Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek
Louis Eug
`
ene Cavaignac, Louis Bonaparte was elected President. But he
then staged a coup d’
´
etat on 2 December 1851, which resulted in the Sec-
ond Empire. A period of severe repression followed, in which over 26,000
republicans were arrested and tried by special tribunals. Ledru-Rollin, Blanc
and others were driven into exile, where some collaborated in the Euro-
pean Central Democratic Committee, formed in London (Lattek 2006,pp.
87–95). Many moderates remained in France, and succeeded in making
republicanism a respectable cause over the next two decades. But disagree-
ments over the extent of social refor m needed, and correspondingly the
viability of laisser-faire liberalism to solve social problems, continued to fos-
ter division.
The Third Republic, announced in September 1870 after France’s defeat
by Prussia, was formally established in 1875. With extremism discredited
after the failure of the Commune, lawyers and middle-class merchants pre-
dominated amongst its supporters, with an influential sprinkling of artists
like Manet, and an increasing numbers of Jews, women and Freemasons,
who tended to promote a more secular approach to public culture. Its lead-
ing light was L
´
eon Gambetta (1838–82), whose great aim was sustaining a
centralised regime based on univer sal suffrage and free compulsory secu-
lar education long enough to build a modern democracy upon a patriotic
foundation, no matter what compromises, notably in religious and for-
eign policy, his ‘opportunist’ policies demanded (see Nord 1995). In the
interim, support was given to the republican ideal, amongst others, by
Auguste Comte (1798–1857), whose followers, if suspicious of democracy,
were nevertheless often inveterate opponents of monarchy.
The Paris Commune
An influential if much debated republican model during the late nineteenth
century was that associated with the Paris Commune, the revolutionary
organisation which emerged after France’s defeat by Pr ussia in the 1870–1
war (see generally Lissagaray 1886). Following the declaration by Jules Favre,
L
´
eon Gambetta and others on 4 September 1870 of a ‘Government of
National Defence’, and preceded by communes in Lyon and Marseille, the
Paris Commune proper was declared on 18 March 1871.Itwasratified
by communal elections in which a number of workers and some leading
members of the International Working Men’s Association were returned.
Inspired more by Proudhon than Rousseau, it collapsed into bloodbath in
April–May 1871, only to have its republican aspirations reaffirmed by the
214
Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism
National Assembly in February 1875. The Commune’s policy was rigor-
ously anti-centralist. Taxation, the direction of local business, the magis-
tracy, police and education were all to be controlled locally, and a standing
army supplanted by a civic militia. Officers of the National Guard were to
be elected, and liberty of conscience and work was also guaranteed. The
Commune was thus a government at once republican, local, anti-centralist,
in possession of its own militia and representative of working-class elements.
The Commune of Paris, in particular, indicated that such powers would
be utilised in a socialist direction; provincial organisations, it was realised,
might not follow suit. To the socialists, the Commune symbolised a move
to divide France into a republic in which autonomous communes sent
representatives to a federative council, and in which Paris was freed from
the conservative weight of the provinces, a majority oppression caused by
‘the dogma of universal suffrage’. To anarchists like Bakunin it was ‘a bold
and outspoken negation of the State, and the opposite of an authoritarian
communist form of political organisation’ (Bakunin 1973,p.199). To Marx,
who had caustically dismissed the commune idea in 1866 as ‘Proudhonised
Stirnerianism’ (Marx and Engels 1987,p.287), its popular character as a
‘social republic’, the ‘self-government of the producers’, with all public
functionaries elected, paid workmen’s wages and directly responsible to the
Commune, was the ‘direct antithesis’ of the old state apparatus. (Some have
taken such comments as a concession to Proudhon and the anarchists, e.g.
Collins and Abramsky 1965,p.207.) It was thus the model which should
be established everywhere, with rural delegates being sent to towns, and
district assemblies sending deputies to Paris, thus ending ‘the State power
which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and
superior to, the nation itself’ (Marx and Engels 1971,pp.72–4). To some
revolutionaries it also necessitated a temporary dictatorship to meet the
threat from without, as in 1793, as well as from within, from a treacherous
National Assembly which made peace with Germany in early 1871.
Towards the end of this period a revolutionary syndicalist movement,
centred in the Conf
´
ed
´
eration G
´
en
´
erale du Travail, founded at Limoges in
1895, also arose in France (see Jennings 1990;Ridley1970). It agreed with
Marx generally on the theory of t he class war, placing greater emphasis
however on strikes, and especially the general strike, as its manifestation. Its
ultimate aim was also the abolition of the state, bureaucracy, police, army
and legal apparatus, with confederated labour supplying all these functions
in the future. This strategy was to meet with support from Georges Sorel,
amongst others, though the movement rapidly became reformist.
215
Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek
Germany
In Germany ‘French ideas’ after 1789, while ambiguously accepted as
imposed by a conqueror during the revolutionary wars, left a legacy of
secularism, anti-parochial nationalism and an appeal to popular sovereignty
which was not easily suppressed (Blanning 1983; Gooch 1927). The mod-
ern democratic movement emerged in the Vor m
¨
arz period and reached its
first apogee during the Frankfurt parliament at the time of the 1848 revolu-
tions (see Sperber 1991). Theoretically, German radicalism also received an
important impetus from the circle of ‘Young’ or ‘Left’ Hegelians to which
Marx belonged, including Ludwig Feuerbach and Arnold Ruge (Breckman
1999; Moggach 2006). Some of this group, like Bakunin, became anarchists;
others, like Ruge, remained radical democrats and republicans. Marx pro-
gressed to communism, promoting the necessity of violent revolution from
the mid-1840s onwards. The young Engels, too, certainly exalted the thera-
peutic effects of proletarian revolutionary violence. Both later accepted the
possibility, however, that the transition to socialism might be peaceful, where
democratic processes permitted it, though this was not a view accepted by
all later Marxists. By the early twentieth century the term ‘radical’ came
increasingly also to be used in reference to right-wing movements, which
association, as rechtsradikal, it often retains today.
In the latter decades of the century the term ‘radical’ came moreover
in some circles to be associated with a movement of moral and cultural
reform, in which the idea of surpassing or transcending existing norms,
‘bourgeois’ or otherwise, but especially moral restraints upon individual
self-expression and creativity, was central. Some of these concepts were
indebted to the more individualistic forms of earlier nineteenth-century
anarchism, in Germany notably that of Max Stirner, whose The Ego and
His Own appeared in 1845. Stirner in turn has been controversially linked
to Friedrich Nietzsche, and described as presenting a ‘remarkable antici-
pation...of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Superman, and the demand for a
“transvaluation of all values” beyond all current standards of good and evil’
(Muirhead 1915,p.68). How far Nietzsche himself regarded the Superman
ideal as ‘radical’ can be contested; he certainly spoke of desiring a ‘radical’
cure to social malaise and/or seeking ‘radical’ change (e.g. Nietzsche 1903,
para. 534), but did not use the term positively in a primarily political sense.
Some recent accounts have, however, suggested that to the degree that Niet-
zsche was a ‘political’ thinker at all, his ideas should be conceived in terms
of a ‘politics of aristocratic radicalism’ (Detwiler 1990). Here the Superman
216
Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism
ideal functions ‘radically’ to subvert democracy, and to reimpose upon the
‘mass’ or ‘herd’ a higher ethical ideal, based also in part, if again controver-
sially, upon a Social Darwinist conception of evolutionary type. This was
to be accomplished by recreating what Nietzsche termed ‘the aristocratic
equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods)’
(Nietzsche 1910,p.30), an ideal also based in part upon Nietzsche’s con-
ception of the Greek polis and its valuation of goodness, truth and beauty.
‘Radicalism’ thus describes a reversion to a purer or original moral type,
in Nietzsche’s case prior to a Judaeo-Christian ‘transvaluation’ of values,
in order to avoid a ‘nihilist’ endpoint, God having been pronounced dead,
and the subversion of all other myths being one of Nietzsche’s central aims.
Hence a new value was to be imposed both upon the individual, in terms of
self-mastery, and upon society, in terms of the ‘will to power’, Nietzsche’s
central and much contested concept. Whatever the merits of this descrip-
tion of Nietzsche’s aims, various of his followers certainly assumed that the
master’s aim could be adapted to shoring up the existing patrician order
(e.g. Ludovici 1915).
In Germany republicanism emerged as a serious alter native during the
1848 revolutions, under the leadership of men like Friedrich Hecker, Carl
Schurz and Gustav von Struve, though many radicals preferred the creation
of an empire to that of a republic. Defeated in the Frankfurt parliament of
April 1848, the republicans, whose strength lay chiefly in the south-west,
were beaten in the field by Prussia by early 1849.
Republicanism enjoyed intermittent support in other European countries
in the later nineteenth century. In Spain a republic was declared in 1873,
but suffered four coups d’
´
etat and the rule of five presidents before collapsing
in 1875.
The United States
All American political thought is republican in the sense of denying the effi-
cacy of monarchy, but the democratic extension of the franchise occurred
only gradually through this period. Nineteenth-century American radical-
ism was born from the more populist interpretation of the principles of
1776, often associated with Thomas Jefferson, and linked to the growing
inequality of wealth, one critic by the mid-1830s denouncing ‘what we
call a Republican government’ as ‘sheer aristocracy’ (Brown 1834,p.43). It
received an impetus from generations of foreign radical
´
emigr
´
es, from British
democrats fleeing repression in the 1790s (Twomey 1989) to Germans after
217
Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek
1848 (Pozzetta 1981; Wittke 1952; Zucker 1950), and Poles, Russians and
Jews in later decades (Johnpoll 1981;Pope2001). Domestically, it evolved as
a consequence of industrialisation, growing social inequality, and such issues
as banking and the control of the money supply, which spawned the Free
Silver and Greenback movements, and the growth of ‘trusts’ or economic
monopolies, particularly the railways, and anti-union activity. It produced
a variety of movements, from Jacksonian Radicalism in the 1830s through
the radical democracy of Locofocoism and Free Democracy in the 1850s
and 1860s, to Abolitionism and various forms of agrarian populism, like
the Grange movement, consumer and producer co-operation, and social-
ism, both domestic and foreign in inspiration. Occasionally proposals for a
republican agrarian law were mooted (e.g. Campbell 1848,pp.110–18). In
the later century a number of prominent leaders emerged, notably Henry
Demarest Lloyd (see Lloyd 1894), and even more, Henry George, whose
single-tax theory was of worldwide influence (see George 1879). Following
the example of the British experiment at Freetown, freed slaves established
a variety of separatist and pan-Africanist movements, resulting, amongst
other things, in the founding of the colony, then later the state, of Liberia
in 1822 (Hall 1978; McAdoo 1983;Robinson2001).
Non-European anti-imperial revolutionary and resistance movements
The nineteenth century was the period of the greatest imperial expan-
sion in European, North American and Russian history, resulting in the
deaths of at least thirty million people and, when poverty-fuelled famine
and civil war exacerbated by foreign intervention are included, possibly
100 million. Some of these conquests were almost openly genocidal in
intent; that is to say, the near-extermination of native populations, often
masked by a Social Darwinist discourse on ‘inferior’ races, was an expected,
accepted, and even desired outcome of conquest. Such expansion was,
however, usually described in terms of the need for territory, raw mate-
rials and new markets (see Claeys 2010). But conquest was everywhere
resisted, and here European ideals of revolution, freedom, equality and jus-
tice intermingled with adherence to and renovation of traditional forms of
polity and social and religious organisation (Wesseling 1978 and Bayly, this
volume).
In the early nineteenth century the most notable extra-European rev-
olutionary developments were in Latin and South America (see Ander-
son 1991,pp.47–82; Schroeder 1998; and generally Gurr 1970). Following
218
Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism
Spain’s defeat by Napoleon in 1808, Venezuela declared itself an independent
republic in 1811, Chile proclaimed a provisional constitution in 1812,both
only to suffer defeats by royalist forces. In 1821, Spanish rule was overthrown
in Mexico, and by 1825, when Sim
´
on Bol
´
ıvar captured Upper Peru, Spain
was left with a tenuous hold on the New World, retaining only Puerto Rico
and Cuba. Brazil became independent in 1822, first under a monarchy, then,
from 1889, a republic. The importation of ideas of popular sovereignty, par-
ticipation and representation from Spanish resistance to Napoleon assisted
this process. But conservative notions of independence more accommo-
dating to political elites, who often allied with military leader s, tended
to take precedence over those based on French ideals of liberty, equality
and fraternity, despite the more revolutionary aspirations of Francisco de
Miranda, and others (Rodriguez 1997,p.122). The sentiments of Bernardo
O’Higgins, who proclaimed that he detested ‘aristocracy . . . beloved equal-
ity is my idol’ (quoted in Lynch 1986,p.142), were thus comparatively rare.
If Borbon absolutism was unattractive, political participation still remained
limited to the elite, with high property qualifications for the franchise. More
liberal political ideas tended to follow rather than precede rebellion, and
were often resisted by both white and Creole elites fearing ethnic unrest
from darker-skinned slaves, natives and peasants. Ethnic diversity, despite
some social banditry and slave revolts, generally inhibited the formation
of national identities in the new states, with American-born Creole elites
often siding with Spain (Macfarlane and Posada-Carb
´
o 1999,pp.1–12).
But an emergent anti-Spanish ‘American’ identity was also marked (Lynch
1986,pp.1–2). Secularising trends were rare. Ideas of state intervention to
promote education and prosperity, such as those proposed by O’Higgins,
as well as economic protectionism, attracted greater support than those of
laisser-faire. Republicanism was common. But even liberals like Bol
´
ıvar, the
first president of Columbia, who upheld principles like judicial review and a
restraint of presidential power, and eventually turned against slavery, insisted
on a strong executive and a franchise limited by property ownership and
literacy (Lynch 2006,pp.144–5). Caudillism, or the emergence of regional
warlords hostile to centralised authority, often followed revolutionary wars.
Mexico settled on an emperor, and monarchist sentiments were evident
amongst leaders like Jos
´
e de San Martin. Insurrection centred on Caracas,
Buenos Aires and Santiago, while Mexico City was initially integral to the
defence of Spanish rule, and Cuba did not successfully rebel until the end of
the century. The process of national independence was thus an exception-
ally uneven one, with modernising elites playing a key role in determining
219
Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek
whether wars of independence took place, and the directions in which they
tended (Dominquez 1980,p.3).
To the north, an immensely influential anti-colonial precedent was estab-
lished with the overthrow of French rule in Saint Domingue in 1791 by
500,000 slaves (one-third died by 1804) inspired by the new revolutionary
principles and led by the ‘black Spartacus’, Toussaint L’Ouverture. ‘The
only successful slave revolt in history’ (James 1963, p. ix) led, after the defeat
of French, Spanish and English armies, to the uniquely symbolic founda-
tion of the first self-governing emancipated slave republic in Haiti in 1804
(see Geggus 2001). Revolts also occurred in Jamaica, Surinam and elsewhere
(see generally Genovese 1979). In Brazil, between 1807 and 1835, they were
sometimes ‘millenarian’, and often religiously inspired, in one case by Islam
(Reis 1993). The aspiration amongst rebels of becoming peasant-proprietors
was widespread. In the West Indies, Jamaica had witnessed a slave revolt in
1831 in which Baptists, including missionaries, were implicated. Here, too,
an uprising of ex-slaves in 1865, generally known as the ‘Jamaica Insurrec-
tion’, was repressed with sanguinary fury by Governor Eyre, resulting in
some 2,000 deaths, and became a cause c
´
el
`
ebre (Semmel 1962). French rule
was also contested in North and West Africa and Indochina (for Algeria
see, for example, Laremont 1999; for West Africa, Crowder 1978; and for
Vietnam, Marr 1971; Trung 1967), as was German rule, whose policy of
native annihilation provoked an uprising in South-West Africa between
1904 and 1907 which was viciously suppressed. The death-toll here, when
famine following the use of scorched-earth tactics is included, was in the
hundreds of thousands (Stoecker 1987). A similar story could be told of
Dutch rule in Java, where a war was fought between 1825 and 1830 which
took some 200,000 native lives (see Kuitenbrouwer 1991). Portuguese rule
was also contested (for background, see Boxer 1963). Resistance to impe-
rialist expansion by non-European powers, notably to Russia in Central
Asia and Japan in Korea, also occurred. (For Japan see Beasley 1987;Kim
1967, and Yeol 1985. For Russia see Geyer 1987.) In the United States
indigenous peoples were successively isolated, decimated by war and dis-
ease and confined to reservations (Bonham 1970; Silva 2004). Exploita-
tion and dislocation through the introduction of new methods of com-
merce and new technologies, relative deprivation, the disruption of village
life
and the displacement of native elites were common causes of discontent
underlying such rebellions. Prophetic, messianic and millenarian responses
to conquest were common to ‘revitalisation movements’ in many reg ions, as
was the description of the pre-colonial past as a golden age. Reactions were
220
Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism
commonly defined less by class consciousness than antagonism towards the
colonial elite, whether European or co-opted natives, and less by nation-
alism than regional or tribal loyalty, or adherence to a charismatic, usually
prophetic, leader (Adas 1987; Thrupp 1970).
In the largest European empire, rejection of British rule by native popu-
lations occurred throughout this period. Aboriginal resistance developed in
Australia from the period of fir st occupation in 1788, led initially between
1790 and 1802 by one Pemulwuy, and continued throughout the nineteenth
century. Revolts were brutally repressed, and aboriginal lands, often declared
terra nullius, or unoccupied, were seized without compensation (Reynolds
1982). Divided by linguistic difference and tribal antagonism, lacking an
authoritarian political or military structure, native peoples rarely engaged
in concerted rebellion, though drilling and organisation were sometimes in
evidence. ‘Domesticated’ natives also sometimes organised attacks on set-
tlers (Robinson and York 1977,pp.5, 11). Escaped convicts like George
Clarke, who painted his body like a native, also occasionally assisted aborig-
inal raids on settlements (Robinson and York 1977,p.120). Tribal law was
sometimes used as justification for armed rebellion, but massacre and forced
resettlement eventually curtailed resistance (Newbury, 1999). In Tasmania
the struggle, eventually ending in genocide, lasted from 1804 to 1834. Con-
flict intensified during the Black War of 1827–30, and racial enmity reached
new depths of bitterness. Between 20,000 and 50,000 natives probably died
violent deaths throughout the centur y in Australia (Reynolds 1982,pp.
122–3).
Though inhibited by inter-tribal rivalry, the Maori resistance in New
Zealand, lasting from 1843–72, was better organised, more prolonged, and
eventually, with the cession of valuable land rights, vastly more successful
(Ryan and Parham, 2002). Here resistance in the 1860s was led by the Maori-
Christian hybrid religious movement, the Hau Hau, under the prophet Te
Ua Haumene. Equally formidable opponents were the Zulus, who inflicted
serious losses on Britain at Ishlandwana in 1879 (Chikeka 2004;Crais1991;
Jaffe 1994). In Canada, the British faced both a native population and disaf-
fected French habitants, who, together with English-Canadian radicals led by
William Lyon Mackenzie, staged a rebellion, with Louis Papineau, in 1837,
which aimed at secession and the creation of an independent republic (see
Read 1896). There was also resistance in West Africa (Pawlikova-Vilhanova
1988), Malaya (see Nonini 1992), Burma and elsewhere. Memorable there-
after as perhaps the most symbolically significant anti-imperialist victory of
the period was the loss of General Charles Gordon at Khartoum in 1885.
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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek
Here Muslim revivalists conducting a jihad, or holy war, led by the Mahdi,
overwhelmed British forces and established an Islamic republic which lasted
until 1898 (Holt 1970;Nicoll2004;Wingate1968).
By far the most important instance of large-scale rebellion in the British
Empire was the Indian or Sepoy Mutiny of 1857–8, also called the First
Indian War of Independence. The grievances underlying it were more
broadly social, ethnic and religious than political, though a sentiment of
Indian nationalism was both a cause and consequence of the growing disaf-
fection of Britain’s Indian subjects. It is now widely recognised that deep-
seated resentment of European rule, and especially religious proselytism,
were crucial sources of this war. Interference with native customs like sati,
or widow-burning, and of course the affair of the greased cartridges, affect-
ing Hindu and Muslim alike, the ostensible, but really only final cause of
the outbreak, were also germane (see Srivastava, 1997). The reinstatement
of Mughal rule, partly in response to the East India Company’s treatment
of the King of Delhi, was certainly also a motivating factor, though when
Delhi was seized a council of twelve was erected which disregarded the
King’s authority (Buckler 1922,pp.71–100). Being soldiers, the revolution-
aries were far better organised than other indigenous rebels in this period,
and many retained their pre-existing command structures throughout the
struggle. Their professional grievances are now recognised as central to the
Mutiny itself (David 2002,p.398). Native officer s, often ambitious profes-
sionals fairly anticipating greater promotion prospects under a native than
the Company government, also provided a cadre of sophisticated and effec-
tive leaders, some of whom sought more directly political ends. In annexed
Oudh the revolt assumed the form of a popular movement in support of
king and country (Metcalfe 1974,p.37). But recent studies, challenging the
idea that the revolt was a war of national independence, have concluded that
nowhere did a general anti-Europeanism emerge, though the gap between
native and Briton had been growing since the 1820s (Chowdhury 1965;
David 2002,p.39; Sengupta 1975,p.9). Though most natives remained
loyal to British rule, the rebellion might well have succeeded had anticipated
Persian and Russian assistance arrived. It met with sympathy from educated
Russian and Chinese opinion, and provided a vital precedent for later anti-
imperial struggles, some of which emerged from an increasingly radical
Bengali intellectual milieu (MacMann 1935,pp.40–69; Majumedar 1962;
Pal 1991). The Indian Congress Movement emerged in 1885 out of the
spirit of post-Mutiny nationalism and both Hindu and Muslim revivalism,
and was assisted in part by Allan Octavian Hume, the son of a prominent
222
Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism
English radical of the preceding generation, Joseph Hume, and later, by the
socialist Annie Besant (Lovett 1920).
Various European upheavals also had an impact on other parts of the
world. The revolutions of 1848 had a considerable if delayed impact, gen-
erally by encouraging greater egalitarianism, the growth of participatory
politics, anti-slavery sentiments, the diffusion of socialist ideas and a ‘social’
critique of liberalism, in Chile, Peru, Mexico and other parts of Latin
and Southern America during subsequent decades (Thomson 2002). The
growth of nationalistic sentiment and ‘patriotic’ resistance to European
imperialism sometimes spurred g reater repression, however, as in the case of
the partly Christian-inspired anti-Tartar (but also anti-opium) Taiping rev-
olutionary movement (1850–65). Here secret societies attempted to create a
theocracy based upon a fraternity of kings, and encouraged some redistribu-
tion of wealth to the poor. They were only defeated with Western assistance,
at the cost of many millions of lives (Clarke and Gregory 1982; Cohen 1965;
Michael 1966). Suppression of the fanatically anti-Christian, anti-foreign
and anti-Manchu spontaneous peasant upheaval known as the Boxer Rebel-
lion in China of 1900, which marked an important stage in China’s quest
for independence (Keown-Boyd 1991;Purcell1963), also further hastened
Western penetration of the region. It was accompanied by unprecedented
looting and the wanton destr uction of China’s cultural heritage.
3 Secret societies and revolutionary conspiracies
The politics of insurrection and mass violence
An important if often blurred distinction in the politics of revolutionary
violence is that between insurrectionary and terrorist violence. In the for-
mer instance, usually, an assassination (or several) is intended to provoke
an uprising to over throw what is regarded as an illegitimate regime. An
act of violence, in other words, is intended to trigger a revolution, like a
coup d’
´
etat by one or a few individuals against an established government,
on the basis of a constitutionally or morally justified right of resistance
(for a British instance, see Baxter 1795). By contrast terrorist violence is
usually part of a prolonged campaign which often functions as a substitute
for popular uprising. In this section we will examine insurrectionary ideas,
and in the next, ‘terrorism’. We will not consider secret organisations in
this period whose function was not centrally but only marginally political
(though such distinctions are often contentious), such as the Ku Klux Klan,
223