The New Penguin History of the World (140 page)

There were also other principles in play besides nationalism. Terms like democracy and liberalism do not help very much in defining them, though they must be used in default of better ones and because contemporaries used them. In most countries there was a general trend towards accepting representative institutions as a way of associating (even if only formally) more and more people with the government. Liberals and democrats almost always asked for more people to be given votes and for better electoral representation. More and more, too, the individual became the basis of political and social organization in economically advanced countries. The individual’s membership of communal, religious, occupational and family units came to matter much less than his or her individual rights. Though this led in some ways to greater freedom, it sometimes led to less. The state became much more juridically powerful in relation to its subjects in the nineteenth century than ever before, and slowly, as its apparatus became technically more efficient, came to be able to coerce them more effectively.

The French Revolution had been of enormous importance in actually launching such changes but its continuing influence as example and a source of mythology mattered just as much. For all the hopes and fears that the Revolution was over by 1815, its full Europe-wide impact was then still to come. In many other countries, institutions already swept away in France invited criticism and demolition. They were the more vulnerable because other forces of economic and social change were also at work. This gave revolutionary ideas and traditions new opportunities. There was a widespread sense that all Europe faced, for good or ill, potential revolution. This encouraged both the upholders and would-be destroyers of the existing order to sharpen political issues and fit them into the frameworks of the principles of 1789: nationalism and liberalism. By and large, these ideas dominated the history of Europe down to about 1870 and provided the dynamic of its politics. They did not achieve all their advocates hoped. Their realization in practice had many qualifications, they frequently and thwartingly got in one another’s way, and they had many opponents. Yet they remain useful guiding threads in the rich and turbulent history of nineteenth-century Europe, already a political laboratory whose experiments, explosions and discoveries were changing the history of the rest of the world.

These influences could already be seen at work in the negotiations shaping the foundation deed of the nineteenth-century international order, the Treaty of Vienna of 1815, which closed the era of the French wars. Its
central aim was to prevent their repetition. The peacemakers sought the containment of France and the avoidance of revolution, using as their materials the principle of legitimacy which was the ideological core of conservative Europe and certain practical territorial arrangements against future French aggression. Thus Prussia was given large acquisitions on the Rhine, a new northern state appeared under a Dutch king, ruling both Belgium and the Netherlands, the kingdom of Sardinia was given Genoa, and Austria not only recovered her former Italian possessions, but kept Venice and was allowed a virtually free hand in keeping the other Italian states in order. In many of these cases legitimacy bowed to expediency; those despoiled during the years of upheaval did not all obtain restoration. But the powers talked legitimacy all the same, and (once the arrangements were complete) did so with some success. For nearly forty years the Vienna settlement provided a framework within which disputes were settled without war. Most of the regimes installed in 1815 were still there, even if some of them were somewhat shaken, forty years later.

This owed much to the salutary fear of revolution. In all the major continental states the restoration era (as the years after 1815 have been termed) was a great period for policemen and plotters alike. Secret societies proliferated, undiscouraged by failure after failure. This record showed, though, that there was no subversive threat that could not be handled easily enough. Austrian troops dealt with attempted coups in Piedmont and Naples, French soldiers restored the power of a reactionary Spanish king hampered by a liberal constitution, the Russian empire survived a military conspiracy and a Polish revolt. The Austrian predominance in Germany was not threatened at all and it is difficult in retrospect to discern any very real danger to any part of the Habsburg monarchy before 1848. Russian and Austrian power, the first in reserve, the second the main force in central Europe and Italy from 1815 to 1848, were the two rocks on which the Vienna system rested.

Mistakenly, liberalism and nationalism were usually supposed to be inseparable; this was to prove terribly untrue in later times, but in so far as a few people did seek to change Europe by revolution before 1848, it is broadly true that they wanted to do so by advancing both the political principles of the French Revolution – representative government, popular sovereignty, freedom of the individual and the press – and those of nationality. Many confused the two; the most famous and admired of those who did so was Mazzini, a young Italian. By advocating an Italian unity most of his countrymen did not want and conspiring unsuccessfully to bring it about, he became an inspiration and model for other nationalists and democrats in every continent for over a century and one of the first idols
of radical chic. The age of the ideas he represented had not yet come, though.

To the west of the Rhine, where the writ of the Holy Alliance (the term given to the group of three conservative powers: Russia, Austria and Prussia) did not run, the story was different; there, legitimism was not to last long. The very restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1814 had itself been a compromise with the principle of legitimacy. Louis XVIII was supposed to have reigned like any other king of France since the death of his predecessor, Louis XVII, in a Paris prison in 1795. In fact, as everyone knew but legitimists tried to conceal, he came back in the baggage train of the Allied armies which had defeated Napoleon and he only did so on terms acceptable to the French political and military elites of the Napoleonic period and, presumably, tolerable to the mass of Frenchmen. The restored regime was regulated by a charter which created a constitutional monarchy, albeit with a limited suffrage. The rights of individuals were guaranteed and the land settlement resulting from revolutionary confiscations and sales was unquestioned; there was to be no return to 1789.

Nevertheless, there was some uncertainty about the future; battle between Right and Left began with arguments about the charter itself – was it a contract between king and people, or a simple emanation of the royal benevolence, which might therefore be withdrawn as easily as it had been granted? – and went on over a whole range of issues which raised questions of principle (or were thought to do so) about ground won for liberty and the possessing classes in the Revolution.

What was implicitly at stake was what the Revolution had actually achieved. One way of describing that would be to say that those who had struggled to be recognized as having a voice in ruling France under the
ancien régime
had won; the political weight of the ‘notables’, as they were sometimes called, was assured and they, whether drawn from the old nobility of France, those who had done well out of the Revolution, Napoleon’s lackeys, or simply substantial landowners and businessmen, were now the real rulers of France. Another change had been the nation-making brought about in French institutions; no person or corporation could now claim to stand outside the operative sphere of the national government of France. Finally and crucially, the Revolution had changed political thinking. Among other things, the terms in which French public affairs would be discussed and debated had been transformed. Wherever the line was to be drawn between Right and Left, conservatives or liberals, it was on that line that political battle now had to be centred, not over the privilege of counselling a monarch by divine right. This was just what the last king of the direct Bourbon line, Charles X, failed to see. He foolishly attempted
to break out of the constitutional limitations which bound him, by what was virtually a
coup d’état
. Paris rose against him in the ‘July Revolution’ of 1830, liberal politicians hastily put themselves at its head and, to the chagrin of republicans, ensured that a new king replaced Charles.

Louis Philippe was head of the junior branch of the French royal house, the Orléans family, but to many conservative eyes he was the Revolution incarnate. His father had voted for the execution of Louis XVI (and went to the scaffold himself soon after) while the new king had fought as an officer in the republican armies. He had even been a member of the notorious Jacobin club, which was widely believed to have been a deep-rooted conspiracy, and certainly had been a forcing-house for some of the Revolution’s most prominent leaders. To liberals Louis Philippe was attractive for much the same reasons; he reconciled the Revolution with the stability provided by monarchy, though the left-wing were disappointed. The regime over which he was to preside for eighteen years proved unimpeachably constitutional and preserved essential political freedoms, but protected the interests of the well-to-do. It vigorously suppressed urban disorder (of which poverty produced plenty in the 1830s) and this made it unpopular with the Left. One prominent politician told his fellow countrymen to enrich themselves – a recommendation much ridiculed and misunderstood, although all he was trying to do was to tell them that the way to obtain the vote was through the qualification which a high income conferred (in 1830 only about a third as many Frenchmen as Englishmen had a vote for their national representatives, while the population of France was about twice that of England). Nevertheless, in theory, the July Monarchy rested on popular sovereignty, the revolutionary principle of 1789.

This gave it a certain special international standing in a Europe divided by ideology. In the 1830s there were sharply evident differences between a Europe of constitutional states – England, France, Spain and Portugal – and that of the legitimist, dynastic states of the east, with their Italian and German satellites. Conservative governments had not liked the July Revolution. They were alarmed when the Belgians rebelled against their Dutch king in 1830, but could not support him, because the British and French favoured the Belgians and Russia had a Polish rebellion on her hands. It took until 1839 to secure the establishment of an independent Belgium, and this was until 1848 the only important change in the state system created by the Vienna settlement, although the internal troubles of Spain and Portugal caused ripples which troubled European diplomacy.

Elsewhere, in south-east Europe, the pace of change was quickening. A new revolutionary era was opening there just as that of western Europe moved to its climax. In 1804 a well-to-do Serbian pork dealer had led a
revolt by his countrymen against the undisciplined Turkish garrison of Belgrade. At that moment, the Ottoman regime was willing to countenance his actions in order to bridle its own mutinous soldiers and put down the Christian peasants who set about the massacre of urban Muslims. But the eventual cost to the empire was the establishment of an autonomous Serbian princedom in 1817. By then the Turks had also ceded Bessarabia to Russia, and had been forced to recognize that their hold on much of Greece and Albania was little more than formal, real power being in the hands of the local pashas.

This was, though hardly yet visibly so, the opening of the eastern question of the nineteenth century: who or what was to inherit the fragments of the crumbling Ottoman empire? In Europe it preoccupied the powers for more than a century; in the Balkans and what were the Asiatic provinces of the empire, wars of the Ottoman Succession are still going on today. Racial, religious, ideological and diplomatic issues were entangled from the start. The Ottoman territories were populated by peoples and communities scattered over wide areas in logic-defying patterns and the Vienna settlement did not include them among those it covered by guarantees of the great powers. When there began what was represented as a ‘revolution’ of ‘Greeks’ (that is, Orthodox Christian subjects of the Sultan, many of whom were bandits and pirates) against Ottoman rule in 1821, Russia abandoned her conservative principles and favoured the rebels. Religion and the old pull of Russian strategic aims towards south-eastern Europe made it impossible for the Holy Alliance to support an Islamic ruler as it did other rulers, and in the end the Russians even went to war with the Sultan. The new kingdom of Greece which emerged in 1832, its boundaries settled by outsiders, was bound to give ideas to other Balkan peoples and it was evident that the nineteenth-century eastern question was going to be complicated by the specious claims of nationalism as it had not been in the eighteenth century. The outlook was not good, for at its outset the Greek revolt had prompted massacres of Greeks by Turks in Constantinople and Smyrna, to be followed, rapidly, by Greek massacres of Turks in the Peloponnese. The problems of the next two centuries in the Balkans were poisoned at their roots by such examples of what would later be called ‘ethnic cleansing’.

In 1848 came a new revolutionary explosion. Briefly, it seemed that the whole 1815 settlement was in jeopardy. The 1840s had been years of economic hardship, food shortages and distress in many places, particularly in Ireland where, in 1846, there was a great famine and then in central Europe and France in 1847, where a commercial slump starved the cities. Unemployment was widespread. This bred violence which gave new edge to
radical movements everywhere. One disturbance inspired another; example was contagious and weakened the capacity of the international security system to deal with further outbreaks. The symbolic start came in February, in Paris, where Louis Philippe abdicated after discovering the middle classes would no longer support his continued opposition to the extension of the suffrage. By the middle of the year, government had been swept aside or was at best on the defensive in every major European capital except London and St Petersburg. When a republic appeared in France after the February Revolution every revolutionary and political exile in Europe had taken heart. The dreams of thirty years’ conspiracies seemed realizable. The
Grande Nation
would be on the move again and the armies of the Great Revolution might march once more to spread its principles. What happened, though, was very different. France made a diplomatic genuflection in the direction of martyred Poland, the classical focus of liberal sympathies, but the only military operations it undertook were in defence of the pope, an unimpeachably conservative cause.