5 - Reaction, Revolution and Empire: The Nineteenth Century

Summary

Democracy is like a rising tide; it only recoils to come back with greater force, and soon one sees that for all its fluctuation it is always gaining ground. The immediate future of European society is completely democratic: this can in no way be doubted.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1833) (Tocqueville 1958: 67)

What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the Destinies, which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these latter days? There lies the question for us. Whence comes it, this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the meaning of it?

Thomas Carlyle (1850: 13)

INTRODUCTION

Following Napoleon's last hurrah at Waterloo in June 1815, Europe's great monarchies were still standing (some only just), but they now existed in a world that had undergone irreversible change. The ideas and principles of the revolution remained, even if their French standard-bearers had finally been defeated. This meant a simple restoration of the ancien régime was not possible. With historic right and custom undermined, international society would instead be explicitly founded on principles of legitimacy that were defined against the popular doctrines that had emerged from revolutionary France.

If many of the fundamental tenets of the revolution would eventually, in one form or another, succeed the old hierarchical order of the monarchy, aristocracy and church, in the immediate aftermath of French defeat, the forces of reaction were overwhelmingly in the ascent. The course of the revolution seemingly vindicated many of the complaints against popular rule levelled throughout the centuries, with the excesses of the Terror providing clear evidence of the dangers of seeking to establish a democracy in the modern world. John Jay, one of the authors of the Federalist papers, summed up the prevailing sentiment in a letter to William Wilberforce: ‘The French revolution has so discredited democracy … that I doubt its giving you much more trouble’ (quoted in Morantz 1971: 149). In the short term, this was a rather accurate assessment, although the situation slowly changed, spurred by developments in the United States and the 1848 revolutions. Given that democracy's meaning and significance altered during this period in a relatively gradual and piecemeal fashion, the structure and analysis of this chapter focuses more on these longer trends.