Europe's Great Powers' Role in Post-Napoleonic Peace: Political Reaction & Social Change S, Study notes of Social structure and social organization

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REACTION
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REVOLUTION
 While hindsight may give the lead in overall consequentiality to industrialisation in the wake of the Great Transformation, it was reactions to the French Revolution and its Napoleonic sequel which had the more immediate and public (i.e., political) effect, at least until the middle of the nineteenth century. This first chapter is concerned largely with these public/political effects of the 'Great Transformation', although some reference to the growth of bureaucracy and the onset of industrialisation before 1850 is unavoidable. For the most part, too, the main concern will be with four of the 'great powers': France, Britain, Prussia, Austria, with some attention given to the lesser German states, and rather less to the fifth - Russia - as well as to the other European countries deeply affected by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The chronological division of the chapter into three, with 1815 and 1830 marking their boundaries, makes sense in terms of the subject-matter. The terminal date of 1850 is less arbitrary that it looks; the 1848 revolutions were already things of the past, the impact of industrialisation on Europe is already visible, and even Britain was beginning to 'bureaucratise' its government administration. Historians writing in the mid-years of the twentieth century, even those of utterly different persuasions, seem to have been at one in regarding the settlement of Europe reached at Vienna after the end of the Napoleonic wars as exemplary. Harold Nicolson called it 'a study in allied unity'; Eric Hobsbawm saw it as 'realistic and sensible' (even though it was 'no more just and moral then any other'). What they had in mind, of course, was the depressing contrast between the relative peace which lasted almost a century after Vienna, with only three fairly short wars, half-way through, between major powers, and the outbreak of the First and then a Second World War, just twenty years later - to be followed by a Cold War which split Europe and threatened the whole world with unimaginable disaster. Nineteenth-century Europe did of course get off lightly, not only compared with the following century but with previous centuries. The settlements reached after the Thirty Years War, after the series of wars which ended with the Treaties of Utrecht, and after the next series which culminated in the Seven Years War, had proved to be almost as short-lived as did the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. It was, after all, one of Frederick the Great's Inspector-Generals who remarked that 'War gives rise to treaties and treaties are the source of all wars'. One reason - perhaps the main one - why Europe enjoyed comparatively long intervals of international peace after 1815 lies not so much in the good sense or amity of the great powers - Russia, Austria, Prussia, France (admitted to their company in 1818) and Britain - all reactionary and all preoccupied with coping with political unrest and demands for reform, with industrialisation, with the accelerating pace of social and political change and with keeping the peace inside their own territories and those of minor states which were their immediate neighbours. There was of course the usual division of territorial spoils among the victors. Russia was awarded most of Poland (what had been the Grand Duchy of Warsaw) and Finland. (Sweden was handed Norway, by way of compensation for the loss of Finland). Austria took over more of northern Italy than she had acquired during the previous century. Prussia did best of all: a large slice of Saxony (the price of having allied itself with Napoleon in 1813), Danzig and the territory around it, Pomerania, and extensive territories in the south and west of Germany. The rest of Europe was sorted out in fairly crude geographical terms by Prussia, Austria, Russia, and England (with France, in the person of Talleyrand, who was admitted to the Vienna conference acting as 'independent counsel' - and, on occasion, as a useful ally). Sweden, having already lost Finland to Russia, was awarded Norway. Russia, which tried to acquire the whole of what had once been Poland, had to be content with the part which had been the Duchy of Warsaw. Belgium was surrendered by Austria to Holland, in the hope of firming the northern boundary of France against any further aggression. The same idea lay behind the strengthening of the newly constituted kingdom of Sardinia by grafting Genoa on to Piedmont as well as restoring Savoy and Nice. But apart from this, Italy was handed over piecemeal to Austria. Venetia was merged with Lombardy and, with the addition of the Valtellina and the Trentino, formed an extension of the Austrian empire south of the Alps. Beyond this, Tuscany went to the Emperor's younger brother, Modena to a grandson, and Parma to his daughter Maria Luisa, who had been Empress of the French; Ferdinand, who had kept Sicily only under the protection of the British, was restored to Naples (as King of the Two Sicilies), but only after signing a permanent defensive treaty with Austria. Apart from the new kingdom of Sardinia, only the Papal States stood outside the hegemony Austria established for itself at the Congress. Spain and Portugal were left intact, and France was allowed to keep the frontiers of 1792. Hanover, now a kingdom, was restored to the British crown (to be separated again - by provision of the salic law!) when Victoria became Queen. Britain's retention of some overseas acquisitions - the most significant being the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon - was of little consequence to the other major signatories, and as far as she was concerned, a reasonably peaceful settlement of Europe was reward enough. I Nationalism had not entered into the determination of the boundaries of France or of the other states within the Empire ('Greater France'). In France itself, militaristic patriotism had done much in the early years of the Republic, to overcome the strong local and regional loyalties, but these revived somewhat, even before 1815, and persisted throughout the nineteenth century. Patriotism had played its part in Britain, Spain and Russia as a truly popular response to the threat or actuality of invasion; elsewhere, the attempt to create and consolidate new loyalties in place of traditional passive ties of authority, deference and local identity (following the model of France) inevitably provoked resistance. Old solidarities - such as regional dialect, community or popular religion - tempered by centuries of exercise, were reinforced. What loyalties there were to formerly separate political entities were left Staatenbund rather than a Bundestaat, as Sheehan remarks.6 Its member states were more concerned with internal integration than with cooperation with their fellow members. But in 1817, Austria became alarmed by the Burschenschaft, an organisation composed mostly of students, which convened an assembly, ostensibly to celebrate the second anniversary of the battle of Leipzig and the third centenary of the start of the Reformation, but essentially to proclaim German nationalism, challenge particularism, and defy reaction. It was never much of a threat, but the implication of a small group of radical members in the murder of Kotzebue, a reactionary publicist and playwright, was seized on by Stein and Metternich as an excuse to mobilise the Confederation against radical reformists. The Karlsbad decrees demanded closer supervision of universities and of the press, while the Wiener Schlussakte closed down any talk of religious toleration or economic reform and authorised other members to intervene in the domestic affairs of any one state so as to preserve public order. The Confederation thereafter came to stand for political reaction, an obstacle to progress, freedom, and national unification. After the peace settlement, most states or regions retained the structures, if not the names, of the Napoleonic administrative, fiscal and juridical reforms - with the single exception (strictly limited in practice) of elected representatives as a check on arbitrary rule. Most of the few who tried to abolish them were soon forced to recant. The restructuring, after Jena, of the organisation of the state and social system by Prussia, as the price of its survival was conceived by Stein and Hardenberg through critical examination of the French model. The cadastre initiated in Prussia by the French was completed after 1815 by order of Frederick William III. The Austrian civil code of 1811 and administrative centralisation, which were to be applied to the Lombard-Venetian kingdom after 1815, owed as much to Napoleon as to Joseph II. The administrative unification of the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily would have been inconceivable without the French decade at Naples. Even in Britain utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham urged their government to acquire statistical information as the basis for a more interventionist policy. In states like Bavaria, Baden and Wurttemburg, the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire was without any negative effect on the process of administrative modernisation, which accelerated between 1809 and 1819, and proved more successful than Prussia in forging a unified state identity. The financial worries of the victorious allies (and of France, too) were, oddly enough, less after twenty-three years of war than they had been before 1789. Much of the burden had been sustained by Britain, and what had been a matter of wartime subsidies (to the tune of L80 million) was switched to loans - mediated by the London banking houses of Barings and Rothschild; paper money (and inflation) had helped, too. There was an immediate expansion of trade. Britain was at last able to capitalise on its lead in industrialisation. Elsewhere, it meant a revival of the commercial rivalries which had been so dominant in the eighteenth century. The first phase of the administrative revolution in Europe had been confined, as we have seen, to the administrative system of France and - in somewhat piecemeal fashion - its Empire. Few other states in western Europe (apart from Prussia) followed suit while Napoleon was still 6 J.J.Sheehan, German History, 1770-1866, O.U.P., 1989, p. 403. Emperor. None were instigated by their own head of state; some, in Italy and the Low Countries, even owed their reforming ideas to the democratic ideology of the early Republic. One major legacy of the Napoleonic years were the arenas it provided for political debate between those who saw restoration as including all the aristocratic and clerical privileges of the ancien regime and those who saw no reason to forego the advantages they had acquired during the twenty-five years before 1814. The liberalism which showed itself in continental Europe after 1815 derived from the same matrix as Napoleonic administration, which served as a model as much for the opponents of French domination as for those who supported it. In some countries, too, there was popular unrest, exacerbated, especially in Britain and France, by demobilisation, inflation (which was, as usual, much harder on the poor) and by the bad harvests which followed the end of the war - although blamed, naturally, on the persistence, or revival, of Jacobin ideas. The experience of French rule had reinforced the sense of French civilisation among the educated elites of Europe. For many, it reflected the personal experience of an entire generation of men, who had participated directly in the Napoleonic administration or armies. For others, the salons, academies, circles and societies of post- revolutionary France had imposed codes of conduct and judgments and had offered the stimulus of honours and public recognition. The popularity of liberalism in France and the countries which had formed part of the French Empire, was based on the progressives' opposition to Napoleonic despotism, in contrast to the reactionary and religious opposition of Joseph de Maistre. Even so, like the Napoleonic functionaries, liberals everywhere were convinced that they embodied social and economic progress, were favourable to science and technology, and proclaimed rational, utilitarian principles as the basis of a superior and neutral administration. Outside France, liberals were often enough seduced by the apparent application of their ideas by their princes, but were almost indifferent, to begin with, about the dangers of the concentration of power. A state guided by utilitarian principles was seen as necessary for the moral elevation of the labouring classes as much as for national identity; while despotism, it was hoped, could be avoided by representation - even when it was restricted to notables. Whatever the assumptions of some literary-minded patriots, nationalism could not function as a rallying-cry, simply because it was devoid of significance to the mass of the people and appeared as a dangerous abstraction to most of the elites in territories without experience of a nation-state - and even within such states. Nationalism was to be constructed as a powerful ideology in the subsequent decades, when memories of the experience of the French occupation served as reinforcement of the political struggle to attain independence. For Mazzini or von Savigny, those years gave birth to the emergence of an innate national identity. For the Belgian patriots of 1830, as for the Lombards, whether liberal or conservative, some of whom had made careers in the Napoleonic administration, a political sense of national identity only developed against the foreign rulers imposed by the Congress of Vienna, whether the Dutch King William I or the Austrian Emperor Francis. Nowhere did nationalism as a political ideology replace the pre-existing loyalties to community and region or integrate state with nation. Only after the creation of nation-states, from Greece and Belgium to the ethnic states of the Austrian empire, was nationalism to be constructed (in opposition to what were considered as the disaggregative forces of local identities) by the transference within national boundaries of the same techniques of administrative uniformity, linguistic imposition and pressure for social integration that had characterised the European experience of the Napoleonic regime. Like the imperial administrators, the politicians and bureaucrats of these new states were to meet with social adaptations and resistance that made the building of an integrated nation a prolonged process. There were national variants of the theme. In Spain, it was reflected in opposition to the restoration in 1814 of the pre-1808 ancien regime stemming on one side from the military leaders who had fought against the French occupying armies and, on another, from the 'afrancesados' who had served, and learned, from them. It was liberalism, rather than nationalism, that emerged as a politically motivating force after 1815, with France, oddly enough, as the acknowledged leader. The growth of liberalism was, to begin with, more directly related to the Napoleonic experience. The political connotations of constitutionalism, greater liberty and liberalism in economic terms, as voiced by Benjamin Constant and Jean Baptiste Say, it expressed a reaction against the authoritarian centralism and economic dirigisme of the Napoleonic state. The reaction was strongest in France, to the point that to foreigners, Restoration France appeared as the country of liberty, with its system of representation extended to local government, formal equality of civil rights, limitation of state intervention and affirmation of landed notables. Constitutions, as the mechanism to reconcile liberty with monarchical order, were invested with the force of a symbolic value for the liberals of Restoration Europe, from Cadiz, Palermo and Lisbon to Brussels, Vienna and Berlin. Liberalism rapidly lost its distinctive quality as opposition to the Napoleonic experience. Economic liberalism or laissez-faire, by which was understood an end to state interference over international trade and the maintenance of entrepreneurial freedom, was enthusiastically promoted by Continental economists like Say, Bastiat and von Hermann. In terms of economic theory, the political economy of Say, however influential in France, was contested in Germany by Friedrich List's analysis of the comparative advantages of protection (mainly from the historical experience of Britain). In economic practice, the flooding of the Continental markets with British manufactures led many governments to revalue the lessons of the Continental blockade and preserve protective Customs barriers. In territories where there was a strong identification between state and dynasty, where the addition of new territories was marginal to the pre-existing core of population, with its thick texture of relationships between state and society - as in the south German states, Piedmont or France itself - administrative reform and the creation of a sizeable professional bureaucracy that identified itself with the state was able to subordinate the privileges and independence of such social groups as the aristocracy or guilds. In states with a substantial accretion of territories - like Prussia or Austria after 1815 - resistance to imposed administrative change was strengthened and facilitated by the ability of the local elites (whether the East Prussian confused and easily diverted. Old animosities, such as those between the (illegally) restored workers' associations (compagnonnages), distracted attention from the first encroachments of industrialism. This was met with machine-breaking riots, like those of 1819 in Vienne, but for the most part working class protest tended to be submerged beneath the more strident voices of liberal opponents and supporters ('ultras') of the reestablished Bourbon monarchy. In the late 1820's there were signs of what McPhee calls a 'tenuous but genuine alliance'8 between town workers and liberal middle-class opponents of rule by people who were seen as the embodiment of the theocratic absolutism which Charles X sought to impose. Economic distress and popular discontent brought them support from the more skilled workers. So when the decisive defeat in a second election in 1830 induced the king to clamp down even more firmly on the press and to narrow the electorate to the 25,000 wealthiest men in France, the call to the liberal-minded nobility and bourgeois to resist oppression found a response among the common people. The famous 'three days' of July followed, with barricades (which had never appeared during the Revolution) thrown up in the streets and fighting between insurgents and troops. Russia and Spain, the most obstinate, persistent and successful opponents of Napoleon on the continent, stood apart from the nascent reactionary, constitutionalist and liberal political party formations which appeared in the years after 1814 in Western Europe. Spain was split confusingly between monarchist, clerical, professional, masonic, army officer and francophile (afresconado) groupings which erupted into short-lived revolutions: 1820, (suppressed in 1823 by a French army authorised by the Allies), 1827 (the 'Revolt of the Aggrieved', in Catalonia), and 1831 (an invasion by liberal exiles from France). The death of Ferdinand VII in 1833 introduced dynastic contention with his brother, Don Carlos, claiming the throne in place of Ferdinand's Queen, Isabella. 'Carlist' wars and contention persisted throughout the next hundred years until they were swamped by the Civil War launched by Franco's invasion from Morocco. The course of Russia's history for the hundred years after 1815 is marked with something of the same series of uprisings and conspiracies. They were less serious, having regard to the numbers of people and the comparative size of the populations involved, but much more portentous and threatening in terms of the sheer size of the country its weight in international affairs. There is also a curious and rather disconcerting link between them. The first open move in support of radical political change was made by a small group of army officers - the 'Decembrists' - after the death of the Czar, Alexander I, in 1825: 'Our revolution will be similar to the Spanish Revolution of 1820; it will not cost a single drop of blood, for it will be executed by the army alone without the assistance of the people'.9 Britain, Napoleon's most inveterate opponent, and the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, took the lead in repressing industrial unrest and political opposition immediately after 1815. The end of the war had brought a sudden fall in demand for manufactured goods which, together with the demobilisation of the greater part of the army and navy, meant a substantial 8 P. McPhee, Social History of France 1780-1880, Routledge, 1992. p. 135 9 A.G.Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825, Stanford, 1961. rise in unemployment. This brought a fresh wave of industrial protest, mostly in the form of orderly strikes and demonstrations. But the reform movement, now revived, seized the opportunity of reviving its earlier strategy. In 1816 the Hampden Society opened up membership to working men (who had formerly been specifically excluded) and, instigated by Cobbett and Hunt, took up the idea of presenting mass petitions to the Prince Regent (of all unlikely people). Most meetings were peaceable enough, but a meeting at Spa Fields, which ended in a riot, awakened memories of the French Revolution, and was followed by the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. A number of prosecutions for sedition followed, all of which led in turn to further protests and demonstrations. The last of these, in Manchester, ended in bloodshed, whereupon the Prince Regent congratulated the magistrates responsible and Parliament passed a series of repressive measures. Once again, they proved to be effective enough. Reform, even in the moderate form of the first Reform Act, still took more than a dozen years to accomplish. It looks as if the working class movement of protest against the conditions of work and deprivation inflicted on them (by largely middle-class masters) had been harnessed to the movement for Parliamentary reform, and so benefited only the middle class. Of course, to lump together merchants, property-owners, industrialists, the new professional groups, writers, clergy and the leisured well-to- do living off inherited capital is in many ways just as nonsensical as it is in the case of the farm-labourers, smallholders, roadworkers, printers, building workers, journeymen, the thousands of lower-paid employees, unemployed, and idlers who made up what was to constitute the lower class. But when it came to the point, what determined 'who gets what' in political terms, ownership of property or level of income was decisive. What it all amounted to, in terms of political history, was a pallid repetition of how marxists have seen the French Revolution working out - and of how the July Revolution in fact did. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did distinctive working class political movements in western Europe even aspire to form their own political parties. V In France, it seemed for a time as if the development of a specifically working-class movement and political party might be achieved in a much shorter space of time. But the alliance between the liberal-minded opponents of the regime and skilled workmen which brought about the abdication of Charles X and the accession of Louis- Philippe was short- lived. It had owed something to one interpretation of the writings of Saint-Simon, who had died in 1825, but was survived by a fairly numerous band of followers; they called for an end to the exploitation of one class of men by another and for the public ownership of property. Otherwise, the alliance seems to have been founded on too rosy a remembrance of things past - and some misunderstanding. For the well-to-do, armed with the economic theory construed as laissez-faire (within national boundaries protected by tariffs, of course) and the positive freedom they saw prescribed by liberalism, it meant freedom from constraints on enterprise and innovation; they saw protest by workers as 'a new barbarian threat'. For workers, it transpired, 'liberty' meant freedom from the threat of wage restraints and from the competition and deskilling embodied in new industry. A new republicanism made its appearance among working people, with calls for an enduring inter-trade unity which would capitalise their mobilisation in 1830 in support of what had turned out to be reforms for the sole benefit of capitalists and entrepreneurs. 'One of the most striking changes in the language of the labour movement in the years after 1830 is the relatively rapid transition from occupational to class definition. This transformation, from skilled artisans grouped in exclusive, and often fiercely competitive, trades to an assumption of the commonality of the working-class experience, amounts to a "making" of the French working class. "Balzac announced the replacement of the old three 'estates' by what he called 'classes', in the fashion now established in England."10 The word 'socialism', also, made its appearance, 'defined as an economic doctrine which drew an unflattering contrast between the "bourgeois" and the "industrials"'.11 The odd feature of these alignments and realignments of politically militant groups is that they have the appearance of manifestations of a process of industrialisation which was, compared with what had been happening across the Channel, still in its infancy. It is perhaps better read as a recrudescence of the division which made itself felt in 1795 between 'sans-culottes' (allied with the remnant of the Jacobin movement) and the younger bourgeois and 'muscadins' of the western precincts of Paris: - part of the inheritance of the Revolution, in fact. All the same, industrial development had added its own pressures. Textile manufacture had expanded to some extent, principally in Paris, Lyons and Lille, with the adoption of English machinery and practices; some native industries, like Limoges pottery, grew; coal-mining started up in south-east of the Massif Central. Yet it was workers in the older industries like printing, furniture, tailoring and dress-making who felt the new pressures as entrepreneurs divided their processes into simpler tasks and enlarged their establishments by sub-contracting work to the lowest bidder, or employing women at half the pay of men. More pressure was added by the expansion of population, which aggravated the poverty which persisted in the countryside and forced men and women to seek any kind of work in the towns, where too often all the men found was unemployment, the women were driven to prostitution, and both had to pay high rents for overcrowded living space. To begin with, radical workers allied themselves with republican bourgeois in the 'Society of the Rights of Man', (named after Robespierre's 'Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), organised in small local sections so as to avoid legal restrictions. The first manifestation of the new political alignment - of the common ground shared by workers as wage-earners - only came after the general strike declared at Lyon in 1834 by the Society of Master Weavers over rates of pay, which was met by repressive measures. A proclamation by the strikers 'that the association of labourers is a necessity of the age ... a condition of existence' found its response in a new law against associations of more then twenty people. It was rigorously enforced - as it was against a repetition of the uprising in Paris a couple of months later. Scores of the leading members of the newly formed Society of the Rights of Man (with Blanqui among them) were brought to trial. Press control followed the next year. 10 P.McPhee, Social History of France, p.140 11 G. Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism, Weidenfeld, 1969, p. 52. major towns, and regulate industrial disputes in favour of the workers, but none of this was enough to arrest the growth of unemployment as the well-to-do reduced consumption and employers, especially in the luxury trades, reduced capital expenditure and purchases of materials. By April, unemployment had reached 55 per cent. New elections, with the suffrage extended to include all adults (males only, of course) for the Assembly were fixed for April 23, two months after the outbreak of the revolution. It was too early. 84 per cent of the new electorate of nine million voted, but their choice was in most areas limited to candidates drawn from the 'loyal opposition' of the Orleanist years; of the 851 deputies elected, only one third were 'genuine republicans', the rest being monarchists of different persuasions. In June, the new government ordered the National Workshops to close. It had already prohibited street gatherings, a law which led to mass arrests, and the closure of the Workshops precipitated what amounted to a civil war in the capital, with the insurgents opposed by the army, the National Guard, and contingents of provincials numbering some 100,000 supplied by landowners and urban bourgoisie. Something like 1,500 insurgents were killed and ten times that number arrested, a third of whom were imprisoned or transported. The civil war was crushed, but it had occurred in Paris. So the focus of democrat-republican protest shifted to the provinces, especially after the government reintroduced taxes on wines and spirits - and resurrected the 45% surtax. Rural families saw their indebtedness increased by higher rents and the further depression of prices for their produce. Rural industry was on the point of collapse. The presidential election held in December saw Louis- Napoleon returned with three-quarters of the vote. And for the next couple of years, he seemed to stand aside from, or above, the incessant dissensions among Royalists ('Legitimacists v. Orleanists), within the party of 'Order' (urban v. rural bourgeois), and among 'democratic- socialists' (to organise against or to take arms to fight the new law to restrict the franchise). So that in December, 1851, he carried out - and got away with - a military coup d'etat which ensured his retention of the Presidency which was subject to a new election in 1852 from which he was excluded. The nation gave its approval to the coup by voting 12 to 1 in its favour in the plebiscite called for on December 20. The only explanation offered by historians is the popular misconception of Louis-Napoleon as the advocate of radical social change. In fact, he was an unknown quantity. Other candidates were all too well known, and, moreover, were backed by movements (rather than organised parties) which were split between urban and rural supporters, between acknowledged leaders and a membership often tied to clubs and local groups which were virtually clandestine (to avoid the laws against assemblies), between the churchgoing faithful and the anticlericals. Louis-Napoleon's descent and name contrasted the present political disarray with the past days of glory and, above all, certainty. The people of France had known where they stood, and they were at least better-off than the rest of continental Europe. "The mid-century crisis must be seen as the dramatic expression of wide-ranging changes occurring in the first half of the century, as a period rich in economic, social and political experiments, the watershed of nineteenth-century France. The Second Republic marked the end of royalist regimes in France and the definitive victory of universal manhood suffrage."14 VI Significantly, neither Prussia nor Austria fitted itself out with a constitution before 1848. But they were caught up in sorting out the consequences and implications elsewhere in Germany, of the post-1814 settlement the constitutional provisions of the new territories and of the new Confederation which was to replace the French Empire and Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine. Making and debating new constitutions provided a useful arena for contention between 'progressives' (liberals) and 'reactionaries' (conservatives). The passing of the 1832 Reform Bill marks the high-water mark of the influence of the working class on the political structure of early nineteenth-century Britain. In fact, the success of the movement for Parliamentary reform helped point the way not for Chartists or the followers of Robert Owen, but for the movement for relieving children and women from the worst of their work in mines and factories. Just as the 'the French Revolution had taught men to think in terms of seizing power',15 British working class movements were reformist from the hour of their birth, and stayed that way. The Chartist movement ended its final burst of energy, provoked by the latest French Revolution early in 1848, in the farce of the three four-wheeler cabs which carried its petition to Parliament, but there is some justification for Guy Chapman's claim that the Ten Hours Act, passed in the preceding year, was 'by far the most important landmark in nineteenth-century social history'.16 Cooperative communities founded on Owenite 'socialist' principles faded out years before that, but the cooperative movement started up by the 'Rochdale pioneers' in 1844 accommodated itself to the capitalist economy surrounding it; it survived and, to a modest extent, prospered. The emergence of an administrative revolution in Britain in the 1830's was not, however, directly inspired by Napoleon's radical reconstruction of the national administrative system but by Benthamite utilitarianism (with its own links to the machine-mindedness of the republican ideologues of the 1790's) and the kind of liberal individualism which was imparted by - or read into - the economic ideas of Smith, Malthus and Ricardo. Largely because of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the distribution of population and on welfare, the first phase of the administrative revolution in Britain made itself evident in a rigorous - indeed ruthless - reform of the machinery of local government, together with revision of the laws relating to poverty and the imposition of a system of inspection to superintend the working of both. The mid-nineteenth century was the time when the social order which had sustained public order since the Middle Ages (though with steadily diminishing authority) was finally replaced by public order sustained by law enforcement. 14 P. McPhee, Social History of France, 1780-1880 p.195. 15 Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968, p.18. 16 G. Chapman, Culture and Survival, Cape, 1940, p.80. But most countries in Western Europe during the second quarter of the nineteenth century were increasingly preoccupied with promoting, or absorbing the impact of, the Industrial Revolution. Railways, steamships, together with the migration of working people to industrial cities made large-lot production methods feasible. It was then that bureaucracy become regarded as an appropriate model for industrial enterprises - tailor-made, in fact, for the large- scale manufacturing organisations that would reduce costs. This time, Germany took the lead in the introduction of bureaucratic methods into industrial organisation. Some significance attaches to the fact that Hegel wrote his Philosophy of Right, the bible of bureaucratic authoritarianism, in 1821, soon after moving to Berlin, but the significance is symptomatic rather than causal. It helps to register the fact that government administration was first seen - in Germany as well as France - as the appropriate field for developing modern bureaucracy. Britain lagged behind until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In the United States it actually met with strong resistance, so far as government was concerned; the spoils system was launched on the back of hostility towards the 'menace' of bureaucracy as well as the contention over states' rights. Other European countries moved towards some form of bureaucratic administration, but in fits and starts and at different speeds; some, like Spain, went into reverse at times. Only in Germany was the shift into bureaucratic structures accomplished speedily and comprehensively. By the third quarter of the century, Germany was beginning to overhaul and at many points outdistance the technical lead of British industry. It was very puzzling (and still is, as Charles Snow remarked in his 'Two Cultures' lecture.17), although there are possible clues. The social distinctions in so many social and political fields more rigid and often more crippling (given the course then set for Western society) than those prevailing in Britain, may well have made the transition to the clearly defined hierarchies of bureaucratic organisation simpler and more 'natural'. (After all, the presumption is that it was army organisation which Napoleon had taken as his model.) There was also the alliance which had formed itself in the later eighteenth century between the new ethos of nationalism and science and technology, as the presumptive heirs of the future; the cult of Reason in revolutionary France had been a variation of the same pattern. Such alliances were the orthodox basis of progressive ideas all over Europe, but the arrest of political liberalism in Germany may have channeled aspirations and effort much more powerfully in the direction of scientific, technical and economic achievement. Whatever the reason, there is little doubt that the rise of German industry was the consequence of the energy and enthusiasm with which academic scientists like Liebig and the members of the Berlin Physical Society, with the full backing of the Prussian government, preached their scientific gospel and, in the case of the Siemens brothers, themselves created industrial empires. The industrial protest movement of the early nineteenth century has its place in all the standard texts on British history, but there are nevertheless some peculiar aspects. It began spontaneously, to all appearances, in the last two or three years of the eighteenth century, with no connection with the specifically political protest movement which preceded it. After some twenty years of more or less continuous activity as a specifically 'industrial' movement, it 17 C.P.Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Rede Lecture), C.U.P., 1959. secondly, in the radical movements which began in the 1770's and 1780's, grew sporadically throughout the French wars, and burst into renewed life after 1815. Price increases, especially for food, which the twenty-three year wars with France brought in their train, were far bigger and longer-lasting than anything experienced for over a century. They were, moreover, national rather than local or regional, as they had been in the past, and were not accompanied by anything like an equivalent rise in pay-rates. Far from applying the traditional remedies of limiting prices in 'assize of bread' terms, the government was far more interested in removing the 'pernicious statutes' which, dead letter though they had become, remained as a possible basis of appeal to some kind of wage- arbitration (as it had been in 1811, by a committee of Lancashire weavers19). Much use was made of 'laissez-faire' principles in 1813, when the Statute of Labourers was finally repealed. No such appeal had been voiced in 1804, when parliament passed a Corn Law described as "the first attempt by a parliament of landlords to legislate purely in their own interest as owners of arable soil, and to secure for themselves and their tenants the high prices resulting from war and bad harvests between 1793 and 1801."20 Nor was it in 1813, when, with peace threatening to break out - with deplorable consequences for war-inflated food prices, yet another Corn Bill was introduced which would have raised the price of bread to famine level.21 Peace brought little remission to the succession of specifically industrial disturbances - although 'disturbance' is hardly a appropriate term for the orderly, almost disciplined, demonstration in Manchester, two years after the end of the war. The local yeomanry and a troop of hussars, brought in to 'maintain order', turned the demonstration into the 'Peterloo massacre', in which eleven people, including two women, were killed, and four hundred injured. But peace also brought a revival of political protest, and of the movement for parliamentary reform. The triumph of reform in 1832, limited as it was, and the subsequent decline of the industrial protest movement in the radical form it had assumed, protracted as that decline was, seems an almost textbook demonstration of the Marxian thesis about the bourgeois takeover of proletarian revolutionary movements. If it wasn't quite that, the course followed by the movement after the conjunction of the two forms of protest does approximate to a recent variant of the Marxian formula offered by Alexander Shtromas. It occurs in an analysis of dissent in the Soviet Union to which events since its publication in 1981 have given an uncannily prophetic character.22 In the first place, challenge to an oppressive, autocratic regime may arise within the established institutions of the regime, or outside them. However, to be effective, it requires the entry on to the publicly visible political scene of a distinct form of collective action, with its 19 E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 546-7. 20 E.L.Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815-1870 O.U.P., 1938, p. 58. 21 S.Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760-1815, p. 572. 22 A.Shtromas, Political Change and Social Development: The case of the Soviet Union, Verlag Peter Lang, 1981. own organisation and institutional forms. The change may be reformist ('within-system') or revolutionary ('system-rejective'), revolutionary including coup d'etat. 'Within-system' reformist action, once started, may, as we know, become 'system-rejective' and revolutionary. But the critical point is that in either case the challenging organisation, to have any hope of success, has to have a 'second pivot'. Shtromas applies the term to the organised movement of dissent itself, but the notion of 'pivot' is also applied - more appropriately - to the rise to public knowledge of two or more bodies of dissenting opinion. For the Soviet Union, he points to the evident presence of such bodies of dissent, each with a sizeable membership but with varying degrees of self- awareness and organisation. They exist among the technocratic elite, the army and industrial workers as well as among the 'cultural dissidents' which became familiar to the West and among nationalist and religious 'reactionaries' about whom - except for the Jews – the West knew precious little at the time, obvious though their presence has now become. What seems to be the case, from his account, is that it is the existence of these disparate unorganised bodies of people, each with their own quarrel with the established system, that provides the fulcrum (rather than pivot) for the organised movement of dissent to move against the established regime and, eventually, to break it. [In the event, of course, nationalist dissent made up an organised body strong enough to take the lead from the technocratic elite under Gorbachev as a 'second pivot' for its own purpose which, in the end, was to dissolve the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics into its component parts. The process - hardly a 'technique' - is illustrated in cursory fashion by Shtromas with instances from the history of Europe and the Third World over the past two or three centuries.23 The union of industrial protest with the reform movement had served its turn, but there were some occasions later when it was revived for specific purposes - notably in the Anti-Corn Law League. Even before this, though, the reform movement had produced its own 'intellectual radicals', among whom there were enough to take the labour theory of value which Ricardo had developed and use it to criticise the expropriation of the total product of industry by capital. One these first English socialists, Thomas Hodgskin, "was quite clear that the private ownership of the means of productions was the real issue: 'It is the overwhelming nature of the demands of capital, sanctioned by the laws of society, sanctioned by the customs of men, enforced by the legislature, and warmly defended by political economists, which keep, which ever have kept, and which ever will keep, as long as they are allowed and acquiesced in, the labourer in poverty and misery.'"24 A new phase started up after the July Revolution of 1830. The emergence of an administrative revolution in Britain in the 1830's was not, however, directly inspired by Napoleon's radical reconstruction of the national administrative system but by Benthamite utilitarianism (with its own links to the machine-mindedness of the republican ideologues of the 1790's) and the kind of liberal individualism which was imparted by - or read into - the economic ideas of Smith, Malthus and Ricardo. Largely because of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the distribution of population and on welfare, the first phase of the administrative revolution in 23 A.Shtromas, Political Change and Social Development, Chapter IV. 24 G. Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, Routledge, 1961, p.28. Britain made itself evident in a rigorous - indeed ruthless - reform of the machinery of local government, together with revision of the laws relating to poverty and the imposition of a system of inspection to superintend the working of both. The need for it was obvious enough. Population increased almost threefold in England alone, from something like six and a half million in 1750 to eighteen million in 1851. This increase had been accompanied by a movement of population which was draining the countryside and swelling the numbers in towns even more. By 1851 the number of agricultural labourers and shepherds amounted to just over one million, a small fraction of the employed population. But Leeds and Birmingham had doubled in size in thirty years; Manchester had over four times the population in 1831 it had had in 1774. 113 There were national variants of the theme. In Spain, it was reflected in opposition to the restoration in 1814 of the pre-1808 ancien regime stemming on one side from the military leaders who had fought against the French occupying armies and, on another, from the 'afrancesados' who had served, and learned, from them. 114 In France, there were the family networks of the old nobility, which once again dominated the army, the civil service, and the church. Confronting them were those who had been army officers under Napoleon, the men of property acquired since 1789, and the younger bourgeois generation, educated for entry into the meritocracy but, finding those ambitions denied, sought to release their frustration in political action, much of it secret and even conspiratorial. (The carbonari, an Italian organisation with links to France engineered by Buonarotti, who had been a close associate of Babeuf, had some 50,000 members by the early 1820's.) 147 The mid-nineteenth century was the time when the social order which had sustained public order since the Middle Ages (though with steadily diminishing authority) was finally replaced by public order sustained by law enforcement. 148 But most countries in Western Europe during the second quarter of the nineteenth century were increasingly preoccupied with promoting, or absorbing the impact of, the Industrial Revolution. Railways, steamships, together with the migration of working people to industrial cities made large-lot production methods feasible. It was then that bureaucracy become regarded as an appropriate model for industrial enterprises - tailor-made, in fact, for the large- scale manufacturing organisations that would reduce costs. 149 This time, Germany took the lead in the introduction of bureaucratic methods into industrial organisation. Some significance attaches to the fact that Hegel wrote his Philosophy of Right, the bible of bureaucratic authoritarianism, in 1821, soon after moving to Berlin, but the significance is symptomatic rather than causal. It helps to register the fact that government administration was first seen - in Germany as well as France - as the appropriate field for developing modern bureaucracy. Britain lagged behind until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In the United States it actually met with strong resistance, so far as government was concerned; the spoils system was launched on the back of hostility towards the 'menace' of bureaucracy as well as the contention over states' rights. Other European countries moved treated as compatible. Both support for the agreed goals of an organisation and personal ambition were generally regarded as necessary components of the moral system on which society must be founded if the kind of social order now envisaged was to survive. It was this ultimate conjunction which 'legitimised' career success. There prevailed in almost every area of social activity a level of discourse in which both kinds of endeavour were acknowledged as valid and reconcilable, a level at which initiative and enterprise might be seen as advancing both the interests of self and organisation. At the same time, both kinds of endeavour worked to serve the interests of those in command. 83 So, while there was now a sense in which society was organised as a cooperative system, it was at the same time a system which depended for its survival on maintaining a flow to the top places in society of those best qualified for them. To do this, a complex system of educational and occupational promotion open to merit was set up. But beyond this, it was essential, if members of society were to enter the race and compete as best they could, for them to regard success in society's terms as their highest personal goal. Their perception of this was much enhanced by the material rewards on offer. 84 In the first place, it is more or less inevitable that the open competition required by the meritocratic principle has been in practice a good deal less than perfect. This is not altogether deplorable. For one thing, it is questionable whether life would be worth living in a meritocratic society in which perfect competition prevailed; it would amount to a purpose- built Hobbesian world. In any case, modern society has had to settle for something less. Quite apart from the part played by careerism and internal politics, whatever the publicly announced criteria may be, promotion depends on the information available to the individual persons or groups of individuals who pass judgment on the merit of candidates for appointment and promotion. And both information and judgment may be imperfect or biased; the criteria applied may vary between seemingly identical cases; and they may well change over time. 85 Women were totally excluded until late in the nineteenth century, and even now, are underepresented in the higher reaches of most organisations. 86 This brief reference to the internal politics of organisations27 can serve to introduce a final point which should be made by way of qualification to this introductory account of the development of modern society in conformity with the principles of meritocratic bureaucracy. ' 28 87 This summary of the cultural significance attaching to the social class differences brought about by major changes in the structure of western societies consequent upon the 'Great Transformation' is not intended to displace the orthodox interpretation of the structural changes - which has been governed almost entirely by Marxist and counter-marxist renderings - but to supplement and so correct it. 27 It is perhaps worth remarking that in my own research experience (which extends from the BBC, BP, universities and hospitals to some three or four dozen industrial undertakings) I have encountered none in which internal politics does not play a part - and at times an important part - in its affairs. 28 W.G.Goode, "The Protection of the Inept", American Sociological Rev., Vol. 32, 1967, p.5. 1. Patriotism had been there before, of course, but it had manifested itself sporadically and, very often, uncertainly, and usually as a response to invasion or oppression by a foreign power, or else easily recognisable as xenophobia. Although triggered off by French aggression and the assumption by their French conquerors of social and cultural as well as military superiority, patriotism became either a recognised support of existing governments and social hierarchies (and thus a readily available endorsement of militarism, increasingly aggressive foreign policies, and enthusiastic support for the acquisition of colonial territories in Africa and South-east Asia) or the basis of popular movements in support of movements in support of national unity, as in Italy, or independence, as in Hungary.