Revolution and Reform, 1830–1832

In 1830, a new wave of liberal and nationalist revolts broke out. The revolts of the 1820s had served as warning shots but had been largely confined to the peripheries of Europe. Now revolution once again threatened the established order in western Europe.

French king Louis XVIII’s younger brother and successor, Charles X (r. 1824–1830), brought about his own downfall by steering the monarchy in an increasingly repressive direction. In 1825, he agreed to compensate nobles who had emigrated during the French Revolution for the loss of their estates and imposed the death penalty for such offenses as stealing religious objects from churches. He further enraged liberals when he dissolved the legislature and imposed strict censorship. On July 26, 1830, spontaneous demonstrations in Paris turned into street battles that, over three days, left 500 citizens and 150 soldiers dead. A group of moderate liberal leaders, fearing the reestablishment of a republic, offered the crown to Charles X’s cousin Louis-Philippe, duke of Orléans, and sent Charles into exile in England.

Though the new king doubled it, the number of men eligible to vote was still minuscule: 170,000 in a country of 30 million. Revolution had broken the hold of those who wanted to restore the pre-1789 monarchy and nobility, but it had gone no further this time than installing a more liberal, constitutional monarchy.

Even so, news of the July revolution in Paris ignited the Belgians, whose country had been annexed to the kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815. Differences in traditions, language, and religion separated the largely Catholic Belgians from the Dutch. An opera about a seventeenth-century insurrection in Naples provided the spark, and students in Brussels rioted, shouting “Down with the Dutch!”

The riot turned into revolt. King William of the Netherlands appealed to the great powers to intervene; after all, the Congress of Vienna had established his kingdom. But Great Britain and France opposed intervention and invited Russia, Austria, and Prussia to a conference that guaranteed Belgium independence in exchange for its neutrality in international affairs. Belgian neutrality would remain a cornerstone of European diplomacy for a century. After much maneuvering, the crown of the new kingdom of Belgium was offered to a German prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, in 1831. The choice, like that of Otto I of Greece, ensured the influence of the great European powers without favoring any one of them in particular. Belgium, like France and Britain, now had a constitutional monarchy.

The Austrian emperor and the Russian tsar would have supported intervention in Belgium had they not been preoccupied with their own revolts. While the carbonari inspired a revolt in Naples in favor of a constitution and an uprising in Palermo demanded independence for Sicily (both were part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), in the north, rebels in Piedmont fought for an Italy independent of Austria. Metternich sent Austrian armies to quell the unrest.

The Polish revolt was more serious. In 1830, in response to news of revolution in France, students raised the banner of rebellion. Polish aristocrats formed a provisional government, but it was defeated by the Russian army. In reprisal, Tsar Nicholas abolished the Polish constitution that his brother Alexander had granted in 1815 and ordered thousands of Poles executed or banished. The independence movements in Poland and Italy went underground only to reemerge later.

Reform of Parliament rather than revolution preoccupied the British. In August 1819, sixty thousand people attended an illegal political meeting held in St. Peter’s Fields in Manchester to demand reform of parliamentary elections, which had long been controlled by aristocratic landowners. When the local authorities sent the cavalry to arrest the speaker, panic resulted; eleven people were killed and many hundreds injured. Punsters called it the battle of Peterloo or the Peterloo massacre. An alarmed government passed the Six Acts, which forbade large political meetings and restricted press criticism.

In the 1820s, however, new men came into government. Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), the secretary for home affairs, revised the criminal code to reduce the number of crimes punishable by death and introduced a municipal police force in London, called the Bobbies after him. In 1824, the laws prohibiting labor unions were repealed, and though restrictions on strikes remained, workers could now organize themselves legally to confront their employers collectively. In 1828, the appointment of the duke of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, as prime minister kept the Tories in power. Wellington’s government pushed through a bill in 1829 allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold most public offices.

When in 1830, and again in 1831, the Whigs in Parliament proposed an extension of the right to vote, Tory diehards, principally in the House of Lords, dug in their heels and predicted that even the most modest proposals would doom civilization itself. Even though the proposed law would grant only limited, not universal, male suffrage, mass demonstrations in favor of it took place in many cities. In this “state of diseased and feverish excitement” (according to its opponents), the Reform Bill of 1832 passed, after the king threatened to create enough new peers to obtain its passage in the House of Lords.

Although the Reform Bill altered Britain’s political structure in significant ways, the gains were not revolutionary. One of the bill’s foremost backers, historian and member of Parliament Thomas Macaulay, explained, “I am opposed to Universal Suffrage, because I think that it would produce a destructive revolution. I support this plan, because I am sure that it is our best security against a revolution.” Although the number of male voters nearly doubled, only 8 percent of the population qualified to vote. Nevertheless, the bill set a precedent for widening suffrage further. Those disappointed with the outcome would organize with renewed vigor in the 1830s and 1840s.