A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (41 page)

General Lake, commander of the armed forces, presided at Orange processions, and armed Orange groups increasingly worked alongside government troops and militia to punish supporters of the United Irishmen. They presented rebel Protestants with a choice—to be whipped and tortured or join the Orange Order to whip and torture other rebels.
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In such ways, the British authorities and Anglo-Irish landowners not only crushed the rising, but gave an enormous boost to sectarian religious feeling.

The two political traditions which have dominated Irish politics for the last 200 years, Republicanism and Orangeism, were born as off-shoots of a Europe-wide struggle of revolution and counter-revolution.

For the time being, however, this was hardly a matter of concern for the ‘civilised’ statesmen of the British government. Having successfully prosecuted a policy of divide and rule against the United Irishmen, two years later they were able to persuade the Irish parliament to vote itself out of existence. Irish agriculture and industry had been severely damaged in the past by exclusion from British-controlled markets. Now they were deprived of any political means of protecting themselves, while the Anglo-Irish landowners extracted huge rents and consumed them in unproductive idleness in England. The British government believed it had solved the ‘Irish question’—a belief that was to recur every 30 or 40 years right through to the present.

Haiti’s black Jacobins

Counter-revolution did not succeed everywhere. On an island 3,000 miles away across the Atlantic, in Haiti, the outcome was very different to that in Ireland. But it took a decade of bitter uprisings, wars and civil wars to attain.

Saint Domingue, the western part of the island of Hispaniola, had been the richest prize in the French monarchy’s colonial empire. Its plantations produced more sugar than all of Europe’s other Caribbean and American colonies put together, and poured wealth into the pockets both of plantation owners and the commercial capitalists of French ports like Nantes and Bordeaux.

The source of this wealth lay in the relentless labour of 500,000 black slaves, whose work so destroyed their lives that only continual imports from Africa maintained their numbers. Lording it over them were 30,000 whites—a much smaller proportion of the population than in any of the North American states—and alongside these lived a similar number of free mixed race ‘mulattos’, some of whom had become quite wealthy and might even be slave-owners.

The relatively small numbers of the white population did not prevent it having great pretensions. It felt the wealth of the colony was a result of its own efforts and resented the rules imposed on its trade by the
exclusive
—France’s version of the mercantile system. Accordingly, it felt impelled to advance its own demands for ‘liberty’ as part of the agitation of the well-to-do middle class of the ‘home country’ in the spring and summer of 1789. News of the storming of the Bastille was followed by armed defiance of the royal governor—although the colonial insurgents had no intention of applying the revolution’s slogans of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ to the black slaves or even the free mulattos.

Although only 7 percent of the population, the whites were very much divided. The ‘small whites’, owning perhaps three or four slaves each, could feel as bitter at the humiliation they endured at the hands of the ‘big white’ plantation owner as the French middle class at the aristocracy. The planters, keen to have a free hand to decide with whom they traded, were not going to let the ‘small whites’ exercise political control. And both groups were outraged when the French assembly, in its revolutionary exuberance, decreed equal rights for all free men, including the mulattos and free blacks—although it carefully avoided any mention of slavery. Soon there was near civil war between shifting alliances of the four groups which made up the free population—the supporters of the governor, the big whites, the small whites and the mulattos.

All of them expected the black slaves to continue working, suffering, receiving punishment and dying as if nothing had changed. They were sorely mistaken. The slaves seized the chance to rebel—setting fire to plantations, killing slave-owners, forming armed bands to fight off the white militia and spread the revolt, and throwing up leaders of their own. The most prominent, the former livestock steward Toussaint L’Ouverture, was soon skilfully manoeuvring between the rival white groups, the mulattos, an invading Spanish army from the other half of the island, and successive representatives from the Girondins in France. Then, just as the
sans-culottes
were sweeping the Jacobins to power in France, a British military force landed in Saint Domingue.

What happened next had much wider implications than just the future of Saint Domingue. Important sections of the British ruling class, influenced by the arguments of Adam Smith, had been coming to the conclusion that slavery’s time was past. After all, they had already lost the sugar plantations of North America and their West Indian sugar plantations were much less important than those of France. The government of William Pitt had given some encouragement to the anti-slavery campaign of William Wilberforce. But the prospect of taking over Saint Domingue, the most important of all the slave economies, changed its mind and it prepared to embrace slavery enthusiastically. Victory in this attempt would have given a new impetus to slavery throughout the world.

The upward surge of the revolution in France which brought the Jacobins to power had equally important implications for the slave rebellion. Many of the Girondin leaders had, personally, been committed opponents of slavery and members of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks formed in 1788. They were mainly journalists or lawyers inspired by Enlightenment ideas. But their most important political base lay with the commercial bourgeoisie of the western French ports, and these were vehemently against any measures which would hit their profits. Having propagandised the anti-slavery argument, the Girondins were not prepared to put it into practice. By contrast the popular forces which swept the Jacobins forward had no material interest in slavery and readily identified the suffering of the slaves with their own suffering. At the same time, the middle class Jacobin leaders, terrified of military defeat at the hands of a coalition including Britain, could see the advantage of encouraging slave revolts on the British islands of the Caribbean.

On 4 February 1794 the Jacobin-dominated convention decreed the abolition of slavery in all French lands, as its president gave a fraternal kiss to black and mulatto emissaries from Saint Domingue. An alliance had been formed between two revolutions that was to shatter Pitt’s hopes of enlarging British capitalism’s stake in slavery. The British expeditionary force of 60,000 troops suffered greater casualties than Wellington’s peninsular army a decade later. The balance of material calculation in the British parliament shifted again. It gave the opponents of the slave trade a new hearing and voted to ban the trade in 1807.

Unfortunately this was not the end of the matter for the ex-slaves of Saint Domingue. The shift to the right in France after Thermidor gave new influence to the old slave-owners and their mercantile allies. As Napoleon prepared to crown himself emperor, he also schemed to reimpose slavery in the colonial empire. He sent a fleet with 12,000 troops to seize control of Saint Domingue from Toussaint L’Ouverture’s forces. The war which followed was easily as bitter as the war against the British. At one point the French army seemed to have won after Toussaint, mistakenly trying to conciliate with the enemy, was kidnapped and died in a French prison. It was left to one of his former lieutenants, Dessalines, to rally black resistance and defeat Napoleon’s army just as Toussaint had defeated the British army.

Saint Domingue became the independent black state of Haiti. It was a poor state—15 years of almost continual warfare had done enormous damage. The sugar economy which had produced so much wealth for a few could not be restored without near slavery—and although Dessalines’s successor, Christophe, tried to impose this, the people would not have it. They might be poor, but they were freer than their fellow blacks in Jamaica, Cuba, Brazil or North America.

Latin America’s first revolutions

It was the freedom of Haiti that attracted a visit in 1815 from the Venezuelan who had argued so vociferously for the principles of the revolution at the age of 16—Bolivar. Now he was one of the leaders of a revolt which was challenging Spanish rule across Latin America.

The revolt, like that of Haiti, was detonated by events in Europe. In 1808 Napoleon had installed his brother Joseph as king of Spain after the abdication of the feeble Bourbon king, Charles IV. This provoked a revolt marked by uprisings in Madrid and massive guerilla activity in the countryside as well as setpiece battles waged by remnants of the Spanish army with British support. Much of the dynamism of the revolt came from deeply religious peasants led by priests horrified at any challenge to the feudal practices of the nobility and church and determined to reimpose an absolute monarchy under Charles’s son Ferdinand—complete with the Inquisition. But for a period, a
junta
(council) of the liberal bourgeoisie of Cádiz was able to pose as the national focus for the revolt, even though its ideas were anathema to the forces involved in the fighting in most parts of the country.

The result was that not just Spain but its whole empire was without a coherent government for six years. In the Americas there was a sudden power vacuum all the way from California to Cape Horn. A variety of political forces set about trying to fill this and, inevitably, ended up in bitter wars with one another.

Over the previous 300 years the original Spanish settlers had, like the British in North America and the French in Saint Domingue, begun to develop interests of their own which clashed with those of the empire’s rulers. The political crisis in Spain seemed to provide the opportunity to assert those interests.

The colonial viceroys, pledged to the cause of the Spanish monarchy, were determined to resist such demands, had troops at their disposal, and could rely on the church for further backing. The viceroys also had something else going for them—the splits within colonial society were even greater than they had been in North America. Vast areas of Latin America were dominated by great landowners, who had established essentially feudal forms of control over the indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, in the cities there were merchants whose fortunes came from trade with Spain rather than other parts of Latin America, a middle class which believed the crown and the landowners alike were cramping economic advance, and a mass of artisans, workers, and, in some regions, black slaves.

Such was the situation when Bolivar, himself from a family of large landowners, took part in the first insurrection in Venezuela against Spanish rule in 1810—just as 2,000 miles away the revolutionary priest Hidalgo was leading a rising in the Mexican town of Guadalajara. The risings enjoyed initial success and then were crushed. Hidalgo was executed and Bolivar forced to flee for his life. The pattern was repeated as Bolivar staged another rising in Caracas, only to be defeated again (and to seek support in Haiti), while Morelos took up the banner of Hidalgo and was executed in turn. Bolivar was successful at his third attempt—marching from Venezuela, through Nueva Granada (now Colombia) into Bolivia and meeting with the ‘liberator’ of Argentina, San Martin, before going on to join with the Chilean ‘liberator’ O’Higgins to drive the Spanish crown from Peru. Meanwhile, a third revolt in Mexico finally forced the Spanish to concede independence. Yet the victories were sour for those driven by the ideals of Bolivar and Hidalgo. They had embraced the values of the French Revolution and aimed not merely at getting rid of the crown, but at ending feudalism, freeing the slaves and establishing a full bourgeois republic. Hidalgo had even gone so far as to rouse peasants to revolt with talk of dividing the land, while Bolivar followed his victories by calling a ‘Continental Congress’ in Panama to establish a ‘United States’ of Latin America.

The great landowners who dominated the continent were not interested. It had been their opposition to such radical talk that led to Bolivar’s initial defeats and Hidalgo’s execution. Although they eventually hailed Bolivar and Hidalgo’s successors as ‘liberators’, they also ensured that independence was on their own terms. Land reform never came, power remained in the hands of regional oligarchies, and schemes to establish a single Latin American republic to rival the United States were stillborn. Despite his successes and the statues of him which adorn every town in Venezuela, Bolivar died a disappointed man.

Latin America remained very much as it had been before independence—a continent of a few outstanding colonial cities with a 17th and 18th century splendour to rival many in Europe, surrounded by vast hinterlands of great
latifundia
estates worked by near-serfs. Its ‘nations’ were freed from Spanish rule but still dependent to a greater or lesser degree on foreign powers. Mexico was to be invaded by the US and France in the course of the 19th century, while Britain was to exercise a dominating influence over countries like Argentina and Chile. In each Latin American country oligarchic cliques plotted against one another, staged coups, ran rival ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’ parties, and preserved social structures characterised by extreme privilege on the one hand and vast, stagnating pools of poverty on the other.

In 1789 revolutionary enthusiasm had swept many intellectual circles influenced by the Enlightenment. But the feeling was not universal. Voices were soon heard denouncing what was happening as an assault on civilisation. Their complaint was not about the terror, which was three years off. Lafayette’s National Guard was still in tight control of Paris, the king was still appointing governments, even if they were responsible to the assembly, and Robespierre was still denouncing capital punishment. The hostility was to the very suggestion that the mass of people should exercise any say over the affairs of state.

‘The swinish multitude’ was undermining the very basis of civilisation according to Edmund Burke in Britain, in a text that became—and remains—the bible of counter-revolution:

Burke had not previously been reckoned a dyed in the wool conservative. He had opposed British policy in America and had damned the behaviour of the British conquerors of Bengal. Tom Paine, returning to London from America in the late 1780s, regarded him as a friend. But the mere hint of mass involvement in political life was too much for him. His denunciation,
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, appeared in 1790 and was a polemic aimed at uniting landed property, moneyed wealth and the ‘cultivated classes’ against any idea that artisans and farmers, let alone ‘servants’ and labourers, should rule. That meant rejecting each and every concession to liberal doctrines. Once sympathetic to the abolition of slavery, Burke now denounced abolitionism as ‘a shred of the accursed web of Jacobinism’.
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In a later writing, he insisted Tom Paine deserved ‘the refutation of criminal justice’.
⁶³

The
Reflections
was an instant success among the upper classes—50,000 copies were sold in England and numerous foreign translations appeared within a couple of years. George III loved it, Catherine the Great was enthusiastic, Stanislav, the last king of Poland, was full of praise. None of them, of course, had any experience of ‘servitude’ or had ever done anything to promote the ‘spirit of exalted freedom’.

Burke’s writings in England were soon matched on the continent by those of de Maistre. He not only insisted that rulers should be ‘separated from the people by birth or wealth, for once the people have lost their respect for authority all government will come to an end’,
⁶⁴
but extended the argument into an attack on the whole basis of the Enlightenment. ‘The greatest crime a nobleman can commit’, he wrote, ‘is to attack the Christian dogmas’.
⁶⁵

He was not alone in warning that challenges to old prejudices could lead to challenges from exploited classes to their masters. Gibbon now saw a place for the absurd Christian beliefs he had savaged in his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. He wrote of ‘the danger of exposing old superstitions to the contempt of the blind and ignorant multitude’.
⁶⁶

Not merely the revolution, but the very foundations of the Enlightenment were under attack—and this intensified as the advance of the revolutionary armies made all the crowned heads and aristocrats of Europe quiver. They turned to obscurantist beliefs as a bulwark against the spread of reasoning among the masses, and took the most repressive police measures against those who tried to continue the Enlightenment tradition.

The tide of unreason was strengthened by the disillusionment among many whose hopes of 1789, dented by the second wave of terror, turned sour with Thermidor and collapsed into despair with the crowning of Napoleon. Their mood became one of cynicism or even reaction. ‘Rulers are much the same in all ages and under all forms of government,’ wrote Coleridge in 1797. The German poet Hölderlin suggested the hope of a better world was in itself an evil—‘What has transformed the state into hell is precisely those men who tried to transform it into heaven’.
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Even those who refused to betray the hopes of 1789 generally abandoned direct confrontation with the old order. The field was increasingly open for those who preached blind faith in religious myths and monarchic delusions.

Whereas 50 years earlier Hume could express openly sceptical views, Shelley was expelled from Oxford at the age of 18 for defending atheism. Voltaire had exposed the absurdities of the Old Testament, but not until the 1840s did people like David Strauss resume the attack on the Bible. Buffon and Lamarck in France and Erasmus Darwin in England had been able in the 18th century to advance the notion that species might evolve. But the atmosphere in Britain even in the 1830s and 1840s was such that Erasmus’s grandson Charles delayed 20 years before revealing to the world that he believed this too and had a new theory as to how it happened.
⁶⁸
The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson had expounded ideas about the development of human society from hunting-gathering to the present. But this was forgotten by those who simply repeated phrases from
The Wealth of Nations
, while seeing society as god-given. It was as if there was an attempt to freeze people’s thinking for the best part of half a century.

The swing from Enlightenment to obscurantism was not total. There continued to be many advances in mathematics, physics and chemistry—encouraged more by the spread of industry and the needs of war. Policy clashes between industrialists seeking profits and landowners interested only in higher rents led David Ricardo in England to develop Smith’s understanding of capitalism. The German philosopher Hegel synthesised many Enlightenment insights into an overview of the development of human understanding, although in a way which separated this development from any material underpinning. Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal and Jane Austen advanced the novel as the characteristic way of giving literary expression to the dilemmas of the middle classes in the emerging capitalist world. ‘Romanticism’ in literature, music and art celebrated feelings and emotions rather than reason. This often led to the glorification of an allegedly ‘golden’ obscurantist past, but in societies which had not cast off the remnants of feudalism it could also lead to a glorification of traditions of folk opposition to tyranny and oppression. A few ‘Utopian’ thinkers like Saint-Simon, Fourier and, in Britain, the successful pioneering industrial manager Robert Owen, drew up blueprints for how society could be better organised—although they were unable to point to any agency for translating these into reality. It required a new generation, born in the late 1810s and early 1820s, to build on the heritage of the Enlightenment and the early revolutionary years. But in the meantime, the world was changing dramatically, despite all the attempts of the Restoration monarchies to reimpose 18th century patterns of life.