From the French Revolution to Revolutions ^*

Introduction

Revolutions matter! The institutional character of the French state that existed in 1814, after a quarter century of war and revolution, differed in basic ways from that of l788. Tocqueville Was right to portray the revolution as continuing the centralizing tendencies of the Ancien Régime but he underestimated the radical discontinuities entailed by the formation of a new type of state organization, by the development of citizenship, and by the creation of nationhood. The French revolution not only accelerated the p ace of state consolidation, but it furnished an essentially new state structure in which local officials acting in the name of the central state intervened in the daily life of ordinary men and women to enforce decisions made in the capital. At the same tirne1 this powerful new state acknowledged that many of its subjects, DOW called "citizens", possessed a common denominator of legal rights, regulated by published laws, and enforced by state officials. Finally, the legitimacy of states was based on the rights of citizenship and on the conception of a shared nationality expressing a common political identity. The state created by the French Revolution with its awesome new power, its fundamental rights, and popular membership is the proper beginning for a study of revolution in :the two centuries between 1789 and 1989. In large part, European revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be seen as a response to the type of state forged between 1789-1814 in France. Whether revolutionaries sought to emulate the state created by the revolution, to modify it, or to abolish it, the consolidated state, created by the French Revolution, is crucial to understanding revolutionary change in Europe.

Let us begin by looking more closely at these three' characteristic features of what has been called the "new regime" in France: centralization, citizenship, and nationalism. ¹ First, centralization. During the French Ancien Régime, centralization had been superimposed upon existing structures of estates, independent municipal councils, ecclesiastical prerogatives, and noble exemptions; everywhere, independent and autonomous organizations buffered and insulated the central government from the local community and the individual. Revolutionaries abolished the intermediary institutions of the old order, the parliaments, tax farmers, semi-independent charitable establishments, and provincial estates; France was departmentalized, districted and communalized. Initially, while the revolutionaries increased the size and scope of the government bureaucracy, they also provided for locally and regionally-elected officials to oversee their work. But, in 1793, local oversight was abandoned when municipalities revolted against the government's favoritism to its local supporters. Under both the Terror and Napoleon, even when elected bodies remained at the departmental and arrondissement level, the real power was usurped by salaried, full-time officials; the prefect and his appointees or specially commissioned elected deputies such as the représentants en mission were solely responsible to the central government. At the most local level, the central government imposed more and more obligations on the mayor. This new administrative structure extended the direct power of the central state into hitherto inaccessible village communes. Decisions about the administration of communal land, responsibility for local roads, and the supervision of rural policing became matters of central government policy.

The powerful new government asserted claims on the civilian population that went far beyond those of the most thoroughgoing European absolutisms. Just as the metric system replaced a melange of regional measures so the revolutionary calendar supplanted the Gregorian calendar. Determined secularists though they were, revolutionary legislators found it difficult to disentangle the many ties that bound church and state together in France. Instead of separating church and state, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 was designed to harness the church to the same centralized direction as other public institutions in French society. In 1798, the Jourdan-Deibrel law decreed universal military conscription for males.

The extensive new powers were justified politically by the state's assumption of vast new obligations to citizens and a massive extension of the domain of rights. At no time during the years between 1789 and 1814 was there a single category of citizenship to which everyone belonged. The constitution of 1791 introduced the categories of "active" and "passive" citizenship and, though their contents expanded or contracted from one constitution to another, this basic distinction endured throughout the whole period. At its most constrictive, active citizenship, which gave its possessor the right to vote, belonged to most male taxpayers. At its widest, in the constitution of 1793, active citizenship belonged to most adult males. Women were considered by their very nature as incapable of citizenship, and they were put in the same category as children and the legally insane. Women's membership in the polity was mediated by their relationship to men.

Nonetheless, even non-citizens were accorded some basic rights, and the revolution's conception of basic right grew as it radicalized and relied more heavily on popular support. In 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man recognized the rights to a fair trial, religious toleration, and freedom of the press. Seigniorial obligations with their connotation of personal dependence were converted into allodial freeholding. Many legally-privileged social statuses disappeared entirely. In 1790, titles of nobility were abolished and, in 1791, the corporations. A law of June 1793 pledged pensions to aged and sick indigents and to impoverished families and widows. And a law of November 1794 required the establishment of a primary school and the presence of a teacher in every commune of one thousand or more. As the republic mobilized all its resources for war, however, the promises of government social provision for the needy and popular schooling were deferred and eventually revoked. Nonetheless, the designation of schooling and social welfare as fundamental human rights constituted an institutional agenda to be pursued at a later date by citizens. Between 1804 and 1811, a standardized legal system, tailored to the needs of a market society, was imposed on the entire country. While the Napoleonic Code ratified revolutionary legislation against entails and primogeniture, it reversed most of the gains for women made during the revolution and restored, indeed strengthened, the legal principle of male superiority.

The state that issued from the revolution claimed to be based on the popular will of the citizens who collectively formed the nation. The importance of popular identification with a shared body of law and a common legislature, a political project that was not linguistic, racial, or cultural, was an enduring message in the many public ceremonies that revolutionary propagandists used to educate the people. ² Typically, major festivals employed representations from a variety of French cultural groups, from Alsatians, Basques, Bretons, and Normans, to emphasize their common participation in the nation. In the eyes of such patriots as Barere and the Abbé Grégoire, establishing the popular will required the teaching of French to the six million French people who, they estimated, did not speak any French at all. But revolutionary assemblies avoided this issue and refused to compel instruction in French. The extent of the Convention's efforts was to ensure that French-language instruction was available in areas where "foreign languages" were spoken and the designation of French as "the language of liberty." At the local level, however, revolutionaries were genei41y busy getting proclamations and laws translated into local tongues so that they could reach the mass of people rather than launching a counter-productive declaration of war on non-French speakers. ³ Male military participation was one of the important aspects of this new nationalism, and a mainstay of its gendered concept of citizenship. Participation in the military was considered partly as a tribute paid by localities to the government but also as an expression of membership in the polity. In 1791, repudiating the monarchy's reliance on mercenaries, the Constituent Assembly forbade foreigners to enlist in the French army and prohibited the entry of bodies of foreign soldiers into France without legislative consent.

As we have seen, the revolution was far more than a change in language or rhetoric; it meant dramatic change in the life and entitlements of every inhabitant of the French state. Given the importance of the French Revolution and the others that we will examine, it is worthwhile looking carefully at how revolutions begin, how they proceed, and how they are embodied in institutions. In order to look at the impact of revolution in Europe over a long period of time, three periods of revolutionary outbreak are identified, periods when waves of revolution swept large areas of Europe. The French Revolution of 1789-1794 begins the modern era of revolutionary transformations and, in some important respects, the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848-1851, and 1917-1920 can be seen as continuing or responding to the French revolutionary tradition. Examining the climate and context in which these revolutions occurred, in each period, one or two of these revolutions will be explored in more detail than the rest in order to pinpoint key changes and continuities in the character of revolutions. Our analysis will show how warmaking and economic change fashioned a political culture based on state centralization, citizenship, and nationhood and how the interplay of the component elements of this culture affected the nature of revolution. With broad strokes, our comparison will sketch out how the problems posed by the revolution of 1789 played out over two centuries and discuss the relevance of the French Revolution for modern Europe.

The French Revolution

Let us begin by looking at the origins of the French Revolution. The special significance of this revolution stems from France's dual role in the European dominion. As the perennial candidate for premier military power on the continent, it was deeply involved in costly land-based military struggles in which ever-growing professional armies equipped with the latest artillery were involved in increasingly destructive warfare. But France also faced the Atlantic and was a foremost commercial power with a flourishing international trade. Its readily taxable foreign trade was invaluable to the financially-strapped monarchy, but it also involved the country in the enormous expense of maintaining a powerful navy and in military adventures as far away as Louisbourg and Québec City in North America and Madras and Pondicherry in India.

After a century of warfare on land and sea in which France had failed either to dominate Europe or to rival England outside Europe, its commercial and agricultural elites were increasingly unwilling to support far-flung military escapades. Efforts to increase taxes intensified debates between the monarch and elites and shaped a new political language. For example, in their desperate money-raising efforts, French monarchs sold royal offices including tax exemptions, noble status, and hereditary succession. The sale of office brought money in the short run and disaster in the long run. Hard-pressed by foreign armies and international crises, monarchs sooner or later had to go where the wealth was and, despite explicit past pledges, they demanded compensation for renewing, confirming, and continuing officeholders in the positions they regarded as their private property. To justify the repudiation of past commitments, monarchs portrayed kingship as representing the common good opposed to privileged particularistic corporate interests. To defend their privileges, officeholders argued that the nation had an existence separate from the king and conferred upon its members inviolable rights. Thus, conflicts between absolutist monarchs and privileged groups fashioned a political language that centered on the common good and on the possession of basic rights within a nation. ⁴

In the late eighteenth century, increased litigiousness brought both elites and peasants into courts where they learned a language that translated specific grievances into general and public disputations over rights. Juristic language looms large in the cahier de dole´ances, the lists of grievances compiled by local assemblies and submitted to the Estates General. It was not accidental that the champion of agrarian communism, Gracchus Babeuf, was trained in feudal law.

With nobles, financiers and the king stalemated over the levying of taxes the king resolved to solve this impasse by calling an Estates General, a drastic measure since no Estates General had been called since 1614. The debate over the selection of these delegates and the grievances discussed in local assemblies throughout France exerted a powerful politicizing effect, as well as the furious controversies over the method of election. But it is in July 1789 with the meeting of a refractory Estates General and the decision of elements of the Estates General to proclaim themselves a National Assembly that a true revolutionary situation emerged. The best known episode of these events was the "Tennis Court Oath" of June 20, 1789, when deputies of the Third Estate, who found their assigned meeting hall closed and surrounded by troops, withdrew to a nearby tennis court and vowed not to disband until a new constitutional order had been established. In July, the deputies' resistance developed into a full-scale revolutionary situation when the National Assembly's action was backed by uprisings in Paris and the provinces. These revolts established armed national guards units while most elements of the regular army remained, for the time, either obedient to the king or too divided to take any action. And in late July and early August, the character of the revolution was profoundly shaped by the peasant revolt that followed the urban uprisings. In order to avoid playing a role in suppressing the revolt and alienating potential rural allies, the National Assembly legislated a series of agrarian reforms that won peasant support, while leaving the precise terms of the rural settlement to a later period.

Worth stressing is the crucial difference between the revolt of the deputies who took the Tennis Court Oath and the uprising of peasants, known as the "Great Fear". Between February and April of 1789, throughout the whole of France, thousands of assemblies discussed popular grievances and elected delegates who would in turn meet to elect deputies to the Estates General. Most French peasants knew that crucial questions concerning agriculture and taxes might very well be decided at Versailles. But the peasant effort to influence these proceedings followed a traditional pattern of local rural protests, coordinated only informally, with attacks on nobles and the burning of land records. In context, peasant rebellions had great impact, but the more significant challenge to the monarch was made by deputies who proclaimed that the National Assembly had the authority not only to demand the recognition of traditional rights or laws, but the power to issue new and authoritative decrees. What was so crucial about the Assembly's actions, and a distinctive aspect of the revolution's political culture, was its simultaneous recognition of the legitimacy of centralized state power, conceived of as the "nation", and its determination to render national power accountable to citizens (and subordinate to basic rights).

The character of this revolutionary situation bears careful examination. Following Charles Tilly, a "revolutionary situation ... entails multiple sovereignty: two or more blocs make effective, incompatible claims to control the state or to be the state". ⁵ In July of 1789, the absolutist claims of Louis XVI supported by the regular army can clearly be counterpoised to the claims of the self-proclaimed National Assembly and the support it won from the National Guard and mutinous royal troops. Yet the issue of incompatibility must be seen in both short term and long term perspectives. In the short term, the question of dual power was clearly posed for the unfortunate de Launey, governor of the Bastille, appointed by the king, who was ordered to surrender by the Paris electors. This conflict was resolved by the siege of the Bastille, its negotiated surrender, and the murder of de launey by the crowd. Yet, over the long term, the fall of the Bastille did not resolve the dual power situation posed by the existence of the king's power, side by side, with that of the National Assembly.

No ceremonies of heartfelt reconciliation between king and people, such as the skillfully staged and enormously successful Festival of Federation of 1790, could bring to a close the power struggle opened in 1789 until the issue of fundamental sovereignty had been resolved by the ending of conflicting claims and the dissolution of one of the armed camps. In January of 1790 Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne began his almanac with the declaration that "the revolution is ended." His mistake is understandable. The great revolutions of our time characteristically comprise a series of "revolutionary situations," one following the others within a matter of months, separated by periods of calm and the apparent return to normalcy. The duration of revolutionary processes is strongly influenced by the damage inflicted on the state administration, particularly on the army, and by the presence of organized groups, independent of state power, able to take advantage of administrative weakness.

Among the important factors in the disintegration of state power in France was concerted opposition from organized political associations, the most powerful of which was the Jacobin society. Founded in Paris in November 1789, the Jacobins became the center of a national political organization; by 1791 it had approximately one thousand affiliates throughout France. The rapid spread of Jacobin clubs was based on its incorporation of previously existing, middle-class social solidarities; those of national organizations, such as freemasonry, Mesmerist societies and charitable organizations, and of local organizations, such as reading salons and literary societies. Drawing on revolutionary newspapers and pamphlets and responding to the events of the day, the Jacobin society played a leading role in forging conceptions of right and political obligation into a distinctive political culture. Their Parisian leaders provided political leadership during many of the most important revolutionary crises.

Meanwhile state power crumbled. The persistence of the two power centers in France, the king and the majority of the elected assembly, exerting power in opposite directions but generally seeking to avoid an open clash, sustained the dynamics of a revolutionary process that had great impact on the institutional legacy of the revolution. It resulted in a succession of armed confrontations that widened the gap between king and elected assembly. Increasingly, the revolutionaries commanded a military force of militia and national guards. As the king's independent power declined, factions in the assemblies sought to use the king for their own purposes but never succeeded in winning his full confidence. The factions backing the king in turn were opposed by others, led by the Jacobins, who turned to the Parisian small masters and artisans, the "sans-culottes," for support.

The depth of the revolutionary crisis, as the opponents of compromise came to rely ever more strongly on the sans-culottes, produced some of the most important institutional outcomes of the entire revolution. The abolition of feudalism without compensation came during the period of greatest revolutionary turmoil, the years between 1793-1794, as did the defeat of federalism, a key date in the triumph of the centralized hierarchical state. The basic legislation that provided for primary education and national social welfare also occurred during this period. The decades of international war that began in 1792 brought a series of French victories and, because of its military triumphs, many Europeans came to recognize to respond to the French challenge.

Towards 1848

Considered in international perspective, the French Revolution really ended in 1814, when Napoleon's rule came crashing down, and French troops packed up and retreated from one corner and another of his once extensive empire. Rapacious, venal, intolerant, brutal were the kindest of the descriptive adjectives applied to the evacuating troops, and all Europe heaved a collective sigh of relief at their departure. Yet, the revolutionary spirit revived within a decade. The persistence and extension of state centralization and the expansion of market society and the beginnings of industrialization made it impossible to return to the old ways. Within individual countries and regions of Western and Europe, the networks of middle-class patriots, formed during the years of the Republic and the Empire, served as the leaven for the development of new national political cultures and political revolt. Together, regional opposition to centralization, middle-class hostility to absolutism, military discontent, and artisanal and peasant economic grievances provided the initiative that brought down governments between 1815 and 1848.

Purged of many of its republican and imperial administrators, the state structure introduced by the French remained intact even as their armies withdrew, and so did many elements of their legal code and the social reforms that they introduced. Restored governments in Bavaria, Naples, Savoy, Tuscany, the Joint Kingdom of the Netherlands, and Wurttemberg kept most of the administrative apparatus left them by the French, while the Napoleonic Civil Code remained in force in most of the Prussian Rhine province. ⁶ Of major European countries, only the Spanish monarchy restored the administrative status quo ante. Upon retaking the throne, Ferdinand VII yielded to regional elites, dismissed the blend of administrative centralization and limited citizenship contained in the Constitution of 1812, written by liberal supporters of the monarchy, and reintroduced the traditional municipal privileges and tax exemptions.

The Napoleonic threat also accelerated existing trends towards centralization in nations that were never fully subjected to French rule. Before 1789, great strides towards central administration had been made already by Frederick II in Prussia and by Marie-Theresa and Joseph II in the Austrian lands. While they built on past precedents, the restructuring of Prussia between 1807 and 1815 was stimulated by French successes and influenced by French examples, as was the Austrian General Civil Code of 1811 and the administrative system installed in Lombardy and Venetia in 1815. Although both Prussian and Austrian reformers were less thoroughgoing centralizers than in the states long ruled by France, these were still serious efforts at incorporating the administrative lesson of the French Revolution. Starting from the top, Prussia imitated French centralized administration until it reached the county level in eastern rural regions and local administration abandoned to the Junker rural elites. The Prussians also incorporated military conscription into their reforms. The difference between France and Prussia in this regard is telling. In rural Prussia, military leadership of the conscripts remained in the hands of the local nobility, and conscription only increased their local power. In the Austrian hereditary lands, centralization penetrated already down to and including the county level, but some of the most important elements of the Empire, such as the entire Hungarian kingdom, remained outside the system.

The military and political strength of the French state, revealed so clearly to European rulers in the preceding fifteen years, its ability to raise money, to conscript soldiers who fought valiantly, and to carry out financial and agrarian reforms forced European monarchs to emulate their enemy, and French occupation or the demands of war had already carried them far along the path during the Napoleonic period. But while they adopted or extended state centralization wholesale, monarchical rulers refused to voluntarily diminish their power by extending citizenship rights or recognizing the bonds of nationality.

Because government centralization imposed a grid of uniformity on an extremely diverse and complex European society, state-centralizing monarchs made enemies in high places as well as low. Conflicts between centralizing monarchs and religious groups trying to maintain their independence from state control sometimes turned religious leaders into revolutionaries or at least into neutral bystanders to revolutionary events. Tensions between church and state were exacerbated by the territorial redistribution along France's eastern borders, designed to strengthen the region against French aggression. In these areas, populations subject to French rule for fifteen or twenty years were given to kings lacking traditional legitimacy. These problems were deepened when the religion of these centralizing monarchs was different from that of their subjects. Such was the case in the Rhineland, where the very Protestant Prussian monarch ruled over territory that was mainly inhabited by devout Catholics, while the relatively liberal Protestants of the Rhenish Pal atinate were governed by fervently Catholic Bavaria. The revolution of 1848 in the Rhineland would reveal the close entanglement of political opposition and confessional difference

Everywhere it was elites, mainly, but not exclusively middle-class elites, resenting unchecked centralized power. who opened the way for the great wave of revolutions cresting in l848 - 185l. In France, those business and professional men and administrators who had rallied to Napoleon after his return from Elba had little choice but to oppose the restoration. Authorities were particularly unforgiving towards those "fédérés" who, with Bonapartist encouragement, had banded together and sworn to preserve the country while Napoleon fought foreign enemies. Throughout Europe, the men who had staffed the French bureaucracy, scorned as Napoleon's tail," found themselves proscribed and subject to retaliation and so, voluntarily or involuntarily, thrown into the opposition.

Opposition was further stoked when principalities that had flourished under French rule were merged with authoritarian predominantly-agricultural states. A well-known story concerns the Cologne businessman who, learning that his city had been given to Prussia by the Treaty of Vienna, remarked: "We have married into a poor family." Such marriages, in which rich small states were joined to larger militarized monarchies which they were expected to financially support, were not uncommon. In Lombardy and Venetia, merchants complained about the prohibitive tariffs that cut their commercial links with France and tied them to stagnant Austrian markets and about the staggering debt accumulated fighting Napoleon and leading the European counter-revolution.

Due to French reforms, middle-class professionals, businessmen, and manufacturers were taxed with new efficiency But, adding insult to injury, their tax increases went for policies determined arbitrarily by kings and court camarillas who spied on them and censored their reading. Many of these men found themselves under attack from a embittered clergy that would not forgive their possession of church lands, purchased during the revolution and Napoleon. while these middle elites were divided on many issues and few were large-scale industrialists, still. they constituted a dangerous opposition, precisely because of their affluence. These men participated in the reading Societies, the religious reform societies and the chambers of commerce that served as covert forums for the dissemination of the political culture of citizenship; their sons joined the many secret organizations, Carbonari, Italia giovani, Societe des Amis de la Verite, that constituted an invisible opposition to established governments.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, professional soldiers were another source of opposition in the first half of the nineteenth century. Military men, often of humble origin in France and Spain, were appalled to see armies given over' to incompetent aristocrats. In 1820 in Spain, military men, encouraged by local Masons, frustrated by military defeat in South America and discontented by the inability of the Spanish crown to raise money for their pay, initiated a revolution to implement the Constitution of 1812.

The impact of industrial revolution and the implementation of French legislation in the economic arena, combined with unfavorable conditions in agriculture, provided further fuel for a revolutionary conflagration. The growing impact of market forces, particularly among the politically volatile urban skilled workers, and they produced a new self-confidence and demand for recognition on the part of businessmen and financiers. To be sure, industrialization only directly affected the continent after 1815, and the growth of an industrial proletariat played a relatively minor role. Up to 1848, only Belgium, parts of France, a few areas in Germany, and a portion of Bohemia had really begun to adopt the new English industrial technologies. Large-scale coal production was confined to the Liege basin in Belgium and the Stephanois basin in France. The Upper Silesian coalfields were in production in both Prussia and Bohemia, but transportation costs limited production to local purposes. Of all the technologies of the Industrial Revolution, before 1848, only textiles had spread across the European continent from Barcelona to Lodz. As in Lancashire, cotton textiles gathered a workforce of mainly unskilled workers, largely women and children, into cities that lacked all social and health amenities. Cotton textile towns like Barmen, Elberfeld, Elbeuf, Ghent, Mulhouse, and Verviers more or less recapitulated the miserable living conditions of their English urban contemporaries, and wool spinning towns such as Aachen, Liberic, and Tourcoing were just as bad or worse.

In contributing to social revolution, however, the true impact of industrialization was indirect. It had its most dramatic effect in those areas where the legal code of the French Revolution struck down guilds, privileged monopolies, and corporations and where it abolished the legal jurisdiction of towns over their surrounding countryside. In Berlin, Düsseldorf, Paris, and Turin, subcontracting and domestic work increasingly menaced the livelihood of tailors, shoemakers, and cabinetmakers. In Cologne, read-to-wear clothing threatened masters more than machinery. Masters complained that journeymen and apprentices had become insubordinate and more inclined to set up their own shops before completing their training. By 1848, capital cities were tinderboxes, filled with skilled workers who possessed strong traditions of solidarity and organization and a growing sense of frustration and rage. The expansion of an immiserated domestic workforce in the countryside also contributed to rural unrest. In Solingen, low-paid domestic metal workers replaced urban craft workers in the less skilled metal trades, but the living standards of domestic workers steadily declined as their charcoal-fired steel products were exposed to competition from English blast-furnaces.

The abolition of communal control or of customary rights over forest land, another result of French legislation, was an additional source of rural discontent in those heavily regions in the southeast of France, northern Italy and portions of the Rhineland. Rights over woodland loomed large as the price of wood soared, due to the expansion of charcoal based ironmaking and shipbuilding, and many villagers found it costly to purchase wood products that had formerly been theirs for the taking.

Economic crises in the 1829 and in 1846-46 also increased the pressure on the working classes. The wet, cool 1840s promoted the spread of potato blight and devastated the rye crops. In areas such as western and southern Ireland where administrative penetration of the country was minimal and government in the hands of landlords, mass starvation resulted---but starving peasants are not the stuff of revolution. Politically more serious were the effects of potato blight in the whole of northern Europe, where peasants had been shifting from grain to potatoes. In northern France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland, administrations prevented mass starvation by purchasing and distributing wheat, but many newly-impoverished peasants were still looking for a means to reestablish their position on the land when good times returned in 1848. Further, the mass purchases of wheat increased the price of bread and put further pressure on the already precarious living standards of artisans and rural outworkers.

Revolutions: 1848-1851

The revolutions sweeping continental Europe between 1848 and 1851 revealed or at least compelled recognition of three new aspects of the political response to the French Revolution; a new type of "modular" protest, an original political culture, and the emergence of fresh protest groups in the course of the developing revolutionary process. Following Sidney Tarrow, this new "modular" repertoire of protest was built around a few key routines of protest and capable of wide diffusion. ⁷

Imagine this scene. A serious political crisis occurs that brings people into the street of the capital city. The army is called out. Noisy crowds taunt uneasy and frightened troops. Suddenly, from nowhere, a shot rings out! Panicked, the soldiers fire on the crowd. Barricades arise, manned largely by skilled artisans. Columns of troops sent into the narrow streets of the pre-industrial city find themselves surrounded and subjected to murderous crossfire and sniper bullets. often the middle-class national guard or militia refuses to reinforce the regular troops who then are pulled out of the city. Alternatively, a demand is put forward for the formation of a national guard or civil militia and the hastily established group demands social reforms. In any case, leading oppositional politicians, with no connection to the insurrection in the streets, bring a series of demands to the ruler or his representative. Among other things, the demands are for a new constitution and, under pressure from the crowd, these politicians influence the selection of a temporary government that will rule until elections are carried out for a representative body that will write a new constitution. with minor modifications, the setting could be Brussels and Paris in 1830 or Berlin, Budapest, Milan, Munich, Palermo, Paris, Venice, and Vienna in 1848. Together, barricades, armed confrontation between militiamen and regular troops, and constitution making constituted the modular repertoire of protest in 1848.

But the modularity of these forms of protest was inscribed within specific national political cultures that shaped the content of claims. Confronted with the barricades of February 1848, Tocqueville instantly recognized: "...and here is the French Revolution beginning over again, for it is still the same one." Opposition to absolutist rule was particularly explosive where groups had mastered the language of citizenship and nationhood and familiarized themselves with the tools for mobilizing masses on these bases. In this area too, the French Revolutionary influence had been momentous. Between 1793 and 1799 in Belgium, Holland, Italy, and the Rhineland, the same revolutionary armies that had brought state centralization had also created political institutions that inspired the inhabitants with ideals of citizenship and participation. In clubs, in which large numbers of French soldiers participated, and in newspapers, local patriots familiarized themselves with the new political culture. In the years up to 1848, such areas had been the heartland of opposition to absolutism.

The spread of both the political cultures of citizenship and nationhood and the new modular forms of protest beyond the old revolutionary strongholds and their application to absolutist regimes in other contexts was one of the distinctive aspects of 1848. Initially, after 1815, the hotbeds of revolution were in France and Spain and in the commercialized, small states along France's eastern and southern boarders, states that the peace settlement had subjected to socially-backward, politically-authoritarian monarchies. But in the culminating year of 1848, revolution spread to commercialized areas of militarized monarchies that had never seen French rule; from Paris and Milan, the barricade form of protest and citizenship demands passed to Berlin and Vienna. Surely the path of revolution had been marked out by the avalanche of forbidden books and by newspaper reports of events in France and Italy. But the political background to revolt as well as its first, quickly-surpassed spokesmen, came from the liberal debating clubs and newspaper staffs which related political ideologies to actually existing political milieus.

A final point that needs making is that at the climax of the cycle of revolutionary protest, between 1848 and 1851, a variety of organized social movements used both revolutionary forms of protest and the political culture based on citizenship, rights and nationalism to advance into the public arenas with new claims. As governments crumbled and protest mounted, relatively marginal groups emerged whose demands represented an extension of the new political culture and who were able to employ the new types of claim making. In order to understand how these new groups burst forth in revolutionary situations and evolved new claims, we must examine the revolutionary process.

If there was a great similarity to the opening of revolutionary situations in key capital cities in February and March of 1848, divergences quickly appeared on account of the varying character of newly-emerging protest groups. For example, in Paris, an organized labor movement put forward explicitly class demands, while national minorities began to raise demands alongside those of workers and peasants within the German Confederation. To get a sense of these differences, it is helpful to examine the revolutionary process in two different arenas, in the streets of Paris and in the corridors of the Frankfurt Assembly. Paris reveals the political culture and insurrectionary action in the capital of a highly-centralized state in which social movements fought to expand citizenship and basic rights. The Frankfurt Assembly gives us the perspectives of German reformers who tried to wield disparate principalities into a centralized state; while citizenship was certainly the order of the day, it increasingly had to share the political terrain with a new brand of nationalism.

Between 1815 and 1848 Paris was in the political vanguard of revolutionary Europe; the middle classes and artisans had accumulated considerable revolutionary experience and were profound discontented with a monarchy imposed by conquering foreign powers. In France, alone, a significant section of politically-active, middle-class liberals, a minority certainly, was committed to democratic republicanism-to a government without a king and to something approaching universal manhood suffrage.

Also in France, an artisanal working class, thrown into contact with these democratic republicans, combined republican political ideals and their own work-based feelings of solidarity to produce a new sense of class consciousness. These workers developed the core concepts of central state intervention, citizenship and nationality to put forward their own political demands. Throughout the nineteenth century, as Michelle Perrot has noted, one of the classic rhetorical exercises of the French working class was to replay the French Revolution in song and story so that the workers won. ⁸ From the 1830s onward, French artisans frequently portrayed the revolution as a necessary but incomplete economic and political transformation. In contrast with those middle-class liberals or radicals who sought to go back to Mirabeau, Danton or even Robe spierre, French workers sought to go beyond them.

In the 1840s, the growth of trade unionism among highly-skilled workers also threw workers into conflict with the state; trade unions were illegal and shared the shadows with secret political societies. Important in the politicization of the labor movement was the Société des saisons, founded by that arch-conspirator, Auguste Blanqul. While the society was predominantly middle class, it succeeded in recruiting workers and even attempted to sow its insurrectionary republicanism among foreign workers resident in France. In 1847, its foreign-worker affiliate, the League of Just, changed its name to the Communist League and commissioned Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to write its manifesto. The League's evolution was not fortuitous. In the 1840s, republican workers paying attention to socialist reformers such as Louis Blanc who championed the "right to work" as a new right of citizenship. On the edges of the republican labor movement, drawing on Blanc, Buchez, and Cabet, a new reform-oriented socialist movement arose.

New rights, only barely envisaged in 1793-96, were the focus of political struggles in Paris in the months after February 1848. Organized workers presented their demands to the hastily -established Provisional Government of mostly middle-class political leaders. Workers possessed leverage because many had joined the national guard and acquired arms. At the same time, the army was demoralized, its embittered generals reticent to involve themselves in politics. The neutrality of the army and the deep divisions within the national guard, split between workers and the lower middle classes, constituted the enduring dual power situation that, finally, came to the surface in June 1848. The demands of French workers for a "right to work," their organized presence in the streets, and their determination to pressure the Provisional Government to recognize their demands produced glaring divisions within the republican camp. At the same time, the speed with which national elections were called gave very limited opportunity for educative political discussion; outside the urban political debate, peasants cast their ballots for familiar names which usually meant members of the landed elite. As a result the new Constituent Assembly that met in early May, 1848, had a monarchical majority. A restoration was only prevented by internal divisions among the monarchists: some were supporters of the Bourbon family (overthrown in July 1830s), others of the Orleans family (overthrown in February 1848) and a few of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew). The political environment made it increasingly unlikely that middle-class republicans would continue to yield to working-class pressures, while a trade depression, prolonged by the revolutionary turmoil, made workers all the more desperate for state employment

While consolidating its political hold, the government temporized. It attempted to coopt workers by enrolling them in "national workshops" and in a citizens' militia, the Garde Mobile. The title, "national workshops" came from a celebrated pamphlet by the socialist, Louis Blanc. But instead of the state-funded, collectives of skilled workers envisaged by Blanc, the national workshops were turned into the traditional outdoor manual public workers programs, long used by French governments in times of high unemployment Workers felt betrayed but enrolled in the national workshops for lack of other recourse. In June of 1848, when the workshops in Paris were abolished by the reactionary legislature, they revolted and, with guns obtained in the National Guard, rebuilt their barricades Here, the dual power situation, existing since February, finally reached its climax in armed conflict; the revolutionary workers in the national workshops were subdued by the counter-revolutionary workers organized in the Garde Mobile. The repression of these workers opened the way for a general smashing of left-wing opposition and, in the end, the defeat of the workers removed a key prop supporting an already rickety republic.

While the main action in 1848 involved artisanal workers, middle-class male republicans and reactionary legislators, there were other social movements that began to develop in the public space opened up by the revolution. Already in 1791, although legally "non-citizens," some women had appropriated the term "citoyenne" and used it to appeal for equal rights. In 1848, as in 1791-93, womens rights activists used what space they found to argue that women should be admitted into full citizenship in the republic. Their demands attracted less attention than that of workers because they lacked the more powerful weapons possessed by male workers. Secret societies, national guards, trade unions, and most of the national workshops were strictly male preserves. Many of the political clubs that organized after February of 1848 did not admit female members. Some feminist scholars have suggested, plausibly, that the term "fraternity" in the revolutionary slogan did refer to "male solidarity," its literal meaning, and entailed the exclusion of females. Yet, women took advantage of the de facto freedom of assembly to organize their own clubs and used the language of universal right to appeal for admission into citizenship. The general suppression of opposition after the June days eliminated the organs of feminist claim making just as thoroughly as they eliminated that of organized workers.

After focusing on the Paris streets, a legislative assembly of the German states may seem a strange place to turn. The dilemmas of German statemaking, in which the multi-power situations obtaining in various capitals overlaid the issue of national unity, can best be viewed from the perspective of the German National Assembly in Frankfurt; political failure there was an important factor in sealing the fate of revolutionaries in Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna. While it met to write a national constitution, governments in Prussia and Vienna were also drawing up constitutions for territories within the jurisdiction of the Frankfurt Assembly and, more important, everyday administration and enforcement of the law remained in the hands of the traditional states.

Because pre-existing states kept their power during the constitutional debates, in those areas where no government penetrated directly, the agricultural elites who ran local government quickly recaptured the initiative after the first, startling shock of popular protest. There, it proved impossible to sustain popular participation in national politics. For example, in East Prussia, large landholders dominated agriculture as well as the local state government. Inexperienced in electoral politics and lacking contact with urban-based reformers, peasants and daylaborers turned to traditional types of protests when elections did not yield immediate results. In May 1848, the rural population went to the polls, amid a wave of tax protests and riots, and voted for radicals and urban dwelling liberals. Wanting organization and subject to pressure from revitalized landlord groups, the movement of peasants soon collapsed in riots and attacks on estates. By the end of 1848, most traces of radical sentiment had dissolved in a countryside which supplied crowds that attacked urban democrats. ⁹

By contrast, in the Prussian Rhine provinces, small-farming and commercialization dominated a countryside in close contact with towns and government administrators. There, political organization and state-centered protest were already familiar tools. ¹⁰ While the elections on May 1, 1848 to the Frankfurt National Assembly, brought a mixed delegation of religious figures and democrats, democratic sentiments gradually pervaded much of the countryside. By the time of the elections for the Prussian Assembly in January 1849, the Rhineland sent a large number of democratic deputies and, in May 1849, after the Prussian King refused the imperial crown offered by the Assembly, this area was swept by urban and rural revolts.

The problems that the Frankfurt Assembly faced were compounded by the profusion of states, the differences in their organization, and the variety of their linguistic and ethnic composition in Central Europe. German reformers had to create a new unified state as well as to revolutionize the existing ones. This further complication and the failure of the German revolution in 1848, have typically obscured many of the basic similarities between French and German revolutionaries. German democrats and liberals, particularly those who had consistently advocated the exclusion of the Hapsburg Germans from the new state, had developed a position broadly similar to that of the majority of the French Convention. In the early days at Frankfurt, they required only a sense of shared political destiny, attaching relatively little importance to ethnic culture or language. Thus, in the German Confederation, made up largely of the old non-national Holy Roman Empire, German democrats and liberals were prepared to include Czechs, Danes, Italians, and Poles, while formally guaranteeing them rights to their language and culture, just as the French had included Alsatians, Basques, and Bretons without requiring them to learn French. At least initially, most German revolutionaries were committed to the restoration of a Polish kingdom and recognized the freedom of Polish areas of Posen/Poznan to join a reconstituted Polish state. Certainly, among the German democrats there were such men as Wilhelm Jordan who wanted to expand German territory to include vast areas with no historical link to the German Confederation, but there were also such men in the French Revolution. Where Robespierre noted that "nobody loves armed missionaries", Lezare Camot wanted to annex the Rhineland to achieve France's "natural frontiers."

What was distinctive about the Frankfurt Assembly was the dramatic appearance of a new ethnic or cultural concept of nationalism which first came to widespread public attention in 1848. Just as workers in Paris took the framework of citizenship and rights and developed it in new directions, so German intellectuals and politicians, influenced by the writings of Fichte and Herder, expanded the French concept of nationalism to include ethnicity and culture. In some ways, the idea emerged almost inevitably in places such as Germany, Italy, or Poland where peoples with ancient traditions of historical unity and fairly similar languages found themselves partitioned across several states. Just as Mazzini in Italy, Count Deym in Germany and Mickiewicz in Poland believed that a popular identity based on language and culture gave heir nation a historic destiny to occupy a central position in Europe But the difficulties with this position became readily apparent in a German Confederation which included Czechs, Danes, Italians, Poles, and Slovaks.

The kind of politically-unified nation that most German democrats sought to construct on the French model would have been difficult to build in Central Europe under the most favorable conditions. The failure of the Frankfurt Assembly to propose a radical agrarian program, certainly made it impossible for the Assembly to win the loyalty of eastern peasants by creating a class of independent small landholders. But there were other equally fatal obstacles, Polish landowners exerted considerable influence in many areas of Posen and Silesia and, unlike Breton or Alsatian elites, they were committed to the restoration of an historically-defined kingdom that would include many ethnic groups in its borders. The presence of Prussian deputies at the Assembly who as administrators had carried out harsh Germanization policies against Poles certainly aroused Slavic suspicions. More prophetic, were developments in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia where lower middle-class scholars and teachers had formed a movement to defend the culture of the Slavic inhabitants. To the German's surprise and consternation, Czechs from Bohemia and Moravia refused to participate in the elections for the Frankfurt Assembly and convened a Slavic Congress at Prague. Nationalist movements, such as that of the Czechs, composed of priests, ministers, school teachers, local government officials, and shopkeepers who served as a nucleus for organizing those who shared a similar ethnic culture, first burst forth upon the public arena in 1848. ¹¹

In the end, the eruption of new movements within the revolutions of 1848-1851, of socialism in France and nationalism in the German Confederation and the Rapsburg Empire broke up the unity of the revolutionary camp, set classes and nationalities fighting against one another, and paved the way for the return of monarchical armies. Appalled by socialistic demands, middle-class deputies reconsidered republicanism; confronted with Polish and Czech cultural nationalism, many German democrats turned overt cultural nationalists. Divisions within the revolutionary camp gave the monarchs their opportunity, and they subdued the divided revolutionaries with armies that had remained loyal. In Prussia, the military were actually chomping at the bit to attack the revolutionaries. In the Austrian Empire, the multi-national army and its officer corps, by and large, held firm so long as they were not ordered to fire on members of their own nationality. Even before the introduction of the percussion caps, macadamized streets, and the long avenues of Napoleon III's Paris, armies of regular troops given enough time and disregarding the damage inflicted on the urban population were capable of defeating urban revolution.

The revolutions of 1848-1851 accomplished important changes, The organization of agriculture in eastern Europe was substantially transformed. In the Austrian Empire, the hated labor services of the peasants were abolished and, in Prussia, an ungenerous land redemption program abolished the remnants of seigniorialism; in both countries, most peasants freed from feudal ties quickly became dependent on wage labor for landowners. In the political arena, constitutionalism progressed. In Prussia, a new constitution limiting arbitrary power but giving the monarch wide powers, remained in place--precariously; in the Austrian lands, the strongly centralist Stadion constitution of l849 was revoked in 1851 but its terms were included almost verbatim in the Constitution of 1867. Not all of this political change was direct. In Holland, the sight of revolutions all around him and street demonstrations, led the Dutch king to grant a constitution.

Other changes were more prophetic in that they provided the material for future struggles. In France and Germany, the revolutions put universal manhood suffrage on the political agenda. The coup d état of Louis Napoleon in France (December 2, 1851) and the subsequent referendum approving his usurpation of power also introduced new and ominous political methods into European politics. Even one of the saddest appendices to 1848 was portentous. This was the doomed insurrection that followed Louis Napoleon's coup. In the years between 1848 and 1851, in many regions, French peasants had begun to participate in politics, to organize themselves and to adopt the agrarian program of radical republicans. In 1851, bands of small-town republicans, composed of the middle classes and artisans of the small trading centers, and peasants all across southern and eastern France rose to defend the republic. But with urban protest crushed their rising was utterly hopeless. Nonetheless, the pattern of peasant radicalization established between 1848 and 1851 and revealed by the risings -- demarcated an area of rural support for left-wing causes that endured for the next century.

Nationalism and Socialism in a New Europe

In the immediate aftermath of 1848, to revolutionaries and reactionaries alike, it seemed that the revolution had been utterly defeated. "I see judgement, execution, death, but I can see neither resurrection nor mercy," wrote Alexander Herzen in 1849. Yet in many ways, the key feature of the period between 1851 and 1920 is how, in Friedrich Engels' words: "the gravediggers of the 1848 revolution became their executors." For the most part the revolutionary wave that crested in 1917-20, carried out the inheritance of 1848 in bringing to power the nationalists and socialist reformers who had come to the fore during the most militant days of the revolution. But why did the forces of citizenship and nationalism, so utterly defeated by 1851, become ascendant over the next sixty years? And why did the Russia revolution, the first of the great upheavals in 1917-20, take a different path than the other revolutions? Russian reformers failed to transform a multi-cultural, poorly-integrated empire with intense class conflicts into a modern state with citizenship rights and national identity. Instead, a new kind of revolution occurred.

In the years before 1914, social reformers and ethnic nationalists made headway in Western and Central Europe because powerful economic and political forces were working to promote state centralization and the extension of state power. These European nations relatively successfully subordinated the military to state power the ongoing threat of military coup d'etat was largely confined to the Spanish and Balkan peripheries. The increased presence of government in the daily lives of ordinary people entailed a growing popular sense of the state and, as a result, demands for participation in state policy. Where increased government intervention subordinated local languages, cultures and religions to those of groups that dominated the central government, and offered little compensation in terms of agrarian reform or bureaucratic job opportunities, demands for separatism and national independence gained support.

Just as the armies of the French Revolution and Napoleon had provoked state centralization so did the growing threat of international war in the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1815 and 1851, fear of revolution had led Russia to devote its great military power to maintaining the status quo on the continent. But regional uprisings supported by Western powers and further declines in Ottoman power pushed the Czars towards a more aggressive Balkan policy, resulting in Russian defeat in the Crimean War (1854-1856). The embittered, revengeful Russia that emerged from this war facilitated the breakup of a stagnant European diplomatic order; it opened the road for great power military rivalry and the whole series of wars and revolutions that brought the unification of Italy (1859-61, 1866-67, 1870) and Germany (1866, 1870). Along with the rise of major new European powers in Italy and Germany came military defeats, territorial loses, and political humiliations for Austria and France. Imperialism further sharpened competition among European nations. In the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), new non-European powers defeated established European states.

Far more than in the first half of the nineteenth century, the vast enhancement of state power in this period depended on industrial development and market expansion. Especially important was the advent of the "Second Industrial Revolution" and the significant shift in attitudes of many industrialists and agriculturalists towards world markets. After 1850, portions of the continent caught up and surpassed British industrial growth. New technologies opened up previously unusable coal and iron fields to steel making. In this period, the coal fields in the Nord and Pas-deCalais, the Ruhr, Upper Silesia and the Donets Basin came into their own as well as the ore fields of Lorraihe. Capital-intensive factory industries, employing semi-skilled adult male workers sprang up across the continent: machinemaking in Augsburg, Budapest, Chernnitz, Lie' ge, Mulhouse, and St. Petersburg/Petrograd: electrical engineering in Berlin: automobiles in Lyons, Stuttgart, Turin, and Vienna: and shipbuilding in Amsterdam, Danzig/Gdansk, Hamburg and Le Havre.

The industrialists of the second half of the nineteenth century were different from their predecessors. "Free trade "and "internationalism" were the British creed during its early nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, but continental industrialists of the Second Industrial Revolution did not convert. German iron and steelmakers, by 1890, the most efficient and cheapest producers in the world outside the US, supported protectionism. Steelmaking was so capital intensive that industrialists needed stable internal markets; vast investments had to be amortized over a long time, free of the vagaries of market fluctuation. Their home markets secured by tariffs and commercial agreements, German industrialists competed all the more effectively on international markets. Increased military spending that went to pay for monster siege guns, field artillery, machine guns and magazine rifles as well as steel fleets gave industrialists and militarists a common ground and further valorized home markets.

In the years before 1914, other important groups also turned towards protectionism. The reduced cost of ocean transportation and the invention of the refrigerator ship combined with the development of agriculture and cattle raising in the Americas and Australia threatened the existence of the great mass of peasant agriculturalists as well as Prussian Junkers, French notables, and Austrian and Hungarian magnates. Coalitions of agriculturalists and industrialists, called the "iron and rye" alliance in Germany, raised tariffs on agricultural and a wide-range of manufactured products in every major European country. Save one. The United Kingdom remained loyal to free trade. The banking interests of the City of London were decisive. The Bank of England was the foundation of the international gold standard, and sterling was the currency of international trade As a result, trading balances were settled through London, the center of a multilateral trading system that benefitted not only London, but the entire European commercial and industrial world.

Also outside the protectionist coalition were the working classes. The workers who would play the dominant role in the revolutions of 1917-1920 were different than those who manned the barricades of 1848. A new type of worker, the semiskilled industrial worker, a creature of the "Second Industrial Revolution", replaced the artisanal worker in labor militancy. Age, national origins, marital status and sex figured prominently in the new forms of industrial organization. Most employers gave the newly-created stable semiskilled jobs to adult males who had families; women's and single migrants' participation in industry was often limited to lower-paying less skilled jobs for which demand was more fluctuating. The adult, primarily male, workforce in the large factories differed from most previous groups of non- artisanal workers by having a distinctive professional identity. Trained on relatively specialized machines, semiskilled workers had less opportunity to move from place to place than older artisanal workers. These men, working in the same industry, year after year, identified themselves as metalworkers, coal miners, or chemical workers. The gendered character of much industrial work and an ethic of fraternalism promoted a spirit of solidarity that flourished in predominantly or exclusively male clubs, bars, and cafes.

By 1900 on the continent, skilled and semiskilled male workers seemed almost everywhere to be turning towards a socialism that repudiated the centralized state and embraced internationalism. Appearances were deceptive. Despite their membership in a workers' international, whose meetings were erratic and invariably quarrelsome, socialist militants were recruited from republican political milieus and retained a basic loyalty to the vision of a democratic nation. Assuming that industrial workers were destined to become the majority of the population in industrializing nations, socialist political leaders generally viewed internationalism as a distant goal; in the here and now, they recognized that politics was national and sought to democratize the existing state. Socialists played a key role in organizing cohesive national political parties with formal members, party discipline and democratic organization; in creating these national organizations, socialists also fashioned a new series of predominantly working-class social networks along national lines. Except in the empires of Austria-Hungary and Russia, whose multi-ethnic nature made questions of minority nationalism inescapable, socialists generally ignored the issue of the propriety of the national framework and focused on whether existing elites would permit socialists to assume power after they had triumphed at the polls.

Doubts about whether socialism could come to power peacefully, even in a constitutional democracy, divided socialists who excoriated existing states while respecting democratic ideals. In France, the Marxist Parti ouvrier expelled any of its locals that celebrated Bastille day, the birthday of the existing "bourgeois" state; yet, one of its leading spokesmen, Gabriel Deville, argued that all collectivist theory could be derived from Article 2 of "The Declaration of the Rights of Man." Within the labor movement, reformers and revolutionaries debated the nature of the state, but could not gainsay the basic fact that the centralized state was the only cadre in which social policy could be actually implemented. And, as World War I demonstrated, the international sentiments of the working classes was less determined than they appeared. Working-class internationalism was grounded in anti-militarism, but much of this was based on the use of troops to crush strikes, on hostility to expensive investments in military adventures, and on opposition to the sacrifices the conscription of young workers caused their families.

Actions in the trade union world prove as significant as debates in socialist congresses, for here evolved the distinctively new tactics of revolutionary protest; the foremost of these tactics was the general strike. In the years before 1917, strikes increased, concentrating in waves of intense strike activity. In France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, strike waves responded to political events. In the most far-reaching of the pre-1917 strikes, the Russian strikes of 1905, workers took advantage of military defeat to demand economic and political change. In France and Germany, socialist electoral progress prompted strikers to take advantage of favorable political circumstances to win economic benefits.

Growing worker electoral strength and strike militancy posed a challenge to state power and to industrialists' policies. More than any other group, workers paid for protectionism, and organized labor movements everywhere opposed it. Socialist anti-militarism worried patriots because the spectacular successes of Prussian armies impelled all important continental powers to imitate the Prussian system of conscription. Between 1870 and 1914, every major country in continental Europe shortened the time required for service in the regular army but lengthened the time spent in the reserves and extended military conscription to as many of its young men as the nation's economy would support. And socialist internationalism provided a controversial alternative to a costly arms race that profited militarists and industrialists. Between 1880 and 1914, one estimate finds that German arms expenditure quintupled, while British and Russian spending, tripled, and French almost doubled. While workers and peasants paid a disproportionate share of the military burden, they also provided the lower ranks of all these armies..

After 1851, as they imposed higher taxes and increased the burden of military conscription, states grudgingly and hesitatingly expanded citizenship and basic rights. In 1914, of the major powers, only male workers in Hungary and Italy and, despite electoral reform in 1905, in Russia had never voted in large numbers. In Austria males got the right to vote in 1907 but most ministries were non-parliamentary and ruled by decree. In the United Kingdom and in Germany most male workers could vote, although in Prussia, by far the largest component of the German Empire, a three-tiered class voting system meant that workers' votes counted for less than that of other social groups. Only the French possessed universal manhood suffrage.

In some countries, mostly those where workers actually voted before 1914, new basic rights were also extended to the industrial working classes. By that date, all the major European countries except Russia had compulsory accident insurance laws. Social insurance programs in Germany and the United Kingdom provided the broadest coverage and provided the widest range of benefits: Austria, France, and Italy followed behind: and Russia occupied the very rear. By 1914, every nation had, at least perfunctory, compulsory elementary school laws in place but implementation was another question. Although unschooled populations can sometimes read, literacy may serve as very rough measure of the outer limit of the effectiveness of schooling. By 1914, in France, Germany, and Great Britain, almost everyone under age sixty could read. In Austria, although the variation among regions was great, about 75% of the population was literate, in Italy, 60% and Russia, 40%.. While the transformation of social reforms into basic rights was rather limited in this period, still workers were beginning to encounter the state, not simply in the guise of disciplinarian, military recruiter and tax collector, but as doctor, teacher, insurance agent and health inspector.

The increased intimacy of the state's relation to its citizens made it necessary to define exactly who were citizens. The French example is illustrative. In the 188Os, a nationalist "no man's land" was discovered in the heart of Europe as hundreds of thousands of male workers moved routinely between France and its neighbors without being subject to conscription. In response, the law of 1889 for the first time defined unambiguously who was a French citizen and required that migrant workers possess identification.

As great power rivalries mounted, so political leaders solicited popular support and stoked the fires of national sentiment. Stilling their fears of putting guns in the hands of the people, conservatives praised the close contact between officers and soldiers in an army which inculcated obedience to constituted authority. According to Treitschke: "a really national army unites all the citizens of the country " ¹² School curricula fostered a spirit of national identification in the students, and centralized education emphasized the importance on teaching the same texts everywhere to promote a common culture. In France, children in Bayonne, Belfort, Nice, and Perpignan learned about our ancestors, the Gaul s." Except for Austria, public school instruction was everywhere in the national language; students in Quimper were punished for speaking Breton at recess as were students in Vilnius/Wilno for speaking Lithuanian or Polish. Wherever ethnic nationalism had stimulated subject minorities during 1848, efforts to impose a dominant language met with resistance. Where landlords spoke the dominant language and peasants did not, as in the Czech and Slovak lands and many regions of Hungary, class antagonisms were superimposed on linguistic differences.

World War and Revolution

A pattern is clearly discernable in the revolutionary wave that swept Europe in 1917-1920, a notably different one from that of 184849. The repertoire of protest in 1917-1920 can be sketched briefly. An illegal or semi-legal demonstration occurs which troops are called to suppress, but the troops fraternize with the demonstrators, set up councils, and formulate political demands. In the meantime, strike waves sweep the city and its surrounding hinterland. The strikes, in which metal workers play a leading role, are coordinated by factory committees or shop stewards who send delegates to city-level or regional councils. In time these councils too put forward political demands. Between 1917 and 1920, this basic scene occurred in hundreds of towns; in Berlin, Budapest, DUsseldorf, Munich, Moscow, Vienna and St. Petersburg. In capital cities, the formation of soldiers and workers councils led to the collapse of governments. Under the pressure of the federated councils, left-wing and liberal politicians established provisional governments, declared the republic, and set the process of constitution-making in motion. In Russia, and, temporarily, in a few other capitals, councils replaced the parliamentary regime and ruled in their stead. Let us looks at these revolutions, first, in St. Petersburg/Petrograd, then, in Berlin.

How to explain the different character of revolutions between 1848 and 1917? The war that broke out in 1914 certainly tested the strength of European's citizenship and national identity. Initially, national loyalty conquered. In August 1914, the only socialist votes against war appropriations were in Serbia by two Social Democrats and, in Russia, by fourteen Russian Social Democrats and eleven of Alexander Kerensky's Labor Party. In 1915, when Italy entered the war, its socialists opposed the war but vowed not to obstruct it. Workers' support turned out to be more critical than anyone had expected. With field armies stalled, immense quantities of munitions were needed in the new siege warfare: thus, the importance of workers in steelmaking, chemicals and machinemaking. To expedite production, warplanners deferred skilled and semiskilled industrial workers and made concessions to their angry demands. The fierce drive to produce led to the introduction of machines that threatened workers' skills; workers knew that wars end but technologies are only displaced by superior technologies. In response, workers often tried to keep control of the new technologies within the skill group. Women were often given jobs formerly performed by men, and organized workers feared that female labor would become permanent. Further, particularly in those countries affected by the Allied blockade, the cost of food accelerated after the "turnip winter" of 1916/17. Adding insult to injury, workers saw the vast profits made in the war effort.

As the war continued and the casualties mounted, the strain began to tell. No one was prepared for the enormous losses. Least prepared to incur such risks were those conscripts who lacked strong feelings of citizenship and nationality. And the cost of continuing the war effort was particularly intolerable in those countries where both soldiers and civilians could see that the war was being visibly lost or terribly mishandled. In December 1917, at Caporetto/Kobarid, a combined Austrian/German attack inflicted great losses and certainly demoralized the Italian army. While many defeated soldiers cursed the "reds" and the deferred skilled workers, some blamed capitalism and the monarchy.

Finally, in: Russia on March 8, 1917, the load became unbearable, and workers and soldiers revolted. In October and November 1918, military defeats and reports of an imminent armistice led to revolts of discontented soldiers and workers in Austria, Bulgaria, Germany and Hungary. In turn, the military disintegration and revolt in imperial capitals gave way to regional revolts among discontented minorities. Nationalist Croats, Czechs, Estonians, and Finns fought to break away from failing empires. Already in imperial hinterlands, armed nationalist groups, Poles and Lithuanians in Wilno/Vilnius, Ukrainians and Poles in Galicia, Rumanians and Ukrainians in Bukovina, fought over their inheritance. The heart of the rebellion in 1917-20 were the eastern and southern militarized empires whose capital cities and regional centers were undergoing industrialization. In Russia, the combination of urban industrialization, incomplete state penetration, and incomplete agricultural commercialization proved particularly explosive.

Why did councils or soviets replace parliamentary institutions and government institutions in Russia? Partly, because there was not much alternative. In 1917 in the Russian Empire, it was not so much a question of abolishing the "ready-made state apparatus" as it was of acknowledging that the state had been abolished by the force of events.

The breakup of the Russian state occurred rapidly within the first months of the revolution. With military revolt and a general strike in the streets, the old Duma stepped in the breach and nominated a government, but power soon devolved on a Provisional Government of liberals and moderate socialists led by Alexander Kereusky. In the meantime, the trade union movement that, since 1906, had been alternately legalized and persecuted, revived, raging against both state and employer. Led by trade unions, factory committees, and soviets, strikes swept Moscow and St. Petersburg/Petrograd and workers' soviets and committees of workers' soviets took over many of the functions of local government and administration. Throughout the revolution, real power in urban areas remained in the hands of these local soviets, and soviet power increased as the months went by. In many areas, the soviets took control of newly-established local governments and, in other areas, the formal local governments ceased to meet because soviets assumed their chores directly. In the opening created by military and urban revolutions, a wave of peasant rebellion swept Russia, and many peasant also formed councils. The epicenter of agrarian revolt were the areas of Russia in which administration of the land had until recently been entrusted to village communes. Rural rebellion and the defection of communes to the soviets deprived the state of key institutions connecting the administration to the village. Finally, the determination of the Provisional Government to continue the war destroyed the remnants of military cohesion.

Because real local power rested in the hands of autonomously established councils of workers and peasants and because these councils were generally inclined to the left, they were the indispensable tools for the Bolshevik consolidation of power. In Russia, the goals of citizenship and its characteristic institutions hardly provided an alternative to a population that had little experience with national political participation. Socialist organizations, relying on networks of clandestine militants, were the only political groups in real contact with the masses of workers and peasants. While sharing the ideals of citizenship common to the socialist tradition, Russian socialists were unanimously distrustful of a state known for its unrelenting intolerance and brutality.. Lenin's Bolshevik party contributed decisively to the victory of the soviets by providing a centralized organization working to coordinate policy on a national basis; everywhere, the besetting sin of councils was their localism. When the Constituent Assembly convened to write a constitution, the rival Congress of Soviets, in which the Bolsheviks and their left-wing allies had a majority, appointed a Soviet government, ordered the Constituent Assembly dissolved, and proclaimed itself sovereign. Immediately, the Soviets passed legislation giving rural soviets the power to redistribute land owned by the church, the state, and large landowners, and the Bolshevik government entered directly into negotiation with the Germans for peace.

The Bolshevik seizure of power only opened up the beginning of a prolonged civil war (1919-21) in which Czarist generals and Allied military commanders confronted Bolshevik armies. In the process of defeating the counter-revolutionary White Armies, one of their most valuable tools was their nationality policy. While the collapse of central power presented an opportunity for minority nationalists, the very failure of the czars to establish schools in the southern and eastern provinces had kept the issue of Russification in the background in these regions. White armies refused to compromise with nationalism anywhere. But the Bolsheviks, chiefly concerned with class identity and not with ethnicity, proved more accommodating. Recognizing the independence of some territories and ceding territory to adjoining states, the Bolsheviks were willing to provide for the language and cultural identity of many groups within the context of a larger Soviet state. Land redistribution and the nationalization of industry were the rewards offered to peasants and workers for joining the Soviet federation. The gyrations and changes in Bolshevik policy and nationality were many but, by 1921, Soviet Russia comprised six soviet republics containing nine autonomous republics and twelve autonomous regions. ¹³

While, the Bolshevik-dominated councils met nationally and dissolved the Provisional Government in Petrograd, a different, almost opposite drama played itself out in Germany. There, the German Provisional Government gained control of the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, got them to meet in Berlin, and to call for elections within the framework of the existing state and then dismissed them back to their localities. One of the reasons that the German Social Democratic leaders of the Provisional Government were able to control the councils in December 1918 is that they had the Russian lesson before them. Friedrich Ebert, head of the pro-war majority Social Democrats, was determined not to be a German Alexander Kerensky. Learning from the Russian case, the German Social Democrats, who still retained a strong organization within the working class, urged their members to take the initiative and establish councils after the fall of the Kaiser's government They used their majority in the valuable tools was their nationality policy. While the colnewly-established Workers and Soldiers' Councils to appoint a Social Democratic Provisional Government.

To secure their hold on rebellious workers, the German Provisional Government issued a decree ending censorship, providing for universal suffrage, granting freedom of the press and the eight-hour day, extending social insurance benefits, and promising to make food and better housing available. Later on, under the pressure of the crowd, a republic was proclaimed. Both the reforms and the declaration of the republic revitalized a moribund state apparatus.

By and large, the disorganized and divided left-wing socialists, even those committed to council government, carried out their opposition within the framework of the established state. Many socialist dissidents had been officials in local and state government and had honed their political skills in pre-war national politics. In the meantime, government continued at the local level within the old framework. Even in radical Düsseldorf, where, in January 1919, radicals tried "council democracy," the councils only supervised the city government, they did not replace it. Thus, the established state continued intact, ready to recapture its monopoly of power the moment that the central government had sufficiently increased its strength.

For the future of the German labor movement, another important aspect of the consolidation of Social Democratic power was the willingness of the socialist leaders to work with a representative of the German general staff recruiting troops to crush left-wing opponents. During the war years, German Social Democratic leaders such as Scheidemann and Noske had worked quite closely with the military high command and did not hesitate to call upon their former colleagues when regular troops refused to repress the left. The general staff supplied troops recruited from the front line who easily crushed the poorly-organized Spartacists' rebellion. But the soldiers' brutal murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, heros to the entire German left, immeasurably widened the internal divisions among socialists.

Although sometimes at a considerable price, as in Germany in 1918, the political program of state centralization, citizenship and nationhood triumphed in 1917-20: the subsequent failure of democratic experiments, under the pressure of international crises and the greatest economic collapse in modern European history, should not lead to an underestimation of the accomplishments of this period. The new German Republic was not a socialist state, but a democratic state with strong social entitlements, one in which Social Democrats would play an important role. Although Prussia was integrated as a body into the new Germany, it was treated on the same basis as other territories. In Austria, moderate socialists also took power and, in Bulgaria, the democratic Peasant Party of Alexander Stambuliski. Among the defeated powers, only in Hungary (1919-20) did a failed communist revolution lead to the restoration of the established order. Nationalist revolution had swept most of the rest of eastern and southern Europe. Poland reappeared on the European map after a 125 year absence, and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia appeared on maps for the first time. New, democratic constitutions were adopted in each of the new states, and the committed democrat, Thomas Masaryk, became the first president of Czechoslovakia.

Tacitly acknowledging their debt to the French revolutionary tradition, by 1922, six new European states chose flags whose basic design was a tricolor: Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Ireland and Yugoslavia. The French revolution had triumphed, then, in so far as republics emerged from the ruins of the great empires and the new European order adhered, in Carnot's words: "...to the principle that every people, however small the country it inhabits, has an absolute right to be its own master." On the edges of the European fold were the prodigals. In the Soviet Union, despite civil war, Allied intervention, and economic blockade, the Bolsheviks clung to power. And, after two years of repeated confrontations between governments and organized labor, in October, 1922, Mussolini's black shirts marched on Rome and took power in Italy with the compliance of king Victor Emmanuel III.

Despite its conquests and achievements, the European system established by the revolutions of 1917-20 and more or less ratified by the Versailles Congress did not and could not last. Although the new states were established according to the universal principles of the French Revolution, J. M. Keynes observed in 1919 that "never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly." Developments on the Italian and Russian periphery prefigured developments in the 192Os and 1930's more than the governments of Ebert, Masaryk, or Stambuliski. By 1932, the year before the advent of Hitler in Germany, the failure of democracy and nationality were already evident in most of southern and eastern Europe: in Austria, the reactionary Christian Socialists were in power, and in Bulgaria, Czar Boris himself had provoked a coup in which Stambuliski was assassinated. Except for Czechoslovakia, most of eastern and southern Europe were ruled by dictators, some of whom wore crowns.

The reasons for the failure of the revolutionary settlement were numerous. World War I consumed vast quantities of capital, changed trading patterns, and entailed enormous national debts. The reparations' settlements introduced a large element of uncertainty into European economies, as well as producing great diplomatic and political rancor. The great agricultural depression that followed wartime overproduction was catastrophic for Eastern and Southern European agriculturalists.

But the effort to create a Europe of independent states in an era of military rivalry and heightened national economic competition was probably foredoomed from the start. Economically, British decline complemented by American government unwillingness to play an important role, meant that there was no dominant economic and financial power that could impose a financial order on contending European nations. Protectionism, slowly nurtured under the pre-war order, became epidemic during and after the war. France's efforts to unite the states on Germany's eastern borders failed because France could provide neither the markets or the capital that these states required and because the so called "Little Entente" nations were increasingly divided among themselves by ethnic conflicts.

In spite of Woodrow Wilson's efforts to respect the "self determination of nations," nationality conflicts post-1919 were fiercer than those pre-1914. The political leaders of the new states followed policies that they had bitterly opposed in the old empires, centralizing their country's administration and imposing their languages on national minorities. of course, the Versailles Treaty, based on military victory, had not implemented "self-determination of nations" in an evenhanded fashion. The inclusion of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia and the creation of a corridor across German territory to give Poland access to the sea were the same old geo/political justifications as France's defense of its "natural frontiers". Beyond this, there were regions of Central and Southern Europe such as Bukovina, Dobruja, and Macedonia over which even the most determined exponent of self determination had to admit defeat. There is good reason why a hodgepodge in France is known as a "salade Macedoine."

The existence of minorities belonging to an established nation within the territory of a neighboring nation intensified national hostilities. The paradigmatic example of how nationalist hatreds led to collective blindness is shown by the reaction of neighboring states to the German occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939, seven months after the allied Concession of the Sudeteni and to Germany at Munich in 1938. With Czechoslovakia utterly forsaken by England and France and with Germany moving to annex the Bohemiani Moravian remnants, a show of solidarity with their dispossessed neighbor might have been in order. But both Hungary and Poland demanded and received portions of Czechoslovakia that contained their own nationals. Thus, the Czechoslovak state was divided three ways, the great portion to the German predator, the lesser remains to the two smaller European powers. The very forces of military need and national economic interest that won rights and urged national unity proved chaotic when applied to the majority of European states.

Conclusion

The effort to organize every ethnic group in Europe into independent nations in an era of economic protectionism certainly stirred the cauldron that produced World War II. This conflict began an era in which Europe was divided east and west into super-power-dominated blocks in the Cold War. This era, too, is now visibly ending. In Western Europe, as American economic power waned, it was succeeded by a European Economic Community, now the European Union: in Eastern Europe, with the collapse of Soviet power, nations long part of the Warsaw Pact have become independent: and the breakup of the Soviet Union into separate republics has further increased the number of independent states. In an era of European Union and with the end of the Cold War, it seems possible, even likely, that new configurations of state power, citizenship and national identity may appear that are very different from those of the era of the French Revolution and its aftermath. Will the European Union, on the model of the United States, develop from a federation into a unified nation with common rights and universal citizenship? Or will the EU return to the pattern of pre-revolutionary Europe, with a central authority whose power is mediated by strong, regional intermediary bodies and particularistic rights? Will the new states in eastern and southern Europe evolve their own specific identities, based on the cultures of the French Revolution, or will they, too, pursue a different strategy?

Whatever it may tell us of the future, the revolutionary tradition that begins with the French Revolution provides an invaluable tool for analyzing two centuries of European political upheaval. Over the last two hundred years, warmaking, particularly European-and worldwide wars such as those of Napoleon and the First and Second World Wars, and economic change, such as industrial revolutions and an unparalleled expansion of markets, have worked to make the political culture of the French Revolution the basic framework for political mobilization and claimmaking.

Yet, there is sometimes a dangerous misunderstanding about the nature of the revolutionary tradition that began in France in 1789. While Qemenceau once asserted that the French "revolution is a bloc," if our discussion of revolution reveals anything, it is the great variability of state centralization, citizenship, and nationhood and their perpetually shifting interrelationships. The revolutionary tradition poses a series of questions. Nationhood applies to the boundaries of the community of citizenship. Who is a member of the nation and who not? Citizenship refers to rights within the national community. To what treatment and resources are all citizens entitled? And the state, too, can relate to its members and to outsiders in a variety of ways. Shall the state be administered by professional bureaucrats or shall citizens participate in government at every level?

If the questions recur, the answers have varied. Over the last two centuries in Europe, capitalists, nobles, workers and peasants have all adopted the rhetoric of the French Revolution to defend or to advance their own interests. Germans, Italians, Ukrainians, and Poles have used it to justify an independent homeland. Soldiers and tax collectors have used it to extract resources from peasants and workers. Europeans have lobbied, rallied, struggled, and killed one another over nationhood, citizenship, and state centralization. However the French revolutionary tradition is defined, it is less a solution than a matrix of interrelated problems.

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Note *: For their very helpful comments, I thank Jeff Goodwin, Ernie Harsch, Peter Stillman, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, Isser Woloch and all the participants in the 1995 seminar on state formation at the New School for Social Research. Back.

Note 1: Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the New Civic Order, 1789-1820's  (New York, 1994). Back.

Note 2: Dominique Schnapper, La communauté des citoyens: Sur l'idée moderne de nation  (Paris, 1994). Back.

Note 3: Martin Lyons, "Politics and Patois: the linguistic policy of the French Revolution." Australian Journal of French Studies  XVIII:3(1981), 264-281. Back.

Note 4: Gail Bossenga, The Politics of Privilege: Old regime and revolution in LilIe  (Cambridge, 1991). Back.

Note 5: Charles Tilly, European Revolutions , 1492-1992 (Oxford, 1993), p.10. Back.

Note 6: Stuart Woolf, Naroleon's Integration of Europe  (London, 1991). Back.

Note 7: Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics  (Cambridge, 1994), p. 40. Back.

Note 8: Michelle Perrot," On the Formation of the French Working Class" in Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg (eds) Working Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States . (Princeton, 1986), pp.71-110. Back.

Note 9: William J. Orr. "East Prussia and the Revolution of 1848," Central European History  XII:4( 1980): 303-331. Back.

Note 10: Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848-1849  (Princeton, 1991). Back.

Note 11: Miroslav Hroch. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Comrosition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations  (Cambridge,1985). Back.

Note 12: V. G. Kiernan, "Conscription and Society in Europe before the War of 1914-18" in M.R.D. Foot (ed) War and Society  (London, 1973), pp.141-158 Back.

Note 13: Ronald Grigor Suny, "Nationalism and class in the Russian Revolution: a comparative discussion,"in E.R. Frankel, J. Frankel, and B.Knei-Paz (eds) Revolutions in Russia: Reassessments of 1917  (Cambridge, 1992), pp.219-246. Back.