Chapter 26 Chapter 1 Development Chapter 6 Revolution 3

3 During the period of the Restoration (1815-1830) the shadow of reaction hung over all dissidents, and in this darkness the differences between Napoleonics and republicans, between moderates and radicals, could hardly be discerned.Outside of Britain, at least politically, there have been no conscious working-class revolutionaries or socialists.In Britain, under the influence of the "Cooperative Movement" initiated by Irving before 1830, an independent proletarian trend had emerged, both politically and ideologically.The grievances of most non-British masses were apolitical, or, as ostensibly orthodox and clerical, a silent protest against a new society that seemed to bring only crime and chaos.Thus, with very few exceptions, political opposition on the Continent was generally confined to a small group of the wealthy or the educated, and the two probably meant the same group of people, since even in such a powerful left-wing camp as the École Polytechnique , and only one-third of the students—a prominent group of rebels—come from the petty bourgeoisie (mostly promoted through low-ranking military and civilian officials), and only 0. 3% came from the "mass class".These poor people, like those who consciously join the left, accept the classic slogan of the middle-class revolution, although in the form of radical democrats rather than moderates, but still only a hint of a challenge to society.The typical platform for which Britain's working poor rallied again and again was simply parliamentary reform, embodied in the "six demands" of the People's Charter. (1. Universal suffrage for adult males; 2. Secret ballot; 3. Equal electoral districts; 4. Members are paid; 5. Parliament is convened every year; 6. Candidates’ property qualifications are abolished.) This program is essentially the same as the " "Jacobinism" is indistinguishable, and perfectly consistent with the political activism of the utilitarian middle-class reformers proposed by Mill the Elder (except for its association with an increasingly self-conscious working class).The only difference in the Restoration period was that labor radicals were already more willing to listen to propaganda in their own language - eloquent men like Hunt (1773-1835), or Both intelligent and energetic critics, and of course Paine - not the language of middle-class reformers.

During this period, therefore, neither social nor even national differences significantly split the European opposition into mutually incomprehensible camps.If we leave out England and America, where formal forms of popular politics were established (although in England they were suppressed hysterically by anti-Jacobinism until the 1820s), the political outlook for the opposition in all European countries was It looks very similar, and the way to achieve the revolution is almost the same, because the united front of absolutism actually ruled out the possibility of peaceful reform in most of Europe.All revolutionaries see themselves, for different reasons, as an emancipated elite minority operating among the energized, ignorant, and misguided masses, fighting for their ultimate benefit.Ordinary masses will no doubt rise to welcome liberation when it comes, but they cannot be expected to actively participate in the struggle and preparation for liberation.They all (at least in the western part of the Balkans) saw themselves as fighting a single enemy, a confederacy of despotic princes under the tsar.They all therefore saw the revolution as unified and indivisible; as a single European phenomenon rather than as a collection of national or regional emancipations.They all tend to use the same type of revolutionary organization, or even the same organization - the Brotherhood of Secret Insurrection.

Each of these fraternities had complex rituals and hierarchies derived from or modeled on the Masonic model.They sprung up in the late Napoleonic era, the most prestigious (and therefore the most international) of them all being the "good cousins" or Carbonari.They seem to have inherited Freemasonry or a similar association through Italian anti-Napoleonic French officers, formed in southern Italy after 1806, and spread north with other similar groups and crossed the Mediterranean after 1815.These organizations themselves, or their derivative organizations and parallel organizations, can be found even in Russia, especially Greece.In Russia, these groups united into the Decembrists, who in 1825 launched the first uprising in modern Russian history.The Carbonari era peaked in 1820-1821, and by 1823 most fraternities had virtually been destroyed.However, Carbonari (in general terms) persisted as the backbone of the revolutionary organization, perhaps united by the common task of helping Greece fight for freedom (the pro-Greek movement), and after the defeat of the revolution in 1830, It spread further afield through political emigration in Poland and Italy.

Ideologically, the Carbonari and its ilk were a motley group, united only by a common hatred of reactionaries.Radicals, the staunchest of which were left-wing Jacobins and Babeuvists, clearly had a growing influence on the Brotherhood.Babeuf's old rebel comrade, Filippo Buonarroti, was the ablest and most relentless plotter of them all, although his beliefs were too far left for most fraternities and "good cousins" . It is debatable whether they were ever committed to a coordinated international revolution, although they did persistently attempt to unite all the Secret Brotherhoods, at least at their highest and original level, into an international super-casp partisan.Whatever the truth of the matter, in 1820-1821 there were a number of Carbonari-style uprisings in Europe.They failed completely in France, where the conditions for revolutionary politics were so lacking and where the conspirators, in their immature conditions, had no access to the only effective force for insurrection, the disaffected army.The French army, which was part of the executive at that time and throughout the 19th century, carried out whatever official government orders they had.They won complete but temporary victories in some of the Italian states, especially in Spain.In Spain, the "pure" uprising found its most effective form - a military coup.Liberal colonels who formed the Secret Brotherhood of Officers ordered their teams to follow them in the uprising, and the latter did as they were told. (Russian Decembrist conspirators tried their best to start the Janissary Revolt in 1825, but failed for fear of going too far.) Officers' Brotherhoods - Since the army provides careers for non-aristocratic youths, they are usually of liberal leanings — and the military coup, which has since become a fixture of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin American political arenas, and one of the longest-lasting but most questionable political achievements of the Carbonari period.From past incidents we can observe that ritualized, highly hierarchical secret societies such as Freemasonry, for understandable reasons, turn very strongly to military personnel.The new liberal regime in Spain was overthrown in 1823 by a French invasion backed by European reaction.

Only one revolution of 1820-1822 was self-sustaining, partly because it succeeded in launching a genuine popular uprising and partly because it benefited from favorable diplomatic circumstances, and that was the Greek Revolution of 1821 (see p. Chapter seven).Greece thus became a motivating force for international liberalism and the "pro-Greek movement".The pro-Greek movement, which included organized support for Greece and the travels of numerous volunteer fighters, contributed to uniting the European left in the 1820s similar to the support for the Spanish Republic in the late 1930s.

The Revolution of 1830 changed the situation completely.As we have seen, these revolutions were the first products of an extraordinary period of sharp and widespread economic and social upheavals and dramatically accelerated social change.From this two main results emerge.The first consequence was that mass politics and mass revolutions on the 1789 model became possible again, so that reliance on secret brotherhoods became less necessary.In Paris, the Bourbons were typically overthrown by a combination of popular riots resulting from the crises experienced by the Restoration Monarchy and economic decline.So the masses are by no means incapable of action, and Paris in July 1830 proved that barricades and barricades were greater in number and spread than at any time before or since. (In fact, 1830 had made barricades a symbol of popular uprising. Although their appearance in the revolutionary history of Paris dates back to at least 1588, they played no important role between 1789 and 1794.) A second consequence is that, as capitalism develops, "the people" and the "working poor"—that is, those who build the barricades—are increasingly identified with the emerging proletarian masses as the "working class."A proletarian socialist revolutionary movement was thus born.

The Revolution of 1830 also brought about two further changes in left-wing politics.The revolution split the moderates from the radicals and created a new international situation.In doing so, they contributed to the fragmentation of the movement not only into different social organizations, but also into different national components. Internationally, the revolution split Europe into two major regions.West of the Rhine, revolutions shattered the combined control of the reactionary powers into pieces, never to be restored.Moderate liberalism triumphs in France, England and Belgium. Liberalism (of a more radical type) was not completely victorious in Switzerland and the Iberian Peninsula, where the popular-based liberal movement and the anti-liberal Catholic movement fought each other, but the Holy League could no longer stand as it did in the Intervention in these areas is still being carried out in various places east of the Rhine.In the Portuguese and Spanish civil wars of the 1830s, the absolutist and moderate liberal powers each sided with one another, although the liberal states were slightly stronger and helped by some foreign radical volunteers and sympathizers. Vaguely foreshadowing the pro-Hispanic movement of the 1930s. (The English became interested in the country through the liberal Spanish refugees they came into contact with in the 1820s. British anti-Catholicism, in keeping with Spanish resistance—preserved in George Borrow's The Spanish The Bible and Murray's famous Handbook of Spain - the shift to anti-Carlist also played some role.) But the subject of liberty or despotism in nations remains largely It is up to the local balance of power to decide, which means they are still up in the air.They oscillated between short-lived liberal victories (1833-1837, 1840-1843) and conservative revivals.

East of the Rhine the situation was superficially the same as before 1830, as all revolutions were suppressed, the German and Italian uprisings were suppressed by the Austrians or with the support of the Austrians, and the more significant Polish uprisings were suppressed by Russia.Furthermore, ethnic issues continue to take precedence over all other issues in the region.All local peoples lived in states that were either too small or too large by national standards: multiethnic if not members of disunified or subjugated nations (Germany, Italy, Poland) split into small principalities Member of the Empire (Habsburgs, Russia, and Turkey), or both.We need not worry about the Dutch and the Scandinavians, who, while broadly non-authoritarian, lived relatively peaceful lives, detached from the drama that was unfolding elsewhere in Europe.

The revolutionaries in the East and West of the Rhine still have a lot in common, for example: they both witnessed the fact that the revolution of 1848 took place in both regions simultaneously, although not all parts of the two regions were revolutionized.However, there were marked differences in the revolutionary fervor that emerged within each particular region.In the West, Great Britain and Belgium ceased to follow the general rhythms of revolution; while Spain, Portugal, and to a lesser extent Switzerland, were already mired in endemic domestic struggles whose crises, except for occasional incidents (such as the Swiss Civil War in 1847), were no longer the same as elsewhere. In other parts of Europe there was a clear distinction between "revolutionary" active peoples and passive or unenthusiastic ones.Thus the Habsburg secret service, constantly plagued by Poles, Italians and (non-Austrian) Germans, and the ever-unruly Hungarians, had no dangerous intelligence from the Apennines or other Slavic territories.Russia only needs to worry about the Poles, while Turkey can still count on the calm of most Balkan Slavs.

These differences reflect the pace of development and social changes in different countries.This change became increasingly evident and politically important in the 1830s and 1840s.Therefore, the developed industrialization of the United Kingdom changed the political rhythm of the United Kingdom, while most of the European continent was in the most acute period of social crisis from 1846 to 1848.Britain had its equally serious crisis, the Great Industrial Depression of 1841-42 (see Chapter 9).Conversely, the ideal Russian youth in the 1820s might have had reason to hope that a single military uprising would win victory in Russia as in Spain and France, but after 1830, the social and political conditions for revolution in Russia were far inferior to those in Spain Maturity, this is a fact that cannot be ignored.

However, the revolutionary problems of Eastern and Western Europe were comparable, albeit different in nature: they both exacerbated tensions between moderates and radicals.In Western Europe, moderate liberals have largely withdrawn from the common front of the opposition (or from deep sympathy for it) and into politics, or potential politics.Having gained power by the efforts of the Radicals (for who else would fight in the barricades?), they immediately betrayed the Radicals and were no longer involved with anything so dangerous as democracy or the republic.Guizot, Prime Minister of the July Monarchy of France, and an opponent of liberalism, once said: "There are no longer any legitimate motives, nor the zeal and plausibility of radical pretexts so long placed under the banner of democracy .The former democracy will be today's anarchism; from now on, the spirit of democracy will mean the spirit of revolution." Not only that, but after brief lulls of tolerance and enthusiasm, liberals tend to temper their enthusiasm for further reforms.In Britain, the Irving-style "General Union" (General Union) and the Chartists of 1834-1835 had to contend with both the hostility of reformers and the unfriendly attitude of many supporters. The commander of the armed forces sent against the Chartists in 1839 was a middle-class radical who, while sympathetic to many of the Chartists' demands, contained them nonetheless.In France, the suppression of the republican uprising of 1834 marked this turning point; that same year, six honest Wesleyan laborers were horribly suppressed for their attempt to form an agricultural labor union ("The Martyrdom of Thorp d "[Tolpuddle Martyrs]), an event that symbolized a similar attack on the working-class movement in England.Radicals, republicans and new proletarian movements thus broke away from their alliance with the liberals.The moderates who belonged to the opposition now began to feel uneasy about the "democratic social republic" that had become the watchword of the left. Elsewhere in Europe, revolutions were unsuccessful.The split between moderates and radicals and the emergence of emerging social revolutionary thoughts originated from the discussion of failure and the analysis of the prospect of victory.Moderates (Whig landowners and the existing middle classes of this type) pinned their hopes on a relatively vulnerable government and the new liberal powers, hoping that the former would reform and win the latter's diplomatic support.Vulnerable governments are extremely rare.The House of Savoy in Italy, which continued to sympathize with the liberals and increasingly attracted the support of a large group of moderates, hoped to help the country achieve eventual unity.The short-lived "Liberal Pope" (1846) of the new Pope Pius IX inspired a group of liberal Christians in vain attempts to mobilize the Church for the same purpose.There isn't a single state in Germany that isn't hostile to the liberals, but that hasn't stopped a few moderates (less so than Prussian historical propaganda would have it) looking to Prussia to keep doing something, after all it has at least organized a German customs union to boast about (1834); at the same time, it did not stop people from dreaming of a monarch willing to moderate reforms, not of revolutionary barricades.As for Poland, the prospect of moderate reforms, backed by the tsar, no longer energized the elite (Czartoryskis) who usually placed high hopes on it, but the moderates could at least have a ray of hope against Western diplomatic intervention hope.In the light of the situation from 1830 to 1848, none of these prospects was practical. Radicals were equally disappointed in France, because of its inability to play the role of international liberator that the French Revolution and revolutionary theory had assigned to it.Indeed, this disappointment, combined with growing nationalism in the 1830s (see Chapter 7), and a new awareness that countries differed in their revolutionary prospects, shattered the internationalist coherence that revolutionaries had sought during the Restoration .The strategic outlook remains unchanged.A neo-Jacobin internationalism, perhaps (as Marx thought) coupled with a radical interventionist Britain, would still be almost essential to European liberation (except for the unlikely prospect of a Russian revolution).Nevertheless, a nationalist reaction was gradually unfolding by this time against the French-centred internationalism of the Carbonari period.This nationalist reaction was a sentiment well suited to Romanticism (see Chapter 14), which was the fashion most noticed by the Left after 1830.Nowhere is the contrast more stark than between the taciturn, rationalistic virtuoso Buonarrotti of the eighteenth century and the befuddled but boastful Mazzini.Mazzini became the propagandist of this anti-Carbonari reaction.He united the national conspiracies ("Young Italy", "Young Germany", "Young Poland", etc.) into "Young Europe".The decentralization of the revolutionary movement was in a sense realistic, since in 1848 countries did rise individually, spontaneously and simultaneously.In another sense, however, this was impractical: the stimulus for their simultaneous outbreaks still came from France, but their reluctance to play the role of liberator ultimately failed them. Bizarre or not, radicals, for practical and ideological reasons, rejected the trust of moderates in princes and great powers.The idea that the people must win their emancipation on their own, since no one else will do it for them, was also adapted at the same time by the proletarian socialist movement.Radicals had to fight for emancipation through direct action, and such action was still mostly in the usual Carbonari style, at least while the masses were still in a state of passivity.So the action didn't work very well, although there was a huge difference between Mazzini's ludicrous attempt to attack Savoy and the constant guerrilla attempts by Polish democrats after the failed revolution of 1831.However, the determination to exclude or oppose existing forces created another split within the radicals.The focus of the split is: do they want to seize power at the cost of social revolution?