1848 (5 page)

This was perhaps to be expected in the absolute monarchies, but it was also true in liberal France. This was because the July Monarchy did not meet the expectations of a wide section of French society. King Louis-Philippe had solid liberal credentials: as ‘Général Égalité' (as he was briefly known), he had distinguished himself in the opening campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792, before fleeing to Belgium at the end of the year, as Louis XVI was put on trial for his life. After being persuaded (above all by his strong and devoted sister, Adélaïde) to take the throne in 1830,
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Louis-Philippe initially held fast to his liberal convictions. When he arrived in Paris, he symbolically embraced the aged Lafayette, hero of both the American and French Revolutions, on a balcony at the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of the capital's municipal government. The July Monarchy also reconnected with France's revolutionary heritage by restoring the tricolour: never again would the Bourbon white banner flutter as the national flag. There was no lavish coronation, but a simple ceremony in which the new ‘Citizen King', dressed in National Guard uniform, promised to uphold the Charter of 1814, albeit with some changes, including a mild extension of the suffrage, the expunging of the crown's emergency powers and the deletion of phrases in the preamble making reference to divine right monarchy.

Yet these moderately liberal reforms did little to please those Parisian artisans who had done most of the fighting on the barricades in 1830. For them, Louis-Philippe's Orléans dynasty was no better than the Bourbons who had just been deposed. During the insurrection, cries of both ‘Long live Napoleon!' - meaning the Emperor's ailing son, Napoleon II, living in gilded captivity in Vienna - and ‘Long live the Republic' were heard above the rattle of musketry. With Louis-Philippe's enthronement, the artisans now received very little in return for shedding their blood, for the new order wanted to avoid what it saw as the extremes of democracy (which evoked memories of the braying Parisian mob of the 1789 Revolution) and Bourbon absolutism. Among the people, however, there was a strong sense that ‘their' revolution had been ‘filched' (
escamotée
) by the complacent rich landowners, industrialists and financiers. There were, moreover, other powerful undercurrents in French society resentful at their exclusion from political life, including middle-class professionals, officials, lesser landowners and entrepreneurs whose fathers or grandfathers had been the backbone of the 1789 Revolution. This opposition found expression either in republicanism, which looked back nostalgically to the democratic days of the First Republic of the 1790s, or in Bonapartism, which wanted to restore the dynasty that, while preserving some of the heritage of the Revolution, also recalled the glorious days when Napoleon took Europe by storm. This nationalist vision of a France exporting the libertarian principles of 1789 to the wider world had widespread appeal. The opposition to the July Monarchy bore with impatience the humiliation of the peace treaties of 1815, which had reduced France (after more than twenty years of warfare) back to its frontiers of 1792.

Yet the July Monarchy by and large sought to avoid foreign adventures; in fact, it tried very hard to be unheroic and rather boring. This was because, quite reasonably, it wanted peace abroad and stability at home so that France could prosper. The regime would therefore do little to try to reverse the 1815 peace settlement, but it succeeded in prodding France into some of the fastest economic growth in its history. In the late 1830s it expanded and improved the road system. In 1842 the government embarked on the construction of a railway network, laying some nine hundred miles of track, which made new demands on heavy industries like coal, iron, steel and engineering, so that they expanded in turn. For this reason, some economic historians identify the 1840s as the period of ‘take-off' in French industrialisation.
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Karl Marx would describe the July Monarchy scathingly as a joint stock company for the exploitation of French national wealth. Indeed, the stolidly ‘bourgeois' nature of the regime was represented by Louis-Philippe himself, who usually appeared in public not in royal regalia, but in a plain suit, a black frock coat and carrying that ultimate symbol of middle-class respectability, an umbrella. This was precisely the safe image that the monarchy wanted to display to the world, but it did not impress the republicans, who seethed at both the regime's unadventurous foreign policy and its resistance to wider political participation. Republican uprisings in 1832 in Paris and two years later in both the capital and Lyon were crushed. The Parisian insurrection of April 1834 - the inspiration for the uprising in Victor Hugo's
Les Misérables
- ended with a massacre on the rue Transnonain, when enraged soldiers clearing revolutionary snipers from a tenement room by room indiscriminately slaughtered twelve civilians whom they found sheltering there.

The killing of innocents left an indelible stain on the July Monarchy, but at least the regime had the support of the well-heeled electorate, which was petrified by the prospect of another revolution. The government therefore felt strong enough to prosecute republican newspapers and imposed restrictions on political associations and workers' unions. Among the organisations proscribed was the paramilitary Society of the Rights of Man, which was founded in 1832 and recruited from workers. It was divided into small revolutionary cells called ‘sections' - a term recalling the old Parisian districts that had been the hotbeds of popular militancy during the 1789 Revolution. This was not an organisation devoted to peaceful persuasion: rather, it sought to drill and discipline its artisanal membership in preparation for an insurrection to establish a democratic republic. It planned the Parisian uprising of 1834, and so it suffered accordingly in the repression: no fewer than 1,156 arrests were made in the initial swoop by the police, although 736 were released within five months.
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The republicans reacted with more violence, including, in 1835, a truly horrific assassination attempt on the King by a twenty-five-barrelled gun, dubbed an ‘infernal machine', in which some fourteen people were killed - but not Louis-Philippe, who escaped with a single bruise. This was one of eight efforts on his life, a frequency that prompted the satirical magazine
Charivari
to quip on one occasion that the King and his family had returned from an outing ‘without being in any way assassinated'.
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The years 1834-5 represented the start of a cycle of violence and repression, in which the republicans became increasingly embittered by the regime, while the monarchy had abandoned its original liberal principles and became ever more repressive. The September Laws of 1835 imposed press restrictions: newspapers could be prosecuted for proposing another system of government or for insulting the King - although that did not stop the bold caricaturist Honoré Daumier (who was prosecuted for his cartoons) from transforming Louis-Philippe's jowly features into a pear shape, an image which stuck. Legal procedure was also changed to make it easier to pursue political prosecutions.
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The liberal monarchy had, despite the King's own misgivings, abandoned some of the very principles that had differentiated it from the Bourbons. This transformation seems to have been encapsulated in the slogan used in support of the September Laws: ‘Legality will kill us'.
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At the same time, the violence and repression split the republican opposition into the moderates, who wanted to use legal methods to persuade the regime to grant political reforms (this tendency took its name from its newspaper,
le National
), and the radicals, who wanted to destroy the monarchy by revolution. On the extreme fringe of this militant tendency Louis-Auguste Blanqui and his friend Armand Barbès forged the insurrectionary Society of Seasons, so-called for the way in which it was structured. To keep the identities of its members secret from the prying eyes of the police, its cells consisted of seven revolutionaries, each named after a day of the week. Four weeks were bound into a month and three months were grouped into the largest unit of all - a season. The catechism to which its members had to subscribe condemned all society as ‘gangrened', which justified ‘heroic remedies . . . to achieve a healthy state', by which was meant not only a revolution, but also a period of ‘revolutionary power' - that is to say, a form of authoritarian rule until the ‘people' were ready for democracy and the old ruling elites were exterminated. This was an early, grisly herald of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's ‘dictatorship of the proletariat'. Indeed, Blanqui started to insist that ensuring all citizens the ‘right to existence' would involve some redistribution of wealth.
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The Seasons was on the extreme left of the republican movement and was responsible for an abortive uprising in May 1839, in which Barbès fell wounded, bleeding from a head wound. Despite the failure - and the captivity that followed - Blanqui remained convinced that revolutions could be made by acts of will: insurrection alone was enough to begin the process of extirpating the old order and of building the world anew. The rest of the republican left was not so sure: in 1843 the left-wing newspaper
La Réforme
was founded, backed with the money of Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, who was rich enough to have been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, but whose sympathies were with the left. The journal's editors and contributors saw themselves as ‘the General Staff' of the coming revolution, but their main thrust was persuasion through propaganda.
Réforme
advocated not only political democracy (as did the
National
), but social reform. In 1845 it denounced what it called ‘communism' (whereupon Blanqui and his followers castigated the paper as ‘aristocratic'), but it certainly entertained socialist ideas.

In Italy, Germany and the Habsburg Empire, liberalism coincided with nationalism. The idea of Italian unification had developed under the ideological impact of the French Revolution of 1789 and the practical experience of Napoleonic rule, under which previously separate states had been lumped and administered together. Yet there were divisions between the moderates, who wanted to ensure the survival of the existing princes within an Italian confederation, and the republicans, like Giuseppe Mazzini, who sought a unitary, democratic state. Others still, devoted to their native city or region, envisaged a republican revolution in their own state, which they hoped would then co-exist with all the others - whether monarchist or republican - in a loose federation. Among the proponents of this solution was the Milanese teacher and intellectual Carlo Cattaneo. Perhaps the leading intellect behind the moderate, monarchist vision was Vincenzo Gioberti, who in 1843 published an influential book, entitled
Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians
, which by 1848 had sold no less than eighty-thousand copies, making it a bestseller by nineteenth-century standards. The title alone could not fail to appeal to a people who in various ways were squirming under foreign domination. For Gioberti, the model for the Risorgimento
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Italy's ‘resurgence' - was not the French Revolution. Indeed, French influence in the shape of Napoleon Bonaparte had disrupted, not nurtured, Italy's national development. The French, in fact, were not the great people many took them to be, for (Gioberti argues crushingly) ‘France is not inventive, not even in the ranks of error'. Italy's primacy stemmed not from imported ideas of nationhood, but from the Pope, for religion by its very nature dominated all that was human. Gioberti therefore proposed a federation of the existing Italian states led by the political and moral authority of Rome: this would give Italy, ‘the most cosmopolitan of nations', its rightful place in the world.
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The unitary, republican vision was of course expressed by Mazzini, who in explaining Young Italy's goals declared:

 

German nationalism was also divided between liberal and radical wings, as became eminently clear at the Hambach Festival in 1832. There, republican orators proclaimed, under streaming black, red and gold banners, the goal of a unitary, democratic German republic. This horrified liberals, who, like their moderate Italian counterparts, wanted to persuade the existing German states to grant constitutions and join a German federation, which would guarantee individual and political liberties. This vision was driven in part by a sincere belief that this was the best way of reconciling freedom with unity. As one Baden liberal put it in a tongue-tied turn of phrase, ‘I desire unity only with liberty, and I would prefer liberty without unity to unity without liberty.'
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For the liberals, the radical vision of a unitary republic would lead to such an uncertain future that constitutional and individual freedoms would be put at risk. Many of them sought simply to develop the Prussian-sponsored customs union, the Zollverein (in existence since 1833 and which excluded Austria), into something more than just a common German market. The divisions between radicals and liberals would prove to be among the gravest weaknesses of both the Italian and the German nationalist movements in 1848.