1848 (6 page)

In the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, Metternich had initially encouraged the local elites to engage in literary activities, to explore the language of their people and to research their national past, because it seemed like a harmless diversion from political activity.
⁴³
It transpired that he was playing with fire, for it was precisely such cultural life among the Magyars, Czechs, Croats, Serbs, Romanians and others that fed into a developing sense of national identity. Sooner or later, these identities would be given political expression, and in 1848 they would endanger the very fabric of the Habsburg Empire. Metternich started to understand this sometime before the cataclysm. He fell particularly hard on the Hungarian liberals. The lawyer and nobleman Lajos Kossuth, elected to the Diet of 1832-6, had circulated in manuscript form his ‘parliamentary reports' which argued for a root-and-branch reform of both Hungarian society and the Habsburg monarchy in general. He was arrested in 1837 and was imprisoned for three years. Undeterred, he went on to publish his own newspaper, the
Pest News
, from 1841 and emerged as one of the fiery leaders of the Hungarian revolution. To counterbalance the Magyar opposition, in 1835 Metternich gave government support to the Croatian intellectual Ljudevit Gaj in publishing the journal
Danica
(
Morning Star
), which argued in favour of the ‘Illyrian ideal', or a united kingdom of southern Slavs (Serbs, Croats and Slovenians). Yet, by 1842, southern Slav nationalism itself became sufficiently worrying for Metternich to change his mind and withdraw his support for Gaj.

Liberalism and radicalism may well have been confined in each country to a few thousand intellectuals and the alienated gentry and middle classes, but opposition to the conservative regime was popularised by one of the most pressing issues of the age: the ‘social question'. This meant the problem of poverty and the dislocation caused by the painful economic transformation that was under way. Pauperism stemmed mostly from the sustained rise in population, which had begun in the mid-eighteenth century and continued relentlessly ever since. Ultimately, economic growth, stimulated by industrial capitalism, would ease the pressure by creating a wide range of different types of jobs and by raising standards of living, but in most parts of Europe these benefits became apparent only after 1850, primarily in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The decades prior to 1848 certainly saw the onset of industrialisation (defined as the application of large-scale technology to manufacturing processes concentrated in factories, bringing sustained economic growth). Indeed, the European landscape across which Alexander Herzen and his family travelled in 1847 was in the first stages of a transformation that would only accelerate in later decades: factories on the outskirts of cities belched fumes into the air, mingling with the more familiar smoke rising from the chimneys of the increasingly crammed working-class tenements. Telegraph wires were just beginning to thread their way across the landscape and railway tracks, with their engines travelling at speeds hitherto unthinkable to most people, were spreading across Europe like an incipient spider's web.

The boom in the heavy industries that supported the railways and the mechanisation of textile manufacturing (which experienced the first phase of industrialisation in the west) were particularly intense in isolated pockets, namely in Britain, Belgium, parts of northern and south-eastern France, some regions of Germany (particularly the Rhineland and Silesia), and in the enclaves in the Czech lands of the Habsburg Empire and around Vienna. Even so, artisans and craft workers, who had formerly enjoyed existences as small-scale producers, found that their skills and independence were being threatened not only by the introduction of machinery, but by new ways of organising production, in which unskilled or semi-skilled workers - including women - could produce the same goods in greater numbers and at lower cost, although (the beleaguered artisans argued) of poorer quality. Desperation pushed some craft workers into revolt. In June 1844 the Silesian hand-weavers, sinking underneath the tide of competition from both the British textile industry and recently established Polish mills, rose up against the merchants who were profiting from the situation by driving down the prices of their homespun wares. Roughly three-quarters of the forty thousand weavers simply did not have enough money on which to feed their families. Factories were sacked, but no one was hurt until the Prussian army stepped in to crush the weavers, killing ten of them.
⁴⁴
Moreover, artisans and craft workers faced with the prospect of succumbing to the factory system found little to recommend life in service to the machine. The working day, which previously had followed gentler rhythms, was now relentlessly timed by the clock. The introduction of gas lighting may have been a boon in a domestic setting, but for European workers it meant that they regularly spent fourteen to fifteen hours a day at the machine, since there was no longer any reason to knock off when daylight faded.
⁴⁵

Industrialisation was not sufficiently widespread to create a middle class or bourgeoisie that owed its wealth primarily to large-scale capitalism. Such bourgeois did exist, of course, but the European middle classes were a much more variegated and a far from socially united group of people. Many of them were landowners, often pretentiously imitating aristocratic lifestyles. In France the wealthiest landed bourgeois fused with the older nobility to form a fifteen-thousand-strong class of super-rich
notables
who dominated political life under the July Monarchy. In Prussia over 40 per cent of landed estates were held by non-nobles. Beneath this stratum of bourgeois landowners, there was a plethora of smaller proprietors, professionals, officials and businessmen, as well as a lower middle class of retailers and master-craftsmen. The main problem facing the middle class was that while many of them had enjoyed a good standard of education, there were not enough positions in the professions and the government to provide them all with employment. So the middle classes experienced the population pressure in the shape of ‘an excess of educated men'. As one French satirist put it, there must have been a population explosion because ‘there were twenty times more lawyers than suits to be lost, more painters than portraits to be taken, more soldiers than victories to gain, and more doctors than patients to kill'.
⁴⁶

In social terms, therefore, the collapse of the conservative order in 1848 was a crisis of ‘modernisation' in the sense that the European economy and society were changing, but they had not yet been adequately transformed to absorb the intense pressures of population growth and, above all, to address the desperation of artisans, craft workers and peasants. In the countryside overpopulation threatened to create a crisis of Malthusian proportions in some parts of Europe, leaving much of the population living on the margins of existence and especially vulnerable to famine when poor harvests struck. Landless labourers saw their wages driven down by proprietors who could draw from an ever-increasing pool of rural workers desperate for jobs: the growth of the rural population was such that between the Napoleonic Wars and 1848, the number of landless agricultural workers in Prussia grew at almost double the rate of the overall population. Even peasants who had some land struggled to scratch out a living: dividing what fields they owned among their children meant that their holdings were ever more subdivided and unproductive, until there was nothing left to do but to sell to a landowner rich enough to buy up these parcels of land. It has been estimated that a hundred thousand Prussian landowning peasants disappeared in this way, joining the struggling masses of the landless rural labourers.
⁴⁷
Such pressure on the land was also acute in France, where from around the 1820s the population outstripped the countryside's capacity to feed all French families, making imports of food essential and workers and peasants particularly vulnerable to price rises.

There was also the problem of the downtrodden peasantry of Central and Eastern Europe. They were either serfs (as in the Russian Empire and Austrian-ruled Galicia) or were obliged to pay heavy dues to their landlords while also being forced to perform compulsory labour services (the
robot
) on their lord's land, as in Bohemia and Hungary. Besides the
robot
, Czech peasants were also weighed down by payments in money and kind to their landlords - and this was in addition to taxes owed to the state and the tithe paid to the Church. Moreover, peasants were meant to be subservient in their behaviour: right up to 1848 they had to address state officials as ‘gracious lord' and landlords could strike a peasant with a fist at will, although beating with a cane required the formal approval of the district government official.
⁴⁸
Outside the Russian Empire, the Ukrainians of Galicia almost certainly bore the worst conditions of all European peasants. On average, more than a third of all the days of the year were spent performing the
robot
on their (usually Polish) landlords' estates, but they also had to work for the government repairing roads and using their draught animals for transportation. Serfdom (for such it was) was enforced through violence: since 1793 landlords were not permitted to use cudgels with which to batter their serfs, but the prohibition was almost universally ignored; so much so that the government had to reiterate the ban repeatedly, the last time in 1841. A Polish democrat despaired on seeing the way in which his aristocratic compatriots treated their Ukrainian subjects: ‘The peasant in the eyes of the magnate was not a man, but an ox, destined to work for his comfort, whom it was necessary to harness and thrash with a whip like an animal.'
⁴⁹

Compared with some of the peasantry, workers were much better off, but they, too, had reasons to be fearful. The growth of industry was fitful, rather than sustained, so there were ‘boom and bust' trade cycles, in which production overtook demand, causing a collapse in prices and commerce, leading to unemployment and despair. One such crisis arose prior to the 1830 revolutions. The worst of them struck in the years before 1848. Even outside these periods of crisis, the conditions in which the poorest people lived shocked observers. Rural poverty meant that many peasants either had to face hunger - and perhaps starvation - in the countryside, or take their chances in emigration to North America (some 75,000 left Germany in the crisis year of 1847)
⁵⁰
or to the cities. Neither course was an easy option. While manufacturing offered wages higher than those gleaned by rural labourers, the costs of living were also greater. One estimate suggests that food and drink for a working-class family swallowed up between 60 and 70 per cent of its income, which left little for rent and clothing.
⁵¹
Indeed, studies conducted by worried middle-class philanthropists in the 1840s suggested that German workers did not have half the income required to live decently: some noted that they survived essentially on potatoes and on hard spirits, providing a standard of living below that of convicts in prisons - an observation that was echoed by similar studies in Prague. German workers also wore the same clothes in the summer as they did in the winter, with no additional layers against the bitter cold.

The towns and cities were teeming with poverty-stricken masses crammed into hideously overcrowded tenements. The building of affordable housing, the provision of sanitation and the delivery of a clean water supply did not keep pace with the migration of the rural poor from the countryside. People were stunned at the sight of half-naked children playing in filthy, narrow streets: close to half did not live to see their fifth birthday, while those who survived could expect, on average, to live until their fortieth.
⁵²
In 1832 a report on the northern French industrial town of Lille described the squalor in which the poorest workers lived: ‘In their obscure cellars, in their rooms . . . the air is never renewed, it is infected; the walls are plastered with garbage . . . If a bed exists, it is a few dirty, greasy planks; it is damp, putrescent straw . . . The furniture is dislocated, worm-eaten, covered with filth.'
⁵³
A resident of the slums in one crowded Parisian district could expect to have on average some seven square metres of living space in the dark, dirty and damp housing of the city centre. ‘No where else', declared one newspaper, ‘is the space more confined, the population more crowded, the air more unhealthy, dwelling more perilous and the inhabitants more wretched.'
⁵⁴
These were the days before the reconstruction of the city by the Baron Haussmann, Emperor Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine, who from the 1850s was responsible for slum clearance and the construction of the airy, elegant boulevards for which the French capital is still famous. Miserable lodgings, a contaminated water supply and open sewers running down the middle of narrow streets provided the unsanitary conditions in which a ghastly new disease, cholera, made its first appearance in western Europe in 1832. The urban squalor also persuaded moralists and reformers that cities were breeding grounds for vice and criminality. In Berlin, a city of 400,000 people by 1848, there were no less than 6,000 paupers being helped by the state, 4,000 beggars, 10,000 prostitutes, 10,000 ‘vagabonds' (meaning people of no fixed occupation) and, it was thought, a further 10,000 engaged in criminal activity. Collectively, these people living on the margins outnumbered the established burghers of the Prussian capital by two to one.
⁵⁵
Since poverty was seen by liberals and conservatives alike as a sign not of economic circumstance but of idleness, vice and even stupidity, there was no welfare state or safety net of social security. There was some relief provided by public works in times of dire emergency, but otherwise paupers had to rely on assistance in the harsh conditions of the workhouse or on handouts, both of which were organised at parish rather than state level, so were dependent on the willingness of local communities to pay for them. Otherwise, paupers could beg for help from private charities.