Kitabı oku: «Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848», sayfa 8

A new ministry was formed by Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool. He had held government office since 1795, under Pitt, Addison and Portland, been secretary of state for war in Perceval’s cabinet, and would go on to serve as prime minister for fifteen years. A modest and undemonstrative man, he had proved himself a good administrator with a tough streak. He was intelligent and only forty-two years old when he assumed office, but although his mother was half Indian and he himself had travelled widely on the Continent, he took an insular and defensive view of the world. He had been at the storming of the Bastille, but does not seem to have derived from the experience any deep understanding of how revolutions are made.

His home secretary was Henry Addington, created Viscount Sidmouth in 1805, a capable if mediocre man who had proved an undistinguished prime minister from 1801 to 1804. The son of a physician and a parson’s daughter, he had grown up in the shadow of his school friend William Pitt, whom he admired enormously and who assisted his ascent in politics. He was an honest man, but dull, pompous and set in his views. Although he was fifty-five years old when he became home secretary in 1812, he had never been abroad or north of Oxfordshire.

One of the most notable members of Liverpool’s cabinet, and in some ways the most controversial, was the foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh. Born plain Robert Stewart in 1769, the same year as Napoleon and Wellington, his father was a politically ambitious Ulster landowner of Scots Presbyterian descent, while his mother was the daughter of the Marquess of Hertford, a man of immense fortune who was close to the king. This connection helped his father advance rapidly, to become Baron Londonderry in 1789, progressing within seven years via a viscountcy to an earldom and a marquisate of his own.

Castlereagh, to which title Robert acceded in 1796 when his father vaulted into his earldom, was educated at Armagh and Cambridge. He was swept up in the general euphoria attendant on the Revolution in France, and toasted the Sovereignty of the People with gusto. But when he made his grand tour at the beginning of the 1790s he had occasion to see the disorders and licence this involved. His Ulster soul was repelled, and his growing interest in a promising political career made him recoil. He had fallen under the spell of Pitt, who rewarded his devotion in 1798 by nominating him chief secretary for Ireland. Castlereagh played an active part in suppressing the Irish rebellion of that year and in pushing through the Act of Union, for both of which he was widely reviled, not just in Ireland. The poet Shelley famously labelled him a murderer, while Byron called him a cruel despot.

A reserved, sensitive man who loved flowers and animals and was never happier than when tending them at his modest country retreat in Kent, Castlereagh was also devoted to his wife. Their unfashionably homely ménage was the butt of jokes, yet he was close to the dissolute prince regent. A poor speaker, Castlereagh was nevertheless a good manager of his party in Parliament and a competent administrator, proving his worth during spells at the Colonial and then the War Office during the crucial years of 1806–09. As foreign secretary he would frame British policy single-handedly over a decade, exerting a decisive influence in Europe and playing a significant part in the defeat of Napoleon. He was trusted by Liverpool, and assumed a dominant role in the cabinet. This had inherited some of Perceval’s sense of evangelical destiny, which goes some way to explain why its members did not waver in moments of adversity or pause to ask themselves whether their opponents might not have a point.

The Luddite disturbances had diminished in frequency by the time Lord Sidmouth took over at the Home Office in June 1812, but chilling reports kept coming in from all quarters. Major Seale, commander of the South Devon militia, reported on 30 June that an informer had told him there was a huge conspiracy, stretching from Glasgow to London: delegates were travelling around the country holding meetings with local committees and planning diversionary risings in the provinces to draw troops away from London before they struck in the capital. The conspirators were allegedly armed to the teeth. The theme of a plot to lure troops away from London by staging diversionary disturbances recurs in other letters received by Sidmouth, and spies sent in information that appeared to confirm that ‘a general insurrection’ was being planned by ‘secret committees’. A ‘Mr. S’ in Bolton had been overheard telling the town’s machine-breakers that great personages in London such as Burdett were only waiting for them to make a move that would bring down the government, and encouraging them to give the signal by burning down a factory at West Houghton.18

In July both Houses set up committees of secrecy to report on the disturbances. The reports bristle with the stock phrases ‘it appears’, ‘there is reason to believe’ and ‘evidence suggests’, and paint an ominous picture of dark goings-on, based on presuppositions and unsupported inference. According to the Commons committee, the disturbances had nothing spontaneous about them, and were the result of ‘organised systems of unlawful violence’; ‘language of the most mischievous nature’ had been employed by the rioters, who demonstrated ‘a sort of military training and discipline’. It makes much of reports of the bands being marshalled by leaders with ‘signals’ and of the fact that ‘rockets and blue lights have been seen by night’. Both reports dwell on the degree of organisation and coordination displayed, on the stockpiling of arms, on the existence of regional ‘committees’, on the ‘signs and countersigns’ used to guard against infiltrators. They quote an oath allegedly sworn by all adepts not to disclose the identity of members of the supreme ‘Secret Committee’ which was supposedly ‘the great mover of the whole machine’. The unstated conclusion is that there was a far-ranging conspiracy to overthrow the government by force. On 23 July Sidmouth laid before Parliament a Bill giving magistrates wider powers. Soldiers were quartered in every inn throughout the affected localities, and camps were set up in Sherwood Forest and on Kersal Moor. By the end of the year some 12,000 regular troops had been deployed in the area, as many as Wellington had in the Peninsula.19

The Home Office received a steady stream of demands for military protection from factory owners and magistrates, while private individuals took their own precautions. The Reverend Patrick Brontë fired a pistol out of his bedroom window at Haworth Parsonage every morning. At Keswick in the Lake District the poet Robert Southey got hold of ‘a rusty old gun’ and kept it loaded against the revolutionaries. An ardent republican in the 1790s, he now smelled sedition ‘even among these mountains’, and warned Lord Liverpool that if the troops were withdrawn from London ‘four and twenty hours would not elapse before the tricoloured flag would be planted upon Carlton House’.20

General Maitland, commanding the regular forces in the north of the country, did not believe in the likelihood of revolution. Earl Fitzwilliam, now lord lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire, one of the worst-affected areas, maintained that the disturbances were no more than ‘the offspring of distress and want of employment’. Such confrontations as did occur between rioters and troops or militia were usually non-violent, and crowds dispersed peacefully. In Sheffield, women had gone around in a mob, but rather than loot, they forced shopkeepers to sell them flour at a price they thought fair: a strong belief in the ‘rights of free Englishmen’ lay at the root of many of the incidents and shaped their course. In July, the same month that Sidmouth sent out the soldiers, Fitzwilliam reported that the incidents had ceased and the country was quiet. The knitters continued to gather, and there were sporadic outbreaks of machine-breaking, but the crisis was over. In February 1813 the prince regent issued a proclamation calling on ‘all His Majesty’s subjects to exert themselves in preventing the recurrence of these atrocious crimes, and to warn those who may be exposed to the machinations of secret directors of the danger and wickedness of such advice’. By then Fitzwilliam was able to report ‘that the country is fast subsiding into a state of temper which promises that no further outrage will disturb the public tranquillity’, and that it was safe to withdraw the troops.21

The authorities’ tendency to view food riots and Luddite disturbances in political terms is difficult to understand. There was certainly some subversive activity by the detritus of the radical groups of the 1790s and the United Irishmen, those of Despard’s associates who had not been hanged, Spenceans and others. They were joined by returning transportees of 1793 and 1794 whose sentences had expired, many of whom were eager to resume the struggle where they had left off. But the authorities knew who they were, and had spies in every cell, so they would have been aware that there was no connection between them and the Luddites, and that they did not even try to exploit the disturbances. The only reformist activity and political opposition to the government in the past decade had been carried on at Westminster by the likes of Burdett, and in the open by Cartwright and others. The Revolution in France had been shackled by Napoleon, and now Napoleon himself no longer represented a threat to Britain. In October he suffered a crushing defeat at Leipzig that put his own future in question.

The bumper harvest of 1813 and the influx of cheap grain from the liberated Continent ensured that there would be no food riots, and without the spur of hunger the lower orders were generally docile. ‘I defy you to agitate a fellow with a full stomache,’ Cobbett famously complained. Not only had they failed to be stirred by slogans crossing the Channel from France, they stolidly clung to their own cherished shibboleths. The Royal Jubilee held in 1809 to mark the fiftieth year of the reign of George III had unleashed a quite unexpected effusion of patriotism and attachment to the monarchy in all classes. As the end of the war and the prospect of peace drew near, people of conservative bent all over the United Kingdom could congratulate themselves that the storm had been weathered. In June 1815 the final act of Waterloo would only serve to place a gilded full stop at the end of the story. Yet the fear would not subside.22

‘The revolutionary ideas of France have already made but too great a progress in the hearts of men in all countries, and even in the very centre of every capital,’ warned a leading article in The Times a couple of weeks before the momentous battle. ‘It is not Bonaparte that at present forms the danger of Europe: he is unmasked. It is the new opinions; it is the disorganisation of men’s minds; it is the making revolt a calculation of private interest; it is the most deadly of all contagions, the contagion of immorality, of false philanthropy, of a perfidious self-styled philosophy; from all of which the world requires to be protected. This is the true hydra which must be destroyed, or it will destroy all Europe. The cause of morality is the cause of God; it is the cause of all men, of all nations, of all thrones!’23

Such a cause could not be defeated in the field, and, spectacular as it was, the victory of Waterloo did not alter the attitude of the cabinet, which refused to abandon its fable of a seething mass of revolutionaries bent on overthrowing the British constitution and murdering the king and most of the aristocracy.

7
Peace

The wars that came to an end in 1815 had been no ordinary wars. For the best part of a quarter of a century, military operations had swept across Europe, from Lisbon to Moscow, from the Baltic to the toe of Italy: if Sweden, Norway, England, Sardinia and Sicily had been spared invasion, Finland, Wales, Ireland, Malta, Egypt and Palestine had not, and the entire population of the Continent had been affected in material terms. The fighting took in almost all of Europe’s colonies, from Florida in the west to Java in the east, and much of it took place at sea. It lasted six times as long as would the First World War, and four times as long as the Second. Battlefield casualties were not as great, but deaths among soldiers and civilians from wounds, disease, famine and exposure were comparable in relative terms, and certainly unprecedented.

The end of hostilities brought a change for the worse in material terms for the majority of the population of Europe, particularly of the poor. Markets closed by war reopened; others, created by the need for armament and military supplies, collapsed, giving rise to economic dislocation on a vast scale. War had been waged at the economic level, with both sides imposing blockades designed to ruin the other. While Britain did everything to starve France of its colonial trade, Napoleon had excluded British trade from mainland Europe. Items traditionally imported from Britain or the colonies had to be produced at home, and the absence of British competition brought prosperity to parts of Saxony, Austria, Switzerland and Catalonia, to the wool, iron and steel industries of Prussia. Belgium went through an industrial revolution caused by the demand for military goods. Rural areas benefited as the lack of colonial trade gave a boost to the sugar beet industry. The length of the wars lent these provisional developments an element of permanence.

The coming of peace removed trade barriers and flooded hitherto protected areas of Europe with colonial goods and cheap English imports, wreaking havoc with local economies. Yet it did little to alleviate hardship in England. While European markets opened up to English goods such as textiles and steel, it was stocks piled up during the blockade that were exported, and there was therefore no corresponding boost in production or reduction in unemployment. Meanwhile, imports of cheap European corn threatened to ruin British farmers.

The wars had coincided with the introduction of labour-saving machinery and of significant increases in population, and the resulting downward pressure on wages was increased by the influx of disbanded soldiers. The burdens placed on poor households were added to by the return of maimed men unable to work but needing to be fed. Dramatic fluctuations in the currency supply over the period and the introduction of paper money by revolutionary France and then Britain added to the instability and sapped confidence. Every government in Europe taxed whatever it could to pay off wartime borrowing. Britain had spent more in real terms than it would on the First World War, and its national debt was astronomical. Russia’s had multiplied by twenty times between 1801 and 1809, and would more than double again by 1822. Austria was technically bankrupt: over the next three decades an average of 30 per cent of state revenue would be siphoned off to service its debt.1

The social consequences, both of the wars and of the peace, were far-reaching. Young men, and the women who often followed them, were plucked out of their families and communities, away from their restraints and taboos. They were often obliged to serve not the interests of their own ruler, but those of his ally, with the result that Portuguese peasants would find themselves fighting in Russia, and Poles in Spain. Their experiences both emancipated and brutalised them. Those who avoided conscription by running away from home and going into hiding lived by banditry, and would never again be susceptible to control by traditional means such as the influence of the Church or deference to local hierarchies and institutions. The same went for deserters, who were forced into a life of crime in order to survive. When peace came, such people drifted back not to their villages but to large towns, where they could lose themselves and hope to satisfy some of the aspirations encouraged by the slogans of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, and the mood of the times.

The urban population was also swelled by economic migration from the countryside, which not only lowered the standard of living of the poorer sections by creating downward pressure on wages and severe overcrowding leading to disease, but also had some unexpected consequences. The move from country to town usually severed or at least weakened not only family ties but also links to traditional forms of religious observance. Established Churches had either been abolished, as in revolutionary France, or seen their property and status dramatically reduced, as well as their social role as providers of education and health care; their influence had shrunk as a result. They had lost control of the poorest sections of the population in large towns, leaving these prone to a variety of new religious movements and political philosophies.

The wars had been preceded by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and were in many ways a continuation of it. They brought in their wake colossal disruption of all social and political relations throughout the Continent and its dependencies overseas: rulers were humbled or toppled, established religion undermined or abolished, hierarchies of every sort weakened or dismantled; individuals, classes, minorities and nations were liberated in one sense or another. This not only aroused dormant disputes and hatreds, it opened to question every aspect of social, political and spiritual practice, introducing an ideological dimension and intensity of a kind that had been absent from most European conflicts since the religious wars of the seventeenth century. Confronted by the revolutionary ardour of the French, the Bourbon kings of Naples had created an ‘Army of the Holy Faith’ to combat it, the Spanish launched a semi-religious guerrilla of great ferocity, Austria roused the passions of the Tyrolese in 1809, Russia used peasant militias to harry the French in 1812, and Prussia mobilised the population of Germany in 1813 for the Freiheitskrieg, or war of liberation.

As though all this were not enough, Nature contributed the greatest volcanic eruption in recorded history, more than four times greater than Krakatoa’s in 1883. On 10 April 1815, as Napoleon was mustering the army that would be undone at Waterloo, Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Indonesian archipelago exploded into what contemporaries described as a mass of liquid fire and sent volcanic ash twenty miles into the atmosphere. The eruption was heard more than 1,600 miles away, and the whole area within a radius of some four hundred miles was plunged into pitch darkness for two days. The death toll was somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000. Winds sent the particles of ash around the globe, and Londoners were astonished by brilliantly coloured sunsets at the end of July. But the real effects would only make themselves felt later.

There would be no summer in Europe in 1816. Constant rain and persistent cold would destroy harvests across the Continent, causing famine in parts of Ireland, Wales and northern Italy, where people were reduced to eating grass, berries, boiled vegetable peelings and animal manure. In Germany they made bread from the bark of trees. This would precipitate a mass migration of people to less affected parts of Europe, to Russia and to America. Weather patterns would return to normal in the course of 1819. But nothing else did. ‘The volcano is not burnt out,’ the British home secretary Lord Sidmouth wrote to a friend on 13 August 1815, and he was not referring to Mount Tambora.2

There were many at every level of society and in every region to whom peace was unwelcome, and who would take every opportunity to stir up old passions. Some out of ideological conviction, others out of loyalty to a defeated cause, others out of a desire to reverse a situation which had cost them wealth and or rank, others still because peace had no use for their talents. All over Europe, young men who craved adventure, glory and status faced a bleak and boring future. At the same time, the nature of the wars had transformed armies from the eighteenth-century model of pressed or indentured soldiers and mercenaries into citizens-in-arms and champions of the nation. The army had acquired a distinctive place in every European society, and would become a factor in the internal politics of every state in Europe. In recognition of this, almost every European monarch henceforth appeared in uniform.

Long periods of war, with their hardship and suffering, invariably raise expectations of the longed-for peace, often giving rise to dreams of a fresh start or a better world which might make up for and to some extent justify some of that hardship and suffering. In 1815 this phenomenon was magnified by concurrent spiritual awakenings which had been taking place over the past two decades, in Germany and other parts of central Europe, in England and in North America. Such dreams are almost as invariably dashed. But in this instance, it was not only the millenarian dreamers who were disappointed.

The peace settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 had been the work of some of the most distinguished statesmen of the day, achieved at the cost of nearly two years of laborious negotiations. The peacemakers had set out with respectable, if not the best, intentions. These had been overtaken by the priority of creating a balance between the major mainland states, Russia, Prussia and Austria, henceforth designated as the great powers, and of making it strategically impossible for France to threaten them again. The final settlement failed to fulfil the expectations and longings of large numbers of people, and it injured cultural and religious sensibilities. It also offended the sense of justice of people at every level of society all over Europe: while many who had prospered from the Revolution and military aggression were dispossessed and criminalised, others were rewarded, and few of the victims obtained satisfaction. Not surprisingly, the peace was widely denounced as unjust and immoral. The complaints of those left out in the cold were, as far as the peacemakers were concerned, irrelevant. But in ignoring them, they were creating causes dedicated to the overthrow of the system they had put in place.

Among the unsatisfied longings torturing various parts of Europe was the aspiration to independent nationhood. Many Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Irishmen, Belgians and above all Germans were unhappy to see their homelands divided or ruled by foreigners, and longed to give them life as independent nations.

Another longing strongly felt in various parts of the Continent, under different guises in every country, was for a return to a simpler and spiritually purer way of life. This had surfaced in the German Enlightenment and the Pietist movement in German religious life, and been taken up in the writings of the Russian journalist Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov, the mystic Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the German poet Novalis, the mining engineer Franz von Baader and Tsar Alexander’s spiritual mentor Baroness von Krüdener. Underlying this trend was the belief not only that the Christian faith should be practised more in spirit than in traditional ritual, but also that love should transcend laws, and that the rights of rulers must be earned through the application of virtue. Some went so far as to see in the French Revolution a punishment for Europe’s abandonment of Christian values, and therefore a salutary lesson which the supposedly Christian monarchs had failed to learn. Such views coincided with a strain in German Romanticism which had identified the Middle Ages as a time of purity and heroism. Writers such as Adam Müller called for a return not to the ancien régime obtaining before 1789, but to an imagined age of chivalry, untainted by the evils of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In his Advice to Young Noblemen, Tsar Alexander’s friend the duc de Richelieu propounded that the Revolution had been in large measure the consequence of the shortcomings of the French nobility, and enjoined their descendants to forget the ‘false grandeur’ of the eighteenth century and to reach back to the ‘age of chivalry’ for models.3

Inchoate as such ideas might have been, they drifted through sections of European society demanding attention and action. The frustrated emotions expressed by French poets such as Vigny and Musset, and later Lamartine and Hugo, came to be known as ‘le mal du siècle’. Those of their Russian counterparts Pushkin and Lermontov gave rise to the notion of the ‘lichnii chelovek’, the superfluous man for whom there was no role in the ugly realities of the existing world order.

‘A reputedly invincible revolution has just been vanquished,’ wrote the conservative historian and former émigré soldier François Dominique de Montlosier as he considered the state of France in 1815. But this had solved nothing, since the victors were beset by ‘both the old vices which produced the revolution and the new ones which the revolution produced’ as they tried to rebuild the state. ‘What plan is to be followed? The wisdom of past times is no longer applicable to the present; it is foreign to it: the wisdom of modern times is even less applicable; it is depraved.’4

The problem is well illustrated by what happened when, on recovering his temporal dominion, Pope Leo XII tried to turn the clock back. When the French occupied the Papal States in 1809 they reorganised the administration, lifted the disabilities on various groups, abolished the privileges of others and modernised the infrastructure. The pope sacked all those who had worked in the administration under the French, brought back the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and sent the Jews back to the ghetto. Other casualties included unholy revolutionary novelties such as street lighting and vaccination.

King Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia took a similar line. He had been forced to flee his mainland capital Turin at the approach of the French in 1798. When he returned, he expelled all French nationals from his realm, even those married to Sardinian subjects, and closed down the botanical gardens created under the French, uprooting and burning plants as though they carried seeds of corruption. He too sacked officials wholesale. Clutching the court almanac of 1798 and muttering ‘Novant’Ott!’ (ninety-eight), he reinstated people in the posts and ranks they had held then, with the result that grandfathers became pages once more. To the joy of breeches- and wig-makers he revived the fashions of the past, and the arch-conservative Sardinian minister in St Petersburg, Joseph de Maistre, had to stop on his way back to Turin in order to have a new wardrobe made (he admitted to a correspondent that ‘at the risk of sounding ridiculous, I am not sure I will know how to walk in our ci-devant dress, having spent more than twenty years in tail-coat or uniform’).5

Victor Emmanuel did, in one case at least, close down a textile factory operating in a former convent and, having traced a dozen former members of its Capuchin community, restore it. But neither he nor the pope returned much religious property confiscated by the state under the French. Nor did they abolish the efficient fiscal systems introduced by them. Victor Emmanuel also retained the French peace-keeping Gendarmerie, under the new name of Carabinieri. Principles crumbled before convenience.

The Congress of Vienna made many casualties of convenience – sovereign rulers, aristocrats, bishops, monasteries and other institutions which had been dispossessed by a revolution or Napoleonic regime saw their property handed over to third parties. Invoking the principle of legitimacy in order to reinstate some offensive aspects of the old order and trampling it for the sake of expediency, the new order set up by the congress alienated large sections of the very nobility and aristocracy that should have been its greatest support. By riding roughshod over the rights of these and other, more humble individuals, the settlement placed the state in opposition to the individual to a greater extent than ever before, and in so doing profoundly contradicted the spirit of the age, which elevated the individual and deified the collective in the shape of the nation. Such sentiments transcended the parochial gripes of wronged minorities, and would unite wildly disparate elements in protest. The philosopher La Harpe went so far as to venture that the peace settlement contained ‘the germs of the disintegration of Europe’. The Italian statesman Camillo di Cavour termed it ‘a political edifice without any moral foundation’. Maistre also denied it legitimacy. ‘Justice, by its very nature, leads to peace,’ he wrote. ‘Injustice, by its very nature, leads to war.’ He would be proved correct, but it would be a very different kind of war from that he imagined.6

The ‘depraved’ wisdom Montlosier referred to was a new liberalism based on considerations of utility and practicality which had left behind the utopianism of the Enlightenment and the idealism of the Revolution, and set aside such grandiloquent concepts as the Rights of Man in favour of a more pragmatic approach intended to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. It took for granted that much of what had been done in terms of political enfranchisement, social emancipation, secularisation, disestablishment and extension of the protection of the law in France and wherever French influence had penetrated represented a huge step forward on the march of human progress.