Nation States in the Nineteenth Century - The Great Powers and the Holy Alliance

France

Under Louis XVIII, who became king of France in 1814 upon the abdication of Napoleon, France made some progress toward becoming a constitutional monarchy, including the establishment of a legislative assembly similar to the British Parliament or the U.S. Congress. However, there were many political parties in France at this time, and all of them felt that Louis XVIII’s moderate policies did not concede enough in the proper direction. Everyone wanted to shift government from its centrist position, but none of the factions could agree. Republicans wanted to abolish the monarchy, while radicals wanted to establish full-blown socialism. On the opposite side, the royalists wanted a return to a seventeenth-century style of absolute monarchy. In other words, one group wanted the legislature to have control; one group wanted the people to have control; and one group wanted the monarch to have control.

In 1824, Charles X succeeded Louis XVIII. Charles was a conservative, with an old-fashioned belief in the monarch’s divine right to rule. When the 1828 elections shifted the balance of power in the legislature toward the liberals, Charles tried to come to terms with their very different philosophy of governing. However, he was unable to see himself as the constitutional monarch the liberals wanted him to be. In 1830, Charles dismissed the legislature, established censorship of the press, and revoked voting rights for certain categories of citizens.

The people reacted furiously. With the National Guard on their side, they started firing on the army in the streets of Paris, building barricades from sand- bags and any sturdy objects they could find. Nearly nineteen hundred people died during these violent demonstrations. Charles, realizing that his people would never tolerate an absolute monarch, but unwilling to compromise, abdicated. He was the last hereditary monarch to rule France.

The legislature selected Louis Philippe as the new constitutional monarch; he was the great-great-grandson of the Duc d’Orleans, who had served as regent during the early years of the reign of Louis X. Known as the “Citizen King,” Louis Philippe ruled as a moderate liberal until 1848. He restored freedom of the press and revoked Charles’s restrictions on voting rights.

During the two decades of Louis Philippe’s reign, discontent developed among the social and economic classes of the nation. The bourgeoisie prospered under the new regime, but little of the profits reached the pockets of the working class. Socialists and radical republicans seized on this discontent to arouse support for their cause. When they were barred from holding public meetings in 1848, they staged a repeat of the 1830 revolution; the people mounted the barricades in the streets and fired on the army. Once again, the people succeeded in forcing the king to abdicate.

However, the various factions could not agree on what kind of new government to establish. The liberals, radicals, and socialists had much in common but could not compromise on matters where they disagreed. The socialists favored a Marxist system in which the workers would own government-supervised factories and share equally in the profits. The liberals considered this system far too radical but agreed to implement some national workshops as a temporary measure to bring down the high unemployment. The workshops were highly successful with the laborers; more than 120,000 had joined by April, with more on the waiting list. However, the 1848 elections returned a National Assembly with a moderate-to-conservative majority. These deputies immediately closed the workshops, which resulted in a return to violent protests in the streets of Paris. More than three thousand people died during the June Days of 1848.

In the end, the National Assembly created a constitution for a new French republic. The constitution called for a strong president, a unicameral legislature, and voting rights for all adult men. When elections were held, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte became the first president of the Second Republic of France.

Like his more famous uncle, Louis Napoleon wanted more power than he could have in a republican system of government. In 1851, he forced the legislature to extend his term for another ten years. When a national vote showed that the vast majority of the people approved his actions, he had himself declared Emperor Napoleon III. (The title “Napoleon II” had been given to the son of Napoleon I, although he never ruled.) This was the end of the Second Republic.

Napoleon III ruled as a despot, but in some ways a benevolent one. He sup- pressed any attempt of the legislature to exercise its powers, and he tolerated no demonstrations or opposition from the people. However, he instituted a number of projects that vastly improved the domestic economy, such as major public-works projects, the construction of a national railroad, and numerous treaties that eased and encouraged trade. From about 1860, his politics grew more liberal and reformist. In 1870 he approved a new constitution; although it called for a hereditary monarchy, it also established a democratic parliament.

Napoleon’s downfall, like that of his uncle, came about because of failures in his foreign policy. A failure to check the spread of Prussian power culminated in 1870 in France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The emperor’s reign ended abruptly with the proclamation of the Third French Republic. The new National Assembly negotiated the peace with Prussia, including the surrender of Alsace and Lorraine. This treaty was highly unpopular in France, especially in Paris, where radicals soon declared Paris’ independence from France and established a new government of their own, the Paris Commune. The Commune did not last long; it turned out to be no match for the national army and was obliterated at the cost of twenty thousand lives.

By 1875 the National Assembly accepted that it would be impossible to restore the monarchy in any form. The deputies devised a new legislative structure modeled after the U.S. Congress. The lower house was popularly elected, the upper house chosen by the political parties, and the president elected by members of both houses.

A famous incident occurred in 1894 when the military courts found Captain Alfred Dreyfus guilty of treason. The evidence was weak at best, and the case dragged on for years, with prominent liberals such as novelist Emile Zola speaking out on Dreyfus’s behalf. In the end, it was proved that Dreyfus had been convicted on the basis of forged documents. The military courts refused to reverse their verdict; however, the president of France pardoned Dreyfus and a civil court overrode the military verdict. This incident served to unite liberals, socialists, and republicans for some time to come.

Prussia

The prevailing sentiment in Prussia was conservative and anti-nationalist. However, Prussian liberals rebelled against the government, demanding one with greater representation. This time the liberal forces won a victory. In 1848, Frederick William IV was forced to summon a new legislative assembly, the National Parliament of the German Confederation, and agree to a new constitution.

This was a moment of triumph for the liberals, but internal disagreements weakened and divided them. The king soon disbanded the assembly and replaced the constitution with a more conservative version. In Prussia as else- where in Europe, the liberals and socialists, who should have been natural allies against the conservatives, could not agree on what they wanted. Their differences prevented German unification at this stage. When the liberals formed a parliament in Frankfurt and asked the king to rule a united Germany as a constitutional monarch, he refused. With no executive, and with parties that were constantly at odds, the parliament broke up in 1849. In a little over twenty years, Germany would become a unified nation for the first time.

Russia

Although Russian society had a liberal element, autocracy was far too firmly entrenched to give way to any notions of republicanism. Russia did not experience a genuine public uprising until 1905. Although this was put down, it sowed the seeds of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

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