Chapter 40: The Rise of the Liberals
From 1830 to 1848, a surge of liberalism swept through the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. It not only brought new political and economic reforms, it established the norms that still influence our politics and economic systems today.
Sources for this episode include:
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
Duncan, Mike. “Revolutions.” Season 6. 2017.
“Reforming Society in the 19th Century.” Living Heritage. www.parliament.uk
Reid, Robert. The Peterloo Massacre. Heinemann. 1989.
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage. 1966.
Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914. Grove Press. 2007.
Full Transcript
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It’s November 1830 in London. The First Industrial Revolution is in full swing. The British economy and population are growing. Steam-powered mill cities are flourishing. Railroads are going into operation. The burgeoning bourgeoises and Proletariat are now seeking representation in the country’s political order.
The local parishes – long the administrators of poor relief – are totally overwhelmed in this new industrial age, as the numbers of the needy are swelling in growing cities. Young children are working more than 12 hours a day in dangerous mills and mines. Frustrated workers rioted across the country during the past summer and autumn.
As a result, the Duke of Wellington – once a national hero for taking down Napoleon – is under siege as an unpopular Prime Minister. He was even met with jeers while he attended the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway back in September. As a Tory, the only reform he has even considered was last year’s successful Catholic Relief Act, which has allowed a Roman Catholic – the Irishman Daniel O’Connell – to take his seat in the House of Commons, much to the dismay of many British Protestants.
Finally, on November 15th, a vote of no confidence is held. Wellington is pushed out as Prime Minister. His cabinet is replaced by a new Whig government – the first in a quarter century. Led by a new Prime Minister, the controversial Lord Grey, the Whigs have an ambitious agenda of liberal reform.
That agenda (and the reaction to it) will be just the start of a tidal wave of change in Great Britain over the next two decades – a wave of change that still informs our politics today. By the end of the First Industrial Revolution, this wave of liberalism had fully crashed down on the United Kingdom – and on the Continent as well.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 40: The Rise of the Liberals
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Before we get started, I think I better make this clarification. When I talk about these “liberals”, I’m talking about “Classical Liberalism.” This is a distinction I’ve had to bring up before. It’s going to be important because the “liberal” label today – especially in the United States – doesn’t always fit the traditional definition of liberalism. In fact, many of the liberals I’m telling you about in this episode were more like modern libertarians than modern “liberals.”
Okay, so, to explain how we got here – in London, 1830 – we need to go back in time and north in geography. We need to go back to 1819 in Manchester.
In the years following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bank of England had made considerably poor decisions as the government cut back on military spending. A deep economic depression followed. Long-term unemployment spiked and wages fell, all happening in the midst of a great transition, as new technologies displaced traditional labor. Making the problems worse were the new Corn Laws, which made food expensive for the new industrial working class.
Both the employers and employees of this new industrial sector were frustrated by the government’s inability to effectively combat the crisis. But their political voice was limited, to say the least. Parliament was dominated by the old landed aristocracy. Political corruption was endemic. The more conservative Tory party always seemed to control government while the more reform-minded Whigs were perpetually relegated to the loyal opposition.
Conditions were ripe for that third bloc of political activists – the so-called “Radicals” who advocated for, among other things, a proto-socialist agenda and American-style democratic reforms, like universal adult male suffrage. Throughout the second decade of the 19th Century they held peaceful demonstrations across the country, which (nonetheless) led to violent suppression and arrests. You see, with the French Terror and the Luddites so fresh in recent memory, the government was loathe to give an inch to the Radicals.
Then in August 1819, the Manchester Patriotic Union Society – a growing organization of Radicals in Lancashire – planned for what they called a “great assembly.” Leading this public meeting would be the legendary orator and, arguably, Britain’s most important contemporary Radical, Henry Hunt.
Born in Wiltshire in 1773, Hunt had become a wealthy farmer and landowner. But despite his position, he had become drawn to Radical politics during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1812, Hunt fought an impressive campaign in a Bristol election and then, four years later, delivered impassioned speeches at London’s Spa Fields rallies.
According to contemporary accounts of his oratory,
“…it was that the expression of his lip was to be observed – the kind smile was exchanged for the curl of scorn, or the curse of indignation. His voice was bellowing; his face swollen and flushed; his griped hand beat as if it were to pulverize; and his whole manner gave token to a painful energy, struggling for utterance.”
Originally planned for August 9th, the “great assembly” was pushed back a week after local magistrates declared the intended gathering illegal. That Monday, August 16th, a crowd of roughly 70,000 men and some women and children – made up of organized contingents of Radicals – gathered in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, to hear Hunt speak. They were sober, well-dressed, and unarmed.
Government spies had learned the plans far in advance and, thus, had plenty of time to mobilize the army for the event. Less than an hour into Hunt’s speech, a local cavalry militia made its way to the field, intending to disperse the crowd and arrest the leaders. But some of these cavalrymen, who might have been drunk, started swinging their sabers and killing folks. Then an army regiment came in with bayonets.
The next ten minutes were chaos as the crowd stampeded to get out of there. As many as 15 people died and hundreds were injured. Blood was everywhere. Prominent Radicals, including Hunt, were arrested. Riots broke out across the Manchester area in the hours that followed.
In reference to the public space where it happened – St. Peter’s Field – and the army’s triumph four years earlier at Waterloo, the event went down in history (with some dark sardonicism) as the Peterloo Massacre.
Peterloo is one of those defining moments in the history of British democracy. While the rights and freedoms enjoyed by British subjects were preferable to the conditions of absolutist regimes on the Continent, this moment proved that not all was well with the political system. The powers that be weren’t just corrupt and inept, they were also capable of brutality.
To the Radicals, these problems had to do with representation.
It’s important to remember that, going back to Magna Carta, the idea that someone deserved political representation in government was tied to their degree of vested interest in the government. To be a true stakeholder in the country, you needed to be a major taxpayer – you needed to be a landholder.
To these ends, those landholders who also held a peerage title – first-born males of the nobility – would have a voice in the House of Lords. But even non-peers could be represented in – or sometimes even serve in – the House of Commons. The key was property ownership.
Well, perhaps this system made sense during the Middle Ages, but with the Industrial Revolution well underway, it had become seriously outdated.
Less than five percent of adult men could vote for their representatives to the House of Commons. (And as women had no real property rights, they had no right to vote.) Not only workers, but even those wealthy industrialists – paying taxes and contributing to the economy as much as (if not more than) the landed aristocrats – were often kept out of the electoral process.
But the problems went well beyond suffrage. For instance, those few who could vote had to do so by public ballot – the thinking being that, in an open society, everyone had the right to know who an elector was choosing. But of course, this meant that usually the vote was either being bought (sometimes with meals or liquor, sometimes with straight-up cash bribes) or coerced (usually by a powerful local landlord who would punish an elector if he voted for the wrong candidate). Often times, the “right” candidate was the son of a peer, who would serve in the Commons until his dad died and then he’d get bumped up to the Lords.
On top of this, the UK was a messy hodgepodge of local, historical traditions around voting, amounting to different election laws from town to town and county to county. Most problematic was that there was no process for regular redistricting, so a region that saw a huge boom or decline in population wouldn’t get any more or fewer seats in Parliament.
The result was that, by the 1831 election, more than a third of the House of Commons was made up of members representing so-called “rotten boroughs” and “pocket boroughs”. Perhaps the worst example was the constituency of Old Sarum, which had a population of zero but was represented by two MPs chosen by seven voters. The constituency of Dunwich, meanwhile, had once been a prosperous port and market town, but in the 1670s most of it fell into the sea. It still had two MPs chosen by 44 voters.
Meanwhile, the booming industrial cities of England – including Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham – effectively had no representation in Parliament.
Now, there were some who argued to maintain this system of government. The Tory Enlightenment theorist and politician, Edmund Burke, for example, defended it on the grounds that it was built on centuries of tested traditions that culminated in one of the world’s most stable political orders.* Basically, he argued, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
*Sorry, as I explain in a future episode, Burke was a conservative Whig, not a Tory.
And certainly, the landed aristocracy that controlled and benefited from this system had no reason to support reform. (I mean, why let a bunch of nobodies, who do not share our interests, get a say? Seriously, why would we do that?!)
But to the vast majority who were excluded from the political process, the system was becoming seen, more and more, as utterly indefensible. Among them was the journalist William Cobbett, a self-educated farmer and former military officer. He was relatively conservative when he began his political life, but by the Napoleonic Wars had become frustrated with the system and, increasingly, associated himself with the Radicals. He dubbed the British political order “Old Corruption” – an elaborate system of special privilege, bribery, and disregard for the masses.
Now, again, this vast majority of subjects included both bourgeois industrial capitalists and their Proletarian workers. But as industrialization became a greater and greater reality of everyday life in Britain, the old class distinctions between conservative landed aristocrat and liberal bourgeois capitalist did become less neat.
For one thing, many aristocrats were themselves jumping at industrial opportunities. Guys like the Duke of Bridgewater, Lord Dundas, Lord Ravensworth, Lord Strathmore, and others were willing to skirt class conventions for the sake of building wealth – sometimes as investors, sometimes as full-on entrepreneurs.
Even more common was for bourgeois industrialists to try climbing into the traditional aristocracy. One of the most famous was Robert Peel Jr. Born in 1750, he was the descendant of yeoman farmers who dabbled in cottage industry textiles. But when Peel saw what Richard Arkwright was accomplishing with the water frame to card and spin cotton on an industrial scale, he raised the necessary capital to build his own mill near Bury, north of Manchester. By the 1790s, he was becoming fantastically rich and expanded with additional factories.
It was also around this time Peel became interested in politics. But unlike most early industrialists, Peel was neither a religious nonconformist nor a Whig. He was Anglican and a Tory. And in the 1790s, that gave him a path to political empowerment not available to most of his fellow industrialists. For one thing, he was allowed to serve in Parliament. And so, he bought an old gentry estate and a rotten borough, became an MP, and was made a Baronet. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, he was able to rise from obscurity into the aristocracy, and secured a political future for his much more famous son, the second baronet, also named Sir Robert Peel.
Most industrialists had to go another way – they had to mount a pressure campaign. Unlike the autocratic regimes of the continent, the UK allowed a relatively free society to flourish, with press freedoms and the right to petition. Using these rights, the bourgeoisie funded newspapers, pamphlets, and petition drives. They organized meetings to discuss legislation and other public issues. Some became Radicals, but many were run-of-the-mill reformist Whigs.
And so, when 1830 finally came around, and the Whigs took power, they seized the opportunity.
Charles Grey was born into an old but rising aristocratic family in Northumberland in 1764. His father, also named Charles, had been a prestigious army general in Britain’s wars throughout the second half of the 18th Century. Throughout his life he had received several advancements in title, in recognition of his service, including the elevation to an earldom shortly before he died.
The younger Charles was an intellectually gifted heir who received a Cambridge education and then got elected to the House of Commons at the age of 22. Grey soon became a prominent Whig and, over the next 20 years, worked his way up to become a frontbencher.
During the brief Whig government of 1806, he served as the First Lord of the Admiralty and then Foreign Secretary, as well as the Leader of the House of Commons. When his father died in 1807 he moved up to the House of Lords as the second Earl Grey. (And in case you’re wondering, yes, it is he who that blend of black tea is named after.)
After spending decades in the opposition, Grey finally succeeded Wellington as Prime Minister after the fateful vote of 1830. In a national election held the next year, his Whigs secured a landslide victory, giving them the mandate they needed to finally bring some reform.
The major bill was introduced by Grey himself: The Great Reform Act of 1832. It took three attempts to pass it – twice it had been approved by the Commons and twice it had been resisted by Grey’s fellow Lords. But after nationwide riots broke out in response to those dismissals, Wellington finally persuaded the Lords to accept the measure.
The Reform Act was the single-most significant constitutional change in Britain since the Glorious Revolution, nearly a century-and-a-half earlier. It abolished 143 rotten borough seats, replacing them with 130 seats that included representation for new industrial towns. Similar bills were passed for Scottish and Irish seats. Voters would have to live in the districts for which they cast ballots. The vote was extended to all men who owned real property worth at least £10 or paid rent of at least £50 per year. This made for a more than 60% increase in the number of eligible voters.
But this meant that the percentage of men who could vote went from like 5% to 8%. It was far short of what the Radicals had died for at Peterloo. And among the MPs who voted against the Reform Act was none other than the great orator, Henry Hunt, elected just the year before, who was incensed by how far the measure fell short of true democracy. The vast majority of working men would get no say and thus, in effect, no true representation.
But their bosses would. And in election after election that followed, the number of middle-class MPs – usually nuevo-rich manufacturers – grew steadily. And in time, they would provide the numbers finally needed to address the Corn Laws – hated by Whigs and Radicals alike. But beyond that, they largely left their former allies in the dust, fighting against worker protection laws and further expansions of the franchise.
But all that’s still to come.
In the short term, Earl Grey was still advancing a reform agenda with the Parliament he had. In 1833, he pushed through another major legislative staple of liberalism – the Slavery Abolition Act, ending the abhorrent institution across nearly all of the British Empire.
Structured kind of like a compulsory purchase policy, it compensated slaveowners with a total of £20 million (the modern equivalent of about $130 billion) for the liberty of their black workers (who, it was hoped, they would now hire as freed laborers). And for this, the British would give themselves a big pat on the back for years to come as global leaders in abolition.
Between these reforms and a bill that introduced some minor limitations on child labor, the king was becoming a bit…mmmmm…weary of the pace of change. Grey started to slow down and then stepped down, allowing his Whig successor – Lord Melbourne – to take over as PM in 1834. But shortly before he did, Grey managed to get one more item on the agenda through Parliament – a New Poor Law.
The old parish system, which had been responsible for poor relief since the Elizabethan Age, was unable to keep up in this era of unprecedented population growth and rising poverty. The government turned to the theories of Utilitarianism and the political economists of Classical Liberalism – namely Malthus and Ricardo. As they saw it, poor relief encouraged employers to pay lower wages. Thus, if you could cut off poor relief, you could maybe stabilize the economic conditions of the working class.
What they came up with was perhaps well-intentioned, but it was seriously draconian on face-value. It sought to disincentivize the poor from seeking poor relief by worsening the conditions of the pauper workhouses and splitting up poor families. It also tried to disincentivize sex outside marriage by reducing support available to unwed mothers. And it was this system, created by this bill, that was so decried by Charles Dickens in “A Christmas Carol” (as you may remember from the Holiday Bonus Episode).
Now, what normally happens when you have a period of significant action? That’s right, an equal and opposite reaction comes along. And that’s just what came in the form of the 1834 Tamworth Manifesto, delivered by none other than Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet.
With his father’s industrial riches, Peel had been able to secure an Oxford education, studying the Classics, mathematics, and later law. In 1809, at the age of 21, he got himself a rotten borough in Ireland and entered the House of Commons as a Tory. Sticking close to Wellington, he rose through the ranks of government over the next two decades. Perhaps his most notable contributions came in the 1820s when, as Home Secretary, he pushed through major criminal justice reforms and established a Metropolitan Police Force for London, which were affectionately known by his nickname (and this remains a colloquial British term for “police” even today) – they were “Bobbies”.
The Tamworth Manifesto marked Peel as the emerging leader of his party. He accepted the Great Reform Act as reality and the possibility that additional reforms may be needed for the country in the future. But generally, he argued, it was time to pump the breaks. Too much change, he said, risked “a perpetual vortex of agitation.”
It’s with the publication of this manifesto that historians mark the end of the old Tory party. It was, in effect, the creation of a new Conservative Party – the one that still exists (and holds the reins of government) today. Shortly thereafter, Peel was ushered in as the first Prime Minister from a middle-class background.
Now, his first stint as PM was a bit of a hiccup, due to a rather bizarre controversy involving the new Queen Victoria. But when he stepped in again in 1841, he would have one of the most consequential ministries of the era.
A lot of it had to do with the new industrial regulations he supported – and I’ll get to that in a month or two. But it also had to do with one more key item on the liberal agenda.
With the economy in recession and the deficit rising, Peel introduced a new income tax. The result was that, when the economy improved, revenues far surpassed expectations. And it meant that another form of taxation – that of import duties – could come back up for discussion. The liberal dream of free trade would live to see another day.
The tipping point finally came in 1846, as the British government was weighing its options for how to respond to one of the greatest humanitarian nightmares they ever faced: the Irish potato famine.
With a million Irish peasants starving to death – and millions more leaving the island – Peel made the moral decision to break with his Conservative Party allies from the landed gentry. With a small cohort of his loyal Conservative partisans – now remembered as “the Peelites” – he joined with the Whigs and the Radicals to narrowly pass a repeal to the Corn Laws.
With this victory, cheaper food could be imported to the kingdom, hopefully to relieve the situation in Ireland. But it also was a longtime goal of liberal reformers, who had finally – seven decades after Smith’s Wealth of Nations – made their first major score in the advancement of free trade.
Peel, however, was finished. He had betrayed his fellow Conservatives, and he resigned almost immediately after the bill passed. His Peelites went on to join the Whigs and a handful of Radicals to form the new Liberal Party.
1830 had seen bourgeois empowerment and the cause of liberal reform burst onto the main stage of British politics for the next two decades. And in that same year – and over the same two decades – a similar situation was playing out down in France.
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Following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, the French negotiated with the allied powers to restore their old monarchy. Now, I have to acknowledge a mistake I made back in Chapter 21, when I said the Bourbon monarchy was restored with Louis XVI’s grandson on the throne. It was not his grandson, it was in fact his younger brother – the Comte de Provence – who was also named Louis.
This new king, Louis XVIII, hoped to preserve the French tradition of absolutist monarchy…at least in theory. He believed a monarch’s powers were derived from God alone, not from a will of the monarch’s subjects. So, a constitution was out of the question. But he also knew that pretending like the Declaration of the Rights of Man had never happened, or that the French people would be satisfied with restored absolutism (or certainly the idea of restoring the Ancien Regime in all its corrupt, inept old ways) would be doomed to fail. The world had changed too much. France had changed too much.
So instead he issued a royal charter, guaranteeing certain rights and freedoms for the French people, as well as the creation of a national elected legislature. (Albeit, elected from among rich property owners.) But these guarantees were the product of Royal benevolence, not some blasphemy like “natural rights” or a social contract.
Now, this compromise – between theory and practice – might have been just fine, if the moderate Louis XVIII remained king forever. But like we all do eventually, he died in 1824, leaving the crown to his younger and much, much more right-wing brother, the Comte d'Artois, now styling himself Charles X. There to support him was a legislature which, for the past three years, was dominated by a faction called the Ultras (because they were ultra-royalist). And unlike his predecessor, Charles had produced an heir, meaning the throne wouldn’t pass to the next in line, his much more liberal cousin, the Duc d’Orleans.
But for years, Charles’ attempts to move France away from his brother’s system of compromised monarchy, (away from protections of free speech, free worship, etc. and toward Ancien Regime principles) were stifled by the legislature’s upper house – the chamber of peers – which Louis XVIII had stacked with Bonaparte’s guys for the sake of national unity and whatnot.
It also didn’t help matters when Charles disbanded the Paris National Guard – made up of bourgeois patriots who were skeptical about the Bourbons – when they didn’t give him a warm enough reception one year when he inspected their ranks. (Though, foolishly, he let them keep their guns.)
All the while, Charles is constantly getting lampooned in the free press, which he doesn’t want in the first place, and it is driving him crazy. And then there was the election of 1827, which saw the Ultras lose seats in a liberal surge.
Finally, in 1829, Charles attempted a maneuver to get a ministry he supported, even if his legislature wouldn’t. He delayed the reconvening of the legislature and then invaded Algeria to distract everyone. (And this is why Algeria became a French colony for over 130 years.) When the legislature finally reconvened the next year, Charles dismissed it and called for new elections for June 23rd. But rather than get his way, his Ultras got trounced by the Doctrinaires faction, liberals who favored constitutional monarchy.
On July 6th, 1830, with no other options left for getting his way, Charles decided to invoke Article 14 of his brother’s charter – the emergency provisions – which gave him absolute power. He then ordered press censorship, the dissolution of the legislature, and new rules for a new election to be held that autumn. And these rules were essentially designed to strip the bourgeoisie of the vote, leaving the franchise almost entirely to large landowners. When these Four Ordinances, as they were called, were published in the official state newspaper on July 26th, it provoked such a strong reaction that Charles’ reign would survive for just one more week.
First of all, bourgeois manufactures – who, while less significant in France than Britain at this point, are nonetheless becoming an increasingly powerful bloc – were pissed about the new election law. No surprise. But even other factions of the bourgeoisie were concerned, most notably bankers, like our old friends Casimir Perrier and James de Rothschild, who viewed absolutist monarchy as bad for economic stability. (I mean, remember how the Ancien Regime couldn’t pay their bills while the British Parliament and Bank of England was turning their county into the global superpower in the 1700s?)
But no industry was more alarmed than the newspaper industry, which, as we’ve discussed a few times recently, had been going through a major growth period over the last few decades. They weren’t just upset about the assault on the free press as a principle, but were also worried about what would come of their jobs under censorship, from the editors down to the typesetters and papermakers.
The most prominent to speak out was the journalist Adolph Thiers, who drafted an editorial for his paper, The National, calling on citizens to revolt. As he put it, “The legal regime has been interrupted: that of force has begun. In this situation, obedience ceases to be a duty!” 43 other journalists signed their names to it as well.
Even before it hit the presses, a mob gathered in the gardens of the Palais Royal. Many hadn’t worked that day because of a holiday and, thus, got drunk instead. And when police pushed them out onto the streets to close up, they got agitated, and started chanting things like “Down with the Bourbons!” and “Long live the Charter!” They also started destroying the new gas-lit street lamps in Paris (shout out Chapter 37) creating a dark city at night once again, and, thus, the conditions for revolution.
They moved through the darkening streets to the Ministry of Finance, where they started throwing rocks at the building. Others attacked Charles’ hated prime minister, hurling bricks at his carriage.
The next morning, Thiers’ “Declaration of Resistance” hit the streets, and folks started mobilizing. Now, the liberal Doctinares were trying to figure out how to resist the King here without going down the dreadful path of revolution again. But the workers and radicals in the streets, meanwhile, were itching for a brawl. Protesters went up against the army. Several got shot. And with the city under military occupation, the urban mob began constructing barricades and stocking up on arms and ammunition. (Hmmm, maybe the Bourbon government should have disarmed the Paris National Guard before sacking them.)
A day later, the mob took over city hall and hoisted up the French tricolor flag – a flag the Bourbons had done away with after their restoration. (In fact, Charles had once suggested capital punishment should be the sentence for anyone possessing a tricolor at home.) This was a symbol everyone could rally around, from bourgeois liberals and constitutional monarchists to working class radicals and republicans to Bonapartists and French nationalists and really anyone fed up with the current king.
The army and royal guards tried restoring order, but by this point the mob was the dominant military force, trapping soldiers behind barricades and shooting at them from the windows above. The Doctrinaires, meanwhile, tried negotiating a solution to the crisis, insisting that no actions would be taken to quell the uprising until after the Four Ordinances were repealed. But Charles refused to give in. And before he got the chance to reconsider, a banker-turned-Doctrinaire politician named Jacques Laffitte decided what the goal of all this chaos should be: Charles X should be replaced on the throne by his liberal cousin, the Duc d’Orleans.
Way back in 1643, King Louis XIII died, leaving the throne to his 4-year-old son, Louis XIV. But the young monarch also had a younger brother, Philippe. In 1660, Philippe was made Duc d’Orleans and — despite the fact that he was quite openly gay — he fathered several children, including a male heir. Thus the Capetian dynasty now had two branches: a senior Bourbon branch and a cadet Orleans branch. And the ducs d’Orleans would play important roles in government during the 17th and 18th centuries, one even serving as regent during the childhood of the young King Louis XV. But the Bourbons were always suspicious of their cousins, who were always poised to take the throne if the senior branch couldn’t produce enough male heirs.
Louis Philippe was born the heir to this House of Orleans in 1773. His father is known to history as Philippe Égalité – the name he took during the French Revolution after renouncing the title “Duc d’Orleans” – and to us as the employer of the soda ash scientist Nicolas Leblanc (shout out Chapter 15!). Philippe Égalité was an Enlightenment era liberal who raised his son on his ideas and using the educational theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
During the French Revolution, Louis Philippe served in the army against the Austrians. But when the Jacobins turned France into a republic, his commanding officer plotted to switch sides – joining with the Austrians to invade France and stop the revolution from spiraling out of control. The plot was found out and this officer had to flee in exile to Austria, taking Louis Philippe with him. So now Louis Philippe has unwittingly found himself in the émigré community, and for it, the Committee of Public Safety decided to Guillotine his father.
Over the next 21 years, Louis Philippe – styling himself the Duc d’Orleans – lived in different places across Europe and even in the United States for a time. He finally came back to France, along with his Bourbon cousins, after Napoleon’s first defeat and exile. He then weathered Napoleon’s Hundred Days and supported the new kings of the Bourbon restoration.
But throughout the Bourbon restoration, he shuddered at the increasingly conservative direction the senior branch was taking. Like his father, he believed in constitutional monarchy and liberal reforms. He would entertain fellow liberals – many from among the rising bourgeoisie – at his property at the Palais Royal. And he acted like a member of the bourgeoisie. He did his own business dealings and even sent his kids to school, rather than hire tutors like most aristocrats. And by 1830, the Duc d’Orleans had become a beloved figure among the liberal Doctrinaires – perhaps the best chance they had for the dream of constitutional monarchy.
So, with their regime change plan in place, the Doctrinaires took it upon themselves to become the leaders of this July Revolution. Our old friend, the now 73-year-old Marquis de Lafayette reassembled the National Guard disbanded by Charles. But even before they could gather, Paris had fallen. The army had fled.
Louis Philippe wasn’t actually brought into the conversation about the regime change until it was out in the open. Laffitte had Thiers print up a bunch of posters calling for the Duc to replace his cousin, then he sent Thier to go offer the throne to the Duc in person.
When Thiers arrived, Louis Philippe had actually fled, thinking he was getting arrested by agents of Charles. The offer was instead accepted on his behalf by his sister and confidante, Adélaïde. When he eventually got the offer in person, Louis Philippe actually hesitated and had to be convinced by the Doctrinaire politicians that, “if don’t take the crown, then the mob in the street will declare a republic — and then we’ll all probably die by the guillotine, just like last time.” The Duc accepted and signed a proclamation to take the reins of the revolution.
Now, around this same time, Charles has finally given in and signed an order to repeal the Four Ordinances, but he is just a little too late in this fast moving chain of events. For one thing, many of his armed forces have, by this point, defected to Louis Philippe. So finally, Charles gave in and both he and his son, the Dauphin, abdicated the throne, passing it to Charles’ 10-year-old grandson. But nobody was having it and 11 days later the legislature declared Louis Philippe king.
With this, Louis Philippe could – and did – make the claim that his power was derived from a will of the people. The old, royal absolutist idea about a divine right of kings was officially dead. And he was not titled Louis Philippe I, King of France. He was Louis Philippe I, King of the French.
The old charter was seriously amended and a new Charter of 1830 was issued by the king and sent to the legislature. They made their own amendment too, guaranteeing the tricolor as the official flag of France. The new charter was, for all intents and purposes, a written constitution.
As the July Monarchy continued over the next 18 years, it gradually became more and more a parliamentary democracy. Louis Philippe, meanwhile, significantly cut back the old glitz and glamour of the throne, behaving frugally. He was sometimes called the “Citizen King” or the first “bourgeois monarch.” It was even noted how he sometimes dressed more like a banker than a royal. Also during these years, industrialization grew significantly as liberal economic policies were enacted.
The problem with that was – well, all the problems that came with industrialization everywhere else. People left the countryside for the cities, which became overcrowded and polluted. Worker protections were cut back. Folks were working too much and earning too little while industrialists profited mightily. The country saw several failed uprisings during these years.
And the politicians of 1830 had been right – many in the mob did want to see France become a republic. Many others wanted a return to the days of the French empire and the Bonaparte dynasty. (And, as it happened, the mob would very soon get all of those things in very short succession.) New economic and political philosophies – including Utopian Socialism and anarchism – started taking root in France stronger than anywhere else.
Finally, in the late 1840s, bad harvests led to a tipping point. In 1848, yet another revolution took place. It would mark the end of Louis Philippe’s reign, the end of monarchy in France, and – as it happens – the end of the First Industrial Revolution.
But all of that is for another time.
Next, let’s turn our attention to the east – because even though it was far behind Britain and France, liberalism was also starting to make gains in Germany.
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Our modern notion of Germany is pretty clear cut. But that’s a pretty big departure from most of German history.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the German people of Europe were consolidated under the Holy Roman Empire. But that empire was never itself super-consolidated. It was made up of smaller vassal territories which supported the emperor. But when the Protestant Reformation came around, it created extreme divisions within the empire – with the princes of some territories going the Protestant route (especially in the north) and the princes of others sticking with the Roman Catholic Church (especially in the south).
Many of these divisions were formalized by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, ending the Thirty Years War and creating distinct political territories within the empire. And in the years that followed, two rival powers within the empire began to emerge – the mostly Protestant, Hohenzollern-ruled Kingdom of Prussia, and the mostly Catholic, Hapsburg-ruled Archduchy of Austria. And those Hapsburgs usually doubled as Holy Roman Emperor. But finally, the empire was brought to its final end by Napoleon in 1806.
After Napoleon’s defeat, there was some question about what came next. And this is where we need to introduce one of the most important politicians of the 19th Century, Klemens von Metternich.
Metternich was born into a minor noble family at their estate near Coblenz on the Rhine in 1773. His father had served as a diplomat for the Holy Roman Empire, meaning the family had some loyalty to their Austrian overlords. The heir to his father’s land, title, and (hopefully) responsibility in government someday, Metternich was sent to the University of Strasbourg and then to the more conservative University of Mainz to study law. It was during these formative years in his education that the French Revolution first began and then went crazy.
And things took a turn south for the Metternich family because of the French Revolution. His father’s diplomatic role to the Austrian Netherlands was cut short thanks to revolutionary France invading and annexing the Austrian Netherlands. Then the French did the same to the Rhineland, including the Metternich family’s land holdings. With nothing else for them, they left for Vienna.
In 1795 though, young Metternich’s fortunes began to improve when he married Countess Eleonore von Kaunitz, the granddaughter of the former longtime (and hugely influential) Austrian chancellor, Wenzel von Kaunitz. The marriage brought him a large dowry, but more importantly, access to the politically powerful. For the next 14 years, Metternich continued to rise in a successful diplomatic career which included the role of Austrian ambassador to Prussia, in which he tried to convince the northerners to join the fight against France. But they didn’t, and instead General Bonaparte came in and ended the Holy Roman Empire.
So then, Metternich became Austrian Ambassador to France from 1806 to 1809. Then his country decided to fight back against French dominance once again. It was such a disaster for Austria that the politicians who recommended it were ousted. And to fill the role of Austrian Foreign Minister was the 36-year-old Klemens von Metternich.
As Foreign Minister, Metternich built the European alliance that finally defeated Napoleon. And then he brought the allies and the Bourbons together, to the Congress of Vienna, where he would chair the talks to figure out what a post-Napoleonic Europe would look like. France would lose almost all of the conquered territory, while Russia, Prussia, and Austria would magically get new territory. The arrangement was primarily designed to forge a new balance of power – and thus, prevent future wars – among the big European players.
But it also had another objective. Giving non-Austrian territories to Austria, giving non-Prussian territories to Prussia, and giving non-Russian territories to Russia was also designed to give Europe’s most conservative, absolute-monarchist regimes more power, and thus, more ability to stifle the forces of liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism, which Metternich detested. As he saw it, “it was liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism in France that led us here in the first place.” To Metternich, stuff like talk of a constitution is what leads to guys like Napoleon marching armies up and down the Continent.
So, while he certainly didn’t believe Europe could, you know, go back to a Medieval order, Metternich did want to prevent political reform as much as possible. And to those ends, he sought to defeat liberal ideas like free trade and democratic institutions. Furthermore, he wished to limit the new industrial developments that seemed to go hand-in-hand with these new ways of thinking. The bourgeoisie, especially, was under constant suspicion of fomenting revolution.
When it came to the question of the old, Holy Roman Empire, a balance was struck. There would be no German unification. There would instead be a loose concoction called the German Confederation, made up of lands like Baden, Hanover, Saxony, Hesse-Kassel, Württemberg, Luxembourg, etc., as well as some free cities like Hamburg and Frankfurt. But it would be dominated by the two major powers: Austria and Prussia. And they would work to keep the status quo in place as much as possible, creating a centralized means of punishing anyone with ideas of popular sovereignty or participation in government, as well as a very decentralized administration of the economy, leading to a fractured – rather than a common – market for trade and commerce.
For nearly 20 years, the German peoples endured this loose confederation as well as its backward political and economic implications. Others decided to leave and make their way to a new country – the most liberal in the world and undergoing strong economic growth – the United States. They’d be America’s first wave of immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity.
In 1817, the southern Kingdom of Württemberg sent a young official to the river port town of Heilbronn, to persuade would-be emigrants from leaving. The government was afraid these folks would lose all their money en route to the coast before setting sail for America, and then come home paupers in need of state support.
The official interviewed the would-be emigrants and found many deep-seated grievances, like exorbitant local taxes, ancient tithes, and other laws held over from feudalism. One interviewee even told him, “We would rather be slaves in America than citizens in Weinsberg.”
The official was dismayed by these responses, as he was actually part of a movement within the government hoping to modernize Württemberg and bring the Industrial Revolution there.
His name was Georg Friedrich List.
Born in Reutlingen in 1789, Friedrich List was the son of a successful tanner. When both his brother and mother died within a couple years of each other – both thanks (as he believed) to ruthless bureaucrats – List was obliged to help the family business. But he didn’t like it very much, and instead sought a career in bureaucracy, hoping to reform the corrupt system from within. He became an accountant and later undersecretary in the civil service, writing critical internal reports.
Then in 1817 he accepted a position as Professor of Public Administration at the University of Tübingen. But as an advocate for reform, List ran into trouble with university authorities – universities were Metternich’s top target for suppressing liberalism – and so he left his post a couple years later.
You see, List had recently agreed to become secretary of a new group called the Union of Merchants, which advocated for an end to customs duties within the German Confederation.
As List explained,
“38 customs boundaries cripple inland commerce, and produce much the same effect as ligatures which prevent the free circulation of the blood. The merchant trading between Hamburg and Austria or Berlin and Switzerland must traverse ten states, must learn ten customs tariffs, must pay ten successive transit dues. Anyone who is so unfortunate as to live on the boundary line between three or four states spends his days among hostile tax gatherers and custom house officials; he is a man without a country… Only the remission of the internal customs, and the erection of a general tariff for the whole federation, can restore national trade and industry and help the working classes.”
What List and the Union of Merchants hoped to accomplish was a customs union for the confederation – a Zollverein. This way, you could move your good from Berlin to Vienna and pay (at most) one customs duty.
Out of his academic job, List ran for the Württemberg assembly and won a seat in 1820. It didn’t take long for him to get in trouble again, as he had signed a petition calling for the abolition of local tariffs to be replaced by a wealth tax.
For that, the King of Württemberg had him arrested for sedition. But before his sentencing, List snuck out of Württemberg and made his way to France, settling as an undocumented immigrant in Strasbourg. He was soon run out of Strasbourg and settled in Switzerland, then run out of Switzerland and eventually made his way to America in 1825.
List then settled in a German community in Reading, Pennsylvania and became a farmer. He also got involved in the railroad and canal projects newly underway.
But eventually, List returned to his love of intellectual agitation. He started editing a German newspaper in Reading and started studying economics. In particular, he was influenced by the ideas of our old friend, Alexander Hamilton, and the French journalist-turned-politician, Adolph Thiers.
Given his support for the Zollverein, you’d think he was a big supporter of Adam Smith style free trade. But not really. The successful economic situation he saw playing out in America suggested a different approach was necessary.
As he wrote of his new country,
“Here you see rich and powerful states arise out of the wilderness. It was here that it first became clear to me how the economy of a people develops step by step. A process which required a succession of centuries in Europe unfolds here in front of our eyes – the transition from a condition of wilderness into animal husbandry, then into a developed agriculture, followed by manufacturing and commerce… Here the simple farmer understands the practical means for elevating agriculture and his income far better than the shrewd scholars in the Old World; he seeks to draw manufacturers and industries into his vicinity.
List now believed that certain economies – that is, developing economies – need certain protectionist policies for their burgeoning industries. Remember how in Chapter 32, liberal Latin American governments had adopted free trade and then their factories got wiped out by low-priced British imports? And remember how in Chapter 33, the United States passed a tariff on British textiles after the War of 1812, and then had a booming textile industry in New England?
List believed this “American System” (as he called it) was also the way forward for an unindustrialized Germany: A nationally-regulated economy with internal free trade but also with certain external trade tariffs, in order to protect new industries. The Zollverein could do both.
In 1830, List was granted his American citizenship. He was then sent to the Kingdom of Saxony, where he would serve as the American consul. In this role, he now got involved in the building of railroads across Germany. Railroads, List believed, wouldn’t just speed up the transport of goods in Germany, it would inevitably lead to the fall of customs barriers.
And he was right. Many German states were already getting frustrated by their slow economic growth and talking about how to fix it. Prussia had eliminated all of their own internal customs barriers, and now wanted other states to join them.
In 1833, fourteen states (including Prussia) agreed to a series of treaties to merge existing customs unions, creating the Zollverein – much along the lines List was promoting. Saxony, Hanover, Bavaria, Frankfurt, and List’s native Württemberg were all among them. Critically, though, Metternich’s Austria stayed out.
And in avoiding this little bit of liberalism, Austria made a critical error for its own future. Over the next 80 years, the Austrian empire declined in power as it industrialized less, and slower, than its rivals. Prussia, meanwhile, would see huge industrial advancement and growth in power, eventually forming a largely-unified Germany (though, without Austria) and seeing powerful economic and technological transformation.
But Friedrich List would not live to see it. Ever the intellectual agitator, he continued to fall out with people. By 1846, he was back to working as a journalist in Europe, but not making any money. He left one morning, complaining of headache, on his way to see a doctor. He was found two days later in a field, where he had shot himself.
Two years later, the now-Austrian Chancellor, Klemens von Metternich, would have his own tragic downfall. The revolutions of 1848 had come. Unable to contain the liberal, radical, and nationalist urges of the many peoples of the Hapsburg Empire, Metternich was forced to resign.
The rise of the liberals, which truly began to take off in 1830, hit a stumbling block in 1848. Because from the get-go, their rise was thanks in part to the efforts of more radical elements. And as soon as the liberal bourgeoisie got what they wanted, they were suddenly uninterested in the objectives of their Radical Proletariat allies. Once they got the vote in Britain, they had no interest in giving it to the working class. When they got the constitutional monarchy in France, they had no interest in going a step further toward a republic. Heck, some of these bourgeois liberals were the bosses of the Proletariat Radicals, and definitely had no interest in helping them get better wages or working conditions. That was the case in all three countries.
(And in case you’re wondering, the entire Marxist orthodoxy of the bourgeoisie and Proletariat is derived specifically from the experience of these two decades, which can make things really confusing when you try talking about a bourgeoisie and Proletariat class struggle today. I mean, a lot has happened since then!)
But the working class would continue on with the struggle. They’d fight for the vote in Britain, forming what’s known as the Chartist Movement. And in France, Germany, and elsewhere, it was they who formed the frontlines in the uprisings of 1848.
And across the industrializing world, they would seek to bring some control to their working lives and social conditions. As the first Industrial Revolution was coming to a close, the world they had once known was changed. They had lost their guilds. They had lost the clean, healthy environments they had once known. They had even lost control of their own families. So, let’s talk about these workers and their lives – next time, on the Industrial Revolutions.
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