping the meridian

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There is some fascinating detail here about how the metre came about - and how the calculators got it wrong.

La Marseillaise on youtube

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If you want to join in the singing of La Marseillaise (with translation provided) go here!

Slavery and the slave trade

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Above is my photo of the elegant house of the Bristol merchant, Charles Pinney, who owned slave plantations in Nevis and who provided mortgages for other slave owners. In 1827 he nearly married William Wilberforce's daughter!

The subject of the slave trade is a vast one and there are some excellent web sites.

Background
Aristotle had divided human beings into two kinds: the masters and the slaves, and he argued that freedom and slavery were ‘natural’ rather than man-made conditions. It is important to realize that up to the nineteenth century slavery was the normal condition of society, though northern Europe was the exception to this rule.

In the Middle Ages in England and France slavery was replaced by serfdom (unlike chattel slaves, serfs had some property rights) and by the fifteenth century even serfs ceased to exist in England. But in the rest of the world slavery continued. It flourished in the Mediterranean in both Christian and Muslim societies. The Arab conquests of North Africa revived the old Roman slave trade; the nomadic Arabs of the southern Sahara traded in slaves with the black African societies of West Africa.

The European Slave Trade
According to Hugh Thomas (The Slave Trade, 1997, pp. 23 ff) the slave trade took a new turn on 8 August 1444 when Portuguese seamen landed 200 African slaves near Lagos on the south west point of the Algarve. These slaves had been seized rather than purchased by a Portuguese raiding party. They were Muslim Azanaghi, some of whom converted to Christianity. From 1444 onwards, more and more kidnappings took place, though the Portuguese soon came to buy rather than kidnap slaves.

The Spaniards were the next nation to enter the slave trade. By the early 16th century the native Indians were in rapid decline possibly more through overwork than disease. For example, in Hispaniola (Haiti), one of the first European settlements, the local population collapsed from 4 million to 100,000. It has been estimated that the smallpox epidemic which spread through the Caribbean might have killed up to 90 million people. (James Walvin, Questioning Slavery, 2.)

Confronted with a labour problem, King Ferdinand gave authority in 1510 for fifty slaves to go to Hispaniola and Santo Domingo to work in the gold mines. The decrees did not specify that the slaves should be Africans though there is no doubt that Africans, though already in Europe, were intended. Further licenses granted rights to carry African slaves to the Americas. Soon ‘the complete collapse of the population of the Caribbean changed the African slave trade to the Americas into a major enterprise’ (Thomas, 96). The slaves worked in the mines and in the newly established sugar industry.

In the 1530s the Portuguese conquered Brazil and Africans were imported to work in the sugar plantations. By the end of the century Brazil was Europe’s main sugar supplier, with about 120 sugar mills along the coast in 1600 (Thomas, 135).

In the second quarter of the 16th century about 40,000 slaves were shipped from Africa to the Americas. The figure may have reached 60,000 by 1575 (Thomas, 114). By this time the Spanish market had eclipsed the Portuguese, who were able to make this dramatic progress thanks to their trading connections in West Africa (James Walvin, 1996, 3-4). Between 1600 and 1620 the African slaves were coming to eclipse the native Indian slaves.

In the sixteenth century Spain and Portugal ‘assumed that they could together retain the Atlantic as a private lake’ (Thomas, 153), but French, English and later Dutch ‘pirates’ posed continual challenges. In 1525 a French ship anchored north of the River Congo and from the 1530s captains from Dieppe were continually harassing the Portuguese. In 1562 John Hawkins captured at least 300 blacks in the River Sierra Leone and (illegally) sold them in Hispaniola. In 1600 the Dutch, who were still fighting Spain for their independence, secured half the carrying trade between Brazil and Europe and were trading for slaves along the Guinea coast. By 1641 they had displaced the Portuguese on the African coast through force of arms and commercial dealings with Africans (Walvin, 7).

Some 11 million Africans survived the Atlantic crossing – the largest forcible migration in human history.

King Sugar
In the seventeenth century the northern Europeans established their own colonies in the West Indies. The Caribbean was converted into ‘the archipelago of sugar’ (Thomas, 188), manned by African slaves. In 1619 twenty Africans landed in Jamestown, Virginia, carried by a Dutch man-of-war, to work in the tobacco plantations.

In 1624 the Dutch established slaves in their colony of New Amsterdam. At first the legal status of Africans in America was poorly defined, and some, like European indentured servants, managed to become free after several years of service. From the 1660s, however, the colonies began enacting laws that defined and regulated slave relations. Central to these laws was the provision that black slaves, and the children of slave women, would serve for life.

Throughout the first half of 18th century, France and England battled for control of the Guinea Coast. In Lower Guinea, Britain’s main adversary was the Dutch. But when the Dutch Company was liquidated, the British soon gained control of the entire Ivory, Grain, and Gold Coasts. By the mid-18th century, Britain had full control of West African trade. In addition, the British won the asiento, the sole licence to ship black slaves from Africa to Spanish controlled territories in America, in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. British dominance in the slave trade began a new period of change in the European/African relationship.

What work did slaves do?
There were few jobs that were not done by slaves. They were barbers and nurses, doctors, cow-keepers, messengers, clerks, cooks, shoemakers, butchers and jewellers. (Walvin, 42) But most slaves – women as well as men - toiled in the fields. On Sundays they could work on their own plots. This was encouraged by the owners on the grounds that it made them more contented. By the 1820s slaves in the British colonies were growing more of their own food than was provided by their owners (Walvin, 142).

In the Caribbean the extremely labour-intensive economy was geared to sugar, with the French West Indian islands being the largest sugar producers.

After 1793, following the invention of the cotton gin, cotton was the great slave crop in the United States. In 1790 the South was producing 3000 bales a year, by 1810 178,000 and more than 4 million by 1860. It was America’s greatest export. On the large estates slaves worked in gangs supervised by overseers.

The greater plantations also had large numbers of domestic slaves, mainly women. This made them a prey to the sexual attentions of their male owners. Yet their knowledge of family secrets and their care of the children could give them a degree of power within the households.

'Homo monstrosus': the Enlightenment debate on race

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[The quotations below are from P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind. British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: J. Dent & Sons, 1982), chapter 8.]

From the late 15th century Europeans had come into contact with a great variety of human beings, and as they did so assumptions about the unity of the human race, based on the Genesis account of creation, came to be questioned. The blackness of the African presented a huge problem, and by the 1730s some Enlightenment thinkers were arguing that white and black peoples must have descended from different ancestors. The great French naturalist Louis Buffon believed that 'mankind are not composed of species essentially different from each other', but he also argued that the temperate zones produced the best human beings. (This is an early example of climatic determinism.) The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus divided humankind into two species, Homo sapiens and Homo monstrosus. Guess where he placed Africans.

In the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758) Linnaeus classified Europeans and Africans thus:

European - white, sanguine, muscular; long blond hair; blue eyes; gentle, most intelligent; a discoverer. He covers himself with clothing suitable to the northern climate. He is ruled by religious custom.

African- black, phlegmatic, lax; black, curly hair; silky skin; apelike note, swollen lips; the bosoms of the women are distended; their breasts give milk copiously; crafty, slothful, careless, he smears himself with fat. He is ruled by authority.

Evangelical Christians who attacked these views had at least one advantage over the proponents of racial inferiority - the Genesis account of creation that claimed that all human beings were descended from Adam and Eve. In our own age, evolution and DNA have provided confirmation that humankind is a single species (monogenesis).

There's a fascinating article in The Linnaean (October, 2006) about John Hunter (1728-93), honorary surgeon to George III, who is rightly acclaimed as the founder of scientific surgery. Born in Scotland, he studied anatomy in London and gained a reputation as a skilled naturalist. His study of nature led him to propound ideas on the origin of life which anticipated Darwin. Just as remarkably, in 1788 he propounded the idea that 'our first parents, Adam and Eve, were indisputably black', and since they were created in God's image, therefore God was black. This was two centuries ahead of proof that human beings originated in Africa.

The elephant in the room

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The 24 March 2005 issue of Country Life has a fascinating article on the very welcome renovation of Danson House in Bexleyheath. The author, Chris Miele reports the following facts without comment:

'In 1753, the estate of John Styleman let the Danson property to John Boyd of Boyd and Company, a family business that had been founded on West Indies sugar plantations and subsequently acted as agents for other Leeward Islands plantation owners.

Boyd’s father Augustus was a resourceful man who left Northern Ireland to seek his fortune and found himself managing a sugar plantation on St Kitts.

He married into the local elite and became a planter.

Sugar was then unbelievably profitable – on an acre-for-acre basis, 20 times more valuable than arable land in the Home Counties.'

Miele doesn't explain how Augustus Boyd 'found himself' managing a sugar plantation! Nor does he think it necessary to explain why sugar was so profitable. To understand why it was such a profitable cash crop we need to look at another man with Kent and St Kitts connections, the Revd James Ramsay (1733-98).

Ramsay was a Scotsman, who went to London to train as a surgeon. In 1755 he entered the Royal Navy as assistant surgeon on the Arundel, commanded by his fellow Scotsman, Charles Middleton and stationed in the West Indies. In 1759 he went on board an infected slave ship. In 1762 he left the navy, returned to England and was ordained by the bishop of London.

He returned to St Kitts in charge of two livings, and what he saw there made him the bitter enemy of the planters. In 1781 he was finally forced from the island because of their hostility. He was presented to the livings of Teston and Nettlestead by Sir Charles Middleton, the local patron.

In 1784: at Lady Middleton’s urging, he wrote An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, one of the first publications of what was to become the abolitionist movement.

The type of sights Ramsay would have witnessed are described in Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains (Macmillan, 2005). Chapter 4 is called 'King Sugar' and it makes very harrowing reading.

'Cultivating and harvesting the crop was brutal work. If you were a field hand, you planted cane shoots in holes or trenches you dug by hand, often in marshland where the air was dense with mosquitoes. At harvest time you carried huge heavy bundles of cane to the mill. You then fed each bundle twice through powerful vertical rollers that squeezed out the juice, which flowed into large copper vats in the boiling house, where it was simmered, strained, filtered, and allowed to crystallize into sugar. ... Slaves ... had to work in the mill or boiling house four to six hours on alternate nights in addition to a full day in the fields. Their clothes soaked with joice, they often lay down to sleep wherever they were, too exhausted to walk to their huts. ... At night flames from the boiling house fires were visible to ships at sea.'

I'll spare you the details of the accidents to slaves operating unguarded machinery.

The case of the Zong

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This was a Liverpool slave ship: master Luke Collingwood, owner William Gregson and George Case, Liverpool merchants. In September 1781 it sailed with 442 slaves from São Tomé. Collingwood mistook Jamaica for San Domingue. Once they had lost the way, water became short, and many slaves died or became ill. Collingwood called together his officers and said that if the slaves on board were to die naturally the loss would be that of the owners of the ship; but if on some pretext affecting the safety of the crew they were to be thrown alive into the sea it would be the loss of the underwriters. Therefore 133 slaves, most of whom were sick and not likely to live, were thrown into the sea.

When the ship returned home the insurers disputed the captain’s claim. The owners therefore brought a suit against the insurers, demanding to be paid £30 for each slave, and were backed in King’s Bench; the underwriters then petitioned the Court of the Exchequer. Lord Mansfield remarked that the jury had to decide whether the slaves were thrown overboard from necessity

‘for they had no doubt (though it shocks one very much) that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard)'.

By this time Collingwood was dead. The barrister for the owners argued that

‘So far from the charge of murder lying against these people, there is not the least imputation - of cruelty. I will not say - but [even] of impropriety’.

However the abolitionist Granville Sharp tried to take the case to the Court of Admiralty but failed. The Solicitor-General, John Lee, deplored his ‘pretended appeal to humanity’, and declared that a master could drown slaves without ‘a surmise of impropriety’.

But public opinion was turning. Sharp now had the support of most of the bishops, most notably Beilby Porteus, bishop of Chester.

In 1783 a bill was introduced into the Commons forbidding officials of the Royal African Company from selling slaves and the Quakers petitioned parliament for a general prohibition of the slave trade. Lord North, then Home Secretary, said it was impossible to abolish the trade, since it was ‘necessary to every country in Europe’. But 1783 was the last year in which the Liverpool Quaker timber firm of Rathbone and Son supplied timber for the African trade. Even in Liverpool, therefore, opposition was building up.

The Somerset judgement

2010-11-03T14:09:00.000Z

Most black slaves in England had been brought back by sea captains. Their status was legally uncertain. Some had been legally emancipated. Francis Barber had been freed by his previous owner, Colonel Bathurst; similarly a black valet in the service of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But slaves were often put up for public sale in Bristol and Liverpool.

Granville Sharp, then a junior clerk in the Ordinance Office (grandson of an Archbishop of York) took up the case of James Somerset, who had been brought to England by his master, Charles Stewart of Boston, in 1769. He escaped in 1771, was recaptured, then put on board the Ann and Mary, whose captain was John Knowles, bound for Jamaica, where he was to be sold.

The case came between Lord Chief Justice Mansfield on the Court of Kings Bench. Mansfield decided that there was no legal definition as to whether there could or could not be slaves in England. After procrastination, he decided the case on the ground that slavery was so odious that nothing could be suffered to support it. Somerset therefore was freed. There was general rejoicing among the many blacks present at the hearing. However in 1779 Mansfield stated that his judgment went no further than to determine that the master had no right to compel the slave to go into a foreign country. Little changed in the Caribbean and Africa, yet the judgment profoundly affected public opinion

The godless Enlightenment

2010-10-30T10:41:00.000+01:00

A friend has drawn my attention to Philipp Blom's A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment. You can read the full review here. As the review states

It is the story of the scandalous Paris salon run by Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach, a philosophical playground for many of the greatest thinkers of the age. Its members included Denis Diderot (most famous as the editor of the original encyclopedia, but, Mr Blom argues, an important thinker in his own right), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of romanticism, and the baron himself; even David Hume, a famous Scottish empiricist, paid the occasional visit. ...It is also an iconoclastic rebuttal of what he describes as the “official” history of the Enlightenment, the sort of history that he finds “cut in stone” on a visit to the Paris Panthéon. There the bodies of Voltaire and Rousseau were laid to rest with the blessing of the French state. Neither deserved it, suggests Mr Blom.

Blom's heroes are the Enlightenment atheists, Holbach and Diderot. You need to read the whole review to see his argument. You will see that he doesn't like Voltaire or Rousseau!