Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

performance of duty. Republicans could deﬁne their aims in terms of the

puriﬁcation of a monarchical ideal in which service to the public good was

the king’s chief duty. They could also point to numerous historical exam-

ples of classical aristocratic republics or oligarchies, such as Venice. But, in

increasing numbers, they also came to reject the monarchical ideal as such

in favour of one or another constitutional variants on the theme of popular

democratic sovereignty.

Britain

Modern British radicalism and republicanism both commenced with the

explosive debate over ‘French principles’ which followed the publication of

Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2) (see Claeys 1989b, 2007a). Though

no typology is uncontentious, at least ﬁve discrete if overlapping sub-

divisions of republicanism can be identiﬁed in Britain in this period: (1)

utopian republicanism, in which community of goods, a tradition identiﬁed

with Sparta, Plato, primitive Christianity and Thomas More, is commended

as the solution to pover ty and inequality (e.g., An Essay on Civil Government,

1793,p.86); (2) agrarian republicanism, in which restrictions on landown-

ership, once associated with the Roman republic, then the tradition revived

by James Harrington, restrain inequality of wealth; this tradition includes

both Paine and Thomas Spence; (3) anti-monarchical republicanism, in which

the abolition of kingship and substitution of a republic, or ‘government by

election’, is a central aim (Paine 1992,p.106), which in this period is mainly

associated with Paine; (4) radical republicanism, in which the extension of

the franchise (generally to universal male suffrage) is the chief goal; and (5)

Whiggish republicanism, in which a reform of governmental ﬁnance, the

restriction of the powers of the monarch and aristocracy to interfere with

and dominate the House of Commons, and a general willingness to govern

with the popular good or res publica in mind, are central.

Of these forms,

3 Such goals can be associated with the Whig leader Charles James Fox in this period. Fox disavowed

having ‘stated any republican principles, with regard to this country, in or out of parliament’ (Fox

1815, iv,p.209). But this must be compared with his praise for that respect for distinction shown

in the ancient republics of Greece and Rome (p. 229), and Fox’s proclamation ‘that he was so far a

republican, that he approved all governments where the res publica was the universal principle’ (p. 232).

See also Barwis 1793:‘Andastothewordrepublic, though it be usually applied to every government

without a King, yet, in its original and true signiﬁcation, (the public weal) some Kings, at least, have so

well understood, and attended to the public weal, that their governments might much more justly merit

the appellation of republican, than many of those which are always denominated republican, though

often severe and tyrannical enemies to the public weal, and liberties of their countries’ (Claeys 1995,

vii,p.380). Paine also argued that ‘What is called a republic, is not any particular form of government.

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

(1) would be largely subsumed by socialism by 1840,(2) would be taken

up by Spenceanism, and the later land nationalisation movement; (3) would

emerge chieﬂy after 1848 in the writings of W. J. Linton, but thereafter vir-

tually die out; and (4) would gradually overtake (5) throughout the course

of the nineteenth and then twentieth centuries. The lineages of sixteenth-,

seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republicanism into this period have

been the subject of considerable controversy (see Pocock 1985). By con-

trast those linking the 1790s to the nineteenth century have been more

neglected, partly because previous languages and paradigms disappear or

become unrecognisable after the French Revolution (but see Burrow 1988;

Philp 1998; Wootton 1994).

Generally speaking the term ‘radical’ was used in Britain during the 1790s

to indicate a desire for democratic constitutional reform, and particularly

the extension of the franchise, with ‘radicalism’, as deﬁned by the early

historiography (e.g. Daly 1892; Kent 1899), emerging c.1819 to describe the

movement associated with such reformers. Within this group disagreements

existed about how far the franchise should be extended, whether a secret

ballot should be used, whether Members of Parliament should be paid, and

so on. Further issues included the reduction of taxation and the expense of

the monarchy and government, the extension of religious toleration, and the

curtailment of patronage. Sociologically, radicalism was often associated with

the plight of small producers, whether in agriculture or commerce, engaged

in an often bitter, protracted and eventually usually futile competition with

larger capitalists.

In Britain the plebeian branch of this movement was generally commit-

ted to universal manhood suffrage. In its early years its aims were often

couched in traditional, even ‘romantic’ terms, more often evoking a nos-

talgia for a lost society of yeomanry or peasant-proprietors than seeking

a new-modelled democratic republic, and hostile to Jacobinical theorising

while condemning the ‘Old Corruption’ of an extravagant government

and proﬂigate aristocracy (see Spence 1996). Before 1820 it rallied around

the prominent radicals (both disavowed republicanism) William Cobbett

(1763–1835) (see Cobbett 1836,p.159) and Henry Hunt (1770–1835) (see

Hunt 1820, i,p.505). It then re-emerged as Chartism in the years from

1836 to the mid-1850s, and helped achieve two acts of parliamentary reform

It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter, or object for which government ought to be

instituted, and on which it is to be employed, res-publica, the public affairs, or the public good; or,

literally translated, the public thing’(Paine1992,p.140).

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

(1867, 1884) thereafter. But the attainment of the franchise was also widely

regarded as a means to other ends, including poor law reform, the alleviation

of restrictions on trade unions, factory reform and freedom of the press.

The middle-class counterpart to this movement was led by Jeremy Ben-

tham (1748–1832) and his followers, such as Sir William Molesworth, often

referred to as ‘Philosophic Radicals’ or ‘advanced’ liberals, who for a short

time mustered a faction of some note in Parliament, though their inﬂuence

has been claimed to have been much more extensive (Dicey 1914). Their

views overlapped on some issues with those of Richard Cobden (1804–65)

and John Bright (1811–89), whose radicalism focused on the peaceful pro-

motion of free trade, extending the franchise and reducing the expenses of

government, the Crown and imperial expansion. Their g reat legislative suc-

cess was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 (see Adelman 1984; Belchem

1986;Harris1885;Wright1988).

Amongst these movements Chartism, despite its ideological heterogene-

ity, was by far the largest, and in the long term the most inﬂuential.

Com-

mencing in 1836, it agreed on a six-point programme, focusing on universal

male suffrage, and petitioned Parliament in three great campaigns. Divided

most notably over the issues of ‘moral force’ versus ‘physical force’ reform,

it became associated during the mid-1840s with the ‘Land Plan’, a scheme

for small-scale peasant proprietorship promoted by Feargus O’Connor. Ple-

beian radicalism faltered in England during the high Victorian period, but

began to recover in the late 1860s, when the movement for female enfran-

chisement also began in earnest after the artisan elite received the vote in

1867 (Finn 1993; Gillespie 1927;Taylor1995). In addition, the rapid growth

of trade union organisation in the last third of the century ensured that issues

important to the ‘labour aristocracy’ came increasingly to the fore. From

the 1880s the rise of socialism divided the labour movement, but also has-

tened the creation of an independent labour party. From 1880 a distinctive

‘Radical Programme’ also emerged which identiﬁed the radical wing of

the Liberal Party with Irish reform, particularly the ‘three F’s’ of fair rents,

free sale and ﬁxity of tenure. Various ‘collectivist’ measures of domestic

reform, notably respecting working-class housing and health, agricultural

wages and tenancy, disestablishment of the state church, the extension of

education and the reform of the taxation and municipal government, also

4 The literature on Chartism is, again, very extensive. The chief contemporary estimate is Gammage

1854. For a summary of modern scholarship, see Chase 2006 and Thompson 1986.Ontheleading

theoretical controversies, see Stedman Jones 1983a.

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

became popular in this period (see Chamberlain 1885,andToynbee1927,

pp. 219–38). A half-way house between radicalism and liberalism emerged

known as New Liberalism, which combined a quasi-collectivist outlook

with a basic adherence to laisser-faire principles (Freeden 1978). By 1880 the

term ‘radical’ thus encompassed a wide range of both social and political

reform proposals, both plebeian and middle class, but usually non-socialist,

and often associated with the United States, Australia and New Zealand

(Carruthers 1894,p.6).

British republicanism

Even the most popular monarchy in Europe, celebrated for the stabilis-

ing effects of its pomp and ceremony (notably by Bagehot, 1867), had

its opponents, though these were relatively few throughout much of the

century (see A. Taylor 1996, 1999, 2004; Williams 1997). Indeed, the vet-

eran Whig radical Henry Brougham lamented in 1840 that ‘in point of

weight from property, rank, and capacity’, the republicans were ‘a most

inconsiderable minority’ (Brougham 1840,p.4). The tradition established

by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2) never entirely disappeared, with

birthday celebrations continuing well into the nineteenth century. Writer s

like Richard Carlile, editor of The Republican (1819–26) (for whom republi-

canism meant simply ‘a government which consults the public interest’, The

Republican, 27 August 1819, p. ix), kept the sacred ﬂames alight, and assured

an intimate association between secularism or freethought and republi-

canism in Britain (Royle 1974, 1980). During the late 1830sand1840s

a variety of Chartist writers toyed with republican themes, though the

movement as a whole never embraced the ideal, and when the Chartist

leader Feargus O’Connor was accused of being a republican, he retorted

that he did not care whether the Queen or the Devil sat on the throne

(Hughes 1918,p.158). Many Chartists continued to embrace the Ameri-

can model, though disillusionment at the growth of social inequality in the

United States commenced in this period. At the time of the revolutions of

1848 some associated with the movement openly avowed themselves ‘ardent

Republicans...anxious...toexpressourallegiance to the only legitimate

source of authority, the Sovereign People’ (Harding 1848, p. iii). After 1848

its socialist rump was led by Ernest Jones and George Julian Harney, whose

Red Republican preached a virulent revolutionary doctrine. For many years

afterwards the Chartist leader James Bronterre O’Brien would continue to

champion the cause of land reform and nationalisation, his follower s being

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

particularly prominent in the International Working Men’s Association,

founded in 1864.

Following the 1848 continental revolutions the republican cause enjoyed

a temporary surge of enthusiasm, particularly as a result of the inﬂuence of

Mazzini, though the latter was principally a nationalist and little interested

in constitutional forms. His great supporter was the engraver William James

Linton, a leading opponent of ‘the possibility of a kingly republicanism’

(Linton 1893,p.47). His The English Republic (1851–5), if it had a limited

circulation, nonetheless revealed how far a powerful mix of charisma, reli-

gion and nationalism could enthuse British radicals with an ideal of duty

based upon ‘sacriﬁce, service, endeavour, the devotion of all the faculties

possessed and all the powers acquired to the welfare and improvement of

humanity’ (Adams 1903, i,p.265). Linton’s republicanism subscribed to the

ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity and association, and commended state

education, the state provision of credit for the working classes, and an oppo-

sition to monarchy as tyranny in principle. But it also opposed socialism

where the state acted as ‘the director and dictator of labour’, thus violating

individual liberty, instead of protecting labour against capital, and giving

the cultivator the opportunity of land ownership (Linton n.d., p. 2). It rep-

resented the ﬁrst impressive British effort to wed the seventeenth-century

republicanism of Milton, Cromwell, Ireton and Vane to that of Mazzini,

Herzen, Kossuth and the causes of the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and

other subject European peoples. Auguste Comte’s followers in Britain also

kept the sacred ﬂames of republicanism alight after the decline of Chartism,

with Frederic Harrison insisting that the only legitimate government was

republican, which was synonymous with entrusting power to those ﬁt to

rule, working in the interests of all, ‘never in the interest of any class or

order’, and whose adoption was ‘as certain as the rising of tomorrow’s sun’

(Harrison 1875,pp.116–22;Harrison1901,p.20; Fortnightly Review, ns

65, June 1872,p.613). John Ruskin, too, lent some support to the ideal.

Republicanism and socialism were thus distinctive if sometimes overlapping

entities throughout this period.

Inspired by the downfall of the Second Empire in France, and antipathy

to the ‘despotic’ principles of German expansionism, with which Queen

5 Ruskin proclaimed that ‘A republic means, properly, a polity in which the state, with its all, is at every

man’s service, and every man, with his all, at the state’s service – (people are apt to lose sight of the last

condition), but its government may nevertheless be oligarchic (consular, or decemviral, for instance),

or monarchic (dictatorial)’ (Ruskin 1872, ii,pp.129–30). Thanks to Jose Harris for indicating this

usage.

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

Victoria was identiﬁed by birth (McCarthy 1871,pp.30–40), republicanism

in Britain enjoyed its greatest ﬂowering in the early 1870s, but declined by

1874. Following the foundation of the Land and Labour League in 1869,

some eighty-ﬁve republican clubs were established between 1871 and 1874,

and a National Republican League formed in 1872. Supporters condemned

the monarchy as simply ‘immoral’ in principle (Holyoake 1873,p.1), and

enthused that ‘great numbers of people are beginning to advocate republican

principles’ (Barker 1873,p.3). Respectable radicals, catching the sense of the

moment, waded into the fray. At a speech in Newcastle in 1871, and then

elsewhere, Sir Charles Dilke addressed the theme of ‘Representation and

Royalty’, and offered a critique of royal ﬁnance, moving for a parliamentar y

enquiry into the issue in March 1872 (see Taylor 2000). But anti-republican

riots dogged his cour se. The increasing appositeness of the American model

after the Reform Act of 1884 naturally enhanced discussion of its virtues

amongst sympathisers, though even here there were dissenting voices (e.g.

Conway 1872).

Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91) was the single most important British

republican of the late Victorian period, and was most inﬂuential in yoking

republicanism to freethought, as well as opposition to socialism (Bonner

1895; Gossman 1962). Yet his rhetoric was more extreme than his prin-

ciples, and his few attempts to found any formal republican organisation

were reluctant, and accompanied by disclaimers of any haste in securing

their ultimate political end (D’Arcy 1982). The illness of Queen Victoria

in 1871, and her return to duties after a decade of mourning, helped to

restore her prestige, while Disraeli gave increasing stress to the superiority

of the British constitution over the American (e.g. Watts 1873,p.1). The

decline of republicanism was clearly intimately interwoven with the expan-

sion of empire, and with Disraeli’s enhancement of the Queen’s imperial

role. Critics threatened that ‘the day that we proclaim a Republic in this Coun-

try, our Colonies are lost, and we sink into insigniﬁcance’ (Ashley 1873,p.19).

English reaction to the Paris Commune was generally negative, and even

English republicans were divided, Frederic Harrison being more favourable,

Bradlaugh, increasingly opposed to the First International, less so. By 1899,

it was claimed, there was only one avowed republican in the House of Com-

mons – the Irishman Michael Davitt (Davidson 1899,p.386, and generally

Moody 1981).

Republicanism also developed in a number of British colonies in this

period, at least in theory, notably in Australia. Here, as early as 1852,it

was being proclaimed (by John Dunmore Lang, but without much popular

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

support) that there was ‘no other form of government either practicable or

possible, in a British colony obtaining its freedom and independence, than

that of a republic’, which could alone promote public and private morals

and ‘pure and undeﬁled religion’ (Lang 1852,p.64; see McKenna 1996;

McKenna and Hudson 2003; Oldﬁeld 1999; and for New Zealand, Trainor

1996; see also Eddy and Schreuder 1998).

Ireland

A separate parliamentary group of Irish radicals kept up pressure for political

and social (and especially land) reform there throughout the period. The

leading nationalist movement of the early part of the century was led by

Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), whose chief goal was the restoration of the

Irish parliament, and who famously argued that ‘No Revolution is worth

the spilling of a single drop of blood’ (White 1913,p.81). Rejecting the

United Irish ‘vain desire of republican institutions’ (O’Connell 1846, ii,

p. 113), he promoted instead moderate parliamentary reform and liberal

economic policies. Catholic Emancipation was achieved in 1828,butinthe

1840s O’Connell failed to achieve ‘repeal’ (of the 1801 Act of Union which

abolished the independent Irish parliament). His most f amous successor

was Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91), the ‘Uncrowned King of Ireland’,

president of the Land League and leader of the Irish parliamentary party in

the 1880s, who promoted a policy of land reform and then, increasingly,

peasant proprietorship, and an independent Irish parliament.

Irish republicanism

Nineteenth-century Irish republicanism dates from the controversy sur-

rounding the French Revolution debate and Paine’s Rights of Man. Its roots,

however, lie in earlier ‘True Whig’ and ‘Patriot’ thought, epitomised by an

opposition to the ‘tyranny’ of a despotic executive, standing armies and the

landed oligarchy, but where English ethnic domination also played a major

role in diluting a vocabulary of ancient constitutionalism and natural rights

and later Catholic rights and even separatism (see Small 2002, and more

generally Connolly 2000). Some reformers, like Lord Edward Fitzgerald,

visited France soon after the Revolution and imbibed republican principles

there (Moore 1831, i,p.166). As the 1790s progressed other reformers like

Wolfe Tone moved from seeking independence under ‘any form of gov-

ernment’ (Tone 1827, i,p.70) towards accepting both a broader franchise

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

and, eventually, a more democratic republicanism. For many, particularly

the Dissenters, this was synonymous with self-government (Byrne 1910,

p. 4; Tone 1827, ii,pp.18, 26). With the formation of the United Irish-

men in 1792, Painite republicanism and Irish self-rule fused in a mixture

that was separatist by 1796 and revolutionary by 1798 (see McBride 2000).

Many even of the most prominent leaders of the uprising of 1798,however,

had no settled political ideas beyond a desire for national independence; the

rebel General Joseph Holt admitted to being ‘not very well up to republican

notions’ when questioned (Holt 1838, ii,p.69).

Irish republicanism in the mid-nineteenth century continued this trend.

The revolutionaries of 1848 had no elaborate political theory, but aimed

chieﬂy at nationhood. Thomas Davis, for instance, while agreeing to support

a federative government, said ‘If not, then anything but what we are’ (quoted

in Lynd 1912,p.224), and even admitted the possibility of ‘royal republics’

as a viable model (Davis 1890,p.280). When another ’48-er, John Mitchel,

declared for republicanism, his view was later recalled to have been ‘an

altogether unexpected development’, since he had himself written of his

comrades that ‘theories of government have but little interest for them; that

the great want and unvarying aim of them all is a National Government’,

which might include a monarchy (Duffy 1898, i,p.262n; Dillon 1888, ii,

p. 130). Many were also later vexed by Mitchel’s overt support of slavery

and ‘an Irish republic with an accompaniment of slave plantations’ in the

early 1850s (he went on to ﬁght for the South in the US Civil War) (Dillon

1888, ii,pp.48–9). Even such a sophisticated social and political theorist as

Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, who favoured nationalisation

of the land (with Henry George as a key inﬂuence) and state socialism

(Davitt 1885, ii,pp.69–142), wrote little about republicanism as such,

while hoping for the emergence of a labour party in Britain.

But the Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded in 1858, settled at least

in part on a number of leading principles, though these were of course also

contested. They included the expropriation of lands whose proprietors were

absentees or inactive, and of church lands; the sale of such lands to create a

new peasantry; the abolition of hereditary titles; the provision of an elected

parliament, one-third of which would be by universal suffrage; the erection

of provincial councils; and the toleration of all religions, but secularisation of

education (Rutherford 1877, i,pp.68–9). Some later Irish republicans were

also principally nationalists and not necessarily anti-monarchical; Patrick

Pearse for instance thought a German prince could well serve as sovereign

an independent Ireland.

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

France

In France a radical movement existed continuously from the time of the

Revolution of 1789 which inherited the traditions of Rousseau and Jacobin-

ism, transformed these through the writings of Babeuf, Blanqui, Proudhon

and Blanc, and can be distinguished by its defence of the small producer,

artisan and peasant against big capital, and the advocacy of greater democ-

racy, social equality, civil rights and nationalism (Loub

ere 1974). France was

the most continuously revolutionary society in Europe through the nine-

teenth century, experiencing moderate upheaval in 1830, and more epochal

transformations in 1848 and 1871. Its radicalism was thus often republican

and revolutionary, though there was no single tradition associated with the

‘principles of ’89’ as such. Within this movement, instead, more moder-

ate and extremist wings contended for public opinion, with Jacobins and

republicans again rising to prominence during the 1848 Revolution. Radi-

calism spread more successfully to the countryside in the second half of the

century, linking itself to wine-growing interests in the south, and pressing

for constitutional reforms such as a unicameral legislature with the Senate

and President abolished, though not female enfranchisement. Some radi-

cals by the 1880s urged nationalisation of the railways, mines and banks,

the regulation of working hours and conditions, cheap credit and gov-

ernment support for co-operatives. By the turn of the century many of

these issues were identiﬁed with socialism, though of a more moderate and

non-revolutionary type, and radicalism declined.

French republicanism

The French Revolution was by no means inevitably anti-monarchical in

tendency, and controversy as to the advantages of retaining modiﬁed king-

ship was already evident in the debate between Thomas Paine and the Abb

Siey

es in August 1791. Here Paine defended republicanism as ‘simply a gov-

ernment by representation’ (Paine 1908, iii,p.9), while Siey

es indicated the

dangers of an elected executive, contending instead for retaining a monarch

to represent the nation as a whole (Siey

es 2003,p.169). Such arguments

would later prove compelling to many, and Siey

es’ ideas would prove impor-

tant under the more conservative phase of the Revolution embodied in the

Directory. Beforehand, however, French republicanism inherited its chief

concerns from the Convention and the ﬁrst Commune of Paris, which

emerged in August 1792, set the Revolution on a more radical course, and

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

strenuously opposed both the monarchy and priesthood (see Fisher 1911;

Pilbeam 1995; Plamenatz 1952; and Soltau 1931). The ﬁrst Commune and

the Jacobin Club organised the insurrection of 10 August 1792, and estab-

lished the pattern of radical, as well as Parisian, rebellion against central

government in the name of the people as a whole. An insurrection led by

Marat and Robespierre on 31 May 1793 led to the National Assembly being

overwhelmed by mob rule. (But to its supporters both then and later this

was the sole means by which democracy could be protected; e.g. O’Brien

1859,p.27.) The arrest and execution of the moderate Girondins, and

a period of radical rule, followed. Church lands had been deemed national

property in 1790, and some

emigr

e lands sold. An even larger transfer was

proposed by a decree of February 1794, but this was aborted when the Ter-

ror was overthrown on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794). These measures were,

however, populist rather than socialist, and aimed at allaying the problems

of poverty and scarcity of food which threatened the Revolution itself from

within. (Republicans generated their own account of political economy

in the same period; see Whatmore 2000.) Universal male suffrage (though

indirect) was brieﬂy achieved at this time, and again in 1848,butwithdrawn

quickly.

Following the Restoration of 1815 the republicans won their next great

victory with the ejection of Charles X after three days’ street ﬁghting in

1830, only to have the institution of monarchy stabilised by the accession

of the Duke of Orleans, Louis Philippe. At this time the republican camp

was divided into four main sections: the moderates, who were the largest

group, led by Godefroy Cavaignac; the radicals or Jacobins, whose chief aim

was manhood suffrage; the social reformers, many of whom, like Cabet, the

Fourierists and Saint-Simonians, were anti-revolutionary and often unin-

terested in politics; and the revolutionaries (Plamenatz 1952,p.39). A ﬁfth

group, the Catholic Liberals led by the Abb

e de Lammenais, tried to bridge

the gap between the church and democracy. But such categories were elastic

rather than exclusive, and many reformers belonged to several groupings.

The Second Republic, founded in February 1848, and led by men like

Ledru-Rollin, Lamartine and Louis Blanc, was also short-lived. Its leading

characteristic was the popularisation of socialist ideas on a widespread scale

for the ﬁrst time, notably Blanc’s national workshop scheme and proposals

for the ‘right to work’. Moderates found themselves challenged by insur-

rectionists, including Blanqui, in May–June, but the latter were defeated

after much bloodshed, and only succeeded in tainting the radical cause in

the eyes of public opinion. Following an interim government headed by

213