The Liberal party split over the Home Rule decision of 1886. According to Parry, the “Liberal party did not fall because of sectionalism or Whig inflexibility but because of Gladstone’s distance from the Liberal tradition.”[1] Gladstone was certainly different from most Liberals. He was first and foremost a Peelite and a High Churchman, and many of his views frustrated his counterparts. He held a curious notion of the role of the people in checking executive shortcomings and his rhetoric was often denounced as Jesuitical and democratic. However, if the success of Palmerstonianism was based on its ability to tap middle-class public opinion, then it can also be argued that the success of Gladstone was rooted firmly in the fact, at least he was able to convince contemporaries, so that he had his finger on the pulse of outdoor opinion. After 1867, Britain it appeared had become a quasi-democracy with the establishment of household male suffrage in the boroughs. The electorate and with it the notion of what public opinion was seemed a lot broader. Nor could it be bribed and cajoled so easily by a few solicitors with a personal knowledge of the local oligarchy; a point made more difficult by the Corrupt Practices Act. Rather, public opinion had to be listened to and lead. This was not a new phenomenon for the Liberals, who regularly stressed the importance of didactic aristocratic leadership in representing the interests of public opinion throughout the nineteenth-century. However, now the notion of who made up this public opinion seemed a lot broader and it was largely due to Gladstone that the Liberals were able to reassure outdoor opinion that the party listened to its concerns. In this way, Gladstone does not seem so far removed from the Liberal tradition, but merely a Whig-Liberal one, which stressed anti-clericalism, piecemeal constitutional reform and open debate. This link between popular forces and the party did not begin in earnest until 1876 and only really began to develop into a potent force on the eve of the 1880 election. This more than anything may explain why the Liberals were defeated in 1874 but were able to reestablish their position in 1880 as the natural ruling party in Britain.
The election defeat of 1874 in fact seemed to represent the loss of the traditional Liberal support base. Gladstone must take some blame for this. Though thorough research on the election of 1874 has hitherto yet to be undertaken, it seems likely, as Parry suggests, that the reason for the Liberal defeat was “a church in danger cry” following the various reforms of Gladstone’s ministry, particularly regarding Ireland and state education, which represented Gladstone’s distance from the Whig-Liberal anti-clerical tradition. Paradoxically however Gladstone had been able to unify the party fairly successfully around the issue of Irish church disestablishment in 1868. This may seem less surprising however when it is remembered that appropriation was the tradition rallying cry of the Whig-Liberals from 1835 onwards. Though most Liberals upheld the superiority of the Protestant creed and Reformation principles, it must be remembered that the majority were fairly undogmatic when it came to religion; in fact since the days of the Grand Tour their principles were based more firmly on cosmopolitanism and rationalism than religious bigotry and so it is not surprising that, realizing that the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland seemed to be doing more harm than good, were willing to shrug their shoulders and accept disestablishment. Gladstone however was a religious zealot. He did not necessarily see the Protestant Church as in any way superior to the Catholic one, ultramontism notwithstanding, but instead saw both as members of an original undivided Christian church. It was these views which caused so much controversy and ultimately led to the loss of 1874. Here, I am referring to the problems of his Irish University Bill of 1873. The main issue with it was this it seemed to grant extensive and unprecedented power to the Catholics. Most Liberals felt that the obvious solution to the Irish University problem was either the abolition of the Tests at Trinity, or increasingly the concurrent endowment of both the Catholic colleges and Trinity, advocated by Hartington and Russell, which would please Catholics and at the same time help to prop up Protestantism. Gladstone offered neither but advocated removing the examinational powers of Trinity and instead hand these powers over to a secular authority to which all colleges, regardless of denomination would refer to. It was feared that because the colleges would have an influence on the syllabus, Protestantism would be over-powered; a fear exacerbated by the fact Gladstone argued that topics such as modern history, which were potentially offensive to Catholics should not be taught. Despite Cardwell making most of the points open to committee debate, the Irish Bill fell by three votes. This “church-in-danger” cry was further exacerbated by the Cowper-Temple agreement of the 1870 Education Act; a point which Gladstone ironically hostile to. This agreement facilitated the teaching of undenominational, doctrinally-diluted religious principles by schools established out of the rates. Alternatively, schools could take the “secular” option, which involved the absence of religious teaching with time set aside for the various denominations to come in and teach their own views. The fear therefore of undenominationalism or alternatively secularization that contributed to the “church-in-danger.” Anger at the influence of temporal powers in church affairs was already raised in 1869 over the Endowed Schools Act; an act which the Tories abolished upon entering government. Ironically also it was Gladstone’s High Churchman opposition to the clause 25 agitation which isolated Nonconformist support. This in itself was a major factor for the defeat of 1874.
If the Liberals seemed down and out in 1874 and the mood of the country seemed overwhelmingly “conservative,” then how do we explain the rapid turnaround in 1880? The answer to this is the rise of popular Liberalism. Gladstone had in fact done much to increase his popular credentials before 1874. The income tax had been slashed from 6d to 3d between 1869 and 1873. Sugar duties were slashed between 1870 and 1873. Most symbolic however was his repeal of the paper duty in 1861, which in many ways explains his apotheosis during his tour down the Tyne in 1862. Parry is particularly scathing over his foreign policy, particularly his agreement to submit to international arbitration over the “Alabama” affair though there is no doubt his policy of international peace did strike chords with many, most probably the Nonconformists as Summerton has shown. However this link between popular Liberalism and Gladstone did not begin until after his resignation from party leadership in 1875. Gladstone, much like Garibaldi during his tours of England in 1854 and 1860 and John Bright after the Proclaim of Emancipation in 1862 was able to portray himself as one of the people. He was in many ways, the first “demagogue-statesman.” Hamer refers to the cult of Gladstone after 1876 and this was underpinned curiously by his hobby of tree-felling at his house in Hawarden, despite the fact he only entertained audiences with this on one occasion in August 1877. The appeal of this was twofold. Firstly, as Biagini has shown, the image of the axeman chopping down the tree, which was home to all sorts of serpents and snaked, which were supposed to represent “corruption” was a common iconographic image of early nineteenth-century radicalism and in fact, the axe became a common form of popular Liberal iconography thereafter – for example, the Gladstone Axe Scarf Pin and Souvenir became an unofficial image of the Liberal party during the 1885 election. This seemed to confirm Gladstone’s reformist tendencies. Secondly, and crucially, this confirmed the view that Gladstone, like Lincoln was in America, was one of the people – his rolled up sleeves and breeches slung aside seemed poignantly anti-aristocratic[2] and he could thus be compared favourably with Beaconsfield, who it must be remembered accepted the offer of the peerage, whereas the offer was rejected twice by the G.O.M. The deification of Gladstone reached its during the Midlothian campaigns of November 1879 and March 1880 and was almost directly responsible for the Liberal success during April 1880. Of course Hartington’s speeches in the autumn of 1879 were important in reassuring propertied voters, but this campaign was completely unprecedented. Gladstone made a total of thirty-six speeches during the first tour, speaking to an audience of over 86,000 and his words, as Matthew has shown, must have reached an even larger audience through the every expanding press.
Even more curious is the relationship between Gladstone and the Nonconformists, which was also responsible for the Liberal victory of 1880. At first this may seem bizarre. Part of the reason for the Liberal-Dissenting alliance was the fact that the Liberal party inherited the Whig notions of erastianism, which were surely pleasing to Dissenters as it underpinned their religious and civil liberties. Many Liberals, having imbibed the teaching of Arnold at Rugby and Jowett at Balliol, came to support what Samuel Morley referred to as a moral, doctrinally-diluted version of Protestant. The party had time and time again showed their sympathetic tendencies by the removal of nonconformist grievances, such as church rates in 1868 and subscription to the Thirty-Nine articles at Oxford and Cambridge three years later. Gladstone however did not support a doctrinally-diluted version of Protestantism; in fact he was fairly stubborn over the Athenian articles and was fairly unequivocal on the religious hegemony of the Church of England. His appeal however was twofold. Firstly, his insistence that Parliament should not interfere with church matters, but defer to the decisions of the Convocation, re-established in 1852 (hence his opposition to the Divorce Bill of 1857) meant that he was willing to contemplate the idea of disestablishment in order to safeguard the church’s religious powers, which struck chords with Nonconformist calls for religious independence. Secondly, for Gladstone, the most important fact in life was the innate sinfulness of man and Unitarians and Quakers notwithstanding, nearly all Dissenters too were bitten by the evangelical bug. Gladstone in fact had respect for any man of religious opinion who shared this view regardless of their denomination, which explains his constant scoring of the pages of the Birmingham Congregationalist, R.W. Dale’s sermons. The Dissenter-Gladstonian alliance reached its zenith over the Bulgarian agitation in 1876. Gladstone’s pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East sold a staggering 40,000 within two days; many of whom must have been Dissenters. Equally, there was a large Nonconformist presence at the meeting at Black Heath on 9th September. This is not surprising. If Bebbington is correct that in order for a cause to exercise the conscience of the Nonconformist then the current issue must either transcend biblical morality or block the spread of Christianity, then it can be said that the Bulgarian agitation ticked both boxes. In fact, after 1876, Gladstone’s standing within the Dissenting community was second only to Cromwell. His veneration was, according to the Times in 1880 “a fascination amounting to fetishism.” Gladstone’s appeal to the nonconformists was important for two reasons. Firstly, the nonconformists could form the organization basis of local Liberalism. Indeed, after 1876, the chapel often became the organizational base of liberal elections. Secondly, as Bebbington notes, though nonconformity on the whole was declining in numbers in relation to the population in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, its numbers were increasing at a faster rate than those of the established church and it must have held a huge sway over the lives of many non-believers as it was often the basis for social activity.
It was Gladstone’s fiscal policies however that secured his veneration among grassroots Liberals. Indeed, it was more than coincidental that the deification of Gladstone as a popular hero began after his tussle with the Lords over paper duties in 1860 and 1861. This is a point which has recently begun to attract much historiographical attention. Matthew in an influential article has stressed the psychological importance of the mid-Victorian budget in creating a feeling of community and I would like to extend this point further and would probably disagree with him that Gladstone’s reformist tendencies in the 1860s gave way to a more conservative approach. Free trade and retrenchment became a radical cry ever since the days of the Levellers and continued to be pursued throughout the nineteenth century by radicals such as “Orator” Hunt, Francis Place and John Gast. In fact, such was its hold on the imagination of popular politicians that Paine’s principles of social democracy were rejected outright as merely a “Trojan horse” for state repression. Traditionally, hostility was based more towards indirect taxes and heavy expenditure. Gladstone, ever the good Peelite, did much to solve these issues. Between 1859 and 1885, Gladstone smashed a huge £150 million from the unredeemed debt. Equally, he proved his popular credentials and his commitment to cutting indirect taxes over his handling of the matchwokers’ strike of 1879. However from the 1870s onwards, increasingly income taxes, a traditionally popular tax and local rates came under attack. The reason for the former was probably because with inflation artisans and shopkeepers, who formed the vanguard of working-class radicalism, were falling within the first category, while the second was due mostly to the fact that they fell on occupiers, rather than owners of household, even though only property-owners were able to sit on municipal councils until 1878. Gladstone’s finances and his 1874 manifesto, which sought to gain a popular mandate based on reform of local government and a replacement of the burden of the rates with a house tax therefore were heavily praised, however Gladstone never made his views over the income tax in particular and other issues affecting the working-class directly clear and in supporting the Liberals in 1874, many radicals were forced to sign a sort of blank cheque. Some did no doubt but others were not so willing to do so even though Gladstone had looked to replace the income tax from 1853 onwards with further taxation on “visible” property, which most probably meant legacy and license duties. The issue of finance perhaps best sums up why Gladstone lost the election of 1874 but won in 1880. In 1874, mainly because public opinion did not seem “mature” enough yet, he was unwilling to take a leap in the dark and trust the lower orders. In 1880 he was and his decision was vindicated with a majority not only in the boroughs but in the counties also and in twenty-seven of the traditional Conservative strongholds.
This leap into the dark was a consequence of the outcome of the Reform Debates of 1866 and 1867; an outcome which neither Liberal nor Tory really wanted. Disraeli too tried to harness public opinion to the Tory cause. His great speeches in Manchester and Crystal Palace in 1872 appealed to the political sub-conscious of many members of the subaltern class over the themes of monarchy, patriotism, imperialism and Protestantism. Popular Toryism, as Matthew has shown was always more irrational than popular Liberalism. When Gladstone spoke he sought to raise the audience’s awareness of political issues and goad them to greater heights of citizenship. Gladstone however was more successful. The Midlothian campaign set a new precedent where autumn tours of the constituencies were a requisite for any politician with ambitions of national proportions. Gladstone’s willingness to link extra-parliamentary opinion to the Liberal cause, which he did not do in 1874, was the reason for his success six years later. The reasons why he was willing to make this leap into the dark and become the first “statesman-demagogue” are not so clear. It was probably largely a result of his religious conviction: a curious blend of quasi-episcopalianism, which essentially connoted aristocratic service to the poor, as Vincent notes and evangelical notions of the moral superiority of the poor. Frustrations at Palmerstonian extravagance and jingoism and the inability of parliamentary incumbents to rule with Peelite self-denial meant that he sought to tap public sentiment to force the executive to act more responsibly. The conviction with which he pursued this was largely a product of his own self-righteousness. He was thoroughly convinced that he had his finger on the pulse of public opinion and curiously enough public opinion seemed to want what he wanted: liberty, retrenchment and reform. When the leader of the Lords, Lord Granville walked hand-in-hand from the cabinet to parliament during the first day of the 1869 session with the radical Bright, he was symbolizing the unity of aristocratic leadership with middle-class opinion. Gladstone extended this further to include the working-classes and the nonconformists. In many ways, Gladstonianism fitted the new spirit of the age, which as the Trade Union Act and the Licensing Act in 1871 and 1872 respectively seemed to suggest, was based on an “incarnationalist” confidence in the possibility of creating a human brotherhood of all men. Gladstone’s leap in the dark perhaps does not seem so foolish and idiosyncratically perhaps this spirit could have been implemented before 1880 through legislative action if it were not for the decision of Isaac Butt’s Home Rulers to separate themselves from the Liberals during the 1874 election.
[1] J. Parry, The Rise & Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain, p225
[2] This of course did not mean Gladstone was now an unofficial member of the working-class or a representative of the labour community and this point should be kept in mind by historians of Chartism such as Pickering. In fact, as Biagini has shown, popular radicalism at the end of the nineteenth century was always based more on representation of communities, rather than labour as a whole.
Thursday, 20 March 2008
To what extent was the collapse of the ancien régime in the summer of 1789 a result of economic problems?
The ancien régime was the name given to the pre-revolutionary French government by the protagonists of the summer of 1789. In doing so they were defining not so much what they had suppressed, but more “what they wanted to create-a complete break with the past, which was to be cast into the shadows of barbarism.”[1] As the Declaration of the Rights of Man[2], published on 26th August 1789 showed, the aim of the members of the new National Assembly, which had claimed national sovereignty under the leadership of Abbé Sièyes on 17th June, was to create an unbridgeable gulf between all they had hitherto been and all that they now aspired to become. The revolution of 1789 was thus baptised in revolutionary rhetoric and political beliefs. Why however did the ancien régime, which had previously weathered so many storms, which had survived the euphemistically-titled “flour war”[3] of 1774 and even more recently the Révellion riots[4] of April 1789, collapse so suddenly and catastrophically? The answer is the fatal fusion of this aforementioned political crisis, beginning with the assault on the outmoded anachronism of absolutism, with the worse economic crisis that France had experienced in years, after a series of poor harvests and expensive foreign wars. Indeed, it was on the famous journée of 14th July, when the medieval fortress of Bastille was seized that the price of bread reached its highest point of 16 sous since 1770. Such food riots coincided with the political effervescence of various clubs and enlightened societies as well as the mutterings in the suburbs with the revolutionary speeches of the duc d’Orléans’ Palais-Royal, who had opened up his gardens to the general public in 1780. The Capetian dynasty had never faced such broad-based opposition and during the summer of 1789, the ancien régime had collapsed.
The system of financial control in France is somewhat difficult to understand, as we still have no absolutely reliable figures on French finances. This is perhaps why it took the Controller-General of Finance, Calonne two years to arrive at the conclusion of a deficit of 112 million livres and subsequent bankruptcy on 20th August 1786. After the failure of the Scottish adventurer John Law to set up a state bank, the government was compelled to rely on intermediaries for raising its loans to fund its foreign wars, bodies like the municipality of Paris and the banks of Amsterdam. The wars of the French government had imposed a crippling legacy of debt on the royal finances, and although this burden was much alleviated by the great financial crisis of 1720-1, which enabled the government to write off huge sums, four major European and overseas wars since that time had brought batters once more to crisis proportions, including the American War of Independence (1778-83) at a cost of 227,000,000 livres. The internal instability of the Dutch Republic, where “patriots,” which seemed to be provoking Prussian invasion through their opposition to the Prince of Orange, meant that France could no longer rely on foreign capital to finance its ambitious foreign policy. The 1,250 million livres borrowed since 1776 had to be repaid, however the French financial system structurally was in a mess. Other than a series of emergency measures, such as the vigntième[5], established with much difficulty for the third time in 1782, there were few successful attempts to solve this financial crisis. The 1780 intendant[6]...was always trying to think up plans for increasing the wealth of the province”[7] though as any new methods were difficult to enforce and usually short-term, this was ultimately fruitless. Council meetings were the scene of acrimonious clashes to gain the favour of the king, resulting in ministers denouncing and rejecting each other’s policies. Indeed, when the Assembly of Notables convened on 22nd February 1787, they were unable to agree on any economic reform, due to clashes between a vocal Neckerite party and Calonne, despite the modest proposals of a new graduated land tax. Moreover, the only police force in the countryside was the maréchaussée, a body less than 4,000 strong to cover the whole of France, ill-paid, ill-equipped and not numerous enough anywhere to enforce any measures. Major economic reforms were needed, which brought the political crisis of the Bourbon monarchy to the forefront, resulting in the eventual announcement on 8th July 1788 of the summoning of the Estates-General.
If the economic problems of the ancien régime succeeded in bringing the political crisis to the forefront, then it also furthered such antagonism. Population increase from 20 to 28 million between 1700 and 1789 was accompanied by the fragmentation of peasant holdings, increasing the vulnerability of crop yields to bad harvests. Despite a moderate increase in agrarian production as more waste land was put under the plough due to demographic changes, the result of the persistent drought and flooding in 1788 was a disastrous harvest, in twenty-seven of the 32 généralites. “The political crisis was accelerated by one of the biggest economic and social storms of the century; the heavens also were revolutionary.”[8] During the worse days of spring 1789, bread alone was absorbing up to 88 per cent of an average Parisian worker’s wage. First serious looting of bakers shops occurred in Brittany in January, while in Provence mobs forced local authorities to fix low prices for bread. Such protests of hunger foreshadowed the popular revolution and the Great Fear during the summer of 1789. Wages had not kept pace with inflation, as the real value of wage between the 1720s and 1789 seemed to have fallen about 7 per cent, due to the wine glut during the mid 1780s. Peasants needed this to supplement their slender livelihood and the result was a growing “floating” population of migrant workers who drifted into Paris in search of work and would later form the revolutionary crowds during the summer of 1789. Most of these penurious immigrants lived in great squalor, huddled together many to a room in garrets or cellars and thus increasing their opposition to the French government. The free-market conditions on grain introduced by Calonne, based on the principles of the physiocrats[9], had produced uncertain bread supplies in the city that would form the motives of many of the Paris crowds, as many demanded uniform bread prices. It was the announcement of the dismissal of Necker, the guarantor of bread supplies, as financial advisor on July 11th 1789 that led to the fall of Bastille. The failure of agriculture and the subsequent bread supplies was thus one of the main motives of the Parisian crowds. As the purchasing power of the populace collapsed, the populace looked desperately for ways out with a decrease in demand for industry. The international hegemony of luxury Parisian industries was short-lived and following the Anglo-French[10] trade agreement, which came into operation in May 1787 and opened the French market to competition from the cheap, high-quality products of the industrial north of England, textile production fell as much as 50 per cent in a few months, leading to mass unemployment and further discontent. “Even the most glamorous sectors, like the colonial re-export trade, did not have sufficient power to draw the rest of the economy into self-sustained growth.”[11] Foreign trade, the real success story of the ancien régime, with its fivefold augmentation since 1715 had enriched many of the ports like Bordeaux, described as “a busier commercial centre than Liverpool”[12] by the contemporary English agronomist Arthur Young. Nevertheless, “spectacular though this boom was, it was peripheral. Only the inhabitants of a few ports and their rural hinterlands derived much benefit.”[13] Indeed, the success of foreign trade was not without its vicissitudes. Chaos among whites and mixed-race creoles opened the way up to “massive uprising among the 450,000 black slaves -“the greatest slave revolt in history”[14] and a damaging trade dispute in the late 1780s with Spain had augmented the economic plight of the French government. The first facing the ancien régime was indeed its economic failings, later fused with its political problems, provoked popular agitation.
The political crisis of the ancien régime was therefore the absolutist rule of the Bourbon monarchy. “Opposition to the government before the revolution was never focused on a national institution such as the English Parliament.”[15] No such institution existed. It is true that medieval and early-modern kings had sometimes called convoked the Estates-General, an elective national representative body; but its powers were vague, its composition fluctuating, and its convocation irregular, with the last meeting in 1614. Faced with an economic crisis, the government could not act without facing remarks of despotism, seen as the worst of all possible governments, the rule of one man according to no law but his own caprices. The elected Assembly of Notables, which met every five years, was the closest paradigm of a permanent national representative body of any sort. Furthermore, it only really survived as it could borrow money at rates more advantageous than the French government (4 to 5 per cent rather than 8 per cent). The real difference therefore between Britain and France at the time was that William Pitt in an economic crisis could raise taxation whereas the equivalent French ministers could not without raising public alarm. Indeed, the French monarchy could not even declare itself bankrupt without seeming despotic. The chaotic years following the financial crash of 1720, in which thousands of government creditors were ruined “had installed French public opinion with a deep hostility to the breaches of public faith.”[16] In 1770, amid the most serious economic crisis for decades, the attempts of the Controller-General of Finance, Terray, to suspend payments of short-term credits was greeted with a general outcry and he was eventually dismissed in 1774. Similar outcries were provoked by the brief imprisonment of the former government minister Beaumarchais and the execution of the Protestant John Calas in Toulouse in 1762, for the false allegations of murder. His father’s support of Chancellor Maupeou’s ruthless reorganisation of the judiciary at the height of the Brittany affair[17] in January 1771 may seem to support the idea that “by the time Louis XVI came to the thrown in 1774 the political system he had inherited had lost its legitimacy.”[18] It may therefore seem that in the middle of an economic crisis, the absolutist rule of Louis XVI could not function. “His power was not absolute, only arbitrary”[19]
However, the belief that the ancien régime was doomed to collapse in the face of a crisis may seem to determinist for some. The personal shortcomings of Louis XVI, as the linchpin of the French government, should not be overlooked. Indeed, his grandfather was able to shrug off criticisms of his despotic rule in placing his two bastard sons in the line for succession and through diligence and firmness under pressure, Louis XVI set new standards of monarchical conduct and tame a rebellious nobility, still angered after their exclusion since “Frondes.”[20] While, Louis XIV was blessed with intelligence and oratory skills, his grandson was withdrawn, solitary and unimaginative. “Where personal qualities were concerned, Louis XVI was not the ideal monarch to personify the twilight of royalty in the history of France”[21] He was plagued by chronic indecision and did not seem to understand the severity of the revolution, shown by his personal insistence on June 26th 1789 to bring up 4,800 troops, despite rumours of an aristocratic counterrevolution to subvert the power of the Estates-General. Similarly, it was his personal decision to insist on the full sacramental panoply during his coronation, not performed since 1537, including anointment with the sacred oils of Clovis[22] at a time of large-scale food riots in Paris. The semi-divine status that he attempted to acquire from this was undone by a series of hack journalists, angered at their exclusion from the ranks of the philosophes, who told titillating accounts of royal sexual depravity. His shy personality fuelled rumours about his private life, as it was only on two occasions that he left the Versailles-Paris region: in 1786 when he travelled to Cherbourg to inspect the new harbour installations and in 1791 during his flight to Varennes. Louis XVI was portrayed as a cuckolded, impotent ignoramus, blissfully unaware of Marie Antoinette’s affair with Comte d’Artois. She, much like the Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra, the last tsar of Russia, was hated because of her nationality. Though, she did little to increase her popularity, as she tangled with crooks, during the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace.”[23] Any attempts of appeasing the already volatile situation through Louis XVI’s absolutist rule therefore seemed to have faded.
It was from the privileged ranks of the nobility that opposition to the despotic rule of the ancien régime. Indeed, it was the great Paris parlement[24] that led the way in insisting on the meeting of the Estates-General to agree to any financial reforms and equally, it was the leadership of men like Mounier and Mirabeau, outraged and suspicious at the growth of troops within the centre of Paris, that led their followers to a nearby indoor tennis court on June 20th, swearing never to disperse until they had given France a constitution. When Louis XVI therefore reached for what should have been his most loyal and potent weapon, the privileged orders, he was browbeaten and intimidated into summoning the Estates-General, which met on May 4th 1789. De Tocqueville’s claim that “the nobles (of Britain and France) had identical positions, had the same privileges, the same appearance”[25] would therefore not appear to reflect the true nature of the pre-revolutionary nobility, though of course, writing in 1856, he did not have the benefit of the plethora of new evidence opened up in honour of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the revolution. Indeed, this new evidence has thrown light on the role of the nobility within the revolution and far from being a caste of feudal remnants; the nobility was an order that held close to itself the principles of meritocracy, shown by their overwhelming support of fiscal equality in the cahiers de doléances.[26] They were a class that “was constantly absorbing the richest and most enterprising members of the Third Estate.”[27] Between a quarter and a third of the nobility from 1715 were of recent origin and the result was that the French nobility was very numerous; even if the lowest of possible estimates is taken, the figure (c. 25,000 families) is more than one hundred times bigger larger than that yielded by the British peerage (220 peers in 1790). Even those without money did their utmost. Marat, the extreme Jacobin journalist and agitator falsely clamed to be noble.
More and more nobles and bourgeois alike came together to share the same tastes and discuss the same issues in the prelude to the revolution of 1789 that it is “hard to identify the nobility as a separate class at all”[28] For some 60 per cent of the nobility had revenues of less than 4,000 livres, which suggested a modest, frugal lifestyle and consequently shared the grievances of the Third Estate. This would not seem to support Lefebvre’s claim that the revolution was above all the “conquest of equal rights”[29] Conversely, at first the nobility were the staunchest supporters of the crusade against absolutism. The parlements portrayed themselves as the sole bulwark against the crown’s despotic tendencies and based on Montesquieu’s belief in the need for an intermediary body, continuously put forward the need for the meeting of an Estates-General to approve of any economic reforms. At a time when the French monarchy needed the support of its privileged orders to appease an economic crisis, the nobility took this opportunity to begin the assault on absolutism.
It was at this point that the political discontent of the masses came together with the aforementioned economic problems, particularly the fluctuating price of bread, which had plagued Paris for some time. The heretical views of the nobility had spread to an increasingly literate Third Estate. The parlements, who since their stoical defence of those dissident priests that had criticised church power in the name of Jansenism, came to be recognised as the “vanguard” of the masses, illustrated by worker support during the “Day of Tiles”[30] in Grenobles on 7th June 1788. Holding their own printing presses, they used them to disseminate innumerable copies of various remonstrances, steeped in ideas of the Enlightenment. The hatred of monarchical despotism had reached the masses and “by the time the Estates-General actually met, some degree of political consciousness had emerged.”[31] Political clubs, most famously Duport’s Société des Trentes had blossomed during the spring of 1789 and the number of academies grew from nine in 1710 to at least thirty-five on the eve of the revolution, with entrance based entirely on merit from 1930 onwards. Figaro’s famous soliloquy denouncing the despotic Count Almavia in Act V of Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro was the talk of Paris when the play secured a performance in 1784. Plebeian grievances were no longer based entirely on the price of bread, but added to this, the urban workers began to share the hatred of the nobility for royal depredations. The first edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie[32], which had penetrated public opinion so greatly and the growth in periodicals, with the first daily newspaper making its appearance in Paris in 1777, did not however have the same effect as Sièyes’ famous pamplet, “What is the Third Estate?” The growth of such propaganda pamphlets, naturally aided by an increase in literacy rates[33], had sharpened the opposition of the Third Estate, who continued to advance the example of the Vizille Assembly[34] for the convocation of the Estates-General. It is difficult to support Wright’s assertion that what had been a clash between the monarchy and the aristocracy now became “a broad conflict between the privileged and the unprivileged,”[35] but the decision of the Paris parlement on September 25th 1788 to reject the Vizille model was a major turning point. The political criticisms of the nobility had reached the masses and there was now a degree of antagonism between the masses (and the “liberal” 46[36]) and the privileged orders. It seemed to the members of the Third Estate a giant paradox that the members of the nobility, advocates of meritocracy, now supported the separation of orders of society, based on birth. The economic problems of the ancien régime that had originally pushed the political crisis to the forefront had fused together with the crisis of absolutism. Workers now complained of both the rising bread prices and the despotism of Louis XVI. Perhaps, if Louis XVI’s ministers had succeeded in introducing various political reforms to placate worker agitation, like during the Reform Bill Agitation[37] of 1830-32, then the revolution could have been avoided. Instead, “almost at once euphoria gave way to frustration and disappointment”[38] towards the Estates-General and the result was the popular revolution of the summer of 1789. Soldiers of the Garde Française, low in moral after the Révellion riots, joined rebellious crowds in burning as forty of the fifty-four custom posts, erected in 1785 to levy duty on the goods entering the capital on 14th July 1789. Power now passed into the hands of revolutionaries such as Baily and Lafayette.
The ideas of the Enlightenment were pivotal in augmenting the opposition to absolutism. The Enlightenment, an essential ingredient in both the views of the nobility and the Third Estate, was a critical movement, which spent much time pouring scorn on the pillars of the established orders. Though the movement did not advocate revolution, and was mainly used as a pretext for the Jacobin terror of 1794, the critical and irreverent views that it put forward fostered the revolutionary spirit that led to the fall of Louis XVI. L’Encyclopédie, despite the huge cost of ninety-three weeks wages of the average wage-earner, “penetrated the country in its various editions, sold well in provincial capitals, and must have been well known to large sections of the reading public”[39] The old-fashioned provincial capital of Besançon provided 338 subscribers. It was the philosophes, who had originally put forward the idea of meritocracy; a system based on ability and talent rather than birth, which would later receive such fervent supported from the French populace and the widespread enthusiasm for such ideas can be seen in the remonstrances of the parlements of the late eighteenth century; steeped in the ideas of Montesquieu, while political pamphlets from the 1770s onwards are full of the notions and language of Rousseauist ideas of popular sovereignty. Those who considered themselves “enlightened” believed they were a small band of crusaders against widespread ignorance and turned increasingly to the example of America, as “a simpler, healthier, more virtuous society”[40] and there is much evidence that this idea was shared by nobles and workers alike. Indeed, many of the fervent supporters of the revolution such as Lafayette and La Reiyne were former officers in the American War of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador and the very embodiment of the new nation’s simple virtues became the most sought-after man in Paris. Similarly, public support for the Sven Years War (1756-63) sprang from the belief that this was the opportunity to defeat the British colonial masters of America. The “Atlantic Spirit,” as it is so often called penetrated the ranks of the nobility and the philosophes, but also the public as well. This obsession with America was quite accessible to those of the petty professions. For example, in March 1783, the Paris journal advertised a complete set of engravings of the battles of the US war for the cost of only one livre. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the American example that they held in such esteem seemed to make revolution in France, and indeed elsewhere, a possible option and seemed to oppose the dynastical absolutism of Louis XVI.
On 27th June 1789 however, Louis XVI ordered the rump of the Estates-General to join the National Assembly, with voting to take place by head and in no separate orders and later promised to secure a regular bread supply in the near-famine conditions. It would seem at this point that the revolution should have ended, though the peasantry, hitherto completely passive observers of what was happening, were aroused by the meeting of the Estates-General and brought the revolution to the provinces during the period of the “Great Fear.” “In the spring, the electoral situation had aroused in peasant hearts a hope as vehement as the despair born out of the crisis.”[41] The conditions of the election for the Estates-General, with every male tax-payer over 25 allowed to participate, had provoked a great hope among the peasantry, as they spent their time preparing their lists of grievances for its meeting; originally planned for 1st May 1789. The peasantry too, still not self-sufficient, had to buy their bread and flour just like town dwellers and were badly hit by the increase in prices became frustrated at the lack of legislative change within the Estates-General and followed the example of the Paris crowds in rebellion. These revolts, which took place against a background of popular hysteria that paralysed most of rural France, hence “the agrarian insurrections, more even than those of the cities, were genuine mass movements”[42] Rumours of an aristocratic counter-revolution, when émigrés[43] would return at the head of hordes of brigands[44] and foreign mercenaries, were fed by the dispersal of military units from Paris to the countryside and by the despatch of troops from the towns to requisition grain. These brigands, it was said, in league with grain hoarders in a “famine pact,”[45] would burn the ripening corn to starve people into submission. Grain convoys were attacked and suspected hoarders intimidated. In Limousin, it was alleged that the Comte d’Artois was coming from Bordeaux with an army of 16,000. Panic-stricken, in both Dauphiné and Franche-Comté, peasants armed against brigands that never arrived, turned their intentions to the châteaux and began burning old deeds of serfdom. Though, it was out of both panic and hatred of seigniorial dues that the number of jacqueries[46] grew. The burden of the taille[47], the main direct taxation, fell heavily on the peasantry. Inflation increased the burden of dues payable in kind and the cahiers reveal that the peasants felt they suffered from recent revision of terriers[48] which recorded feudal obligations. For the French peasantry, who were the most prosperous in Europe, the heavy burden of feudal obligations seemed outmoded and archaic. “For even after it had ceased to be a political institution, the feudal system remained basic to the economic organization of France. In this restricted form it was far more hated than in the heyday of feudalism.”[49] During this period of the Great Fear, the peasantry did not hesitate to put an end to feudalism themselves. It was these revolts that forced the complete abolition of feudalism on the night of 4th August 1789.
It was on this famous night supposedly that the ancien régime collapsed, as some 100 deputies of the privileged orders gathered in the Versailles café by the Breton club and denounced fiscal privileges. The final decree, written by Du Port on 11th August claimed: “The National Assembly completely destroys the feudal regime.” It would appear here that the war against feudalism was won. The historian Doyle even suggests that the announcement from the Controller-General of Finance, de Brienne in July 1788 that the Estates-General would meet the following year, marked the end of absolutism. Though, it was during the summer of 1789 that power passed from the monarchy to the revolutionaries. Hitherto, “the political arm that was flexed to introduce tax reform was that of absolutism,”[50] though faced with an economic collapse, it could not cope. The administrative monarchy was an unstable compromise between the modern state and the feudal society. On the one hand, it continued to subvert the traditional social fabric by selling off various noble titles to raise much needed cash to fund its ambitious foreign policy. On the other hand, when it called on its traditionally most loyal weapon, the nobility, to sanction the economic reform, they refused and began the crusade against absolutism that the Paris crowd and the agrarian insurrectionists were to complete in the summer of 1789. The 2,500 pamphlets produced during the winter of 1788-89 and the irreverent attitude of the Enlightenment had created a political consciousness among the Third Estate and the opposition of the privileged orders to the arbitrary absolutism of Louis XVI was extended to the masses. It was at this point that the on-going economic problems, particularly unemployment and fluctuating bread prices came together with the political crisis of the ancien régime and “it was the fusion of these two crises in the spring and summer of 1789 which allowed the mass of discontents to become critical and turn into a revolution.”[51] This revolution was completed by the risings in rural France during the period of the “Great Fear.” The boycott of taxation in the spring of 1789 had shown the staunch opposition of the peasantry to feudal dues and the fear of an aristocratic counter-revolution was the trigger in the agrarian revolution during the summer of 1789.
[1] F. Furet, The French Revolution 1770-1814, p3
[2] A list of basic civil rights; intended as a preamble to a constitution, on the model of the declaration of rights which had prefaced the constitutions of new American states like Virginia or Massachusetts
[3] After disastrous farming in previous year, price of bread rose to 14 sous in 1774, resulting in general rioting around Paris in April and then in the capital in May
[4] Hundreds of workers took to the streets after the remarks about the high cost of wages by Révellion, a wallpaper manufacturer
[5] 5 per cent tax on landed revenue
[6] Direct representatives of the king’s authority in each of thirty-four administrative districts (généralites)
[7] A. De Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, p173
[8] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1814, p56
[9] An economic belief of the Enlightenment that developed during the late 1750s and advocated the abolition of what they regarded as artificial obstacles in the way of the “natural” economic order of agriculture, such as internal tariffs
[10] Commonly known as the Eden Treaty and was agreed in 1786. Both France and Britain agreed to a mutual lowering of tariffs. Britain, which was entirely self-sufficient agriculturally took little off France other than wine, whereas the better-quality British industries crippled French production
[11] T. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, p10
[12] A. Young, Travels, p173
[13] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p152
[14] W. Doyle, The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, p73
[15] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1814, p65
[16] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p48
[17] After a series of disputes, 130 Parisian representatives were exiled and the entire legal profession went on strike. Maupeou responded with a general reorganisation of the judiciary system, replacing them with tribunals
[18] T. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, p33
[19] D. Thomson, Europe since Napoleon, p27
[20] Groups of nobles who had rebelled against the King, resulting in Civil War in the seventeenth century
[21] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1814, p30
[22] Believed to have been brought down from heaven by the Holy Ghost
[23] In an attempt to regain the favor of Marie Antoinette, the Cardinal de Rohan was duped into buying a necklace worth nearly two million livres and when the plot was unmasked in 1785, he won the sympathy of the public
[24] Sovereign courts of law for the thirteen judicial districts; no law took into effect until it was registered by the courts
[25] A. De Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, p15
[26] Written instructions given to the deputies by their constituencies. 89% of noble cahiers supported fiscal equality; more than those of the Third Estate
[27] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p115
[28] D. Wright, Revolution & Terror in France, 1789-95, p11
[29] G. Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, p166
[30] Soldiers that were called in to exile the magistrates of the regional parlement, who had refused to sanction the various economic reforms, were bombarded with tiles by workers from the roof-top
[31] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p195
[32] The main works of the philosophes
[33] The work of Daniel Roche in studying wills showed that in Monmartre, 74% of people could sign their name
[34] A provincial assembly that met on July 21st 1788 in the forms that the Third Estate desired: vote by head, rather than in separate orders and the Third Estate had as many members as the clergy and nobility put together
[35] D. Wright, Revolution & Terror in France, 1789-95, p19
[36] The 46 members of the Second Estate, who voted in favour of the Vizille model on 7th May 1789
[37] Riots in Bristol, Nottingham and Derby were appeased by the passing of the Third Reform Act in June 1832, despite the moderate increase in the franchise from 470,000 to 840,000
[38] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p157
[39] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p82
[40] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p90
[41] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1815, p69
[42] G. Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, p143
[43] Members of the aristocracy, who emigrated following the revolution
[44] A sort of unemployed “lumpenproletariat,” created out of the collapse of the textile industry, due to the Eden Treaty. Fear of these was fed by the hundreds of vagrants, who migrated to the countryside, in search of work
[45] The fear of such a pact dates back to the failure of Louis XV in 1763 to legislate the agricultural reforms proposed by the physiocrats in 1763. Many believed that he had entered into a pact with unscrupulous speculators to starve his own subjects. In the summer of 1789, increasing numbers of brigands were regarded as shock troops of the plotters.
[46] Peasant risings
[47] Poll tax
[48] Records of feudal obligations
[49] A. De Tocqueville, the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, p32
[50] S. Schama, Citizens, p112
[51] T. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, p5
The system of financial control in France is somewhat difficult to understand, as we still have no absolutely reliable figures on French finances. This is perhaps why it took the Controller-General of Finance, Calonne two years to arrive at the conclusion of a deficit of 112 million livres and subsequent bankruptcy on 20th August 1786. After the failure of the Scottish adventurer John Law to set up a state bank, the government was compelled to rely on intermediaries for raising its loans to fund its foreign wars, bodies like the municipality of Paris and the banks of Amsterdam. The wars of the French government had imposed a crippling legacy of debt on the royal finances, and although this burden was much alleviated by the great financial crisis of 1720-1, which enabled the government to write off huge sums, four major European and overseas wars since that time had brought batters once more to crisis proportions, including the American War of Independence (1778-83) at a cost of 227,000,000 livres. The internal instability of the Dutch Republic, where “patriots,” which seemed to be provoking Prussian invasion through their opposition to the Prince of Orange, meant that France could no longer rely on foreign capital to finance its ambitious foreign policy. The 1,250 million livres borrowed since 1776 had to be repaid, however the French financial system structurally was in a mess. Other than a series of emergency measures, such as the vigntième[5], established with much difficulty for the third time in 1782, there were few successful attempts to solve this financial crisis. The 1780 intendant[6]...was always trying to think up plans for increasing the wealth of the province”[7] though as any new methods were difficult to enforce and usually short-term, this was ultimately fruitless. Council meetings were the scene of acrimonious clashes to gain the favour of the king, resulting in ministers denouncing and rejecting each other’s policies. Indeed, when the Assembly of Notables convened on 22nd February 1787, they were unable to agree on any economic reform, due to clashes between a vocal Neckerite party and Calonne, despite the modest proposals of a new graduated land tax. Moreover, the only police force in the countryside was the maréchaussée, a body less than 4,000 strong to cover the whole of France, ill-paid, ill-equipped and not numerous enough anywhere to enforce any measures. Major economic reforms were needed, which brought the political crisis of the Bourbon monarchy to the forefront, resulting in the eventual announcement on 8th July 1788 of the summoning of the Estates-General.
If the economic problems of the ancien régime succeeded in bringing the political crisis to the forefront, then it also furthered such antagonism. Population increase from 20 to 28 million between 1700 and 1789 was accompanied by the fragmentation of peasant holdings, increasing the vulnerability of crop yields to bad harvests. Despite a moderate increase in agrarian production as more waste land was put under the plough due to demographic changes, the result of the persistent drought and flooding in 1788 was a disastrous harvest, in twenty-seven of the 32 généralites. “The political crisis was accelerated by one of the biggest economic and social storms of the century; the heavens also were revolutionary.”[8] During the worse days of spring 1789, bread alone was absorbing up to 88 per cent of an average Parisian worker’s wage. First serious looting of bakers shops occurred in Brittany in January, while in Provence mobs forced local authorities to fix low prices for bread. Such protests of hunger foreshadowed the popular revolution and the Great Fear during the summer of 1789. Wages had not kept pace with inflation, as the real value of wage between the 1720s and 1789 seemed to have fallen about 7 per cent, due to the wine glut during the mid 1780s. Peasants needed this to supplement their slender livelihood and the result was a growing “floating” population of migrant workers who drifted into Paris in search of work and would later form the revolutionary crowds during the summer of 1789. Most of these penurious immigrants lived in great squalor, huddled together many to a room in garrets or cellars and thus increasing their opposition to the French government. The free-market conditions on grain introduced by Calonne, based on the principles of the physiocrats[9], had produced uncertain bread supplies in the city that would form the motives of many of the Paris crowds, as many demanded uniform bread prices. It was the announcement of the dismissal of Necker, the guarantor of bread supplies, as financial advisor on July 11th 1789 that led to the fall of Bastille. The failure of agriculture and the subsequent bread supplies was thus one of the main motives of the Parisian crowds. As the purchasing power of the populace collapsed, the populace looked desperately for ways out with a decrease in demand for industry. The international hegemony of luxury Parisian industries was short-lived and following the Anglo-French[10] trade agreement, which came into operation in May 1787 and opened the French market to competition from the cheap, high-quality products of the industrial north of England, textile production fell as much as 50 per cent in a few months, leading to mass unemployment and further discontent. “Even the most glamorous sectors, like the colonial re-export trade, did not have sufficient power to draw the rest of the economy into self-sustained growth.”[11] Foreign trade, the real success story of the ancien régime, with its fivefold augmentation since 1715 had enriched many of the ports like Bordeaux, described as “a busier commercial centre than Liverpool”[12] by the contemporary English agronomist Arthur Young. Nevertheless, “spectacular though this boom was, it was peripheral. Only the inhabitants of a few ports and their rural hinterlands derived much benefit.”[13] Indeed, the success of foreign trade was not without its vicissitudes. Chaos among whites and mixed-race creoles opened the way up to “massive uprising among the 450,000 black slaves -“the greatest slave revolt in history”[14] and a damaging trade dispute in the late 1780s with Spain had augmented the economic plight of the French government. The first facing the ancien régime was indeed its economic failings, later fused with its political problems, provoked popular agitation.
The political crisis of the ancien régime was therefore the absolutist rule of the Bourbon monarchy. “Opposition to the government before the revolution was never focused on a national institution such as the English Parliament.”[15] No such institution existed. It is true that medieval and early-modern kings had sometimes called convoked the Estates-General, an elective national representative body; but its powers were vague, its composition fluctuating, and its convocation irregular, with the last meeting in 1614. Faced with an economic crisis, the government could not act without facing remarks of despotism, seen as the worst of all possible governments, the rule of one man according to no law but his own caprices. The elected Assembly of Notables, which met every five years, was the closest paradigm of a permanent national representative body of any sort. Furthermore, it only really survived as it could borrow money at rates more advantageous than the French government (4 to 5 per cent rather than 8 per cent). The real difference therefore between Britain and France at the time was that William Pitt in an economic crisis could raise taxation whereas the equivalent French ministers could not without raising public alarm. Indeed, the French monarchy could not even declare itself bankrupt without seeming despotic. The chaotic years following the financial crash of 1720, in which thousands of government creditors were ruined “had installed French public opinion with a deep hostility to the breaches of public faith.”[16] In 1770, amid the most serious economic crisis for decades, the attempts of the Controller-General of Finance, Terray, to suspend payments of short-term credits was greeted with a general outcry and he was eventually dismissed in 1774. Similar outcries were provoked by the brief imprisonment of the former government minister Beaumarchais and the execution of the Protestant John Calas in Toulouse in 1762, for the false allegations of murder. His father’s support of Chancellor Maupeou’s ruthless reorganisation of the judiciary at the height of the Brittany affair[17] in January 1771 may seem to support the idea that “by the time Louis XVI came to the thrown in 1774 the political system he had inherited had lost its legitimacy.”[18] It may therefore seem that in the middle of an economic crisis, the absolutist rule of Louis XVI could not function. “His power was not absolute, only arbitrary”[19]
However, the belief that the ancien régime was doomed to collapse in the face of a crisis may seem to determinist for some. The personal shortcomings of Louis XVI, as the linchpin of the French government, should not be overlooked. Indeed, his grandfather was able to shrug off criticisms of his despotic rule in placing his two bastard sons in the line for succession and through diligence and firmness under pressure, Louis XVI set new standards of monarchical conduct and tame a rebellious nobility, still angered after their exclusion since “Frondes.”[20] While, Louis XIV was blessed with intelligence and oratory skills, his grandson was withdrawn, solitary and unimaginative. “Where personal qualities were concerned, Louis XVI was not the ideal monarch to personify the twilight of royalty in the history of France”[21] He was plagued by chronic indecision and did not seem to understand the severity of the revolution, shown by his personal insistence on June 26th 1789 to bring up 4,800 troops, despite rumours of an aristocratic counterrevolution to subvert the power of the Estates-General. Similarly, it was his personal decision to insist on the full sacramental panoply during his coronation, not performed since 1537, including anointment with the sacred oils of Clovis[22] at a time of large-scale food riots in Paris. The semi-divine status that he attempted to acquire from this was undone by a series of hack journalists, angered at their exclusion from the ranks of the philosophes, who told titillating accounts of royal sexual depravity. His shy personality fuelled rumours about his private life, as it was only on two occasions that he left the Versailles-Paris region: in 1786 when he travelled to Cherbourg to inspect the new harbour installations and in 1791 during his flight to Varennes. Louis XVI was portrayed as a cuckolded, impotent ignoramus, blissfully unaware of Marie Antoinette’s affair with Comte d’Artois. She, much like the Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra, the last tsar of Russia, was hated because of her nationality. Though, she did little to increase her popularity, as she tangled with crooks, during the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace.”[23] Any attempts of appeasing the already volatile situation through Louis XVI’s absolutist rule therefore seemed to have faded.
It was from the privileged ranks of the nobility that opposition to the despotic rule of the ancien régime. Indeed, it was the great Paris parlement[24] that led the way in insisting on the meeting of the Estates-General to agree to any financial reforms and equally, it was the leadership of men like Mounier and Mirabeau, outraged and suspicious at the growth of troops within the centre of Paris, that led their followers to a nearby indoor tennis court on June 20th, swearing never to disperse until they had given France a constitution. When Louis XVI therefore reached for what should have been his most loyal and potent weapon, the privileged orders, he was browbeaten and intimidated into summoning the Estates-General, which met on May 4th 1789. De Tocqueville’s claim that “the nobles (of Britain and France) had identical positions, had the same privileges, the same appearance”[25] would therefore not appear to reflect the true nature of the pre-revolutionary nobility, though of course, writing in 1856, he did not have the benefit of the plethora of new evidence opened up in honour of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the revolution. Indeed, this new evidence has thrown light on the role of the nobility within the revolution and far from being a caste of feudal remnants; the nobility was an order that held close to itself the principles of meritocracy, shown by their overwhelming support of fiscal equality in the cahiers de doléances.[26] They were a class that “was constantly absorbing the richest and most enterprising members of the Third Estate.”[27] Between a quarter and a third of the nobility from 1715 were of recent origin and the result was that the French nobility was very numerous; even if the lowest of possible estimates is taken, the figure (c. 25,000 families) is more than one hundred times bigger larger than that yielded by the British peerage (220 peers in 1790). Even those without money did their utmost. Marat, the extreme Jacobin journalist and agitator falsely clamed to be noble.
More and more nobles and bourgeois alike came together to share the same tastes and discuss the same issues in the prelude to the revolution of 1789 that it is “hard to identify the nobility as a separate class at all”[28] For some 60 per cent of the nobility had revenues of less than 4,000 livres, which suggested a modest, frugal lifestyle and consequently shared the grievances of the Third Estate. This would not seem to support Lefebvre’s claim that the revolution was above all the “conquest of equal rights”[29] Conversely, at first the nobility were the staunchest supporters of the crusade against absolutism. The parlements portrayed themselves as the sole bulwark against the crown’s despotic tendencies and based on Montesquieu’s belief in the need for an intermediary body, continuously put forward the need for the meeting of an Estates-General to approve of any economic reforms. At a time when the French monarchy needed the support of its privileged orders to appease an economic crisis, the nobility took this opportunity to begin the assault on absolutism.
It was at this point that the political discontent of the masses came together with the aforementioned economic problems, particularly the fluctuating price of bread, which had plagued Paris for some time. The heretical views of the nobility had spread to an increasingly literate Third Estate. The parlements, who since their stoical defence of those dissident priests that had criticised church power in the name of Jansenism, came to be recognised as the “vanguard” of the masses, illustrated by worker support during the “Day of Tiles”[30] in Grenobles on 7th June 1788. Holding their own printing presses, they used them to disseminate innumerable copies of various remonstrances, steeped in ideas of the Enlightenment. The hatred of monarchical despotism had reached the masses and “by the time the Estates-General actually met, some degree of political consciousness had emerged.”[31] Political clubs, most famously Duport’s Société des Trentes had blossomed during the spring of 1789 and the number of academies grew from nine in 1710 to at least thirty-five on the eve of the revolution, with entrance based entirely on merit from 1930 onwards. Figaro’s famous soliloquy denouncing the despotic Count Almavia in Act V of Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro was the talk of Paris when the play secured a performance in 1784. Plebeian grievances were no longer based entirely on the price of bread, but added to this, the urban workers began to share the hatred of the nobility for royal depredations. The first edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie[32], which had penetrated public opinion so greatly and the growth in periodicals, with the first daily newspaper making its appearance in Paris in 1777, did not however have the same effect as Sièyes’ famous pamplet, “What is the Third Estate?” The growth of such propaganda pamphlets, naturally aided by an increase in literacy rates[33], had sharpened the opposition of the Third Estate, who continued to advance the example of the Vizille Assembly[34] for the convocation of the Estates-General. It is difficult to support Wright’s assertion that what had been a clash between the monarchy and the aristocracy now became “a broad conflict between the privileged and the unprivileged,”[35] but the decision of the Paris parlement on September 25th 1788 to reject the Vizille model was a major turning point. The political criticisms of the nobility had reached the masses and there was now a degree of antagonism between the masses (and the “liberal” 46[36]) and the privileged orders. It seemed to the members of the Third Estate a giant paradox that the members of the nobility, advocates of meritocracy, now supported the separation of orders of society, based on birth. The economic problems of the ancien régime that had originally pushed the political crisis to the forefront had fused together with the crisis of absolutism. Workers now complained of both the rising bread prices and the despotism of Louis XVI. Perhaps, if Louis XVI’s ministers had succeeded in introducing various political reforms to placate worker agitation, like during the Reform Bill Agitation[37] of 1830-32, then the revolution could have been avoided. Instead, “almost at once euphoria gave way to frustration and disappointment”[38] towards the Estates-General and the result was the popular revolution of the summer of 1789. Soldiers of the Garde Française, low in moral after the Révellion riots, joined rebellious crowds in burning as forty of the fifty-four custom posts, erected in 1785 to levy duty on the goods entering the capital on 14th July 1789. Power now passed into the hands of revolutionaries such as Baily and Lafayette.
The ideas of the Enlightenment were pivotal in augmenting the opposition to absolutism. The Enlightenment, an essential ingredient in both the views of the nobility and the Third Estate, was a critical movement, which spent much time pouring scorn on the pillars of the established orders. Though the movement did not advocate revolution, and was mainly used as a pretext for the Jacobin terror of 1794, the critical and irreverent views that it put forward fostered the revolutionary spirit that led to the fall of Louis XVI. L’Encyclopédie, despite the huge cost of ninety-three weeks wages of the average wage-earner, “penetrated the country in its various editions, sold well in provincial capitals, and must have been well known to large sections of the reading public”[39] The old-fashioned provincial capital of Besançon provided 338 subscribers. It was the philosophes, who had originally put forward the idea of meritocracy; a system based on ability and talent rather than birth, which would later receive such fervent supported from the French populace and the widespread enthusiasm for such ideas can be seen in the remonstrances of the parlements of the late eighteenth century; steeped in the ideas of Montesquieu, while political pamphlets from the 1770s onwards are full of the notions and language of Rousseauist ideas of popular sovereignty. Those who considered themselves “enlightened” believed they were a small band of crusaders against widespread ignorance and turned increasingly to the example of America, as “a simpler, healthier, more virtuous society”[40] and there is much evidence that this idea was shared by nobles and workers alike. Indeed, many of the fervent supporters of the revolution such as Lafayette and La Reiyne were former officers in the American War of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador and the very embodiment of the new nation’s simple virtues became the most sought-after man in Paris. Similarly, public support for the Sven Years War (1756-63) sprang from the belief that this was the opportunity to defeat the British colonial masters of America. The “Atlantic Spirit,” as it is so often called penetrated the ranks of the nobility and the philosophes, but also the public as well. This obsession with America was quite accessible to those of the petty professions. For example, in March 1783, the Paris journal advertised a complete set of engravings of the battles of the US war for the cost of only one livre. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the American example that they held in such esteem seemed to make revolution in France, and indeed elsewhere, a possible option and seemed to oppose the dynastical absolutism of Louis XVI.
On 27th June 1789 however, Louis XVI ordered the rump of the Estates-General to join the National Assembly, with voting to take place by head and in no separate orders and later promised to secure a regular bread supply in the near-famine conditions. It would seem at this point that the revolution should have ended, though the peasantry, hitherto completely passive observers of what was happening, were aroused by the meeting of the Estates-General and brought the revolution to the provinces during the period of the “Great Fear.” “In the spring, the electoral situation had aroused in peasant hearts a hope as vehement as the despair born out of the crisis.”[41] The conditions of the election for the Estates-General, with every male tax-payer over 25 allowed to participate, had provoked a great hope among the peasantry, as they spent their time preparing their lists of grievances for its meeting; originally planned for 1st May 1789. The peasantry too, still not self-sufficient, had to buy their bread and flour just like town dwellers and were badly hit by the increase in prices became frustrated at the lack of legislative change within the Estates-General and followed the example of the Paris crowds in rebellion. These revolts, which took place against a background of popular hysteria that paralysed most of rural France, hence “the agrarian insurrections, more even than those of the cities, were genuine mass movements”[42] Rumours of an aristocratic counter-revolution, when émigrés[43] would return at the head of hordes of brigands[44] and foreign mercenaries, were fed by the dispersal of military units from Paris to the countryside and by the despatch of troops from the towns to requisition grain. These brigands, it was said, in league with grain hoarders in a “famine pact,”[45] would burn the ripening corn to starve people into submission. Grain convoys were attacked and suspected hoarders intimidated. In Limousin, it was alleged that the Comte d’Artois was coming from Bordeaux with an army of 16,000. Panic-stricken, in both Dauphiné and Franche-Comté, peasants armed against brigands that never arrived, turned their intentions to the châteaux and began burning old deeds of serfdom. Though, it was out of both panic and hatred of seigniorial dues that the number of jacqueries[46] grew. The burden of the taille[47], the main direct taxation, fell heavily on the peasantry. Inflation increased the burden of dues payable in kind and the cahiers reveal that the peasants felt they suffered from recent revision of terriers[48] which recorded feudal obligations. For the French peasantry, who were the most prosperous in Europe, the heavy burden of feudal obligations seemed outmoded and archaic. “For even after it had ceased to be a political institution, the feudal system remained basic to the economic organization of France. In this restricted form it was far more hated than in the heyday of feudalism.”[49] During this period of the Great Fear, the peasantry did not hesitate to put an end to feudalism themselves. It was these revolts that forced the complete abolition of feudalism on the night of 4th August 1789.
It was on this famous night supposedly that the ancien régime collapsed, as some 100 deputies of the privileged orders gathered in the Versailles café by the Breton club and denounced fiscal privileges. The final decree, written by Du Port on 11th August claimed: “The National Assembly completely destroys the feudal regime.” It would appear here that the war against feudalism was won. The historian Doyle even suggests that the announcement from the Controller-General of Finance, de Brienne in July 1788 that the Estates-General would meet the following year, marked the end of absolutism. Though, it was during the summer of 1789 that power passed from the monarchy to the revolutionaries. Hitherto, “the political arm that was flexed to introduce tax reform was that of absolutism,”[50] though faced with an economic collapse, it could not cope. The administrative monarchy was an unstable compromise between the modern state and the feudal society. On the one hand, it continued to subvert the traditional social fabric by selling off various noble titles to raise much needed cash to fund its ambitious foreign policy. On the other hand, when it called on its traditionally most loyal weapon, the nobility, to sanction the economic reform, they refused and began the crusade against absolutism that the Paris crowd and the agrarian insurrectionists were to complete in the summer of 1789. The 2,500 pamphlets produced during the winter of 1788-89 and the irreverent attitude of the Enlightenment had created a political consciousness among the Third Estate and the opposition of the privileged orders to the arbitrary absolutism of Louis XVI was extended to the masses. It was at this point that the on-going economic problems, particularly unemployment and fluctuating bread prices came together with the political crisis of the ancien régime and “it was the fusion of these two crises in the spring and summer of 1789 which allowed the mass of discontents to become critical and turn into a revolution.”[51] This revolution was completed by the risings in rural France during the period of the “Great Fear.” The boycott of taxation in the spring of 1789 had shown the staunch opposition of the peasantry to feudal dues and the fear of an aristocratic counter-revolution was the trigger in the agrarian revolution during the summer of 1789.
[1] F. Furet, The French Revolution 1770-1814, p3
[2] A list of basic civil rights; intended as a preamble to a constitution, on the model of the declaration of rights which had prefaced the constitutions of new American states like Virginia or Massachusetts
[3] After disastrous farming in previous year, price of bread rose to 14 sous in 1774, resulting in general rioting around Paris in April and then in the capital in May
[4] Hundreds of workers took to the streets after the remarks about the high cost of wages by Révellion, a wallpaper manufacturer
[5] 5 per cent tax on landed revenue
[6] Direct representatives of the king’s authority in each of thirty-four administrative districts (généralites)
[7] A. De Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, p173
[8] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1814, p56
[9] An economic belief of the Enlightenment that developed during the late 1750s and advocated the abolition of what they regarded as artificial obstacles in the way of the “natural” economic order of agriculture, such as internal tariffs
[10] Commonly known as the Eden Treaty and was agreed in 1786. Both France and Britain agreed to a mutual lowering of tariffs. Britain, which was entirely self-sufficient agriculturally took little off France other than wine, whereas the better-quality British industries crippled French production
[11] T. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, p10
[12] A. Young, Travels, p173
[13] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p152
[14] W. Doyle, The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, p73
[15] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1814, p65
[16] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p48
[17] After a series of disputes, 130 Parisian representatives were exiled and the entire legal profession went on strike. Maupeou responded with a general reorganisation of the judiciary system, replacing them with tribunals
[18] T. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, p33
[19] D. Thomson, Europe since Napoleon, p27
[20] Groups of nobles who had rebelled against the King, resulting in Civil War in the seventeenth century
[21] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1814, p30
[22] Believed to have been brought down from heaven by the Holy Ghost
[23] In an attempt to regain the favor of Marie Antoinette, the Cardinal de Rohan was duped into buying a necklace worth nearly two million livres and when the plot was unmasked in 1785, he won the sympathy of the public
[24] Sovereign courts of law for the thirteen judicial districts; no law took into effect until it was registered by the courts
[25] A. De Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, p15
[26] Written instructions given to the deputies by their constituencies. 89% of noble cahiers supported fiscal equality; more than those of the Third Estate
[27] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p115
[28] D. Wright, Revolution & Terror in France, 1789-95, p11
[29] G. Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, p166
[30] Soldiers that were called in to exile the magistrates of the regional parlement, who had refused to sanction the various economic reforms, were bombarded with tiles by workers from the roof-top
[31] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p195
[32] The main works of the philosophes
[33] The work of Daniel Roche in studying wills showed that in Monmartre, 74% of people could sign their name
[34] A provincial assembly that met on July 21st 1788 in the forms that the Third Estate desired: vote by head, rather than in separate orders and the Third Estate had as many members as the clergy and nobility put together
[35] D. Wright, Revolution & Terror in France, 1789-95, p19
[36] The 46 members of the Second Estate, who voted in favour of the Vizille model on 7th May 1789
[37] Riots in Bristol, Nottingham and Derby were appeased by the passing of the Third Reform Act in June 1832, despite the moderate increase in the franchise from 470,000 to 840,000
[38] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p157
[39] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p82
[40] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p90
[41] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1815, p69
[42] G. Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, p143
[43] Members of the aristocracy, who emigrated following the revolution
[44] A sort of unemployed “lumpenproletariat,” created out of the collapse of the textile industry, due to the Eden Treaty. Fear of these was fed by the hundreds of vagrants, who migrated to the countryside, in search of work
[45] The fear of such a pact dates back to the failure of Louis XV in 1763 to legislate the agricultural reforms proposed by the physiocrats in 1763. Many believed that he had entered into a pact with unscrupulous speculators to starve his own subjects. In the summer of 1789, increasing numbers of brigands were regarded as shock troops of the plotters.
[46] Peasant risings
[47] Poll tax
[48] Records of feudal obligations
[49] A. De Tocqueville, the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, p32
[50] S. Schama, Citizens, p112
[51] T. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, p5
Wednesday, 12 March 2008
How different was Chartism from other movements?
Chartism, not surprisingly for a popular movement, has been dealt with largely in thematic terms and it is probably wise to begin with a brief outline of the historiography. Chartism until very recently has tended to be treated as a socio-economic movement of the working classes in response to the threat of industrialization and as a watershed in the development of working-class consciousness. Ever since the collapse of the movement this has dominated the study of Chartism. Even sympathetic accounts such as Mrs Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton have depicted Chartism in socio-economic terms and as a protest of hunger and distress. Eduard Dolléans in claiming in 1913 that Chartism was a working-class protest to the effects of the Industrial Revolution set the trend for modern historians of the movement. An analysis of the support base for Chartism has suggested that most local Chartists tended to belong to pre-industrial trades such as handloom-weaving and framework-knitting, faced with the threat of mechanization, while factory operatives served as the shocktroops of the movement. The reason for socio-economic dominance is perplexing. Perhaps it is due to the proliferation of local studies following the work of Asa Briggs as local studies in stressing the regional heterogeneity of the movement tend to focus on socio-economic differences. Equally, the attention given to the moral/physical force debate within Chartism tends to underpin this approach as it is often given a sociological correlation even though recent research suggests seemingly placid areas like London were in fact at times militant and South Lancashire and the North-East in particular were hardly involved in the movement’s dénouement. In fact, the continuation of the debate over moral and physical force within the movement is quite bewildering, and more importantly anachronistic. Robert Lowery, for example, often characterized for his moderation, was introduced on stage for the elections for the 1839 Convention as an advocate of physical force. The reasons for its prevalence are unsure. Perhaps it is because of its affinity with the debate between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, fresh in the mind of twentieth-century historians. Regardless, this, like the socio-economic interpretation of Chartism is fairly out-dated and has actually fallen out of favour recently among historians. Indeed, the differences between the two notwithstanding, Miles Taylor has shown in a synthesis of the work of Stedman Jones and Thompson, a common shared commitment to take the political aims of the movement seriously. Even those, like Thompson, who see Chartism as pivotal in development of working-class consciousness, perhaps building on the work of her husband, argue for a political interpretation of class formation (Margot Finn’s study for example of mid-Victorian radicalism emphasizes the importance of intellectual currents and the interpenetration of class with national sentiments). In comparison to other movements, I will argue that Chartism, far from being a breakthrough in working-class development, held many affinities with the ideology of previous radical movements and indeed with middle-class liberalism as well, which precipitated its decline. Insofar as it differed from other contemporary radical movements, this was only in the sense that it focused radical attention on political reform as the panacea of all the current evil and misery, in place of one-issue movements. Indeed, the ability of the Chartists to convince workers to unite around political reform is not dealt with sufficiently in the socio-economic interpretation.
An analysis of the ideology of the Chartists will reveal the similarities of Chartism with previous radical movements and the difficulty of seeing it in terms of class-consciousness. Here, Gareth Stedman Jones’ seminal essay and the linguistic turn in general come into play. Recent work emphasizing the importance of class within the Chartist movement, though has tended to take the political aims of the Chartists more seriously, is still based on an important pre-supposition of the relationship between social being and social consciousness. Such an assumption is arbitrary and in order for this to be proved, an analysis of the ideology of the Chartists, specifically what they said, needs to be undertaken and the work of Stedman Jones in doing so, has downplayed the class element of Chartism. Here, according to Stedman Jones, the language of the Chartists suggests an ideology based on the dichotomy between the represented and the unrepresented, or quite often the workers and the idle, instead of between various competing classes. Not only does this work have important implications for those who view Chartism as a class-based movement, but it also suggests its affinity with earlier radical movement. This can be seen in particular in the continuity of radical lexicography from the late seventeenth century, with such words as “independent” and “patriot” and the demonological connotations of “stockjobbing” and “fundholding” still in use within the Chartist movement. Above all, the implications of this work suggest the difficulty in seeing Chartism as a working-class movement. The language of the Chartists, as foremost the vocabulary of political exclusion, could never be seen as the vocabulary of a particular class and if it became more and more working-class this was in a sense de facto as a result of the aligning of the middle-class with the aristocracy in the oppression of the people; a point which both Dorothy Thompson and Stedman Jones can agree upon. The language and ideology of the Chartists – above all the dichotomization of the represented and the unrepresented – can be seen in the Chartist stance towards the middle-class. The points to make here are twofold: firstly, the Chartists were not completely hostile to the middle classes and often sought rapprochement with them, which fits in with the ideology of Chartism discussed so far. Secondly, Chartist criticisms of the middle classes were usually due to their political views, not their economic role. In fact, a desire to win middle-class support was a constant aim of the Chartists even after the withdrawal of the Birmingham Chartists from the Convention. This is perhaps why Chartists favoured exclusive dealing over Trade Union activity. Equally, the reason for the withdrawal of support for the Complete Suffrage Union was not based on a questioning of the desirability of a cross-class alliance but a belief that delegates who supported the principles of universal suffrage would naturally rally round the six points of the Charter. In fact, such an alliance was almost axiomatic within the movement. The Poor Man’s Guardian spoke out in July 1835 in favour of such and an analysis of its language, almost nonchalant, reveals how commonplace the idea must have been within the movement. Hostility, which did arise, was because the middle-class had been seen in 1832 to have joined the aristocracy within the system of oppression. Because of the ideology pervasive within Chartism of workers and drones, employers, unlike the aristocracy who were seen as quasi-parasitic upon society, were not criticised for their economic role, but merely for their ties with the aristocracy in the political order. Symptomatic of this is the proliferation of such terms as “millocrat,” “cotton lords,” and “steam aristocracy.” Robert Fyson’s study of the outbreak of violence in the Potteries during the 1842 strikes shows that those who were singled out for attack by workers were those of obnoxious political views. The petty-tyrannical middle-class employer, the kind who was unsympathetic to the demands of the workers and espoused the worst effects of laissez-faire political economy, may have been held in low regard by the Chartists, but the middle-class and employers as a whole did not receive criticism merely for their economic function and separation from the working-class. All this suggests the pervasiveness within Chartism of a classless ideology, an ideology of political exclusion and its similarity with earlier movements, dating as far back to those who felt excluded by the settlements of 1688 and 1714.
Touching upon the relationship between the middle and working classes within the Chartist movement naturally leads to the discussion of the similarities between Chartism and middle-class liberalism. In explaining the decline of Chartism, the labour aristocracy theory remained, at least until Royden Harrison’s “Before the Socialists,” largely unchallenged. Here, it was assumed, based on the decline in protest movements during the mid-Victorian period that this period witnessed the embourgeoisment of the working-classes as the skilled workers’, the artisans and industrial pacemakers, acceptance of such ideas as respectability and individualism, tied them to the middle-class value system and prevented the development of a working-class movement in the post-Chartist era. Such a notion, based on a paucity of evidence, has quite rightly come in for a lot of criticism (if only because it assumes the natural leadership of a labour aristocracy). Though the notion that there was a surrender to middle-class ideology has been questioned, an emphasis on liberalization generally during this period has remained. This has important implications for the study of Chartism. Particularly, it suggests the affinity of Chartism with a middle-class set of values, which has been a common theme of recent historiographical developments. Particular emphasis has been placed on the notions of moral intellectual improvement of the individual within the Chartist movement. Winstanley’s analysis of local politics in Oldham shows a continuation from the pre-Chartist era to the grassroots Liberalism of the 1850s, and importantly within Chartism itself, of the importance of education as a means to self improvement. Moreover, in an interesting article on the formation of Lovett’s National Association in October 1841, Stack shows the emphasis on the need to educate workers for the exercise of the franchise. This, as Stack has shown by an analysis of the reading materials of Lovett and the Association and the pervasiveness of body imagery within Lovett’s speeches, was based, idiosyncratically, on a Combean scientific analysis of the tripartite division of the brain. Its significance, as far as the similarities between Chartism and middle-class liberalism were twofold: firstly, as noted by Stack, it emphasised the ability of education to elevate the moral and intellectual faculties over the animal and therefore fitted within the liberal culture of self-improvement. Secondly and curiously only implicit in Stack’s work, it suggested the innate as well as the educable and therefore underpinned the existing class and gender order of society. What better demonstrates the similarities between Chartist and middle-class liberal ideology? Similarities notwithstanding, there were also many differences between the two mindsets. Tholfsen, who suggests that the origins of middle-class liberalism and working-class radicalism, Chartism in particular, can be found in the shared experiences of the Enlightenment and the evangelical revival, also notes the dissimilarities between the two, as liberalism became more conservative after 1789 and tended to depict liberty mainly in terms of economic liberalism and a system of representative government with a narrow franchise. Nevertheless, the points of affinity remain clear: a love of liberty, both economic and political, a commitment to the moral and intellectual improvement of the individual, and a shared reverence for the principles of soberness and cleanliness. Deep down, the Chartists “seem to have accepted the Peelite vision of a society in which individual effort, thrift and moral desert should bring its reward. They differed from self-satisfied middle-class moralists only in their insistence that the desired state of society had not yet been achieved.”[1]
If we accept that Chartism did not differ much from liberalism and the only difference was an archetypal radical critique of the corruption of the state and its exclusiveness, then all that needed to be done to quash the Chartist movement and bind the movement up within a broader liberalism, was prove otherwise. It is interesting here that Hilton mentions Peel as it is his economic reforms in particular which Stedman Jones credits with the grinding down of the radical critique of the state and in precipitating Chartist decline. While partial credit is given to Russell, particularly his proposed educational reforms, which emphasised the classless, disinterested aspects of government, above all credit is given to Peel’s economic reforms. The affects of which were twofold: firstly, it removed the material sources of discontent (here, the reduction of taxes on consumption and the introduction of an income tax in 1842 are most important) and secondly, it showed the state’s disinterest in various sectional matters (the most obvious examples here are the 1844 Bank Charter Act, the Joint Stock Company’s Act and above all the repeal of the Corn Laws). The latter was probably more important than the former for obvious reasons. Criticisms of Stedman Jones’ Peelite obsession have been many. Hilton, for example places more emphasis on the success of the Anti-Corn Law League in quelling Chartism by espousing a doctrine of free trade, favourable to all, compared to the sectional aims of O’Connor’s Land Plan. Mandler stresses the importance of the Whig-Liberal reform schemes after 1846 and suggests that any social reforms carried out under Peel’s government, such as the 1842 Mines Act, were carried in opposition to the government, often on the back of public opinion. A far more stinging criticism, building on the work of Dorothy Thompson, has been the complaint that in focusing on the conciliatory nature of the state, Stedman Jones has tended to downplay the draconian measures implemented by government to crush the Chartist movement. Partly, perhaps because Stedman Jones (quite incorrectly, albeit in my opinion) tends to view the collapse of the Chartist movement fairly early, ignores the use of state repression to counter the mass meeting on 10th April 1848 at Kennington Common.[2] Special constables were sworn in to deal with the movement and a number of strategically timed arrests were made to prevent the meeting getting out of hand. Nevertheless, the long arm of the state would never have been successful in removing the radical critique of a repressive government and would in fact most probably have augmented it. For this reason, conciliation was far more important. Paradigmatic is the decision to allow the 1839 Convention to go ahead as planned. It was a main premise of radical thought that the state would resort to violence in opposing an anti-parliament and when it allowed the Convention to go ahead, the ball was firmly back in the Chartist court, much to their chagrin. Strife, schism over the debate between moral and physical force and the disaster at Monmouth were all examples of Chartist disarray when faced with this uncomfortable position. The radical notion of an oppressive state did not seem to make sense, which hastened the decline of Chartism, replacing it bathetically with single-issue movements such as the Land Plan and the Ten Hours Movement. The decline of the radical critique of the state therefore meant a rapprochement between Chartism and liberalism, hitherto (almost) diametrically opposed, though fairly similar in many of their suppositions. If anything however, as both Finn and Tholfsen in their analyses of post-Chartist radical politics have shown, this meant an acceptance in many cases of radical working-class opinions or at least an introduction of measures which were viewed by them as acceptable, rather than the embourgeoisment of the working-class.
A comparison with middle-class liberalism naturally leads on to a consideration of the similarities (or dissimilarities) between Chartism and other contemporary radical movements. Here, largely out of a desire to express the hegemony of radical principles over those of class, Stedman Jones has sought to demonstrate the affinities between Chartism and various movements. Such affinities did exist. Ricardian socialists saw the current system of unequal exchange as a manifestation of artificial law and power, contrasting the current situation unfavourably with Smith’s depiction of the aboriginal exchange between the hunters of beavers and deer in Book II of the Wealth of Nations. Hostility to employers on political, not economic grounds was shared by many trade unionists, as Stedman Jones’ analysis of the union papers “Crisis” and “the Pioneers” shows. Equally in terms of nomenclature, the National Union of the Working Classes, formed in 1831 was intended to juxtapose, as Chartists and radicals so often did, workers to the idle, not the working- to the middle-class. Stedman Jones is certainly correct that various contemporary movements were incapable of forming a class-based alternative to Chartism. Yet an obsession with the similarities in terms of ideology between Chartism and other radical movements, largely out of a desire to disprove the prevalence of class ideology at the time and thereby its prevalence within Chartism, can distort the significance of Chartism in comparison to other movements. The significance of Chartism, compared to other radical working-class movements was that it managed to unite the various different grievances under the banner of political reform. Though various inroads could be made, Chartism premised upon an oppressive state and little ameliorative reform to the conditions of working people could be made until the introduction of universal manhood suffrage. Various lessons in the history of protest movements had taught Chartists this. Most recently, the fate of the Glasgow cotton spinners was picked up upon to demonstrate how futile the campaigning for social reform under the current political system was. When Stedman Jones points to the similarities between Chartism and Trade Unionism, citing the shared personnel between the two movements as one example,[3] he seems to overlook the fundamental differences between the two. Trade Unionism effectively argued that proper trade organization could maintain decent wage levels and acceptable working conditions under the current political order. This was incompatible with the Chartist radical doctrine, which sought the political overhaul of the state. The success of Chartism and its mass appeal lay in its ability to convince workers for the need for political reform before any specific reform could be undertaken. This, as Edsall has shown, is the reason why Chartism eventually superseded the Anti-Poor Law Movement in the north between 1837 and 1838. If Chartism differed from other radical movements in its ability to unite various grievances under political reform, its similarities with radical movements as a whole as well as liberalism, can be seen by a comparison with Owenism. Owenism was a very different animal. It was a truly counter-cultural movement, unlike Chartism. It is true that there was a degree of overlap between Chartism and Owenism: a labour theory of value and a belief based on the Owenite analysis of Colquhoun’s tables that the productive classes only received one-fifth of what they produced were common platitudes of various Chartist leaders, particularly the enigmatic Bronterre O’Brien. It is also true, as Tholfsen has shown that Owenism borrowed various rituals from popular culture, particularly nonconformity. Yet, this should not obscure the fact that Owenism was fairly unlike any radical movements or even liberalism for that matter. It rejected any notion of historic or natural rights as part of an atavistic system of competition and advocated an ideological upheaval to bring about change (though interestingly, despite its differences with other movements, Owenism was probably even further from forming a class-based radical model as it blamed all classes equally for the current system of competition). Equally, its belief in the unlimited powers of education meant that it was, unlike Chartism, totally incompatible with the liberal middle-class mindset. For Owen gender and class categories were meaningless and there was no limit on the ability of each individual to rise. While middle-class liberalism appreciated the ameliorative power of education, it had its limits based on inherited physical differences. Owenism, with its emphasis on environmentalism, was therefore totally incompatible with a mindset which, based mostly on an evangelical thought, emphasised the innate as well as the educable or individualism over environmentalism. This is perhaps one reason why bloodletting was still so commonly practiced in favour of contagionist interpretations.
A proper analysis of Chartism shows that it was fairly orthodox when compared with other movements. Chartism was not very unique. It was based on an ideology of previous radicalism, a vocabulary of political exclusion, not of class. Also, it shared many points of affinity with middle-class liberalism, particularly a notion of self-improvement and even, when compared to Owenism, had a lot more in common with other contemporary radical movements. Symptomatic of Chartist orthodoxy is their fascination with agendas, motions and meetings and that it sought to appropriate a culture of recreation; both of which were hitherto the exclusive property of the upper and middle classes. Perhaps a better example of the orthodoxy of the movement is an analysis of the role of women within the movement, which is something I have hitherto completely ignored and can only apologise for. At first, Chartism seemed to bind together female and working-class aspirations for emancipation. Women, led by the Birmingham Women’s Political Movement, were galvanized into action and soon over one-hundred and fifty associations across the country sprouted up. Once however it was realized that their role within the movement was merely one of cheerleading from the sides as it became clear that Chartists accepted Victorian notions of gender differences, the number of women within the movement began to decrease rapidly. What exactly was unique about Chartism then and why did it attract such a vast base of support? This can be explained, in comparison to other radical movements, by the fact that it united various different grievances under the political aims of the Charter and convinced them that piecemeal reform was not the answer and that only true reform could be undertaken after the political upheaval of the state. “For all their differences, Chartists were held together by a shared perception that the state was their common enemy.”[4] Implicit in this argument that Chartism was a fairly orthodox movement is that the socio-economic, and the class interpretation in general, is wrong. This interpretation, which sees Chartism as a watershed in the development of working-class radicalism is almost the direct antithesis of one that interprets the movement as orthodox. Having begun with a discussion on the historiography of Chartism, it makes sense to end my essay on the topic. Above all, the problem of interpreting Chartism as a social response to the Industrial Revolution is that it assumes the permanence and irreversibility of industrialization, which, though may seem obvious to posterity, was not so to contemporaries. Indeed, Boyd Hilton has shown that opinions towards industrialization were characterized by a general ambivalence, oscillate from an acceptance of it as a natural progression to a criticism of its lop-sided nature and breakneck speed. The resumption of cash payments in 1819 was intended to counteract the latter issue. Chartists themselves were far more concerned with the Norman Yoke, the loss of suffrage rights in the medieval period and the creation of a bloated fiscal-military state at the end of the seventeenth century. What is more, this approach no longer seems to fit the new narrative of industrialization espoused by Crafts and Harley. Historians, who view Chartism in class terms, have therefore had to adjust and have tended to emphasise political developments in the formation of class consciousness. One new trend in attempting to resurrect this model has been a focus on not what the Chartists actually said but how they said it and the symbolism of the movement generally. Pickering for example focuses on the fact that in greeting his supporters after being released from gaol on 30th March 1841 at York Castle, O’Connor chose to war the working-class attire of fustian. Interesting and enlightening though this may be, if historians of Chartism are going to resurrect the class model, there needs to be a greater attention given to the intellectual origins of the movement, rather than presupposing the importance of class based on a twentieth century notion of the relationship between social being and social consciousness. A study of the intellectual considerations of the Chartists, similar to that undertaken by Stack, is perhaps what is lacking in Stedman Jones’ essay and should certainly form a key component of any future work on Chartism.
[1] B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People?, p612
[2] The fact that over 150,000 attended and fever reached other towns as far as Bradford and Manchester should do more to damage than anything else Stedman Jones’ view of Chartism in the late 1840s as “anachronistic”
[3] This in itself is most probably incorrect. Michael Winstanley’s monograph of Oldham shows that the confusion of bitter industrial disputes with popular radicalism has distorted the study of Oldham politics. In fact, very few popular leaders involved themselves in industrial disputes. Though this is only a monograph, it has obvious implications for the nation as a whole.
[4] Ibid, B. Hilton, p619
An analysis of the ideology of the Chartists will reveal the similarities of Chartism with previous radical movements and the difficulty of seeing it in terms of class-consciousness. Here, Gareth Stedman Jones’ seminal essay and the linguistic turn in general come into play. Recent work emphasizing the importance of class within the Chartist movement, though has tended to take the political aims of the Chartists more seriously, is still based on an important pre-supposition of the relationship between social being and social consciousness. Such an assumption is arbitrary and in order for this to be proved, an analysis of the ideology of the Chartists, specifically what they said, needs to be undertaken and the work of Stedman Jones in doing so, has downplayed the class element of Chartism. Here, according to Stedman Jones, the language of the Chartists suggests an ideology based on the dichotomy between the represented and the unrepresented, or quite often the workers and the idle, instead of between various competing classes. Not only does this work have important implications for those who view Chartism as a class-based movement, but it also suggests its affinity with earlier radical movement. This can be seen in particular in the continuity of radical lexicography from the late seventeenth century, with such words as “independent” and “patriot” and the demonological connotations of “stockjobbing” and “fundholding” still in use within the Chartist movement. Above all, the implications of this work suggest the difficulty in seeing Chartism as a working-class movement. The language of the Chartists, as foremost the vocabulary of political exclusion, could never be seen as the vocabulary of a particular class and if it became more and more working-class this was in a sense de facto as a result of the aligning of the middle-class with the aristocracy in the oppression of the people; a point which both Dorothy Thompson and Stedman Jones can agree upon. The language and ideology of the Chartists – above all the dichotomization of the represented and the unrepresented – can be seen in the Chartist stance towards the middle-class. The points to make here are twofold: firstly, the Chartists were not completely hostile to the middle classes and often sought rapprochement with them, which fits in with the ideology of Chartism discussed so far. Secondly, Chartist criticisms of the middle classes were usually due to their political views, not their economic role. In fact, a desire to win middle-class support was a constant aim of the Chartists even after the withdrawal of the Birmingham Chartists from the Convention. This is perhaps why Chartists favoured exclusive dealing over Trade Union activity. Equally, the reason for the withdrawal of support for the Complete Suffrage Union was not based on a questioning of the desirability of a cross-class alliance but a belief that delegates who supported the principles of universal suffrage would naturally rally round the six points of the Charter. In fact, such an alliance was almost axiomatic within the movement. The Poor Man’s Guardian spoke out in July 1835 in favour of such and an analysis of its language, almost nonchalant, reveals how commonplace the idea must have been within the movement. Hostility, which did arise, was because the middle-class had been seen in 1832 to have joined the aristocracy within the system of oppression. Because of the ideology pervasive within Chartism of workers and drones, employers, unlike the aristocracy who were seen as quasi-parasitic upon society, were not criticised for their economic role, but merely for their ties with the aristocracy in the political order. Symptomatic of this is the proliferation of such terms as “millocrat,” “cotton lords,” and “steam aristocracy.” Robert Fyson’s study of the outbreak of violence in the Potteries during the 1842 strikes shows that those who were singled out for attack by workers were those of obnoxious political views. The petty-tyrannical middle-class employer, the kind who was unsympathetic to the demands of the workers and espoused the worst effects of laissez-faire political economy, may have been held in low regard by the Chartists, but the middle-class and employers as a whole did not receive criticism merely for their economic function and separation from the working-class. All this suggests the pervasiveness within Chartism of a classless ideology, an ideology of political exclusion and its similarity with earlier movements, dating as far back to those who felt excluded by the settlements of 1688 and 1714.
Touching upon the relationship between the middle and working classes within the Chartist movement naturally leads to the discussion of the similarities between Chartism and middle-class liberalism. In explaining the decline of Chartism, the labour aristocracy theory remained, at least until Royden Harrison’s “Before the Socialists,” largely unchallenged. Here, it was assumed, based on the decline in protest movements during the mid-Victorian period that this period witnessed the embourgeoisment of the working-classes as the skilled workers’, the artisans and industrial pacemakers, acceptance of such ideas as respectability and individualism, tied them to the middle-class value system and prevented the development of a working-class movement in the post-Chartist era. Such a notion, based on a paucity of evidence, has quite rightly come in for a lot of criticism (if only because it assumes the natural leadership of a labour aristocracy). Though the notion that there was a surrender to middle-class ideology has been questioned, an emphasis on liberalization generally during this period has remained. This has important implications for the study of Chartism. Particularly, it suggests the affinity of Chartism with a middle-class set of values, which has been a common theme of recent historiographical developments. Particular emphasis has been placed on the notions of moral intellectual improvement of the individual within the Chartist movement. Winstanley’s analysis of local politics in Oldham shows a continuation from the pre-Chartist era to the grassroots Liberalism of the 1850s, and importantly within Chartism itself, of the importance of education as a means to self improvement. Moreover, in an interesting article on the formation of Lovett’s National Association in October 1841, Stack shows the emphasis on the need to educate workers for the exercise of the franchise. This, as Stack has shown by an analysis of the reading materials of Lovett and the Association and the pervasiveness of body imagery within Lovett’s speeches, was based, idiosyncratically, on a Combean scientific analysis of the tripartite division of the brain. Its significance, as far as the similarities between Chartism and middle-class liberalism were twofold: firstly, as noted by Stack, it emphasised the ability of education to elevate the moral and intellectual faculties over the animal and therefore fitted within the liberal culture of self-improvement. Secondly and curiously only implicit in Stack’s work, it suggested the innate as well as the educable and therefore underpinned the existing class and gender order of society. What better demonstrates the similarities between Chartist and middle-class liberal ideology? Similarities notwithstanding, there were also many differences between the two mindsets. Tholfsen, who suggests that the origins of middle-class liberalism and working-class radicalism, Chartism in particular, can be found in the shared experiences of the Enlightenment and the evangelical revival, also notes the dissimilarities between the two, as liberalism became more conservative after 1789 and tended to depict liberty mainly in terms of economic liberalism and a system of representative government with a narrow franchise. Nevertheless, the points of affinity remain clear: a love of liberty, both economic and political, a commitment to the moral and intellectual improvement of the individual, and a shared reverence for the principles of soberness and cleanliness. Deep down, the Chartists “seem to have accepted the Peelite vision of a society in which individual effort, thrift and moral desert should bring its reward. They differed from self-satisfied middle-class moralists only in their insistence that the desired state of society had not yet been achieved.”[1]
If we accept that Chartism did not differ much from liberalism and the only difference was an archetypal radical critique of the corruption of the state and its exclusiveness, then all that needed to be done to quash the Chartist movement and bind the movement up within a broader liberalism, was prove otherwise. It is interesting here that Hilton mentions Peel as it is his economic reforms in particular which Stedman Jones credits with the grinding down of the radical critique of the state and in precipitating Chartist decline. While partial credit is given to Russell, particularly his proposed educational reforms, which emphasised the classless, disinterested aspects of government, above all credit is given to Peel’s economic reforms. The affects of which were twofold: firstly, it removed the material sources of discontent (here, the reduction of taxes on consumption and the introduction of an income tax in 1842 are most important) and secondly, it showed the state’s disinterest in various sectional matters (the most obvious examples here are the 1844 Bank Charter Act, the Joint Stock Company’s Act and above all the repeal of the Corn Laws). The latter was probably more important than the former for obvious reasons. Criticisms of Stedman Jones’ Peelite obsession have been many. Hilton, for example places more emphasis on the success of the Anti-Corn Law League in quelling Chartism by espousing a doctrine of free trade, favourable to all, compared to the sectional aims of O’Connor’s Land Plan. Mandler stresses the importance of the Whig-Liberal reform schemes after 1846 and suggests that any social reforms carried out under Peel’s government, such as the 1842 Mines Act, were carried in opposition to the government, often on the back of public opinion. A far more stinging criticism, building on the work of Dorothy Thompson, has been the complaint that in focusing on the conciliatory nature of the state, Stedman Jones has tended to downplay the draconian measures implemented by government to crush the Chartist movement. Partly, perhaps because Stedman Jones (quite incorrectly, albeit in my opinion) tends to view the collapse of the Chartist movement fairly early, ignores the use of state repression to counter the mass meeting on 10th April 1848 at Kennington Common.[2] Special constables were sworn in to deal with the movement and a number of strategically timed arrests were made to prevent the meeting getting out of hand. Nevertheless, the long arm of the state would never have been successful in removing the radical critique of a repressive government and would in fact most probably have augmented it. For this reason, conciliation was far more important. Paradigmatic is the decision to allow the 1839 Convention to go ahead as planned. It was a main premise of radical thought that the state would resort to violence in opposing an anti-parliament and when it allowed the Convention to go ahead, the ball was firmly back in the Chartist court, much to their chagrin. Strife, schism over the debate between moral and physical force and the disaster at Monmouth were all examples of Chartist disarray when faced with this uncomfortable position. The radical notion of an oppressive state did not seem to make sense, which hastened the decline of Chartism, replacing it bathetically with single-issue movements such as the Land Plan and the Ten Hours Movement. The decline of the radical critique of the state therefore meant a rapprochement between Chartism and liberalism, hitherto (almost) diametrically opposed, though fairly similar in many of their suppositions. If anything however, as both Finn and Tholfsen in their analyses of post-Chartist radical politics have shown, this meant an acceptance in many cases of radical working-class opinions or at least an introduction of measures which were viewed by them as acceptable, rather than the embourgeoisment of the working-class.
A comparison with middle-class liberalism naturally leads on to a consideration of the similarities (or dissimilarities) between Chartism and other contemporary radical movements. Here, largely out of a desire to express the hegemony of radical principles over those of class, Stedman Jones has sought to demonstrate the affinities between Chartism and various movements. Such affinities did exist. Ricardian socialists saw the current system of unequal exchange as a manifestation of artificial law and power, contrasting the current situation unfavourably with Smith’s depiction of the aboriginal exchange between the hunters of beavers and deer in Book II of the Wealth of Nations. Hostility to employers on political, not economic grounds was shared by many trade unionists, as Stedman Jones’ analysis of the union papers “Crisis” and “the Pioneers” shows. Equally in terms of nomenclature, the National Union of the Working Classes, formed in 1831 was intended to juxtapose, as Chartists and radicals so often did, workers to the idle, not the working- to the middle-class. Stedman Jones is certainly correct that various contemporary movements were incapable of forming a class-based alternative to Chartism. Yet an obsession with the similarities in terms of ideology between Chartism and other radical movements, largely out of a desire to disprove the prevalence of class ideology at the time and thereby its prevalence within Chartism, can distort the significance of Chartism in comparison to other movements. The significance of Chartism, compared to other radical working-class movements was that it managed to unite the various different grievances under the banner of political reform. Though various inroads could be made, Chartism premised upon an oppressive state and little ameliorative reform to the conditions of working people could be made until the introduction of universal manhood suffrage. Various lessons in the history of protest movements had taught Chartists this. Most recently, the fate of the Glasgow cotton spinners was picked up upon to demonstrate how futile the campaigning for social reform under the current political system was. When Stedman Jones points to the similarities between Chartism and Trade Unionism, citing the shared personnel between the two movements as one example,[3] he seems to overlook the fundamental differences between the two. Trade Unionism effectively argued that proper trade organization could maintain decent wage levels and acceptable working conditions under the current political order. This was incompatible with the Chartist radical doctrine, which sought the political overhaul of the state. The success of Chartism and its mass appeal lay in its ability to convince workers for the need for political reform before any specific reform could be undertaken. This, as Edsall has shown, is the reason why Chartism eventually superseded the Anti-Poor Law Movement in the north between 1837 and 1838. If Chartism differed from other radical movements in its ability to unite various grievances under political reform, its similarities with radical movements as a whole as well as liberalism, can be seen by a comparison with Owenism. Owenism was a very different animal. It was a truly counter-cultural movement, unlike Chartism. It is true that there was a degree of overlap between Chartism and Owenism: a labour theory of value and a belief based on the Owenite analysis of Colquhoun’s tables that the productive classes only received one-fifth of what they produced were common platitudes of various Chartist leaders, particularly the enigmatic Bronterre O’Brien. It is also true, as Tholfsen has shown that Owenism borrowed various rituals from popular culture, particularly nonconformity. Yet, this should not obscure the fact that Owenism was fairly unlike any radical movements or even liberalism for that matter. It rejected any notion of historic or natural rights as part of an atavistic system of competition and advocated an ideological upheaval to bring about change (though interestingly, despite its differences with other movements, Owenism was probably even further from forming a class-based radical model as it blamed all classes equally for the current system of competition). Equally, its belief in the unlimited powers of education meant that it was, unlike Chartism, totally incompatible with the liberal middle-class mindset. For Owen gender and class categories were meaningless and there was no limit on the ability of each individual to rise. While middle-class liberalism appreciated the ameliorative power of education, it had its limits based on inherited physical differences. Owenism, with its emphasis on environmentalism, was therefore totally incompatible with a mindset which, based mostly on an evangelical thought, emphasised the innate as well as the educable or individualism over environmentalism. This is perhaps one reason why bloodletting was still so commonly practiced in favour of contagionist interpretations.
A proper analysis of Chartism shows that it was fairly orthodox when compared with other movements. Chartism was not very unique. It was based on an ideology of previous radicalism, a vocabulary of political exclusion, not of class. Also, it shared many points of affinity with middle-class liberalism, particularly a notion of self-improvement and even, when compared to Owenism, had a lot more in common with other contemporary radical movements. Symptomatic of Chartist orthodoxy is their fascination with agendas, motions and meetings and that it sought to appropriate a culture of recreation; both of which were hitherto the exclusive property of the upper and middle classes. Perhaps a better example of the orthodoxy of the movement is an analysis of the role of women within the movement, which is something I have hitherto completely ignored and can only apologise for. At first, Chartism seemed to bind together female and working-class aspirations for emancipation. Women, led by the Birmingham Women’s Political Movement, were galvanized into action and soon over one-hundred and fifty associations across the country sprouted up. Once however it was realized that their role within the movement was merely one of cheerleading from the sides as it became clear that Chartists accepted Victorian notions of gender differences, the number of women within the movement began to decrease rapidly. What exactly was unique about Chartism then and why did it attract such a vast base of support? This can be explained, in comparison to other radical movements, by the fact that it united various different grievances under the political aims of the Charter and convinced them that piecemeal reform was not the answer and that only true reform could be undertaken after the political upheaval of the state. “For all their differences, Chartists were held together by a shared perception that the state was their common enemy.”[4] Implicit in this argument that Chartism was a fairly orthodox movement is that the socio-economic, and the class interpretation in general, is wrong. This interpretation, which sees Chartism as a watershed in the development of working-class radicalism is almost the direct antithesis of one that interprets the movement as orthodox. Having begun with a discussion on the historiography of Chartism, it makes sense to end my essay on the topic. Above all, the problem of interpreting Chartism as a social response to the Industrial Revolution is that it assumes the permanence and irreversibility of industrialization, which, though may seem obvious to posterity, was not so to contemporaries. Indeed, Boyd Hilton has shown that opinions towards industrialization were characterized by a general ambivalence, oscillate from an acceptance of it as a natural progression to a criticism of its lop-sided nature and breakneck speed. The resumption of cash payments in 1819 was intended to counteract the latter issue. Chartists themselves were far more concerned with the Norman Yoke, the loss of suffrage rights in the medieval period and the creation of a bloated fiscal-military state at the end of the seventeenth century. What is more, this approach no longer seems to fit the new narrative of industrialization espoused by Crafts and Harley. Historians, who view Chartism in class terms, have therefore had to adjust and have tended to emphasise political developments in the formation of class consciousness. One new trend in attempting to resurrect this model has been a focus on not what the Chartists actually said but how they said it and the symbolism of the movement generally. Pickering for example focuses on the fact that in greeting his supporters after being released from gaol on 30th March 1841 at York Castle, O’Connor chose to war the working-class attire of fustian. Interesting and enlightening though this may be, if historians of Chartism are going to resurrect the class model, there needs to be a greater attention given to the intellectual origins of the movement, rather than presupposing the importance of class based on a twentieth century notion of the relationship between social being and social consciousness. A study of the intellectual considerations of the Chartists, similar to that undertaken by Stack, is perhaps what is lacking in Stedman Jones’ essay and should certainly form a key component of any future work on Chartism.
[1] B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People?, p612
[2] The fact that over 150,000 attended and fever reached other towns as far as Bradford and Manchester should do more to damage than anything else Stedman Jones’ view of Chartism in the late 1840s as “anachronistic”
[3] This in itself is most probably incorrect. Michael Winstanley’s monograph of Oldham shows that the confusion of bitter industrial disputes with popular radicalism has distorted the study of Oldham politics. In fact, very few popular leaders involved themselves in industrial disputes. Though this is only a monograph, it has obvious implications for the nation as a whole.
[4] Ibid, B. Hilton, p619
How important were the great Reform Act and the repeal of the Corn Laws in the formation of the Liberal party?
The formation of the Liberal party and Victorian Liberalism in general has fallen out of favour in teaching. The proliferation of various parliamentary groupings and the fragmentation of traditional two-party politics, evident from the time of Pitt and Fox,[1] have meant that this period has been considered conceptually too hard to grasp for students, particularly of A-level. The various parliamentary groupings obviously pose problems for any chronology of the formation of the Liberal party. Historians of this period have traditionally cast pre-Gladstonian Liberalism as whiggish, intellectually slippery and reliant on a constant body of unpredictable Irish and radical MPs (with particular attention given to the Lichfield House Compact on February 18th 1835 based on the issue of appropriation). Recent historiographical trends however have been much kinder to earlier Whig-Liberalism. Newbould for example has suggested that the Whigs of the 1830s were far from the radical’s playthings and sought to cultivate a coherent, moderate strategy, propped up by Peelite support. Parry argues for the formation of a clear Liberal party in the period of 1835-41. Nonetheless, the constant interchanging of the terms “Whig,” “Whig-Liberal” and “Liberal” used so far should reveal the problems of putting a precise date on the formation of the Liberal party. Strictly in terms of nomenclature, the party’s formation must remain ambiguous. Though strict adhesion to contemporary nomenclature does not always provide the most obvious guidelines for historians for understanding contemporary politics,[2] ambiguous terminology can often cloud the certainty of historians over things like the formation of the Liberal party. Charles Dodd and Henry Stocks Smith could not agree over terminology. As far as historians are concerned, Taylor argues that the term “liberal” did not become in common use until the 1860s,[3] whereas Halévy’s shows that the term was in full use in the press during the 1837 and 1841 elections. Liberalism however was first and foremost a creed and as Parry sagaciously remarks above all “Liberals saw government as a matter of integrating and harnessing different classes and interest groups within the political nation.”[4] Liberal politicians would listen to the demands of their constituents, reflect upon them and then legislate accordingly. This view of the parliamentarian took place against a backdrop of an increasingly vocal public opinion, which could not be ignored, as Mackinnon identified in his pamphlet in 1828 “On the Rise, Progress and Present State of Public Opinion.” The best example of this is Sidmouth’s attempt in 1811 to introduce a bill to regulate the itinerant evangelical preaching of societies like the London Missionary Society. 336 petitions in 48 hours and the bill was dropped. Public opinion could no longer be ignored. In this essay then I will argue for the formation of a “liberal” model of politics, which sought to bind outdoor clamour to aristocratic leadership, whilst legislating also for the benefit of the moral development of the people. This was a traditional staple of the Grand Whiggery and it was only when it was realized that this had to be achieved through financial methods as well – a legacy of Peel’s – that it can be suggested the Liberal party was formed in earnest.
The most obvious place to begin in the study of the formation of the Liberal party, is the great Reform Act of 1832. The Tory honeymoon, which had lasted some fifty years, came to an end abruptly on 2nd November 1830. The Whigs had been reduced to an aristocratic rump. Liberal Toryism had courted public opinion successfully, with their emphasis on economic retrenchment – public expenditure was slashed, sinecures abolished – and a popular foreign policy under Canning, which attempted to prop up constitutional movements abroad without damaging the continental status quo. The Tories had even stolen their clothes and proved their responsiveness to outdoor clamour in the Catholic emancipation crisis. All that the Whigs could do was stand back and applaud. In fact this was their policy for most of the early nineteenth century and when Grey went into open attack on Wellington on 30 June 1830, largely due to his anger at his exclusion from office, this was no more beneficial to the Whigs. If there was one great turning point in nineteenth century British history then surely Wellington’s speech is the moment. The 1830 elections as Professor Brock has shown were curious insofar as no one seemed to demand reform, yet at the same time few seemed willing to oppose it. Clearly some sort of gesture was needed and Wellington dropped the ball. Four days after his speech, the Canningites agreed to support the Whigs in some measure of reform and on 15th November, they were joined by the Ultra Tories. Into office came the Whigs. Whether or not Mandler’s view of the 1830s and 1840s as a reassertion of Whig principles and his dichotomization of Tory commercial liberty and Whig institutional liberty is correct, after fifty years in exile, this is the moment when the Whigs came into office once more and immediately put forward a plan for reform. Holland House, which had nurtured so many members of the Grand Whiggery as well as other politicians outside the clique, most famously Russell, had certainly instilled in them the primacy of political liberty and the Foxite notion of the role of the aristocracy to serve the people. This gave the Whigs a great opportunity to reassert their leadership over the nation and political reform became one of the main foundations of the Liberal party.
The Great Reform Act was one of the founding principles of the Liberal party as it showed the ability of the parliament to represent different interests and legislate accordingly. It sought to increase the representativeness of parliament and in doing so increase popular acquiescence for parliament and bind the people to the legislature. Decline in reverence for parliament was a worrying aspect of the outdoor agitation of 1830-32, as radicals increasingly sought alternative means to express their discontent. Most Whigs certainly wished for a return to the kind of reverence that was common to the eighteenth century, which Linda Colley has demonstrated in her analysis of patriotism in the “long” eighteenth century.[5] Nevertheless, the Reform Act was far from a concessionary piece of legislation. Instead it “sought to reconcile the people to government by emphasizing the representativeness of parliament as the protector of interests and the expression of the national will”[6] This certainly, as Mandler, has shown played into Whig hands who valued institutional reform so highly and held parliament as the reconciler of all sectional interests. Whig obsession with parliamentary hegemony is perhaps best demonstrated by the parliament of 1836, which was designed to amaze. One of the most impressive features was certainly the eighteen bronze statues of barons and prelates signing the Magna Carta. The Whigs had their own model of parliamentary reform and it is wrong, as Southgate among others have done, to view the reform act as a piece of concessionary legislation. Indeed, it is one of the many idiosyncrasies of nineteenth-century historiography that for so long now reform has been seen as a concessionary measure, designed to pass power from land to town, and as a gradual step towards democracy by enfranchising a vague occupational body known as the “middle class.”[7] The reasons for this remain vague though most likely it is because of the startlingly lack of archival material concerning the Act so historians have instead often turned to the writings of polemicists, who viewed the act in these peculiar terms. Regardless, Professor Moore has shown that the Act was more curative. Increasing the ability of parliament to represent various different interests would cure any outdoor agitation. Ministers set boundaries geographically and socially so that it would provide representation for some interest. Indeed, the permanence of this idea of “representativeness” is an interesting phenomenon. In introducing a reform bill in 1854, Russell argued that it was necessary as the Reform Bill of 1832 had been too successful. Parliament had become nothing more than a great mix of various sectional pressures with no overall consensus possible. In 1832, rotten boroughs and freeman constituencies were abolished as they did not represent any interest and were merely a product of aristocratic coercion. Although, it is interesting that even though the disenfranchised boroughs went mainly to large cities, such was the Whig obsession with representing various interests that a few new boroughs were enfranchised on the basis of the various interests they represented, rather than their size. A prime example cited by Boyd Hilton in his epic book “A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People?” is that of Frome, with only an exiguous population of around 12,000 though the centre of the woolen industry in Somerset. Equally, Moore has shown in his analysis of the debates on Reform in parliament that desire to separate rural and urban interests, particularly urban penetration of the counties was common among the Whigs and ministers; a point which is frequently ignored, peculiarly so by Parry. Indeed, Whig ministers only accepted an amendment to the borough freeholder clause, which gave him a vote in the counties in some circumstances, as a corollary of the “Chandos” clause.[8] The Reform Bill then in terms of the formation of the Liberal party allowed the greater representation of various interests and in doing so bound the people to parliament. Perhaps the best testimony to its success is the change in radical discourse following reform, which according to Taylor began to appeal to the sovereignty of the Commons, rather than some vague ancient constitution and glorious revolution.
Reinvigoration of local government was seen as the natural concomitant of reform of parliament and sought further to bind the people to aristocratic leadership. Changes in beer sales in 1830 and in the position of poaching in 1830 and 1831 respectively were all part of a general movement to remove arbitrary, discretionary government in place of a set of fixed principles and in doing so limit criticism of the Commons. The most obvious example of this is the changes made to the municipal corporations in 1835. Corporations, hitherto seen as a self-perpetuating oligarchy of merchants, who levied rates arbitrarily to fit their own ends, would be replaced by a more accountable style of local government, subject to election by local ratepayers, which in the Whig mind at least, would increase public acquiescence. This was only one object of reform however as part of the Whig-Liberal creed was their confidence in the ability of aristocratic legislative initiative to shape public behaviour. Any analysis of the Reform Act would lead to this conclusion and the reform of the corporations was no different. The regular auditing of accounts and corporation accountability to ratepayers were intended to help drive down expenditure and encourage individual independence. A more striking example of this is the Poor Law of 1834, viewed by posterity as one of those seminal acts that defined the mindset of an entire epoch. For this reason, it is not surprising that the secondary literature on the Poor Law is extremely vast. Perhaps part of the attention on the Poor Law is the obvious evangelical overtones with emphasis on the natural order designed by Providence, coupled with the apparent Benthamism, where it was envisaged that once the pre-1834 system had been eradicated, the strivings of both landlord and labourer could be undertaken for mutual benefice. Relief of poverty was taken out of the hands of the lenient parish vestries and local magistrates and placed into the hands of local guardians, elected by ratepayers. Ratepayer pressure it was envisaged would lead to a fall in poor relief expenditure – and indeed it did, with expenditure falling from £6.83m to £5.53m between 1830 and 1835.[9] Also implicit in the Act was the role of indoor relief. The stigma of the workhouse it was believed would deter labourers from pauperization unless it was absolutely unavoidable and encourage them to fend for themselves. Such a harsh system of relief surely, more so than anything, does discredit to the dominant view of Whig government in this period, that the Whigs, faced with irregular support to the Commons were subject to the whims of outdoor clamour. Rather, an analysis of local government reform reveals not only the importance of public acceptance of legislation, but also the ability of aristocratic leadership legislate as they saw fit for the moral good of the people.
The Whig-Liberal mindset is probably best understood however by its attitude towards religion and Ireland; two issues so often intertwined. Historiographical trends have tended to ignore the influence of these two. The reasons for it are difficult to fathom. Perhaps, it is because the Whig-Liberal government of 1835-41 is often treated dominated by radical and Irish thought and thus any reform on these two issues are seen as merely concessionary. This would certainly explain why economic concerns and laissez-faire individualism, the main legacy of Peel’s government, have come to dominate the historiography of the formation of Liberalism. Even Boyd Hilton, who views laissez-faire in terms of “moderate” evangelicalism, rather than Cobdenite cosmopolitanism,[10] fits this trend. However, the works of Parry and Brent have bucked the trend with their emphasis on religious reform. Ignoring religious as well as Irish reform would certainly be a mistake when the Whig-Liberal mindset is considered. It is one of the many paradoxes of nineteenth century British history that despite over fifty years in the political wilderness, the Whigs failed to develop any sort of complex. The reasons for this are manifold. Certainly the Grand Whiggery’s cosmopolitan lifestyle and the narrowing of this clique through the constant intermarriage between a few select families (such as the Gowers, Cavendishes and Cowper-Temples)[11] meant that they saw themselves as a privileged group within a privileged group. Whatever the reasons, the Whigs seemed more willing to blame their exclusion from politics on skullduggery, most usually on behalf of local Tory landowners but also curiously sometimes the monarch as well. When the Reform Act seemed to bind the various hitherto unrepresented interests to parliament, it was only natural that Whig confidence grew and they sought to legislate in other areas. Two such areas were religion and Ireland. Here the aims of Whig-Liberals were once again twofold: to increase the representation of various interests and in doing so harness public opinion to aristocratic leadership and also, to legislate for the moral improvement of the people. One such example is appropriation. This was seen as the natural concomitant of Stanley’s Irish Temporalities Act in 1833, which tried to make the church establishment more acceptable to a hostile Irish (mostly Catholic or Dissenting) population, by severely reducing its size and its finances. This obviously led to calls for the use of any surplus revenue for utilitarian, sectional purposes and Russell finally agreed to this when introducing his 1834 Tithe Bill. Parry actually sees the appropriation issue as the most important step in the formation of the Liberal party. Certainly the introduction of a body of committees investigating the issue led to the secession of Stanleyites, allowing the Whig-Liberals to pursue a purely “liberal” strategy. Most importantly however, and the point Parry makes, appropriation represented the aforementioned aims of Liberal government: to bind people to government by demonstrating its responsiveness, and also to improve the moral behaviour of the people – it was believed that appropriation would encourage a more conciliatory attitude to British rule in Ireland from the various Catholic priest-demagogues, who whipped up sectional hostility. Similar reform reveals the same aims. The lapsing of the Coercion Act in 1834, replaced by an established, and mostly Catholic police force, and the appointment of stipendiary justices in Dublin, to the chagrin of local Orangemen magistrates are two examples. Equally, with regards to religion, the same two aims are clear: the granting of a charter to London University with no religious profession required, the ending of Church of England monopoly over registration and ceremonies and the abolition of the Tithe - all in 1836 – are just a few examples. On a number of other issues, further reform was often frustrated by a conservative parliament. The most obvious examples are Russell’s attempts to introduce appropriation in the Irish church and his educational reforms in 1838 and 1839 respectively.
Hitherto, the Whigs sought to define good government in constitutional and religious terms only. The main legacy of Peel to the Liberal party was to show members of Parliament that any future government had to be more reassuring on economic issues. This was the main legacy of his various economic reforms in 1841-46 though particularly of the repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel’s main achievements in this sphere were twofold: firstly, the implementation of a sound economic and fiscal policy – by introducing the income tax in 1842, Peel was able to reduce the annual deficit of £2.4million - and secondly, the creation of a policy, which at least feigned economic disinterest and in doing so, thus absolving the state from blame. This was achieved through tariff reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws. The two were obviously not mutually exclusive. For example, higher and more regular revenue yields following the implementation of an income tax allowed Peel to tinker with tariff reform. Import duties on all raw materials and finished articles were cut to five and twenty per cent respectively in 1842. Such was the success that Peel was able to go even further by removing all export duties and import duties on 430 articles. Recent historiographical trends have often portrayed Peel as a precursor of later Liberalism and in economic terms, there is certainly much evidence for this. Peel was not the flaccid moderate of the A-level textbooks. He had a strong view of executive government and the sovereignty of the church-state relationship. Nonetheless, he was probably much closer to later Liberals in economic terms than the Tories. Regardless, Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws was a great boon to later Liberal government. Such was the ideological pull of protectionism among Conservatives, as Anna Gambles has shown in her analysis of the Tory periodicals Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Quarterly Review that the inevitable outcome of reform was Tory schism. 114 Tories voted with Peel and 241 against. The protectionists, led by Disraeli, distanced themselves from the majority of the Peelites, who slowly gravitated towards the Liberal party and in doing so bolstered Liberal parliamentary dominance. Had government voted in favour of Russell’s fixed duty of 8s per quarter in April 1841, or called Peel’s bluff over his threat to resign unless the Commons overturned their rejection of Ashley’s ten-hour amendment act, as he surely must have hoped for, the outcome of nineteenth-century British history could have been so much different. As it was, the only possible beneficiaries of Corn Law repeal were the Liberals. The ball was now firmly in the Liberal court, but they had to make sure unlike Wellington in 1830, they took the opportunity. Peel, as Hilton has shown in his highly influential article in 1879 for the Historical Journal, in repealing the Corn Laws, was motivated by a belief in the “natural order” of things;[12] a bizarre combination of Butlerian cosmology, evangelical individualism and Benthamite consequentialism. Free trade had placed Britain at the mercy of Providence and subject to his machinations. In doing so, they absolved the state from blame. This not only increased public acquiescence but would educate people, as the Poor Law had intended to do, to stand on their own two feet. “Whereas the Whigs had sought to establish the state’s openness primarily in constitutional terms, from 1846 onwards British opinion was led to judge politicians also by their distance from economic vested interests”[13] It was this more than anything that accelerated the transfer from Whiggism to out-and-out Liberalism.
There were two shared paradigms of Liberal government throughout this period. One was the responsiveness of ministers to whatever public opinion was clamouring for. However, this does not mean that Liberal politicians were demagogues. An ideal Liberal politician would be kind, responsive and intuitive to the needs of his constituents, but at the same time would be firm and able to distinguish between “real” and “immature” public opinion. The Liberal MP would often have to legislate despite public opposition. This is the second point to be made: that Liberals believed that once public opinion was harnessed to government, it could legislate accordingly without fear of rebuff if their legislative initiatives would benefit the people in some way. The Reform Act increased the representation of previously ignored interests and bound the people to aristocratic leadership. This played into the hands of the Whigs as institutional reform, as Mandler has shown, was the main preoccupation of the Grand Whiggery. The Whigs were only given this opportunity thanks to a miscalculation of the longevity of public clamour for some form of concessionary reform. It is a sobering thought that the fall of the ancien régime and the formation of the Liberalism, which became the dominant ideology of nineteenth century Britain, rested on the decision of one man not to consider even reform an open question. If there is one main issue with Mandler’s work however it is his overemphasis on organic political reform, as Whigs were willing to demonstrate their responsiveness and inculcate certain behaviour. Here, we should point to religious, Irish and local government reform. However, if the main issue with Mandler’s work is his firm distinction between Whigs and Liberals, then the main problem with Parry’s work is his ability at times to confuse Whigs and Liberals. Throughout his work, he suggests a love of laissez-faire individualism to be a common theme of Whig-Liberalism even though political economy, which may have been a common topic of conversation among the Bowood circle, was rarely discussed at Holland House. Rather, the Whigs were never too sure on economic issues and Peel’s legacy was that any future Liberal government could no longer ignore economic issues. The Whigs were still stuck in an outmoded definition of vested interests in non-economic terms. Decay and corruption were common contemporary themes – a common iconographic image at the time for example was a shipwreck – and in order to portray an image of vitality, the Liberals now had to display responsiveness in economic issues. Of course, once again the Liberals were rather fortuitous. Contrary to Parry therefore, I would argue that the Liberal party did not develop in full until after 1846. The Liberals now had to prove that they could take the initiative and if there is one man that did so it was Palmerston. Palmerston was able to cultivate an air of economic frugality and retrenchennt through various reforms such as the 1861 Public Accounts Act and 1866 Exchequer and Audit Departments Act. At the same time however, particularly through foreign policy, he was able to unite the people and crucially the press too to constitutional issues. Such was the spell he held over the nation that he was able to portray the bully-boy tactics of Don Pacifico in 1850 and the bombardment of Canton in 1856 in a good light. If the Reform Act had shown the importance of binding the people to aristocratic government through constitutional reform, then the repeal of the Corn Laws did the same for economic reform. The Liberals had to be more reassuring on this issue and economic reform became a staple of Liberal policy. Contrast this to Althrop’s failed attempt to lead an opposition in his rooms in Albany over a policy of taxation government and retrenchment. Economic issues were deemed insignificant. Liberalism was therefore a post-1846 phenomenon. If it is necessary to pin down one moment (and it is difficult to do so), when Liberalism finally emerged from its Whig cocoon then surely Palmerston’s cabinet of 1859, which was a combination of Liberals (Palmerston, Grey, Wood and Lewis), Whig-Liberals (Russell), Peelites (Gladstone, Herbert and Cardwell) and radicals (Villiers and Milnor Gibson) under the umbrella of responsiveness in not only constitutional and religious matters, but also economic ones, is that moment.
[1] This point is particularly acrimonious, as most historians do not view the formation of two-party politics until much later. Boyd Hilton for example argues that this occurred around the 1820s. However in response I would point to the partisan atmosphere of the 1784 election, where, according to poll book analysis, plumping was commonplace.
[2] For example, Pitt always referred to himself as an “independent” Whig, but very few historians cast him in the traditional Whig mould. Also, the word “Tory” was only ever used pejoratively until the Reform Crisis though I have personally never heard of the 1820s mentioned as a period of “liberal” Whiggism.
[3] M. Taylor, the Decline of British Radicalism, 1847-60 (1995), p24
[4] J. Parry, The Rise & Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (1993), p3
[5] L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1992), p50-52
[6] Op.cit, J. Parry, p73
[7] For example, “the line drawn for the exercise of the franchise was precisely made to include all members of the middle and upper classes and to exclude all wage-labourers.” D. Thompson, The Chartists, p5
[8] The “Chandos” clause led to the enfranchisement of the £50 tenant-at-will in the counties as the system of leasing was no longer the norm in the counties. The Whigs however, led by Althorp, viewed this as dangerous as they were subject to landlord influence and saw them as no more than opulent serfs. Urban penetration of the counties was seen as a counterpunch to the potential influence of pernicious landlords.
[9] Op.cit, J. Parry, p126
[10] See for example, Peel: A Reappraisal, Historical Journal (1979)
[11] Though interestingly according to Mandler, the influence of the Howards seemed to wane by the nineteenth century
[12] Interestingly however, perhaps with one eye on Thatcher, posterity has tended to cast Peel incorrectly as optimistic in the benefits of free trade, particularly to commerce.
[13] Op.cit, J. Parry, p165
The most obvious place to begin in the study of the formation of the Liberal party, is the great Reform Act of 1832. The Tory honeymoon, which had lasted some fifty years, came to an end abruptly on 2nd November 1830. The Whigs had been reduced to an aristocratic rump. Liberal Toryism had courted public opinion successfully, with their emphasis on economic retrenchment – public expenditure was slashed, sinecures abolished – and a popular foreign policy under Canning, which attempted to prop up constitutional movements abroad without damaging the continental status quo. The Tories had even stolen their clothes and proved their responsiveness to outdoor clamour in the Catholic emancipation crisis. All that the Whigs could do was stand back and applaud. In fact this was their policy for most of the early nineteenth century and when Grey went into open attack on Wellington on 30 June 1830, largely due to his anger at his exclusion from office, this was no more beneficial to the Whigs. If there was one great turning point in nineteenth century British history then surely Wellington’s speech is the moment. The 1830 elections as Professor Brock has shown were curious insofar as no one seemed to demand reform, yet at the same time few seemed willing to oppose it. Clearly some sort of gesture was needed and Wellington dropped the ball. Four days after his speech, the Canningites agreed to support the Whigs in some measure of reform and on 15th November, they were joined by the Ultra Tories. Into office came the Whigs. Whether or not Mandler’s view of the 1830s and 1840s as a reassertion of Whig principles and his dichotomization of Tory commercial liberty and Whig institutional liberty is correct, after fifty years in exile, this is the moment when the Whigs came into office once more and immediately put forward a plan for reform. Holland House, which had nurtured so many members of the Grand Whiggery as well as other politicians outside the clique, most famously Russell, had certainly instilled in them the primacy of political liberty and the Foxite notion of the role of the aristocracy to serve the people. This gave the Whigs a great opportunity to reassert their leadership over the nation and political reform became one of the main foundations of the Liberal party.
The Great Reform Act was one of the founding principles of the Liberal party as it showed the ability of the parliament to represent different interests and legislate accordingly. It sought to increase the representativeness of parliament and in doing so increase popular acquiescence for parliament and bind the people to the legislature. Decline in reverence for parliament was a worrying aspect of the outdoor agitation of 1830-32, as radicals increasingly sought alternative means to express their discontent. Most Whigs certainly wished for a return to the kind of reverence that was common to the eighteenth century, which Linda Colley has demonstrated in her analysis of patriotism in the “long” eighteenth century.[5] Nevertheless, the Reform Act was far from a concessionary piece of legislation. Instead it “sought to reconcile the people to government by emphasizing the representativeness of parliament as the protector of interests and the expression of the national will”[6] This certainly, as Mandler, has shown played into Whig hands who valued institutional reform so highly and held parliament as the reconciler of all sectional interests. Whig obsession with parliamentary hegemony is perhaps best demonstrated by the parliament of 1836, which was designed to amaze. One of the most impressive features was certainly the eighteen bronze statues of barons and prelates signing the Magna Carta. The Whigs had their own model of parliamentary reform and it is wrong, as Southgate among others have done, to view the reform act as a piece of concessionary legislation. Indeed, it is one of the many idiosyncrasies of nineteenth-century historiography that for so long now reform has been seen as a concessionary measure, designed to pass power from land to town, and as a gradual step towards democracy by enfranchising a vague occupational body known as the “middle class.”[7] The reasons for this remain vague though most likely it is because of the startlingly lack of archival material concerning the Act so historians have instead often turned to the writings of polemicists, who viewed the act in these peculiar terms. Regardless, Professor Moore has shown that the Act was more curative. Increasing the ability of parliament to represent various different interests would cure any outdoor agitation. Ministers set boundaries geographically and socially so that it would provide representation for some interest. Indeed, the permanence of this idea of “representativeness” is an interesting phenomenon. In introducing a reform bill in 1854, Russell argued that it was necessary as the Reform Bill of 1832 had been too successful. Parliament had become nothing more than a great mix of various sectional pressures with no overall consensus possible. In 1832, rotten boroughs and freeman constituencies were abolished as they did not represent any interest and were merely a product of aristocratic coercion. Although, it is interesting that even though the disenfranchised boroughs went mainly to large cities, such was the Whig obsession with representing various interests that a few new boroughs were enfranchised on the basis of the various interests they represented, rather than their size. A prime example cited by Boyd Hilton in his epic book “A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People?” is that of Frome, with only an exiguous population of around 12,000 though the centre of the woolen industry in Somerset. Equally, Moore has shown in his analysis of the debates on Reform in parliament that desire to separate rural and urban interests, particularly urban penetration of the counties was common among the Whigs and ministers; a point which is frequently ignored, peculiarly so by Parry. Indeed, Whig ministers only accepted an amendment to the borough freeholder clause, which gave him a vote in the counties in some circumstances, as a corollary of the “Chandos” clause.[8] The Reform Bill then in terms of the formation of the Liberal party allowed the greater representation of various interests and in doing so bound the people to parliament. Perhaps the best testimony to its success is the change in radical discourse following reform, which according to Taylor began to appeal to the sovereignty of the Commons, rather than some vague ancient constitution and glorious revolution.
Reinvigoration of local government was seen as the natural concomitant of reform of parliament and sought further to bind the people to aristocratic leadership. Changes in beer sales in 1830 and in the position of poaching in 1830 and 1831 respectively were all part of a general movement to remove arbitrary, discretionary government in place of a set of fixed principles and in doing so limit criticism of the Commons. The most obvious example of this is the changes made to the municipal corporations in 1835. Corporations, hitherto seen as a self-perpetuating oligarchy of merchants, who levied rates arbitrarily to fit their own ends, would be replaced by a more accountable style of local government, subject to election by local ratepayers, which in the Whig mind at least, would increase public acquiescence. This was only one object of reform however as part of the Whig-Liberal creed was their confidence in the ability of aristocratic legislative initiative to shape public behaviour. Any analysis of the Reform Act would lead to this conclusion and the reform of the corporations was no different. The regular auditing of accounts and corporation accountability to ratepayers were intended to help drive down expenditure and encourage individual independence. A more striking example of this is the Poor Law of 1834, viewed by posterity as one of those seminal acts that defined the mindset of an entire epoch. For this reason, it is not surprising that the secondary literature on the Poor Law is extremely vast. Perhaps part of the attention on the Poor Law is the obvious evangelical overtones with emphasis on the natural order designed by Providence, coupled with the apparent Benthamism, where it was envisaged that once the pre-1834 system had been eradicated, the strivings of both landlord and labourer could be undertaken for mutual benefice. Relief of poverty was taken out of the hands of the lenient parish vestries and local magistrates and placed into the hands of local guardians, elected by ratepayers. Ratepayer pressure it was envisaged would lead to a fall in poor relief expenditure – and indeed it did, with expenditure falling from £6.83m to £5.53m between 1830 and 1835.[9] Also implicit in the Act was the role of indoor relief. The stigma of the workhouse it was believed would deter labourers from pauperization unless it was absolutely unavoidable and encourage them to fend for themselves. Such a harsh system of relief surely, more so than anything, does discredit to the dominant view of Whig government in this period, that the Whigs, faced with irregular support to the Commons were subject to the whims of outdoor clamour. Rather, an analysis of local government reform reveals not only the importance of public acceptance of legislation, but also the ability of aristocratic leadership legislate as they saw fit for the moral good of the people.
The Whig-Liberal mindset is probably best understood however by its attitude towards religion and Ireland; two issues so often intertwined. Historiographical trends have tended to ignore the influence of these two. The reasons for it are difficult to fathom. Perhaps, it is because the Whig-Liberal government of 1835-41 is often treated dominated by radical and Irish thought and thus any reform on these two issues are seen as merely concessionary. This would certainly explain why economic concerns and laissez-faire individualism, the main legacy of Peel’s government, have come to dominate the historiography of the formation of Liberalism. Even Boyd Hilton, who views laissez-faire in terms of “moderate” evangelicalism, rather than Cobdenite cosmopolitanism,[10] fits this trend. However, the works of Parry and Brent have bucked the trend with their emphasis on religious reform. Ignoring religious as well as Irish reform would certainly be a mistake when the Whig-Liberal mindset is considered. It is one of the many paradoxes of nineteenth century British history that despite over fifty years in the political wilderness, the Whigs failed to develop any sort of complex. The reasons for this are manifold. Certainly the Grand Whiggery’s cosmopolitan lifestyle and the narrowing of this clique through the constant intermarriage between a few select families (such as the Gowers, Cavendishes and Cowper-Temples)[11] meant that they saw themselves as a privileged group within a privileged group. Whatever the reasons, the Whigs seemed more willing to blame their exclusion from politics on skullduggery, most usually on behalf of local Tory landowners but also curiously sometimes the monarch as well. When the Reform Act seemed to bind the various hitherto unrepresented interests to parliament, it was only natural that Whig confidence grew and they sought to legislate in other areas. Two such areas were religion and Ireland. Here the aims of Whig-Liberals were once again twofold: to increase the representation of various interests and in doing so harness public opinion to aristocratic leadership and also, to legislate for the moral improvement of the people. One such example is appropriation. This was seen as the natural concomitant of Stanley’s Irish Temporalities Act in 1833, which tried to make the church establishment more acceptable to a hostile Irish (mostly Catholic or Dissenting) population, by severely reducing its size and its finances. This obviously led to calls for the use of any surplus revenue for utilitarian, sectional purposes and Russell finally agreed to this when introducing his 1834 Tithe Bill. Parry actually sees the appropriation issue as the most important step in the formation of the Liberal party. Certainly the introduction of a body of committees investigating the issue led to the secession of Stanleyites, allowing the Whig-Liberals to pursue a purely “liberal” strategy. Most importantly however, and the point Parry makes, appropriation represented the aforementioned aims of Liberal government: to bind people to government by demonstrating its responsiveness, and also to improve the moral behaviour of the people – it was believed that appropriation would encourage a more conciliatory attitude to British rule in Ireland from the various Catholic priest-demagogues, who whipped up sectional hostility. Similar reform reveals the same aims. The lapsing of the Coercion Act in 1834, replaced by an established, and mostly Catholic police force, and the appointment of stipendiary justices in Dublin, to the chagrin of local Orangemen magistrates are two examples. Equally, with regards to religion, the same two aims are clear: the granting of a charter to London University with no religious profession required, the ending of Church of England monopoly over registration and ceremonies and the abolition of the Tithe - all in 1836 – are just a few examples. On a number of other issues, further reform was often frustrated by a conservative parliament. The most obvious examples are Russell’s attempts to introduce appropriation in the Irish church and his educational reforms in 1838 and 1839 respectively.
Hitherto, the Whigs sought to define good government in constitutional and religious terms only. The main legacy of Peel to the Liberal party was to show members of Parliament that any future government had to be more reassuring on economic issues. This was the main legacy of his various economic reforms in 1841-46 though particularly of the repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel’s main achievements in this sphere were twofold: firstly, the implementation of a sound economic and fiscal policy – by introducing the income tax in 1842, Peel was able to reduce the annual deficit of £2.4million - and secondly, the creation of a policy, which at least feigned economic disinterest and in doing so, thus absolving the state from blame. This was achieved through tariff reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws. The two were obviously not mutually exclusive. For example, higher and more regular revenue yields following the implementation of an income tax allowed Peel to tinker with tariff reform. Import duties on all raw materials and finished articles were cut to five and twenty per cent respectively in 1842. Such was the success that Peel was able to go even further by removing all export duties and import duties on 430 articles. Recent historiographical trends have often portrayed Peel as a precursor of later Liberalism and in economic terms, there is certainly much evidence for this. Peel was not the flaccid moderate of the A-level textbooks. He had a strong view of executive government and the sovereignty of the church-state relationship. Nonetheless, he was probably much closer to later Liberals in economic terms than the Tories. Regardless, Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws was a great boon to later Liberal government. Such was the ideological pull of protectionism among Conservatives, as Anna Gambles has shown in her analysis of the Tory periodicals Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Quarterly Review that the inevitable outcome of reform was Tory schism. 114 Tories voted with Peel and 241 against. The protectionists, led by Disraeli, distanced themselves from the majority of the Peelites, who slowly gravitated towards the Liberal party and in doing so bolstered Liberal parliamentary dominance. Had government voted in favour of Russell’s fixed duty of 8s per quarter in April 1841, or called Peel’s bluff over his threat to resign unless the Commons overturned their rejection of Ashley’s ten-hour amendment act, as he surely must have hoped for, the outcome of nineteenth-century British history could have been so much different. As it was, the only possible beneficiaries of Corn Law repeal were the Liberals. The ball was now firmly in the Liberal court, but they had to make sure unlike Wellington in 1830, they took the opportunity. Peel, as Hilton has shown in his highly influential article in 1879 for the Historical Journal, in repealing the Corn Laws, was motivated by a belief in the “natural order” of things;[12] a bizarre combination of Butlerian cosmology, evangelical individualism and Benthamite consequentialism. Free trade had placed Britain at the mercy of Providence and subject to his machinations. In doing so, they absolved the state from blame. This not only increased public acquiescence but would educate people, as the Poor Law had intended to do, to stand on their own two feet. “Whereas the Whigs had sought to establish the state’s openness primarily in constitutional terms, from 1846 onwards British opinion was led to judge politicians also by their distance from economic vested interests”[13] It was this more than anything that accelerated the transfer from Whiggism to out-and-out Liberalism.
There were two shared paradigms of Liberal government throughout this period. One was the responsiveness of ministers to whatever public opinion was clamouring for. However, this does not mean that Liberal politicians were demagogues. An ideal Liberal politician would be kind, responsive and intuitive to the needs of his constituents, but at the same time would be firm and able to distinguish between “real” and “immature” public opinion. The Liberal MP would often have to legislate despite public opposition. This is the second point to be made: that Liberals believed that once public opinion was harnessed to government, it could legislate accordingly without fear of rebuff if their legislative initiatives would benefit the people in some way. The Reform Act increased the representation of previously ignored interests and bound the people to aristocratic leadership. This played into the hands of the Whigs as institutional reform, as Mandler has shown, was the main preoccupation of the Grand Whiggery. The Whigs were only given this opportunity thanks to a miscalculation of the longevity of public clamour for some form of concessionary reform. It is a sobering thought that the fall of the ancien régime and the formation of the Liberalism, which became the dominant ideology of nineteenth century Britain, rested on the decision of one man not to consider even reform an open question. If there is one main issue with Mandler’s work however it is his overemphasis on organic political reform, as Whigs were willing to demonstrate their responsiveness and inculcate certain behaviour. Here, we should point to religious, Irish and local government reform. However, if the main issue with Mandler’s work is his firm distinction between Whigs and Liberals, then the main problem with Parry’s work is his ability at times to confuse Whigs and Liberals. Throughout his work, he suggests a love of laissez-faire individualism to be a common theme of Whig-Liberalism even though political economy, which may have been a common topic of conversation among the Bowood circle, was rarely discussed at Holland House. Rather, the Whigs were never too sure on economic issues and Peel’s legacy was that any future Liberal government could no longer ignore economic issues. The Whigs were still stuck in an outmoded definition of vested interests in non-economic terms. Decay and corruption were common contemporary themes – a common iconographic image at the time for example was a shipwreck – and in order to portray an image of vitality, the Liberals now had to display responsiveness in economic issues. Of course, once again the Liberals were rather fortuitous. Contrary to Parry therefore, I would argue that the Liberal party did not develop in full until after 1846. The Liberals now had to prove that they could take the initiative and if there is one man that did so it was Palmerston. Palmerston was able to cultivate an air of economic frugality and retrenchennt through various reforms such as the 1861 Public Accounts Act and 1866 Exchequer and Audit Departments Act. At the same time however, particularly through foreign policy, he was able to unite the people and crucially the press too to constitutional issues. Such was the spell he held over the nation that he was able to portray the bully-boy tactics of Don Pacifico in 1850 and the bombardment of Canton in 1856 in a good light. If the Reform Act had shown the importance of binding the people to aristocratic government through constitutional reform, then the repeal of the Corn Laws did the same for economic reform. The Liberals had to be more reassuring on this issue and economic reform became a staple of Liberal policy. Contrast this to Althrop’s failed attempt to lead an opposition in his rooms in Albany over a policy of taxation government and retrenchment. Economic issues were deemed insignificant. Liberalism was therefore a post-1846 phenomenon. If it is necessary to pin down one moment (and it is difficult to do so), when Liberalism finally emerged from its Whig cocoon then surely Palmerston’s cabinet of 1859, which was a combination of Liberals (Palmerston, Grey, Wood and Lewis), Whig-Liberals (Russell), Peelites (Gladstone, Herbert and Cardwell) and radicals (Villiers and Milnor Gibson) under the umbrella of responsiveness in not only constitutional and religious matters, but also economic ones, is that moment.
[1] This point is particularly acrimonious, as most historians do not view the formation of two-party politics until much later. Boyd Hilton for example argues that this occurred around the 1820s. However in response I would point to the partisan atmosphere of the 1784 election, where, according to poll book analysis, plumping was commonplace.
[2] For example, Pitt always referred to himself as an “independent” Whig, but very few historians cast him in the traditional Whig mould. Also, the word “Tory” was only ever used pejoratively until the Reform Crisis though I have personally never heard of the 1820s mentioned as a period of “liberal” Whiggism.
[3] M. Taylor, the Decline of British Radicalism, 1847-60 (1995), p24
[4] J. Parry, The Rise & Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (1993), p3
[5] L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1992), p50-52
[6] Op.cit, J. Parry, p73
[7] For example, “the line drawn for the exercise of the franchise was precisely made to include all members of the middle and upper classes and to exclude all wage-labourers.” D. Thompson, The Chartists, p5
[8] The “Chandos” clause led to the enfranchisement of the £50 tenant-at-will in the counties as the system of leasing was no longer the norm in the counties. The Whigs however, led by Althorp, viewed this as dangerous as they were subject to landlord influence and saw them as no more than opulent serfs. Urban penetration of the counties was seen as a counterpunch to the potential influence of pernicious landlords.
[9] Op.cit, J. Parry, p126
[10] See for example, Peel: A Reappraisal, Historical Journal (1979)
[11] Though interestingly according to Mandler, the influence of the Howards seemed to wane by the nineteenth century
[12] Interestingly however, perhaps with one eye on Thatcher, posterity has tended to cast Peel incorrectly as optimistic in the benefits of free trade, particularly to commerce.
[13] Op.cit, J. Parry, p165
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