1848 (4 page)

The most dramatic surge of resistance to the conservative order came in Poland, where in November 1830 the patience of the patriotic Polish nobility within the Russian partition snapped when the Tsar mobilised the Polish army in response to the revolutions in Western Europe. The insurrection lasted ten months and was crushed - after some bloody and intense fighting - by a 120,000-strong Russian army under General Ivan Paskevich (who would help repress another revolution in 1849). In the retribution that followed, a staggering eighty-thousand Poles were dragged off in chains to Siberia. There were also revolutions in Italy, but these were flattened, mostly by Austrian troops. The revolutions of the 1830s were nowhere near as widespread as those of 1848, but on a European scale they loosened Metternich's grip on the conservative, international order. When the Austrian Chancellor heard the first news of the revolution in France, he collapsed at his desk, moaning, ‘My entire life's work is destroyed.'
¹⁸
His despair was exaggerated, however, for the cautious behaviour of the July Monarchy, which rapidly swung on to a conservative tack, would do much to bury his worst fears. He was not troubled, either, by another crack in the conservative edifice, in the shape of Greek independence. After a brutal, atrocity-ridden war which lasted eight and a half years between 1821 and 1829, the Greeks won their freedom from Turkish rule. Yet Metternich's international system did not descend into crisis because the final Greek victory had been secured, first, with military intervention by Russia, Britain and France and then by the diplomatic recognition of the great powers at the Treaty of London in 1830. The new kingdom of Greece was therefore rapidly enveloped within the folds of the post-Napoleonic order.

Metternich saw revolution as an essentially French disease: in late 1822 he had written to the Tsar that ‘nationality, political boundaries, all have disappeared for the [revolutionary] sect. Without doubt, it is in Paris that the directing committee of the radicals of all Europe is today established.'
¹⁹
Metternich was once again overstating the case, but he illustrates the truth of the cliché that just because someone is paranoid, it does not mean that some people are
not
out to get him. The 1830s witnessed the emergence of a new wave of very real and resilient underground, revolutionary networks. These were energised by a new generation of intellectuals, romantics and patriots who were not old enough to have any clear recollection of the French Revolution, but who lived and breathed the glorious memories of its liberating promise. For the French republican historian Jules Michelet, born in 1798, and writing in 1847 the preface to his epic history of the French Revolution, that great historical moment was driven by the entire people - an unstoppable, providential force whose destiny was to spread the benevolent gospel of liberty, equality and fraternity across the globe.
²⁰
Following the exhilarating example of 1789, some visionaries believed that revolution would be the means by which a freer, more equitable world would be born and they now dedicated their entire lives to bringing about that glorious day.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this epoch therefore witnessed the birth of the ‘professional' revolutionary, who plotted tirelessly for the violent overthrow of the conservative order. Those of the French Revolution of 1789 had been unexpectedly hurled - often from obscure, drab provincial lives - into the maelstrom that eventually convulsed Europe for more than two decades: they became revolutionaries by accident and often quite reluctantly. Those of this new generation were self-consciously and actively trying to provoke a revolution. Foremost among them was the inspirational, if rather quixotic, figure of Giuseppe Mazzini. Born in Genoa in 1805 and a member of the
carbonari
from 1829, Mazzini was devoted not only to expelling the Austrians from Italy, but also to unifying the country in a democratic republic. Although this Italian patriot was far from giving his unqualified admiration to the revolution of 1789, he held that the French had proclaimed the rights of the individual, while demonstrating that great revolutions were possible even against the odds and in the most unexpected of places. Even failed uprisings, Mazzini argued, had their purpose, because ‘ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs' - and the ideas would ferment even as the insurgents were mown down by cannon and musketry.
²¹
The modern-day revolutionaries, he wrote in 1839, ‘labour less for the generation that lives around them than for the generation to come; the triumph of the ideas that they cast on the world is slow, but assured and decisive'.
²²
Mazzini was convinced that the next great revolution would bring genuine liberty to all the oppressed peoples of Europe. In this vision, he cast the Italians in the leading role - this was a people who, once they had rid themselves of their Austrian and princely masters, were predestined to unleash their immense but as yet untapped energies and resources for the good of the entire continent: ‘It is in Italy that the European knot must be untied. To Italy belongs the high office of emancipation; Italy will fulfill its civilizing mission'.
²³
Mazzini's dream was of a Europe of nationalities, equally free and each with their own character: indeed, from the mid-1830s, he used the term ‘nationalism' as a term of abuse, declaring that while struggles for national freedom against foreign oppressors were absolutely necessary, patriotism should never stand in the way of ‘the brotherhood of peoples which is our one overriding aim'.
²⁴

Mazzini's ideas were very influential on his countrymen. His underground organisation, ‘Young Italy', founded when he was in exile in Marseille in 1831 after the failure of the
carbonari
movement, probably (by Metternich's own estimate in 1846) had no more than a thousand active members in Italy itself, but many thousands more offered moral support and read its banned literature. Mazzini also enjoyed overt backing among Italian expatriates, including some five thousand subscribers to its journal in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. One of them was another professional revolutionary named Giuseppe Garibaldi who had been exiled from Piedmont since 1833 and was now fighting for revolutionary causes in Brazil and Uruguay. His exploits made him famous throughout Italy.

Mazzini proved to be a truly inspiring figure for revolutionaries of all nationalities. Alexander Herzen met him on a number of occasions (in this instance, in 1849):

 

Such was his attraction as a theorist and an apostle of revolution that Mazzini felt able to draw revolutionaries of all nationalities into a pan-European movement. While in exile in Berne in 1834, he gathered around him a small number of political refugees from Poland and Germany, as well as Italy, to create an organisation called ‘Young Europe', aimed at liberating the oppressed nations and at coaxing the peoples of Europe - eventually - to settle their differences peacefully. This glorious vision proved tragically too elusive, but ‘Young Italy' and ‘Young Europe' inspired a wealth of imitators in other countries: there was a ‘Young' Ireland, Switzerland, Poland and Germany and later the world would boast a Young Argentina and a Young Ukraine. Metternich was not, therefore, being entirely unreasonable when he lost sleep over the existence of a revolutionary network: it was just that it did not take its orders from Paris. He was perhaps nearer the mark when he castigated the Italian as the most dangerous man in Europe - certainly some anxious European rulers wholeheartedly agreed. In 1834 Mazzini, Garibaldi and other members of Young Italy were condemned to death
in absentia
by a Piedmontese military tribunal, while the Pope ordered his police to be watchful over the ‘immense designs of this extraordinary man'.
²⁶
There were even some sweaty palms in the Belgian and Dutch governments when they learned that Mazzinian propaganda was circulating in the Low Countries, yet as parliamentary regimes they almost certainly had much less to fear from its influence. By the crisis year in 1847, Mazzini had become such a bogeyman for the authorities that there were simultaneous sightings of him in Malta, Switzerland, Germany and Italy.
²⁷
For all this, when faced with the golden opportunities that 1848 offered, the great visionary proved capable of seizing them with some political pragmatism.

The revolutionaries were not merely romantic dreamers, but were willing to take grave personal risks in the single-minded pursuit of their brave new world. Many of them also sacrificed comfort and financial security: Mazzini relied heavily on his parents for money (they kept paying up in the hope that - someday - he would get a ‘proper' job). While living in exile in London in the ten years or so before 1848, he lived austerely, bemusing his British friends and patrons by eschewing the expense of taking cabs, so appearing at social events spattered with the mud of the filthy city streets. Herzen was better off, since he was living off his inheritance from his father, but his friend, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, another scion of the Russian gentry, had burned his bridges with his well-heeled family and had an irritating habit of asking his new acquaintances for loans. When not being paid for his military services in South America, Garibaldi, who came from a seafaring family in Nice (which then belonged to Piedmont), earned a living, variously, as a sailor, as a cattle drover in the Argentinian pampas and as a ship's broker.
²⁸

The revolutionaries did not create the conditions for revolution in 1848, nor were they responsible for the initial outbreaks of the violence that year, which arose from a confluence of much broader circumstances. Yet they were poised for action when the moment arrived and, more importantly, they had the support of organisations that could mobilise significant numbers of activists when the time came for insurrection. More importantly, this organised, revolutionary opposition to the conservative order could not have flourished if it had been the work of only a few thousand isolated fanatics. It was, rather, rooted in the frustrations of a wider, civil society. While the vast majority of Europeans had no intention of becoming active revolutionaries - and indeed they dreaded the violence and social dislocation that an insurrection would bring - the grievances and aims of the activists found sympathetic echoes among the more passive majority of the population. In this sense, the lurid picture of a bloodthirsty, all-embracing revolutionary movement, painted by conservatives to justify their repressive policies, became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Legislation which targeted genuine revolutionaries may have been acceptable to most people, but much of it - like the Karlsbad Decrees in Germany - also struck more broadly at the press, at education, at public associations, at workers' unions and at cultural societies. In many countries, censorship, government or church interference in education and restrictions on the freedom to assemble, to form associations and to discuss politics freely, frustrated many educated, articulate and ambitious people who genuinely felt that they had something positive to contribute to both state and society. There was also a sense that the existing political systems - constitutional or absolutist - did not represent the interests of those social groups such as the manufacturers, artisans and educated middle class like lawyers, professors and low-ranking officials, who felt, first, that they performed roles useful to the state and, second, that the political system was not arranged to protect or further their own interests. Consequently, there were broad segments of society which, while they may have abhorred the prospect of revolution and social upheaval, at least understood the revolutionaries' grievances and shared some of their aims.

Underlying this wider dissatisfaction with the conservative order was the growth of public opinion. Since the eighteenth century, new concepts of ‘civil society' had been emerging, fostering the idea that there was - or should be - a cultural and social space independent of the state, where individual citizens could engage in discussion, debate and criticism of everything from art to politics. Civil society was to be the independent arbiter of artistic taste and the legitimate source of political opinion and judgement. This, of course, assumed the existence of an educated, cultured and politically conscious section of society that could sustain such interests. By the nineteenth century, that did indeed exist everywhere, although it varied in scope and size from one part of Europe to the next. Among the great powers, it was perhaps broadest in Britain and France, where censorship was lighter (or where there were ways to avoid it) and literacy was higher. In France by 1848, some 60 per cent of the population could read (a figure closely matched by the Habsburg Empire, which boasted 55 per cent), whereas in Russia the figure was a lowly 5 per cent. In Prussia, where there was a well-established tradition of state schooling, an impressive 80 per cent of people were literate.
²⁹

Public opinion was expressed not only in print, but in societies and clubs, with their membership drawn from among the progressive middle classes and nobility. These often covered their political purposes with more innocuous activities, including scientific discovery (a favourite in Italy), gymnastics (popular with the perennially healthy Germans), music and shooting (although this last, of course, had its revolutionary uses). ‘Public life', wrote one German observer, ‘stormed and raged in the theatre and the concert hall because there was nowhere else it was allowed to storm and rage.'
³⁰
Alexander Herzen - for so long used to the oppressive atmosphere in Russia - found even this limited freedom refreshing. Soon after his arrival in Prussia, he visited a grubby theatre and left exhilarated not by the play, ‘but by the audience, which consisted mostly of workmen and young people; in the intervals people talked freely and loudly'. He was also so delighted by the caricatures of the Tsar on sale in a bookshop that he bought ‘a whole stock of them'.
³¹
From 1839 the annual Italian scientific conference gathered together hundreds of the most learned minds from up and down the country to discuss the latest developments in technology, medicine and science. In the particularly tense year of 1847, it was held in the Doge's Palace in Venice. The name of the national hero of the day, Pope Pius IX, was invoked as often as possible and even discussions of agriculture provided opportunities to fulminate against the Austrians, since the northern Italians traditionally nicknamed the Habsburg soldiers ‘potatoes'.
³²
That there were ways around government restrictions none the less did nothing to soothe resentment when governments tried to determine what people could and could not read or discuss and how, when and with whom they could meet. German liberals liked to joke that a typical conservative sign would read ‘It is permitted to walk in this field', the assumption being that people were not allowed to do anything unless it was explicitly allowed. In other words, there was a parting of ways between the conservative state and civil society.