Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

or more obviously criminal associations like the Maﬁa, or political organi-

sations which employed violence in defence of the status quo, such as the

Orangemen, founded in 1794 to suppress Catholicism in Ireland, or the

‘Royalist Terrorism’ during the French Revolution, or the ‘White Terror’

which followed the Restoration. There were also a variety of underground

nationalist movements in this period worth mentioning, but which can-

not be detailed, notably in Turkey; amongst the Slavs; in Greece, where

the Hetairia, probably founded around 1815, helped secure independence

by mustering some 20,000 insurgents in 1821–2; and in Spain, where the

Communeros emerged from Freemasonry to promote moderate constitu-

tionalism. Young Europe, a loose grouping of political refugees who met

at Berne in April 1834 with the aim of founding ‘an association of men

believing in a future of liberty, equality, and fraternity, for all mankind’ (Frost

1876, ii,p.236) was a federative revolutionary democratic organisation. Its

branches included Young Poland; Young Germany, which was mostly com-

posed of German workmen resident in Switzerland, and was supposed to

have about 25,000 members in 1845, with branches in twenty-six towns,

but was crushed after 1849 (see Weitling 1844); and Young Switzerland. It

suffered a schism in 1837, when many of the communist members, chieﬂy

followers of Wilhelm Weitling, departed. But in 1848 it committed itself,

at a meeting in Berlin, to the principle of abolishing private property in

land and the means of production, credit and transportation. In Poland

the Templars, founded in 1822, aimed to restore national independence.

Insurrections and revolutionary agitation aiming at land reform as well as

national independence were common throughout this period, notably in

1830 against Russia, in 1846 against Austria, in 1848 against Prussia, and in

1863 again against Russia (Edwards 1865; Walicki 1989). A ‘Young Hun-

gary’ group suffused with French political principles emerged in 1846,with

a Society for Equality emerging to lead the left-wing and republican club

movement in 1848. Hungary thereafter instigated a powerful nationalist

resistance movement against Austria led by Louis Kossuth (1802–94)which

succeeded in emancipating the Jews and peasants, and sweeping away most

of the vestiges of feudalism in the name of liberal constitutionalism (Deak

1979; Deme 1976).

France

From the early years of the Revolution the notion that the ancien r

egime

had been felled by a vast conspiracy of enlightened ‘Illuminati’ of deist

224

Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

or freethinking, cosmopolitan and republican philosophes dedicated to ‘the

threefold aim of the wise – truth, freedom, and virtue’ (Frost 1876, i,p.26),

had been a popular one among the Revolution’s opponents (notably Barruel

1798). That such a society, led by Adam Weishaupt, existed, and included

Freemasons who opposed both despotism and priestcraft, is undisputed.

(See generally Frost 1876; Heckethorn 1875; Lepper 1932;Vivian1927.)

But while little credence can be attached today to such claims respecting

its role in the Revolution itself, genuine conspiracies against the Direc-

tory, Napoleon and the Restoration are well documented. These included

groups driven underground by the prohibition on public political activity,

like the United Patriots; the Society for the New Reform of France; the

Society of the Friends of the People, which was active in the insurrection

of 1830; and its successor, the Union of the Rights of Man, which staged

an uprising in 1834, from which emerged the Society of the Families. A

secret society known as the Friends of Truth was founded about 1818–20

as a political Masonic lodge. Some of its members became the nucleus of

French Carbonarism, or Charbonnerie (charcoal-burners, so-called for the

disguise they assumed as political refugees), which was anti-clerical and hos-

tile to the

emigr

es, and whose main aim was the overthrow of the Bourbons

(Johnston 1904). Its leading light was Armand Bazard, later a prominent

Saint-Simonist.

For nineteenth-century revolutionaries the prototype of this form of con-

spiratorial insurrection, as well as of the type of professional revolutionary,

selﬂessly and wholeheartedly devoted to the incandescent renewal of social

virtue through violence, was Franc¸ois-No

el or ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf’s abortive

plot of 1796. Immortalised in the Babouvist and later Carbonarist leader

Philippe-Michel Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy (1828), this aimed

to overthrow the Directory, to return to the more democratic constitution

of 1793, and to establish collective property in land within one generation

by abolishing inheritance and establishing a community of goods via an

equal division of the land (to about fourteen acres per family). Communal

authorities were to supervise elected ofﬁcials within each trade, and to reg-

ulate the system of production and distribution. Private employment and

commerce were to be abolished, with the national government rectifying

inequalities between regions (Bax 1911,pp.125–34; Lehning 1956;Rose

1978; Thomson 1947). Babeuf (1760–97), whose ﬁrst aim was to kill the ﬁve

members of the Directorate, famously claimed at his trial that ‘All means

are legitimate against tyrants.’ Buonarroti, the friend of Robespierre, agreed

that ‘No means are criminal which are employed to obtain a sacred end’

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

(Laqueur 1977,p.23). (Critics accused them of going ‘all lengths in blood,

in order to go all lengths in levelling’, Southey 1856, iv,p.180.) Babeuf’s

scheme is sometimes described as aiming at a dictatorship as such, thus,

after Robespierre, establishing the prototype of a permanent revolutionary

dictatorship. Some have added that ‘the absence of anything speciﬁcally

popular was precisely what made it into a terrorism’ (Laqueur 1977,p.23).

More detailed studies, however, emphasise the merely provisional character

of the dictatorship, which was to last no longer than three months, and

to be replaced by mass democracy and popular accountability, including

participation by women. Thus it has been construed as not only dissimilar

to the later schemes of Blanqui and Lenin, but in fact a democratic reac-

tion against Jacobinical dictatorship, even ‘one of the major breakthroughs in

democratic theory that occurred during the revolutionary epoch in Europe’

(Birchall 1997,p.155;Rose1978,pp.218, 342). Nonetheless such a dic-

tatorship of hommes sages ‘qui sont embras

es de l’amour de l’

egalit

e et ont

le courage de se d

evouer pour en assurer l’

etablissement’ (Lehning 1956,

pp. 115–16), could also be construed as existing en permanence,anidea

Buonarroti would advocate throughout his life (Lehning 1956,p.114).

Opponents of such ideas view him as personifying the idea of ‘totalitarian

democracy’, where the search for a perfect social order and the implemen-

tation of one true political scheme justiﬁes practically any means (Talmon

1960,pp.1–3, 167–248).

Doubtless Babeuf and Buonarroti created the model of the secret revo-

lutionary organisation, rather than a proletarian party of the later Marxist

type. Here the conspiracy was centralised at the top, but composed of many

small groups, usually unknown to each other. This model was utilised by

the Society of the Families, founded in July 1834, which was formed on a

basic unit of only six members, called a family, ﬁve or six of these forming

a section, and two or three sections a quarter, the chief of whom received

orders from a committee of direction. Similarly its successor, formed in

1836, the Society of the Seasons, consisted of cohorts based on gradations

of a Week (the lowest), with seven members composing a Month (of four

weeks), three Months making a Season (88 members), and four Seasons

a Year, with a triumvirate of leaders at the top. Its aim was not merely

the overthrow of the monarchy; equally to be ‘exterminated’ were ‘the

rich, who constitute an aristocracy as devouring as the ﬁrst’, the hereditary

nobility abolished in 1830 (Hodde 1864,p.255) (but Hodde was a police

spy whose veracity has been challenged).

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

This movement, which had some 900 members by 1839, consisted of

Armand Barb

es, Martin Bernard, and Babeuf’s most famous successor,

Auguste Blanqui (1805–81), leader of the movement known as Blanquism,

and often proclaimed as the founder of the theory of post-revolutionary

proletarian dictatorship associated with Marx and later Bolshevism (Post-

gate 1926,p.35). (But Spitzer 1957,p.176, denies that Blanqui ever used

the phrase, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, and views his conception

of dictatorship as closer to Jacobinism than Marxism. For details of Marx’s

most Blanquist phase see Marx and Engels 1978a, pp. 277–87. The issue

is analysed in Lattek 2006,ch.3.) Blanqui commenced his career as an

anti-Bourbon Carbonarist, but achieved fame by transmitting the tactics

of revolutionary republicanism to socialism, which before 1840 was often

apolitical and explicitly anti-revolutionary. The Blanquists emerged as a stu-

dent society in the Second Empire, became a political faction during the

Commune, languished in British exile, then regrouped in opposition to

Gambetta’s middle-class republicanism in the 1880s (Hutton 1981; Spitzer

1957). Their conception of revolution was essentially Jacobin, and united

fervently patriotic nationalist, anti-clerical, democratic and republican aspi-

rations. Some have emphasised that this was based on a rudimentary theory

of class struggle in which the ‘workers’ rather than merely the poor or the

‘people’, would play a key role. Others, however, have contended that the

masses were to be led by a disinterested elite group of conspirators consti-

tuted out of alienated elements in modern urban society, hence chieﬂy those

Parisians who were the ‘people’ of Jacobin myth, rather than the industrial

proletariat (Spitzer 1957,pp.162–6). After the revolution priests, aristocrats

and other enemies were to be expelled from the country, the army replaced

by a national militia, and the magistracy by universal trial by jury. Private

property would be retained initially, but Blanqui hoped that, after universal

education, it would be supplanted by communism. The Blanquists staged

one abortive insurrection in May 1839, were active in 1848, and brieﬂy

mounted another uprising in 1870.

Italy

In Italy, Spain, Piedmont and France, the early nineteenth century wit-

nessed the rapid development of the professional underground revolution-

ary organisation known as the Carbonari. They are ﬁrst recorded at Naples

in 1807 (see Mariel 1971, and for France, Spitzer 1971). Dedicated to

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

over throwing Napoleonic rule, then, in France, to opposing the Bourbon

restoration, the Carbonari helped to develop the idea of the morally pure

revolutionary type, bound together by secret oaths (some swearing, blind-

folded, dagger in hand, to wash in the blood of kings), with initiation rites

and elaborate rituals akin to those of Freemasonr y and the Illuminati, in

this case without opposing Christianity (Bertoldi 1821,p.22; Hobsbawm

1959,pp.150–74). The doctrines, ritual and organisation of the Carbonari

assumed many forms, but the society was generally divided into two grades,

Apprentices and Masters. The assassination of traitors in their own ranks,

but not necessarily their enemies elsewhere, was obligatory. Members were

bound to support the principles of liberty, equality and progress, and to

over throw the rulers of Italy. They also policed their own internal morals,

frowning on gambling, dissoluteness, marital inﬁdelity and drunkenness,

any of which could bring about a trial before a jury of the ‘Good Cousins’,

and possible expulsion. The Carbonari helped to engineer revolutions in

1820–1, when 20,000 men invaded Naples, and in 1831 when linkages

were established with conspirators in Germany and elsewhere; this sustained

the revolutionary idea through some of its darkest days. Their aims were

broadly republican, but this included a liberal or constitutional monarchy,

which might in turn be more centralised, Saint-Simonian or more federalist

(Spitzer 1971,p.275). In their most theoretical exposition, the proposed

Ausonian Republic, Italy was to be divided into twenty-one provinces,

each with a local assembly, the whole to be ruled by two kings elected for

twenty-one years (Heckethorn 1875, ii,pp.107–8).

Most of the leading Italian revolutionaries of the period were linked to this

movement, which was extended to France around 1820. The most impor-

tant nationalist insurgent of the early period, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72),

began his insurrectionary life as a Carbonaro, was linked to Buonarroti

in the years 1830–3, and founded Young Italy in 1831. Under the twin

principles of ‘Progress and Duty’, this aimed to overthrow Austrian rule in

Venice and Milan, unite Italy under a republic, and create a revolutionary

cohort capable of bringing this about (see Hales 1956; Lehning 1956;Lovett

1982). Mazzini succeeded in establishing a short-lived republic at Rome in

1848 (Orsini was one of its deputies), was active in British exile, notably

on the Central Committee of European Democracy (with Ledru-Rollin

and Ruge), and remained a vocal symbol of European nationalism for some

two decades thereafter. He thus established Italy as what Greece had been

to the generation of Byron. Thereafter he was supplanted by his leading

disciple, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), whose victorious campaign in 1860

228

Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

gained Naples and Sicily for the new Kingdom of Italy (Mazzini 1861,

pp. 31–47).

Germany

In Germany anti-Napoleonic resistance also gave rise to a variety of secret

organisations, such as the Union of Virtue (Tugendbund), established in 1812

at the behest of the Prussian prime minister, Stein, and later linked to the

Burschenschaften, or univer sity student organisations. Here the Carbonari

were also active, and established the Totenbund, or Band of Death, which

was revealed in 1849 as aiming to rid the world of tyrants. A ‘League of

Exiles’ was formed by Germans in 1834, but split and formed the League

of the Just in 1836, which was inspired by

Etienne Cabet and Wilhelm

Weitling, and included amongst its members a number of revolutionar-

ies prominent during the 1848 Revolution, notably Auguste Willich and

Karl Schapper (Lattek 2006). Composed of cells of ﬁve to ten persons,

its members used mystic signs and passwords, and each had a secret mil-

itary name. The Communist League, which lasted from June 1847 until

1852, aimed chieﬂy to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and introduce a class-

less society in which private proper ty had been abolished. It abjured the

traditional rituals, secret oaths and small cell basis of the secret societies in

favour of an openly democratic and centralised organisation, a scheme that

would remain largely unchanged through the Bolshevik period. Its goals

are described elsewhere in this volume. Before 1848 the chief theoretician

of these groups was the German tailor Wilhelm Weitling (1808–71), who

argued for a Christian communist vision of recapturing a lost stage of natural

equality by the abolition of private property and implementation of direct

democracy (see Wittke 1950).

Russia

Hints of revolutionary sentiment appear in Russia as early as 1790,with

the publication of Radishchev’s A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,

which has been hailed as ‘the ﬁrst programme of Russian political democ-

racy’ (Yarmolinsky 1957,p.13; Venturi 1960). After 1815 a number of

Masonic and literary societies were founded. The earliest underground

political organisation was the Society of the True and Faithful Sons of the

Fatherland, or Union of Salvation, founded in 1816, which brieﬂy con-

templated regicide. Another secret society, the Union of Welfare, followed

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

in 1818, which aimed at spreading enlightenment and the ‘true rules of

morality’, and was bound by quasi-Masonic oaths and rituals (Von Rosen

1872). By 1820 various Polish revolutionary societies had been formed. An

early republican thinker of note, associated with the group known as the

Decembrists, was Colonel Pavel Pestel. He wedded ideas of representative

government based on universal suffrage to a proto- or quasi-totalitarian state

which was to rely on a powerful clergy and secret police. Serfdom was to

be abolished, half the land nationalised, public morals regulated and pri-

vate associations, as well as drinking and card-playing, banned (Yarmolinsky

1957,p.27). Pestel’s plottings were soon linked to the Society of United

Sclavonians, or Slavs, founded in 1820, with members in many noble fam-

ilies, which from philanthropic origins came to aim at compelling the Tsar

to accept a liberal constitution, and mustered 3,000 troops for a short-

lived rebellion in 1822. The Decembrists attempted a further coup in 1825;

thereafter most were exiled to Siberia.

From this point onwards, despite a variety of populist and Jacobin cur-

rents of thought, radicalism and socialism were virtually inseparable in Rus-

sia (Gombin 1978,p.44). In the 1830sand1840s these trends were often

linked to Alexander Herzen (1812–70), who was attracted by Hegel’s ana-

lytic framework as well as the writings of communalist ideas of Fourier,

Proudhon’s anti-authoritarianism and Saint-Simon’s renovated Christian-

ity. Like many anarchists, Herzen’s ultimate aim was the reinforcement of

‘natural’ voluntary associations, notably the mir (for peasants) and the artel

(for artisans), in which external authority imposed upon the individual

could be limited. Republicanism, in his view, could only mean ‘freedom

of conscience, local autonomy, federalism, the inviolability of the individ-

ual’ (Gombin 1978,p.53). While united by a desire to abolish serfdom,

Russian radicalism was divided into Slavophile and Westernist factions, the

latter including Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky. The revolutions of 1848

promoted socialist ideas, but resulted in the exile of a number of promi-

nent dissidents, including Michael Bakunin, and Herzen, who continued

to promote revolutionary sentiment through his journal Kolokol (The Bell,

begun in 1857).

This attracted a new generation of agitators, such as Nikolai Cherny-

shevskii, who promoted a form of socialism based on loosely federated vol-

untary associations. The Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 failed to reduce

the servitude of the peasantry to the landlords, and these radicals dismissed

liberal proposals for a laisser-faire economy and constitutional monarchy,

turning instead to republican and revolutionary principles. Such views were

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

startlingly expressed in the pamphlet, Young Russia (1862), which was later

described as ‘the ﬁrst Bolshevik document’ in Russian history. It called for

a federal republic, distribution of the land among peasant communes, the

emancipation of women, marriage and the family, the socialisation of fac-

tories under elected managers and the closure of monasteries (Yarmolinsky

1957,p.113). One of its consequences was the popularisation of the move-

ment mis-named Nihilism, which was in fact a critical realist, or naturalist

and pragmatist critique of existing Russian conditions, especially as linked

to Dmitry Pisarev, whose ideas were popularised as ‘Nihilist’ in Turgenev’s

Fathers and Sons (1862). Thereafter the term was widely adopted to connote

a rejection of bourgeois opinions of marriage, religion and respectability, thus

symbolising an intellectual fashion more than a political movement.

Though often ranked amongst the Nihilists or Terrorists, the Russian

anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814–76) was in fact a professional revolu-

tionary ﬁrst and foremost, the epitome, in histories of anarchism, of the

‘destructive urge’, or belief in revolutionary action as a cathartic ‘purify-

ing and regenerative force’ (Woodcock 1970,pp.134, 162). For Bakunin

rebellion would signal the apocalypse of the institutions of the old world,

with the entire state, including the army, courts, civil service and police,

destroyed, and all archives and ofﬁcial documents burned. Yet it would

simultaneously embody a creative will, born of an instinctive ‘sentiment

of rebellion, this satanic pride, which spurns subjection to any master

whatsoever’ (Maximoff 1964,p.380). While provoked by a secret elite

organisation, it would produce a ‘collective dictatorship . . . free of any self-

interest, vainglory and ambition, for it is anonymous and unseen, and does

not reward any of the members that compose the group’ (Bakunin 1973,

p. 193). Revolution would thus occur when the right psychological cir-

cumstances, rather than, as for Marx, the economic, combined (Bakunin,

1990). Bakunin’s Principles of Revolution (1869) spelled out the variety of

forms – ‘poison, the knife, the rope, etc.’ – which could be utilised to meet

the end of human liberation (see Pyziur 1968). Bakunin acknowledged that

many would die in any popular uprising, and counselled the death penalty

for all who interfered ‘with the activity of the revolutionary communes’

(quoted in Pyziur 1968,pp.108–9). Yet he also stressed that if rebellion was

by nature ‘spontaneous, chaotic, and ruthless’, and always presupposed ‘a

vast destruction of proper ty’ (quoted in Maximoff 1964,p.380), the aim of

revolutionary violence was to ‘attack things and relationships, destroy prop-

erty and the state. Then there is no need to destroy men’ (Bakunin 1971,

p. 151). When victory was certain some measure of humanity could be

231

Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

shown to former foes, now to be recognised as ‘brothers’ (Maximoff 1964,

p. 377).

The idea that revolutionaries should be wholly devoted to the task

of destruction was outlined in the most famous tract of its type of this

period. Composed for a possibly non-existent group linked to Sergei

Nechayev, the ‘Revolutionary Catechism’ built on Bakuninist foundations,

if it was not actually written by Bakunin (Carr 1961,p.394; Laqueur 1979,

pp. 68–72;Pyziur1968,p.91). It described the prototypical insurrectionist

as withdrawn, hard, asocial and wedded solely and passionately to the strug-

gle and its aims, which included the complete destruction of the institutions

and structures of the old society. The ‘Catechism’ proposed to divide the

upper class of Russian society into six categories, the ﬁrst of which con-

sisted of persons to be executed immediately, ranked according to their

‘relative iniquities’ (Woodcock 1970,p.160). Nechayev was reputed to

have founded the Nihilist society in early 1869,basingitoncirclesofﬁve

members, a certain number of which constituted a section, the society itself

being directed by a committee which vested in itself the power of inﬂicting

the death penalty. It circulated printed incitements to revolt in late 1874,

but many arrests followed. Its social and political programme, dismissed

by Marx as ‘an excellent example of barracks communism’, included the

central supervision of production by ‘the Committee’, obligatory physical

labour, mandatory communal dining and sleeping arrangements, and the

abolition of marriage and all other forms of private contract (Yarmolinsky

1957,p.163).

Britain

In Britain the 1790s and ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century witnessed a

variety of attempts at armed uprising (see Dinwiddy 1992a; Royle 2000;

Thomis and Holt 1977). During the 1790s various organisations emerged

as shadow revolutionary groups acting under the cover of legitimate parlia-

mentary reform organisations, notably the London Corresponding Society,

and seeking the same end of ‘equal political representation’ and parliamen-

tary reform. But this could mask both republicanism and any number of

possible social reforms, which were now more openly discussed than had

been the case during the debate over the principles of Paine’s Rights of

Man in the early 1790s (see Wells 1986). An early group was the United

Britons, based in London, who were succeeded by the United Englishmen,

founded in April 1797, who adopted a system of branches, called Baronial,

232

Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

County and Provincial Committees, principally centred in the Midlands,

with members bound by a secret oath. North of the border the United

Scotsmen fulﬁlled a similar role from 1797, taking over the earlier Society

of the Friends of the People. The naval mutinies of 1797 had a political

dimension, even if goals were rarely stated. Growing out of the United

Britons and other organisations was the plot known as the Despard Con-

spiracy (1803), which involved a plan to assassinate the King and leading

members of the government (Conner 2000;Jay2004; Wells 1986,p.221).

The United Irishmen, who played a prominent role in the rebellion of

1798, were the most important association of this type (see Curtin 1994;

Madden 1858). Founded in Belfast in October 1791, this was not initially

a revolutionary group, but aimed at ‘an impartial and adequate represen-

tation of the Irish nation in parliament’. As we have seen, one of their

leaders, Wolfe Tone, abjured any interest in abstract principles, and claimed

that he sought not a republic, but the independence of the Irish nation;

by 1796, however, Tone was committed to seeking French assistance for

establishing a republic. Contemporary accounts suggest that despite many

internal disagreements other member s also were moving gradually towards

both revolutionism and republicanism in the mid-1790s (e.g. O’Connor

et al. 1798,p.3). Some United Irishmen, like Robert Emmet’s father, also

derived inspiration from the classical republics (O’Donoghue 1902,p.21).

By 1795 the United Irish had formed a pyramid-type organisation with

many small local societies based on groups of twelve persons living in the

same neighbourhood. Five local societies constituted a lower baronial com-

mittee, and delegates from ten such committees formed an upper baronial

committee. Above these were county and provincial committees, with a

national executive at the apex. It was rumoured to have had a Commit-

tee of Assassination, though this was also vehemently denied. (By Arthur

O’Connor et al. 1798,p.8, for example, who asserted that the doctrine

was ‘frequently and fervently reprobated’. But doubt has also been placed

on such assertions; see Lecky 1913, iv,pp.80–1.) Citing the parallel of

the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, when English revolutionaries had called

upon a foreign republic to help release them from despotism, the United

Irish negotiated with the French Directory through Lord Edward Fitzger-

ald, and a general plan of insurrection was hatched by early 1798. This

resulted in the landing at Bantry Bay of French troops in 1798,whowere,

however, speedily routed. A further attempt at uprising, led by Robert

Emmett in 1803, met with an equally dismal result (O’Donoghue 1902,

pp. 121–77).

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