given over to several of them, in a combination which
oppressed it for a generation. The sovereigns who had united
to dethrone Napoleon, with the two emperors, of Austria and
Russia, at their head, and with the Austrian minister,
Metternich, for their most trusted counselor, assumed first,
in the Congress of Vienna, a general work of political
rearrangement, to repair the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
disturbances, and then, subsequently, an authoritative
supervision of European politics which proved as meddlesome as
Napoleon's had been. Their first act, as before stated, was to
restore the Bourbon monarchy in France, indifferent to the
wishes of the people. In Spain, Ferdinand had already taken
the throne, when Joseph fled. In Italy, the King of Sardinia
was restored and Genoa transferred to him; Lombardy and
Venetia were given back to Austria; Tuscany, Modena and some
minor duchies received Hapsburg princes; the Pope recovered
his States, and the Bourbons returned to Naples and Sicily. In
Germany, the Prussian kingdom was enlarged again by several
absorptions, including part of Saxony, but some of its Polish
territory was given to the Czar; Hanover became a kingdom;
Austria resumed the provinces which Napoleon had conveyed to
his Rhenish proteges; and, finally, a Germanic Confederation
was formed, to take the place of the extinct Empire, and with
no more efficiency in its constitution. In the Netherlands, a
new kingdom was formed, to bear the Netherland name, and to
embrace Holland and Belgium in union, with the House of Orange
on the throne.
The Holy Alliance.
Between the Czar, the Emperor of Austria, and the King of
Prussia, there was a personal agreement that went with these
arrangements of the Congress of Vienna, and which was
prolonged for a number of years. In the public understanding,
this was associated, perhaps wrongly, with a written
declaration, known as the Holy Alliance, in which the three
sovereigns set forth their intention to regulate their foreign
and domestic policy by the precepts of Christianity, and
invited all princes to join their alliance for the maintenance
of peace and the promotion of brotherly love. Whether
identical as a fact with this Holy Alliance or secreted behind
it, there was, and long continued to be, an undoubted league
between these sovereigns and others, which had aims very
different from the promotion of brotherly love. It was wholly
reactionary, hostile to all political liberalism, and
repressive of all movements in the interest of the people.
Metternich was its skilful minister, and the deadly, soulless
system of beaureaucratic absolutism which he organized in
Austria was the model of government that it strove to
introduce.
In Italy, the governments generally were reduced to the
Austrian model, and the political state of the peninsula, for
forty years, was scarcely better, if at all, than it had been
under the Spanish rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
Germany, as divided as ever, under a federal constitution
which federated nothing else so much as the big and little
courts and their reactionary ideas, was profoundly depressed
in political spirit, while prospering materially and showing
notable signs of intellectual life.
France was not slow in finding that the restored Bourbons and
the restored émigrés had forgotten nothing and learned
nothing, in the twenty-five years of their exile. They put all
their strength into the turning back of the clock, trying to
make it strike again the hours in which the Revolution and
Napoleon had been so busy. It was futile work; but it sickened
and angered the nation none the less. After all the stress and
struggle it had gone through, there was a strong nation yet to
resist the Bourbonism brought back to power. It recovered from
the exhaustion of its wars with a marvellous quickness. The
millions of peasant land-owners, who were the greatest
creation of the Revolution, dug wealth from its soil with
untiring free arms, and soon made it the most prosperous land
in Europe. Through country and city, the ideas of the
Revolution were in the brains of the common people, while its
energies were in their brawn, and Bourbonism needed more
wisdom than it ever possessed to reconcile them to its
restoration.
Revolutions of 1820-1821.
It was not in France, however, but in Spain, that the first
rising against the restored order of things occurred.
Ferdinand VII., when released from his French imprisonment in
1814, was warmly received in Spain, and took the crown with
quite general consent. He accepted the constitution under
which the country had been governed since 1812, and made large
lying promises of a liberal rule. But when seated on the
throne, he suppressed the constitution, restored the
Inquisition, revived the monasteries, called back the expelled
Jesuits, and opened a deadly persecution of the liberals in
Spanish politics. No effective resistance to him was organized
until 1820, when a revolutionary movement took form which
forced the king, in March, to reestablish the constitution and
call different men to his council. Portugal, at the same time,
adopted a similar constitution, and the exiled king, John VI.,
returning now from Brazil, accepted it.
The revolution in Spain set fire to the discontent that had
smouldered in Italy. The latter broke forth, in the summer of
1820, at Naples, where the Bourbon king made no resistance to
a sudden revolt of soldiers and citizens, but yielded the
constitution they demanded at once. Sardinia followed, in the
next spring, with a rising of the Piedmontese, requiring
constitutional government. The king, Victor Emmanuel I., who
was very old, resigned the crown to his brother, Charles
Felix. The latter refused the demands of the
constitutionalists and called upon Austria for help.
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These outbreaks of the revolutionary spirit were alarming to
the sovereigns of the Holy Alliance and excited them to a
vigorous activity. They convened a Congress, first at Troppau,
in October, 1820, afterwards at Laybach, and finally at
Verona, to plan concerted action for the suppressing of the
popular movements of the time. As the result of these
conferences, the congenial duty of restoring absolutism in the
Two Sicilies, and of helping the King of Sardinia against his
subjects, was imposed upon Austria and willingly performed;
while the Bourbon court of France was solicited to put an end
to the bad example of constitutional government in Spain. Both
commissions were executed with fidelity and zeal. Italy was
flung down and fettered again; French troops occupied Spain
from 1823 until 1827. England, alone, protested against this
flagrant policing of Europe by the Holy Alliance. Canning, its
spirited minister, "called in the New World," as he described
his policy, "to redress the balance of the old," by
recognizing the independence of the Spanish colonies in
America, which, Cuba excepted, were now separated forever from
the crown of Spain. Brazil in like manner was cut loose from
the Portuguese crown, and assumed the constitution of an
empire, under Dom Pedro, the eldest son of John VI.
Greek War of Independence.
These stifled revolutions in western Europe failed to
discourage a more obstinate insurrection which began in the
East, among the Christian subjects of the Turks, in 1821. The
Ottoman government had been growing weaker and more vicious
for many years. The corrupted and turbulent Janissaries were
the masters of the empire, and a sultan who attempted, as
Selim III. (1789-1807) had done, to introduce reforms, was
put to death. Russia, under Alexander I., had been continuing
to gain ground at the expense of the Turks, and assuming more
and more of a patronage of the Christian subjects of the
Porte. There seems to be little doubt that the rising begun in
1821, which had its start in Moldavia, and its first leader in a
Greek, Ypsilanti, who had been an officer in the Russian
service, received encouragement from the Czar. But Alexander
turned his back on it when the Greeks sprang to arms and
seriously appealed to Europe for help in a war of national
independence. The Congress of Verona condemned the Greek
rising, in common with that of Spain. Again, England alone
showed sympathy, but did nothing as a government, and left the
struggling Greeks to such help as they might win from
individual friends. Lord Byron, with others, went to Greece,
carrying money and arms; and, generally, these volunteers lost
much of their ardor in the Greek cause when they came into
close contact with its native supporters. But the Greeks,
however lacking in high qualities, made an obstinate fight,
and held their ground against the Turks, until the feeling of
sympathy with them had grown too strong in England and in
France for the governments of those countries to be heedless
of it. Moreover, in Russia, Alexander I. had been succeeded
(1825) by the aggressive Nicholas, who had not patience to
wait for the slow crumbling of the Ottoman power, but was
determined to break it as summarily as he could. He joined
France and England, therefore, in an alliance and in a naval
demonstration against the Turks (1827), which had its result
in the battle of Navarino. The allies of Nicholas went no
farther; but he pursued the undertaking, in a war which lasted
until the autumn of 1829. Turkey at the end of it conceded the
independence of Greece, and practically that of Wallachia and
Moldavia. In 1830, a conference at London established the
Greek kingdom, and in 1833 a Bavarian prince, Otho I., was
settled on the throne.
Revolutions of 1830.
Before this result was reached, revolution in western Europe,
arrested in 1821-23, had broken out afresh. Bourbonism had
become unendurable to France. Charles X., who succeeded his
brother Louis XVIII; in 1824, showed not only a more arbitrary
temper, but a disposition more deferential to the Church than
his predecessor. He was fond of the Jesuits, whom his subjects
very commonly distrusted and disliked. He attempted to put
shackles on the press, and when elections to the chamber of
deputies went repeatedly against the government, he undertook
practically to alter the suffrage by ordinances of his own. A
revolution seemed then to be the only remedy that was open to
the nation, and it was adopted in July, 1830, the veteran
Lafayette taking the lead. Charles X. was driven to
abdication, and left France for England. The crown was
transferred to Louis Philippe, of the Orleans branch of the
Bourbon family,--son of the Philip Égalité who joined the
Jacobins in the Revolution.
The July Revolution in France proved a signal for more
outbreaks in other parts of Europe than had followed the
Spanish rising of ten years before.
Belgium broke away from the union with Holland, which had
never satisfied its people, and, after some struggle, won
recognized independence, as a new kingdom, with Leopold of
Saxe Coburg raised to the throne.
Russian Poland, bearing the name of a constitutional kingdom
since 1815, but having the Czar for its king and the Czar's
brother for viceroy, found no lighter oppression than before,
and made a hopeless, brave attempt to escape from its bonds.
The revolt was put down with unmerciful severity, and
thousands of the hapless patriots went to exile in Siberia.
In Germany, there were numerous demonstrations in the smaller
states, which succeeded more or less in extorting
constitutional concessions; but there was no revolutionary
movement on a larger scale.
Italy remained quiet in both the north and the south, where
disturbances had arisen before; but commotions occurred in the
Papal states, and in Modena and Parma, which required the arms
of Austria to suppress.
In England, the agitations of the continent hastened forward a
revolution which went far beyond all other popular movements
of the time in the lasting importance of its effects, and
which exhibited in their first great triumph the peaceful
forces of the Platform and the Press.
{1098}
England under the last two Georges.
But we have given little attention to affairs in Great Britain
during the past half century or more, and need to glance
backward.
Under the third of the Georges, there was distinctly a check
given to the political progress which England had been making
since the Revolution of 1688. The wilfulness of the king
fairly broke down, for a considerable period, the system of
responsible cabinet government which had been taking shape and
root under the two earlier Hanoverians, and ministers became
again, for a time, mere mouthpieces of the royal will. The
rupture with the American colonies, and the unsuccessful war
which ended in their independence, brought in another
influence, adverse, for the time being, to popular claims in
government. For it was not King George, alone, nor Lord North,
nor any small Tory faction, that prosecuted and upheld the
attempt to make the colonists in America submissive to
"taxation without representation." The English nation at large
approved the war; English national sentiment was hostile to
the Americans in their independent attitude, and the
Whigs--the liberals then in English politics--were a
discredited and weakened party for many years because of their
leaning to the American side of the questions in dispute.
Following close upon the American war, came the French
Revolution, which frightened into Toryism great numbers of
people who did not by nature belong there. In England, as
everywhere else, the reaction lasted long, and government was
more arbitrary and repressive than it could possibly have
continued to be under different circumstances.
Meantime extraordinary social changes had taken place, which
tended to mark more strongly the petrifying of things in the
political world. The great age of mechanical invention had
been fully opened. Machines had begun to do the work of human
hands in every industry, and steam had begun to move the
machines. The organization of labor, too, had assumed a new
phase. The factory system had arisen; and with it had appeared
a new growth of cities and towns. Production was accelerated;
wealth was accumulating more rapidly, and the distribution of
wealth was following different lines. The English middle class
was rising fast as a money-power and was gathering the
increased energies of the kingdom into its hands.
Parliamentary Reform in England.
But while the tendency of social changes had been to increase
vastly the importance of this powerful middle class, the
political conditions had actually diminished its weight in
public affairs. In Parliament, it had no adequate
representation. The old boroughs, which sent members to the
House of Commons as they had sent them for generations before,
no longer contained a respectable fraction of the "commons of
England," supposed to be represented in the House, and those
who voted in the boroughs were not at all the better class of
the new England of the nineteenth century. Great numbers of
the boroughs were mere private estates, and the few votes
polled in them were cast by tenants who elected their
landlords' nominees. On the other hand, the large cities and
the numerous towns of recent growth had either no
representation in Parliament, or they had equal representation
with the "rotten boroughs" which cast two or three or
half-a-dozen votes.
That the commons of England, with all the gain of substantial
strength they had been making in the last half of the
eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth,
endured this travesty of popular representation so long as
until 1832, is proof of the potency of the conservatism which
the French Revolution induced. The subject of parliamentary
reform had been now and then discussed since Chatham's time;
but Toryism had always been able to thrust it aside and bring
the discussion to naught. At last there came the day when the
question would no longer be put down. The agitations of 1830,
combined with a very serious depression of industry and trade,
produced a state of feeling which could not be defied. King and
Parliament yielded to the public demand, and the First Reform
Bill was passed. It widened the suffrage and amended very
considerably the inequities of the parliamentary
representation; but both reforms have been carried much
farther since, by two later bills.
Repeal of the English Corn Laws.
The reform of Parliament soon brought a broader spirit into
legislation. Its finest fruits began to ripen about 1838, when
an agitation for the repeal of the foolish and wicked English
"corn-laws" was opened by Cobden and Bright. In the day of the
"rotten boroughs," when the landlords controlled Parliament,
they imagined that they had "protected" the farming interest,
and secured higher rents to themselves, by laying heavy duties
on the importation of foreign bread-stuffs. A famous "sliding
scale" of such duties had been invented, which raised the
duties when prices in the home market dropped, and lowered
them proportionately when home prices rose. Thus the consumers
were always deprived, as much as possible, of any cheapening
of their bread which bountiful Nature might offer, and paid a
heavy tax to increase the gains of the owners and cultivators
of land.
Now that other "interests" besides the agricultural had a
voice in Parliament, and had become very strong, they began to
cry out against this iniquity, and demand that the "corn laws"
be done away with. The famous "anti-corn-law league,"
organized mainly by the exertions of Richard Cobden, conducted
an agitation of the question which brought about the repeal of
the laws in 1846.
But the effect of the agitation did not end there. So thorough
and prolonged a discussion of the matter had enlightened the
English people upon the whole question between "protection"
and free trade. The manufacturers and mechanics, who had led
the movement against protective duties on food-stuffs, were
brought to see that they were handicapped more than protected
by duties on imports in their own departments of production.
So Cobden and his party continued their attacks on the theory
of "protection" until every vestige of it was cleared from the
English statute books.
The Revolutions of 1848.
Another year of revolutions throughout Europe came in 1848,
and the starting point of excitement was not, this time, at
Paris, but, strangely enough, in the Vatican, at Rome. Pius
IX. had been elected to the papal chair in 1846, and had
immediately rejoiced the hearts and raised the hopes of the
patriots in misgoverned Italy by his liberal measures of
reform and his promising words. The attitude of the Pope gave
encouragement to popular demonstrations in various Italian
states during the later part of 1847; and in January 1848 a
formidable rising occurred in Sicily, followed in February by
another in Naples. King Ferdinand II. was compelled to change
his ministers and to concede a constitution, which he did not
long respect.
{1099}
Lombardy was slow this time in being kindled; but when the
flame of revolution burst out it was very fierce. The
Austrians were driven first from Milan (March, 1848), and then
from city after city, until they seemed to be abandoning their
Italian possessions altogether. Venice asserted its republican
independence under the presidency of Daniel Manin. Charles
Albert, King of Sardinia, thought the time favorable for
recovering Lombardy to himself, and declared war against
Austria. The expulsion of the Austrians became the demand of
the entire peninsula, and even the Pope, the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, and the King of Naples were forced to join the
patriotic movement in appearance, though not with sincerity.
But the King of Sardinia brought ruin on the whole
undertaking, by sustaining a fatal defeat in battle at
Custozza, in July, 1848.
France had been for some time well prepared for revolt, and
was quick to be moved by the first whisper of it from Italy.
The short-lived popularity of Louis Philippe was a thing of
the past. There was widespread discontent with many things,
and especially with the limited suffrage. The French people
had the desire and the need of something like that grand
measure of electoral reform which England secured so
peacefully in 1832; but they could not reach it in the
peaceful way. The aptitude and the habit of handling and
directing the great forces of public opinion effectively in
such a situation were alike wanting among them. There was a
mixture, moreover, of social theories and dreams in their
political undertaking, which heated the movement and made it
more certainly explosive. The Parisian mob took arms and built
barricades on the 23d of February. The next day Louis Philippe
signed an abdication, and a week later he was an exile in
England. For the remainder of the year France was strangely
ruled: first by a self-constituted provisional government,
Lamartine at its head, which opened national workshops, and
attempted to give employment and pay to 125,000 enrolled
citizens in need; afterwards by a Constituent National
Assembly, and an Executive Commission, which found the
national workshops a devouring monster, difficult to control
and hard to destroy. Paris got rid of the shops in June, at
the cost of a battle which lasted four days, and in which more
than 8,000 people were wounded or slain. In November a
republican constitution, framed by the Assembly, was adopted,
and on the 10th of December Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, son of
Louis Bonaparte, once King of Holland, and of Hortense
Beauharnais, daughter of the Empress Josephine, was elected
President of the Republic by an enormous popular vote.
The revolutionary shock of 1848 was felt in Germany soon after
the fall of the monarchy in France. In March there was rioting
in Berlin and a collision with the troops, which alarmed the
king so seriously that he yielded promises to almost every
demand. Similar risings in other capitals had about the same
success. At Vienna, the outbreak was more violent and drove
both Metternich and the Emperor from the city. In the first
flush of these popular triumphs there came about a most
hopeful-looking election of a Germanic National Assembly,
representative of all Germany, and gathered at Frankfort, on
the invitation of the Diet, for a revision of the constitution
of the Confederation. But the Assembly contained more learned
scholars than practical statesmen, and its constitutional work
was wasted labor. A Constituent Assembly elected in Prussia
accomplished no more, and was dispersed in the end without
resistance; but the king granted a constitution of his own
framing. The revolutionary movement in Germany left its
effects, in a general loosening of the bonds of harsh
government, a general broadening of political ideas, a final
breaking of the Metternich influence, even in Austria; but it
passed over the existing institutions of the much-divided
country with a very light touch.
In Hungary the revolution, stimulated by the eloquence of
Kossuth, was carried to the pitch of serious war. The
Hungarians had resolved to be an independent nation, and in
the struggle which ensued they approached very near the
attainment of their desire; but Russia came to the help of the
Hapsburgs, and the armies of the two despotisms combined were
more than the Hungarians could resist. Their revolt was
abandoned in August, 1849, and Kossuth, with other leaders,
escaped through Turkish territory to other lands.
The suppression of the Hungarian revolt was followed by a
complete restoration of the despotism and domination of the
Austrians in Italy. Charles Albert, of Sardinia, had taken
courage from the struggle in Hungary and had renewed
hostilities in March, 1849. But, again, he was crushingly
defeated, at Novara, and resigned, in despair, the crown to
his son, Victor Emmanuel II. Venice, which had resisted a long
siege with heroic constancy, capitulated in August of the same
year. The whole of Lombardy and Venetia was bowed once more
under the merciless tyranny of the Austrians, and savage
revenges were taken upon the patriots who failed to escape.
Rome, whence the Pope--no longer a patron of liberal
politics--had fled, and where a republic had been once more
set up, with Garibaldi and Mazzini in its constituent
assembly, was besieged and taken, and the republic overturned,
by troops sent from republican France. The Neapolitan king
restored his atrocious absolutism without help, by measures of
the greatest brutality.
A civil war in Switzerland, which occurred simultaneously with
the political collisions in surrounding countries, is hardly
to be classed with them. It was rather a religious conflict,
between the Roman Catholics and their opponents. The Catholic
cantons, united in a League, called the Sonderbund, were
defeated in the war; the Jesuits were expelled from
Switzerland in consequence, and, in September, 1848, a new
constitution for the confederacy was adopted.
{1100}
The Second Empire in France.