2

The Paradoxes of Freedom

LORDS AND SERFS

Savva Dmitrievich Purlevsky (1800–68), born in the village of Velikoe in central Russia, had few good words to say about the system of obligations and impositions under which he had grown up, the system of serfdom. ‘Our peasant dependence,’ he complained, ‘was bitter!’ His village belonged to a small estate owned by a lieutenant-colonel, and consisted of around 3,000 acres of arable land, 432 acres of forest, and 1,620 acres of meadow and pasture. Dissolute and undisciplined, the colonel spent his life in St Petersburg, drinking, gambling and womanizing, and never visited his estate, which was run for him by a steward who creamed off much of the income for himself. Although most of the peasants on the estate were illiterate, Purlevsky learned to read with the aid of an ABC given him by the parish priest. He began to collect books with the small sums of money relatives gave him on his birthday and other occasions. This was to prove more than useful as he grew up.

The villagers, around 1,300 in number, had to pay the seigneur an annual rent. They were able to afford this without too much trouble, however, since besides the agricultural produce they farmed for their own subsistence, they also grew flax and other products which they traded on the market. The villagers knew they were better off than most. ‘The common folk of the northern provinces lived almost entirely on rye bread and grey vegetable soup,’ wrote Purlevsky. ‘Everything the peasant household produced – dairy products, beef, lamb, eggs, and so on – was sold out of necessity. People lived on peas, oats, and steamed turnips. Our village was an exception. Trade and crafts brought us money and made us richer than other villages.’ Nevertheless, the villagers of Velikoe had to suffer repeated additional demands from their seigneur, who periodically sent down orders from St Petersburg to be read out in the village assembly. On one occasion, for example, he commanded his steward ‘to select four tall men no older than twenty, who would be suitable to stand on the footboard at the back of his carriage, as well as four beautiful eighteen-year-old girls [for purposes that he left unspecified but which can be guessed at]. All these people were to be taken personally to the landlord in St Petersburg.’

Russian noble landowners frequently lived away from their estates. They spent much of their time and money in St Petersburg or in French resorts and central European spas, running up enormous debts at the gambling table. Even if they were not indebted or mortgaged up to the hilt, they often saw their estates as little more than sources of income to sustain their lifestyle in the big city. So it was with the village of Velikoe. After the colonel’s death in 1817, his daughter and her husband, a general in the Russian Army, arrived in the village and demanded the immediate payment of 200,000 roubles, a vast sum, as an advance on the next ten years’ rent. The peasants refused point blank. Rebuffed, the general and his wife climbed into their coach and left for St Petersburg. But this was far from being the end of the affair. Soon after, fresh orders were read out to the village assembly. The new seigneurs had mortgaged the estate as security for a twenty-five-year loan, and required the villagers to pay the interest, calculated at 30,000 roubles a year, on top of their existing annual rent of 20,000. Those who failed to pay their share were to be conscripted into the army or taken off to Siberia to work in the seigneurs’ metallurgical factories. The villagers received this fresh demand in shocked silence. ‘At that very moment, for the first time in my life,’ Purlevsky wrote later, ‘I tasted the sorrow of my status as a serf.’ What mattered indeed was the powerlessness of the enserfed. There were estates where peasants were beaten or whipped by their lord, or put in an iron collar if they disobeyed his orders. Purlevsky had even heard of a seigneur who punished a peasant boy for throwing a stone at one of his hunting dogs by stripping the lad of his clothes, which he showed to his borzois to sniff, then putting him in a field and loosing the dogs from their leads to hunt him down. (Fortunately the dogs did not harm him, and the emperor, on hearing this story, had the landlord arrested; there were limits even under serfdom, and he had clearly transgressed them.) Nevertheless, the serfs, not just educated ones like Purlevsky, keenly felt their overwhelming impotence in the face of seigneurial demands.

In the 1820s the situation of the serfs in Velikoe began to deteriorate even further. A new German steward started to interfere in who married whom, flogged those who disobeyed, forced serfs to work in the manorial textile factory, and had troops sent in when they complained. A hundred men were publicly whipped in front of all the serfs on the estate. Although the steward was replaced by another one who was less brutal, the peasants continued to complain about mismanagement until Purlevsky, almost the only man in the village able to read and write, was himself appointed steward in a bid by the seigneur to quell the discontent. He began to improve the administration of the estate and persuaded the seigneur to establish a school and a medical centre in the village. But Purlevsky’s assistants started embezzling money behind his back, and the seigneur, blaming him for the financial irregularities when they came to light, summoned Purlevsky to St Petersburg, where he gave him a severe dressing-down. Terrified that he would be whipped as a punishment, Purlevsky absconded, making his way first to Moscow and subsequently Kiev. Then, building a raft for himself out of reeds, he floated down the river Dnieper all the way to Moldova, some 330 miles away. Arriving in ‘Yassakh, exhausted, ragged, hungry and without money’, he was taken in by Russian exiles belonging to the ‘Old Believer’ religious sect known as the Skoptsy. The German traveller Baron August von Haxthausen (1792–1866) came across them on his travels in 1843, and described their ‘strange secret ceremonies’, mostly held at night, where ‘their shrill voices, dismal fervour, and wild enthusiasm made an indelible and painful impression on me’. They practised not only celibacy but also, alarmingly, self-castration.

The Skoptsy made a living as carters, and soon Purlevsky proved his worth to them by his honesty and hard work. One night, however, he overheard two of them talking about him. ‘He is a good fellow, we need to convert him to our faith.’ As Haxthausen had observed, the Skoptsy were ‘very zealous in making converts to their doctrines, and in performing the operation alluded to upon their disciples’. Forced conversions, Purlevsky had learned, were far from uncommon. Terrified, he fled again, this time westwards for over 600 miles before reaching the Danube, where he fell in with another group of sectarian Russian exiles, with whom he stayed a further two years, working in the fisheries. In 1834, however, he discovered that Nicholas I had amnestied runaway serfs, so he left for Odessa some 800 miles to the east, where they were now allowed to settle legally, and began working as a waiter in a bar. Before long, he had become the manager, and then, with the help of a regular customer, he went into business as a sugar merchant, re-establishing contact with his family back in Velikoe. By 1856 he had saved enough to buy freedom from serfdom for his son. He died in 1868. All in all, Purlevsky’s life was a lucky one for a serf. His village was prosperous. Like many others in central Russia, where agriculture was less intensively developed than in other areas, it was slowly turning itself into an industrial town centred on textile production and trading. The nature of the village economy meant that the serfs frequently travelled on business, possessed a considerable degree of freedom of action, and could in no way be described as backward or isolated from the world outside. They had no difficulty in standing up for their rights when these were threatened, though this did not always meet with success. Yet these developments were slowly undermining the institution of serfdom. Purlevsky saw it as exacting and burdensome in financial terms, but more importantly, he bitterly resented the humiliations and injustices it imposed, so much so that in the end he ran away from it altogether.

By Purlevsky’s time, European Russia contained the vast majority of serfs who lived on the Continent. Across many western and central parts of Europe the formal institution of serfdom had come to an end under the egalitarian impact of the French Revolution of 1789, including Baden, Bavaria, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Schleswig-Holstein, Swedish Pomerania and Switzerland. In Württemberg, and in Latvia and Estonia, it was abolished in 1817. But in other areas it remained in force, including the Kingdoms of Hanover and Saxony, where the institution of serfdom was not abolished until the early 1830s; in Austria, Croatia and Hungary; in Prussia, where it continued in a weakened form until 1848 or shortly thereafter, following the rolling-back in 1816 of more radical reforms introduced five years before; and in Russia and Poland, where it remained in force until the 1860s. In Bulgaria serfdom was not abrogated in practice until 1880, and in remote Iceland, where about a quarter of the population worked in effect as serfs, it lasted until the legal compulsion for anyone without land to provide labour for a farmer was formally ended in 1894. Only in Bosnia, seized by Austria-Hungary from the Ottomans in 1878 and formally annexed in 1908, did serfdom remain until the First World War; serfs could buy their freedom, but it was expensive, and only 41,500 managed to do so by the time the war broke out. Popular resentment in the Bosnian countryside at this failure to end serfdom stored up a legacy of bitterness that was to find dramatic expression in 1914. Standing trial for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863–1914), heir to the Austrian throne, the young Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918) declared: ‘I have seen our people being steadily ruined. I am a peasant’s son and know what goes on in the villages. This is why I meant to take my revenge and I regret nothing.’ The shadow cast by serfdom across nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe was long indeed.

Serfs were not slaves (although there were slaves in Europe, notably the gypsies of Romania, who were treated as chattels and bought and sold on the open market until their emancipation by both Church and state in the 1840s, and altogether in 1848); serfs had rights as well as duties. But neither were they free agents. Because serfdom had evolved gradually over the centuries and depended for its implementation on local or regional custom, it appeared in many thousands of variants that make it difficult to generalize about the way it functioned. Fundamentally, however, it obliged the peasant farmer to work without pay on certain tasks, or for a specific number of days per week, on the estate of the local landowning aristocrat, the seigneur, and to carry out particular duties such as assisting in hunts, repairing the seigneur’s buildings, carrying messages for him, and performing various other menial tasks. The serf’s wife might have to spin for the seigneur and his family or do light manual work, and his children might be made to guard his sheep or goats, or serve in the manor house. In some areas, further obligations were imposed by the state, which could require serfs to keep the local roads and bridges in good order, pay heavy taxes, provide horses for messengers, or make the younger men in the family available for military service. In some areas, like the village of Velikoe, these obligations had been commuted into an annual rent, but this did not free the serfs from having to do things such as work in the village textile factory, obey the dictates of the steward as to who should marry whom, or submit to physical punishments if they were considered refractory by the seigneur or his steward. Whatever the nature of their obligations, their servile status was always clear.

For most serfs, work on the seigneur’s estate generally included the provision of draught animals to pull ploughs, but it could also involve labour such as threshing and winnowing, as well as bringing in the harvest. The amount of labour was usually tied to the amount of land held by the peasant. Thus in Lithuania, for example, where peasant landholdings had been divided up over the decades, a farmer with a quarter-holding was usually obliged to provide the seigneur with two workers, one male, one female, for three days a week each, a day being counted from sunrise to sunset. A three-day norm was also common in Russia, thanks to a ruling laid down by Tsar Pavel in 1797. The serf frequently had to provide produce to the seigneur, such as eggs or milk, nuts or vegetables. In western Europe, where peasant holdings were usually hereditary and labour services had often been commuted into money payments, the serf frequently had to pay the seigneur a fee in cash or kind when he transferred his holding by selling it or bequeathing it to his heirs. In addition the peasant had to pay a tithe, usually levied in produce, to the seigneur and the local priest or pastor. Across most of eastern Europe, a peasant needed the permission of his seigneur to leave his village and had to pay a fee if he moved (hence the danger of becoming, like Purlevsky, a ‘runaway serf’ if he failed to do so).

Added together, all these obligations could amount to a major burden on the peasant family. In the 1840s, for example, a substantial peasant family in Austrian Silesia owning around 42 acres of land was obliged to provide the local seigneur regular labour service with two draught animals for up to 144 days a year, plus twenty-eight days of manual labour, three days of hunting assistance, and two days of herding sheep or cattle. In addition the family had to supply 36 cubic yards of wood, a large quantity of spun yarn, sixty eggs, six hens and a goose. The annual tax on the family holding came to just over 23 florins a year, and there were additional payments and tithes adding up to another 15 florins. In the Habsburg Monarchy it was estimated that the average serf farmer paid 17 per cent of his income to the state and 24 per cent to the seigneur in money, labour or produce, totalling over 40 per cent altogether. This left very little room for keeping the family going even in good times, and almost none at all for improving its lot; for all of this prevented the peasant and his family for a large part of the week from doing work on their own farm, work that was essential to keep them alive, and deprived them of a very large proportion of the income they could have earned from the sale of their own produce had they been free to do so. The power of the serfs to determine their own fate was further restricted by the many rights and monopolies that the seigneurs possessed. In many parts of Europe serfs were only allowed to buy produce such as salt, tobacco, herring or alcohol from their seigneur, and were compelled by law and custom to bring their grain to the seigneur’s mill for grinding. Only the seigneurs were allowed to hunt, a privilege that not only deprived peasants of access to important sources of food and clothing but also caused serious damage to their crops. Deer and wild boar could roam unchecked across their land, and noble hunts sometimes charged through the fields in pursuit of their quarry, trampling on the crops in the process. In some areas peasants could not fence off their crops in case the wooden stakes injured fleeing game or impeded the hunt; they had to feed the seigneur’s hunting dogs and keep their own dogs chained up in case they ran after game. Only seigneurs could keep pigeons, which caused further damage to peasant crops, and seigneurs frequently had a monopoly over fishing rights in the local rivers and streams.

These rights and restrictions were enforced in most parts of Europe by seigneurial courts, where the local lord sat in judgement over his own refractory subjects. The powers of these courts were underwritten by the state and enforced by seigneurial police, in other words by the lord’s own servants. Peasants caught snaring game or shooting game birds, or failing to pay their dues, could be hauled before the courts and punished. Many seigneurs had their own prisons or possessed the right to administer corporal punishment, usually whipping, but more serious offences had to be referred to higher state courts, and most states, such as Russia, imposed restrictions on the degree of punishment that could be ordered. The power of these courts was not limitless but was bound by state law. Most seigneurs summoned a trained lawyer or judge to preside over the court when it sat, and the involvement of the law also meant that peasants could bring lawsuits against the seigneur if his exactions exceeded what was allowable. The growing intrusion of state law into seigneurial justice, indeed, increasingly persuaded poorer landlords to pass over their judicial powers to the owners of nearby large estates, or to suggest the abolition of seigneurial justice altogether, as the Estates of Lower Austria did in 1833. Even where peasants did bring their cases before the courts, however, they were disadvantaged in a system that across much of Europe was characterized by widespread corruption and inequality. ‘How can you expect the peasant to obtain justice,’ remarked a wealthy Russian landowner to a traveller in the 1840s, ‘when he only gives the judge an egg, while we give him a silver rouble?’ Of course, serfdom had two sides to it. Law and custom required the seigneur to provide for his serfs in hard times, to care for the sick, the elderly and the feeble-minded if their families were unable to look after them, and to feed the serfs and their draught animals while they were working for him. In many areas the serfs had the right to graze their animals on the seigneur’s pastures, to glean the pickings from harvested fields on his estate, to send their pigs to root in the lord’s forest, and to enter his forest to cut wood. In turn, the seigneur usually had the right to graze his animals on the village common land and make use of the common forests.

Encompassed as they were by a web of rights and duties, serfs could still be bought and sold along with the land they rented or owned. If the seigneur sold an estate, the serfs on it passed to the new owner. The state often gave tacit approval to the practice of selling serfs on their own without land, as implied in a Russian law that banned the use of the hammer at public auctions of serfs, or in a regulation of 1841 that made it illegal to sell parents and their unmarried children separately from one another. In Russia serfs were not just tillers of the soil; increasingly they were enrolled as domestic servants, footmen, coachmen, cooks and much more besides. The aristocrat-turned-anarchist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842–1921) noted that his father had possessed 1,200 serfs in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘Fifty servants in Moscow and sixty or so in the country did not seem too many . . . The dearest wish of every landowner was to have all his requirements supplied by his own serfs . . . so that if a guest should ask, “What a beautifully-tuned piano: did you get it tuned by Schimmel’s?” the landowner could reply: “I have my own piano-tuner.”’ Even educated serfs could be bought and sold, however, and sometimes gambled away on the gaming tables in Moscow or St Petersburg. For serfs such as Purlevsky, an educated man performing clerical functions but living in constant fear of the knout, and also for many who were much worse off than he was, the humiliation of belonging to someone else was among the worst features of the servile system.

Map 3. The Abolition of Serfdom

THE GREAT EMANCIPATION

Several pressures came together over a period of time to bring about the ending of serfdom in Europe. The first and most important of these was the growing discontent of the serfs themselves. Especially during times of hardship they found the exactions imposed on them unbearable. Officials in many areas expressed the fear that peasant soldiers returning from the wars against Napoleon would now turn their arms against their landlords. In Russia historians have counted nearly 2,000 violent peasant disturbances between 1826 and 1840, with troops called out to restore order in 381 of these cases. The number of disturbances increased dramatically after the Crimean War (1854–6), as serfs began to anticipate a measure of emancipation, with riots spreading rapidly between 1857 and 1861, necessitating the use of troops on 903 occasions. Even in areas where serfdom had been formally abolished, as in Russian-ruled Estonia in 1816, residual obligations requiring the provision of unpaid labour on specific occasions could still arouse bitter resentment; a major revolt on an estate near Tallinn in 1858 saw an army of 800 peasants confronted by regular troops, involving deaths and injuries and a mass trial resulting in large numbers of the peasants being sentenced to death by the courts or transported to Siberia. Serf revolts could take many forms. At their most basic, they involved serfs taking everyday matters into their own hands, as in 1834 when the inhabitants of four villages in Lower Austria drove the seigneurial flocks from the village pastures, remaining obdurate until troops arrived to enforce the lord’s grazing rights. Peasant resistance could also be expressed more mundanely, keeping it within the letter of the law. By the 1830s seigneurs in Silesia were complaining that the peasants were sending their youngest son, often a child, to perform labour service, while in Austria they were paying dues late, sending stringy chickens, addled eggs and mouldy honey as tribute, working slowly and with reluctance, and in some areas keeping an especially old and decrepit horse for work on the seigneur’s demesne. In Poland and Russia, when a serf decided to take his time over a job, he said he was going to ‘work as you work on the demesne’. In addition, increasing numbers of serfs (like Savva Purlevsky) were abandoning their villages and fleeing to the cities or to regions where they could conceal their servile status and find work as free men. In 1856 it was reported that more than 100,000 servile Romanian peasant families had abandoned their holdings and left for Bulgaria, Serbia and Transylvania since 1832 in search of freedom. By the 1860s some 300,000 runaway Russian and Ukrainian serfs were said to be living in Bessarabia, where serfdom had recently been abolished.

But some serf protests were far more violent, and far more dangerous in the eyes of the authorities. When the Russian Tsar Nicholas I imposed a formal, legal system of serfdom in the Danubian Principalities through the so-called Organic Statutes of July 1831, Hungarian rural colonists, angry that the privileges they had been promised were being abrogated, were joined by Romanian serfs in an armed uprising of more than 60,000 peasants. Cossack regiments soon arrived, arrested the ringleaders, and sent them off to the salt mines of Siberia. Many of the others were each punished by fifty blows of the cudgel. But repression, it was increasingly recognized, would not solve the problem. ‘I have closely observed the spirit of the peasant classes and, in general, of the lowest ranks of the population,’ wrote a Russian government inspector in 1832, ‘and have noticed a vast change in their attitude. They have grown bolder, more independent, less submissive, and at the same time poorer. They have stopped revering, as they once did, officials and the representatives of constituted authority.’ Nicholas’s son and successor Alexander II (1818–81) drew radical conclusions from the increasingly refractory behaviour of the serfs. ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above,’ he declared in 1856, ‘than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below.’ Defeat in the Crimean War that year led him to embark on a wholesale reform of the Russian state and Russian society. The military commander in the later part of the war, Prince Mikhail Gorchakov (1793–1861), had urged emancipation as a means of building greater loyalty and commitment among the troops, who consisted overwhelmingly of conscripted serfs. ‘The first thing,’ he was reported as saying, ‘is that we must emancipate the serfs, because this is the knot which binds together all the things that are evil in Russia.’ But there were longer-term processes at work in the ending of serfdom in Europe. Many landlords seeking improvements to the system felt that the inefficiencies of servile labour impeded agrarian reform. Servile obligations, noted the declaration of emancipation in Saxony the following year, ‘hinder the free development of agricultural activity and damage one of the chief sources of national wealth’. The heavy burden of obligations prevented peasants from investing in better methods and materials, just as the forced reliance of seigneurs on inefficient servile labour and easy income from servile dues made them reluctant to improve working standards. The open-field system, where large fields were divided up into strips each farmed by an individual serf family, made it hard to achieve economies of scale by consolidating holdings. Serfs could not invest in better livestock or afford fertilizers. Landlords who sought improvements by hoping to imitate the achievements of the ‘agricultural revolution’ in England grew increasingly frustrated.

International factors could also play a role. Thus, for example, the Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War in 1856 led to the emancipation of the serfs in the Danubian Principalities not least because Britain and France wanted a viable state – Romania, created by the unification of the two Principalities in 1858 – to act as a buffer against Russian expansionism. The objections of seigneurs had to be overridden by an international convention in 1858 that required laws to be introduced to end serfdom and thus to give all Romanians a stake in the country’s future. The new sovereign, elected by assemblies convened in the two Principalities, overcame further landowner resistance by seizing full power in 1864, and immediately issued an emancipation decree, thus cementing his own domination over the nobility as well as carrying out the wishes of the international community. Although the ending of servile status and the introduction of the equality of all citizens before the law was one of the central demands of liberals in the first half of the nineteenth century, for conservative governments, cementing the loyalty of the peasantry became a major tool in the battle to stave off the drive to power of the liberals. The peasants, it was generally if rather inaccurately assumed, were conservative, pious, monarchist, anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, and would form the ultimate bulwark of order in the face of the liberal advance. Therefore, acceding to their demands for the ending of serfdom could be seen as constituting a vital element in the preservation of the existing political order. So there were political forces of many kinds acting in favour of emancipation.

Everywhere, the abolition of serfdom became the subject of complicated political manoeuvrings between the major interested parties. The serfs themselves were seldom formally consulted, but legislators knew well enough that if the terms on which they were freed proved too restrictive, popular uprisings would probably follow. The accession of a new monarch or government frequently provided the opportunity, most notably with Alexander II in Russia, but also with lesser sovereigns such as King Friedrich Augustus of Saxony (1797–1854). His nomination in 1830 as co-ruler with his elderly uncle, the reigning monarch, resulted in major agrarian reforms. Meanwhile in Hanover, the revolutionary upheavals of 1830–1 led a new government to introduce sweeping changes in the system of serfdom, as also happened in Hesse-Kassel. Revolution, as these examples suggest, could also prompt action. In 1848 remaining feudal dues and obligations were abolished across much of Europe by revolutionary legislatures in measures that traditional state authorities found no difficulty in subsequently ratifying. Men such as the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I (1830–1916) and his advisers in effect regarded abolition as inevitable and were broadly convinced of its advantages for the state.

The abolition of serfdom usually involved legal instruments of daunting complexity, made more convoluted by previous mitigations of servile obligations by Enlightened monarchs in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Prussian edict of 2 March 1850, which finally abolished the last vestiges of serfdom in the kingdom, listed thirty-three previous laws passed between 1811 and 1849 that it superseded. Grand statements declaring peasants to be free men were followed by a maze of legal technicalities that often heavily qualified the principle on which the legislation rested. The revolutionary declaration of abolition in Hungary on 11 April 1848 had to be supplemented over the next five years by a series of detailed measures implementing abolition in each of the counties separately. Between the announcement of the principle and its application in practice there was often room for hard bargaining between the seigneurs and the government. The key issue here was the level of compensation the lords were given for the loss of peasant dues and services. In Hungary, for example, as in many other parts of Europe, the original revolutionary decree ended serfdom without compensation for the seigneurs, but by the time it came to be implemented, compensation had become a central part of the deal.

In most places the lords received no indemnification for the loss of noble privileges that stemmed from the peasants’ servile status itself, such as seigneurial jurisdiction, since all serfs were now declared to be free men. Rights such as freedom of movement, inheritance, labour and so on were also granted without charge. But agreement had to be reached on compensating the seigneurs for the loss of labour services and the payments in kind and other dues that the peasants had paid as rent. Officials delved into the files and came up with elaborate calculations of what this all meant in monetary terms. In the Habsburg Monarchy the value of servile labour was set at one-third of that of hired wage labour, an indication of how little effort serfs were thought to put into their work. In addition a third was deducted to account for the money that the seigneurs had spent in administering the servile system. In some areas, such as Württemberg, Baden, Romania or the Habsburg Monarchy, the state helped the peasants with their redemption payments, even meeting them in full in Habsburg-ruled Hungary and Bukovina. Usually, however, the former serfs had to bear the entire burden themselves. In Romania the instalments had to be paid over a period of fifteen years, in Saxony twenty-five, in Russia forty-nine, so that redemption payments to the tsarist authorities resulting from the Emancipation Edict of 1861 were not scheduled to end until the year 1910. Often special banks were set up to manage the payments, especially in the German states. Just as important were the arrangements made for the distribution of land. As a general principle, the emancipation deal allowed the peasants to carry on farming the land they had occupied before emancipation, but there were, inevitably, variations in this pattern. Romania lay at one extreme, where the seigneurs could seize the best land for themselves provided they compensated their peasants with the same acreage elsewhere, usually on inferior soil or even broken up into smaller plots miles apart. Poland was at the other extreme, where the hostility of the Russian government to the nobility added two and a half million acres to the peasants’ land, or 8 per cent of the entire area of Congress Poland.

A more difficult situation confronted the many serfs who held no land, including 1.5 million household serfs in Russia. Worried about the possibility of unrest among cottagers, smallholders and landless peasants, tsarist administrators in Congress Poland distributed 130,000 smallholdings of government land to these people. In Romania similarly the Crown, in its determination to create a loyal peasantry as a counterweight to the nobility, promised every former serf some land, though the promise was never fully honoured. In Russia peasants on state land were given limited title to it, later converted into freehold in return for a redemption fee payable according to a schedule that envisaged payments on an annual basis all the way up to 1931. In parts of Germany, peasants were still making redemption payments in the early 1920s. Payments in rent could sometimes be little different in practical terms from feudal obligations, as in Denmark, where serfdom had been abolished in the eighteenth century but redemption payments continued to impose a heavy burden on the peasantry through much of the first half of the nineteenth century. If a landlord preferred payment in work rather than in cash, it was frequently easy enough for him to put his wishes into effect.

The scale of these measures was vast. In East-Elbian Prussia, 480,000 peasants became free proprietors in the wake of the emancipation edicts of the early nineteenth century. Even in a small country such as Romania, more than 400,000 peasants received ownership of their land, and another 51,000 households were given land enough for a house and garden. Nearly 700,000 peasants in Poland became landowners. In the German and Slav provinces of the Habsburg Empire, the emancipation involved more than two and a half million peasant households indemnifying nearly 55,000 landowners for the loss of 39 million days of labour services without animals and 30,000 days with them, plus over 10 million florins’ worth of annual fees and tithes and nearly 4 million bushels of dues in kind. In Russia the emancipation was even more gargantuan in its effects, with some 10 million peasants on private estates receiving title to nearly 100 million acres of land, quite apart from the similar measures already enacted for the even larger number of serfs on state demesnes. Nevertheless, everywhere the measures were put into effect relatively quickly, with a minimum of fuss. In principle this was the greatest single act of emancipation and reform in Europe during the whole of the nineteenth century. A huge class of people who had hitherto been bound to the land in a form of neo-feudal servitude had been emancipated from its chains and given equal rights as full citizens. Legally prescribed social distinctions now came to an effective end. Encrusted status and privilege had been swept away and every adult male was now in almost every respect equal before the law and free to dispose over his person and his property. The last significant legal vestiges of the society of social orders assailed by the French Revolution of 1789 had now left the stage of history.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

Who gained most from the emancipation of the serfs, and what were its overall effects? Much depended on the terms on which land was redistributed and the level at which compensation was set. The lords lost their exclusive hunting and fishing rights, and were no longer able to hunt on other people’s land. Seigneurial monopolies were ended, though the sole right to distil and sell liquor was retained in the Habsburg Monarchy until the end of the 1860s. The feudal status of the lords came to an end, though not the social deference that came with it. The remaining formal patrimonial juridical and police powers in Prussia were only ended by laws passed in 1872 and 1891, though the former seigneur usually occupied the position of local administrator (Landrat), so in effect he could exercise similar powers on behalf of the state. This power was particularly marked in East Prussia and the traditional lands of the Junker noblemen to the south of the Baltic. In the lands of the Baltic German nobility, under Russian suzerainty but to a considerable extent self-governing, manorial justice continued even longer, if in a diluted form. But in general, emancipation completed the process of the removal of juridical rights from seigneurs, even though it was delayed in some areas. In some parts of Europe judicial power was partially devolved onto local village councils or courts, as in Austria (after 1862), Russia, Saxony and Switzerland. Where a lord had previously taken matters into his own hands, he now had to go through an elaborate procedure of judicial enforcement. As a local judicial official in Königsberg noted, previously, when a peasant had been caught stealing fruit from the seigneurial orchards:

the seigneur took several of his men to the thief’s orchard and harvested all the fruit on his trees for himself. The tears of the peasant’s wife and children failed to move him, and he harvested perhaps three times more fruit than the quantity he had lost, and his action was unanimously approved by his fellow lords.

Now this would itself be regarded by the state as a breach of the law. ‘The nobleman,’ complained one Austrian aristocrat ‘with thirty-two or sixty-four ancestors, has to bow to that vulgar local council . . . The ignorant peasant who often cannot write . . . becomes the superior of his cultured and wealthy lord.’

As this indignant exclamation suggests, many of the seigneurs objected strongly to the emancipation on a variety of grounds. Aristocratic Russian officials complained bitterly about what they saw as a disastrous increase in crime and disorder in the countryside. ‘In earlier times,’ a marshal of the nobility declared, ‘estate owners supervised their peasants’ morality and therefore . . . legal order was maintained.’ But now, he went on, ‘our peasants – or at least 99 per cent of them – are not aware that a person is obliged to be honest and to recognize his duty to obey government orders and lead a patriarchal family life.’ Prince Alfred zu Windischgrätz (1787–1862), a large landowner and leading military figure in the Habsburg Monarchy, protested to Emperor Franz Joseph about the emancipation in 1850. ‘The most outstanding of communists,’ he declared, ‘has not yet dared to demand what Your Majesty’s government has carried through.’ Such extreme views were less common in areas where large landowners already farmed for profit. On the Hungarian plains, estate owners could plough their monetary compensation into agricultural improvement and sell all of their produce on the market. In Austria and Bohemia large landowners, faced with huge quantities of cheap cereals coming in from Hungary, converted their farms to cash crops like sugar beet and abandoned marginal and unprofitable land altogether. In France the expropriation of noble and Church land and the emancipation of the serfs in the late eighteenth century meant that the number of small peasant farmers increased by more than 50 per cent in the decades after 1790. By 1851, 68 per cent of French peasants were independent farmers. In the plains around Bologna in northern Italy, the end of feudalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution reduced the value of noble lands from 78 per cent of the total in 1789 to 51 per cent in 1835, many of them bought up not by peasants but by middle-class entrepreneurs eager to share in the profits of a successful agricultural region. By contrast, 90 per cent of land in Sicily stayed in noble hands until well into the second half of the century.

Landowners who had survived the vagaries of war and revolution often did very well out of the emancipation. They remained a dominant force in areas of Europe where grain could be grown on a large scale for the market: on the baking-hot plains of Spain, in northern France, in the flatlands extending southwards from the Baltic, in the fertile soil of Hungary and Bohemia, and in ‘Europe’s breadbasket’ –  Ukraine. In Bohemia redemption payments for the ninety-three biggest estates totalled nearly 16 million florins. Such payments enabled landowners, and others like them elsewhere, to buy up a lot of the land that poorer estate owners were forced to sell to make ends meet. Thus between 1867 and 1914, estates of over 14,300 acres increased from 8.5 per cent to 19.4 per cent of the area occupied by landed estates in Hungary. By and large, these belonged to major noble families, as was also the case in Austria and East-Elbian Prussia. In general, therefore, except in the special case of Poland, the landowners did reasonably well out of the emancipation of the serfs. Whether they were able to capitalize effectively on the gains they made in a rapidly changing economic climate was, however, another matter altogether.

What was the effect of the emancipation on the peasantry? In the Habsburg Monarchy commentators waxed lyrical about the effects they imagined emancipation would have on the improvement of the rural economy. ‘The ex-villein,’ wrote one of them, ‘now become freehold owner of his land, is able to devote his whole labour to the cultivation and profitable exploitation of his land, while the woodlands formerly owned by him, which had been deteriorating progressively, are now preserved and rationally exploited.’ In practice, however, this applied mainly to market-oriented peasants with substantial farms; many smaller peasants, lacking familiarity with monetary transactions, continued farming just for their own subsistence, quickly ran into debt, and had to go back to working for the local lord so they could pay their taxes and meet their redemption payments. In East-Elbian Prussia some 7,000 large peasant holdings and more than 14,000 smallholdings were bought out by the larger noble estates between 1816 and 1859, furthering the creation of a landless rural proletariat. By mid-century there were more than two million people in Prussia and Mecklenburg earning a living either in part or in whole as farmhands; also by this time, 30 per cent of the agrarian population in Austria were wage-labourers; in Bohemia the proportion was 36 per cent.

Many better-off peasants now found themselves in a position to purchase extra land or rent it from middle-class proprietors. The land owned by Russia’s peasants increased by a quarter from 1877 to 1905. Much of the increase was funded by a Peasant Land Bank set up by the state in 1882. Yet such a surge did not keep pace with population growth. By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly 40 per cent of landholdings in France consisted of less than 2.5 acres; in Denmark the proportion of holdings under 1.2 acres had reached 27 per cent, in Germany 33 per cent. These were little more than gardens, and their owners had to work for a living in some area other than farming to keep their families alive. The rural poor with no land had to hire themselves out as farm labourers. From 1750 to 1870 landless or semi-landless labourers and their families in Sweden increased from around a quarter to a half of the population, a class extremely vulnerable to dearth and economic crisis. These people had to purchase their food and most other necessities of life since they were unable to produce enough to feed themselves and their families. All over Europe the growing integration of agriculture into the capitalist economy created increasing numbers of people who only had their labour to sell. In some parts of the continent, indeed, a kind of quasi-serfdom was maintained by legal restrictions on the freedom of manoeuvre of rural labourers. The Prussian Statute of Farm Servants, passed in 1810 and valid up to the end of the First World War, denied permanently employed rural labourers many of the rights enjoyed by urban workers, and allowed their employers to administer corporal punishment if they so desired. Similar provisions obtained in Denmark. The Hungarian Farm Servants Act of 1907 forbade workers who lived on an estate to leave it or even to see anyone from outside it without their employers’ permission, and allowed them to be whipped if they were under the age of sixteen; those who urged strikes could be imprisoned. It was only the growing preference of landlords for casual labour hired for a few weeks at a time during the harvest or sowing season that began to release these rural workers from the restrictions under which they suffered, and allowed them to begin looking for work elsewhere.

PEASANT REVOLTS

Even at the outset, emancipation disappointed many of those it affected. In Russia peasants were outraged by the provisions for compensation accorded to the seigneurs, believing, in a popular phrase, that ‘we are yours, but the land is ours’. The intrusion of government inspectors and agents into their lives was another source of dismay. In many parts of Russia the peasants simply wanted to be able to govern themselves without interference from anyone else. A wave of uprisings and revolts had already swept the country in the years leading up to emancipation. In the short run at least, the promulgation of the Emancipation Edict intensified this process rather than bringing it to an end. In one village, in the department of Perm, the peasants said that the Edict, read out by the local policeman, was a fake, since the real one would surely have been written in gold. They objected violently to ‘a kind of liberty that leaves us just as before under the authority of the Count, our landlord’. Troops were sent in to restore order. By early 1863, the wave of protest had run its course. It indicated a strong and widespread feeling of dissatisfaction with the terms of emancipation, a feeling that was to grow rather than diminish over time.

The main problem was that emancipation did little to improve agricultural production in Russia. Over the decades following emancipation, to be sure, grain production per capita did rise, even after grain exports were deducted from the total, but not everywhere, and livestock farming was getting into serious difficulties. The number of pigs, horses and cattle in Russia fell almost continuously between 1880 and 1914. Population growth, especially in the rich ‘black-earth’ region, led to a shrinkage of farm sizes, and much of the land was still held communally, portioned out among an increasing number of families. After emancipation the peasants were barred from the landowners’ forests and meadows: ‘even chickens could not find a place to roost,’ they complained in one petition. Peasants everywhere considered that unfarmed land was communal property, so they paid no attention to the landlords’ enclosure of forests. As a result, wood theft and illegal tree-cutting in Russia increased from 14 per cent of all crimes brought before the criminal courts in the years 1834–60 to 27 per cent in the years 1861–8, with an average of 20,000 cases tried each year. (A similar phenomenon can be observed in Prussia from 1815 up to 1848, where wood theft made up the great majority of all cases of theft, and was often accompanied by individual or even mass violence against foresters on the part of the peasants.)

The aftershocks of emancipation continued through the rest of the century and into the next. Land prices and rents rose in Russia in the 1890s as a result of population pressure, which also kept rural wages down. Redemption payments continued to exact a heavy burden. As so often, a crisis of the state gave the opportunity for protest. In 1905 news of the military defeats in the war with Japan sparked strikes and revolutionary uprisings in the cities. Helped by local teachers and officials, peasants held mass meetings, drew up petitions, and articulated their demands. Where there were large estates and landless labourers, as in the west of the empire, strikes were the favoured medium of protest, but more traditional methods prevailed elsewhere. In the central black-earth region, the Volga and Ukraine, peasants stormed noble estates and sacked manor houses, particularly where there were no alternative means of earning a living apart from the land, and where landlords had been particularly harsh in the terms they exacted for leasing land or setting the terms for sharecropping. In many areas, peasants attacked and burned down noble residences, along with their records, and seized the land in an attempt to ensure the landlords would never return – tactics seen in peasant jacqueries all over Europe since the Middle Ages.

Altogether between 1905 and 1907 there were 979 cases of arson in Russia, almost all of them involving manor houses; 809 cases of illicit wood-cutting; 573 instances of the seizure of pasturage; 216 instances of the seizure and tillage of arable land; and 316 cases of the seizure of foodstuffs and fodder. Predictably, a subsequent government inquiry blamed many of these events on ‘the intoxication of the people by agitators, Jews, and students’, ‘psalm-readers’ and even ‘railway guards’, but few concrete examples were provided, and the key role was usually played by peasants who had a degree of literacy and some experience of the world outside the village, along with peasant soldiers and sailors returning from military service holding the strong conviction that they should be rewarded for their sufferings. The Russian peasant uprisings of 1905–7 were brutally put down by the police and army, but led directly to government measures to defuse rural discontent in an attempt to restore order and stability after the unsuccessful revolution in the cities. These included the final cancellation of redemption payments, the freeing-up of the peasant land market to allow individual farmers greater flexibility in buying and selling land outside the commune, and the extension of the Peasant Land Bank. Encouraged by the leading minister Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin (1862–1911), a new class of substantial peasant farmers began to emerge in the following years, the famous kulaks later so reviled and persecuted under Stalin. But Stolypin’s intention of destroying the influence of the peasant commune was widely frustrated by peasant resistance, reflecting widespread attachment to collective methods of exploiting the land.

In Romania post-emancipation peasant discontent ran as deep as it did in Russia. State officials colluded with obstinate landowners to slow down the process of land redistribution, so that the peasants were granted land too slowly to meet the very tight, fifteen-year deadline to pay the compensation they owed, and ten years on, in 1874, the state had to cancel the unpaid compensation payments altogether. The peasant holdings were usually very small – nearly eight out of ten peasants possessed fewer than 12 acres at the end of the century – and after the fifteen years were up, the lords took advantage of the clause in the 1864 emancipation statute that abrogated the rights the peasants had to exploit seigneurial pastures and forests. Some 38 per cent of the arable land was owned by 1,500 large estates at the turn of the century. By 1882 a commentator could note that ‘the misery in which most of the Romanian peasantry live beggars all description’. Under these circumstances, the landlords were able to force the peasants into a state of dependency not far from serfdom by demanding that rent be paid in labour rather than cash. As late as 1900, the landlords’ estates were worked mainly by the peasantry, who owned nearly 95 per cent of all draught animals in the country and were obliged to use them when tilling the landlord’s fields. A steep property qualification ensured that the vast majority of them lacked the right to vote and thus to express their grievances in political form.

The scene was set for the last great peasant jacquerie in European history, as a confrontation between the administrator of a 30,000-acre estate in Moldavia, who increased his demands over those of the previous year, and an angry assembly of villagers, spilled over into violence as he was assaulted and beaten. ‘We are poor people,’ said the peasants in a petition to the regional prefect, ‘all we do is till the fields . . . We have come to the end of our tether as we can find no piece of land to provide food for us and our children this spring, and so we are threatened with starvation.’ If they were not granted better prices for their crops, and allowed to pay rent in cash rather than in work on the estate, they threatened ‘we will take the estate by force’. As their demands were ignored, Romanian peasants began to occupy noble forests and estates. Manors were destroyed, and bands of peasants marched on the towns, attacking the offices of merchants and dealers (many of them Jewish). In some places they forced state administrators to order a redistribution of land. As the government sent in troops, peasants armed ‘with poles, clubs, stones, and even weapons’ rushed the soldiers ‘with unspeakable rage’ and drove them into their barracks. The revolt spread southwards across Moldavia, and manor houses were burned to the ground, archives destroyed, and clerks beaten up. Everywhere the peasants demanded lower rents, and more grazing and wood-gathering rights. At Negresti they wrecked the estate office, seized the books, and ‘divided the cattle amongst themselves and took possession of the mill too’. The revolt spread south to Wallachia, where in some towns apprentices and shop assistants joined in the mayhem as bands of peasants invaded the towns.

Government repression was savage. The prefect of one district reported on 15 March that:

Baielesti village was shelled by the artillery, and when the 5th Mountain Corps Battalion arrived in the commune to inquire into the prevailing state of mind, the rebels, who were in their houses, began to fire revolvers, wounding two officers and ten soldiers, then the Mountain Corps shot ten salvoes, killing forty-two rebels and wounding over one hundred. Half the village was on fire.

As the revolt was quelled, thousands of arrests followed, while troops, egged on by landlords, attacked and devastated peasant cottages and farms. ‘Ringleaders’ were brutally beaten, and there were complaints about torture in the overcrowded prisons. Long sentences were meted out to many of the participants. In all, an estimated 11,000 people were killed in what was the largest and most violent peasant uprising in Europe anywhere in the period between 1815 and 1914. Ionel Bratianu (1864–1927), Minister of the Interior in a new Liberal government, pushed through legal maxima for rents and minima for wages, and created a Peasant Bank, the Casa Rurală, to provide loans for the purchase or leasing of estates to be divided into peasant lots. But these measures were seldom put into practice. The compulsory sale of 440,000 acres of pasturage by landlords to create communal grazing lands in no way met the needs of the 725,000 households who still held under 12 acres of land.

Similar if less dramatic events took place in southern Europe. In Portugal serfdom had come to an end in the Middle Ages, but seigneurial and ecclesiastical rights and privileges continued to weigh heavily on tenant farmers, especially in the Crown lands, which made up a quarter of the national territory. One church estate in the early 1830s owned 6,000 homesteads and had a monopoly of all the mills, olive presses and granaries in the area. Tenant farmers had to pay it a tribute of the first-born livestock, an eighth of the linen woven, and duties on bread, wine and fruit. In other estates the landlords charged a threshing fee and demanded rent for the use of ploughs and oxen. These obligations were heavy enough, but in 1846 liberal reforms aimed at registering land ownership and privatizing the commons triggered a revolt led by Maria da Fonte (dates unknown), a peasant woman of the north. Claiming that the government planned to sell the land to ‘the bogeymen of northern Portugal, the English’, the rebels burned down registry offices and invaded the towns. The government had also tried in the name of health and safety to abolish the custom of leaving dead bodies in charnel houses until the bones could be recovered and buried in family vaults, ordering their immediate burial outside town perimeters instead. Armed bands attacked funerals and carried the bodies off to their traditional resting places, increasing the disorder. In the end the uprising, which destabilized the political system, was crushed by a British seaborne invasion, sanctioned by the Great Powers. The peasant grievances remained.

Map 4. The Carlist Wars in Spain, 1833–76

In Spain the ending of feudal obligations in the mid-1830s put more power above all in the hands of landowners operating the sharecropping system. Under this system, families contracted with landowners to work their fields and receive pay in the form of a share in the crop. Since disentailment and agrarian reform, including the sale of common lands, were carried out by liberal administrations, protest tended to be anti-liberal, distinguishing it from uprisings and revolts in other parts of Europe. Peasant revolts in Spain also took on a political hue, as they were joined by local notables and priests who provided them with leadership. In 1822–3 the royalists managed to gather widespread peasant support in the conflicts centred on King Fernando VII; the Governor of Valencia reported that peasants were raiding grain stores and forcing tithe administrators to return the taxes they had collected ‘under threats of murder’. In 1827 a royalist uprising known as the War of the Malcontents engaged many peasants who had earned their spurs in the guerrilla wars against Napoleon. At the height of the revolt there were said to be 30,000 men in arms, above all impoverished small farmers, sharecroppers and labourers.

Rural protest coalesced around the figure of King Fernando’s younger brother Carlos (1788–1855), who rejected the 1830 abolition of the Salic Law and the accession of Fernando’s daughter Isabella II (1830–1904), a mere infant, in 1833. The First Carlist War lasted from 1832 to 1839 and spread across the Basque Country, Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia. Many of the liberal generals had fought in the wars of independence in Latin America, and their experience gradually told. In 1847 a Second Carlist War, also known as the War of the Early Risers (from the rebels’ habit of mounting their attacks before dawn), expressed the hatred of the rural poor for the liberals who had taken power in the 1830s. A Third Carlist War lasted from 1872 to 1876, sparked by the accession of Amadeo I (1845–90), whose right to the throne the Carlists also disputed. Carlism aimed above all at abrogating the agrarian reforms of the liberals. Extreme cruelty, torture, rape and massacre characterized the conflict, as with many peasant uprisings, despite an agreement on the orderly treatment of prisoners brokered by the British ambassador Lord Eliot (1798–1877) in 1835. Capitalizing on divisions within the royal family and the political elite, the Carlist uprisings acquired sufficient political significance to engage foreign supporters, including monarchists from Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy and Portugal; active fighters included leading members of the Habsburg Monarchy’s aristocratic conservative Schwarzenberg and Lichnowsky families.

A very different form of peasant protest took hold in areas further south in Spain, dominated by latifundia and landless labourers. After 1848, as the liberals failed to deliver improvements to their lot, landless labourers in the south turned to anarchist ideas, which exercised a strong appeal to people who felt the state, with its taxation, military conscription and de facto support of the landowning class, was a hostile and alien institution that had to be swept away. A wave of arson and banditry swept southern Spain in the 1860s, as unemployed labourers stole crops and uprooted trees to sell them for firewood, and discontent spilled over into an uprising in Seville in June 1857 put down by government forces, who executed ninety-five of the rebels. A more thoroughgoing liberal revolution in 1868, bringing about the deposition of Queen Isabella II and the proclamation of a republic in 1875 after the brief interlude of Amadeo I’s unsuccessful reign, was the signal for peasants across the south to occupy and divide seigneurial and common lands. Illegal grazing, occupations, theft, and all kinds of low-level agrarian protest rumbled on in parts of Spain beyond the end of the century.

The sharecropping system existed in Italy as well as in Spain, and aroused a similar level of discontent, though one with fewer political repercussions. In Tuscany contracts imposed strict limits on the amount of land any given family worked, allowing them just enough to survive after the landowner had taken his 50 per cent of the harvest. Landowners in this region of Italy customarily demanded the right to give permission for members of the sharecropper’s family to get married, keeping an eye on their moral conduct, and they could even order members of the family to move elsewhere if they were surplus to labour requirements. If a sharecropper left the farm without permission, he was in breach of contract and guilty of a criminal offence. The bailiff inspected the harvest to make sure the sharecroppers did not take more than their contracted portion of the harvest. Sharecroppers in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna had to provide the landlord with chicken, eggs and hams free of charge. In some areas they had to dig ditches and perform other labour services without payment. They were not allowed to work for others or use the farm cart to help other families. They could be dismissed and evicted simply for disobeying the proprietor’s orders. The portion of the harvest the sharecropper was allowed to keep was intended for his family’s subsistence; all the cash crops had to be made over to the landlord, who would sell them and make over half the proceeds. In bad harvest years, the sharecroppers usually had to take out loans from the proprietor, and this deepened their dependency on him still further.

Peasant protest in Italy was sparked by the liberal reforms that accompanied unification in the 1860s. The most frequent form of protest was the occupation of enclosed former common land, but banditry and brigandage were also rife in southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia for much of the century. In 1847, for example, a mountain villager in Sardinia justified raids on the farms of the plains to the Bishop of Sassari in the following terms:

Monsignore: until now we did not believe that we were offending against the law of God when we took the lambs, ewes, cattle and swine that we needed. Since the providence of Almighty God offers pity for all his creatures, how could he suffer that the shepherds of the Galkura plains should possess in some cases 500, in others 800 or even 1000 sheep, while we possess only tiny flocks numbering less than a hundred each?

Brigandage was such a major problem in the 1860s that the newly created Italian state sent a large military force to the south, making up at one point two-thirds of the entire Italian Army, during the so-called ‘brigand wars’. The Napoleonic land reforms still needed to be implemented in many respects, and peasant land hunger had not been appeased. Kidnapping, murder, cattle-rustling, highway robbery and other crimes were met with thousands of arrests – 12,000 in the second half of 1863 alone. By this time more than 2,500 insurgents had been shot. Eventually order was restored by what was virtually an army of occupation, numbering 120,000 troops. ‘This is our fate!’ one brigand leader exclaimed to a military tribunal, blaming landowners for the disturbances: ‘The signori are the root of this evil business, but we are the ones who pay the price: but what does it matter anyway, since that was why we were born.’

Banditry was a common phenomenon in the wake of the abolition of serfdom. Travelling in Spain in the mid-1840s, the Romanian historian and politician Mihail Kogălniceanu (1817–91) remarked that ‘nobody dares show himself on the open plain unarmed . . . The roads are still not safe and looting occurs up to the gates of Madrid and the Gacetilla de provincias rubric of the newspapers is filled daily with paragraphs entitled Ladrones [bandits].’ There were even bolder brigands in other parts of Europe. The Hungarian rebel Sándor Rózsa (1813–78) began his career as a bandit in his teens, and was caught and imprisoned in 1837. He managed to escape, however, and lived for the following years as a highwayman, waylaying travellers on the sparsely populated Hungarian plain. He took advantage of the revolutionary upheavals and the effective ending of serfdom in the middle years of the century to form a band of robbers, acting under the pretext that they were defending the Hungarian revolution against the Habsburgs. Captured and sentenced to prison, he was released by the Emperor Franz Joseph as part of an amnesty of a thousand prisoners issued to celebrate his coronation in Hungary, and joined another gang of bandits who derailed the Szeged-Pest railway train, shooting the drivers. Several of the passengers were armed, however, and after a gun battle the gang withdrew, having failed to collect any booty. Rózsa was finally captured in January 1869 and died in prison in November 1878.

Such men inspired many legends and stories, along the lines of the medieval English outlaw Robin Hood, providing the rural poor with outlets for their fantasies and desires about living freely. The Calabrian bandit Giuseppe Musolino (1876–1956) was said, for example, to give money to churches and monasteries and wrote frequently to the king complaining of the misdeeds of the rich in Calabria. Greek bandits, called klephts from the word for ‘thief’ (as in ‘kleptomania’), were the subject of a whole genre of songs and ballads, though their most durable invention was probably ‘lamb klephtiko’, a meat dish roasted slowly in a pit to avoid giving off suspicious-looking smoke. In Bulgaria and other parts of Ottoman territory in the Balkans, the bandits known as Haiduks, despite their notorious cruelty, served as the symbolic vehicle of the resentment of rural Christians against their Turkish overlords. At least some bandits, especially in Italy, retained their close connections to settled rural society: young unmarried men, shepherds and goatherds guiding their flocks through mountain pastures, casually employed farmhands, were all able to escape the forces of the law with relative ease, while poverty and immiseration frequently drove them to a life of crime. Only rarely did banditry take on a political hue, as with the activities of the Greek-Macedonian Kota Christo (1880–1904), who collaborated with Bulgarian irridentists in the fight against Ottoman rule: ‘Let’s kill the bear’, he is said to have told them, referring to the Turks, ‘and we’ll manage easily to share the skin.’ Following a victorious pitched battle against an Ottoman force in 1902, however, his Bulgarian allies deserted him and his career, like that of many bandits, ended in betrayal, in his case by the Church authorities: he was handed over to the Ottoman governor in 1904 and beheaded.

As the example of Sándor Rózsa showed, it was especially in moments of political crisis that the rural poor were able to assert themselves. In Sicily, on the slopes of Mount Etna, the miserably poor estate of Bronte, which had been given to the British Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) by the king, along with the title Duke of Bronte, as a reward for defending him against Napoleon, was still ruled by the admiral’s family in mid-century. The arrival of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his volunteer army in 1860 plunged the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into terminal crisis and prompted the peasants to rise in open revolt. Thousands marched on the town of Bronte, burned the archives to the ground, looted the houses of town officials, and stabbed a notary to death before throwing his body onto a bonfire in front of his son’s house. One man stuck a knife into the body and licked the bloodstained blade; another was said to have cut out the notary’s liver and eaten it with a piece of bread. More murders followed: the objects of the peasants’ fury in Bronte were the same as in other parts of Europe; legal documents and their authors, the instruments of their dispossession, were targeted in the belief that the natural right to common land outweighed the letter of the law that had assigned it to the former feudal landowners as their private property. Conscious of his need to win the support of the local landowners, Garibaldi quickly had the revolt put down.

Sicily was brought under control, but peasant discontent was considerably more widespread than this, and far from appeased; it found expression in the revolt of the Siclian Fasci at the beginning of the 1890s. Numbering 300,000 sharecroppers, agricultural labourers and small farmers, they named themselves Fasci, ‘bundles’, because while anyone can break a single stick nobody can snap a whole bundle. They mingled socialist ideas with religious millenarianism, wore red rosettes, and carried religious symbols and portraits of the king as well as pictures of Garibaldi. The targets of their protest meetings and processions were rising rents and food prices, high taxes, and discriminatory sharecropping contracts. Peasants began to seize land and occupy tax offices, burning mills and government buildings. The Italian government responded in 1894 by declaring a state of siege and drafting in 40,000 troops. Hundreds of insurgents were shot or subjected to summary executions, a thousand were sent to a penal colony without trial, and many others were arrested.

By this time, however, sharecropping and its attendant discontents were in decline. Several factors began to undermine the sharecropping system in southern Europe towards the end of the century. Import tariffs protected Italian agriculture against foreign competition; by 1885 Italy had the highest grain duties in Europe. This did not stop prices from falling, as wheat sold on the Italian market dropped from 33 lire per quintal in 1880 to less than 23 lire five years later, hemp from 103 to 75. Grain yields in Italy were poor (6.4 quintals per hectare in the south, 11 on average across the country, compared to 32 in Britain) – largely a result of the dominance of sharecropping. In Tuscany, as late as 1901, half the rural workers were sharecroppers, whose short-term priority was keeping the family fed. This led to over-exploitation of the land. The vine disease phylloxera, which reached Chianti in 1890, devastated the vineyards. Tax increases, especially on essentials like salt and sugar, and the failure to improve harvest yields, led to increasing destitution, and sharecroppers began to steal or conceal produce, and to engage in demonstrations and protests, often involving violence – fifty-four in Tuscany between 6 and 13 May 1898 alone, following a particularly bad harvest the previous year.

Landlords responded to these crises by switching to more profitable crops like sugar beet, and by mechanizing production to reduce labour costs. This accelerated the decline of sharecropping, especially in more commercially viable agricultural regions. As early as 1883 one conservative commentator in Bologna complained, in terms that bore a striking resemblance to similar complaints by landlords in the last decades of serfdom in northern Europe, that:

The sharecropping families of today are breaking up and dividing due to the lack of respect, obedience and subordination towards the household heads, whose virtues provided the cement that bound together old families and gave them their well-being. The sons of the family, just as soon as they are able to do all the farm work, begin to want to take part in the direction of the farm, and want money to pay for their habits and vices. They want clothes with better materials than those made at home, and they want much more spending money than was ever requested in the old families.

Not only was the sharecropping system disintegrating as a result of changing economic, social and cultural influences in the wider society, it was also increasingly being replaced by a more modern economy of wage labour. As markets expanded from the mid-nineteenth century, landlords began to prefer employing labourers who could be taken on and laid off as needed, and who had every incentive to work hard. From the 1880s onwards, trade unions and socialist parties began to recruit rural labourers, harnessing sharecropper discontent with their harsh contractual conditions into strikes and protests, but these remained sporadic and largely unsuccessful. Meanwhile the labourers lived in miserable conditions, often, according to an Italian inquiry of 1881, crammed hundreds at a time into decaying brick apartment blocks in nearby towns, with bare clay floors and minimal hygienic and sanitary facilities. Nearly three-quarters of their income went on food, even though they were often supplied with some basic form of sustenance while they worked, and customarily sent their children round the local farms to beg for bread. By the time of the First World War, much of southern Europe too had evolved into a rural wage-labour economy; but poverty and exploitation had already driven hundreds of thousands to emigrate to the New World.

FEEDING THE PEOPLE

The emancipation of the serfs and its consequences, and the decline of the sharecropping system, were of such enormous importance in nineteenth-century Europe not least because right through the century, the overwhelming majority of people lived on the land and depended on it for their survival. Almost everywhere, towns were few and far between, urban islands in a rural sea. As late as 1850 only 20 per cent of Italians lived in towns, 17 per cent of Spaniards, 15 per cent of French people, 11 per cent of Germans, 9 per cent of Poles, and 8 per cent of Austrians and Bohemians. The relatively high rates of urbanism in Italy and Spain reflected old patterns of settlement rather than the newer influences of industrialization, and the same can be said of the Netherlands, where 30 per cent of the population lived in towns at this time. The great exception was Britain, where fully 50 per cent of people lived in towns in 1850, the consequence of the rapid growth of the industrial economy. The proportion of the adult male population in Britain employed in agriculture, which stood at 41 per cent in 1800, had declined to 29 per cent by 1840, in sharp contrast to other parts of Europe. Even by the end of the century, relatively few European states could boast that more of their citizens lived in towns than in the countryside – Belgium and Germany certainly, but not France or Spain and certainly not Russia. Urbanization had barely begun in eastern Europe. The typical European for most of the century was a peasant living on and from the land.

During this time, despite the wars and famines of the early years of the century, Europe’s population was on the rise, growing in total from around 205 million in 1800 to some 275 million fifty years later. The rise in population was uneven in pace and extent, but it was happening across the whole Continent, and it took place under what historians have called the demographic ancien régime, where birth and death rates were both extremely high; typically there were around forty-five live births per 1,000 population at this time, and thirty to forty deaths. The main reason for the rising population was the disappearance of the great epidemics that had swept across Europe in the past, such as the bubonic plague, which had killed between a third and a half of the entire population of Europe in the mid-fourteenth century but had retreated eastwards during the eighteenth. Medical intervention was also important, for example the widespread campaign to promote breastfeeding, the clearing of swamps (reducing the incidence of malaria, common throughout southern Europe and all the way up into the Rhine valley), and the improvement of public hygiene, at least in major European capital cities. The decline of smallpox, a major killer before the development of effective vaccination by Edward Jenner in 1798, also played a role, as did the relative absence of wars in Europe after the Battle of Waterloo. Birth rates also began to rise as a result of women marrying younger, increasing the excess of births over deaths that created population growth.

The annual percentage rate of population growth was striking. Between 1800 and 1850 it measured 1.3 per cent in England and Wales, around 0.9 in Russia, Norway, Finland and Denmark, 0.8 in Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium, and 0.6 to 0.7 almost everywhere else apart from France, Bulgaria and Portugal. There was, to be sure, an east-west contrast, with life expectancy at birth in mid-century a mere twenty-four years in Russia compared to forty in western Europe, the consequence above all of very high rates of infant mortality, but Russia compensated by high birth rates, of around fifty per thousand, reflecting a much lower average age at first marriage. The part played in bringing about this population growth by falling death rates at a time when birth rates remained very high can be neatly illustrated with the case of Sweden, where early demographic records are particularly good. After two massive crises of mortality in the 1770s and again in the famine of 1815–16, with death rates soaring respectively to more than fifty and just under forty per thousand, before the late 1840s Sweden experienced no more major peaks in the death rate, which declined unevenly but steadily from just under thirty per thousand in a normal year in the late eighteenth century to just over twenty per thousand by 1840.

In the late eighteenth century the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) had warned that in an agrarian society, population tended to grow beyond the capacity of the land to sustain it. Dearth and famine would be the result. In Britain this threat was averted not merely by agricultural improvement but also by the increasing ability to use income from the export of industrial goods to import foodstuffs, above all following the abolition in 1846 of grain duties. Governments everywhere increasingly made efforts to improve the efficiency of agriculture, with the Russians establishing a Ministry of State Domains in 1837 to build and run model farms and set up training schools for state peasants. Local agricultural improvement societies formed by progressive-minded landowners had some influence in distributing information. But most effective of all was the profit motive, which only really took hold after the emancipation of the serfs. Even before this, landowners had begun to import British-made tools and machines such as threshers, and new improved breeds of sheep and cattle onto the Continent. By the middle of the century, a quarter of the 44 million sheep kept in European Russia were fine-wool varieties like the merino. Good profits were to be had farming sheep for the market: while in 1816 fewer than ten in every hundred of the 8 million sheep grazing on Prussian soil were fine-wool breeds, more than a quarter of the 16 million there in 1849 were merinos. The rest of Germany already exported nearly 3 million pounds of wool to Britain in 1816; by the mid-1830s this number had increased more than tenfold. Only by this point, however, did competition from overseas wool, particularly from the southern hemisphere, begin to undercut European producers and prompt a turn to pig-rearing instead.

It was normal in the early nineteenth century for peasants to leave a substantial part of their fields untilled in rotation every year to allow the soil to recover from the previous years’ crops, but increasingly this practice was declining, under the influence of English agricultural writings whose message filtered down from landlords seeking a change in methods and greater efficiency. Instead, small farmers began to plant root crops that tapped deeper layers of the soil than wheat could do, or clover, which restored its value when ploughed back in. Even before emancipation, too, enterprising peasant communities had begun to consolidate holdings, overcoming the diseconomies associated with the strip-field system. Stock-breeding improved the quality of sheep, pigs and cattle, while crop rotation – changing the crops planted in any given field year by year so as not to exhaust the soil – further reduced the amount of fallow land and made animal fodder available during the winter, when previously many animals had to be slaughtered.

Perhaps the most dramatic transformation of agriculture, in the areas where larger farms produced for a wider market and were thus able to invest, was in the use of fertilizers to replenish exhausted soil and improve crop yields. By far the most important fertilizer in the first half of the century was guano, or seabird dung, which had accumulated over millennia in enormous mountains on the Chincha islands off the coast of Peru, where the arid climate prevented the nitrates they contained from being dissolved by rainwater. Alexander von Humboldt had confirmed the effectiveness of guano as a fertilizer, and the German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–73) also advocated its use. After achieving independence from Spain in the 1820s, Peru needed new sources of income, and guano exports started to provide it from the early 1840s onwards. Chinese coolies were imported to excavate the mountainous deposits, while Peruvian merchants signed export contracts with British shippers. This inaugurated something of an economic boom in Peru, the so-called Guano Age, which only came to an end in the 1870s as artificial fertilizers began to take over. In Europe it helped achieve a sharp increase in productivity in market-oriented agriculture.

Despite Malthus’s gloomy predictions, in general, agricultural production in Europe grew over the decades to keep pace, more or less, with the growth of the population. This was largely because a greater amount of land was being brought under cultivation. It has been estimated that the cultivated land of the Continent as a whole increased from 270 million acres in 1800 to 378 million in 1910. In the Netherlands, where many new agricultural techniques had been pioneered, huge areas of marshland were drained and polders and dykes assisted the reclamation of more low-lying land from the sea. In all, nearly 123,000 acres of land were brought under cultivation with the help of the state between 1833 and 1911. Most Dutch farmers were small producers, and they were unusual in farming for the market, increasingly in specialized produce such as cheese. Slowly, peasant farmers in some other parts of Europe followed suit. Particularly important was wine-growing, an activity carried on by small producers just as much as by capitalist agribusiness. In France wine production grew from 25 to 60 million hectolitres between the 1780s and the 1870s. Fruit, hemp, tobacco and olives gradually helped free peasants from the tyranny of subsistence farming in areas where it was possible to grow them.

In some parts of Europe agriculture remained stubbornly traditional well into the nineteenth century. This was not least because governments frequently hid its inefficiencies behind protective import tariffs. Like many other European governments, for example, the Spanish authorities imposed severe restrictions on the import of grain, which was only allowed in from other countries when prices for Spanish grain reached exceptionally high levels. This only happened four times before the abrogation of the measure in 1869. Spanish peasants and labourers tilled the soil using the same methods as they had done for centuries, and although the grain-producing latifundia of the plains began to use machinery and fertilizers to boost profits from exports later in the century, even their methods remained relatively primitive for many decades. Successive Spanish governments made repeated attempts to free up a market in land and remove restrictions on production. Even where change came to agriculture, it was often seriously disadvantageous to the peasantry. In Hungary, for instance, the agricultural depression of the 1820s and 1830s caused widespread indebtedness among the nobility and gentry, which they tried to remedy by converting their lands from arable to pasturage, enclosing large areas of common land for sheep to graze on.

Although increasing numbers of small farmers produced for the market, to a very large extent peasant life in rural Europe was self-sufficient. Economists grew impatient with ‘the narrow spirit that makes every family, even locality, every pays live on its own resources, asking nothing of trade’. Peasants were unused to outsiders; a middle-class traveller near Saint-Agrève in southern France noted around the middle of the century: ‘The peasant is extremely suspicious, a stranger can expect no help from him even for money, and the most insignificant questions seldom receive an answer.’ When this traveller drew a map, he was arrested by a group of armed men and charged with sorcery. Further east, Russian and Ukrainian peasants might greet strangers with traditional offers of bread and salt, but they might just as easily set on them and drive them away, suspecting they were coming to collect taxes. Yet however self-sufficient they might be, peasants always had to purchase at least some goods from tinkers and travellers or from the nearest town, especially metal and ceramic goods. In times of hardship, harvest failure or economic crisis, however, rural communities often had to fend for themselves, with predictably disastrous results. Even in normal times, poverty and destitution were never far away. As the numbers of the landless poor grew, as a result both of population increase and dispossession following the emancipation of the serfs, the question of how they were to be supported became rapidly more urgent. Many took to the roads or sought refuge in the towns in time of hardship, begging for alms or throwing themselves on the mercy of government poor relief and charitable institutions as the traditional patterns of family support broke down.

Visiting western Europe in the late 1830s, the Polish poet Zygmunt Krasińsky (1812–59) found the streets of Messina, in Sicily, ‘populated by masses of beggars, children on crutches, crippled in legs and arms’. Poverty was everywhere, even in the towns he visited in England, where he thought attitudes towards it far harsher than on the Continent. In Bavaria it was calculated in 1818 that 6.2 per cent of the population depended on poor relief to survive, but these were only sedentary poor, and the figures did not include itinerant beggars or the recipients of private charity; an additional 19 per cent of the population were thought to be living on the verge of poverty. There was no welfare state in the modern sense anywhere; no state benefits, no national insurance, no unemployment support, no old people’s homes. Poor relief traditionally depended on the Church. Especially in Catholic areas, giving was thought to ennoble and sanctify the soul. Christian charity provided alms for the destitute, and professional beggars, asking for support, ritually gesturing to the passer-by, and calling down God’s blessing on those who gave them money, were ubiquitous.

In view of the Church’s inability to deal with the mounting problem of pauperism, secular voluntary associations across Europe were playing a growing role in poor relief. In Russia, where the institutions of civil society were weak in the extreme, it was not surprising that the most important of the voluntary poor-relief organizations, the Imperial Philanthropic Society, was founded in 1816 on the initiative of Tsar Alexander I, who supplied it with an annual grant to increase the income it received from membership fees and private donations. Branches opened in many cities, and the number of people it assisted increased from just over 4,000 in the 1820s to more than 25,000 in the early 1840s and nearly 38,000 in 1857. Some twenty new charitable societies were granted licences in Russia between 1826 and 1855. Typical was the house of industry opened in 1833 by Anatoly Nikolayevich Demidov (1813–70), the son of a rich industrialist, providing soup and work to the needy. On a visit to the main prison in St Petersburg in 1837, Tsar Nicholas I was shocked to find beggars mingling with common criminals, and he set up a Supreme Committee for Differentiation and Care of Beggars in St Petersburg, as well as a similar institution in Moscow. The Committee took beggars arrested by the police, sent those thought to be the deserving poor unable to work through no fault of their own to the Imperial Philanthropic Society, and referred the able-bodied to employers. Allegedly idle professional beggars were returned by the Committee to the police and then sent on to labour colonies in Siberia, while those in temporary difficulty were helped out with funds or documents.

The relative centralization of poor relief in Russia was unusual. In most parts of Europe it was localized. In 1816, for example, a new poor law devolved poor relief onto Bavarian municipalities, granting it on the basis of birth or marriage in the community or long years of work there. The system, which lasted for exactly a century, required local administrations to register paupers and provide them with food, clothes and shelter. Help also included the provision of free medical services, for which local doctors were paid from poor-law funds; pharmacies had to sell medicaments at a two-thirds discount. It was only a safety net and it proved entirely inadequate to deal with the growing immiseration of the working population during the 1820s or at times of crisis. All European relief systems had been designed above all to help the rural poor, in a society in which the overwhelming majority of people lived on and from the land. They were vulnerable not only to agrarian crises but also to the changing nature of poverty as Europe began to become more urban. In most countries, municipalities and parishes were obliged to provide relief for the sick, the elderly, the disabled, and the orphaned, but the Church continued to provide for the vast majority of the poor. In the Netherlands food, shelter, fuel and funds were made available by local authorities in limited quantities, mainly to the elderly, widows and the disabled. In the period 1829 to 1854 an average of 25 per cent of the entire population of Amsterdam was in receipt of poor relief on a regular basis. Some 90 per cent of the relief consisted of work. Three out of every four paupers were still supported by the Reformed Church, as was also the case in the bustling port of Rotterdam, where in 1859 some seventeen out of every hundred people were in receipt of poor relief.

All across Europe, the growth of pauperism was highly alarming to middle-class urban elites, who increasingly thought that the Church was encouraging it. Poverty in this view was the result of idleness, breeding an underclass whose lack of property made it a potential social and political threat. In Castile the political upheavals of the 1820s brought liberal programmes of welfare reform to the forefront of politics, in which municipalities waged an aggressive campaign against Church welfare foundations, expropriated their property (in the Welfare Law of 1822), and placed welfare institutions under the control of local councils. However, it was in Britain, the first country to experience industrialization and the rapid and uncontrolled urban growth evolving from it, that a new way was found to try and grapple with pauperism and reduce the burden of expense it imposed. Like other European states, Britain operated a system of relief in which those capable of work were provided with it, unless they refused, in which case they were imprisoned or whipped. But this system, the so-called Old Poor Law, under which – as in other countries – local authorities, in this case parishes, were responsible for supporting the destitute, began to impose impossible burdens on ratepayers during and after the economic crisis of 1815–16. Parishes were mostly too small to deal with the growing numbers of the rural poor dispossessed by the enclosure of common lands and the conversion of arable to pasture. Malthus and others thought the system of allowances for the poor based on the price of bread and the size of their family – the so-called Speenhamland system – encouraged irresponsible breeding and wanted the Old Poor Law abolished altogether. It ‘spread pauperism and improvidence’, as one commentator complained in 1831.

By the early 1830s, with a reforming government in power, the time had come in the eyes of most British politicians to apply the new principles of political economy to the relief of the poor. In 1834 the British Parliament passed a New Poor Law designed to push the able-bodied poor into work. The 1,500 parishes of England and Wales were grouped into 600 Poor Law Unions, run by Boards of Guardians elected by ratepayers (with larger landowners having plural votes). Outdoor relief – the provision of work for the poor – was abolished. If any able-bodied man wanted relief he had to find it in a workhouse, where the conditions were deliberately made unpleasant, with strict discipline, miserable food, spartan living conditions and no social amenities. As one of the new assistant commissioners remarked, the workhouse was a deterrent, with its ‘prison-like appearance’ intended to ‘torment the poor’ and inspire ‘a salutary dread’, while the work the inmates had to do was, as the Act itself put it, to be made as ‘disagreeable’ as possible. ‘Every penny bestowed that tends to render the condition of the pauper more eligible than that of the independent labourer,’ said the report that led to the passage of the New Poor Law, ‘is a bounty on indolence and vice.’ If a pauper found life in the workhouse really unpleasant then he would expend all his energies in finding paid work, ‘he begs for a job, he will not take a denial’.

This principle of ‘less eligibility’ was applied to all. Orphans and the elderly and infirm were expected to be cared for by their families, or by more distant relations. The workhouse, with its minimal level of support, its harsh discipline, its uniforms, its degrading delousing sessions, and its social stigma, was popularly regarded as something to be avoided if at all possible. Its reputation was made even worse by the 1832 Anatomy Act. This was a response to the growing price of corpses supplied to the Anatomy Schools, which encouraged ‘resurrection men’ to dig up newly interred bodies to sell them to the medical schools, and the grisly Burke and Hare murders in 1829, in which two criminals in Edinburgh, William Burke (1792–1829) and William Hare (1807–1829) killed people in order to make money by selling their corpses to the anatomists. From 1832 the bodies of paupers were assigned free of charge to the medical schools if they were unclaimed by relatives. In a religious age when most people believed in the physical resurrection of the body, this was probably even more disturbing than the workhouse itself.

Not surprisingly, the New Poor Law was widely criticized as a denial of traditional English rights. It separated husbands from wives in the workhouse, and subjected to its harsh discipline children, orphans, the sick and the elderly – some 80 per cent of inmates in the 1850s and 1860s – none of whom was likely to obtain paid employment in society outside, as well as the able-bodied poor to whom it was directed. Its mean-spiritedness and its potential for corruption were memorably pilloried in the early novel by Charles Dickens (1812–70), Oliver Twist, where the eponymous orphaned boy creates an uproar in the workhouse by asking on behalf of the starving inmates for a second helping of gruel. Written in 1837–9, the novel caricatured the pomposity and hypocrisy of the parish board members responsible for running the workhouse, described the painful and pointless work the inmates had to perform, and condemned the ineffectiveness and cruelty of the system.

While some 350 workhouses had been built by 1839, the Act’s failure to provide a specific timetable meant that more than 170,000 paupers were still receiving outdoor relief in 1849, as against 28,000 ‘able-bodied’ adult inmates of the workhouses. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1830s British expenditure on poor relief had been halved, doubtless to the satisfaction of ratepayers. The Act’s harsh spirit of utilitarianism, in which ideals of charity and benevolence were replaced with a rational calculation of rewards and (more obviously) punishments as incentives to work, could be seen increasingly in other countries too. In Germany the ‘Elberfeld System’ of poor-law administration, involving the division of a municipality into districts each with a volunteer poor-law overseer who applied stringent conditions for relief and reviewed cases on a regular basis, began to spread following Prussian municipal administrative reforms in 1823. In the eyes of Political Economy and its followers, there was no reason for anyone to starve except in the most extreme cases of illness or decrepitude: if the able-bodied were destitute, it was because they were idle. This doctrine was to have calamitous consequences, above all in Ireland, in the economic crisis of the late 1840s.

THE HUNGRY FORTIES AND BEYOND

If European agriculture managed to adapt to support a rapidly growing population, despite the alarming rise of pauperism, it was not least because farmers in many parts of the Continent showed themselves more than willing to introduce new crops. Maize proved so popular in the Danubian Principalities (later Romania), where it had been grown since the seventeenth century, that by the 1830s it occupied 70 per cent of the arable land in Wallachia and provided the basis for the peasants’ diet there. Tobacco and tomatoes were increasingly grown in the warmer parts of Europe, and the cultivation of sunflowers, like them another American import, went to meet the growing demand for cooking oil. New crops allowed landowners and peasants to diversify into more industrial kinds of production, and here sugar beets registered particularly impressive results. Although their yield could compete with colonially produced cane sugar neither in quantity nor in quality, improvements in the refining process in the 1820s, coupled with new government incentives, allowed an expansion, so that the number of sugar refineries in the Russian Empire, for example, increased from seven in 1825 to 448 by 1861, most of them located in Ukraine.

By far the most important of the new crops imported into Europe after the colonization of America, however, was the potato. It took a long time to find acceptance among the European peasantry. In Russia in the 1830s, peasants called potatoes ‘apples of the Devil’, and government attempts to make state serfs plant them sparked a series of violent disturbances known as the ‘potato revolts’. In 1834 the English radical William Cobbett (1763–1835) dubbed the potato ‘this nasty, filthy hog feed’, while in one French district, the Sologne, it was reported ten years later that the local inhabitants ‘would consider themselves disgraced if they ate potatoes’. Nevertheless, in most parts of Europe, the potato had found acceptance by this time, not least as a consequence of the post-Napoleonic famine, when, notably in hard-hit areas of Hungary and Poland, it proved an indispensable foodstuff in the absence of adequate supplies of grain. It was easy to grow, it was nutritious, it gave high yields, and it required nothing more than washing and cooking to make it edible. Almost everywhere in northern Europe, the acreage devoted to potato cultivation increased dramatically during the early decades of the nineteenth century, reaching more than half a million acres in the Russian provinces of Belarus by the early 1840s, and reportedly increasing twentyfold in Estonia during the 1820s alone. Large areas of land were planted with potatoes in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Galicia by the 1840s, and potato cultivation spread rapidly across Scandinavia, northern France and the British Isles. Potatoes gained a particular importance in Ireland, where rural overpopulation made their intensive cultivation irresistibly attractive. By the early 1840s, nearly a third of arable land on the island was devoted to growing potatoes, a proportion more than twice that of the next most potato-friendly country, Belgium. Daily per capita consumption of potatoes in Ireland was estimated at more than two kilos, meaning that many people were effectively using it as their only means of nutrition.

In the summer of 1845 warm and humid weather conditions across Europe caused the infection of potatoes everywhere by a fungal blight that turned them into a foul-smelling, soggy brown mess in the ground. The blight was worst where winters were mild and summers wet, as in Ireland and the west of Scotland, but it affected almost all of Europe in one way or another. In 1845 potato crops collapsed by a catastrophic 87 per cent in Belgium, 71 per cent in the Netherlands, 50 per cent or more in Denmark and the south-west German state of Württemberg, and 30 per cent in Ireland. The blight continued into 1846, but although crops recovered slightly in most parts of Europe, they experienced a further sharp fall in Ireland, where the yield was now 88 per cent below normal. And after a brief recovery in 1847, the blight hit hard again in 1848–9. In Prussian Silesia, where dependency on the potato was almost as great as in Ireland, people in the winter of 1846–7 were said to have ‘nothing to eat except grass and nettles, coltsfoot, or a mess concocted of chaff, clover and blood’.

In Holland, Belgium and Prussia, the problems caused by the potato blight were exacerbated by the loss in 1846 of almost half of the rye harvest and a large portion of the wheat harvest as well. This was a catastrophic collapse, unparalleled since 1816–17, and hit these regions hard because of their heavy dependence on bread made from rye and wheat. Population growth in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands came to a standstill in the late 1840s, as people died from malnutrition-related diseases, succumbed to epidemics (notably cholera in 1849, and malaria on the Dutch coast), fled to the towns, and stopped having children. Governments moved swiftly to limit the damage, with the Prussian authorities organizing the purchase of massive quantities of Russian grain, the Danish government abolishing import duties on corn, and the French government also buying up Russian grain. By 1840, Belgians were consuming an average of 1.5 kilos of potatoes a day, but in 1846, 95 per cent of the potato crop in Flanders was destroyed by blight. Moreover, the rural flax industry, which employed nearly a third of a million people by the 1840s, fell into crisis as well, undercut by mechanized cotton production and damaged by falling demand. The Belgian government poured in 2.5 million francs in subsidies, lifted duties on food and grain imports in September 1845, purchased 5.5 million kilos of healthy seed potatoes from abroad in 1846, and spent 14.7 million francs on public works. Municipalities immediately organized massive relief efforts, supported by the Church; in the town of Bruges, for example, the winter of 1846–7 saw the distribution of a quarter of a million kilos of coal, 247,000 litres of soup, bread coupons to the value of 64,000 francs, and 40,000 francs in direct support to the poor. Local and national elites in Belgium had a strong interest in overcoming the crisis, especially in view of the very recent advent of national independence.

In the Scottish Highlands and the Western Isles over three-quarters of crofting parishes reported a total failure of the potato crop in 1845. Starving and malnourished crofters and their families began succumbing to diseases of the digestive organs; mortality rates in the Ross of Mull increased threefold in the winter of 1846–7. Yet the disaster was mainly confined to areas where the population depended on the potato, so that the Scottish Lowlands largely escaped despite the continuation of the blight into the 1850s. Around 200,000 people in the Highlands and islands were affected. By the end of 1846, the government had moored two ships off Mull and Skye to sell cheap grain, and public works were starting to provide wages for the distressed. Roads were laid, walls built, piers constructed, drainage ditches excavated. Religious and secular charities formed a relief board early in 1846 to supply grain to the stricken areas, and raised nearly £210,000, an enormous sum that has been described as probably the largest amount ever raised in nineteenth-century Scotland for a single cause. Local committees organized the distribution of grain and meal.

Acting in the spirit of the New Poor Law, the authorities insisted that only those who worked were entitled to relief. A bureaucracy sprang up to enforce this principle with work-books, inspectors and meal-tickets. The Assistant Secretary to the British Treasury, Sir Charles Trevelyan (1807–86), who was in charge of relief in both Scotland and Ireland, insisted that ‘next to allowing the people to die of hunger, the greatest evil that could happen would be their being habituated to depend upon public charity’. What saved the day was the intervention of the landowning elite. By the 1840s, 75 per cent of Highland estates had been bought up by businessmen seeking hunting preserves and looking to acquire status and power. Coming from an urban-industrial, trading and financial background in Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Lowlands, these men had the financial muscle to provide relief for their starving tenants, and most of them did so. Drawing on the resources of Jardine Matheson, the powerful and immensely successful merchant enterprise that dominated the tea and opium trades with China in this period, Sir James Matheson (1796–1878) pumped £107,000 into the island of Lewis, which he had previously bought, between 1845 and 1850, some £68,000 more than he earned in revenues from the estate in these years. In these various ways, catastrophe was averted. Such measures mitigated, but did not prevent, a real crisis of mortality in Europe in the late 1840s. Mortality in Belgium was nearly a third higher than average in 1847, with a total of up to 50,000 deaths attributable directly or indirectly to the harvest failure; in the flax-growing areas of Flanders excess death rates doubled in places. As in all famines, many deaths were caused by people crowding together in towns in search of relief, and succumbing to diseases that spread easily in unhygienic and overcrowded conditions, notably typhus. In the Netherlands excess mortality in 1847 reached 32 per cent, with 60 per cent in some areas, and in Prussia there were 42,000 more deaths than in a normal year, an increase of 40 per cent; conditions were worst in proto-industrial areas like Upper Silesia. Elsewhere, deaths were only about 5 to 10 per cent higher than usual and mostly the consequence of epidemic disease.

The situation was far worse in Ireland, for a variety of reasons in addition to the population’s uniquely heavy dependency on the potato. Poor relief was not decentralized as it was in Belgium. Moreover, unlike in Scotland, absentee landlords had little direct contact with their tenants and were not bound to them by ties of nationality, nor were they able to call on industrial and financial wealth to underpin any charitable activities. During the crisis, mortality rose in Ireland by a staggering 330 per cent, compared to a more modest but still grim rise of 40 per cent in Flanders. Distressing reports of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Ireland were already beginning to reach England in the autumn of 1845. Action had to be taken. But there were political obstacles in the way. The most important of these were the Corn Laws, which protected British agriculture by favouring exports while imposing extremely steep import duties on grain from outside the country. Their existence reflected the domination of landowning, grain-producing aristocrats in British politics, and they were not going to abandon them without a fight. They made it difficult if not impossible to import food to relieve the situation in Ireland. In November 1845 the Mansion House Committee, consisting of a number of important figures including Augustus Fitzgerald, Duke of Leinster (1791–1874), and the Lord Mayor of Dublin, condemned ‘the culpable conduct of the present administration’ for the ‘crime of keeping the ports closed against the importation of foreign provisions’, which drove up prices ‘for the benefit of a selfish class who derive at the present awful crisis pecuniary advantages to themselves by the maintenance of the oppressive Corn Laws’. Worse still, the ports remained open for the export of Irish grain, in ‘a quantity nearly adequate to feed the entire people of Ireland’. The government of Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) in London announced in January 1846 its intention to repeal the Corn Laws, a triumph for a lengthy campaign waged by the liberal, mostly middle-class proponents of free trade; but the passage of the Bill in June 1846 came too late for Ireland, since it only provided for a gradual reduction of import duties until their final abolition in 1849. By this time the damage had been done.

Aware of the dimensions of the crisis, the British government mobilized public works projects to provide the destitute with wages, and introduced strict controls on the price of potatoes. Grain imports were organized, with Indian meal distributed from central depots. But these measures were patchy, often incomplete, and above all slow to be implemented. It was not until 1847, for instance, that soup kitchens were operating on any scale, and even these were inadequate. Starving Irish families crowded into the workhouses, which contained 135,000 inmates at the beginning of 1848 and 215,000 eighteen months later, all looking for food and sustenance. Yet poor relief was legally unavailable to anyone with more than a quarter-acre of land. In the end, private relief operations were more important, though landlords were both less willing and less able to dole out relief to their tenants than were their counterparts in hard-hit Scotland. Underlying the whole crisis in Ireland was a widespread feeling in the British political and social elite that the Irish had brought their fate upon themselves by being lazy and having too many children (precisely the complaint made by Malthus about the supposed effects of the Old Poor Law). They had a fatal tendency, one critic declared, to ‘loiter about upon the land’, doing nothing.

By the end of 1846, crisis had become catastrophe. The secretary to the Relief Committee for Clonlolan told the Sheffield Independent on 26 December that he had received applications from 1,400 families. On his travels through the barony he was everywhere:

attended by crowds of famishing wretches, – gaunt with hunger. Men who ought to be comfortable farmers were clothed in rags, and bore all the appearance of the most abject want. Women were to be seen with hardly enough of clothes to preserve decency; but the aspect of the children struck me most painfully of all, – pinched, sallow, wrinkled, like little old men and women.

A magistrate in Cork, writing to the Duke of Wellington, described a village near Skibbereen ‘apparently deserted’, but on entering ‘some of the hovels’ he found no fewer than two hundred ‘famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead’, most of them ‘delirious, either from famine or from fever’. In one house the police had found ‘two frozen corpses . . . half devoured by rats’. The scenes, he wrote despairingly, were ‘such as no tongue or pen can convey’. Soup kitchens had been opened by this time, but they were in no way adequate to the task. ‘It is the very maximum if two out of any ten that are absolutely starving get relief in this way,’ it was reported on 4 March 1847.

Altogether the Irish potato famine killed a million people, or around a fifth of the entire population of the island. This made it the greatest of all European famines in the nineteenth century. In absolute terms it stood with the famine of 1816–17, but most deaths then had been from epidemic diseases, notably bubonic plague in the Balkans, which can best be seen as a side effect of the harvest failure. In the late 1840s the same holds true for most other European countries, where the majority of the 400,000 excess deaths were caused by cholera. In Ireland, uniquely, most deaths occurred as a result of actual starvation. And this was not the end of it. There were longer-term effects as well. Many children and adolescents who survived suffered from stunted growth: in the Netherlands, for instance, the proportion of army recruits under 5 feet 2 inches tall increased by 20 per cent in the years after 1847. Births fell by a third in Ireland, a fifth in Flanders, and an eighth in Prussia compared to a normal year, as people proved either unwilling or unable to conceive children during the crisis. The marriage rate fell by 40 per cent in Flanders and even in France it dropped by 11 per cent in 1847. In Ireland more than anywhere else, survivors responded by emigrating. By the mid-1850s, a quarter of all survivors born in Ireland had moved abroad. Helped by assisted passage schemes and driven out by land clearances, a third to a half of the population of some parts of the Scottish Highlands emigrated as well, either to England or overseas, between 1841 and 1861. A million people left Germany in the decade after the crisis, but legal restrictions, both in Europe (notably the limitations placed on the free movement of serfs and sharecroppers) and in the United States, where farmland in the Midwest did not become legally available until the 1860s, prevented most from people in other parts of the continent leaving.

The Irish famine was not the last to occur in Europe. Russia and Scandinavia, with their long winters and harsh climates that made agriculture vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather, were badly hit on several more occasions in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Where communications were difficult, it proved impossible to get relief to stricken areas. In Russian-ruled Finland there was an almost complete crop failure in 1856. By the spring of 1857, the poor were eating bread made of bark and straw mixed with a small amount of barley or rye meal, and bands of starving people were flocking to the cities in search of food. A series of poor or mediocre harvests every year from 1862 onwards, culminating in a total harvest failure in 1867, caused not least by a severe frost in September, before the barley, oats and potatoes had been harvested, resulted in yields only 25 per cent of normal rates. The country was plunged once more into a calamitous famine. The government, worried about balancing the budget, left it too late to buy in foreign grain supplies. By the early spring of 1868, people were starving.

Poorhouses fed migrants arriving from the countryside – over 100,000 of them in Finland as a whole, according to one estimate – on bark, straw, roots and lichens. In the municipality of Uusikaupunki in Turku province, migrants coming in from Ostrobothnia ‘were so hungry that they immediately went to the slop bucket and ate the food that was reserved for the pigs’. One man remembered begging, but ‘they didn’t want to give me anything, only scraps of food . . . one boy was sitting beside the road, eating horse manure’. Beggars were buried in mass graves all over the country. Some 90,000 deaths were reported from March to August 1868, nearly twice as many as in a whole year in normal times, while reported deaths from dysentery, a sure sign of malnutrition, rose from 1,038 in 1867 to 7,855 the following year. Travellers commented on ‘the black, empty windows in villages where all the inhabitants have either starved or emigrated’. The famine of the mid-1860s also hit Sweden, where meteorologists recorded average temperatures between 3 and 6 degrees lower than normal in April and May, and snow was still covering the ground in many areas at a time when the summer seed had to be planted. The governor of Jämtland instructed his local officials to provide lessons to the peasants on how to make bread from lichens and pea stalks, a policy that earned him the nickname Lav-Kungen, the Lichen King, in his district; many people fell ill as a result of taking his advice, and not a few died. Other officials encouraged people to eat mushrooms, which were generally considered fit only for cattle fodder. All these efforts had only limited effect: mortality in Westrobothnia reached eighty-four deaths per thousand population by 1868, far above normal levels. The famine extended to the Baltic coast of Poland, Courland, Livonia and Estonia, and along the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia; a report from St Petersburg pictured ‘villages depopulated; private houses turned into hospitals; fever-parched skeletons tottering from the doors of overcrowded places of refuge’.

By the end of the 1870s, improved transportation and greater governmental and administrative vigilance ensured that bad harvests seldom led to famine anymore. The spread of the railways to rural areas made it possible to transport food supplies to districts affected by poor harvests, and so stave off the public disorders that officials so feared as an accompaniment to famine. Already in 1854 when the harvest failed in the French department of Maine-et-Loire, the prefect reported with satisfaction that ‘for the first time . . . a calamitous year will have passed without sedition and almost without muttering’. The spectre of famine continued to stalk nineteenth-century Europe, especially in areas that were difficult of access. In March 1897 a newspaper reported a regional famine in León, a province of Spain:

where agriculture is almost the only source of wealth, [and] the inhabitants are on the verge of starvation; nearly all their flocks and herds have died either of disease or want of food. As for the crops, they were practically destroyed by the late storms and floods and by the drought of a few months ago, and all the horrors of famine threaten the already sorely tried peasants. Those who can do so emigrate to Brazil in hundreds, and those who cannot are reduced to eating acorns.

The government rushed food supplies to the area, and averted total disaster, as it did again when famine threatened in 1905 following a drought in Andalusia. Over a million people were affected, children were reported to be eating cactus leaves and fir cones, and infant mortality rates rocketed. Angered by the slow response of the government, bands of armed farm labourers roamed the countryside and entered the towns looking for food. Emigration was the response of many. An Irish potato failure in 1879 had similar effects. Overall, however, for all their dilatoriness, governments managed to prevent the worst from happening in these later episodes of dearth.

The most striking exception was Russia, where vast distances and poor communications, ill-advised fiscal reforms, and the long-term effects of the emancipation conditions led to disaster at the beginning of the 1890s. An early frost in October 1890 destroyed the seedlings for the following year’s crops, sown late because of unusually dry autumn weather. Winter was exceptionally long, and followed by another lengthy dry spell. The grain harvest of 1891 in European Russia was 26 per cent below normal, while the rye crop fell by an average of 30 per cent overall, and 75 per cent in the black-earth province of Voronezh. During the 1880s the government had tried to work towards the convertibility of the rouble into gold by stimulating grain exports while racking up taxation at home. But these policies squeezed the peasantry, already suffering from the loss of land as a consequence of the emancipation of 1861 and the rising population in the countryside. Peasant farmers had also taken advantage of the new market for corn by converting pasturage to arable, cutting down forests to turn into fields, and reducing their livestock, which deprived them of their major source of fertilizers. Over-intensive farming and the droughts of 1890 and 1891 did the rest.

Travelling through the stricken regions towards the end of 1891, Brayley Hodgetts (1859–1932), Reuters’ news agency correspondent in Berlin, encountered starving peasants everywhere he went. ‘We have no bread,’ people told him as they huddled round the stove in one peasant cottage: ‘“We have had nothing to eat for three days, by God”, they all sang in a kind of chorus . . . They looked as if they had not eaten anything for weeks – not days.’ They had consumed or sold almost everything they had. Hodgetts wrote that ‘some of the food of these poor peasants was terrible to see. Broken bits of bread, collected through begging; some mildewed, others foul with dirt, lay together in the peasants’ bread-basket.’ In another village he found people eating soup ‘little better than dirty, hot water. The men were wretched-looking, with hollow eyes, some in the last stages of fever, all huddled up on their double stoves, whither they had crawled to die. People were eating only every other day.’ As so often, epidemics swept across the starving countryside, carrying off thousands of people already weakened by malnutrition. In another area, a Tolstoyan Swede, Jonas Stadling (1837–1945), who thought the Russian government was deliberately keeping the peasants ignorant and crushing any sense of initiative they might try to develop, saw families taking the straw off their thatched houses and feeding it to their cattle or using it for winter fuel.

By the autumn of 1891, the need for full-scale relief operations was clear. But State Secretary Alexander Alexandrovich Polovtsov (1832–1909) thought everyone in authority was ‘weighed down with despair . . . no-one [had] a clear idea what to do but all . . . [vie] with each other in proposing the most wild-eyed schemes’. Grain exports were banned, but although money was released, the relief effort was hampered by poor communications and lack of information from the provinces. The railway network was effectively non-existent in many of the areas worst affected, different lines were managed by different companies and different state agencies, and there was a bitter personal feud between the two ministers responsible for running them. Public works and food loans to peasants were organized, but the schemes took a long time to get off the ground and were too limited in scope to be wholly effective. Even in August 1891 only 200,000 people were receiving food loans. By the time the programme was fully operational, in March 1892, the number exceeded 11 million, but most of the damage had already been done. By the end of 1892, death rates had increased by around 55 per cent in Samara and Saratov, 50 per cent in Ufa and Voronezh, 40 per cent in Orenburg, 36 per cent in Kazan and Simbirsk, and 30 per cent in Penza and Tambov. A total of 406,643 more people had died in the provinces most seriously affected by famine than in a normal year; 103,364 of these deaths can be attributed to the cholera epidemic that broke out in the summer, so that the figure of famine deaths is most likely to have been around 300,000, among which there were also many deaths from typhus, spread by starving peasants crowding together in relief centres in the towns.

The halting aid effort of 1891–2, even if partially successful, brought down massive criticism on the head of the tsarist administration. ‘The famine is a great lesson,’ commented one newspaper: it should galvanize the government into reform. This did not happen. There was no effective intensification of liaison and co-operation between the tsar’s central administration in St Petersburg and the local administrative bodies, the mainly liberal and professional zemstva in the provinces. Mutual suspicions were too great. In 1899 dearth struck Russia again, after bad harvests in the two preceding years. Some 10,000 cases of scurvy were reported by the medical authorities in the Kazan province alone by May 1899, and in one district 5,588 people out of a total population of 8,659 were in receipt of poor relief. The tsar’s Minister of Finance, Sergei Yulyevich Witte (1849–1915), commented that the Russian peasant ‘seems unable in any way to provide for the future, and by a single bad harvest is plunged into an abyss of misery from which he can only be extricated by external help’. Witte blamed the situation not on the burden of taxation, which he said did not fall on necessities and was generally very light, even when it included annual redemption payments, but on the peasants’ ignorance of their rights and duties within the rural community, and their reliance on custom and tradition. Witte was supposed to be a modernizer, but opinions such as these indicated a deep lack of understanding of Russian society that was to prove fatal in the end for the regime he served.

By 1914, famine had been banished from the greater part of the Continent. The ‘hungry forties’ had seen the deepest and most devastating crisis of subsistence. In some areas at least, notably in Flanders, the crisis had gained its depth from a combination of a simultaneous collapse of agriculture and proto-industry, the old economy and the new: just as had happened periodically for centuries, a poor harvest pushed up the price of grain, so that people in the countryside as well as in the towns had to use a greater part of their income to pay for bread and other foodstuffs, reducing demand for clothes, utensils and other manufactured goods. This caused a crisis in urban factories and workshops, which therefore had to lay off their workers, throwing them into destitution just at the moment when they most needed an income to survive. By the 1840s, however, a new dimension to such crises was emerging in the shape of the spread of modern industrial production across Europe, beginning in Britain.

THE TEXTILE REVOLUTION

Industrial production on the European Continent in the early nineteenth century was overwhelmingly small-scale, concentrated in individual workshops rather than in large factories, and driven by human or horse power, woodfires, water-mills or (especially in Holland) windmills. Artisanal workshops produced a whole variety of goods, ranging from glassware and silverware to clocks and furniture, often to high specifications for sale to the better-off. Agricultural workers and small farmers in areas like Switzerland or south-west Germany supplemented their meagre incomes with a handloom or spinning wheel in their home, selling their product to a middleman under the so-called ‘putting-out’ system, a highly seasonal and unreliable source of income, dependent on the labour of women and children in the family. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Britain had forged ahead economically, leaving the European Continent far behind. Per capita industrial production in Britain in 1830 was almost twice that of Switzerland or Belgium, more than twice that of France, and three times that of the Habsburg Empire, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark or the Netherlands.

Linen and wool had long formed the basis of the textile industry. What was new in the late eighteenth century was the arrival of cotton, previously used mainly for printed fabric or calico, for mass consumption. By this time, England was mass-producing cloth from raw cotton grown with cheap labour in India and then exporting finished cotton products back to the subcontinent. In the American south, cotton was farmed by slaves, making it cheaper still. Soon cotton in Europe was replacing the more expensive linen and wool, which did not undergo mechanization until the 1820s or later, as the basic fabric used in clothing. Imports of raw cotton into Britain rose from 11 million pounds in weight in 1785 to 588 million in 1850, all used to manufacture cloth. India, meanwhile, was sent headlong into industrial decline, to be followed by Egypt, where the attempts of the local pasha, Muhammad Ali, to develop a cotton industry were undermined by the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1838. The British intervened the following year, after the pasha defeated an Ottoman army in battle and threatened to march on Constantinople. His monopoly on trade was forcibly abolished, and as Egypt was flooded with cheap British cotton products, the domestic industry collapsed. Britain’s industrial advantage over the rest of the world was not the product of British ingenuity or inventiveness or other domestic factors. More than anything else, the explosion of cotton production in Britain was driven by world trade. In 1814, Britain was already exporting more cotton cloth than it sold at home; by 1850 the disparity had increased, with thirteen yards sold abroad for every eight in the UK. In 1820, 128 million yards of cotton cloth were sold to the European Continent, with 80 million going to the Americas (apart from the USA), Africa and Asia: by 1840 the comparable figures were 200 million and 529 million. British domination of the seas guaranteed a virtual monopoly for cotton sales to Latin America, which took a quarter more cotton cloth than the European Continent in 1820 and nearly half as much again twenty years later. Exports to India rose from 11 million yards in 1820 to 145 million in 1840. Cotton products made up nearly half the value of all British exports between 1816 and 1850. The growth of a new industrial economy in Britain after 1815 was not just the product of scientific or technological superiority, it was also the product of global empire.

The boom in mechanized cotton production in Britain was concentrated overwhelmingly in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Cheshire, in the north of England, where fast-flowing mountain streams turned the water-wheels that powered the machinery through a system of shafts operating a large number of looms weaving cloth under the same factory roof. Machinery had been introduced because labour costs were high, whereas elsewhere in Europe labour costs were low and so did not justify the substantial capital outlay needed to install the new machines. By 1829 there were 55,000 power looms in England; five years later their number had almost doubled, to 100,000. Power looms gradually drove handlooms out of business. In 1820 there were 240,000 handloom weavers in Britain. Increasing demand could still not be entirely satisfied by power looms. But the handloom weavers were becoming increasingly impoverished. Mechanization was driving down prices for the average piece of printed cotton: 3 shillings and 7 pence in 1818, 2 shillings and 11 pence in 1824, just over 2 shillings by the end of the decade. The handloom weavers could not compete. By the mid-1840s, their number had fallen to a mere 60,000. By the end of the decade, there were 250,000 power looms in operation in Britain, up from 100,000 in 1833. And the increase in numbers was not all. Continual improvements in technology meant that spinning machines were growing steadily in capacity, with machines of 300 spindles by the 1830s doing, in other words, the work of 300 individual women each sat at a hand-operated spinning wheel. In 1830, moreover, the ‘self-acting mule’ came into operation, invented by Richard Roberts (1789–1864) after factory owners had approached him in an effort to procure a technological means of dealing with the problem of strikes by reducing the number of workers. His invention incorporated many more aspects of spinning into machine operation, including for example the reversing of the spindle to ‘back off’ the yarn, an operation that previously had to be carried out by hand. Mechanization drastically lowered prices while producing a better-quality, finer and more even yarn, though where labour costs were low, as for example in Germany, the expensive self-acting mules were not adopted until the late 1850s.

Technological innovation also took place on the Continent. The French Jacquard loom, for example, invented in the late eighteenth century, revolutionized silk weaving and had an application to fancy cotton products as well; the number of looms in Lyon doubled between 1788 and 1833, by which time two-thirds of them were Jacquard models. And one of the most significant innovations in textiles came in 1845 when the Alsatian engineer Josué Heilmann (1796–1848), in Mulhouse, invented a machine that could be used for worsted wool yarn as well as fine cotton. He had previously developed an embroidery machine, and in 1832, Philippe de Girard (1775–1845) produced a machine for combing flax (or ‘heckling’ as it was known). Another French engineer, Benoît Fourneyron (1802–67), developed a new, highly efficient way of using water power in 1827 by turning a water-wheel on its side. He called it a turbine, and over the following years he built increasingly effective models, producing in 1837 a 60-horsepower turbine that could rotate 2,300 times a minute and operate at 80 per cent efficiency. Most remarkably of all, the wheel was only a foot in diameter and it weighed a mere 40 pounds. By 1843 his turbines were at work in 129 factories in France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Poland. But the most powerful means of introducing technological innovation into the textile industries on the Continent was through the export of British machinery, either directly or at second hand. After the war with France ended in 1815, the export of cotton to the Continent became possible again, and soon it was conquering one country after another as entrepreneurs saw the advantages of the new material and the new techniques.

Not surprisingly, after the war was over, the textile industry grew very rapidly once more in northern France. The first spinning machine was set up in Reims in 1815, while in Roubaix the woollen industry introduced the first power loom in 1844. Power-loom weaving began further east, with the installation of a steam-driven cotton mill in Elberfeld in 1821; by 1834 there were ten engines in the Wupper valley. The spread of the new industrial production across Europe was as uneven as its driving forces were diverse. The Spanish textile industry increased only very slowly in the first decades of the century; although there were fourteen water-powered textile mills in 1808, this number had only grown to thirty-six by 1836. The loss of the American colonies had cut off Spain’s major export market, and it was only after the import of cotton goods was banned in 1832 that the industry began to mechanize and to flourish. By contrast, there were 225,000 cotton spindles in Lower Austria by 1828 and 118,000 in Bohemia; weaving continued to be done by hand, except in the Vorarlberg, where there were 466 power looms by the early 1840s. The nascent cotton industry of Italy in the 1830s was dominated from the beginning by Swiss and German immigrants, and even at the end of the century the world of the industrialists in Lombardy, as one commentator reported, ‘abounded in guttural sounds and harsh terminations’. Despite a few improvements in the machines in the 1830s and 1840s, this was not a fully industrialized branch of the economy by any means; yet silk accounted for a third of the value of all Italian exports right through the nineteenth century and beyond. Still, by 1848 there were sixty cotton mills in Piedmont and Lombardy, with 200,000 spindles, giving an average of just over 3,000 spindles per mill.

Government initiative was responsible for the early mechanization of the textile industry in Poland. Rajmund Rembieliński (1774–1841), the Prefect of Mazovia, a low-lying district in east-central Congress Poland, was an Anglophile Polish nationalist whose publications included a play entitled Lord Salisbury; he succeeded in getting two Saxon manufacturers to set up a mechanized cotton mill in Łódź, powered by water. Meanwhile, the woollen and linen industries had revived in Białystok and Żyrardów, where a factory set up by a French engineer managed to obtain a monopoly of linen production from the Russian authorities. Yet the industrialization of Congress Poland was frequently retarded by government policies as well. From 1823 to 1825 a tariff barrier with Prussia made contacts with western Europe more difficult, while from 1832 to 1850, in the wake of the failed uprising of 1830, Congress Poland was excluded from the Russian customs area so that Polish industrial goods found it hard to secure a market to the east. In Russia itself, British machinery was imported into the state-owned Alexandrovsk factory in St Petersburg and already in the 1840s Russian firms had stopped importing finished cotton cloth from Britain, and were buying raw cotton direct from the United States instead. After mid-century, domestic machine-building firms quickly began to supply most of the wants of the textile industry in Russia: by mid-century there were fifty-eight cotton mills in Vladimir, with 900 looms and 5,800 workers on the premises, but also 45,000 handlooms and 65,000 workers processing the cotton at home in the surrounding villages.

The most important centre of the new textile production in Europe was in northern France and southern Belgium, where the industrial mills exemplified the new world of work and discipline that was now being established. Here the flat land and sluggishly flowing rivers meant that steam power was used from the outset, since watermills were impractical. In the early industrial town and port of Ghent there were already 250,000 spinning jennies by 1815. The largest mill in the town, owned by the Voortman family, signed a contract in 1821 with two English businessmen to import and set up 100 power looms, ten dressing machines, a steam engine and a washing machine, at a total cost of £5,000. This was an enormous sum in the currency of the day, funded by the profits the firm had made during the Napoleonic Wars. By 1824 the mill was employing sixty workers, but such was demand that the business was still contracting out work to 800 handloom weavers. Other enterprises followed suit, and by 1830 the town’s cotton mills were employing 10,000 workers in spinning and printing cotton, with a further 20,300 handloom weavers working to commission at home outside the city. Access to markets and imported raw materials was improved by the construction of canals linking the town to the coalfields of Wallonia, lowering the costs of operating the machines. By 1830 there were 700 steam-driven power looms in Ghent, increasing to 3,600 by 1840 and 5,000 by 1846.

The annual profits of the Voortman factory had tripled by 1830, largely on the basis of new contracts to export finished textiles to the Dutch colonies, but there was a crisis following the revolution of that year and the mill closed temporarily. The Voortmans were originally Dutch and the company had an office in Amsterdam; the family was known to be Orangist. Moreover, the firm was unpopular not only because of its introduction of machinery but also because it had responded to a strike in November 1829 by locking the workers out, hiring twenty-five spinners from France, and getting several of the strikers sent to prison. In 1831 the workers spread a rumour that the company was concealing weapons on its premises; they broke in and during their search they also, not coincidentally, smashed the factory machines. Somewhat tactlessly, the owner told workers demanding the reopening of the factory ‘Go and eat your freedom tree if you are hungry!’ The workers broke into his house, beat him badly, and forced him to kiss the Freedom Tree, though they did not make him eat it. When he recovered and reopened the factory, in 1832, wages were lowered, only twenty-seven of the previously employed 132 workers were re-hired, and the police were called in to protect him from the workers yet again.

Discipline in Voortman’s mill was harsh; wages were docked for arriving late for work, being drunk, going to the toilet too often, submitting a sub-standard finished product, or even suspending work briefly to fetch tools or oil the machinery. Fines were a cause of bitter resentment and contributed further to worker discontent. There were further strikes in July and September 1834. Working conditions in the new factories elsewhere shared many of these characteristics. The factory as an institution introduced a ferocious new time-discipline for those it employed. Handloom weavers might be forced to sit at their looms for fourteen hours a day to make ends meet, but they could choose when to start, when to finish, and when to take a break. Workers had to arrive on time to hear the bell sounding the start of the day’s work, and a long list of rules and regulations docked their wages for any perceived or supposed slackness. A description of regulations in a spinning factory at Tyldesley, near Manchester, handed out by the workers during a strike in 1823, noted that the temperature in the factory was normally around 27 or 28 degrees Celsius, the working day was fourteen hours ‘including the nominal hour for dinner; the door is locked in working hours, except half an hour at tea time; the workpeople are not allowed to send for water to drink, in the hot factory’. A fine of a shilling, a not inconsiderable sum, was levied on any worker who was five minutes late for work, ‘found with his window open’, ‘found washing himself’, or ‘heard whistling’. ‘Any spinner being sick and cannot find another spinner to give satisfaction must pay for steam per day 6 s[hillings].’ Such harsh new rules and regulations were widely resented by workers wherever they were imposed.

Early industrial cotton mills were dangerous places. Workers suffered from bronchitis, indigestion, varicose veins and deafness, caused respectively by working long hours in an environment filled with fluff and dust, by standing for lengthy periods of time, and by spending their days amid the enormous noise of machinery. Some weavers had the task of threading the ‘kissing shuttle’, placing their lips to the threading hole and sucking in, making respiratory diseases a certainty. Hair or clothing could be caught between belt and shaft, pulling a worker in and twirling her around the shaft until she was beaten to death; shuttles could fly off the loom, spiking a worker in the face. Workers could be caught in machinery, like the young ‘scavenger’ Patrick Noon of Stalybridge, whose job was to clean the floor underneath a spinning mule; in March 1846 his head became trapped in a space only four inches wide, and the whirling machinery flayed the skin from his head, revealing the bone. Over a period of six months in 1840, the English and Scottish Factory Commissions reported 1,114 accidents in cotton mills caused by machinery, along with another 907 of various kinds, all resulting in 22 deaths and 109 amputations. There were few provisions for compensation, though some companies did put funds into charities set up for this purpose. Workers were widely assumed to be engaged in their chosen occupation out of free choice and at their own risk. Employers frequently accused injured workers of negligence.

A high proportion of the workers in the mills was female. In 1843 two physicians in Ghent commented that ‘the tendency to replace men with women and children exists here as in other manufacturing districts’ because of the mill-owners’ desire to ‘economise’. The more new machines were installed, the more women were employed. In 1829 over 40 per cent of employees in Ghent cotton mills were female, a figure that increased to 48 per cent in the highly mechanized Voortman mill. Male workers in the mill actually went on strike in 1832 in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent a further increase in the employment of women. Even more than women, young children were thought to be dexterous and known to be cheap. Employing them would keep them off the streets and contribute to family income. There were no Belgian child-labour protection laws until 1889. The number of children aged five to nine employed in the Voortman textile factory increased from 1 per cent of the workforce in 1842 to 9 per cent in 1879, and the number of those aged ten to fourteen rose from 6 per cent in 1842 to 34 per cent in 1859. Many of these were girls working in the carding room, or on spinning or weaving machines. Almost all of them were relatives of people who already worked there; more than three-quarters of the workers in the mill had been born in the town. A family income was especially necessary in bad times such as the late 1840s, when food prices increased by 20 per cent and food expenditure accounted for 76.2 per cent of the total expenditure of Ghent cotton workers (normally it was around 66 per cent). A typical family of workers in Ghent, the Bauters, tied up their entire lives with the Voortman factory. Louis Bauters (1801–?) worked as a weaver in the factory from 1840 to 1850, while his wife, whom he married in 1829, was employed as a weaver there from 1835. The couple had twelve children. Those who survived infancy started work in the factory when they were thirteen: there were three wage-earners in the family in 1845, and five in 1849. Yet this was a family living precariously on the very margin of existence. Only one of the Bauters’ twelve children lived beyond the age of twenty-five; four died in infancy, and seven died between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. According to a survey of 1845, food for the Voortman factory’s workers consisted mostly of bread and potatoes, eked out with meat four times a week for 20 per cent of them, twice a week for 35 per cent, once a week for 26 per cent, and not at all for 18 per cent, and otherwise a thin gruel of buttermilk or leeks and potatoes. Poverty, malnutrition, disease and infant mortality were not newly created by the industrial revolution, but the new world of the factory did nothing to alleviate them and in some respects made them worse.

COAL AND IRON

There could be no doubt of the significance of steam technology, even when it powered only a minority of industrial enterprises. Its introduction was rightly described as an ‘industrial revolution’, a term first used in France in the 1820s to denote a momentous change in production, in which, as the economist Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui (1798–1854) wrote in 1831, ‘industrial conditions were more profoundly transformed than at any time since the beginnings of social life’. What was momentous was not so much the organization of production into large factories where hundreds or even thousands of people laboured to make standardized products; these enterprises had existed already in the eighteenth century. The difference was that in those earlier ‘manufactories’ the workers had each been working essentially by hand, using their own muscle-power. Natural sources of power – human beings for operating handlooms, horses for pulling carts, wind for operating windmills, above all, water for driving water-wheels – each played a part in the first stage of the industrial revolution. But very quickly steam became the key source of power. This was the decisive breakthrough. From now on, society was free from the tyranny of the elements and the limitations of human, elemental and animal strength in the creation of industrial power.

The industrial revolution was not confined to textile manufacture, but was in the longer run of even greater significance in the production of coal and iron. Here what marked out Britain from the rest of Europe in the industrial sphere was above all its early use of coal as a source of energy and its continued domination of coal production well into the second half of the century. Between 1815 and 1830 coal output in Britain virtually doubled, from 16 million tons a year to 30 million. As late as 1860, Britain was still producing more than twice as much coal as the whole of the rest of Europe put together. As demand grew, so mines had to be sunk deeper to access coal seams hundreds of feet below the surface. Water had to be pumped out of the mine, air circulated along the pits and galleries, gallery roofs held up with timber props, coal hauled to the surface and taken away by specially built canals or, in the 1840s increasingly, by rail. The need to pump water out of coalmines was a key factor in the development and refinement of the steam engine, but the actual cutting of coal from the seam was done by hand. Production could only be increased by bringing ever more miners to the coalfields, and areas where there were rich seams of coal, for example in south Wales, saw increasing numbers of immigrants drawn by the prospect of steady work.

The work was dirty, difficult and dangerous. Spectacular colliery disasters were frequent. At the Wallsend pit near Newcastle, for example, it was reported on 23 October 1821:

At around 8:00am the new pit shaft called New Belcher Seam, in Wallsend Colliery, on the river Tyne, blew up with a most tremendous explosion, which was heard at the distance of several miles around. It is not known with any certainty how the accident originated, but it is thought to be by the ignition of the hydrogen gas. The report of the explosion having alarmed the people belonging to the collieries in the neighbourhood, hundreds instantly came running to the fatal spot, wishful to ascertain the extent of the calamity . . . In the pit, out of fifty-six men, it was found only two had escaped unhurt – four men got out alive, but in a very weak state, two of whom are since dead. The rest, to the amount of fifty souls, had all perished.

On 18 June 1835 people working above ground at the same pit heard ‘a considerable report, which they spoke of as being like an earthquake, accompanied by a rushing of choke damp to the mouth of the shaft, bringing up with it some of the pitmen’s clothes and other light articles from the bottom’. A huge gas explosion had killed twenty-six men and seventy-five boys working underground. Crowds of distraught relatives gathered at the pithead as the bodies were brought up over the following days. Gas explosions were the cause of the greatest disasters such as these, but day in, day out, miners suffered injuries and sometimes death from less spectacular causes: broken arms or legs from runaway wagons, bodies scarred by falling rock, drowned by a sudden onrush of water, trapped by rock falls, or injured in many other ways. Pregnant women working underground pulling heavy coal wagons were frequently reported to suffer miscarriages.

Flooding became more common as mines sank deeper shafts to reach more remote seams, often disregarding the geology of the area. In 1838, for example, it was reported:

A dreadful accident occurred at Mr Hughes’ colliery near Begelly Pembrokeshire on Saturday last in consequence of a very thoughtless . . . cutting in of water; by which means 6 poor men . . . were drowned. The quantity of water cut in was so great as to take the constant working of persons, night and day, at two pits, with the assistance of a steam engine at a third pit, from the day the accident happened, to Thursday morning.

Unusually, the father of one of the men killed prosecuted the manager for manslaughter, though he failed to get his case through a grand jury. On 14 February 1844 the Garden Pit in Pembrokeshire, which went some 197 feet beneath the estuaries of the rivers Cleddau and Daucleddau, and produced 10,000 tons of coal a year, suffered one of the decade’s worst disasters. An unusually high tide put heavy pressure on the relatively shallow workings, sending the sea roaring through the mine and drowning forty workers who had no chance of escape.

There were no formal rules of compensation in such cases, though employers sometimes made ex gratia payments. In the mid-1840s the mine-owners of South Staffordshire mines were reported to be giving 6 shillings a week to men off work because of injuries, one shilling and sixpence to widows of miners killed in the pit, and an extra shilling a week for every child under ten. Such generosity was more forthcoming after great disasters, when the newspapers sometimes organized public subscriptions for the bereaved, though it was only directed at the ‘deserving poor’. Following the 1821 explosion in Wallsend, the mine-owners buried the dead in the local churchyard at their own expense and gave the bereaved families money for food and fuel as long as they needed it. However, many employers were commonly critical of the workers’ ‘recklessness in dangerous occupations, their neglect of cleanliness, their refusal to adopt preventive measures against evident evils, and above all, their widespread habit of intemperance’, as the hygiene expert John Thomas Arlidge (1822–99) put it. Workers often set up their own collections or ‘gatherings’ to help injured comrades, but, rather than depend on unsystematic and intermittent charity, many miners went back to their job as soon as they recovered. William Morrow (1836–?) lost his leg in 1844 at the age of eight when he was run over by a coal wagon, but he was reported working at the pit six years later, now sporting a wooden leg. Miners and their families often treated their mishaps as mere bad luck, or acts of God, or the fault of the injured worker. Safety improvements were slow to come. The covered Davy Lamp, introduced in 1816, gradually replaced the far more dangerous candles, but also encouraged the exploitation of deeper, more remote and more difficult seams, leading to an increase in the number of accidents. The expansion of coalmining in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century was achieved at a high price, paid by the workers.

The growth of the coal industry was paralleled by rapid expansion and technological change in ironmaking. Here, innovation was driven by the high cost of charcoal in the absence of abundant supplies of wood. In Britain, too many trees had been felled to build the ships of the Royal Navy and provide land for ploughing and pasturage, so a new method had to be found. By 1790 almost all pig iron (basic smelted iron) was being smelted using coke, a concentrated form of coal that could be heated to very high temperatures. New techniques of purifying pig iron and turning it into wrought or bar iron (‘puddling’ and ‘rolling’) developed in the 1780s and fuelled a massive boom in iron production in Britain. In 1750, France and Sweden had dominated European iron production, while the British imported much of what they needed. By 1860, Britain was producing 60 per cent of all pig iron manufactured in Europe, basing the industry around iron ore and coal mines in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and other areas of the country.

The only part of the Continent to follow suit in the first half of the century was the region located on large coal and iron-ore deposits stretching from Belgium into northern France and western Germany. The long capitalist industrial tradition of the region, its rich natural resources, the lack of a strong agrarian political interest, and the concentration of banking and financial resources, strengthened by heavy government investment, all made Ghent and the southern part of Belgium the pioneering centre of industrialization on the Continent, not only in textiles but also in coal and iron. By 1838, British-made steam-pumps were routinely used in all the deeper Belgian pits – and the average depth of pits in Belgium was 689 feet at this point. By the 1820s coke blast furnaces and puddling and rolling mills were being constructed around Liège and Charleroi, using technology imported from Britain. Import duties protected the industry from British competition, and the reduction of costs undercut traditional means of production. By the 1830s, coked pig iron made up virtually 100 per cent of all pig iron produced in Belgium, as it did in Britain, whereas in Germany and France traditional charcoal-based methods continued to dominate. Charcoal continued to be used in Sweden for refining pig iron in an adaptation of the British puddling technique until the 1860s. Alpine pig iron continued to be smelted exclusively by charcoal up to the 1860s, and the Vítkovice ironworks in the north of the Habsburg Empire, which introduced coke smelting in 1836, remained the only one to use coke in the entire Empire until 1854, probably because it had been set up by two ironmasters brought over from Wales.

Much of the innovation that took place on the European Continent was a direct result of the importation of British men and machinery. British governments tried to prevent the export of technical know-how by passing laws forbidding the export of machinery and the emigration of artisans in the 1780s. But these regulations were completely unenforceable. Already in 1798 the Belgian (at the time, French) engineer Liévin Bauwens (1769–1822) had smuggled a disassembled spinning jenny packed into sugar crates out of Manchester to Ghent via Hamburg, despite the fact that the export of machinery was punishable by death. Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860), a Hungarian aristocrat who visited England in 1815, succeeded in obtaining:

a model of the gas-driven engine, which cost me a deal in both money and effort and was obtained only by dint of sheer will-power and persistence . . . Several acquaintances mocked me for my preoccupation with machines, especially the light-generating one to which I devoted so much time while in England. Of course, it is indeed odd for a captain of the hussars to take three hours of instruction from not just mechanics but their assistants, in both theory and practice, and to be covered in wood oil in the morning and eau du Rasumovsky in the evening.

Nevertheless, while he considered steam engines useless and dangerous (‘We have no factories, and thank God that we do not’), the count thought that machines which made light out of coal gas had many potential uses, and he was prepared to pay 2 pounds for the model and a further sum to bribe a ‘proud Englishman guised as a customs official’, who ‘for a potage of four ducats sold the soul of his nation: a gas machine’. Such subterfuges were common enough in the period immediately after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

In the mid-1820s, Britain’s export ban was replaced by a licensing system and in 1843 it was done away with altogether. Foreign entrepreneurs eager to acquire the latest techniques came over to England to work, and took plans and blueprints back with them, or hired British experts to modernize their workshops. A case in point was the celebrated German iron and steel firm Krupp, whose owner Alfred Krupp (1812–87) (his English first name was a deliberate homage to English industrial superiority) travelled to England in 1838 (lightly disguised as ‘Herr Schropp’). He returned to Germany but every now and then sent agents over to England to learn the latest factory designs and industrial techniques. Sometimes the state took a hand in bringing the new methods into its domains. On the vast Zamoyski estates in Congress Poland the Physiocrat Stanisław Staszic (1755–1826), an official in the Russian administration responsible for trade and industry, began to encourage mines, steel mills, textile processing and canal-building, based on the English example. In Dabrową Górnicza he discovered coal deposits and founded a coalmine, and he modernized the blast furnaces of the Staropolskie Basin so that they used coke instead of charcoal.

But in most of Europe private enterprise played the major role, and initially too this frequently involved entrepreneurs from Britain, such as the Irish engineer William Thomas Mulvany (1806–85). A civil servant in charge of job-creation schemes in Ireland, mainly in canal and road building, after the famine Mulvany had found himself without a job when the schemes were wound up, and began to search for new opportunities to make a living. Visiting the Ruhr area with a group of potential investors, he found what he was looking for :

As a result of a short visit to the Head Mining Office and examination of the geological map, I immediately realised what wonderfully extensive riches were hidden under the earth. I had seen how inadequate in those days were your railways and how insufficiently your canals and transport facilities were used. I said to myself on the spot: these people do not understand what they possess here.

The coalmines he founded were named Hibernia, Shamrock and Erin, and remain so to this day; Mulvany was eventually made an honorary citizen of Gelsenkirchen, and died in old age in Düsseldorf, where he spent the last part of his life.

Yet the state remained important in providing the legal, institutional and economic framework for industrialization. In Britain in particular it undertook limited reforms of working conditions. The Cotton Mills and Factories Act of 1819 banned the employment of children under the age of nine, and restricted the hours of work for those under sixteen years of age to sixteen hours a day. Such legislation was difficult to enforce, but in 1833 a new Factory Act not only further limited the hours of work for children and required them to have at least two hours of education a day, it also set up a Factory Inspectorate. Often the legislation was introduced after a public outcry resulting from an industrial disaster. People became aware of conditions in the country’s collieries in 1838 after a freak accident at Huskar Colliery, near Barnsley. A stream overflowed into the ventilation system after violent thunderstorms, causing the death by drowning of twenty-six children – eleven girls aged from eight to sixteen and fifteen boys aged from nine to twelve. The reading public was appalled by the revelation of the widespread use of child labour. The disaster came to the attention of Queen Victoria (1819–1901), who ordered an inquiry. The Christian philanthropist Lord Ashley (1801–85, later Earl of Shaftesbury) led the Commission in its visits to collieries and mining communities, gathering information sometimes against the wishes of mine-owners. The report, illustrated by engraved illustrations and the personal accounts of mineworkers, was published in May 1842. Victorian society was shocked to discover that children as young as five or six worked as ‘trappers’, opening and shutting ventilation doors down the mine, before becoming ‘hurriers’, pushing coal tubs along the underground tunnels. Lord Ashley deliberately appealed to early Victorian prudery, focusing on girls and women wearing trousers and working bare-breasted in the presence of boys and men, a practice that ‘made girls unsuitable for marriage and unfit to be mothers’. The resulting Coal Mines Act of 1842 and the Factory Act of 1844 established an inspectorate and banned women and children from working underground, continuing initiatives begun in the previous decade. The 1844 legislation reduced the limit to nine hours a day for nine-to-thirteen-year-olds. It required guard rails to be put around equipment. Owners could be fined if a worker was injured by unsafe machinery.

These reforms had few parallels elsewhere in Europe. Far more important was the state’s involvement in the expansion of industry and above all in transportation. The construction of roads and canals was overwhelmingly funded by governments, which also invested heavily in railway-building. The state was a key source of investment capital, as well as legislation making it easier for banks to provide loans to business. Just as important perhaps were the activities of men such as Peter Beuth (1781–1853), head of the Prussian Department of Trade and Industry, who in 1821 set up a Technical Institute in Berlin, and visited Britain in 1823 and 1836 to gather information about the new industrial techniques and machines. More significant still was the lead taken by Prussia in dismantling onerous tariff barriers, first through a reform passed in 1818 and then through the German Customs Union founded in 1834, soon to be joined by South German states such as Baden, though not by Austria. The Customs Union brought together a range of earlier, smaller tariff agreements on the basis of a uniform import duty based on the Prussian one. A major and often neglected effect of the Customs Union was to protect German industry from British competition; in 1844, for example, it was charging an import duty on pig iron of a pound a ton.

Free trade was initially championed in Germany by the British economist John Prince-Smith (1809–74), a schoolmaster who taught in the Baltic port of Elbing and set up a Free Trade Association in Berlin in 1847. The cause made little headway before mid-century as far as Germany’s relations with the rest of Europe were concerned. The breaking-down of internal tariff barriers was, however, vital for economic progress. A case in point was the river Rhine, the main artery connecting central Europe with the North Sea and the Atlantic. In the mid-eighteenth century there had been a customs barrier on average every ten miles of the length of the Rhine, which abutted on numerous different states. Free traffic all along the length of the river was actually ordained by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 but proved so fiendishly complicated to implement that it did not come into effect until 1831. Up to that point, among other things, all boats had been legally obliged to offload their cargo in Cologne and again in Mainz, and offer it for sale there. The reform of 1831 led to a temporary crisis in the two cities, as most boats and barges now just bypassed them; tonnage passing through Cologne harbour fell by a half between 1834 and 1840, in Mainz by a third between 1829 and 1832, and only slowly recovered with the coming of the railways. But in the long run the creation of free trade along the river drastically lowered costs for the goods it was used to transport.

There were other respects in which a reduction of state interference in the economy played a significant role in freeing it up for technical innovation. Surviving from the mercantilism of an earlier age, the state in Prussia for example regulated by law the number of workshops to prevent economic distress, enforcing the restriction with particular vigour in times of crisis like the late 1840s. The Prussian state of the time owned twenty coalmines, mostly in the Saar and Silesia, producing more than 20 per cent of all coal mined in the kingdom in 1850. Nationalized ironworks were producing 150,000 tons of pig iron a year at this time, and the state exercised a total monopoly over the production of salt. The Prussian Overseas Trading Corporation (known as the Seehandlung) owned and ran textile mills in Silesia, as well as chemical works and machine-building factories. It made loans to struggling industrial companies, but its activities in subsidizing loss-making enterprises with taxpayers’ money got it into trouble. In 1845 the king ordered the Corporation not to undertake any new ventures, and in the late 1840s it was forced to start selling off most of its enterprises. Similar conditions existed in Bavaria, where the state also owned the salt mines, along with coal and iron-ore mines, the Royal Bavarian Bank, three health spas, and the largest beer cellar in the world, the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. Christian von Rother (1778–1849), head of the Seehandlung, roundly condemned ‘the familiar cry that a civil servant cannot compare with the private citizen when it comes to running an industry successfully’. The phrase ‘familiar cry’, however, was a sign of the times; critics pointed out that civil servants had no interest in fostering industrial growth – Rother, for example, had declared that there was no future in railways – and liberal economists and politicians gradually brought about the withdrawal of the state and agencies such as the Seehandlung from direct involvement in industry, except, notably, in the railways, where strategic considerations were often more important than economic ones.

Yet despite the influence of the state in financing industrialization, determining tariffs and subsidies, constructing roads, railways and canals, and collecting and publishing economic statistics, it is important to remember that the distribution of natural resources and markets did not follow state boundaries. Rather, it determined that industrialization would take place in regions that in many cases cut across them. A case in point is the north-west European coalfield, stretching from southern Belgium and northern France across to the Ruhr in western Germany. Elsewhere industry was concentrated near coal and iron-ore deposits in the Scottish Lowlands, in north-east and north-west England, in south Wales, in east-central France, in Silesia on the borders of Prussia and Austria-Hungary, in the Saar on the German-French border, or in Liegnitz and Zwickau in Saxony. Early industrialization in Europe was no respecter of borders; it was characterized above all by the borrowing of techniques, the migration of labour, and the spread of investment and expertise from country to country. In no area of the industrial economy was this more obviously so than in the case of the railways.

RAIL, STEAM AND SPEED

Industrial growth depended not least on cheap, rapid and effective means of communication, carrying raw materials to the factories and finished goods to the markets. In the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, major improvements had been made to Europe’s roads and waterways, though their impact was uneven. Napoleon’s road-building programme had been based on the need to move troops around strategically; it was patched up in the 1820s until popular disturbances in 1832 prompted the July Monarchy to make bridges and highways usable by troops in every kind of weather; over 800 miles of new roads of various grades, most of them not metalled, were constructed every year in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1824 nearly 60 per cent of national roads in France were in bad need of repair; by 1845 almost all main arteries were serviceable all the year round, though the actual size of the network of metalled roads barely increased at all – from just under 21,000 miles in 1824 to almost 23,600 miles in 1914.

In the Habsburg Empire the road-building budget increased from 420,000 thalers in 1821 to 3 million two decades later. Up to 15,000 workers were employed on road-construction schemes, and the network grew from 1,965 miles in 1816 to 6,864 miles in 1846. Getting from place to place became easier and faster as a result of these projects. A post-chaise could cover 18 to 25 miles a day on a good road in the early nineteenth century; a small ‘diligence’ could reach speeds of 9 miles an hour, reducing the journey time from Frankfurt to Stuttgart from forty to twenty-five hours when it was introduced in 1821. In the earlier part of the century it was reckoned that a stagecoach could achieve about 6 miles per hour on a good road, travelling some 50 miles a day in summer and half that distance in autumn and winter, when roads were muddy and weather conditions bad. A journey from Buda in Hungary to Vienna took a mere thirty-one hours by the 1830s, where it had required two whole days half a century before; the state road system within Hungary itself had expanded from 435 miles in 1790 to 1,100 miles in 1848, though a carriage provided by the national transportation company, complained one traveller in 1830, was ‘dirty and uncomfortable’ and resembled ‘a covered wagon of gypsies’.

Metalled roads remained an extreme rarity in the Russian Empire, which had none before 1831, only 3,000 miles of these chaussées in 1850, and just 10,000 fifty years later. In Eugene Onegin the poet Alexander Pushkin described in unflattering terms a journey undertaken by road from a country estate to Moscow by the Larin family: ‘Our roads are bad. Neglected bridges rot. At post-stations you can’t get a minute’s sleep for bugs and fleas.’ In summer the roads were covered in choking dust, in autumn and spring they turned to mud and slush in which coaches frequently got stuck fast. Many Russians found travel by land easiest in winter, when the ground was covered in a thick layer of snow and ice, and large horse-drawn sledges took their passengers gliding along a route marked by tall posts sticking up above the surface. Open to the elements, the sledges exposed their passengers to strong winds and blizzards. The richer and more important the passengers, the faster the journey: Tsar Alexander I took forty-two hours to travel from St Petersburg to Moscow in the winter of 1810, while Nicholas I lowered the record to thirty-eight hours in December 1833. Most travellers would take far longer.

Beyond this system of turnpikes, highways and arterial roads, European travel was much more difficult. Carts and carriages, horses, mules, flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, and individual human beings making their way on foot, had to find their direction as best they could along unmapped and unmade trails, across fords and along causeways, or down tracks and paths that could barely be discerned in bad weather. Some of these served specialized uses, such as pilgrimage routes or drovers’ trails, others connected villages to local markets, or linked mines, quarries and factories to major arteries of communication, but the overwhelming majority of trails were purely local, at most regional. Mountain passes were treacherous in all weathers, and had to be traversed on horseback or by mule, using the services of a local guide. On the plains, peasant farmers ploughed over the unmade roads, turned them to mud by driving cattle over them, and neglected to restore roads when they were washed away by floods. Fords, far more common than bridges, were impassable after it had rained. Wheeled traffic was not possible on the overwhelming majority of roads and was not seen in many areas until the dawn of the twentieth century. Farmers often carried produce to market on their backs, especially if they could not afford a mule. In 1840 a regional primary-school inspector in one part of France reported that the peasants in his district divided the local roads into three kinds: rabid where the horse sank to the level of its breast, perishing where the rider sank to his eyes, and desperate where horse and rider both disappeared into the morass without trace.

For the transport of bulk goods, industrial raw materials and goods for export, waterways were by far the most efficient means of communication in the first half of the century. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been an age of canal-building, and this continued after 1815. Some canals were dug to link rivers, such as those joining the Rhône and the Rhine in 1832, the Marne and the Aisne, or the Saône and the Yonne. Others were constructed for specifically industrial or trading purposes, like the Oise canal, dug in 1836 in order to facilitate the transport of coal from northern French mines to Paris. Governments were active sponsors of these projects, and the Restoration authorities in France even drew up plans in 1820 for 6,200 miles of new canals, though curbs on government spending meant that only 1,900 were completed by the end of the 1840s in addition to the 1,240 already in existence. The Prussians built a network of canals around Berlin, notably the Oranienburg canal in the 1830s and the Landwehr and Louisenstadt canal in the late 1840s, enabling cheap British coal to be transported to the city. In Britain most canals had been short waterways linking collieries, quarries or iron foundries to the sea, or to the market, and they had been built mainly as industrialization was already under way.

However, steam power was rapidly revolutionizing travel and transport by river, canal and sea. Steamboats were already operating on the Clyde and the Thames in 1815, and their use – mainly for carrying passengers – quickly spread to the Continent. By the 1840s, for example, the Austrian Royal and Imperial Steamboat Company already had a fleet of 224 ships transporting over 200,000 passengers on the Danube every year, and it had extended its operations to the Black Sea. Its rivals, including the Hungarian Danube Steamship Company, the Kulpa Navigation Company, and others, covered the demand for local transportation. By the 1820s it was possible to travel by water between the Black Sea, the Caspian and the Baltic, and barges with up to 700 tons of cargo could make their way along 2,500 miles of water from Astrakhan to St Petersburg in under two months. In 1815 the first steamboat appeared on the Neva at St Petersburg, and by the 1820s steamboats could be seen on the Volga and Dnieper, but they remained uncommon until around 1900, and most barges were pulled by horses on a riverbank towpath, or indeed by teams of men (the source of the famous ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’, which became popular across Europe). The great advantage of the paddle steamer was its ability to travel upstream against a river current, but this innovation was slow to come in Russia, where labour was cheap. Continuous improvements led to over 100,000 miles of navigable inland waterways in Russia by the end of the century, and the tonnage of freight carried on them increased from 6 million in 1861 to 30 million by 1900, more than half of it timber and firewood.

Short railway lines designed to serve mines and quarries, with wagons pulled by men or by horses, had been around for many centuries; what transformed them was, first, the use of iron for rails from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, and second and most important, the invention of the self-propelled steam-powered locomotive, devised in the early nineteenth century by Richard Trevithick (1771–1833) and made fully viable by George Stephenson (1781–1848) and his son Robert (1803–59). In September 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester line was opened in a ceremony attended by the Duke of Wellington and ‘immense crowds’ of people who ‘lined almost every inch of the road, and flags and banners, booths and scaffoldings, and gorgeous tents’, according to a contemporary newspaper report. Once the 30-mile Liverpool to Manchester line was in operation – carrying not only large quantities of raw cotton and coal but also half a million passengers in its first year – it was soon followed by others. Within twenty years there were 7,000 miles of railway line extending across many parts of the British mainland. Railway companies earned huge profits and fuelled speculation. At the height of the British railway mania, in 1847, no fewer than a quarter of a million men were engaged in railway construction, and the demand for iron rails, steam engines, rolling stock, signals and other equipment took up 33 per cent of brick production and 18 per cent of iron production. Railways consumed all these things voraciously, along with gravel for the permanent way and coal for the engines. Soon their profitability was exerting an appeal for investors on the Continent as well, where horse-railways were already in existence but steam technology was as yet unused. Indeed the Austrians actually boasted the world’s longest horse-railway, begun in 1825 and eventually covering 90 miles from Linz to Budweis; it kept going up to the mid-1850s, with over a thousand light, wooden-wheeled trucks and ninety-six passenger cars, carrying nearly 200,000 people a year and travelling an average of 40 miles in a day through the period of its operation. But the future, as was apparent well before the last horse-drawn train made its way from Budweis to Linz in December 1872, lay with steam.

Perhaps unexpectedly, steam railways, originally designed to carry goods, turned out to be immensely profitable because of their passenger traffic, and soon they were spreading not only across Britain but to the Continent as well. The first French railway was opened at Saint-Étienne in 1828 to carry coal, but when the horses that pulled the wagons were replaced with steam locomotives four years later and the line was extended to Lyon, the railway began to attract passengers, who travelled on double-decker trains, with the more expensive seats on the lower deck protected at least to some degree against inclement weather. In 1835 the first line was opened in Belgium, and another in Bavaria, with the Russians opening a short line from St Petersburg to the royal palace at Tsarskoe Seloe in 1837, and the Netherlands following in 1839. In 1847 it was the turn of Denmark and Switzerland. In Italy the first two railways, from Naples to Portici and Milan to Monza, were opened in 1839–40, in each case to connect the king’s palace with the capital city. Railway development in Italy was slow before unification, with fewer than 1,100 miles built by the end of the 1850s, though it was later boosted by politicians in the more prosperous parts of the north, especially Piedmont, who clearly saw its economic advantages. Railway construction was held up in part by opposition from Pope Gregory XVI (1765–1846), an inveterate enemy of modern technology who had also blocked the introduction of gas lighting on the streets of Rome. After his death, the city’s inhabitants joked that when he complained to St Peter on the way to the Pearly Gates that his legs were getting tired, and asked how far he had to go, St Peter told him: ‘If only you had built a railway, you would be in paradise by now!’

When George Stephenson visited Spain in 1845 to investigate the potential for building railways there, he commented gloomily: ‘I have been a whole month in the country, but I have not seen during the whole of that time enough people of the right sort to fill a single train.’ Only 283 miles of track had been laid by 1855. In areas lacking in resources and low in population density, railways came even later: the first lines were not opened in Norway until 1854, Sweden in 1856 and Finland in 1862. Romania and Greece opened their first lines in 1869, leaving only Albania without railways. This was partly because railway construction required heavy initial investment. Private capital was available in Britain because industrialization was already in progress and the need was to provide cheap and quick means of transport for industrial goods and raw materials. But on the Continent railway-building preceded industrialization, and so either the investment had to come from the British or it had to be provided by the state.

In Belgium the government regarded the railways as a means of unifying the newly created country as well as assisting industrialization. So it issued government bonds to finance construction. King Leopold I also sought to use the railway network to provide an alternative means of importing goods to the country’s main waterways, all of which went through potentially hostile territory, namely the Netherlands. The first lines, approved in 1834, linked Antwerp, Brussels and Mons with Aachen and Cologne, and Ostend with Liège. This meant that Belgian trade could either bypass the Rhine completely or avoid the Dutch part of it and so make it impossible for the Dutch to impose a blockade in the event of a dispute. German states also saw railways as a way of expressing their statehood, centring the network on their respective capital cities and ignoring links with the outside world; in the Grand Duchy of Baden, indeed, the state-built and state-run railways operated on a broad gauge and only converted it to standard gauge in 1853. Even with state investment, the costs of building networks far exceeded the capacity of most states to finance them, so the majority of railways, particularly those in France, were financed from Britain. Many of the Belgian government railway bonds, for example, were bought up by British investors. Even so, the scale of the national financial investment required for railway construction was staggering. By mid-century the French were investing more than 13 per cent of their gross domestic capital formation in railways, while the railway shares issued in Prussia from 1845 to 1849 amounted to the equivalent of a third of the national budget each year. This had become, in other words, the leading sector of the economy. Speculators like George Hudson (1800–71) in Britain put huge sums of other people’s money into railway projects, many of which turned out to exist on paper only; he was disgraced after he was found to have defrauded investors and bribed Members of Parliament. Yet Hudson soon found his counterparts in other countries, notably Bethel Henry Strousberg (1823–84), whose dizzying speculations in Germany were founded on a similarly shaky basis and brought many investors to ruin when his schemes eventually crashed. And just as the British initially supplied much of the capital, so they also initially supplied the rails, the wagons, the locomotives and the equipment. In 1841 only one of the fifty-one locomotives used in Prussia was not British, and it did not work.

The personnel were usually also British. The Paris-Rouen line was not only financed and run by the British, but it used locomotives built at a local workshop staffed entirely by British workmen. The Leipzig to Dresden line was constructed, perhaps unusually, with native capital raised in Saxony in 1835, but a Scottish engineer, James Walker (1781–1862), who had worked on the Liverpool to Manchester line, was brought in to survey the route, the first sixteen locomotives were shipped over from Britain in boxes and assembled by British engineers, drivers and mechanics, and on the first journey the train was driven by a British engine-driver. The coaches were designed by Thomas Worsdell (1788–1862), tempted over from his position in the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Belgian railways too were built with British expertise; George Stephenson produced the first locomotives, travelled incognito on the first train with the king and his advisers, repaired the engine when it broke down, and was knighted by the monarch for his services. This pattern was entirely typical of early railway construction on the European Continent, so it was not surprising that most states adopted the British standard gauge of 4 foot 8½ inches for their lines; apart from Baden, only Spain, with a 5 foot 6 inch gauge, and Russia, where an American engineer called in to advise on railway construction recommended a 5 foot gauge, went down a different route, thus making it impossible for trains to come through from other countries and storing up considerable problems for the future.

While local labourers were often used – the first Russian railways were largely constructed by serfs – British labourers predominated here too in most parts of Europe in the early years. The railways everywhere were built by gangs of ‘navvies’ – short for ‘navigators’ – casual manual labourers who lived at the railhead or lodged in nearby villages if there were any, and stayed on the job until the line was finished. They built embankments and carved out cuttings, blasted tunnels, threw up bridges, and laid thousands of miles of permanent way, all by hand. Accidents were common, explosions went off prematurely, embankments and tunnels collapsed, wagons broke loose and crushed navvies to death; there was no health and safety legislation to protect their lives and prevent them from being injured. Matters were made worse by the fact that they were often drunk; gangmasters were paid a commission by brewers to supply beer to their men, and even one British contractor who refused to allow the sale of beer at the workings conceded that ‘a man has a right to bring a gallon with him if he likes in the morning’. Fatalities were frequent. More than a hundred men were killed during the construction of the Box Hill tunnel on the Great Western Line from London to Bristol between 1836 and 1841. At Ashton-under-Lyne in 1845 a nine-arch viaduct collapsed, burying the men working on it under the rubble; a crowd estimated at 20,000 gathered to watch the rescue operation, and troops were called to hold them back. Fifteen men were killed, and only two were brought out alive; an inspector’s report concluded that poor workmanship had caused the disaster. Such accidents were often preventable, and they multiplied as railway-building spread across Europe.

The railway navvies were hired in enormous numbers; in 1845 there were said to be 200,000 working on around 3,000 miles of new railway lines in Britain, and at any one site several hundreds would be toiling away, if not thousands. Often the railway-builders paid scant attention to the ownership of the land on which they built the permanent way. ‘In some cases,’ wrote one commentator, ‘large bodies of navvies were collected for the defence of the surveyors [against local landowners]; and being liberally provided with liquor, and paid well for the task, they intimidated the rightful owners.’ A minority of the navvies were Irish, and violent clashes with the resentful local English workers were not uncommon, sometimes involving hundreds of men on either side. Five thousand British navvies worked on the Paris-Rouen railway in the early 1840s, shipped over by an entrepreneur from Southampton; in Rouen they spent liberally on drink, and, after every pay day, construction had to stop for three days until the navvies had been collected from the bars and cabarets and sobered up. This made them popular with the local bar-owners though not with their employers. A British engineer, Robert Rawlinson (1810–98), said that ‘they labour like degraded brutes; they feed and lodge like savages; they are enveloped in vice as with an atmosphere’. In 1842, when a large part of the city of Hamburg burned to the ground, some of the inhabitants blamed the British and Irish navvies working on the construction of a nearby railway line, there were protest meetings and riots, and Englishmen were attacked in the streets.

From their earliest days, the railways were known above all for the speed with which they conveyed passengers and goods from one place to another. George Stephenson called his first locomotive Rocket, while the two engines that pulled trains on the first German steam railway, from Nuremberg to Fürth, were called the Eagle and the Arrow. Travelling by train at night in the late 1830s, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) thought it the ‘likest thing to a Faust’s flight on the Devil’s mantle; or as if some huge steam night-bird had flung you on its back, and was sweeping through some unknown space with you’. In 1840, taking his first train trip, the future historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), then a student in Berlin, noted with astonishment that the ‘train . . . glides in 33 or 35 minutes to five-hours’ distant Potsdam . . . It really flies there like a bird.’ In 1844 the painter J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) tried to capture these novel sensations in his Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway. ‘These steam-train journeys,’ noted the poet Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) in 1850, ‘tirelessly shake up the world, which actually only now consists of railway stations, like a kaleidoscope, in which the passing landscape continually takes on new shapes.’

As railway traffic increased, the inevitable accidents began to occur. The first actually happened at the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway in September 1830, when the President of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson (1770–1830), was run over by Stephenson’s Rocket, coming up slowly and silently behind him to take on water as he conversed with the railway’s promoters. As a newspaper report sagely noted, since ‘no engine can move off the rail, any person who stands clear of it, is perfectly safe from danger. Unfortunately,’ the paper continued, ‘in the hurry and agitation of the moment, Mr. Huskisson did not pursue this advice.’ Instead, he ran along the track, and then when he tried to climb into a carriage on an adjacent rail, was knocked back into the path of the oncoming locomotive by a swinging door and was run over, ‘uttering a shriek of agony, which none who heard it will ever forget’. He died in hospital shortly afterwards. In May 1842 newspapers across Europe carried lengthy reports of a crash on the Paris-St Germain line in which fifty people were killed and more than a hundred injured: a long train of eighteen carriages pulled by two engines came to grief when the axle of the first locomotive snapped, causing it to derail; the second engine, still going at full speed, smashed into it, causing it to burst into flames, and as the whole train went off the line, the fire spread to the carriages, which had just been painted. The doors were locked on the outside, and, as a newspaper correspondent reported, ‘the flames were 30 yards high, and as a smart wind was blowing, the wagons and their living contents were instantly consumed, amidst heart-rending screams for aid’.

And yet, ‘the safest place in which a man could put himself,’ declared the British politician John Bright (1811–89), ‘was inside a first-class railroad carriage of a train in full motion’. First-class carriages had buffers, padded seats and stout wooden frames holding up the roof, and would have been a better protection for their passengers in such a situation. Travelling third-class in the early 1840s was not a pleasant experience. ‘I took a train to Rochdale,’ reported one early traveller. ‘We were put into a truck worse and more exposed than cattle trucks. There were seats, or forms to sit on, but they were swimming with rain.’ In 1844 an Act of Parliament required all railway carriages to offer protection from the weather, an example quickly followed on the Continent. This encouraged many more people to travel by train. However, the major economic effect of the railways was achieved through the transportation of bulk goods. By carrying large quantities of goods over longer distances at faster speeds, the railway reduced costs sharply. According to one estimate, one ton of goods cost an average of 64 pfennigs a mile to transport by road in Germany in 1800, falling to 43 pfennigs in 1875, but in 1850 the cost of transporting it by rail was a mere 16 pfennigs per mile. Lower transport costs boosted the production of heavy and bulk industrial goods, providing further income for the railways and an incentive to build new lines. Continental countries soon stopped importing railway-building materials and began using their own, further stimulating production. After buying 51 British-made locomotives up to 1841, the Prussian railways bought another 124 engines in 1842–5, but 40 per cent of these were German-made, and by the 1850s almost all of the new railway engines were built in Germany. In France 88 out of 146 locomotives at work in 1842 were British, but by 1854 the French were already producing 500 a year. The largest ironworks on the Continent, in Belgium, was producing 30,000 tons of rails a year by the mid-1840s.

This was a classic case of industrial substitution, and it further advanced industrialization on the Continent as well as stimulating demand for local labour. In Germany most of the 178,500 men working on the lines in 1846 were not British but German. Once the initial lines had been constructed, the same development occurred elsewhere. The full impact was to be felt in the decades after the middle of the century, but already by the late 1840s railways and railway-building were beginning to transform European economies and societies. The German firm of Krupp really got under way in the 1840s, when it began to supply axles and crankshafts for railway engines and rails for them to run on. A few years later his business had expanded so fast that Krupp’s ambitions had become global in scale: his ultimate vision encompassed the supply of railway equipment to the whole world, with railway lines ‘linking and crossing the great continents of Africa, America and Asia so that they will come to the status of civilized countries and with connecting and branch lines will keep industry busy until the end of the world – as long as some windbag does not destroy this expectation by developing air transport’.

Railways made communication faster and easier, carrying letters, documents and other vehicles of information speedily from place to place. So too did the aerial telegraph, using stations equipped with semaphore signals and carrying messages by visual contact. Systems were reported working in Prussia in 1832, Austria in 1835 and Russia in 1839. The French system played a role in The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), by Alexandre Dumas (1802–70), as the count altered signals to cause a financial disaster in Paris. But the semaphore was only visible a third of the time because of the weather and the night, and the cost of operating it was considerable – £3,300 a year in the case of the London to Portsmouth line around mid-century, for example. Electromagnetic telegraphs began to replace them after the American Samuel Morse (1791–1872) patented the first fully functioning one in 1837. It only required a single wire, and was cheap to operate. In 1846 the Electric Telegraph Company was established to begin its commercial exploitation. Many people were mystified by its operation, ‘Some,’ it was reported, ‘firmly believe that the paper on which the message is written actually passes through the interior of the wire itself.’ Morse’s code of long and short impulses initially had to compete with a variety of other codes, but in due course it became standard. By 1850 there were 620 miles of telegraph wires in France, with a further 899 under construction. Where they were above ground, they were mostly suspended from telegraph poles placed alongside railway lines for convenience.

The Prussians preferred to coat the wires in gutta-percha and bury them underground: 2,468 miles of wires were set up in this way, out of a total of 4,000 altogether. Later on, lead tubing was used, as a more solid and reliable casing. Governments were seriously worried about the subversive potential of telegraph communication, and in France and Prussia all despatches had to be submitted to government agents at the stations before being transmitted. Private individuals were not allowed to send messages themselves anywhere. By 1850 it was being reported that ‘Calais may send news to the city of the Magyar in the Danube; and ere long intelligence will be flashed without interruption from St Petersburg to the Pyrenees.’ Such novel means of communication began the process whereby ideas and information could spread quickly across the Continent, encouraging the formation of new political movements and a new political consciousness that transcended boundaries. This was a vital development that was to provide an essential communicative basis for the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848, which would not have occurred in so many countries virtually simultaneously without it.

THE MAKING OF THE EUROPEAN WORKING CLASS

Before the coming of industrial manufacture, the production of goods such as cutlery, textiles, furniture, pottery, wine and beer and the like was regulated across much of Europe by guilds, formally incorporated institutions that aimed to maintain high standards of production and ensure a decent living for all the workers in the trade by limiting the amount produced. Over the centuries guilds had come to exert an enormous influence over the affairs of many towns and cities in Europe, which often depended heavily on their reputation for producing high-quality goods for sale on the market. Guildsmen frequently had seats on town councils, and were able to use their influence to punish anyone who tried to ply their trade without being a member. These restrictions were made easier by the fact that many if not most European towns still had outer walls in 1815, required guildsmen to live within them, and closed the town gates at dusk, obliging strangers to depart unless they had legitimate business in the town extending over more than one day. Guildsmen had a large range of ceremonies and ‘mysteries’ with which they cemented their corporate identity; frequently they wore a particular kind of clothing, amounting almost to a uniform, that could distinguish a mason from a carpenter, a draper from a haberdasher. The guilds formed strong bonds between their members, which frequently provided a basis for collective action. Among their services were pensions for widows and orphans. By training up and promoting young men in the business, guilds ensured that everyone earned a living and would eventually be well enough off to get married and found a family (something the guild rules did not permit for those below the rank of master).

The guilds were controlled by master craftsmen, tried and tested in their skills, and these in turn employed young apprentices to whom they taught the basics of their trade. When he had satisfied the master that he could make a good-quality product, the apprentice was given a letter or certificate from his guild that advanced him to the grade of journeyman, in which he was obliged to travel for up to three years, seeking work from masters in other towns and gaining as wide a range of technical experience as he could. Finally, the journeyman would be obliged to produce a ‘masterpiece’, a complicated product demanding advanced skills in his trade. He would then be admitted as a master providing his masterpiece satisfied the demanding standards set by the guild. While they may have ensured that high standards were maintained, however, the guilds’ ingrained respect for tradition meant that they had no interest in pioneering new methods, least of all if these pointed towards producing for a mass market. By keeping out interlopers they prevented the development of free trade and free enterprise.

In 1853, Otto von Bismarck enumerated the disadvantages of the guilds in Frankfurt, where he was based as Prussian envoy to the German Confederation: ‘excessive prices for manufactured articles, indifference to customers and therefore careless workmanship, long delays in orders, late beginning, early stopping, and protracted lunch hours when work is done at home, little choice in ready-made wares, backwardness in technical training, and many other deficiencies’. Conservative though he was, even Bismarck did not fail to recognize that things had to change. Not surprisingly, already in eighteenth-century England the guilds had largely ceased to have any real influence, and absolutist regimes on the Continent had launched a determined campaign to reduce their privileges. The decisive blow had come with the French Revolution, when guilds had been formally abolished in France. The influential textile guilds of Flanders had been destroyed when the French invaded, as they had also been in western Germany. Reforming administrations in Germany abolished guild privileges and gave everyone the freedom to choose their own trade without any restrictions, unless they required a very high level of expert knowledge (such as was needed for apothecaries, for instance). Guilds continued in existence after 1815, even in France, but in most parts of Europe they entered the post-Napoleonic world in a severely weakened condition.

Even where economic growth was slow and the market in industrial goods arrived relatively late, as in Sardinia or Sicily, the growing financial problems of guild members – here, as in some other parts of southern Europe, responsible for putting on elaborate and expensive religious festivals and processions – led state officials to allow craftsmen exemption from membership in 1841. The involvement of guilds in the uprising of 1821 in Palermo led to their abolition by the Crown the following year, but, as in Naples, where the same measures were implemented, associations such as friendly societies and co-operatives continued to organize artisanal workers long afterwards, both reflecting and perpetuating the weakness of market competition. In Spain the government abolished the privileges of the guilds in 1831 and introduced complete freedom of enterprise three years later. They collapsed rapidly – the Holy Thursday procession in Gerona was cancelled in 1836 because the guilds could not afford to take part, and those in Seville were described as being in a state of ‘general calamity’ around the same time. Not only legislative but also economic developments further undermined their influence. Guilds routinely expelled any member found working in a factory, but as factory production gathered pace after the coming of peace in 1815, the guilds were increasingly bypassed by the new methods. They showered governments and legislative assemblies with petitions complaining about declining standards of workmanship and the effects of increased competition from new centres of production. In Bavaria guildsmen complained that a law of 1825 had created ‘an increase in destitution and complete impoverishment, which are in turn further aggravated by the creation of new master artisans which the industrial law facilitates’.

But none of this could stop the onward march of mass industrial production. In 1826 there were no non-guild master plasterers in Berlin at all; by 1845 they made up 65 per cent of masters in the trade. Non-guild master bakers increased from 5 per cent to 19 per cent in Berlin over the same period, non-guild master shoemakers from 35 per cent to 82 per cent. Only in luxury goods did guilds retain any influence. ‘Free’ craftsmen in the villages and the countryside, far away from guild controls in the town, were able to use new methods, and already in 1816 some 75 per cent of masters and journeymen in Bavaria were located in the countryside. In areas like textiles and the production of finished iron and steel goods, masters and guildsmen either had to lower their prices to compete, or abandon their old methods and embrace the new technology of mass production. The crisis of the guilds was expressed in the breakdown of the promotion system. In 1816 there were 259,000 masters and 145,000 journeymen and apprentices in Prussia; by 1846 their numbers had increased to 457,000 and 385,000 respectively, signifying the growing difficulty of journeymen and apprentices in obtaining a mastership. This, not the peasantry or the landless labourer class, was the reservoir of labour that early industrialization tapped.

The more the numbers of guild artisans grew, the poorer they became, and the more the primary purpose of the guilds, to ensure a decent living for all their members, was undermined. By 1840 three-quarters of all master artisans in Berlin had an income so low that they were no longer charged even the basic rate of business tax. The situation of journeymen was even worse. Brockhaus’s encyclopedia of 1839 confessed: ‘The journeyman is also regarded by the master only as his wage-labourer, and the master is only interested in him insofar as he wants to earn money with his labour.’ The Prussian authorities responded in 1845 by extending the freedom of production first introduced in 1810, but implemented unevenly, across the whole state. Some trades disappeared entirely through changes in fashion (the wigmakers’ guild was a prime example) while others were decisively undercut by factory production, such as furniture-makers. Some were able to make the transition: locksmiths, for example, found a new source of income in the machine-tool industry. A very small number succeeded in building an expanding business, but only by flouting the guild rules and becoming industrial producers themselves. For the vast majority, the choices were becoming increasingly stark: become a pauper and subsist off poor relief, or join the swelling ranks of the new factory proletariat.

The artisans, however, did not give up without a fight. If the guilds were increasingly ineffective, then there were other institutions they could use to articulate their interests. In France apprentices and journeymen had long been involved in the compagnonnage, a system of secret societies with initiation rites, passwords and the like, through which they sought to ease their journeymen years on the tour de France by providing work and accommodation, and put pressure on masters to provide a living wage. When they left the compagnonnage artisans frequently set up friendly societies into which they paid money to support themselves and other members in their old age, or if they were unemployed. It was estimated that around 100,000 young workers passed through the compagnonnage every three years in the 1830s. But while the institution possessed some of the attributes of a trade union, it was riven by internal disputes, often based on petty rivalries and struggles over status. Blacksmiths agreed to admit wheelwrights to their compagnonnage on condition they wore their ribbons in their bottom buttonhole, but the wheelwrights insisted on wearing them in a buttonhole as high as that of the blacksmiths. Farriers refused to admit harness-makers at all. If two groups of journeymen encountered each other on the road, they would shout the ritual greeting ‘Tope!’ after which they would ask each other’s trade; if it was the same, they would share a drink; if not, and one journeyman considered himself to be of superior status, he would demand that the other give way. Fights would often ensue, and be continued in revenge attacks in town. Serious injuries and sometimes deaths were the result. The institution was already in decline in the 1830s, as a new generation of workers entered their trade with a sceptical attitude towards tradition. Apprentices rebelled against the tyranny of the journeymen, while the journeymen themselves began to abandon the tour de France as railways robbed it of its excitement and industrialization undermined what was left of the guilds. An attempt was to be made to unite the rival groups in 1848, but it came to nothing, and the compagnonnages were unable to represent workers effectively in the dawning industrial age.

The future lay with trade unions. But these existed only in Great Britain, and even here their development was severely curtailed by the Combination Laws, originally designed to combat Jacobinism during the years of conflict with Revolutionary France. Already before this, organized strikes for higher wages and better working conditions had occurred from time to time, above all in the cotton-spinning industry, but they had frequently been suppressed and their leaders imprisoned. A fresh wave of strikes that broke out after the repeal of the Combination Laws in 1824 (when post-war unrest had subsided) prompted the founding of a number of trade unions to represent the workers’ collective interests, but all proved short-lived. Frustrated by their inability to convey their demands effectively, Lancashire cotton handloom weavers engaged in attacks on power looms in the mid-1820s, continuing a machine-breaking movement supposedly led by the mythical ‘King Ludd’ during the Napoleonic Wars. Machine-breaking was restricted to small towns where there were few opportunities for alternative employment. A period of high inflation led to numerous strikes for higher wages, and in 1825 new Combination Laws were passed, but at least they legalized trade unions, despite placing severe restrictions on their activities. Local unions began to form, but like the guilds on the Continent, they frequently aimed above all to restrict the influx of new workers into their trade. Many, too, used quasi-Masonic titles, rituals, regalia and language to underscore their links with older traditions, but they were soon bypassed by more modern organizations.

The law in Britain still discriminated heavily against workers’ unions, and when in 1834 a group of farmhands in Tolpuddle, near Dorchester, formed a Friendly Society and went on strike to stop employers lowering wages as a general economic depression began to deepen, they were prosecuted under a 1797 Act forbidding seditious oaths, and sentenced to transportation to Australia. A national outcry followed and the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ were allowed to return home after the remittance of their sentences in 1836. Trade unions only emerged on a wider, more permanent basis among highly skilled workers whose withdrawal of labour could prove damaging to employers. Rivalries between different trades that had limited the prospects of collective action in the 1820s were overcome at the start of the next decade with the formation of the nationwide Amalgamated Society of Engineers, Machinists, Millwrights and Patternmakers, which levied a high subscription (a shilling a week) and aimed to provide sickness, unemployment, retirement and burial benefits. It survived an unsuccessful strike and lasted through the following decade, though its membership of 12,000 in 1831 was not always sustained. Most unions were highly regionalized, and where they were able to form a national association, this often failed to endure, as with the National Typographical Association, founded in 1844, which split into three regional bodies four years later because the London printers felt they were subsidizing their northern comrades and gaining little in return. During a long economic downturn that lasted until mid-century, trade unions were defeated in labour disputes time and again as employers forced lower wages on their members, leading to the rapid disintegration of national associations like the Grand General Union of Cotton Spinners or the National Association for the Protection of Labour.

A typical example of the difficulties of securing effective worker representation may be seen in the case of the Miners’ Association of Great Britain and Ireland, formed by an alliance of coalminers in Durham and Yorkshire in 1842–3. By 1844 it had 70,000 members, or 30 per cent of all miners in the region, along with a general secretary, a national executive and a newspaper. Its clearly stated aim was to keep prices and wages from falling by restricting output. In that year the inevitable strike was quickly defeated when the employers brought in substitute labour and sacked the leading activists. By 1848 the union had collapsed. Strikes and labour actions were confined to local or at most regional disputes. A politically driven attempt to form a Grand National Consolidated Trade Union in 1833–4 had done nothing except hold a much-publicized Congress before it too broke up in disarray. The lesson that increasing numbers of leading trade unionists drew from all this was that trade unionism and the improvement of the workers’ bargaining power stood little chance of success without political action.

Although union activism could potentially lead to political activism in the United Kingdom, police repression and the relative backwardness of the industrial economy ensured that this was far more difficult for workers on the Continent. In France a Combination Law passed in 1834 made any association of more than five people potentially illegal. The 1830s and 1840s witnessed a growing crescendo of protest across those parts of Europe most affected by the penetration of the market in industrial goods and the calamitous effects on the life of the urban artisan of harvest failures and the potato famine, which forced up food prices and left people with little money with which to purchase finished goods, thus severely reducing demand. Everywhere, protests were led by skilled and literate artisans, using their traditions of solidarity and mutuality to articulate demands that could not be satisfied by the political system. Industrial strikes certainly took place but they were confined to a relatively small number of factories and addressed immediate practical issues such as wage cuts. During industrial depressions, fear of unemployment kept workers quiet; in Rouen sackings for insubordination fell by 75 per cent during the depression of 1845–6. More than a third of the textile employees in the town were women, and a fifth were children; they lacked the tradition of activism common among male artisans. Strikes among miners, predominantly men, were more common, and were mounted in Anzin in the Nord department in 1834 and 1846 for higher wages, but during these decades worker protest was articulated above all by the artisans and guildsmen.

The majority of protests were backward-looking in nature, aiming to establish a ‘fair price’ or ‘fair wages’ for the workers’ products, and above all a ‘just price’ for food. Riots and public protests centred on bread-and-butter issues; guildsmen tried to protect their rights and privileges, and crowds of men, women and children articulated demands for a ceiling on food prices. There were an estimated 186 examples of machine-breaking and attacks on power looms in the German Confederation between 1816 and 1848. This was not an attempt to stop the march of technological progress so much as a drastic form of bargaining for better wages. After the largest outbreak of wrecking in Bohemia, in 1844, the workers marched on Prague to ask for help, only to be met with a hail of bullets from the police and the military. Yet protest of this kind, for all the notoriety of ‘King Ludd’ in England, was unusual. A study of ‘social protest’ in north German towns between 1815 and 1848 has estimated that forty-one incidents of violent collective action arose from economic issues, sixty-three from clashes with authority, nineteen from quarrels between guilds, and thirty-five from struggles over political rights. In the south German state of Baden over the same period, research has uncovered over a hundred violent collective protests, seventy-five of them directed at trying to protect the privileged status of guildsmen. Protest expressed not the despair of uprooted landless labourers or a new urban underclass, but the community spirit of specific groups of craft workers or villagers attacking outsiders whom they blamed for their plight, whether bailiffs, merchants, gamekeepers, foreigners or, as in Germany, Jews. Harsh actions by the police could sometimes spark violent incidents, as in Cologne in 1846 when several young people were arrested for letting off fireworks during a religious festival and rioted in protest.

Yet such actions were also beginning to express the new consciousness of the nascent working class. A particularly significant uprising took place in Silesia in 1844. Here the handloom weavers, originally independent craftsmen, had declined in both status and income as the merchants who supplied them with the yarn and bought their cloth were forced to reduce their prices in the face of competition from the power-loom industry. On 4 June a crowd stormed the opulent residence of the Zwanziger family, merchants who had refused the weavers’ demand for increased compensation for their labour. Troops were sent in and shot eleven of the protesters, arousing denunciations from appalled journalists and writers across Germany. The incident was characteristic of the transitional nature of protest in this period of working-class formation. On the one hand, it was an attempt to secure higher wages, not a bid to restore guild privileges. On the other, the workers, though acting as workers, directed their ire against particular individuals and did not seek to generalize it. Contemporary commentators reacted with dire warnings about the emergence of a new class, the proletariat, ‘a large class [that] can subsist only as the result of the most intensive labour’, as Brockhaus’s encyclopedia put it in 1846. In English and French the terms ‘worker’ and ‘working class’ gradually came into use to describe the poor single master, the factory worker, the miner and the urban wage labourer, indeed all those who lacked property and were forced to live entirely off their own physical labour and that of their families. The differences between guildsmen and wage labourers were being eroded, and a new social class was being born. In some areas and trades, indeed, there were signs of the formation of a hereditary working class. ‘Our peculiar race of pitmen,’ said the mining engineer John Buddle (1773–1843) in 1842, ‘ . . . can only be kept up by breeding – it never could be recruited from an adult population.’ The process of creating a hereditary proletariat in this and in other parts of the new industrial world had not gone very far by the middle of the century, but it was clearly under way.

MAPPING THE ‘SOCIAL QUESTION’

‘A new epoch of world history is beginning,’ noted the poet Heinrich Heine on the occasion of the opening of the railway line from Orléans to Paris in 1843, ‘and our generation can be proud to say it was there.’ Not everyone saw things in such a positive light. By this time, thinking Europeans were aware that society was beginning to change with unprecedented rapidity. The conservative German writer Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–97) complained of a ‘confusion of concepts’, in which ‘new things emerge daily, and with them new words, and if a new word can’t be found right away, then an old one changes its meaning’. Already in 1835 another German writer, the jurist Robert von Mohl (1799–1875), was warning of the potential social damage that industrialization could cause. The factory worker, unlike the apprentice, he said, could never hope for advancement; he was destined to remain ‘a serf, chained . . . to his wheel’, ‘like the machinery’ he operated, ‘that belongs to a third party’. His desperate situation created ‘every sort of immorality’, especially when men were taken from home and family. Voluntary associations were the cure, von Mohl advised, especially those devoted to improving the educational standards of the working class.

The ‘social question’ of the era was dramatized in a number of ‘social novels’, of which one of the most influential was Sybil: Or the Two Nations, published in 1845 by the Tory politician and future British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Like many other observers, Disraeli was shocked by the living conditions of the new industrial poor, who inhabited ‘wretched tenements . . . with the water streaming down the walls, the light distinguished through the roof, with no hearth even in winter’, fronted by ‘open drains full of animal and vegetable refuse’ or ‘spreading into stagnant pools’. Lamenting the death of traditional paternalistic relations between the classes, Disraeli saw British society disintegrating into ‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy . . . THE RICH AND THE POOR’. An irresponsible, self-aggrandizing aristocracy confronted an exploited people led by agitators with ‘wild ambitions and sinister and selfish ends’, and at the climax of the novel the alienation between the classes breaks out into open violence and the destruction of property. Social criticism permeated the popular novels of Charles Dickens, most notably Oliver Twist, with its portrayal of the neglected pauper boy drifting into the sinister London criminal underworld, while the German novelist Ernst Willkomm (1810–86) entitled his novel about factory workers, published in 1845, White Slaves, underlining the power of anti-slavery rhetoric to stimulate radical ideas. In 1843, Bettina von Arnim (1785–1859), who was active in literary and cultural circles, published This Book Belongs to the King, passionately pleading with the Prussian monarch to establish a ‘social monarchy’ dedicated to overcoming the social crisis that threatened to overwhelm the country. It exerted a widespread influence and fuelled an impassioned debate about the growing pattern of ‘pauperism’.

In the first half of the century, the most popular of all the books written about poverty was, however, not an earnest social tract, but The Mysteries of Paris. It was written by Eugène Sue (1804–57), who served as a military surgeon in the French invasion of Spain in 1823, and was present at the Battle of Navarino in 1827 during the Greek War of Independence. Sue wrote Romantic, sensationalist stories with subjects featuring pirates and bandits, and in his novel Mathilde (1841) coined the saying ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’. Serialized in ninety parts during 1842–3, The Mysteries of Paris featured a Parisian worker, a prostitute, a doctor, a freed black slave, and many other figures from the common people. The worker was of course a German nobleman in disguise, one of many ‘mysteries’ that permeated the story; the novel pilloried the indifference of the upper classes to the plight of the workers. The book found imitators across Europe, notably The Mysteries of London by George Reynolds (1814–79), a ‘penny-dreadful’ that sold 40,000 copies in instalments in 1844 and was translated into numerous European languages. It featured characters such as hump-backed dwarfs, libertine clergymen, grave-robbers and violated maidens, but expressed underneath it all a strong sympathy for the urban poor. Similarly, in The Mysteries of Berlin, also published in 1844, the author August Brass (1818–76) insisted that the ‘mysteries’ of lower-class existence in the Prussian capital were there for all to see, ‘if we took the trouble to cast off the convenient veil of selfish comforts and turned our gaze outside our usual circles’.

All this literature signified a deep anxiety about the advent of a new social world whose future was freighted with conflict and danger. The social novel of the period did not, however, extend to portrayals of rural life, even though the vast majority of Europeans in every country continued to live there. Frustrated by the resistance to change they frequently encountered in the countryside, agricultural reformers often regarded the peasants as little better than animals. The peasant in Moldavia, wrote a local administrator who served in the province during the 1830s and 1840s, was ‘reduced almost to the abject status of a beast, abandoned to the rapacity of all who use him’. The French novelist Léon Cladel (1834–92) called the peasants ‘quadrupeds on two feet . . . Greedy, envious, hypocritical, crafty, cynical, cowardly, and brutal’. Russian literature is full of complaints about the dullness of the muzhik, mired in drink and superstition, hostile to any kind of agricultural improvement, stubbornly sticking to tried and tested methods of cultivation and suspicious of anything newfangled. Most nineteenth-century novelists stuck to writing about the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy and the urban poor, and ignored the peasants except as objects of schemes of improvement. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) called one of his novels Les Paysans (The Peasants, written is 1844 and published in 1855), but on opening the pages it becomes clear that it is an indictment of the rural habit of gleaning or scrounging, collecting leftovers from the landlords’ fields after the harvest. Yet, given the overwhelming numerical dominance of country-dwellers in nineteenth-century Europe, the behaviour of the peasantry, small farmers and landless labourers in times of political upheaval was crucial. A peasant revolt had underpinned the French Revolution of 1789, the rural uprisings that swept across Russia in 1905–7 shook the tsarist regime to its core, and an even greater rebellion of the countryside was to be a vital component of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The stance of the peasantry in the upheavals that convulsed Europe in 1848–9 would play a large part in determining the outcome of the dramatic events that brought the ‘hungry forties’ to an end.