Political change in the age of revolutions in France - Essay Example

Political Change in the Age of Revolutions in France 02 May 2008 Political Change in the Age of Revolutions in France Many s can be chosen as the beginning of the French Revolution. 1799 was nonetheless the year with an important impact in its course. The coup d'etat which then spread the Directory away, installed to power a dictator which was to last until 1814 and spin international relations in disarray. The man was Napoleon Bonaparte, the republic's former general and this time the First Consul of the new regime and soon to be France's first Emperor. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte had a great personal reputation and popularity. No one but the beaten politicians much regretted it when Bonaparte swept them aside and assumed power. Immediately he validated himself by defeating the Austrians and making a triumphant peace for France, as he had once done. This removed the threat to the Revolution; no one questioned Bonaparte's own pledge to its principles. His most positive achievement was his consolidation of them. Although Napoleon, as he was officially called after 1804 when he proclaimed his empire, reinstituted France's monarchy, it was in no sense a reinstatement. If anything, he affronted the exiled Bourbon family that any compromise with it was unthinkable. He sought popular acclaim for the empire in a plebiscite and got it. The Frenchmen voted for a monarchy resting on popular sovereignty, that was the Revolution. It took up the consolidation of the Revolution which the Consulate had already started. All the great reforms of the 1790s were confirmed or at least left undisturbed. In the actual working of government, however, the ideals of the Revolution were often breached in practice. Napoleon, like all his predecessors in power since 1793, controlled the press by a repressive censorship, imprisoned people without trial and generally gave short shrift to the Rights of Man so far as civil liberties were concerned. A more subtle revolution deriving from the Napoleonic impact lay in the reaction and resistance it provoked. In spreading revolutionary principles the French were often putting a rod in pickle for their own backs. Popular sovereignty lay at the center of the Revolution and it is an ideal closely associated to that of nationalism. In the end, though, the dynasty that Napoleon hoped to found and the empire he set up both proved fragile. His unconditional abdication in 1814 was not the end of the story. He returned to France just under a year later from Elba where he had lived in pensioned exile, and the restored Bourbon regime vowed out at a touch. However, the battle of Waterloo in June 1815 ended Napoleon's illustrious history. The regime installed in 1815 was still there, although somewhat shaken forty years later. This owed much to the salutary fear of revolution. In all the major continental states the restoration era, as the years after 1815 have been termed, was a great period for policemen, conspirators and plotters alike. Secret societies were widespread, undeterred by failure after failure. Class struggles proliferated. This period showed, however, that there was no subversive threat that could not be quashed easily enough. Incorrectly, liberalism and nationalism were usually considered to be inseparable; this was to be proven terribly wrong in later times, but in so far as a few people did seek to change by revolution before 1848, it is largely true that they wanted to do so by espousing both the political principles of the French Revolution - government by representation, popular sovereignty, individual and press freedom - and those of nationality. To the west of the Rhine, where the writ of the Holy Alliance, as was referred the big three conservative powers (Russia, Austria and Prussia), did not run, the story was different; there legitimism was to last for a short period. The very reinstitution of the Bourbon dynasty in 1814 had itself been a bargain with the principle of legitimacy. Louis XVIII was supposed to have ascended to power like any other French King, but he did so only on terms acceptable to the Napoleonic political and military elites of France and, presumably, tolerable by the masses. The reinstituted regime was regulated by a charter which created a constitutional monarchy, although with a limited suffrage. The rights of individuals were guaranteed and the land settlement resulting from revolutionary confiscations and sales was unopposed. What was completely at stake was what the Revolution had actually accomplished. Those who had fought to be recognized to have a voice in the ruling France under the ancient regime had won; the political influence of the notables was assured and they, whether of the old French nobility, those who had done well out of the revolution, Napoleon's lackeys, or just simply landowners and businessmen of substantial means, were now in reality the actual and real rulers of France. Finally and crucially, the Revolution had transformed the philosophy of the Frenchmen. Among other things, the terms in which French public affairs would be discussed and discoursed had been changed. Wherever the line was to be drawn between Right and Left, liberals or conservatives, it was on that line that political infighting now had to be centered, not over the favor of counseling a monarch by Divine Right. This was just what happened to the last king of the direct Bourbon line, Charles X, unable to perceive. He recklessly tried to break out of the constitutional limitations which bound him, by what was implicitly a coup d'etat. Paris rose against Charles X in the July Revolution of 1830, liberal politicians hastily put themselves at its head, and to the mortification of republicans, made certain that a new king be installed to replace Charles. In 1848 came a new revolutionary upsurge. The 1840s had been years of economic privation, food shortages and suffering in many places, particularly in 1847 in France, where commercial collapse starved the cities. Unemployment was prevalent. This brought up violence which gave new advantage to radical movements everywhere. One riot instigated another. The emblematic beginning came in February in Paris, where Louis Philippe abdicated after finding out the middle classes withdraw their support to his continued resistance to the extension of suffrage. By the middle of the year, government had been brushed off or was at best on the defensive. When a republic emerged in France after the February Revolution, every revolutionary and political exile in Europe had taken heart of this development. The dream of thirty years' conspiracies appeared achievable. The Grande Nation would be on motion again and the Great Revolution armies might advance once more to spread its ideals. What was expected, though, did not happen. France made a diplomatic bow in the direction of martyred Poland, the classical center of liberal backings, but the only military operations it carried out were in depending the pope, an unimpeachably conservative cause. This was indicative. The 1848 revolutionaries were inflamed by very different situations, and many varied aspirations, and went after divergent and confusing aims. They rebelled against the government which they believed oppressive because they were illiberal. The great symbolic demand was for a constitution to guarantee basic freedoms. When such a revolution happened in Vienna, the chancellor Metternich, architect of the 1815 conservative order, escaped into exile. Successful revolution in Vienna signified the paralysis and therefore the displacement of the whole of central Europe. Germans were now free to have their revolutions without fear of Austrian involvement in support of the ancien rgime in the smaller states. So were other peoples within the dominions of Austria; Italians, led by an ambitious but hesitant conservative king of Sardinia, went on the armies of Austria in Vienna and Lombardy, Hungarians rebelled at Budapest, and Czechs revolted at Prague. This greatly complicated things. A number of these radicals demanded national independence rather than constitutionalism, though for a time it seemed that constitutionalism was the way to independence since it confronted autocratic dynasty. If the liberals were victorious in installing constitutional governments in all the central European capitals and Italy, then it followed there would actually come into being nations until then without structures of state of their own, or at least without them for a very long time. In Paris, an uprising to give the Revolution a further push in the way of democracy was defeated with great carnage in June. The republic was to be a conservative one, after all. Liberals saw 1848 as springtime of the nations. If it was one, the branches had not lived long before they withered. By the end of 1849 the conventional structure of Europe was once again much as it had been in 1847, in spite of significant changes within some countries. Nationalism had clearly been a popular cause in 1848, but it had failed to uphold neither revolutionary governments nor essentially an enlightened force. Its breakdown represents the allegation that the statesmen of 1815 neglected to give it direct attention is not true; no new nation arose from 1848 for none was prepared to do so. The fundamental reason for this was that although nationalities might exist, over most of Europe nationalism was still not a concrete concept for the masses; only relatively few and well-educated, or at least better-educated, people much minded about it. Where national variations also exemplified social issues there was at times effective action by people who felt they had an identity given them by language, tradition, or religion, but it did not paved the way to the setting up of new nations. There were some truly popular uprisings in 1848. Such outbreaks terrified urban liberals as much as the Parisian outbreak of despair and unemployment in the June days terrified the middle classes in France. Speaking broadly, because the peasant population was, since 1789, a conservative, the government was assured the backing of the provinces in defeating the Parisian poor who had given radicalism its short-lived triumph. Almost constantly, the lack of interest of liberalism to the masses was shown up in 1848 by popular revolution. Altogether, the social importance of 1848 is as intricate and escapes easy generalization as much as its political substance. It was probably in the countryside of eastern and central Europe that the revolutions transformed society most. In there, liberal ideals and the terror of popular revolt went hand in hand to compel change on the landlords. That year in 1848 carried the rural social revolution started sixty years previously in France to its conclusion in central and most of eastern Europe. Though a number of its practices and customs of mind were still to stay, in effect feudal society came to an end. The political elements of French revolutionary ideals, however, would have to wait longer for their realization. Down to 1848 there had been many uprisings, to say nothing of plots and conspiracies. After 1848, there were very few revolutions. A receding revolutionary effort is understandable by then. Revolutions appeared to have realized little outside France and had there carried dissolution and dictatorship. Some of their objectives were being realized in other ways. Other ends were achieved by economic advancement; for all the horrors of the poverty which it suppressed, nineteenth century Europe was getting richer and was giving more and more of its peoples a larger share of its wealth. A more basic reason for the less frequent revolutions at this time was, perhaps, that they became harder to carry out. Governments were finding it steadily easier to wrestle with them, largely for technical reasons. The nineteenth century brought with it modern police forces. Better communications by rail and telegraph granted new power to central government in confronting with distant revolt. Armies had an increasing technical superiority to rebellion. As early as 1795, a French government demonstrated that once it had control of the regular armed forces, and was ready to use them, it could control Paris. During the peacetime from 1815 to 1848, a number of European armies actually became much more instruments of security, potentially directed against their own citizens. It was only the defection of important sections of the army which made possible the successful revolution in Paris in 1830 and 1848; once such forces were available to the government, battles such as that of the June Days of 1848 could end only with the crushing of the revolutionaries. Indeed, from that year no popular rebellion was ever to succeed against a government whose control of its armies was not stunned by defeat in subversion, and which was determined to use its power. This was stunningly and bloodily shown in 1871, when a rebellious Paris was once again defeated by a French government in just over a week with a casualty of dead as great as that obtained by the Terror of 1793 to 1794. A popular government which drew to itself a broad range of radicals and reformers set itself up in Paris as the Commune of Paris, a traditional evocative name of municipal independence going back to the Middle Ages and, more significant, to 1793, when the Commune or city council of Paris had been the heart of revolutionary zeal. The Commune of 1871 was able to grab power because in the outcome of defeat by the Germans the government could not disarm the capital of the weapons with which it had victoriously survived a siege, and because the same defeat had ignited many Parisians against the government they believed to have let them down. During its short-lived existence, the Commune did very little, but it made a lot of left-wing rhetoric and was soon seen as the personification of social revolution. This created additional bitterness to the efforts to suppress it. They arrived when the government had rebuilt its forces from returning prisoners of war to regain Paris, which became the landscape of short but bloody street fighting. Once again, regularly constituted armies prevailed over workmen and shopkeepers operating on hurriedly devised barricades. If anything could have done so, the terrible failure of the Commune of Paris should have exterminated the revolutionary myth, both in its power to terrify and its power to inspire. But it was not able to do so. It actually strengthened it. Conservatives considered it a great standby to have the Commune example to deliver, stirring up the dangers waiting, always prepared to come out from underneath the surface of society. Revolutionaries had a new event of heroism and martyrdom to add to an apostolic progression of revolutionaries running already from 1789 to 1848. The Commune, however, also reawakened the myth of the revolution because of a new aspect whose significance had already hit both Right and Left. This is nothing but socialism. Socialism has come to include a number of different things, and did so almost from the beginning. Socialism or like its relative, socialist, was first commonly used in France at about 1830 to depict concepts, theories, and men against a society run on market principles and to an economy operated on laissez-faire approaches, of which the chief beneficiaries, they believed, were the wealthy. Such notions could be scary, but were not very original. Egalitarian principles have appealed to men throughout history and the Christian sovereigns of Europe had dealt without much effort to reconcile social arrangements leaning on sharp contrasts of wealth with the application of a religion one of whose greatest mantras glorified God for filling the poor with good things and sending away the rich empty. What occurred in the early nineteenth century was that such notions appeared to become instantly more dangerous and more prevalent. There was also a necessity for new terms in light of new developments. One was that the triumph of liberal political reform seemed to present that legal equality was not sufficient, if it was denied of substance by reliance on other men's economic power, or denatured by impoverishment and attendant ignorance. Another was that existing in the eighteenth century a few theorists had seen big disparities of wealth as unreasonableness in a world which could and should, they believed, be controlled to create the greatest good for the greatest number. In the French revolution, some intellectuals and dissenters already pushed forward demands in which future generations would establish socialist ideals. After 1852 France was ruled by an emperor who again bore the name of Napoleon. He was the nephew of the first Napoleon. He had been elected president of the Second Republic, whose constitution he then rejected by a coup d'etat. The name Napoleon was itself terrifyingly portentous. It evoked a program of international reconstruction, in short, a revolution. Napoleon III - the second was legal fiction, a son of Napoleon I who had actually never ruled - stood for the destruction of the anti-French settlement of 1815 and, hence, of the Austrian domination which supported it up in Germany and Italy. He declared the rhetoric of nationalism with less reticence than most rulers and appears to have believed in it. With diplomacy and arms, Napoleon III forwarded the work of two great diplomatic technicians, Cavour and Bismarck, the prime ministers of Sardinia and of Prussia, respectively. Cavour died in 1861, and debate still persists over what was the extent of his real aims, but by 1871 his successors had established a united Italy under the former King of Sardinia, who was thus rewarded for the loss of Savoy, the ancestral duchy of his house. In that year Germany was united, too. German unification required one further step. It had slowly dawned on France that the contention of Prussian power beyond the Rhine was not in the best interest of France; instead of a disputed Germany, France now faced one dominated by one important military power. Bismarck took advantage of this new knowledge, together with Napoleon III's weaknesses at home and isolation internationally, to incite France into a foolish declaration of war in 1870. Victory in this war set the way of German nationality, for Prussia had taken the lead in defending Germany against France - and there were still Germans alive who could recall what French armies had done in Germany under an earlier Napoleon. The Prussian army annihilated the Second French Empire -- it was the last monarchial regime in France - and established the German empire, the Second Reich. Work Cited Roberts, J.M. History Of The World. New York: Oxford University Press (1993). Read More