Political Restoration and Reform
France
Restoration refers to the events in France where the Bourbons were restored to the throne following the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. The throne that Louis XVIII returned to was quite different from the one his older brother had until 1789. The Charter of 1814 contained many of the freedoms from the revolutionary period, such as freedom of religion, even though presented by the king and contained no mention of popular sovereignty. The charter angered many royalists by confirming land purchases made from nationalized church property. It allowed for a constitutional monarchy, with a chamber of peers and a chamber of deputies made up of a very restricted system. The king held power, because only he could introduce legislation, and ministers were responsible to him, not the assembly.
In 1820, the son of the younger brother of Louis, Duke de Berry, thought to be the last male Bourbon, was assassinated. The ultra-royalists, those who wanted to revive the absolute monarchy, used the assassination to pressure the king to rein in the press and to give more rights to the aristocracy, including compensation for nobles who had lost land during the Revolution.
Political repression increased after Louis XVIII’s death in 1824, when his younger brother Charles X came to the throne. He felt more bitter about the Revolution than Louis had. A year after taking control, he introduced a Law of Sacrilege, which ruled death as the penalty for any attack on the church. In 1829, Charles appointed the Prince of Polignac as his chief minister, a man disliked throughout the country for being a leading ultra-royalist. Polignac issued the July Ordinances, which dissolved the newly elected assembly, took away the right to vote from the upper bourgeoisie, and imposed rigid censorship. That same month, revolution broke out in Paris. Leading liberals were afraid of the Parisian mob and wanted to avoid the creation of a republic because they associated them with the violence of the first French republic dating back to 1792. Instead, they turned to Louis Phillipe, the Duke of Orleans, a liberal who had stayed in France during the Revolution. The 1830 Revolution ended with the crowning of Louis Phillipe and the creation of what ecame known as the bourgeois, or July monarchy.
Revolutionary Movements
People across Europe showed that it would be impossible to stop their desire for change.
In Spain, King Ferdinand VII had been restored to the throne following the collapse of French control in 1814. He was restored on the condition that he honor the liberal constitution of 1812 drawn up by the Cortes (the Spanish parliament), which had met in Cadiz, the one part of Spain not conquered by Napoleon. Once restored to power, Ferdinand dissolved the Cortes and persecuted those liberals who had drawn up the constitution. In 1820, a rebellion began among army divisions that were about to be sent to South America to put down the rebellions against the Spanish Empire. The small Spanish middle-class soon joined the army divisions in the rebellion. Although the king agreed to end the rebellion, Austria, France, Prussia, and Russia wanted to intervene to stop the revolt. The British refused to directly intervene; they did not want the five great powers of Europe to get involved in putting down internal rebellions in other nations. Two years later, a French army acted unilaterally—although with the support of Russia, Prussia, and Austria—and restored Ferdinand to absolute power.
A similar revolt took place in Portugal, where a group of army officers wanted to draw up a constitutional monarchy under John VI, who had fled to Brazil during the Napoleonic Wars. A more serious revolt broke out in Naples, which Metternich labeled the “greatest crisis” of his career. Similar to Spain, King Ferdinand of Naples had made promises while in exile to rule as a constitutional monarch, although once restored to the throne, he refused to give up any of his absolute powers. Neapolitan army officers joined with members of the Bourgeoisie and, with the assistance of secret nationalistic societies such as the Carbonari, began to oppose the match. The revolt led to nationalistic feelings throughout Italy and to another revolt in the Kingdom of Sardinia, which ultimately had no result. Metternich wanted to put down the revolt in Naples, but once again the British refused to participate in a joint attack. Metternich wanted the support of the other great powers, so he called the rulers of Austria, Prussia, and Russia to the Austrian town of Troppau to create the Troppau Protocol, which stated that the great European powers had the right to intervene in revolutionary situations. The following year, the rebellion in Naples was put down with the help of Austrian troops.
Liberals throughout Europe looked with hopeful eyes to the Greek revolt of 1821. Liberals were passionate about this revolt because Greece was the birthplace of democracy. The romantic poet Lord Byron went to Greece to aid the rebels in their struggle against the Ottoman Empire and died not on the battlefield but from a fever. The Greek revolt was also tied to what became known as the “Eastern Question,”—what should be done regarding the increasing weakness of the Ottoman Empire? By 1827, Britain, France, and Russia organized a combined naval force to intervene on the side of the Greek revolutionaries, and in the following year the Russians attacked the Ottomans on land. By 1832, Greece declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire, although it became a monarchy and was hardly a center of liberalism. Around the same time, the Ottoman Emperor granted independence to Serbia, which was protected by Russia. The Russians saw themselves as Serbia’s champion because ethnic Slavs populated both Russia and Serbia.
Russia had emerged as a great European power as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, although it was a more backward nation in many ways than any other European country. Alexander I had ruled Russia and at various times had toyed with the idea of political reform, although in the latter part of his reign he grew more and more reactionary. His death in 1825 produced confusion as to the succession; Constantine, the older of his two surviving brothers, turned down the throne, so Nicholas I stepped up. In the confusion, a small group of military officers decided to stage a revolt in support of Constantine, who they wrongly thought was in favor of a constitutional monarchy and had been unfairly removed from succession. This “Decembrist” Revolt was put down rapidly and with great brutality. In the following years, Nicholas ruled with an iron fist, making sure to end any additional movements for reform within his vast empire.
Great Britain
The French Revolution and the wars against Napoleon had created a backlash against the idea of political reform in Great Britain. The governing elite were very wary of possible social unrest owing to the economic downturn that occurred following the end of the wars. Such fears were realized in 1819 when a crowd of 60,000 gathered in St. Peter’s field in Manchester to demand fundamental political changes, including universal male suffrage and annual parliaments. Although those who attended were for the most part peaceful, the soldiers on hand shot 11 members of the crowd. This became known as the Peterloo Massacre. Soon after this disgraceful event, parliament passed the repressive Six Acts, which banned demonstrations and imposed censorship.
Great Britain became more conducive to reform beginning in 1824 with the repeal of the Combination Acts, which had banned union activity. In 1829, restrictions dating back to the 17th c. on the rights of Catholics to hold political office and government posts were lifted. In 1832, the Great Reform Bill was passed. The bill was not radical—although it expanded the electorate to include those who had become wealthy as a result of industrialization, only 1:5 males in Great Britain could vote. It reduced the number of so-called rotten boroughs, which were sparsely populated electoral districts. The Bill succeeded in showing that political reform was possible in Great Britain without having to resort to the barricades as in continental Europe. The new electorate created out of the Great Reform Bill undertook additional reforms. Although inspired by the middle-class members of the parliament, they showed a new harshness toward the poor. The Poor Law of 1834 forced the destitute to enter into workhouses where conditions were purposefully miserable to discourage people from seeking assistance. On a more humanitarian level, in 1833 slavery was banned in the British Empire, and the Factory Act of 1833 reduced the number of hours that children could work in factories and established government inspectors to ensure adequate working conditions. One sign that the new political order in Great Britain was dominated by manufacturing interests as opposed to the old landed class was the 1846 elimination of the Corn Laws, which had imposed high tariffs on imported grain to support domestic growers. Manufacturing had long supported the end of the Corn Laws, believing that lower food prices would allow them to pay lower wages to their factory workers.