Download Did economic crisis cause the revolutions of 1848?

Did economic crisis cause the revolutions of 1848?
In 1848, revolutions across Europe took place. This came after particularly difficult years of economic
crisis, with poor harvests, a trade cycle downturn and recession. However, historians since have rightly
been aware of the dangers of making post hoc ergo propter hoc judgments. The Marxist conception of the
event as framed around a class conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has been replaced with
more nuanced accounts, emphasising the importance of looking to less rigid and bipolar economic
structures. The most recent historiography concerned with political culture has rightly emphasised the
importance of the politicisation of economic crisis in the minds of contemporaries to form the language of
revolution. It is vital, too, to emphasise the heterogeneity of Europe at this time, and the contextual
variation of revolutionary movements across social strata and time. To reduce the revolutionary
movements of 1848 to monocausal explanations is to fundamentally misunderstand the revolutionary
process.
It is first essential to outline the historiography of 1848. Given the intellectual environment at the time,
the revolutions were immediately subject to theorised interpretation. The revolution was hauled by
contemporaries Marx and Engels as the first fought between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The July
Monarchy of 1830 was dismissed as a ‘joint stock company’ of the bourgeoisie. The urban proletarian
insurgents were presented as the ‘special and essential products’ of modern industry, against the
lumpenproletariat, who in June 1848 Marx criticised as defeating the proletariat ‘hired and armed’. In
hindsight, he saw that the proletariat were not organised enough to rule - it was not yet a class in which
‘the revolutionary interests of society are concentrated’. The Marxian teleological conception of history
has been derided as deterministic and capable of interpretation only on predefined and anachronistic
parameters. Revisionist historiography has moved ferociously past such interpretations. Gouldner,
following Kuhn’s analysis in social sciences, called attention to the role of anomalies in theoretical
advance. The attempt to derive laws of human nature in Scientific Marxism requires anomalies such as
the ‘lumpenproletariat’ which alert us to the possibility of new avenues of enquiry. Historians are now
unwilling to see mid-nineteenth-century European society as defined as distinctly on industrial lines, and
have looked for new explanations for how in France, the Mobile Guard and National Workshops fought
against each other despite having exceptionally similar social compositions. Most were Parisian working
class artisans with a shared concern for unemployment. Traugott has emphasised the contrast in the
organisational elements of such groups, while explanations of a ‘generational hypothesis’ in age between
the two groups have been advanced. These historiographical advances have been vital to our
understanding.
Perhaps the most convincing analysis, however, from more recent poststructuralist historiography
emphasising political culture has come from Tombs. Class conflict for contemporaries is explained as a
‘discursive reality’ - these were ideological, rather than socioeconomic, ‘imagined communities’. There
were other divisive aspects in French culture, and by looking to the interests of different groups, and how
individuals transformed social grievances into revolutionary political objectives we can ascertain a more
nuanced and credible analysis. It is finally worth mention that while revolutions took place in vastly
different environments across Europe, they shared key similarities that warrant shared analysis: they were
oppositional to old regimes, bid for greater participation, had a distinct urgency on the social question,
stressed national self-determination, and were precipitated by economic crisis. It was news of the
revolution in Paris, with faster communications across Europe, that had it spread with such fervour across
Europe. This was, after all, self-consciously proclaimed a ‘great European revolution!’. It is with a view
to how economic and social grievances became politicised that we can analyse the heterogeneous but
ultimately European revolutionary movements of 1848.
It is now worth looking to the nature of the economic crisis, and its socioeconomic effects, precipitating
the revolutions. Mediocre harvests had caused food shortages in the early 1840s; in Mediterranean Europe
in 1843, bad harvests led to villagers in the province of Basilicata reduced to eating the carcasses of
donkeys found dead on the side of the road in southern Italy. 1845 saw a harvest disaster, while 1846
broadened and deepened the crisis. Historians have counted over 400 food riots in France during 1846-47,
and 164 in German states during 1847. A bountiful harvest in 1847, however, brought down food prices
substantially even before the outbreak of revolution in 1848. However, the crisis of 1845-47 had led to
another kind of crisis. The more people spent on food, the less they had for manufactured goods, i.e. the
produces and services of artisans. This produced a sharp downturn beginning in 1847. Unemployment
grew in large cities and manufacturing regions. The slump was compounded by a credit crisis, since high
grain prices had been accompanied by substantial borrowing; when food costs outstripped income, the
debt stemming from bad harvest remained a problem in 1848. It is worth looking to too the nature of
some of the economic conflicts that took place, for example that elicited by Sperber’s study of the
Rhineland, in the transition towards a marketised economy in Europe. Bavarian and Prussian
governments controlled the bulk of the forest land; with increasing demand for wood and rising wood
prices throughout the early nineteenth-century, they were brought into conflict with the upland peasantry.
Officials attempted to make wood a supply of income for the state; but state forest policy stirred up
resentment among other wood consumers. Upland peasants were now forced to compete at auctions with
tanners, exporters or ironmasters wanting more than fixed-price quotas. The peasants had relied on their
traditional rights, Berechtigungen, to gather branches and fallen wood, or to use forests for pasture. With
heath and underbrush planted in non deciduous trees, opportunities for pasture declined, and foresters
were increasingly less sympathetic to peasants’ traditional rights, demanding written evidence of
existence (a legacy of the Revolutionary state’s policy of abolishing feudalism). Villagers resisted by
engaging in ‘wood theft’; in the Palatinate in 1846-47, some 185,000 of 600,000 inhabitants were
convicted for this. With the state apparatus unable to consistently punish offenders, the situation near
Kleve got so out of hand in 1840 that the army was called in to protect the woods.
Marx’s interpretation of the Rhenish forest conflict has given it almost canonical status, but the view of
peasants clinging to subsistence agriculture and pre capitalist property rights against market forces is not
wholly helpful. Peasants did not just steal wood for subsistence, but for sale in the market. Sperber has
argued that this was in fact the practice of an unfree market economy, stemming from fiscality and an
attempt to accrue government revenue. State intervention served to sharpen preexisting market conflicts.
The conflicts leading up to 1848 cannot simply be understood as class conflicts. The class structures of an
industrial society had prevalence in mid-century cities. The high level of unemployment among
journeymen often meant a kind of self-employment was the answer, while the structural crisis in craft
branches in the late 1840s saw outworking spread and craftsmen become increasingly subject to
merchants. To properly understand how economic strains and tensions were politicised, we need to look
to the political culture of the time, and especially the Vormärz in Germany. It equally becomes clear that
the revolutions of 1848 were less caused by class conflict, so much as the political processes in the
revolutionary movements led to the ‘imagined communities’ of class developing concomitant with
increased emphasis on organised oppositional groups.
During the 1830s and 1840s, German interest in public affairs increased significantly; the public sphere
expanded in the press, lecture halls and with informal festivities. Social tensions were conceptualised as a
source for political passions, as popular participation became part of a wider political culture. Among
radicals, to the liberals’ left, there was a steady rise in commitment to the Volk. The French Revolution of
1830, with the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, was clearly important. It was described by Metternich as
‘the collapse of the dam in Europe’. Some crowds had gathered, and Wilhelm Weitling, a future radical
leader, observed the crowds that roamed Leipzig’s streets:
In one night the people were masters of the city and its environs. Because they did not know what
else to do, they set about to destroy a dozen houses. Everyone sought to express his anger in some
way: some [attacked] the villa of a merchant who had employed locksmiths from outside the city
and thus deprived citizens of their proper work, others broke up the furniture of an unpopular
lawyer.
The crowd clearly lacked popular direction, but this came to develop over time. Frederick William III,
ruler of Prussia, died in 1840; hopes on his successor, Frederick William IV, were thwarted by his
announcement he had a ‘natural duty’ to maintain a ‘patriarchal regime’. The lively public sphere that had
developed in Germany by this point led to the widespread expression of popular disenchantment. Johann
Jacoby’s Vier Fragen beantwortet von einem Ostpreussen (1841) demanded independent citizens be
given opportunity for ‘lawful participation in the affairs of the state’. By 1847, Frederick William
attempted to defuse growing discontent by a combined meeting of the provincial Landtage; he stirred
tensions by telling them that no power on earth would force him to ‘change the nature and especially for
us inherently true relationship between Prince and people into something conventional and
constitutional’. The political order became increasingly antagonistic with the burgeoning organisations of
social reformers, which came to furnish the interpretation of economic struggles. Bildungverein was
founded in Cologne in 1844 to ‘counter the spiritual and corporal privation of those who work with their
hands’. This was not so much working class organisation, so much as the attempt to encourage lower
orders to be inspired by their betters; it was, nevertheless, a push towards popular participation. Vormärz
organisations essentially encouraged wage-earners and craftsmen to develop a sense of common interests;
people began to see themselves as workers, rather than for a particular firm. Their plight was
conceptualised in a way that linked it to the political order, and allowed for the development of
revolutionary activity. It is within this context that we can begin to understand the words of the journal of
the Workers’ Fraternization in 1850:
The constitutional monarchy, like the pure monarchy, is supported by capital, by the
representation of [special] interests. Hence with the overthrow of the monarchy, capital is
overthrown as well.
If workers began to conceive themselves as part of a politically radicalised community, engaging in direct
action to change society in pursuit of their own shared interests, this was part of their conceptualisation as
an ‘imagined community’ rather than distinct class movements. It is important to remember that society at
this time was not fundamentally based around competing classes, and that conflicts persisted between
groups such as journeymen and masters. However, the concepts of this ‘imagined community’ grew
during the revolution, rather than being a cause for it. Our understanding of the revolution is best assessed
by looking to the ‘layers’ of revolutionary activity, and the competing interests at different social levels.
Wolfram Siemann usefully looks to different layers of revolutionary activity. First was the revolution at
the ‘grassroots’. As the Breslauger Zeitung commented in March 1848, it was ‘quite common to hear
from men of the lowest classes, even women, uttering clear and sensible opinions about political and
social questions’. The public was agitated by strikes in factories and railroad construction. The second
was the ‘political revolution’, with movements pushing for a free press and a public organised into
political parties. Political lines of conservatives, constitutional liberals, democrats, political Catholics and
workers societies organised nationally. The third was the ‘parliamentary revolution’, ‘the governmental
revolution’ and finally the ‘monarchy and counter revolution’, though these are perhaps less helpful for
our purposes. The lower orders were politicised by the conceptualisation of changing the political order to
suit their social needs, with legitimising slogans based on popular participation. The revolution would
catalyse the process of individuals seeing themselves as part of political ‘imagined communities’.
However, the root of the impetus for revolutionary activity can be rightly understood as economic crisis,
if the precondition was the environment where this could be politicised. The revolutionary momentum
was a transformative political process, leading to the articulation of concepts of national unity and
engendering religious conflicts.
To rightly corroborate this judgment, we need look to other examples from other parts of this ‘European’
revolutionary movement. France might be a good example. It was similarly in a state where industrial
capitalism cannot be understood to have defined the structure of society. It lacked a national market, had
numerous market restrictions, many non-market social relations and was mostly agrarian. The working
population was concerned more with crafts, and textile factories of modern industrial production existed
only in Normandy and Alsace, or in the coal mines. In 1847-48, 50.4% of Parisian enterprises had fewer
than two employees. The broad lower classes were in towns were more politically active than those
employed in countryside factories. These individuals were struck by economic instability, but
homogenous class formations had not developed. Within the group of the ‘peuple’, from which
aristocrats, bourgeois notables, finances, businessmen and increasingly landlords were excluded, there
were still conflicts, such as between journeymen and masters. Groups were increasingly inspired by
socialism, but these referred to ‘imagined communities’ more than anything else: sociétés de secours
mutuels developed, such as the Société des corporations reunies, which in 1848 demanded an economic
and social system based in producers’ cooperatives. This politicisation of interpreted social and economic
conflict was partly the legacy of the French Revolution, which had a tendency to universalising political
dilemmas. However, we cannot simply seek monocausal explanations of historical phenomena. Political
events, organisational contingencies and even the ‘generational hypothesis’ may be useful modulations to
nuance our understanding of the Parisian insurrection of 1848.
The July Monarchy faed post-revolutionary conflicts; both the ‘social question’ of problems posed by
economic modernisation and the ‘national question’ of France regaining its status of mistress of a
liberated Europe. Since this was supposed to be a people’s victory, the government had to make
concessions. The government was met with demands to ban machinery, expel immigrants, guarantee
wages and fix hours; the political culture of those demanding popular sovereignty and participation could
clash with that of the newly established order. The Prefect of Police noted that ‘they want things that are
against their own real interests. I am neglecting nothing to convince them’. Political crises followed;
Adolphe Thiers’ appointment as Prime Minister in 1840 came to represent the victory of Parliament over
the crown - the policy of ‘transaction’ to regain monarchical popularity failed for Louis-Philippe. The left
saw the influence of the bourgeoisie and Francois Guizot in monarchy as working against the ‘national’
interest, and the regime came to be unpopular. With the heir Duc d’Orleans dead in 1842, the future was
malleable. It was in this context that the socioeconomic crisis of the years preceding 1848 compounded
revolutionary fervour. Economic crisis appeared to aggravate the plethora of dangers destabilising
society.
It is finally worth looking to the detail of the revolutionary movement in France to understand how
organisational contingency could affect the nature of the revolution. Traugott’s analysis of the June Days
of 1848, following a conservative government replacing the Orleans monarchy, rightly emphasises the the
lack of empirical evidence for economic crisis leading to class formation, culminating in a revolution
between class interests. Indeed, the insurgent National Workshops of 1848 had an almost identical social
composition to the Mobile Guard defending the government, so an analysis rooted in the presumption of a
conflict based purely on rational economic objectives is clearly problematic. He looks instead to the
differences in organisation between the two groups. The Mobile Guard had the integrity and morale of
officer corps intact due to several changes of commanding general; the grievances of rank and file were
properly addressed before they could become generalised; there was a high degree of isolation achieved
by quartering troops in barracks throughout the city, inhibiting cross-cut loyalty and ensuring support for
the regime. By contrast, the National Workshops had lost their paramilitary structure, effective handling
of grievances and efforts to isolate them from the Parisian population from mid-May, with the removal of
the director personally responsible for this. The workshops underwent a transformation where the rank
and file were drawn into alliance with radicals, as leadership collapsed. Traugott’s analysis is
exceptionally plausible, as is the ‘generational hypothesis’ that the Mobile Guard was younger, with less
experience of revolution and labour agitation. Traugott fails to address, however, that older workers may
have been socialised into a different political culture, and that it was not simply radicals against the
regime, with the leading radical organ La Reforme opposed to the action as premature and
counterproductive. These initial criticisms, as well as Traugott’s hypothesis, reminds us that we should rid
of monocausal explanations for historical phenomena. If the National Workshops were more vulnerable to
infiltration by radicals due to generational and organisational differences, the radicals’ message had a
special sway in the context of a society where social and economic grievances could be politicised with
references to the leitmotifs of the republic, nation and interests of working people. The linguistic reference
to these ‘imagined communities’ was vital for encouraging revolutionary fervour, especially given the
political upheavals in France of the last sixty years.
Ultimately, we must rid ourselves of monocausal explanations in history. Marx’s teleological and
deterministic conception of historical process has led to assumptions of class conflict that, when tested by
empirical evidence, are clearly untrue. Economic crisis had a fundamental role in precipitating mass
action and popular revolutionary fervour, but only in the sense that it had been politicised by a linguistic
emphasis on ‘imagined communities’ in a newly developed public sphere. This nuance helps us look
beyond assuming a coalescence between economic crisis and political grievances, and when compounded
by a refined awareness of concomitant phenomena such as political events, organisational contingencies
and the ‘generational hypothesis’ helps present a more convincing view of the revolutions of 1848.
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