CHAPTER VIII - LIBERALISM AND CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENTS

Summary

Eighteen-thirty, the ‘revolution stopped half-way’, and eighteen-forty-eight, the ‘turning point at which modern history failed to turn’, are the principal landmarks of this period during which the forms of government of states changed perhaps more sharply and in more interesting and varied ways than at any other time between the revolutionary decade of the 1790's and the ten years that shook the world between 1910 and 1920.

In a brief period of some forty years between 1830 and 1871 France experimented with a semi-liberal ‘bourgeois monarchy’, a radical Second Republic, a semi-authoritarian prince-presidency, an authoritarian Second Empire (see ch. XVII), a so-called ‘liberal empire’, an ultra-radical Paris Commune and an (at first) ill-defined Third Republic. Great Britain passed two parliamentary reform acts (cf. ch. XIII, pp. 335 and 336), abandoning the 400-year-old forty-shilling franchise in the counties and sweeping away the rotten and pocket boroughs, and in 1870 was on the eve of adopting that secret ballot which the dreaded Chartists had demanded as one of their ‘Six Points’ in 1839. Prussia, after a false dawn of liberalism when Frederick William IV became king in 1840 (like that in Italy when Pius IX was elected pope in 1846), saw a united Diet called for the first time in 1847, initiated a constitutional regime in 1848 and, after briefly adopting universal manhood suffrage, settled down at last as a mildly limited monarchy (though with a distinctly undemocratic class franchise) under the constitution of 1850—which was to last until the year 1918 (see ch. xix passim).