The overthrow of the old regime in France affected the whole of Europe, and beyond, and destabilised the political order for generations. Dominic Alexander explores its legacy in France, Britain and Germany

The social forces unleashed by the French Revolution resulted in an age of transformation and revolutions across Europe and beyond. Outside Europe, in the French slave colony of Saint-Domingue, the revolution’s ideals helped to spark the first successful slave revolution in history, in 1791, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, which established the Haitian republic. In Europe, the initial stages of the revolution garnered considerable sympathy among Enlightenment-minded intellectuals and writers. In Germany, it also seems to have encouraged a considerable wave of unrest among peasants and workers, even before the radicalisation of 1792.¹ As there were Black Jacobins in Haiti, so there were English Jacobins in Britain, and German Jacobins in the German realm.²

The most direct impact of the French Revolution on Europe came through the French conquests. Starting in the 1790s, the ‘Batavian Republic’ was created in the Netherlands, overthrowing the old regime there, and several other similar client republics were created in Italy. Germany was transformed by revolutionary French and then Napoleonic occupation with hundreds of the semi-sovereign micro-states swept into oblivion by the enforced consolidation of larger territorial units. In the occupied parts of Germany, ecclesiastical states were secularised, tithes abolished, serfdom and seigneurialism abolished, guilds dissolved, privileges and monopolies abolished, and religious tolerance instituted.³ In short, the detritus of feudalism was swept away. Prussia, which was truncated but unoccupied, instituted its own programme of major reforms, which included the formal emancipation of the peasantry.

While in an abstract sense, all this could be considered as changes of a revolutionary nature, and they did open the way for capitalist development, their impact was nonetheless much less than revolutionary. The heavy burdens of French occupation drained the reforms of popular support, and worse, they were hedged around with half measures and compromises that left significant elements of the old order firmly in place. The abolition of seigneurialism was so limited in many areas that its impact was to solidify the power of landowners over the peasantry, rather than to emancipate them. This was particularly so in Prussia, where emancipation has been said to have freed the landowning Junker nobility rather than the peasantry.⁴ What was born in Germany as a result of the modernising wave of French invasions was less a new age of bourgeois liberty than one of bureaucratic absolutism.

Spread of revolutionary ideas 

Even so, revolution was now an option that seemed within grasp throughout Europe. New ideas about remaking society also spread relentlessly, despite the authoritarian regimes that appeared with Napoleon and after his fall in 1815. These new ideas, whether liberal constitutionalism or radical Jacobin democracy, appealed to wide layers of society from reform-minded aristocrats, through the middle classes to peasants and artisans. However, another new and more radical set of ideas were also a legacy of the Revolution. These took revolutionary ideas of democracy and equality, and the most radical impulses of sans-culotte politics to their logical conclusion, creating a new synthesis of revolutionary communism for the modern age. As an abstract, theoretical idea, communism had a long history, but only occasionally intersected with real social movements, as it did with the Diggers in the 1640s, and during the Reformation.⁵

Gracchus Babeuf, as François-Noël Babeuf renamed himself, after the plebeian heroes of the Roman republic, was much more than just an extreme Jacobin, as some historians have dismissed him.⁶ Babeuf had been a radical activist, even though he became critical of the Terror, but during an imprisonment under the Directory, developed a more radical agenda. He then gathered around him other radicals and ex-Jacobins, during a period of economic crisis in the Directory, hoping to re-ignite the popular revolution. The planned insurrection of his Conspiracy of Equals may have been stillborn after Babeuf and the leadership’s arrest and trial in 1797, but it was more interesting than a last blip in the fizzling out of the radical phase of the French Revolution. Unlike most earlier visions of an egalitarian utopia, Babeuf’s ideas were not another reworking of agrarian communism, but were inspired by France’s growing industrial society. Historians often minimise the extent to which modern industry was a presence in revolutionary France, and that there were significant concentrations of ‘a wage earning class which began to act in its own class interests, using its own characteristic forms of struggle’.⁷ Babouvist influence was at its greatest in the more developed industrial regions.

Many in Babeuf’s organisation were ex-Hébertists and ex-Jacobins, and not all may have fully accepted the Babouvists’ programme for the abolition of private property, while enthusiasm for the idea of reviving the 1793 constitution may also have driven some popular support. Despite the label of ‘conspiracy’, Babeuf’s organisation was far from being the caricature of a secret society. Babouvist propaganda openly proclaimed its goals in its newspapers and flyposting, whose circulation and impact seem to have been surprisingly wide.⁸ Babeuf’s organisation reached outside Paris and into the provinces, and although there were notable weaknesses, such as lacking any appeal to the peasantry, supporters in Marseilles were organised enough to publish their own paper.

Babeuf’s conception of a revolutionary dictatorship was one that was committed to democratic accountability and freedom of opinion, points on which he argued that Jacobinism had fallen short.⁹ The caricatures of Babeuf’s position were made easier by his follower Buonarroti, whose 1828 history of the Babouvist movement was influential, and also important in the development of the model of conspiratorial societies as a form of revolutionary organising. The unfortunate corollary of this was that revolutionary socialists could not engage in creating mass propaganda and organising to promote their ideas.¹⁰

Radicalism in Britain

Napoleon’s regime and then the Restoration put a lid on radicalism in France, but working-class movements were developing during this time in Britain. Under the impact of the French Revolution, a radical democratic movement was reborn in the 1790s, derisively nicknamed by the Tory press, ‘English Jacobins’. Some prominent radicals even spent time in France. One, Tom Paine, already famous for his involvement in the American revolution, now wrote the pamphlet Rights of Man, which was a runaway bestseller of radical propaganda. Its second part, published in 1792, adumbrated a plan for a welfare state, paid for by the confiscation of aristocratic land. Mary Wollstonecraft was influenced by the ferment about women’s rights in the revolution to produce her foundational text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). There isn’t the space here to tell the story of the development of radical politics and working-class movements in Britain, but while the unrest of the 1790s was supressed during the wars with France, it returned with the appearance of the Luddite movement from 1811.

The Luddites, named after their fictional leader Ned Ludd, were clandestine groups of artisans in the textile industries protesting against the new factory machines that were putting them out of work. They later became a byword for unreasoning technophobia, due to their tactic of machine smashing. Even left-wing historians could dismiss them as a minority of ‘daring and desperate men’, but they were nonetheless strongly connected to the development of trade unionism among skilled artisanal workers in the textile industry.¹¹ Moreover, E. P. Thompson and later historians showed them to be far from blindly anti-technology or just ‘primitive’ trade unionists, but people capable of considerable feats of clandestine organisation and political-economic awareness.¹² By 1812, there were 12,000 troops in the affected counties of the North and Midlands attempting to supress Luddite activity.¹³

Although the authorities executed some Luddites, largely they were unable to discover the leaders or suppress the movement except by the presence of massive force. The number of workers involved in Luddism was actually very large, but more, they depended upon the refusal of vast numbers of people in their communities to inform on them. The movement eventually died down, but it was a testament to the rising capacity of the industrial working-class for self-organisation. Certainly, the Luddites scared capitalists and the authorities; one mill owner said that: ‘If more military is not sent into the country … they will not be called upon to protect it, but will be required to reconquer it.’¹⁴

Luddites, or those sympathisers who spoke on their behalf, were not against new technology as such, but objected to the situation within capitalism where workers’ livelihoods are destroyed by the new machines, and left destitute. A larger political programme did not otherwise develop from Luddism, even though they doubtlessly overlapped with the radical political tendencies in many places, as they did with more regular trade unionism.

Old corruption and new radicalism

The political reform movement revived again from 1815 and the end of the wars with France, picking up from the agitation of the 1790s. The existing electoral system restricted the suffrage largely to the landowning gentry, with some exceptions. Many constituencies lacked many, or any, actual voters, and were in the gift of the monarchy or various aristocrats. Moreover, constituencies were concentrated in the south and more rural areas, while the new industrial towns often went entirely unrepresented. The system, which ensured aristocratic political domination, was widely detested as ‘Old Corruption’.

The middle class and industry chafed under this dispensation, but it was the working class who provided the militant crowds behind the reform movement which initially peaked in 1819 at the Peterloo demonstration in Manchester. The crowd of tens of thousands was attacked by troops on horseback, with an estimate of eighteen people killed and hundreds wounded. This shocking act of vicious repression certainly sharpened the anger most working-class people felt towards the system, and was followed by a wave of further demonstrations and protests, which alarmed magistrates and local authorities.

The government responded with the highly authoritarian and repressive Six Acts, which suppressed political gatherings and the radical press. One immediate radical response to Peterloo and the Six Acts was an attempt to organise an insurrection by a group of ultra-radicals, the ‘Spencean Philanthropists’. The Spenceans were followers of Thomas Spence (1750-1814), who as early as 1775 was advocating the expropriation of landowners and the creation of co-operatives to replace private property in land. Spence was on the radical wing of the English Jacobin movement, and the idea of a social revolution targeting the aristocracy spread with his followers. They were the only group of English Jacobins to maintain themselves across from the 1790s to the post-war period.

One of them, Thomas Evans, was involved in insurrectionary plotting in the late 1790s, was imprisoned, and in 1816 wrote: ‘All the land, the waters, the mines, the houses and all permanent feudal property, must return to the people’.¹⁵ Unlike with Babeuf, the target of revolutionary thinking had not yet passed beyond seeing the aristocracy as the class enemy of the people, rather than capitalists as well. Nonetheless, there was, albeit small, a revolutionary wing of radicalism. This was effectively brought to an end by the debacle of the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, an attempt to organise an insurrection in revenge for the Peterloo Massacre and the repressive Six Acts, which included a plan to assassinate the Cabinet. The plotting was encouraged by a police spy, who, of course, then betrayed the conspirators. They were either executed or transported.

Thus Britain’s old regime survived for the time being, while as the economy rose out of the post-war slump, reform agitation died down temporarily. This should not be taken to imply, as historians too often do, that working-class agitation rises and falls mechanically with the health of the economy. Rather, a different pattern was in operation. These had also been the decades of the early development of trade unionism, but when the economy was in depression, it was hard to sustain fledgling trade-union organisation, so there was a mass turn to political agitation instead. Conversely, when the economy was stronger, so trade-union organising had greater traction, and naturally appeared as a priority in improving people’s lives. The swelling militant trade-union organising was undoubtedly a factor that forced the legalisation of trade unions in 1824 with the repeal of the Combination Acts. These had been passed in 1799 and 1800 as part of the suppression of 1790s radicalism. The 1820s showed growing working-class self-organisation. Desire for political change did not cease, it was just waiting for more propitious times.

The Spenceans’ dabbling in insurrectionism may have been disastrous, but their ideas about agrarian communism did have an impact, spreading among artisan circles in London particularly, and preparing the ground for utopian socialist ideas that would soon proliferate.¹⁶ However, the idea of a co-operative, collective land system, re-establishing a lost rural community, persisted within the working class, and even re-asserted itself in the mid-1840s, during a relative lull in Chartist agitation.

Utopian socialism came in a great range of forms in the early nineteenth century, but in Britain it was dominated by the conceptions of a reforming manufacturer, Robert Owen. Owen’s ideas for remodelling society on a co-operative basis were paternalistic, even authoritarian, and initially directed towards the ruling class, but he declared that ‘the present arrangement of society is the most anti-social, impolitic, and irrational that can be.’¹⁷ Meeting with polite disinterest among the elite, Owen turned towards practical experiments in communistic communities, and but in so far as he was anti-capitalist, he was no revolutionary, merely arguing that the superiority of co-operative institutions would gradually prove themselves superior to capitalist ones.

Owen’s ideas were an unlikely impetus for working-class self-organisation, but this is precisely what happened in the later 1820s, as Owenite socialism spread within and was adapted by artisanal trade-union circles especially: ‘it was the very imprecision of his theories, which offered none the less, an image of an alternative system of society, … which made them adaptable to different groups of working people.’¹⁸ Owenism contributed to the development of working-class critiques of bourgeois economics, and became influential to the co-operative movement, then closely intertwined with trade unionism.

The anti-political tendency in Owen and Owenism was one of its many limitations, but it did spread the idea of ‘socialism’, and provided a source for social alternatives to industrial capitalism. It was also an expression of the growing class consciousness and self-organisation to be found among workers in the years leading up to and around the spectacular return of political radicalism in the 1830s. Utopian socialism in general tended away from revolutionary or even radical politics, and its practical applications directed workers towards co-operative ventures, rather than political organisation. Co-operatism or mutualism, although remaining a popular idea, would prove to be a dead end as a viable alternative to capitalism. Nonetheless, utopianism gave hope to many that an alternative way of organising society was possible, and worth fighting for. 

From Restoration to revolution

The road from Jacobin democracy to working-class socialism took at least as long in France, with its revolutionary tradition, as it did in Britain, despite the precedent of Babeuf. There was little room for oppositional politics under Napoleon’s regime, and the Bourbon Restoration from 1815 was a highly conservative settlement. While there was a parliamentary system post 1815, the limited suffrage meant that only wealthy landowners, or the very wealthiest bourgeois could vote, amounting to some 1% of adult men. The Restoration was constantly destabilised by the ultra-Royalists, who wanted to reclaim lands confiscated during the revolution, and were well represented in the elected Chamber of Deputies. Press censorship limited the possibility for organised opposition to all but the most conservative of liberals. The restored king, Louis XVIII, knew better than to give into the royalist ultras, but nor was he prepared to base his regime firmly upon the social power of the bourgeoisie. This left the Restoration teetering on a very narrow basis of support.

With repressive counterrevolutionary regimes being general in post-Napoleonic Europe, this became the era of secret societies as the focus for oppositional organising. Such groups were particularly important in southern Europe, with the originally Italian Carbonari spreading into France, where they had as many as 40,000 members after 1820.¹⁹ Revolutions in Spain, Portugal and Italy in 1820-1 were echoed weakly in France with unsuccessful revolts across a string of French towns and cities, including Toulon, Nantes, Strasbourg and Paris.²⁰ The Carbonari had no ideological coherence, including the range of positions from Bonapartists, moderate liberals through to Jacobin republicans, and a membership composed of anyone from students to soldiers.

The fall of the Restoration regime in France was certainly not due to anything done by secret societies like the Carbonari, but rather through its own inability to reconcile itself to the bourgeois-dominated society of post-Revolutionary France. The irreconcilable clash between conservative liberals and ultra-royalists came to a head after the death of Louis XVIII, and the accession of Charles X, whose lack of wisdom inclined him towards the ultra-royalists’ reactionary agenda. In this atmosphere, the liberal and republican opposition both began to regain some organisational coherence.

When Charles X’s government announced plans to further restrict the franchise, dissolve the existing Chamber of Deputies, and tighten censorship still further, a leading liberal politician, Adolphe Thiers, helped issue a manifesto calling for resistance. On 26 July 1830, shops and workshops in Paris shut. The next day rioting broke out, and there were clashes between crowds of workers and troops, but the soldiers’ loyalty to the government became unreliable. The crowds erected barricades, and were able to take important public buildings, including the Tuileries Palace, upon which the revolutionary flag, the tricolour, was soon flying. The Bourbon government fell apart and Charles X fled, while conservative liberals hastened to create a Provisional government, which soon installed Louis Phillipe, Duc d’Orléans, as a new constitutional monarch. The radicals involved in the street fighting in Paris were blindsided by this rapid reconsolidation of order. Bourgeois liberals were well aware of the danger of losing control of events, and so acted quickly to plug the vacuum in power.

The Parisian working class was unable to mount a response to this manoeuvre because it had no real political leadership of its own. Even a convinced radical revolutionary like August Blanqui was working for a liberal newspaper on the eve of the revolution, and was disconcerted to find that his colleagues ‘feared the armed workers more than the Bourbons’.²¹ After the establishment of the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ of Louis Phillipe, radicals felt betrayed, and the illusion that the liberal middle class could lead the people against oppression and exploitation was shattered. The Orléanist regime, also sometimes called the July monarchy, was not much less restrictive than the Restoration one, with the new electorate extended to just 2.8% of the male population.²² One of its leaders, Jacques Laffitte, even declared at the outset that ‘from now on the bankers will rule’.²³

It was not simply plain sailing for the new regime to start with, however, as working-class unrest broke out over and again in the early years. There were several episodes of rioting and demonstrations by republicans and workers in Paris and elsewhere in 1831, including a first uprising by silk workers in Lyons. Then again in 1834, the silk workers in Lyon staged mass demonstrations for return to a minimum wage, which had been agreed then rescinded by the silk merchants. A confrontation with troops during the strike which followed led to several weavers being shot dead, and Lyons erupted in barricades and insurrection. The National Guard joined the workers, and they briefly took over the city. Royal troops retook the city with considerable bloodshed. News of the revolt in Lyons led to disturbances in various other cities, but only in Paris was there a republican attempt at insurrection. This was suppressed, accompanied with a massacre of working-class residents of a building on the rue Transnonain. The artist Honoré Daumier’s image of this atrocity, printed in newspapers, was the occasion for the Orléanist government to institute new censorship laws in 1835.

¹ David Blackbourne, The Fontana History of Germany 1780-1918 (London: Fontana Press 1997), pp.50-2

² ibid. p.54

³ ibid. p.71

⁴ ibid. p.86

⁵ See https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-dreadful-history-and-judgement-of-god-on-thomas-muntzer-the-life-and-times-of-an-early-german-revolutionary-book-review/

⁶ See Ian Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf, second edition (Chicago: Haymarket Books 2016)

⁷ ibid. p.xiii

⁸ ibid. pp.67-9

⁹ ibid. p.46

¹⁰ Doug Enaa Greene, Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books 2017), p.44

¹¹ G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, The Common People 1746-1946 (London: Methuen 1938), p.184

¹² See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin 1963/1968), pp.597-659

¹³ ibid. p.617

¹⁴ Martin Empson, ‘Kill all the Gentlemen’: Class Struggle and change in the English Countryside (London: Bookmarks, 2018), p.224

¹⁵ Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p.178

¹⁶ ibid. p.672

¹⁷ ibid. p.884

¹⁸ ibid. p.868

¹⁹ Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, volume 2: 1799-1871 (London: Penguin 1961), p.80

²⁰ Greene, Communist Insurgent, pp.14-15

²¹ ibid. p.23

²² Cobban, History of Modern France, p.98

²³ Greene, Communist Insurgent, p.25