The Mid-Century Crisis and The 1848 Revolutions A Critical Comment

The Mid-Century Crisis and the 1848 Revolutions: A Critical Comment
Author(s): Gareth Stedman Jones

Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Jul., 1983), pp. 505-519
Published by: Springer
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505
THE MID-CENTURY CRISIS AND THE 1848 REVOLUTIONS
A Critical Comment
GARETH STEDMAN JONES
In the last two decades, the pan-European crisis of 1846-8 and the revolu-
tionary upheavals of 1848 itself have been a chosen testing ground for the
theoretical approaches of some eminent American sociologists and political
scientists. The embroilment of Franceand central Europe in a revolutionary
process and, conversely, the absence of any comparable revolutionarychal-
lenge in England has been interpretedin the light of large scale evolutionist
theories of modernization and stages of economic development. Older em-
phases on the political origins of revolution or its absence have been down-
played in favor of comparative social typologies, and the propensity to a
politics of confrontation and direct action have been placed within a frame-
work of developmental sociology. In general, what seems to have been
involved is an inversion of the classical Marxist model of proletarianrevolu-
tion. Despite the considerabledifferencesof object and emphasis in the work
of Barrington Moore, Charles Tilly, and Eric Wolf, one common theme at
least emerges. It is that the bearers of anticapitalist revolution were not the
new factory proletariat, but those groups most threatened by industrializa-
tion - "preindustrial"artisans and peasants.' Eric Wolf, in his book Peasant
Wars of the 20th Century, emphasizes the revolutionary role of middle
peasants, the most vigorous carriers of peasant traditions and a social
stratum both willing and still able to organize collective resistance to the
incursions of capitalist agricultureand the world market. BarringtonMoore
in his latest work, Injustice,treats 1848 in Germanyas a revolt of guild-mas-
ters and preindustrial journeymen. The new proletariat, so far as they
existed, he considers to have possessed no coherent political perspectiveand
to have remained quiescent. Charles Tilly and the many historians of nine-
teenth-century France inspired by his work have again stressed the role of
tight-knit communities of artisans and peasants and correlate their capacity
to organize resistancewith the traditionalismof their values and goals. Once
University of Cambridge

506
again, the relativeinsignificanceof the new factory proletariatin the revolu-

tionary process of 1848 is highlighted.
What emerges from all these accounts is the conservative character of the
revolutionary. Just as Trevor Roper, in his account of the English seven-
teenth-centuryrevolution, assigned the revolutionary role to the declining
gentry,2so Craig Calhoun, who broadly shares Tilly's approach, states that
"we need to see revolutions against capitalism as based not in the new class
that capitalism forms, but in the traditional communities and crafts that
capitalism threatens."What is stressed in this more or less shared picture of
confrontationist and potentially revolutionary social groups is a "rooted-
ness" in a social order under threat, and this pre-existing social order is
generallycharacterizedas traditional,"preindustrial,"steeped in custom and
ritual, dominated by face-to-face social relations, affective rather than cal-
culative and rational in its social bondings. Paradoxically, however, much of
the intellectual authority, both conceptual and empirical, appealed to in
recent times by this approach, also derives from the work of two English
historians who stand in a position of self-confessed allegiance to a Marxist
tradition of historiography - Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson.
However much their ultimate evaluation of the historical process may di-
verge from some of the American theorists, Hobsbawm's work Primitive
Rebels and Thompson's notion of "moral economy" or "customs in com-
mon," are not difficult to assimilate into a pictureof societal development in
the nineteenthand twentieth centuries,which derives more inspirationfrom
Weber than from Marx.3 What they have strongly reinforcedis a notion of
the preindustrial,as a culture, as a coherent system of values and customs,
not only distinct from emerging liberal capitalism, but also, implicitly at
least, distinct from later working-classlife under industrialcapitalism.
Another facet of the approach I am tryingto characterize,more prominentin

the United States than in England, is its confident, though not necessarily
optimistic, evolutionism. Particularlysalient in Craig Calhoun'sarticle, and
not entirely absent from the other contributions, is the notion that France
underwenta revolution in 1848 while England did not, because France was
two generations or even half a century behind England in terms of economic
and social development.Therewerefar fewerfactory workers,a still peasant-
based agriculture,slower population growth, smaller cities and towns, and
hence the presenceof more traditionallyrooted geographical or occupation-
al communities of peasants and artisans possessing greaterwill and capacity
to mount organizedand even insurrectionaryresistance.In England,conver-
sely, a higher stage of the development of industrial capitalism had engen-
dered the virtualelimination of these protestingtraditionalcommunitiesand

507
their replacementby a new industrial working class, more distant from and
increasingly without "radical"preindustrialroots, culturally permeable to
ascendant capitalist values and prone to "respectability"and reformism.
England escaped revolution in 1848 because it stood severalstages nearerto
the evolutionary terminusimplied by this model - that in which, accordingto
Craig Calhoun, capitalism would "recreate the majority of the working
population into its [own] more individualisticand bureaucraticimage."
Having attempted - I hope fairly - to outline the characteristicfeatures of

what has become one of the most influential approaches to nineteenth-cen-
tury social development, and in particularto the interpretationof the rela-
tionship between industrialization and social movements culminating in
1848, 1want for the remainderof this article to outline some objections to it.
These objections are both conceptual and empirical.
The first thing I would like to question about this picture of nineteenth-cen-
tury revolution as the product of threatened social groups of artisans and
peasants rooted in preindustrialvalues, customs, and communities, is its
implicit model of capitalist development. Like the Communist Manifesto
model of Marxism to which it is juxtaposed, it assumes that the destiny of
such groups was to disappear in the face of large-scalecapitalist agriculture
and modern factory industry. If, however, we projectthat model forward in
time to the late nineteenth century - or even further into the twentieth - we
can see that such a predictionis very misleading.The Englishdevelopment of
capitalist agriculturehas been the exception ratherthan the rule, and may be
ascribedto the highly peculiarpolitical frameworkdevised by a seventeenth-
and eighteenth-centuryagrarian capitalist class, rather than to a universal
logic of capitalist development. In Prussia, for example, where the intention
of the Stein-Hardenbergreformsof 1807-21 was preciselyto promote a form
of peasant emancipation that would benefit an English-styleclass of substan-
tial agrarian capitalists, rather than a French-style class of peasant small-
holders, peasants in the first half of the nineteenth century sacrificed 1 mil-
lion hectares to landed proprietors. Yet, even so, by 1869 the peasantry
owned 49% of the land, the Junkers 45%. The explanation of this paradox
was the tremendous extension of cultivation that succeeded emancipation
(from 7.3 to 12.5million hectaresbetween 1815and 1848).4The laterattempt
by the Russian state to generate a capitalist agriculture was a far more
unequivocal failure.5 In general, peasants have not simply disappeared
through the logic of capitalist developments. Where they have, long sus-
tained state pressure or exceptional political violence - from enclosure to
collectivization - have been necessary in addition. Certainly peasants in
Western and Central Europe have not disappeared, as can be testified by
anyone who has studied the politics of the Common Market today.

508
If we take the case of artisans, defined as skilled workers operating in small

units of production, the case is similar. At a theoretical level, Marxist
economists have attempted in vain to establish any consistent tendency over
the last century and a half towards a rising organic composition of capital.
Nor can it be argued that there has been any unilinear tendency towards
largerand largerunits of production. Factory industryhas spawned as many
new workshops as it has displaced. To cite West Germany,the most dynamic
example of postwar European capitalism, in 1962 there were over 700,000
craft shops employing some 3.5 million people.6This was about 121/2times
the numberof industrialenterprisesand the numbersemployed amounted to
about half those in factory employment. The average size of a craft shop was
about 5.1 workersand craft workshop production accounted for about 11%
of GNP. By all these criteria,craft shop production had increasedin impor-
tance between 1936 and 1962. In the nineteenth century, according to
Prussian statistics, craft production in 1815accounted for 4% of the popula-
tion, by 1858 it had reached6%,by 1895it had fallen back to 4.5%, and then
resumed an upward trend. Very generally over the whole period 1815 to
1962, it is estimated by Wolfram Fischer that the craft labor force and its
dependents may have increased from 15% of the total population to
about 25%.
If we restrictourselves to nineteenth-centuryBritain,once again a pictureof

disappearing artisans would be very misleading. Apart from the textile
sector, and primaryiron and steel manufacture,the great bulk of manufac-
turing activity took place in small workshops and involved a considerable
degreeof handlaborof various kinds. Both the old researchof J. H. Clapham
and the more recent exhaustive enquiry by Raphael Samuel, suggest that
handlabor and workshop production remained a bouyant and expanding
sector of the economy at any time up to the 1880s.7Britain was with justice
described, not as the factory, but as the workshop of the world.
If we remove a priori assumptions about a teleology of modern industry,

none of this data is particularly surprising. Handlabor of a skilled, semi-
skilled, or unskilled kind was the basic form by which the elementary de-
mands of an expanding population for housing, clothing, footware, furni-
ture, and consumer durables was satisfied. Because labor was plentiful and
cheap and demand was fashion-prone, in addition to being seasonally and
cyclically variable, increasingdemand was met by the addition of new units
of production rather than by economies of scale; and new technology was
capital- ratherthan labor-saving.This is exemplified not only by the role of
the sewing machine, the bandsaw, and the handlathe in the clothing, furni-
ture, and metal trades, but also by the striking role of skilled handlabor in a

509
completely new industry which took off in the second half of the nineteenth
century - iron shipbuilding.8It is important to note that these industriesto
which I have alluded were as much new industries of the nineteenth century
as mechanical spinning had been a distinctive innovation of the end of the
eighteenth century. It is quite misleading to harp on their "traditional"
features, when their working methods, their products, their markets,and the
bulk of their labor force were no more or less rooted in preindustrialcustoms
or values than were their equivalents working in cotton mills and iron
foundaries.
All this leads on to a second point raised by sociological interpretation.How

significantwas it - a featureso emphaticallyreiteratedin the recenthistorical
literature on 1848 - that the worker activists in Paris and other cities came
from workshops rather than factories? The polemic between orthodox
Marxists and historical sociologists over this issue seems to me somewhat
sterile.9In the case of Chartism, recent researchsuggests that it is impossible
to interpret Chartism as a movement of artisans as opposed to factory
workers.'0Chartistactivity in Ashton under Lyme, a purelyfactory town by
1840, was just as militant and extensive as it was in Trowbridge,a declining
community of handloom weavers, or Finsbury and Clerkenwell, a classic
center of skilled London artisans. Moreover,the rhetoricof Chartistactivists
was remarkablyuniformacross the country. After the departureof a middle-
class leadership in 1839, it did not differ significantly in Birmingham, Lon-
don, Manchester,Oldham, Nottingham, or Brighton. It is certainlynot true
to suggest, as does CraigCalhoun, that the 1842strikewas "anti-industrial"-
whatever that may mean - or that unions of the new industriessuch as the
cotton spinnersdistancedthemselvesfrom the Chartistupheaval. In fact, the
contrary was true. It was unions in the textile and engineering industries in
the Manchesterarea - not the pre-existingChartistleadership,nor tradition-
al craft workers - who mounted the general strike of 1842. And they did so
for Chartist and not purely industrial reasons. Chartism had focussed on
what it called "class legislation"as the principal reason for the affliction of
the working classes. Oppression and exploitation in Chartist analysis was
political, not economic, in origin. Attempts to increase wages by industrial
means were renderednugatory by the political tyranny of the ruling classes
over the unrepresentedproducers.This was the Chartistcase - and in strike
meetings and conferences of delegates throughout Lancashireand the Mid-
lands, it was reiteratedas the reason for the struggle of that year.'l
If the decline of Chartism after 1842 was not uniform between regions, this
again cannot be correlated in any neat way with a division between factory
districts, handloom weaving areas, or skilled workshop areas. In part, the

510
geography of Chartismafter 1842was defined by areas in which O'Connor's

land plan possessed a particular appeal (for this was the main activity of
Chartist activists between 1843 and 1847); in part it was defined by the
resilience of some local leaderships or peculiaritiesof local political condi-
tions enabling Chartistrepresentationin local government,and in partby the
fortunes of particulartrades. But all this cuts across any schematic division
between traditional craftsmenand new industrialworkers. In 1848,so far as
there was a Chartistrevival,it was particularlyprominentin London and the
West Riding. 2 London, as a center of workshop finishingtrades, slop-work,
a massive building industry, and very little factory production, could easily
be fitted into the picture of Paris drawn by historical sociologists. The
depiction of marchandage produced by Bob Bezucha could certainly be
duplicatedin the history of London building workers. But the most militant
center of the West Riding - a virtually insurrectionarytown in 1848 - was
Bradford, the center of the worsted trade, a factory industry whose market
was heavily hit by the revolutionaryturmoil in Europe. In fact, however, the
feature uniting London, Bradford, Liverpool, and other trouble spots in
1848probablyhad less to do with the proportions of the workforceemployed
as artisans, outworkers, or factory-hands,than the relativedegree of promi-
nence of the Irish immigrants in each of these districts. It was Repeal of the
Union rather than the six points of the Charter or the formation of the
National Convention, that provoked most of the violent political confronta-
tions in England in 1848.13
In Germany, analogous evidence could be cited from Berlin to establish the

relativeunimportanceof the factory/ workshop division. According to Fred-
erick Marquardt,the evidence contradicts the belief that there was a signifi-
cant division of outlook between men working in large mechanizedfactories
or nonmechanizedmanufactorieson the one hand and journeymen working
in small handicraft workshops on the other.14There was in fact a consider-
able interchangeof labor between the two. The picture he paints of workers'
political activity in 1848 very much resembleswhat has been unravelledby
lorwerth Prothero'swork on London trades- a picturethat also fits much of
the French evidence.15That is to say that the division lay rather between
richerand poorer trades. The more affluent were mobilized mainly by issues
that affected their political and civil status as workers;the poorer tradeswere
most associativeand the backbone of most social and political militancy;and
the poorest, through disorganization and poverty, were often unable to
sustain any effective forms of organized activity.
The primary division in England, at least to the end of the 1880s, lay not
between factory workers and artisans, but between those who possessed a

511
trade (including such factory workers as cotton spinners, powerloom weav-

ers, puddlers,and blockprinters)and those who did not (casual day laborers,
porters, navvies, and quayside workers): a group, in Mayhew's words, "as
unpolitical as footmen." Harneyand Jones vainly talked about attemptingto
mobilize these groups because it was thought that Chartismcould do with an
influx of support from the physically strong. But all the evidence suggests
that apart from the special case of the Irish, their efforts were largely
unsuccessful. Indeed, some from these groups - notably the coalheavers -
were actually mobilized as special constables on 10 April 1848.
So far we have argued against the exaggeration of the polarity between the
outlook of artisansand factory workersin the recent historiographyof 1848.
In the country where factory production was most highly developed and
where that polarity may be most extensively tested - England - recent
researchcasts doubt on the strong contrasts that have habituallybeen drawn
between the Chartism of factory workers and that of artisans or outwork-
ers.'6This is not to suggest that thereare no relevantdiversitiesbetweentypes
of production, occupation, or popularcultures.It is simply to arguethat such
diversities do not in themselves explain the prevalence or absence of a
particular type of popular politics and that their pertinence must be con-
structed in each case, not simply assumed on the basis of a priori social
hypotheses. It has also been arguedthat skilledartisanswere not a disappear-
ing component of the workforce in either England, France, or Germany in
the second half of the nineteenth century;and it would also be necessary to
add that they did not retreat from the salient role they had played in labor
movements either. In England around the time of the Second Reform Bill,
they dominated the trade union movement and continued to do so up to the
1880s, just as in Paris they dominated the Commune and the Bourses de
Travailand in Germanythey formed the core of the SPD. Thus, if we are to
explain why the capitalist order appeared much more stable in the second
half of the nineteenth century, our explanation would have to include
artisans within it.
How then does the global crisis of 1845-7 relate to the revolutions of 1848,
and why did England escape them? Rather than comparing countries ac-
cording to some scale of comparative stages of social and industrialevolu-
tion, as the Communist Manifesto, Rostovian growth theorists, and histori-
cal sociologists are alike prone to do, we should, I believe, think in terms of
phases of capitalist development as a global entity - as a system of combined
and uneven development - that (a) should be looked at structurally and
synchronically in any given epoch, but (b) will be decisively inflected by its
political conditions of existence and operation in different states.

512
In the case of the relative impact of the economic crisis in France and
England between 1845and 1848, its incidence has been admirablydescribed
by Mark Traugott, so I will not go over the same ground. What I will briefly
attempt to do, is on the one hand to place the crisis in a more epochal
framework and, on the other, to highlight the importance of the different
political conditions that obtained in each country. One conclusion that might
follow from this is that the reason there were fewer"social movements"in the
second half of the nineteenthcenturyis not primarilybecause other countries
were now following the path successfully pioneered by England, but rather
because there was greater stability to the capitalist system as a whole.
If we approach the crisis of 1845-7 with the analytical tools provided by

Labrousse, we miss the full dimensions of the crisis.17Labrousse suggests in
the case of France that it was a combination of what he calls "thelast crisis of
the old type" with a modern industrialdepression in the capital goods sector
(rail, coal, and iron), the two crises being seen as largelyindependent of each
other (except in terms of a strainon the balance of paymentsas a resultof the
necessity to import corn, and hence pressureon credit). But the crisis in the
1840swas not simply a combination of industrialdepressionand exceptional
dearth. It represented a more secular turning point in the history of the
western European economy. According to a persuasive recent study, it
inauguratedthe deindustrializationof the countryside and the pastoraliza-
tion of extensive areas that until then had combined agricultureand domes-
tic industry, though it did not in England or anywhere else diminish the
importance of small workshop production in the towns.18It precipitatedthe
first massive wave of emigration to America from Ireland, Southwest Ger-
many, and, to a lesser extent, France, succeeded thereafterby a continuous
stream of migration into the towns, where industrialactivity was henceforth
to be increasingly uniformly concentrated. The case of Irish demographic
involution after the famine is well known. But other cases should also be
mentioned. It is only from 1851 that the English rural population began to
decline in absolute, as well as relative,terms. In France,accordingto Charles
Pouthas, Frenchpopulation growth in the first half of the nineteenthcentury
represented a continuation of eighteenth-century patterns.19The turning
point came in 1847-50, in his view, a period of demographic crisis. In more
than half the departments of France, population growth halted or began to
decline. The areas particularlyaffected were the relativelydensely populated
regions combining agricultureand industry, especially the cultivation and
weaving of linen - Picardy, Normandy, Brittanny,Gascony, and, across the
Belgian border, Flanders. In Prussia, the increaseof population in town and
country proceeded in step until 1849. The period 1847-55 was similarly in
large parts of the rest of Germany a time of demographic stagnation and

513
reaction. In the southwestern areas - Baden and Wiirttemberg- the popula-

tion actually declined during these years.
Changes on this scale indicate something more than harvestcrisis on the one
hand and industrialdepression on the other. They suggest a more long-term
disruption of the relationsbetweentown and country, engenderednot simply
by potato blight and bad wheat harvests, but compounded by a pervasive
crisis of rural bye-industryin the textile sector. To explain this aspect of the
crisis, we must attempt to place the crisis of the 1840s in the generalcontext of
British and European industrialization in the first half of the nineteenth
century.
Industrializationduring this period remainedvery narrowlybased. Its most

salient feature was the mechanization of cotton spinning and to a lesser
extent worsted, wool, and linen. Mechanization of the weaving sector was a
slower process, not effectively accomplished in cotton in Britain until the
later 1830s. Cotton was an imported raw material, and had few multiplier
effects through the rest of the economy.20Whereasit adopted machinesand
steam power, it possessed little capacity to extend their use in the rest of the
economy. The other industrializedsector was iron. Innovation in iron manu-
facture was based more on fuel- than labor-savingeconomy (coking instead
of charcoal, the puddling process, the hot-blast). Iron had been stimulatedin
Britainby wartimedemand, but was cursed by overcapacityuntil the coming
of the railways provided it with a steady and expanding international
market, further reinforced by the growth of the iron shipbuilding industry.
The mechanizationof the cotton industryin Britainhad been precipitatedby

labor scarcity,a steadilygrowingdomestic demand, and a dominant position
in the export market. Between 1790-4 and 1800-4, the volume of exports to
Europe had doubled after several decades of stagnation, whereasexports to
North America rose by 58%. European competitors were crippled by the
blockade and the growing British technological lead was reinforced by the
supremacy of the Britishfleet. French and German mechanization of cotton
spinning was a necessity if their domestic markets were not wholly to be
captured, but the internalnecessityto industrializewas weak. The Napoleon-
ic wars had deprived them of former export markets, and the technological
gap now meant there was little chance of recapturingthem.21The effect of
this change was most serious on the linen industry, the largest export
industryof eighteenth-centuryGermany,and the principalsubsidiaryindus-
try of most German peasants.22In cotton, both in France and Germany,the
mechanized spinning sector was confined to the domestic market. In Ger-
many, because of the low rate of protection, the cotton industry remained

514
precariousuntil the end of the 1840s,whereasin heavily protectedFrancethe

success of the Alsatian industry was largely at the expense of the more
backward Norman industry. Success in the export sector in both countries
was confined to the finishing sector, where the higher proportion of cheap
labor input could offset the advantage of machines. Neither in France nor in
Germany could the textile sector generate an industrial takeoff. This came
with railwaybuildingin the 1840s,which stimulatedcoal, iron, and engineer-
ing activity.23Both in France and Germany the first major cycle in the
production of capital goods proceeded independently from the cycle of
textile and consumer goods.
Compared with the last half of the eighteenth century and the second half of
the nineteenth, the pace of technological change was slow (for example, the
slowness of the introduction of mechanical weaving). This was mainly the
result in Britain of abundance of labor supply and uncertainty of foreign
markets. In Europe, this was accentuated by the decline of linen exports and
the domestic competition between linen and cotton. Protoindustrialization
in the eighteenth century had particularlybenefitted those on the margin of
rural society. Areas of protoindustrializationhad been characterizedby a
higher than average birth rate, lower ages of marriageand, much literary
evidence suggests, higher rates of illegitimacy.24Moreover, political changes
during the French revolutionary period increased the labor supply. In
France, the dividing up of the commons and the imposition of stricter
forest laws increasedthe hardshipof those beneath the peasant smallholders,
and impelled them into whatever subsidiary industrial employments were
available. In Prussia, the onerous conditions of peasant emancipation, and
the proliferationof a practicallylandless stratum of cottagers dependent on
casual labor had a similar effect.
But while the supply of rural labor increased, the demand contracted. The
mechanization of spinning in cotton pushed former spinners into weaving.
The contraction of the export market for linen had analogous effects. The
domestic marketdid not greatly expand. The debt burdenson the peasantry
if anything encouraged a tendency towards subsistence. Moreover, the do-
mestic market was subject to the constant pressure of foreign competition.
Cottage industryin textiles had to face Britishmachine competition. Cotton
prices fell 72% between 1815 and 1851. The price of linen yarn halved
between the 1790sand 1840s. In such a situation, however, where labor was
abundant and agriculturalearnings were low, workers in domestic industry
reacted to superior factory competition by increasing output and lowering
their rates, thus retardingthe pace of mechanization. In England, according
to Habakkuk, between 1819 and 1829, the number of handlooms fell from

515
240,000 to 225,000, but the output per handloom increased by between

25-30% and the prices of their products fell.25Thus the mechanization of
cotton weaving and linen spinning in the 1830s was resisted by domestic
workers by a furtherattempt to increase their output and lower their prices.
In Bielefeld, it was estimated that the annual income of a 5-member linen
spinnerfamily between 1800and 1853had fallen from 82 to 49 reichsthaler.26
Finally, this growing competition between domestic workers was further
exacerbated by merchantsattempting to depress prices still further to com-
pete effectively on the world market. The Silesian cotton weavers who
revolted in 1844 had only recently abandoned linen weaving and had been
incensed by the advantage taken of them by the merchantsof Peterswaldau.
It should be clear that the phenomenon of"pauperism"so much discussed in

Central Europe in the 1840s cannot simply be explained in Malthusian
terms.27The extent of overpopulation, highlightedby the harvestcrises, was
to be measured not simply against the resources of the land, but also against
the development of the world market. The harvestcrisis and the diversion of
consumer spending to food goods took place against the background of the
finally victorious onset of mechanizedcotton weaving and flax spinning and
the beginning of the migration of these industriesto the coalfields. For those
affected on the continent and in Ireland, neither agriculture nor factory
employment offered an alternative source of livelihood. Those who could,
emigrated;those unable formed bands of beggarsand took to the roads. The
crisis of the 1840s began the mid-centuryEuropean migration to industrial
towns and the ruralization of the countryside, which proceeded steadily
thereafter.
It is therefore misleading to see the crisis simply in Labrousse's terms as a

combination of the traditional and the new. We should look ratherat their
dialectical interrelationand at the imbalance imposed on every economy in
the period - including the British - by the crisis-riddendevelopment of the
textile sector. The crisis in France and Germany in the countryside was not
just a repeat of what had occurred on the eve of the first French revolution.
The weakness of Labrousse's model is its failure to consider international
trade and the export sector. Rural industry cannot be viewed as merely
traditional. From the eighteenth century onwards it had been intimatelytied
to competition in the world market. The constriction of the export sector in
France and Germany from the time of the Napoleonic wars, the large
numbers trapped within it, and the recurrentthreat of invasion by English
goods accentuated the pressure on the domestic market and made the crisis
seem more "traditional"than it actually was. Conversely, the superiorityof
England in the export sector, particularlyin extra-European trade by the

516
1840s, mitigated the impact of the crisis at home. Even with a considerable
rise in the price of corn in 1846-7, the domestic marketfor manufactureswas
not hit so heavily because unemploymentwas far less severe in those sectors
of the economy dependent on exports.
If we wish to trace the connection between the crisis and the revolutions,
however, this differencebetween Englandand Europewould certainlynot be
sufficient.First,as MarkTraugott has shown, the crisisin England,while not
as harsh as France, was neverthelesssevere - indeed more so, if we included
the Irish crisis; and conversely, the worst of the crisis in France was over
before February 1848. Moreover the crisis in the countryside played only an
indirect role in the 1848 revolutions, which were in the first instance generat-
ed in capital cities. The handling of distress by the state was an object of
political criticism among the urban classes both in France and in Central
Europe. But, until the Red Republican movement of 1849-50, which devel-
oped after the Parisian working class had been defeated in June 1848, there
was little synchronization and no effective political coordination between
urban and rural movements; and even then, the areas most hit by the
protoindustrial crisis - Westphalia and Northern and Western France, for
instance - were more likely to be mobilized by parties of order.28
It was not primarilya stage of social or industrialevolution, but the political

framework within which distress occurred, that explained the difference
between England and the Continent. An analysis of economic relations can
pinpoint particular antagonisms between classes and social groups, but
cannot of itself explain why these tensions could not be resolved within the
existing political structure. In this sense, in France, what needs to be ex-
plained is not primarilythe lower-classdiscontent that emergedon the streets
in February, but its political coherence expressed in the demand for a
democratic and social republic, and even more crucial, the defection of the
Parisian petit bourgeoisie, who as national guardsmenrefusedto defend the
Guizot ministry, and the growing divisions within the notable class itself,
which to everyone's surprise turned an apparently manageable political
agitation within a few days into the headlong collapse of the monarchy and
the regime. It is in these areas that the essential contrast with Englandis to be
found: first, the absence of a coherent social and political movement of the
lower classes comparableto social republicanismin Paris;second, the aliena-
tion of the lower middle class from the momentarily revived Chartistmove-
ment; and third, the high degree of unity among the propertied classes in
support of the existing polity.
In England, as in France, there had been the growth of lower-middle-class

517
agitation in 1847, partly stimulated by tight credit conditions and mainly

focussed around the Whig intention to raise the income tax. O'Connor and
the Chartistleadershiphad placed great hopes in this evidence of shopkeeper
discontent. But alreadybefore April 10,the London lower middleclasses had
been stronglyalienated from the Chartists.Particularlycrucialin the process
was a meeting at TrafalgarSquare, supposed to be adressed by the leader of
middle-classagitation, CharlesCochrane.The meetingwas taken over by the
recent Chartist convert, G. M. W. Reynolds, and was followed by a riot in
which, it was said, criminal elements were present and considerable looting
followed. The tone of the lower-middle-classpress was thereafterunrelent-
ingly hostile to the Chartists, and this was compounded by the news of
revolutions in Europe.
Among the working classes themselves, the picture of their activities in 1848
is incomprehensible unless it is understood that politically - as a coherent
movement with coherent aims and tactis - Chartism had already been
defeatedfrom the early 1840s.29In the first half of the yeartherewerea consid-
erablenumberof riots by the unemployed. Most contemporariescommented
on the general youthfulness and disorderliness of the participants, and
Chartist activists were forced on several occasions to disown them. In
general, one is struck by the absence of the large, threatening,but controlled
meetings that had so impressed observers of Chartism in the late 1830s and
early 1840s. Second - and here perhaps is a possible connection with the
previous agriculturalcrisis - the momentum of Chartism, such as it was in
1848, and in particularafter April 10, was mainly the result of the alliance
between the Chartistsand the Irish.The insurrectionarytone, the propensity
to violent struggle, and most of the conspiratorial activity was centered on
the Irish issue. Chartism itself was already a spent force. Even its own
activists had become sceptical of its methods - the petition, the convention,
the appeal to the disaffected middle classes. Only in the West Riding and in
certaindistrictsof London could it be said that the movement was more than
a shadow of its former self. The reason for this, as I have argued, had little to
do with the decline of artisan or outworkercommunities. In the first instance
it was because Chartism had already been politically and ideologically
defeated in the years leading up to the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Whereas
republicanism and socialism provided growth points, capable of uniting
town and country at least in Southern France between 1849 and 1851, in
England the chances of any popular alliance comparable to Red Republica-
nism had been academic since the end of the 1830s. The economic stabiliza-
tion that occurred in the 1840s only confirmed this trend and helped to
consolidate the new framework of popular politics - affecting artisan and
factory worker alike - that became predominant after the mid-century.

518
NOTES
1. See BarringtonMoore, Jr., Injustice:TheSocial Bases of Obedienceand Revolt (London,

1978), esp. pt. 11; Eric Wolf, "On Peasant Rebellions," International Social Science
Journal(1969); CharlesTilly, "The Modernisationof Political Conflict in France,"in E. B.
Harvey, ed., Perspectiveson Modernization: Essays in Memory of lan Weinberg(Toron-
to, 1972).It is only fair to add that Tilly has since distancedhimselffrom the terminology of
modernization theory: see C. Tilly, L. Tilly and R. Tilly, The Rebellious Century:
1830-1930 (London, 1975),49-50. However, the ease with which his new classification of
rebellion into Competitive, Reactive, and Proactive may be reappropriated into the
framework 1am discussinghere is indicatedby the use to which these termsare put in Craig
Calhoun's essay. My critique of BarringtonMoore's position is developed in "Barrington
Moore on Injustice,"Historical Journal (1980).
2. See H. R. Trevor Roper, Historical Essays (London, 1957), 179-205.
3. E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the EighteenthCentury,"
Past and Present(1971); E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels:Studies in Archaic Forms of
Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries(Manchester, 1954).
4. See Reinhart Koselleck, "Staat und Gesellschaft in Preussen, 1815-1848," in H. U.
Wehler, ed., Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte(K6ln, 1973).
5. See T. Shanin, The Awkward Class (Oxford, 1972).
6. See Wolfram Fischer, Wirtschaftund Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung
(Gottingen, 1972), 285-349. The figures as cited, however, I have taken from John
Breuilly'sstimulating paper comparing numbers, politics, and values of British, French,
and German artisans in the nineteenth century:unpublished MS, (June, 1980), 6.
7. J. H. Clapham, An Economic Historyof Modern Britain,3 vols (Cambridge, 1926-38); R.
Samuel, "The Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Vic-
torian Britain,"History Workshop Journal (1977).
8. On this see A. J. Reid, "The Division of Labour in the British Shipbuilding Industry
1880-1920 with special referenceto Clydeside,"dissertation (Cambridge, 1980).
9. See, for instance, the importanceattached to this issue in Roger Price, The FrenchSecond
Republic: A Social History (London, 1972); or from an orthodox Marxist perspective,
John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974).
10. See D. Thompson, "The Geography of Chartism,"unpublished MS.
11. See R. Sykes, "EarlyChartismand Trade Unionism in S. E. Lancashire,"and G. Stedman
Jones, "Rethinking Chartism," in J. Epstein and D. Thompson, eds., The Chartist
Experience(London: MacMillan, forthcoming).
12. See J. Belchem, "Feargus O'Connor and the Collapse of the Mass Platform,"ibid.
13. See ibid. and also D. Thompson, "Ireland and the Irish in English Radicalism and
Chartism,"ibid. The importanceof the Irishissue in the Chartistdisturbancesof 1848also
comes through strongly in R. G. Gammage, History of the ChartistMovement (London,
1854).
14. F. D. Marquardt,"WorkingClass in Berlinin the 1840s?"in H. U. Wehler,ed., Sozialge-
schichte Heute: Festschriftfur Hans Rosenberg (G6ttingen, 1974).
15. 1. Prothero, "London Chartism and the Trades," Economic History Review (1971); see
also 1. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth Century London (London,
1979).
16. The origins of this emphasis are to be found in M. Hovell, The ChartistMovement (1918).
17. E. Labrousse,ed., Aspects de la Criseet de la Depressionde l'Economiefrancaiseau milieu
du XIX sibcle (La Roche-sur-Yonne, 1956).
18. See Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jtirgen Schlumbohn, Industrialisierungvor der
Industrialisierung(Gottingen, 1977), esp. ch. 6.
19. C. Pouthas, La Population francaise pendant la premiere Moitie du XIX Sibcle (Paris,
1956).
20. This issue is well discussed in D. A. Farnie, The English Cotton Industryand the World
Market 1815-1896 (Oxford, 1979); on cost and efficiency factors inhibiting the use of
steam in the first half of the nineteenthcentury, see G. N. von Tunzelmann, Steam Power
and British Industrializationto 1860 (Oxford, 1978); see also A. E. Musson, "Industrial
Motive Power in the United Kingdom, 1800-1870," Economic History Review (1976).
21. For an account of the development of this gap, see M. Levy Leboyer, Les Banques
europeennes et L'Industrialisationinternationaledans lapremiere(Moitie du XIX Siecle,
1964);for the way in which this affected the patternof French industrialdevelopment, see
M. Levey Leboyer, "Les Processus d'industrialisation:Le Cas de L'Angletereet de La
France," Revue Historique(1968); see also P. O'Brienand C. Keyder, Economic Growth
in Britainand France 1780-1914: Two Paths to the Twentieth Century(London, 1978).
22. See Kriedteet al.

519
23. See T. J. Markovitch, "L'industriefrancaise de 1789-1964," in J. Marczewski,ed., His-

toire Quantitativede I'Economie Francaise,vol. 7 (Cahiers de l'ISEA, 1967);H. Motteck,
WirtschaftsgeschichteDeutschland, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1964); K. Borchardt, "The Industrial
Revolution in Germany 1700-1914,"in C. M. Cipolla, ed., Fontana Economic History of
Europe, Pt. 1 (1972); K. W. Hardrach,"Some Remarks on German Economic Historio-
graphy and its Understanding of the Industrial Revolution in Germany," Journal of
European Economic History (1972).
24. See H. Medick, "The Protoindustrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of
Household and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to IndustrialCapital-
ism," Social History (1976); D. Levine, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capital-
ism (New York, 1977).
25. H. J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century (Cam-
bridge, 1962), 147.
26. Kriedteet al., 316.
27. See for example W. Abel, Massenarmut und Hungerkrisenim VorindustriellenEuropa.
VersuchEiner Synopsis (Hamburg, 1974);see also W. Conze, "Vom Pobel zum Proleta-
riat,"in H. U. Wehler, ed., Moderne Sozialgeschichte (Koln, 1973).
28. See Ted. W. Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: Theinsurrectionof 1851 (Princeton,
1979),40-103.
29. This point is argued extensively in my "Rethinking Chartism."
Theory and Society 12 (1983) 505-519
0304-2421 / 83/$03.00 ? 1983 Elsevier Publishers B.V.


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