How revolutionary was the age of revolution? Jonathan Sperber: Revolutionary Europe 1780-1850. Harlow: Pearson, 2000. pp. 422-431. Looking back from the vantage point of the middle of the nineteenth century, we can consider, briefly, the extent and nature of the changes occurring in the previous seven decades. We might wonder whether the changes were drastic, discontinuous and irreversible — ‘revolutionary’, in the meaning that the word acquired precisely in this era — or gradual, involving no sharp break with the past, and not definitive. Naturally, such a consideration could, and does lead to different conclusions when we look at different aspects of social, economic, political and cultural developments; as it does when we consider different regions of Europe. It was in the realm of political participation that this era was at its most revolutionary. Both the possibilities for and the expectations of participation in public life expanded enormously. Revolutionary upheavals, particularly those following 1789 and 1848, were the major multipliers of political participation, but even countries where revolutionary efforts failed, such as Great Britain, or where they were basically lacking, such as the Scandinavian lands, nonetheless saw major changes in the public sphere. No longer reserved for an elite largely sanctioned at birth, public life had become an arena in which an ever-greater number of adult men, and even, sometimes, if to a lesser extent, women, could register their claims — often in drastic fashion. The focus and legitimation basis of public life had shifted from the absolute monarch, and the constituted bodies of the society of orders, to distinctly new entities, such as constitutions, elected legislatures and the nation. Admittedly, these changes were most strongly felt in the British Isles and in northwestern and central Europe. Southern and eastern Europe rather lagged behind, with the latter area only first seeing a burst of popular political participation at the very end of the period, during the revolution of 1848. Perhaps the one region that did not experience this change was the core provinces of the tsar’s empire, where eighteenth-century autocracy continued into the nineteenth, and the possibilities for the expansion of political participation were felt at best feebly, and often not at all. Less drastic but still considerable were the changes in the nature and structure of government. This was an age of growing claims by the state: to legislate and regulate, to tax, conscript, police and imprison, to count and investigate — and to do it all in centralized and uniform fashion. Paradoxically, such claims could go along with a lessened and restricted area of competence for governmental action, a division of powers to check such actions, and a constitution setting forth areas of society and the economy quite outside of government control. To put it differently, a mid-nineteenth-century constitutional monarchy might claim a lesser radius of action than an absolutist monarchy of the end of the old regime, but within that reduced space it could be more effective and intrusive than its predecessor. However, these many claims on public life could only be effectively implemented if there existed a well-trained and well-staffed government bureaucracy and police force. Here, aspirations and reality diverged, particularly in the states of central and eastern Europe, where state servants were present in relatively modest numbers. In the 1840s, there were far fewer police or government officials per capita in absolutist police states like Austria, Prussia or Russia, than in constitutional monarchies with guaranteed civil liberties, such as France or especially Great Britain. Much the same can be said for those aspects of politics pertaining to relations between sovereign states, the realm of warfare and diplomacy, in which a pattern of drastic change coexisting with elements of continuity can be discerned. Above all, the ‘Pentarchy’, the five Great Powers, Great Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia, remained the dominant influences on European warfare and diplomacy, except for a few Napoleonic years, when Prussia and Austria had been pushed into a marginal position. Admittedly, there were changes in the hierarchy of the five Powers: in the long term, this period saw the rise of the two peripheral powers, Russia and Great Britain, and the relative decline of the three continental powers. Positions of the smaller powers changed as well, mostly for the worse: Poland vanished; Spain and Sweden, still important states for military confrontations in the 1780s, at least ona regional basis, were diplomatically and militarily irrelevant, seventy years later. There are, however, three more significant changes in international relations we can point to in this period. One is the decline of maritime warfare and colonial competition among the Atlantic nations: still vigorous in the 1780s, it was won, decisively, by Great Britain in the following two decades. A second is the change in the nature of warfare brought about by the French Revolution and perfected by Napoleon: the mass conscript armies, whose common soldiers could fight on their own initiative, the order of battle in columns, instead of rows, the emphasis on mobility. It would be difficult to perceive the continuation of this development during the years 1815-50, since the European powers were not at war with each other, but it would be seen in the period of renewed warfare, running from the mid-1850s to the early 1870s. The third, and most significant change in diplomacy was in its guiding principle. Under the old regime, raison d’état, the self-interest of absolutist rulers, had guided international relations, only modestly influenced by a fast-fading tendency to orient diplomacy on confessional lines. The French Revolution and the warfare proceeding from it, brought — often quite against the wishes and intentions of the elites running foreign policy — the newly developed sphere of popular politics into foreign affairs, as countries were forced to line up for or against the revolution. The guiding statesmen of the post-1815 era, particularly Austria’s Prince Metternich, tried as hard as they could to keep the relations of the Great Powers aligned on a counter- revolutionary course. Raison d’état continued to be a major principle guiding international relations, but it was now quite heavily influenced — more heavily than confessional questions had influenced diplomacy at the end of the old regime — by the opposition between revolution and counter-revolution. Turning from politics to society, we can see an equally revolutionary change in the movement from the society of orders to a civil society of property owners. The old regime patriarchal hierarchy of corporate groups with their chartered privileges, and of position set at birth, creating a constellation of status, affluence and power, was visibly evident in such organizations as the guild system and, above all, in the countryside, where most people lived, in serfdom and the seigneurial system of agriculture. Already largely undermined in the British Isles by the late eighteenth century, sometimes threatened by the reform projects of Enlightened absolutism, it came under direct attack in the French Revolution, and in the armed, Napoleonic export of the revolution’s principles throughout continental Europe. The end of warfare in 1815 did not stop this questioning of the society of orders, which continued, virtually uninterrupted, during the subsequent decades, whether in peaceful gradualist, or abrupt revolutionary form. As the society of orders was placed in question, its successor, the civil society of property owners, with its characteristic features of equality before the law, public action through voluntary organization, assembly, and the press, and the primacy of the unrestricted use of property and labour, steadily gained ground. Here as well, we need to note regional differences. The impact of the French Revolution in France itself, in the Low Countries, Switzerland, Italy, and parts of western Germany had left the society of orders largely in ruins by 1815, and at least the outlines of a civil society of property owners apparent. To a somewhat lesser extent, this was the case in the Scandinavian lands as well. By contrast, in most of the German states, and on the Iberian peninsula, this transformation had only gone part way, and was completed, either via gradual reform, or sharp revolutionary transitions, in the decades of the 1830s and 1840s. In eastern Europe, in the eastern provinces of the Austrian empire, in the Danubian principalities, and in the core provinces oft he tsar’s empire, the society of orders remained largely intact until the 1840s. The 1848 revolution destroyed one of its key features, serfdom and seigneurialism throughout the realm of the Habsburgs, but had no effect further east. It is important to note that what had changed so drastically in this transition was the basic principles of social organization and the use of property, not the content of social classes or the actual distribution of property owner- ship. These changed noticeably less. Most Europeans lived in the countryside and earned their living from agriculture in 1850 as well as 1780; landed property, which remained the primary basis of wealth, continued to be very unequally distributed. Even revolutionary upheavals, coerced changes in the Napoleonic era, or anti-Napoleonic agrarian reforms, such as those in Prussia, produced relatively modest changes in the actual ownership of landed property, compared to the much more substantial changes they did produce in what it meant to own land, and the relationship of those who worked the land to those who owned it. Admittedly, there are exceptions here, primarily in Great Britain, where the industrialization and urbanization of the period, particularly in the years after 1820, did produce new social groups which were present in substantial numbers, such as the urban-industrial working class, or capitalist manufacturers. Such sharp changes, however, were very much more the exception than the rule on the European continent. When we turn our gaze from society to the economy, we find that change was more modest still. In spite of that persistent and apparently ineradicable misnomer, the ‘industrial revolution’, developments in manufacturing — and in other sections of the economy — were anything but revolutionary. At the most basic level, that of demographic developments, population gradually increased, due to modest long-term changes in both birth and death rates, and the rate of population increase, for all the difficulty it caused contemporaries, was one-half to one-quarter of what it has been in some underdeveloped countries during the second half of the twentieth century. In regard to another twentieth-century development, the lack of a practice of birth control (with perhaps some exceptions in parts of France) kept women tied to the cycle of reproduction, and told heavily against the possibility of revolutionary changes in women’s lives. There were dramatic economic and technological innovations in this period — the planting of nitrogen-fixing crops in a new crop rotation, the use of steam power for transport, mining and manufacturing, the forging of pig iron with coking coal — but before 1820 they were implemented primarily in the British Isles, and before 1850 only to a modest extent in continental Europe. The major changes in the economy were gradual and incremental rather than sudden and drastic: increase and expansion of outwork, cultivation of market-oriented and new world crops, more roads, canals and navigable rivers. All of these were developments that had been under way in most of the eighteenth century, and, to some extent, since the middle ages. The dominant economic change, the increase in the influence of market forces and market relations in all branches of production, was itself a relatively slow and gradual process, albeit one with considerable influence on people’s lives. The best testimony to the slow, potentially reversible, and gradual nature of economic change is the way that total production barely kept pace with a growing population. The threat of a Malthusian disaster was only narrowly averted, and emigration — whether to overseas lands in the Americas and Australia, or to the lightly populated southern territories of the tsar’s empire — played a crucial role in avoiding the worst. Such a conjunction suggests that changes in output were modest, and even where they were more substantial they tended to be noticeably inequitably distributed. Turning to the realm of symbolic expression and interaction, the movement from the classical to the romantic cultural style was definitely perceived by artists, writers and intellectuals as a major, dramatic and revolutionary break, a discontinuity reflected in their lives as well as in their work. To a lesser extent, this change in cultural sensibility had a substantial effect on the educated public — although the older classical style certainly retained its partisans. Of course, the educated public was a small group, at most 5-10 per cent of the population; the influence of the new cultural style on the vast majority of farmers, craftsmen, labourers, small businessmen and the like was substantially more modest. More important, and more truly revolutionary, was the challenge to the culture of confessionalism mounted by the French Revolution, when the revolutionaries took the counter-culture of the Enlightenment out of the salons and learned journals and brought it to the centre of public life. This attack on the centrality of religion, taking visible form in the desecration of churches, the invention of a new calendar, and the creation of new forms and centres of cultic expression, was truly a cultural revolution, and one that had a dramatic and perceptible influence on the lives of ordinary people. This wave of secularization left its permanent mark in many places, and new secularized forms of transcendence, such as the cult of the nation, appeared, after the initial revolutionary tide had ebbed. However, it would be easy to overstate the extent of such a secularization. Among Europeans of Eastern Orthodox or Moslem belief, the counterculture of the Enlightenment made only a feeble appearance, and the cultural upheavals of the revolutionary era were primarily a distant rumour. Catholics, Protestants and Jews were much more strongly affected, and the institutions of the Catholic Church were severely shaken. Yet the connection between the clergy and the faithful remained unbroken, and new forms of religious expression and sensibility, particularly among Catholics, but to a lesser extent among Protestants as well, forms that made use of the new possibilities embedded in the growing civil society, rallied the faithful and reinforced the culture of confessionalism. In many ways what made this an age of revolution, an era of rampant political instability, was precisely the interaction between drastic changes in some aspects of life and more modest ones, or even downright stagnation, in others. Placing the expansion of political participation, the development of new ideas about the appropriate foci of public life, and the spread of new cultural forms to articulate these ideas, and new institutions of civil society to realize them, in the context of governments that were making ever-greater demands on their subjects, and an economy that changed relatively little, leaving a growing population worse off, or at least fearful that this would be the case, was a recipe for recurrent revolutions. The revolutions themselves, however, generated a chaotic situation — whether the warfare and economic setbacks after 1789, or the clash of different and opposing nationalist movements in central and eastern Europe in 1848 — that prevented them from creating a new, more stable and more widely accepted social and political order. In this way, instability begat instability and from 1789 to 1848 Europe never seemed to come to rest. Looking forward: from the age of revolution to the second half of the nineteenth century From this point of view, contemporaries of the mid-nineteenth century might have seen, with either hope or fear, a future of uninterrupted revolutions. One of the classic documents of the period, The Communist Manifesto, in fact looks forward to such a future of revolution, civil wars, and large-scale international warfare between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary governments. Yet this is precisely what did not happen in the decades after 1850, above all because the new political, social, economic and cultural forms, apparent, but never completely successfully implemented, in the age of revolution, would finally come into their own. One example is the path of economic development. The decades after the middle of the nineteenth century would be prosperous ones, when rail networks, steamship lines and telegraph networks would expand the reach of the market throughout Europe. In this increasingly favourable environment, pre-1850 trends, such as the growth of agricultural specialization and the introduction of more productive systems of crop rotation would flourish. Industrialization on a substantial scale would spread from the British Isles to the western and central portions of continental Europe. Gradually rising standards of living, combined with an unprecedented emigration to North America would substantially reduce social tensions. Progress would become a slogan oft he post-1850 era. Admittedly, this process was less pronounced in south- western Europe — the Iberian peninsula and southern Italy — and even less apparent in the Balkans and great reaches oft he tsar’s empire, so that some of the social tensions of the age of revolution lingered longer there. They can be seen in events such as the Spanish revolutions of 1854-56 and 1868-74, or the massive agrarian upheavals and quasi-permanent state of insurrection found in southern Italy during the 1860s, as a consequence of the incorporation of the region into a united Italy, dominated by the northern kingdom of Piedmont-Savoy. Such post-1850 disturbances, however, remained on the margins of Europe. For most of the continent in this age of progress, the constant impetus to social upheaval characteristic of the age of revolution would diminish and politics would lose something of its bitter and violent edge. Plans for total social and economic renovation, as formulated by the early socialists, would no longer seem quite so attractive. The social question, so hotly posed before 1850, would continue to be an important part of public life, but practical solutions in the form of trade unions, and the cooperative movement, or a growing influence of labour groups on political parties — even when workers did not have the vote — would take priority over revolutionary initiatives, or schemes for total moral renewal. More generally, the institutions of civil society would flourish as never before, but the consequences of their development would be more in the direction of different groups jockeying for position within an existing political and socioeconomic system, rather than working to overthrow it. In this calmed down and cooled off environment, political participation would not reach the levels of 1848; the notables, although not unchallenged, would be in a better position to guide and direct public life. In all these respects, the third quarter of the nineteenth century would be the high noon of the civil society of property owners in Europe. The last remains of the society of orders would be abolished in the 1860s, with serfdom being done away with in Russia and the Danubian principalities, and the guild system reaching its end in the German and Scandinavian states. In an age of progress, when the market showed some of its most favourable sides — above all, the potential for increased standards of living, largely lacking before 1850 — previous forms of criticism, whether Jacobin, communist, or social democratic in provenance, were muted and only marginally present. It would only be with the onset of another period of economic crisis in the last quarter of the century that the ideal of the civil society of property owners would be challenged once again. Another reason for stability would be the increased power of the state. The major confrontations of the 1848 revolution, running from the Parisian June Days, through the barricade fighting in Frankfurt and Vienna, to the insurrections of the spring of 1849 and the French uprising of 1851 had all shown that insurgent irregulars were no match for organized, disciplined regular troops with good morale. This was a lesson not lost either on governments or revolutionaries. After 1850, governments would strive to preserve order, supplementing their control of the armed forces with an expansion of the police force on the model of Great Britain. Most major post-1850 European revolutions, from the Paris Commune of 1870-71, to the Portuguese revolution of 1974, would only occur when the power of the state and its control over the armed forces had been shaken by defeat in war. Only in 1989, with the total economic collapse of the communist states of eastern Europe, would widespread revolutions again occur that were not the direct result of military defeat. Yet we can see after 1850 a similar development to the previous decades, the increased power of the state coinciding with a growth in constitutional forms of government. 1848 marked a decisive breakthrough for constitutional government. To be sure, constitutions granted in the mid-century revolution in Austria and most of the Italian states were revoked in the 1850s. But by the end of the following decade constitutional government had re- turned, and absolutist rule in Europe was restricted exclusively to the realm of the tsar. In such circumstances, the post-1789 question of governments’ political legitimacy remained — the way that their rule, their expanded intrusion into people’s everyday lives, could be welcomed and greeted, not just accepted by threat of force. Here, one of the developments of the first half of the nineteenth century, as exemplified in the 1848 revolution, would point the way. Nationalism had shown itself to be a powerful political force that could attract popular loyalties. In the first half of the nineteenth century, nationalism had largely been an oppositional force, one used against the existing states. In the two decades after mid-century, European statesmen would seek to meld nationalism and existing governments, to make it a force for the regime, rather than one directed against it. The dominant political figures of the years 185070, the Piedmontese prime minister Emilio di Cavour, the French emperor Napoleon III, and, above all, the Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck, would show great skill in harnessing nationalism for the benefit of existing governments rather than letting it be used against the them. All three of these statesmen, in acting to coopt nationalism, did not hesitate to use war as an instrument of policy. To be sure, the wars they fought were limited in extent, not the massive, decades-long confrontations of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era — a result that was in part conscious diplomatic calculation, in part the consequence of new strategies, expanding on the revolutionary and Napoleonic principle of the rapid mobility of mass conscript armies, by using the railway for troop movements, and in part just the luck of the battlefield. While preserving the basic structure of the Pentarchy, they would reshape it somewhat: the particularly powerful position of Russia, held since 1815, was demolished in the Crimean War of 1854-56; the question of whether France, Austria or Prussia would succeed to this position remained open and was not finally settled until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71,with the newly created German empire (a Prussia writ large) emerging as the most powerful nation in continental Europe. None of these events changed Great Britain's position as the dominant maritime and colonial power. The united Kingdom of Italy, created in the 1860s, laid claim to being a Great Power equal to those of the Pentarchy, but such a claim had little basis in the military and diplomatic realities of power politics. Changes in the nature of such power politics were another important aspect of this cycle of Great Power warfare, running from 1854 to 1871. The wars testify to a different, in some ways rather more cynical attitude toward power and power relationships, an attitude that would be part of a broader, cultural style. They demonstrated that the post-1850 era would see, to use a phrase coined by the German author Ludwig August von Rochau in 1853, the dominance of Realpolitik — of politics and policy based not on ideals or aspirations, but on the way power relationships really were, whether you liked it or not. The decades after 1850 would be an age of progress, but also an age of realism. The era of revolutionary Europe had been one in which older forms of social, economic and political organization had been declining, sometimes gradually and peacefully, sometimes abruptly and violently, and newer ones had been emerging to take their place. A not very productive agrarian-artisan economy had been giving way to a market-oriented, more productive and, ultimately, industrialized one. A society of orders was in the process of being replaced by a civil society of property owners. Governments typified by the simultaneous clash and cooperation of absolutism and Estates were replaced with unitary, bureaucratically administered and constitutionally governed regimes. Dynastic and confessional loyalties were giving way to nationalist ones. The process of these multiple transitions had been difficult, characterized by impoverishment, disruption and disorder, but also by powerful expressions of ideals and aspirations, whether in classical or romantic cultural modes. The subsequent period of European history would see the end of this difficult transition, the establishment of a new economic, social and political, framework, under the sign of a culture of progress and realism.
