Chapter 24 Chapter 1 Development Chapter 6 Revolution 1

Liberty, the nightingale with its giant voice, has awakened most of the sleepers... Is there anything else to concern us but a fight for or against liberty?Those who are unlikely to love humans, may still be great people, such as despots.But how can ordinary people be indifferent? — Bernard, February 14, 1831 Governments out of balance are feared, threatened, and thrown into disarray by the voice of the middle classes of society, who stand between king and subjects, shattering the scepter of the sovereign and usurping the voice of the people. —Metternich to the Tsar, 1820 1 Rarely has the inability of governments to check the course of history been so evident and widespread as in the post-1815 era.Preventing a second French Revolution, or even a French-style general European revolution, was the paramount goal of all the powers that had just spent over 20 years crushing the first, even Great Britain.Although it has no sympathy for the re-establishment of reactionary absolutism throughout Europe, and is well aware that reform cannot and should not be avoided, it fears, perhaps more than any other international contingency, a new French Jacobin expansion. event.Moreover, never in the history of Europe, and seldom elsewhere, has revolutionism been so prevalent, so pervasive, so readily spread under the influence of spontaneous infection and deliberate propaganda.

Between 1815 and 1848 there were three major waves of revolution in the Western world. (Asia and Africa were not yet affected, and the first great revolution in Asia, the "Indian Mutiny" [Indian Mutiny] and the "Taiping Rebellion," did not occur until the 1850s.) The first occurred in 1820-1824.The European region was mainly confined to the Mediterranean area, centered on Spain (1820), Naples (1820) and Greece (1821).All uprisings were suppressed, except in Greece.The Spanish Revolution revived Latin America's liberation movement, sparked by Napoleon's conquest of Spain in 1808 and reduced to a handful of refugees and banditry in remote areas after initial attempts failed.The three great liberators of Spanish South America, Bolivar (Simon Bolivar), San Martin (San Martin) and Voiggins (Bernardo O'Higgins), each established an independent "Grande Colombia" (including what is now Colombia , Venezuela and the Republic of Ecuador).Argentina (but minus the interior of what is now Paraguay and Bolivia and the grasslands across the River La Plate where the Banda East cowboys in what is now Uruguay fought the Argentines and Brazilians), and Peru.With the help of the Chilean fleet commanded by the British radical nobleman Cochrane (the prototype of C.S. Forester's Captain Hornblower), St. Martin liberated the last of the Spanish power. Fortress - Palace of the Governor General of Peru.By 1822, Spanish South America had been liberated.Mild, far-sighted, and with rare self-restraint, San Martin left liberated South America to the Bolivarian republicans while he retreated to European seclusion, on Voikins grants, often in debt Boulogne-sur-Mer, the sanctuary of the haunted Englishmen, lived a noble life.At the same time, the Spanish general Iturbide, who was sent to deal with the remaining peasant guerrillas in Mexico, joined forces with the guerrillas under the influence of the Spanish Revolution and established Mexico's permanent independence in 1821. Brazil gained peaceful independence from Portugal in 1822 under the leadership of the local Regent, who was the representative of the Portuguese crown in Brazil when it returned to Europe after the fall of Napoleon.The United States almost immediately recognized Brazil as the most important member of the new nation; Britain, concerned with concluding commercial treaties with them, soon recognized their independence; .

The second revolutionary wave occurred in 1829-1834, and affected all of Europe west of Russia and the North American continent, because the great reform years of President Jackson (1829-1837), although not directly related to the upheavals in Europe, should still be count as part of it.In Europe, the revolution that overthrew the French Bourbons sparked various other upheavals.Belgium (1830) won its independence from the Netherlands; the Polish (1830-1831) revolution was suppressed after a major military campaign; unrest prevailed in Italy and Germany; liberalism prevailed in Switzerland, which was then a far less Peaceful countries; and in Spain and Portugal, the era of civil wars between liberals and priests began.Even Britain was affected, partly because its volcanoes—that is, Ireland, agitated by the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) and renewed Reformation—were in danger of erupting at any moment.The British Reform Act of 1832 was the French equivalent of the July Revolution of 1830, and it did receive a strong stimulus from Paris.This period is the only period in modern history in which the political development of Britain was in harmony with that of the European continent. We can safely say that a certain revolutionary situation should have developed in Britain in 1831-1832 if it had not been suppressed by the Whig and Tory parties.And in the whole of the nineteenth century, this is the only period that makes the above analysis seem less than pure fiction.

The revolutionary wave of 1830 was therefore much more serious than that of 1820.In fact, it marked the final victory of bourgeois power over aristocratic power in Western Europe.The ruling class for the next fifty years will be the "big bourgeoisie" of bankers, big industrialists, and sometimes high civil servants.They were embraced by aristocrats who were quiet or agreeable to bourgeois policies, unchallenged by popular suffrage, despite beset by small or disaffected merchants from outside, the petty bourgeoisie, and the early labor movement.The political system dominated by the bourgeoisie is roughly similar in Britain, France and Belgium.They all adopted constitutional monarchies, and both set limits on the property or educational qualifications of voters to ensure the security of democracy.Only 168,000 people were eligible to vote in France initially.In fact, it is very similar to the 1791 constitution (in fact it only has a more restricted suffrage than the 1791 one) drawn up during the first phase of the French Revolution and the most moderate period of bourgeois rule.In the United States, however, Jacksonian democracy has gone further than in Europe: an unrestricted political democracy, won across the board by winning the votes of frontier dwellers, small farmers, and the urban poor, defeating the undemocratic bourgeois oligarchy similar to Western Europe.It was an ominous change, and moderate liberal thinkers, fully aware that the extension of universal suffrage might be sooner or later, watched the question closely.Tocqueville in particular, with his Democracy in America (1835), drew pessimistic conclusions on this question.But as we shall see later, 1830 also marked an even more radical political change: the British and French working classes began to emerge as an independent and self-conscious political force, and nationalist movements began to emerge in many European countries.

Behind these major political changes are major changes in economic and social development.The year 1830 represented a turning point in every aspect of society, and the period 1789-1848 is clearly the most memorable period.This era stands out equally in the history of industrialization and urbanization in continental Europe and the United States, in the history of human social and geographical migration, and in the history of art and thought.And in Britain and all of Western Europe, it opened the crisis years of new social development, which ended with the defeat of the revolution in 1848 and the economic great leap forward after 1851.

The third and largest revolutionary wave, that of 1848, was a product of the above-mentioned crisis.In France, all of Italy, the German states, most of the Habsburgs, and Switzerland (1847), revolutions broke out and (temporarily) triumphed almost simultaneously.Less acute disturbances also affected Spain, Denmark, and Romania, and sporadically, Ireland, Greece, and England.Nothing came closer to the world revolution dreamed of by the insurgents of this period than this spontaneous and full-scale revolution, which revolutionized the era discussed in this book. What started as a revolution in a single country in 1789 now appears to have turned into a "spring of nations" across the continent.