by Mike Rapport
CONCLUSION
This book began with Alexander Herzen’s hopeful journey into Europe in 1847. It ends with his disillusionment. The middle years of the century had been a time of personal as well as political tragedy for the Russian socialist. After their exile from France, Herzen and his wife Natalie lived first in Geneva and then in Nice with Georg and, eventually, Emma Herwegh, the German republicans. At the opening of 1851, however, Natalie confessed to having had an affair with Georg, and there followed months of recriminations and depression. Then tragedy struck an even heavier blow: in November, Herzen’s mother and his seven-year-old son, Kolia, returning to Nice after a visit to Paris, were killed when their vessel was shipwrecked. Natalie, heartbroken, died in May the next year. The traumatised Herzen travelled around Europe over the summer until, in the autumn of 1852, he settled in London with his thirteen-year-old son, Sasha.1 It was to him that he addressed his thoughtful reflections on the revolutions of 1848. It was a dispirited man who wrote From the Other Shore, dedicating it to his son on New Year’s Day 1855. The old social and political order would be torn down in its entirety by a revolution; that, for Herzen, was a historical inevitability. But clearly it had not occurred in 1848. It was up to the current generation to destroy and root out the old regime, but it would be the people of the future who would reap the rewards: ‘Modern man’, he told Sasha, ‘only builds a bridge - it will be for the unknown man of the future to pass over it. You may be there to see him . . . But do not, I beg, remain on this shore . . . Better to perish with the revolution than to seek refuge in the almshouse of reaction.’2
The revolutions were seen subsequently as failures, but one should not be too pessimistic. The events of 1848 gave millions of Europeans their first taste of politics: workers and peasants voted in elections and even stood for and entered parliament. The civil liberties that flourished all too briefly in that year also provided Europeans with the free space in which they - including women - were politicised, through participation in political clubs and workers’ organisations. That some of these were conservative rather than liberal or radical does not weaken the argument, for conservatism was in itself a political stance that many members of the masses consciously took. Perhaps the most important achievement was the abolition of serfdom, of the compulsory labour services and dues enforced against the peasantry. Quite besides the social and economic implications of this reform, it had an important long-term political impact: it enhanced the power of the state at the expense of the landed nobility. For, along with ending peasant servitude, the emancipation entailed the destruction of the nobles’ judicial rights over their peasants, who would henceforth live under the immediate jurisdiction of the state. In other words, the nobles would no longer act as intermediaries between the peasants and the government, but rather the peasantry now shared the same legal and civil rights as other subjects. In the long run this paved the way for them to become fully integrated citizens of the modern state.3 Moreover, the problems that came boiling to the surface in 1848 - constitutionalism, civil rights, the social question, nationalism - did not disappear simply because the counter-revolution stifled discussion and protest about them. Instead, conservatives were forced to reckon with them more than ever, not least because of the accelerating pace of economic and social change in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some conservatives were realistic enough to recognise this shortly after the collapse of the liberal regimes: the historian Leopold von Ranke told one of Frederick William IV’s advisers that ‘the storms of today must be met with the institutions of today’.4 Many of the solutions that were eventually adopted - social reform, national unification - may have been imposed in an authoritarian rather than a constitutional manner, and they may have been carried out for the sake of conservative interests, but they were often adapted from those originally proposed by the ‘forty-eighters’. Occasionally they were even implemented with the help of some of those repentant revolutionaries who had made their peace with the conservative order. To cite but one example, in 1867, Franz Joseph’s absolute monarchy in Austria finally yielded to renewed pressure and - at the expense, it is true, of the other nationalities - negotiated a compromise with the Magyars. This converted the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary, with both parts theoretically on equal terms and with representative institutions for Hungary, Austria and the empire as a whole. Significantly, its leading architects on the Hungarian side were both former ‘forty-eighters’, Gyula Andrássy and Ferenc Deák. The dogged Lajos Kossuth, however, remained in exile for the rest of his life (he died in Turin in 1894, aged ninety-two), steadfastly refusing to have any dealings with the Habsburgs.
Yet, in the context of longer-term national histories, 1848 has generally been regarded as a missed opportunity to set most of Europe permanently on a liberal, constitutional path. The implication, of course, is that if the revolutions had succeeded, the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism would have been avoided. A. J. P. Taylor famously remarked that 1848 was the moment when history reached a turning point, but ‘Germany failed to turn’.5 The German revolution of that year has been seen by historians as the moment when unification could have been achieved by liberal, parliamentary means, ‘from below’, rather than imposed ‘from above’ by Bismarck armed with Prussian military might (a process that was completed by 1871). Although there was a parliamentary system in Bismarck’s Reich, the imperial state was authoritarian and militarist. The argument continues that the middle classes - who in France were the backbone of the democratic, revolutionary movement - in Germany submitted to the dominance of the Prussian Junkers. Pushing still further this notion of Germany’s ‘special path’ - Sonderweg - in its historical development, some historians have seen in the authoritarian German Empire of the later nineteenth century the seeds of the much darker, murderous Third Reich of the twentieth.6 In this interpretation the failure of 1848 was a tragedy of catastrophic proportions. The great lesson drawn from the revolution was that German unity could be achieved only with power - and Prussian power in particular. Unification failed in 1848 because the revolutionaries themselves had no military strength at their disposal - and in the end they were unceremoniously overthrown by the armies of the conservative German states. Bismarck outraged his liberal Prussian audience in 1862 when he told them, ‘the great questions of the age are not decided by speeches and majority decisions - that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by blood and iron’.7 Yet the German ‘forty-eighters’ were not merely idealists: they, too, were interested in power, and especially German power, as their debates on the future course of Germany revealed all too well. When forced to choose between national unity and political freedom, the liberals - with some exceptions, such as Johann Jacoby - opted for the former. That, perhaps, was the deeper tragedy of 1848: even the liberals were all too ready to sacrifice freedom to power.
A similar process can be seen at work in Italy. In the 1930s the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by Mussolini, sought to explain how Italy, which was finally united in 1860, should have slid under the heel of the Fascist dictatorship. He found the answer in the weakness of the liberal Italian middle classes, the very people who led the struggle for national unity and freedom in 1848-9. The lesson learned from the failures of the revolutions in Italy, as in Germany, was that liberation and unification could be achieved only with the help of the armed forces of monarchist Piedmont and the cooperation of the landed elites. Consequently, unification was a ‘passive revolution’, imposed from above by conservative forces rather than made by the people (as Mazzini and other republicans would have liked). The Italian kingdom that emerged therefore had a weak parliamentary system which struggled to develop into a viable democracy. And that is what made the state vulnerable to the Fascist counter-revolution.8 Once again, the process by which the revolutionaries were willing to shelve or surrender their democratic or liberal ideas to achieve power and so further the cause of national unity could already be seen at work during 1848. The
Italian revolutionaries of 1848-9 also planted some cultural seeds that would bear a great deal of illiberal fruit. The revolution itself was a war, after which the hero willing to sacrifice himself for the national cause was lionised. The epitome of such selfless heroism was Garibaldi, whose memoirs of course did little to dispel the myth. Besides introducing a militarist germ into the movement for national freedom, the contrast between the heroic myth and the reality of defeat also injected the ideas of decadence and betrayal into the story of the Risorgimento, or the Italian national ‘resurgence’. 9 The tension between heroism, military glory and self-sacrifice on one hand and the corruption within Italian politics and society on the other was a theme that would have a deep appeal among those who would later seek authoritarian solutions to Italy’s problems.
The French experience was rather different. While no one would argue that the short-lived Second Republic was a runaway success, it has been seen (by Maurice Agulhon, among others) as a republican ‘apprenticeship’,10 a preparation for the permanent establishment of parliamentary democracy in France. After many storm-tossed decades, the emergence of the Third Republic after 1870 is seen as the long-awaited triumph of the principles of the revolution of 1789: it was the ‘French Revolution coming into port’, as François Furet puts it.11 Yet this does not account for the persistence of the deep-rooted political divisions within French society, which erupted during the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s and, most bitterly, during the Nazi occupation and Vichy regime, and its aftermath, in the 1940s. Historians are still faced with the challenge of explaining why France eventually arrived, after 1945, at a permanent parliamentary democracy by such a fiery and traumatic route, having passed since 1789 through three monarchies, two Bonapartist empires, five republics and no fewer than fifteen constitutions. Lying among the corpses of the other regimes that litter this circuitous and bloody journey, 1848 begins to look less like a democratic apprenticeship and more like yet another failure to create a viable political settlement. A French political system would survive only if it could bridge the great schism between the liberal, democratic France that accepted the inheritance from 1789 and the conservative France that rejected it - or to end, as some historians have put it, the ‘Franco-French War’.12
Central to the gloomy assessments of 1848 was the realisation that democracy was not always progressive. The elections in France in April 1848 returned a strongly conservative parliament, prompting Proudhon to remark bitterly that ‘universal suffrage is counter-revolution’.13 This opinion was reinforced by the plebiscites in favour of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and, later, by Bismarck, who listened intently to the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle who promised him: ‘Give me suffrage and I will give you a million votes.’14 European popular conservatism and nationalism were a means by which authoritarian governments could outflank and enfeeble the liberal opposition, whose support frequently rested on the numerically smaller middle classes or landed elites. Yet, while ideas of French exceptionalism, of the German Sonderweg and of Italy’s ‘passive revolution’ all have explanatory power, it is important not to be too downbeat. These interpretations can lead to a one-track view of historical developments: for example, at its most extreme, the idea of the Sonderweg can give rise to the impression that all German roads led inexorably to the Nazis and the Holocaust. It was still a long way from 1848 to 1933, but one disillusioned German ‘forty-eighter’ who was a harbinger of that dark future was the composer Richard Wagner, who wrote bitterly that the German people of 1848 had misunderstood the real nature of ‘French-Jewish-German democracy’ and so the ‘authentic German suddenly found himself and his name represented by a kind of human being utterly foreign to him’.15 However, while Wagner certainly expressed an anti-Semitism that was latent in German society, it did not become a marked feature of the political landscape until later in the nineteenth century, when populist, ultra-nationalist currents seeped into the debates in the wake of German unification and with the rise of mass politics. Until then Jewish liberals had been happy to strive for German unity: for them that process marked further progress along the path of their own emancipation.
One could argue (as the present author has) that, while the twentieth century certainly inherited its authoritarian tendencies from concepts, movements and problems rooted in the nineteenth, it was the catastrophe of the First World War and the immense strain that it placed on European politics and society which ensured that they were able to predominate in the decades after that conflict.16 One can, however, discern these tendencies in 1848, not as the overgrown jungle that they were to become in the twentieth century, but as germinating bulbs: in this sense 1848 was, as Lewis Namier suggests, the ‘seed-plot of history’.17 The revolutions were a ‘seed-plot’ in another important way, too: the ‘social question’, which had caused a great deal of anxiety in the years before 1848, erupted violently on to the political agenda in that year.
When, in 1848, the German democrat Ludwig Bamberger first heard the news of the June days in Paris, he immediately focused on one of the great problems that throbbed relentlessly through the entire industrial age: how to reconcile social justice with individual liberty? This was a great moral and political issue, which would produce many different ‘answers’, from communism to liberal capitalism. ‘The social question’, Bamberger saw, ‘had thrown its sword into the turmoil of the political struggle, never again to disappear from the battle and to make more difficult if not impossible for all time the victory of . . . political freedom.’18 In 1848 the social question ulcerated the liberal regimes because there was no revolutionary consensus. There was, first, no agreement over the form that the new political order would take: republic or monarchy, democratic or liberal, unitary or federal. Second, liberals and radicals did not see eye to eye over the extent to which the revolutions should overhaul social relations - how far the state should intervene to alleviate poverty, to mediate in labour disputes, and to regulate economic activity. In other words, to what extent should the new regime go beyond political reform and head into social revolution? These two sources of dissension were related, because the failure to resolve the first meant that there was no legal framework in which all sides had confidence and within which the second issue could be peacefully resolved through the political process. The failure of the 1848 revolutions to address the social question was therefore inextricably linked to the political failure of the revolutionaries to forge constitutions that could integrate those at the sharp end of the economic crisis.
This was one of the great tragedies of 1848: that the social and political unity that had secured the victory of the opposition in the initial revolutionary outbursts proved to be so fragile. Some historians have been damning of the radicals, in particular, for irreversibly damaging the liberal order while it was still in its vulnerable, early life. Frank Eyck, for example, says that in the long term, the radicals may have been right, ‘but in the short term they for a time destroyed constitutionalism and the tender beginnings of representative government by using force when they could not gain their ends by persuasion. It was they who made the task of moderate liberal governments impossible.’19 One may have sympathy for this view, as the present writer certainly does. However, while it is true that the radicals were rarely the true representatives of the impoverished masses for whom they claimed to speak, they did voice some of the widespread frustration over the social question and, in some cases, offered constructive (if sometimes unrealistic) solutions to the problems of poverty. In the long term it is true that capitalism dramatically improved the overall standards of living in Europe. With the benefit of hindsight, therefore, Eyck’s chastisement of radical impatience with the limitations of the emerging liberal order in 1848 seems entirely justified. With more forbearance in 1848, it could be argued, the liberal order would have survived, and within a generation or more Europeans would have enjoyed both constitutional government and the wealth created by maturing industrial economies. Yet in 1848 it was far from clear to contemp
oraries that capitalism would bring the benefits of sustained economic growth and prosperity. Herzen expressed the problem rhetorically while in Paris in 1848: ‘How will you persuade a workman to endure hunger and want while the social order changes by insensible degrees?’20
Namier’s term, a ‘seed-plot of history’, can be applied to this aspect of 1848 because the revolutions of that year witnessed the fatal consequences of the perennial tension between, on the one hand, the liberal emphasis on political freedom and civil liberty and, on the other, the socialist stress on social justice, or the friction between the individual and society. Since 1848 this tension has provoked a wide range of responses, ranging from liberal capitalism to totalitarianism and all points between. Most modern democracies cope with the social question because it is debated within a constitutional framework on which all parties are (more or less) agreed and which protects democratic freedoms. In 1848, no such political consensus existed in most European countries. The ‘social question’ could therefore not be resolved within a peaceful, legal framework. So the revolutions faced the great challenge that confronts all modern states: how to integrate the masses into the state and to resolve the social question without provoking instability? Some states, such as the French Third Republic and Britain, managed to forge a political consensus by appealing to traditions (in the French case, to the democratic inheritance of 1789), which enabled them to offer some social reform through liberal, parliamentary systems. Others imposed reform from above through more authoritarian regimes, as in Bismarck’s Germany during the 1880s. A third solution was revolutionary, where integration of the masses failed, or was not even seriously attempted, and where alienation led to a violent challenge to the old order, as in Russia, where the result was a totalitarian answer to the social question, in which the needs of society and, above all, the state took precedence over the liberty of the individual.