1848 (16 page)

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.'
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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'.
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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 British government of deliberately allowing hundreds of thousands of Irish to die).
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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.
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The insurgents scattered, but Smith O'Brien was later caught at a railway station and was eventually transported to Tasmania.
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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'.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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'.
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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'.
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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.