The Transformation of the World (119 page)

A
regionally
differentiated picture would show that the revolution failed less drastically in France than elsewhere. The last remnants of Legitimist monarchism were swept away, and a republic came into being for the first time since 1799. When Louis Bonaparte staged his coup d'état three years later, going on to claim his uncle's legacy as Emperor Napoleon III, this was in no sense the restoration of an earlier state of affairs. The Second Empire was a modernized version of the original Bonapartism, in many ways a synthesis of all the tendencies in French political culture since the end of the Terror in 1794.
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The new regime began life with fierce repression of all its opponents, but over time it proved quite open to liberalization and established a framework within which France's bourgeois-capitalist society could peacefully flourish. In Hungary, by contrast, where national autonomy was at the center of all demands, the revolutionaries suffered a spectacular defeat. Since, alone in Europe, they armed themselves adequately, the conflict was bound to escalate into a war with the intractable imperial power, Austria, which lasted until the insurgents formally surrendered in August 1849. A tide of vengeance then swept over Hungary. All traces of the revolution would be erased, with the indulgent understanding of many Hungarian magnates. Army officers were tried before military courts, and the grim punishment of forced labor in chains (the Austrian equivalent of banishment to an island in the tropics) was meted out on a large scale. If losses on the Austrian side are included, approximately 100,000 soldiers alone lost their lives in Hungary in 1848–49—to which should be added thousands of peasants killed in rural conflicts among the nationalities of the Danube region.
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Finally, a longer time frame clearly places the “failure” of the 1848 Revolution in a different perspective. We can only speculate what its success would have produced: a recast republic in France, doubtless with unresolved contradictions; in the case of victory for the Italian and Hungarian rebels, most probably the breakup of the Habsburg Empire as a multinational state; a shortening of Germany's road to constitutional government and wider political participation. Tempting as such counterfactual speculation may be, the reality was this: The conservative oligarchies, having survived the storm, turned to neo-absolutist policies that left no doubt as to where the power lay (including the now stronger military power), but this does not mean they were set against any compromise. Napoleon III's quest for popular acclamation, Austria's conciliation of the Hungarian upper classes in
the constitutional “settlement” of 1867 (unthinkable without its military defeat a year before at the hands of Prussia), and the granting of universal manhood suffrage in the 1871 Constitution of the German Reich were three examples, highly dissimilar no doubt, of a willingness to seek new solutions in a political middle ground. A second long-term effect, also irreversible, was that many social groups learned to mold the experience of politicization, which often came as a surprise even to themselves, into solid institutional forms. The years of the European revolutions therefore mark a turning point in the development “of traditional forms of collective violence into the organized assertion of interests.”
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The revolutions of 1848 were not a global event. Here lies their supreme paradox: the greatest European revolutionary movement between 1789 and 1917 had an extremely limited impact around the world; it was not seen elsewhere as a beacon; unlike the French Revolution, it did not formulate any new universal principles. In 1848 continental Europe had fewer and less dense permanent contacts with the rest of the world than it had had fifty years earlier, or would have fifty years later. The paths of transmission were therefore rare and narrow, the most important being emigration across the Atlantic. The United States happily took in “forty-eighters” as refugees, seeing this as confirmation of its progressive superiority. Lajos Kossuth arrived there in late 1851 via the Ottoman Empire and was welcomed as a hero. In 1867 Emperor Franz Joseph granted him a pardon, but he remained until his death in exile in northern Italy. Carl Schurz, a participant in the Palatinate-Baden uprising of 1849, took the emigrant's road to America, becoming one of the most influential leaders of the newly founded Republican Party, a Civil War general, a senator from 1869 on, and secretary of the interior from 1877 to 1881. Gustav von Struve, somewhat less adaptable and successful than Schurz, was militarily active in both South Baden and the Shenandoah Valley, proud to have taken part in two great struggles for human freedom. A smaller revolutionary fish, the Saxon kapellmeister Richard Wagner, did not show himself in Germany again until 1862.
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It is hard to judge the extent to which politics lay behind the growing midcentury emigration from central Europe, but there can be no doubt that revolution triggered a considerable brain drain to the more liberal countries of Europe and the New World, and that many emigrants took their political ideals with them.
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In 1848–49 Britain and Russia, the two powers at opposite ends of Europe and its most important links to other continents, were less caught up in the revolutionary events than in the earlier age when the heir and executor of the French Revolution had marched on Moscow with his huge army. The year passed peacefully in oppressive Russia, while in England the Chartist movement against arbitrary government and for the defense of ancestral rights, having peaked in 1842, flared up again in 1848 but again failed to produce results. The ideas and language of radicalism did not completely disappear, however, from the national culture. Nonradical currents in the public rejoiced over the superior performance of British institutions.

The most turbulent nations in the two empires—the Irish and the Poles—remained quiescent by the Western European standards of the time, but several hundred Irish rebels were deported as convicts to the colonies. This offers a first pointer to imperial interconnections.
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As so often in the past, London used the soft option of “transportation” to clear away troublemakers. But many people in the colonies were tired of seeing their country used as a penal dumping ground; in 1848–49 Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa witnessed demonstrations thousands strong against the convict ships. Thus, although the British state was able to keep Chartists and Irish rebels at arm's length, it triggered unwelcome reactions in other parts of the Empire.

Finances were another link between world empire and the avoidance of revolution at home. Those in power in London saw that it was necessary at all costs not to raise the fiscal burden on the middle classes. A tax hike in the colonies (as in 1848 in Ceylon/Sri Lanka) risked the kind of protests familiar in Europe, which could be quelled only through repression. Where the colonial state reduced its personnel, as it did in Canada, settlers could obviously fill any gaps. And one of the reasons for the annexation of the Punjab in 1848–49 was that it would pacify a notoriously troubled frontier and enable defense costs to be lowered. Even if no sparks from the European revolutions flew as far as Britain's imperial periphery, opponents of the empire took heart when news eventually arrived from Europe (this was the age before telegraphic cabling), and French revolutionary rhetoric echoed in Ceylon, among French Canadians, and in radical circles in Sydney. Despite such links, imperial conflicts did not grow into political explosions in 1848–49. Yet there was something like a sharpening of political conflict in the wake of the revolutions. Colonial representative assemblies were given more leeway, while at the same time governors strengthened their control over the all-decisive area of finances. Symbolic concessions went hand in hand with a tighter grip on the levers of power.

The Taiping Revolution

There is nothing to suggest that the Taiping rebels in China heard a word about the '48 Revolution in Europe. Whereas in the mid-nineteenth century there were no Chinese observers in Europe who could report on political events there, European consuls, missionaries, and merchants residing in Hong Kong, as well as in the port cities opened up in 1842 under the Treaty of Nanjing, were relatively close to the events when the Taiping Revolution broke out in 1850. They did not learn much. The first reports, still based entirely on rumor, date from August 1850, when the movement was beginning to stir in the remote province of Guangxi. Only in 1854 did Western interest pick up, and then no more was heard about the Taiping for another four years; fleeting contact was made with them again only in 1858, during the Second Opium War. After 1860, when the movement was already on the wane and fighting to survive, contacts and reports finally began to multiply.
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So, the leaders of the largest uprising by far in
modern times knew nothing about the revolutions in Europe, while Europeans were largely in the dark about the scale of events in China; any direct interaction can be ruled out. Some Western mercenaries fought on the Taiping side, but it is not known whether there were any “Forty-Eighters” among them. In midcentury nothing connected the mental worlds of European and Chinese revolutionaries, and yet both must have a place in a global history of the nineteenth century.

What exactly was the Taiping uprising? With its construction of an alternative state and its virtual eradication of the old social elite in some provinces, it was at least as revolutionary as the 1848 Revolution, embroiling China in civil war for almost fifteen years.
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The charismatic founder of the movement, Hong Xiuquan, was a farmer's son from the far south of China. Having entered a personal crisis after failing an exam in his home province, he experienced visions which, owing to his reading of Christian texts (in Chinese), led away from Chinese traditions. In 1847 he sought instruction from American revivalist preachers in Canton, and his conclusion from all he learned was that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, commanded by God to spread the true faith. Soon there came an additional mandate to liberate China from the Manchus. The Mormon sect in America arose in a similar way, and the idea of an apocalyptic clash between the powers of darkness and fighters for a new world order also existed on the margins of the French Revolution. Uniquely in China, however, the religious awakening of one individual led within a few years to a gigantic mass movement.

This would not have been possible if the potential for social revolution had not already existed in southwestern China, where the revolt had its origins, and in the other parts of the country that it soon overran. Alongside the political goal of driving out the ethnically alien Manchu, a program for the radical transformation of society took ever clearer shape. In the southern and central regions that fell under their control, the revolutionaries proceeded to expropriate land on a large scale, to hound officials and landowners, and to introduce new laws. The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (
Taiping Tianguo
) proclaimed at the beginning of 1851, which two years later turned Nanjing, the old imperial city of the Ming dynasty, into its capital, implemented for several years a radical alternative to the old Confucian order, but it was not quite as egalitarian, or even proto-socialist, as official historians in the People's Republic later claimed.

The extraordinary military success of the Taiping is explicable by the initial weakness of the imperial armies and by the fact that some of the men who joined Hong Xiuquan were militarily and administratively more gifted than the rather confused prophet himself. In the course of time, however, these followers—who acquired regal titles in accordance with the old Chinese model of “rival kingdoms” (Northern King, Eastern King, etc.)—fell out with one another even more sharply than the European revolutionaries of 1848 had ever done. As a result of such dissension, the movement lost many a charismatic figure who had updated Hong Xiuquan's divine visions with new illuminations of his own. In 1853 Taiping troops were within sight of the walls of Beijing, from which the
Qing court had already fled, but their commander turned back and passed over this golden opportunity, supposedly because he lacked an order from heaven to capture the city. In 1856 the relative strength of forces began to tilt as the Qing rulers permitted some high regional officials to put together new armies and militias, which were far superior to the regular imperial troops and gradually got the better of the Taiping. The hiring of Western (mainly British and French) mercenaries without opposition from their governments further strengthened the imperial camp, although it cannot be said to have tipped the balance in the war. The Heavenly Capital, Nanjing, eventually fell to imperial forces in June 1864. The brutality that the Taiping showed toward their enemies, and the exterminatory impulses with which these responded, were without parallel in the history of the nineteenth century. To take just a couple of examples: when the Taiping captured Nanjing in March 1853, massacres and mass suicide claimed the lives of 50,000 Manchu soldiers and family members; and when Qing troops retook the city in 1864, it is estimated that 100,000 people died in a purge that lasted two long days, many preempting a grisly fate by taking their own lives.
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In the three densely populated provinces of eastern China alone—Jiangsu (including Nanjing), Zhejiang, and Anhui—the population is thought to have declined by 43 percent between 1851 and 1864.
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The overall loss of life resulting from the unrest in China, extremely difficult to estimate, has traditionally been put at 20 to 30 million. Historian Kent Deng has recently revised this number upward to arrive at 66 million.
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The bitterness and violence were indeed symptomatic of a genuine civil war. Anyone identified as a Taiping leader was killed on the spot or executed after a trial. The Heavenly King, Hong Xiuquan, succumbed to disease or poisoning before the fall of Nanjing, but his fifteen-year-old son was among the victims of the repression. The wholesale elimination of the “bandits,” as they were officially known, was the consequence not of innate Chinese cruelty but of political decisions. The Taiping, unlike the European revolutionaries, suffered a total defeat and left no legacy to be picked up later. After 1864, there would be no compromise and no reconciliation.