by Mike Rapport
VII
Not all European countries experienced violent revolution in 1848. There was some impact from the shockwaves of the revolution in France across the Pyrenees: there were some stirrings in Catalonia, a blundered uprising in Madrid and a military mutiny in Seville, but (except in Madrid) the extent to which the republican movement was involved is unclear. And in Catalonia, the main threat to the government came from a ‘Carlist’, or ultra-royalist, revolt. The government of the day, led by General Ramón María Narváez, reacted to the European revolutions in March by pushing through the Cortes the suspension of civil rights, extra funds to meet any insurrection and the temporary dissolution of parliament (which in the event lasted for nine months).121 Narváez sometimes appeared to be the epitome of Spanish militarist reaction: on his deathbed, when asked to forgive his enemies, he replied, ‘I don’t have to, because I’ve shot them all.’ Yet, while certainly not above authoritarian methods, he had some liberal credentials: he tried to steer a middle, constitutional way between Catholic royalism and republican revolution, but it was a constitutionalism that, he was determined, would give power to the propertied elites. Backed, for now, by Queen Isabella and seemingly the guarantor of political and social stability, Narváez managed to navigate Spain through the revolutionary storms of 1848. Neighbouring Portugal since 1846 had been (with British, French and Spanish backing) under General Saldhanha, who, like Narváez, defended a conservative constitutional order against both reactionaries and radicals with a rod of iron.122
Britain - while facing down a small insurrection in Ireland - relied primarily on the robust nature of its constitutional structures and the broad acquiescence of civil society to weather the radical challenge of the Chartists, who demanded the six points of their ‘People’s Charter’ of 1838: universal male suffrage, annual elections, equal electoral constituencies, the payment of Members of Parliament, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs and the secret ballot. They drew strength from the political radicalism of British artisans and skilled workers, and the movement included various, sometimes conflicting tendencies. A radical wing, personified by the likes of Bronterre O’Brien and Feargus O’Connor, considered strikes and violence - or the threat of violence - as necessary tactics, while a more moderate face, exemplified by the London cabinet-maker William Lovett (one of the authors of the People’s Charter), sought to exert pressure through education, self-improvement and rational persuasion. On the left the movement certainly had a pink, socialistic tinge, and it was associated with the nationalist opposition in Ireland. In the economic distress of the 1840s O’Connor, with his strident rhetoric and the thirty-thousand-strong circulation of his newspaper, the Northern Star, gained ground.123
Although much of his rhetoric of revolution was just that, the news of the February revolution in Paris caused some anxiety in official circles that the Chartist agitation might turn into something more aggressive than propaganda and patient petitioning for parliamentary reform. The alarm grew shriller when, on 6 March, there was rioting in Glasgow and London, initially in response to a government proposal (which was in fact withdrawn) to increase income tax. In Glasgow the violence was more serious: most of the demonstrators were unemployed workers, and they looted bakeries and tore up railings as weapons before the authorities called out the troops and read the Riot Act. In the ensuing shooting, one demonstrator was killed and two mortally wounded. ‘The alarm’, reported The Times, ‘flew over the city like wildfire, and coupled with the late events in Paris, gave rise to a general dread of some political disturbance.’124 The London disturbances took place on Trafalgar Square, where a meeting, although banned by the police, attracted up to ten thousand people, who listened to Chartist orators speaking about the glories of the French Republic and finishing with cheers for the People’s Charter and the new regime in France. There were some scuffles with the police and a small group of about two hundred protesters smashed shop windows and street lamps. A lady’s carriage was stopped by the crowd, who berated her for being an ‘aristocrat’, but since her husband had only recently been ennobled, she took this as praise. All in all, the day showed that the ‘London mob, though neither heroic, nor poetical, nor patriotic, nor enlightened, nor clean, is a comparatively good-natured body,’ reported The Times with patronising aloofness.125
Yet the danger did not appear to be over, since three days later the Chartists called for two hundred thousand people to rally on 10 April on south London’s Kennington Common, from where the demonstrators would march on Parliament in support of a petition for parliamentary reform. If, the socialist Chartist Ernest Jones declared, this was imitated in other cities, then Parliament would give way under the intense pressure and the People’s Charter would become law. With this announcement, genuine public alarm about the threat of revolution now began to stir, the more so when, on 4 April, a Chartist convention met in London. For a population that had been consuming press stories about the Parisian revolution and its socialist clubs, this appeared to be a malign attempt at a British imitation. Chartist rhetoric merely intensified the anxieties: on the eve of the massive demonstration, Jones told the cheering convention, ‘So help me God I will march in the first rank tomorrow, and if they attempt any violence, they shall not be 24 hours longer in the House of Commons.’126 The government’s alarm was sufficiently great for it to persuade Queen Victoria and her family to travel to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. The authorities - with some involvement from the aged Duke of Wellington - prepared for trouble by putting professional police on the Thames bridges, while tactfully keeping regular troops out of sight, but close to strategic points. The Bank of England was fortified with sandbags and mounted with cannon. Some 85,000 citizens were sworn in as special constables, prompting Charles Dickens to turn down the opportunity on the grounds that ‘special constable-ing’ was becoming an epidemic.127 Indeed, the overwhelming support for the government of the middle classes, from the wealthiest to the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ of shopkeepers, clerks and the like, was an essential difference between the situation in London in April and that which had prevailed in Paris in February.128
Yet, so too was the restraint showed by the Chartists themselves. Despite the strong words, the aim of the protest was primarily to exert pressure, not to purge Parliament and topple the government. Now, faced with an impressive show of coercive might, even the fiery Feargus O’Connor, learning from the police that the mass meeting but not the march on Parliament would be permitted, showed some relief when he mounted a carriage and told the dense ranks of Chartists ‘not to injure their cause by intemperance or folly’. Jones, more reluctantly, agreed, since he felt the movement was not yet ready for an ‘attempt at collision with the authorities’. 129 In the end the Chartists’ demands were presented by a small delegation led by O’Connor. The petition was ridiculed in Parliament - MPs were especially amused by the false signatures it contained (one joker had apparently signed as ‘Queen Victoria’) - but the suspicion must be that the laughter was borne as much of relief as it was of derision. A relieved Palmerston, the British foreign secretary at the time, declared 10 April ‘the Waterloo of peace and order’.130 Although it was not immediately obvious, the wind had been taken out of the Chartists’ sails, and while a radical wing chose to turn to violence in the summer, most of its leaders, including Jones, were arrested.
The defeat of the Chartists almost guaranteed the failure of the opposition in Ireland in 1848, since the Whig government in London had no need to make concessions to the Irish nationalists in order to muster all their strength against a revolutionary threat in Britain. Almost immediately, the lord lieutenant in Dublin Castle turned the screws: in March three leaders of the nationalist ‘Young Ireland’ movement - William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel - were arrested and charged with sedition. The government wanted to silence troublemakers before they could whip up a revolutionary storm among a population devastated by the famine (O’Brien had already accused the Bri
tish government of deliberately allowing hundreds of thousands of Irish to die).131 Yet the pre-emptive strike was counter-productive as the three men became nationalist heroes. The case against the first two collapsed when the jury could not reach a verdict, and when Mitchel was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation the previously fractious nationalist movement was pushed into unity, with the moderates of the Repeal Association (so called because it wanted to repeal the 1800 union of Ireland with Britain) under John O’Connell joining with the more militant Young Ireland to form the Irish League. Young Ireland’s seventy-odd ‘confederate clubs’, with a total membership of some twenty thousand, mostly in the cities (half of them were in Dublin), were allowed to arm and were regarded as an Irish ‘national guard’. In the event, however, weapons were in short supply and the confederates did not have the time to train properly. Nevertheless, all the bluster about revolution provoked another round of government repression: in July it banned possession of arms in Dublin, suspended habeas corpus and arrested a number of confederates. Facing suppression, it was hard for the moderates to hold the middle ground, but the League’s executive voted - albeit by a very narrow margin - to wait for more propitious times before pressing for an insurrection. It authorised the confederate clubs to use force in defending themselves, but not to rise up. Only Smith O’Brien and a few other Young Irelanders, including Meagher, soldiered on. At the end of July they tried to rouse the countryside around Kilkenny in revolt, but they gathered only a few hundred recruits. Smith O’Brien and his closest colleagues ended up taking a stand in a farmhouse and its cabbage patch. There was some heavy shooting, with the flashes from the police musketry lighting up the dark. Meagher, who would later serve with distinction on the Union side in the American Civil War, claimed that the Irish revolutionaries took as much fire that day as he did at Gettysburg.132 The insurgents scattered, but Smith O’Brien was later caught at a railway station and was eventually transported to Tasmania.133
The established order in the British Isles therefore emerged from the trauma of 1848 unaltered. Some other European governments - such as those of the Netherlands and Belgium - made timely concessions before anything like a groundswell of opposition could pose a serious challenge. Russia, meanwhile, took the opposite tack and brutally repressed the stirrings of revolutionary opposition, and the Swedish government also used force to rebuff demands for reform.
In the Netherlands King William II, who governed under parliamentary restraints that were far from robust under the 1815 constitution, had declared - prior to the outbreak of the European revolutions - that he was willing to listen to the Estates-General debate proposals for mild constitutional reform. When the time came for the debate on 9 March, however, the revolutionary torrent was now cascading across the continent. Still, ignoring the advice of a minority of his cabinet, William set his face firmly against any reform beyond the original bill. The widespread disappointment was articulated by the liberal leader Johan Thorbecke, who called the bill ‘a small, poor spoonful out of our kettle’.134 Yet, four days later, influenced by (unreliable) reports that the people of Amsterdam were becoming restive, the King - without consulting his cabinet - yielded, summoning the leader of the lower house of parliament to discuss a more radical reform programme. His conservative ministers resigned en masse, prompting popular celebrations that, in The Hague on 14-16 March, developed into peaceful demonstrations of support for Thorbecke’s demands for an independent commission to decide on the scope of the reforms. The King, after much agonising (and with his will shaken by the sudden death of his son), appointed the commission, which in turn appointed a new cabinet and drafted far-reaching reforms, including freedom of the press, assembly, association and religion. (This last point was essential for the large Catholic minority who had hitherto felt like second-class citizens.) Ministers would be responsible to parliament, which would be elected by direct election, albeit on a limited suffrage, and at legally defined intervals. When these proposals, having been accepted by the King, were finally brought before parliament on 19 June, the conservatives rejected many of them. The Dutch were therefore in the rather peculiar position (for 1848) of having a government that was trying to implement a political reform programme being frustrated by an elected assembly. In the end a compromise was hammered out and the various amended proposals were all accepted after fresh elections to a new, reformed parliament were held in September. This meant that, when the reaction took hold elsewhere in Europe, the Netherlands had a liberal government, under Thorbecke, between 1849 and 1853. According to the American ambassador, this gave ‘a consoling Spectacle to the friends of freedom throughout Europe’.135 The events of 1848 also strengthened the belief that, because the Netherlands was a small, weaker European state with no great international mission (although it was still a colonial power), it could afford to give greater liberties to its subjects since it had no need for a strong, coercive government. In this sense, 1848 enabled the Dutch to comfort themselves over the obvious decline of the Netherlands (since the later eighteenth century) as a world power by suggesting that this very fact made Dutch liberties at home possible.136
In neighbouring Belgium there was no revolution partly because the constitution was of recent vintage (1831), arising as it did from the struggle for independence from the Netherlands: prior to 1848 it was widely admired as a model for liberals in other countries. Armed with a parliamentary order that would have satisfied the opposition elsewhere in Europe, the Belgian constitutional monarchy was therefore barely shaken by the republican movement that flashed briefly in the pan in February and March. There was widespread distress in this most industrialised of European countries, and there was certainly socialist agitation and a rash of riots in March, but the government, under the astute liberal Charles Rogier, had already acted promptly, on the 2nd of that month, by broadening the suffrage, which placated the potential middle-class leadership of the opposition. The economic suffering was then addressed by investment in public works, by giving poor relief to the indigent and by reforming the system of workhouses and municipal pawnshops. These timely measures helped to soothe popular distress and took the sting out of the radical opposition. By the time the government faced a small invasion by expatriate republicans sallying across the frontier from France at the end of March, the threat could be met and repressed easily. The government felt strong enough not to carry out the seventeen death sentences that were passed on the insurgents, and it triumphed in the elections of June. There was, moreover, as yet no vigorous Flemish nationalist movement that might otherwise have threatened Belgium with ethnic strife.137 The King of Denmark, Frederick VII, implemented the constitutional reforms of his father Christian VIII, who had yielded to liberal pressure at the very end of his life, creating the Joint Estates of the Realm, which held legislative and fiscal powers. When the new king signed the edict abolishing royal absolutism, there was a ‘silence so profound that the stroke of the pen could be plainly heard’. It was 29 January 1848. The timing could not have been more fortuitous.138
While concessions were made in the Low Countries and Denmark, the situation in Russia and Sweden was very different. In Sweden a banquet was held in Stockholm on 18 March at which banners demanded reform and a republic. The authorities were sufficiently anxious to call out the army, and thirty people were killed, leaving the capital restless for several days before calm was restored. King Oscar I, who had enjoyed a liberal reputation before 1848, now set himself against political reform and there would be no extension of the franchise in Sweden for more than a decade. In Norway, which had been in a political union with Sweden since 1815, an assembly of delegates representing local branches of a Chartist-style movement for universal male suffrage and social reform, led by the socialist Marcus Thrane, met in Oslo (then called Christiania). It was broken up and 117 people were imprisoned, including Thrane, who served four years before he left for the United States.139
Uncompromising as the authorities were in Sweden and Norway,
though, the initial repression was even harsher in Russia. On hearing word of the February revolution in Paris, Tsar Nicholas I is alleged to have burst into a palace ballroom, proclaiming, ‘Saddle your horses gentlemen! A Republic has been declared in France.’140 In fact, the Tsar refused to act impetuously - at least, not in foreign policy. He partially mobilised his forces along the western frontiers of the empire, declaring that he was ready to meet his enemies ‘wherever they may appear’, but this was a defensive posture, for he also declared that Russia would not intervene in Europe ‘unless anarchy crossed her frontiers’.141 Nicholas’s pronouncements suggest that he would be circumspect in foreign policy, but it is equally apparent that he was anxious about the spread of the ‘political illness’ into his empire, which, the Prussian ambassador wrote, he believed was ‘very far from being immune from infection’.142 The partial Russian mobilisation was not, therefore, a precursor to a counter-revolutionary assault on Europe, but was intended to meet the warlike noises coming from Germany, where overzealous liberals were calling for a revolutionary war against Russia to liberate Poland and cement German unity. It was also aimed at persuading the oppressed Poles that an insurrection of the kind attempted in 1831 was not worth repeating. Although many Europeans (perhaps understandably) feared Russia’s designs, Nicholas had no intention of provoking a major European war. He was well aware that Britain was becoming concerned about the expansion of Russian influence, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, and he saw Britain, as the only other great power unaffected by revolution, as a potential diplomatic partner in restoring stability to the continent. He also feared that the revolutionary virus would contaminate Russia: consequently, his instincts were not to strike outwards, but to isolate his empire from the rest of Europe and to turn inwards, repressing all domestic dissent.