Prof: Today,
what I want to do is talk about the revolutions of 1848.
Read the chapter.
It's not very long.
I want to talk principally
about why there was no revolution in Britain in 1848,
since there were revolutions in France,
in the Hapsburg domains of the Austrian empire,
what would become in 1867 Austria-Hungary,
in Prussia, in the Rhineland,
and in Northern and Central Italy,
but not in Britain. I want to talk about that.
But before I do that,
let's just think about revolution in general and how
revolutions work. I'll mention this again when we
get to the Russian revolution. If you think about what you
know about the French Revolution in this context,
hopefully it will make some sense.
In the 1960s many social
scientists, not all, believed that revolutions came
when pressure builds up and you've got intellectuals bailing
out, leaving the regime.
Then you've got all this
tension building up and then boom, you've got your basic
revolution. But revolutions don't work like
that. If you think about revolutions
you know anything about, the Iranian revolution in 1979
would be a good example, or the revolutions we're going
to talk about today a little bit,
that you're reading about in 1848,
or the French Revolution. What happens is that in the
case of 1848, or in the case of the other
ones that I've mentioned, is that there is a seizure of
power by a group who have come together because they oppose the
policies of the government in power.
But it's at that point that
you've got an increase in social and political tension.
It's at that point that tension
really increases and all sorts of interesting things begin to
happen. In the case of 1917 in St.
Petersburg, in February the
bread lines are very long. There are not a lot of troops
around. They're at the front.
There are not a lot of police
around. Suddenly, the czarist regime is
just sort of swept away, like that.
It's at that point that things
heat up. In 1917 things weren't any
tenser than they were in 1916, and there are a lot of things
happening vis-à-vis the war that helped people mobilize.
Try to imagine a post-czarist
world or a reformed czarist autocracy.
In the case of 1848 you've got
demonstrations in Paris. In February--it rains all the
time in Paris in February. It's gray.
People want electoral reform.
Troops open up and shoot a
bunch of people. The same thing happens in
Berlin not long after that. At that point you've got the
regime that's swept away. What's interesting about the
revolutionary process is that after you've got this kind of
basic, provisional government. In the case of all--what the
constitutional monarchy in 1789 and 1790 becomes,
and in the case of Kerensky's provisional government in 1917,
and in the case of this kind of moderate republic in France,
or in Germany, or in Austria,
you've still got the monarchy, but you have all these
contenders for power who are saying at that point,
"We want to take advantage of the situation so that we will
have a republic," or,
in the case of France, "that women will have more
rights," or "that workers will have
more rights." In the case of the German
states, people who want a unified Germany put forth their
claims at that point. In the case of France,
people want the monarchy, the Bourbons,
that is the legitimists who were chased out in 1830.
They want them back.
They put in their claims.
You've got your basic moderate
republicans that are saying, "We want a moderate
republic." In the case of Austria you've
got all these Viennese students who want reforms.
They want a progressive regime.
It's at that point that this
sort of social tension and political tension increases.
What the revolutionary process
does, and what's important about
1848, is that it brings,
for the first time, lots more people into the
political process. In the case of France,
my friend Maurice Agulhon has called the "apprenticeship
of the republic," that is 1848 to December 2,
1851 and really 1852. Because now you've got
universal manhood suffrage. All men can vote.
Lots of women want to vote, too.
It's not a dominant course,
but it's still important in Paris.
So, you have a politicization
of ordinary people. You have this in the German
states. You have it in the Italian
states as well, and you have it in
Austria-Hungary. In the case of Austria-Hungary,
you've got Hungarians putting forth special claims within the
Hapsburg domains, and the national question
surfaces in central Europe and in Italy,
where people can imagine a unified Italy,
which would mean you have to get rid of the Austrians,
basically. You can read about what happens
subsequently. You have these people putting
forth their claims. You have this remarkable
politicization. In the case of Paris,
the barricades go up, which happened in February.
Then the June Days follow,
which is basically a sort of class war in which lots of
people get killed and put in prison--massive unrest for three
days in June 1848. That's a much more violent
confrontation and telling confrontation than the initial
revolutionary seizure of power by groups who don't necessarily
agree on what's going to happen. In the case of France,
which is the best documented, you've got all these newspapers
that begin publishing because now suddenly you can publish
things. You've got all these political
clubs, just as in 1848. You've got neo-Jacobin clubs.
You've got clubs of women.
You've got the club of the two
sexes, as it's called. This becomes a way of
politicizing ordinary people. When men go to the polls in
1848 in April for the first time and they elect a relatively
conservative, indeed monarchist leading
national assembly, they do so with considerable
knowledge about what they want. They want schoolteachers.
They want credit available.
They want the right to vote.
This politicization,
or the apprenticeship of a republic that would finally be
permanent starting in the 1870s, is one of the most important
aspects of the Revolution. The same thing is in the
Russian Revolution, which I'll come back and talk
about. You've got Mensheviks.
You've got Bolsheviks.
You've got socialist
revolutionaries. These are three big radical
groups. You've got constitutional
democrats. You've got monarchists.
You've got people who want the
czar to have all the power that he had before,
and to lop off the heads of those people who are against him
and that kind of thing. In the case of the Russian
Revolution, how you get from the February
revolution to October, when the Bolsheviks seize
power, is really very fascinating.
That's just a way of thinking
about revolution. You can think about other
revolutions that you know. The point is that the
revolution as a process brings into play the aspirations of a
lot more people. The French case,
which is fascinating, is what begins as this kind of
urban, middle-class revolution of
people fought by artisans, as usual,
who want the right to vote, ends up in December 1851,
after Napoleon's nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,
who had become the good old Napoleon III,
not so good old--he destroys the republic,
where he completes a process of repression that he'd already,
as president of France, elected on the 10^(th) of
December 1848, initiated.
But that very ordinary people,
peasants for the most part, but also rural artisans,
particularly in the south and not necessarily speaking French,
at all rise up to try to defend the republic or what they
call la Belle, the beautiful one,
against the rape, as they called it,
by the repressive apparatus centered in Paris.
This urban revolution ends up
with over 100,000 people taking arms,
and the largest national insurrection in France in the
nineteenth century trying to defend the republic against its
abolition by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,
who would not be able to stand for a second term as president
of the republic. That's really fascinating.
A long time ago I used to read
all these interrogations of people,
including the great, great, great uncle of one of our
neighbors in Ardèche. It's being translated from
Occitan, which is the language of that part of the south,
into French by some translator as he's being interrogated.
"When did you join the
secret society?" "Who did you initiate into
the secret society?" to defend the republic,
the democratic and social republic that's going to provide
more things to more people, etc.
etc.
Fascinating,
the politicization of this. Now, in the case of Germany and
of Italy, it's a different kind of revolution.
It still had its kind of
liberal and democratic component,
but you had this scene, for example,
in Frankfurt in the Frankfurt parliament,
which was basically a lot of professors and lawyers debating
long into the night in St. Paul's church.
They imagine the unification of
Germany, what they called then the
"springtime of the peoples,"
that the German states, which Prussia,
Saxony, Bavaria, and Wurtemburg were the most
important of these states. All these other little states,
too, are going to be unified along liberal auspices.
They were just dreaming.
In the end they were kind of
dismissed as a servant who was not wanting to be kept on at the
big house anymore. They're sort of dismissed.
But they debate far into the
night. The significance of all of this
is when you read the chapter--please do--on the
Second Republic, and you see what happens in the
case of the German states is that when Germany would be
unified, and that unification is
proclaimed in January 1871 in Versailles,
in the Chateau of Versailles after the Franco-Prussian War,
it would not be a liberal unification.
It would not be a Germany
united by lawyers and professors meeting in a Frankfurt church
with what would become eventually the German flag,
the colors of it hanging all around the rafters.
It would be unified,
as Bismarck accurately put it, "by blood and iron,"
in the context of the Prussian aristocracy, the nobles,
the Junkers, a term you already know,
J-U-N-K-E-R-S, or Prussian nobles,
and that basically unified Germany would be,
as some wag once put it, "an army with a state
trailing behind it." Germany would not be a republic;
it would be an empire. Because one of the things that
happens with empires is that emperors can do whatever they
damn well please, just as czars can,
and you might have had an assembly called the Reichstag,
in which socialists became the leaders or the most dominant
numerically by 1914, but power rests in the hands of
a thoroughly irresponsible, intellectually lazy,
sort of madcap ridiculous guy who happens to be the Kaiser,
William II. Over the long run,
the costs to Europe of that fact would be,
in retrospect, given what happens in the
twentieth century, which is the one that follows
the nineteenth, would be one thing that
historians would go back and say very obvious things,
sort of clichés like, "Well,
in 1848 history in Germany reached its turning point and
failed to turn." That German unification would
not come because of professors, and liberals,
and merchants in Hamburg, and this sort of thing,
and that the German middle classes would,
in a way, abdicate their political
responsibility and not having much political power,
and the state would be run by a bunch of Junkers,
military officers with dueling scars and veterans of the
fraternities of the Prussian universities.
Prussia wasn't just Pomerania
and Brandenburg and the marshes of northeastern Europe.
Prussia also controlled the
Rhineland. But the kind of magnates of
industrializing Prussia were not going to be the ones who were
running the show. In the case of Italy,
you can read about that, too, is that there were a lot of
people running around saying, "Long live united
Italy," and all of this business,
but that was to be very hard, too.
In order to unify Italy under
any auspices, and most people wanted under
liberal auspices, you have to get rid of whom?
You have to get rid of the
Austrians. The Austrians control almost
all of northern Italy and much of central Italy,
too. There are lots of impediments
to Italian unification, not the least of which was the
fact that the vast majority of people in Italy did not speak
Italian. That itself was not a major
impediment, but I guess it was, too.
Only about four or five percent
of the people in Italy spoke what now is considered to be
Italian, which I guess is--I don't speak
Italian--essentially the language of Tuscany,
the area around Florence. They spoke all sorts of other
dialects. The Tuscan language was
virtually unknown in the south of Italy or in Sicily,
and was identified with money-grubbing tax collectors
coming down from the north. After the tide of the
springtime of the people or, as somebody once called it,
"the great illusion" of 1848,
after that tide had passed, what you had is still lots of
fervent hopes and dreams that Italy was going to be unified
along liberal auspices. That is what happens,
even though it's a monarchy, and unification comes because
of basically the expansion of the state of Piedmont Sardinia,
which was that most influenced by the French wave in the times
of the French Revolution and of Napoleon,
and also the wealthiest part of Italy.
In the case of
Austria-Hungary--this is a long story,
and you can read about it--but the springtime of the peoples
meant the dreams first of number of nationalities,
and I'll talk about nationalism in a week or two,
who suddenly think that now they, too,
will have their time. A bunch of Czech nationalists
were sitting in a room rather like this.
Somebody looked up and said,
"Geez, if this ceiling collapsed, that's the end of the
Czech national movement." There was something to that.
The springtime of the peoples
would not bring an independent Czech state.
It wouldn't bring
Czechoslovakia, which only lasts until 1993,
despite what John McCain thinks.
It doesn't come until 1918,
after World War I. But in the Austrian-Hungarian
empire everybody says, "What if we have an
independent Galicia?" "What if Poland is
independent and the parts of Russia and Austria and Poland
will be independent?" But these are pipe dreams.
National awareness and great
power politics will mean that this isn't going to happen until
later. Poland becomes independent in
1918, for reasons that you already know.
The chill of reaction,
revolution, reaction, repression is what really
happens. That's the theme running
through the whole thing, besides the big hopes of the
spring of 1848. The Austrian imperial system,
and I'll come back and talk about Austria-Hungary quite a
bit, run in German in the polyglot
Austrian-Hungarian empire, where there at least fifteen
major languages, will be the story of
Austria-Hungary in the 1850s. Of course, the Hungarians get
separate status, equal status in principle,
as of 1867. One of the interesting things
about the Austrian-Hungarian period is that it's in 1848 that
Franz Joseph becomes emperor of Austria-Hungary.
He is in power until 1916.
He is around even longer than
Queen Victoria. The world changes in such
dramatic ways between 1848 and 1916.
When I was younger than you,
I was in Vienna for the first time and I was sitting in a
coffee shop, as one does there, in a café.
This very old man started
talking to me. He had actually seen,
when he was young, had seen Franz Joseph.
That was the most amazing thing
for me to actually meet somebody who had seen,
when he was a boy, Franz Joseph.
That's just extraordinary
continuity. Anyway, Austria-Hungary is
another story and it's an interesting one.
That we're going to come back
to, but I can't do that now. We've got to go back to the
question of England. Another of the legacies of this
is that after this tide of reaction what it does is it
sends waves of political refugees to places like this.
Not New Haven so much,
but yeah, there were some Italians who ended up in New
Haven who were Italian political refugees in that period.
But lots of Germans who were
thrown of the German states and had better not come back;
they end up where? They end up in Philadelphia or
in New York. Lots of Irish,
who I'm going to talk about in a minute, end up in obvious
places--Boston, New York, those two above all,
but also Philadelphia. The glacial wave of repression
sends these people, a lot of them,
to the United States. That itself is an interesting
story. Although the revolutions of
1848 failed--and you should read about that, please do;
I love this stuff, talking about this--the
political legacies that they left are extremely important.
These demands for political
rights would be something that would last for a very long time.
Again,
to repeat and to end this little part of what we're
doing--oh my goodness--that German unification would come
under very different auspices than that of the revolutionaries
of 1848, what they wanted.
The King of Prussia rejects
this crown offered from the gutter, as he called it,
to unify Germany under liberal monarchical auspices.
That ain't gonna happen and it
doesn't. Okay.
There's revolution in all these
places in 1848. The big wave.
Why not in Britain?
Why not?
You probably already know some
of the answers. There are really two major
contexts in all of this. First is that the Reform Act of
1832 puts down the drawbridge and opens it to more voters.
More people can vote now.
Again, voting was based on
property qualification. Feargus O'Connor,
who is an Irish Chartist whom I'll talk about in a minute,
he didn't even have the right to--he is not disbarred,
but he's thrown out of parliament because he doesn't
make enough money in order to actually qualify to vote
himself. You could vote if you paid X
number of pounds and shillings in taxes.
What happens is 1832 opens up
the drawbridge and more people can vote.
The political arena expands a
little bit and the same thing happens in France in 1830,
as you know. In France the revolution of
1830 doubled the number of people that could vote.
But it still leaves people on
the outside looking in. In 1867 they would pass a
second reform bill that lets more people in.
In 1884 they pass another one
that lets almost everybody in except for, I think,
domestic servants and maybe rural proletarians.
I can't remember exactly.
The political arena is
expanding. The point of this is it's
expanding through reform. Britain reforms.
The self-image,
the self-identity of the freeborn Englishman,
tracing more or less, at least in the imaginary,
antecedents back to June 15, 1215 at Runnymede near London.
The idea that the freeborn
Englishman has rights and that we British citizens,
our identity is we reform. We don't rebel.
Clearly, as I will demonstrate
in a minute drawing on the work of John Belcher and other
people, too, what happens in 1848 is when
there might have been a revolutionary moment in Britain,
"France has sneezed and Europe is catching a cold,"
as they like to say over and over again.
It doesn't come to Britain.
British national identity,
like all national identities, have to be systematically
reinvented and reconstructed. This happens in 1848 and
subsequent years as well, the sense that we are
respectable. I've written
"respectability" up on the board.
Respectability means reform and
not revolution. The aristocracy of labor,
who were craftsmen and artisans who could be seen walking
through Hyde Park with their ladies on their arms wearing
suits, of all things, on Sundays,
the bourgeois respectability had a political aspect of it,
too. In 1848 Britain does not rebel.
More about this in a minute.
The other context is Chartism,
which you should read about. Chartist campaigns were
campaigns to get ordinary people to sign an enormous charter with
millions and millions of names. There's two big waves in the
1830s and 1840s. What they do is they sign and
they say, "We the humble poor,
we ordinary people, we entreat you,
big time lords, property owners of great
distinction who are representing property and parliament,
we entreat you to give us political rights."
They bring these huge petitions
in on wagons signed by zillions of people, many of whom can only
mark an X instead of writing their names.
They bring them to parliament
in the rain, as always. Parliament says,
"Gee, thanks a lot. We don't want to see that."
Then they say,
"Oh, we'll do it again. O great lords,
give us political rights." They sign.
They don't pick up their
blunderbusses, they sign.
In 1830 the French middle class
was more than happy to turn their artisans loose on the
street to fight their battles for them for political reform.
In Delacroix's famous painting,
Liberty Leads the People,
the bourgeois with his top hat, in this romantic picture
romanticized view of revolution, does not have any place there,
because the bourgeoisie does not fight,
unless you consider master artisans petty bourgeois.
But in England that's never
going to happen. The Chartist campaign remains
respectable. It is class-based to the extent
that most people who signed the chartist petitions are ordinary
people. But really they saw themselves
as moral reformers. They see themselves as trying
to do--and it cuts across class lines.
They're trying to get the
government to do the right thing, to pass more reforms.
The Reform Act of 1832 was
passed by a conservative government because they knew
that inevitably it was going to have to be passed.
Who knows?
It would create more lords in
order to--and you'd have these not real lords who are there so
the bill gets passed. It's passed by a conservative
government. Then everybody says,
"We British, we reform.
We've opened up the drawbridge.
More people can vote."
There was a component of
Chartists who were called "physical force"
Chartists. They're not so sure that reform
without revolution is possible. They are a minority within the
Chartist movement. They are a very small minority,
the physical force Chartists. What you've got in 1848 is
you've got two things that are going on.
First of all,
you don't have a revolution. There's this big date in April,
I think it's April 10^(th), where there's going to be this
huge march in London. What the government does is it
deputizes 25,000 men of property.
They become sheriffs.
They become--I don't know what
you call them, sheriffs, I guess.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,
who had not yet returned to France, he was one of those who
was actually deputized as a sheriff.
The business people in the
City, which is what the financial
capital that overlooks the British Empire was increasingly
called, they come with their hunting
rifles to work. They get those file cabinets
ready to barricade the door. And with their rifles they're
going to blow apart anybody who rises up and would try to bring
revolution to Britain. There are 25,000 of these
people. The number of marchers was far,
far smaller to that. It's a very peaceful march.
There is no revolution in
Britain in 1848. But if there had been a
revolution, where would it come from?
From where would the
revolutionary ranks have come? That is the interesting
question. That's by far the most
interesting question in all of this.
Because of what I said before,
1848 helps the British re-invent or reconfigure,
reconstruct their identity. There has to be an unwanted
Other there who's frightening them, who makes them convinced
even more that they're doing it the right way.
I alluded before,
when we talked about British identity in the eighteenth
century, I said what the British weren't
in the seventeenth century helped determine who they
thought they were. What they weren't were
absolutists. They reformed.
What they weren't was Catholic.
The biggest riots in the
eighteenth century were the Gordon riots,
which were anti-Catholic riots. They are not the French,
not at all. France has a centralized state
and France is full of Catholics. Many of the Protestants who had
left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685
come, not just to the Netherlands,
but come to Britain as well. So, this may have already
tipped you off on who is the unwanted,
dangerous Other in the British--particularly
upper-class, but not just
upper-class--imaginary. They are the Irish.
What happens in 1848 and the
subsequent years is that British nationalism is redefined again
or re-infused with a sense of "what we are not,"
and we are not Catholic and we are not Irish.
If there was going to be a
revolution in April or any other month in 1848,
the components would be, from the point of view of the
upper classes and from the police,
the Irish and groups of physical force Chartists or
revolutionaries who might join forces.
Chartists looked to the Irish
to get them to sign the big petitions.
They see them as allies.
Remember, because of the Irish
potato famine in the 1840s that tens of thousands of Irishmen,
hundreds of thousands of Irishmen--I have it in the book
somewhere, but the number of people who
leave Ireland in the 1840s is in the millions,
along with all those who just simply die in the fields.
They go to where?
They go to the United States
and they go to England, particularly Liverpool.
That's why the Liverpool--this
has nothing to do with anything, ça na rien à
voir avec--soccer team is very much perceived as a
Catholic team in the way that in Glasgow that the Celtics are the
Catholic team, because so many Irish
immigrants went to Glasgow and to Scotland.
The Rangers are the Protestant
team, very anti-Catholic. That's why these people were
brawling in 1900. They played before 100,000
people in 1900--one hundred thousand people at a soccer game
in about 1900. They hate each other's guts and
they still do. All of these Irish are going to
London, also. They live in the Irish
neighborhoods. From the point of view of the
ruling classes, and from the point of view of
British nationalism, and from the point of view of
the police, the possibility was there that
the Irish confederation, who are extremely militant--one
of the important Irish leaders, Daniel O'Connell,
who is in the book, he dies in 1847.
But you've got these people who
are far more militant. Many of them believe that the
only way Ireland is ever going to be independent is by rising
up and rebelling. That's what happens, isn't it?
That's what eventually happens.
They were right about that.
What if they start rebelling in
1848? What if you had, for example,
your basic Peterloo massacre, as they called it,
playing on the word "Waterloo,"
where the British troops shoot down well-dressed demonstrators
in Manchester. What is it, 1817?
Either 1816 or 1817,
I don't remember. What if people who said,
"We're never going to get anywhere if we don't do what our
French colleagues have done, and that is take arms against
these people." So, there is a potential for an
alliance between militants in the physical force Chartist
movement, other radicals, and members of the Irish
confederation. Because it never happens,
there are a few marches and a few skirmishes,
but basically the only news is no news,
does not mean that this wouldn't have a big effect on
the reinvention of British nationalism,
British self-identity. What do I mean by that?
Here, one of the interesting
things is that John Belcher told me a long time ago,
on a train in Germany coming back from a conference in
Wurzburg, that there were more boxes of
documents in the public record office about the surveillance of
ships coming into the port of Liverpool,
than there were any other documents about any other aspect
of 1848. Why?
What are they doing?
Where is the potential
insurgency or infusion of militants for Irish coming from?
It's coming from the United
States. One of the interesting things
about this, and you can see also in the
time of the troubles in the 1970s--I was in Ireland,
ironically, when it all started up again in
1969. At the time they were really
worried about the IRA, and there was a lot to worry
about then. The IRA was getting all sorts
of money from Irish pubs in New York and Boston,
just tons of money, big bucks all the time to buy
weapons. In 1848, one of the interesting
things that Belcher and other people have discovered is that
the real Irish militants, the most committed,
were Irish immigrants, immigrants to and immigrants
from Ireland living in Boston and New York.
What they had done is taken the
notion of "American liberty"
and said, "All right. Our role will be that of the
French Revolution, to carry liberty in principle
across the borders and free Europe from nobles,
from priests, etc., etc.
What we will do,
as first generation Irish living in New York,
and Philadelphia, and Boston,
and maybe Connecticut, too, is we will raise money and we
will make Irish independence. We will achieve this with
violence, with guns." Every ship that came into any
port that was coming from the United States was thoroughly
searched for weapons and for money.
These Irish immigrants to the
United States were the most militant, arguably,
within the Irish political movement for independence.
For one thing,
they had more means. Some of them had come from
Ireland to the United States maybe going through England and
maybe not. They had jobs,
and the people in Ireland themselves were just starving.
They were dying in the fields.
They were ending up in London
living with other Irishmen, which is not surprising,
maintaining these kinds of patterns by county,
Cork, and all this. The Catholic Church was
terribly, terribly important in their lives.
It was terribly important as a
means of charity and all this. But what it meant for the upper
classes is that the unwanted Other, Catholic--remember in
1798 they tried to ally with the French.
What happens in World War I?
Roger Casement,
who is an Irish militant who is absolutely against the
exploitation of workers in Peru, and in Africa,
and in everywhere else, Roger Casement ends up being
sent off with a little boat off of a submarine off the coast of
Carey. He tries to stop the Easter
Insurrection. Of course, he's arrested within
about twenty-five minutes and hung later.
What he tried to do was
organize, in prisoner of war camps in Germany,
Irish militants to fight the good fight and to free Ireland.
This is looking later,
but there was always this potential fear among the British
upper classes that they--these Catholics who are no longer just
across the channel. They're not over in Ireland
across a very choppy, gray, freezing sea.
They are living in Liverpool in
huge numbers. They are living in London in
even bigger numbers. They are there.
They are dangerous.
If they ally with these
dissatisfied workers from the Chartist movement,
all hell is going to break out. During the next time,
and I don't have much time at all--and I didn't even use this,
but you see the point. This potential alliance never
occurs, but one of the interesting
things about the re-invention or the reconstruction of British
identity, self-identity--and it's one
shared not just by nobles and big time gentry but by ordinary
workers, "Tory workers,"
we tended to call them dismissively,
those of us who couldn't stand Margaret Thatcher and always
were amazed to go through working-class parts of Britain
and see these miserable council houses with these big pictures
of Margaret Thatcher or the royal family.
Anyway, it's just amazing.
But these Tory workers,
and not just Tory workers, they see themselves as
respectable. They see themselves as British
and they increasingly see this unwanted enemy within,
Catholic enemy within, as the Irish.
The newspapers are full of
cartoons and caricatures of the Irish, who are portrayed
invariably as drunken, as stupid, and as lazy.
"Paddy" becomes,
for the caricaturists in British newspapers in 1848 and
subsequent years--Paddy is portrayed as the unwanted Other
who is a threat to and has no place being in,
except to do menial jobs or as a factory operative if they
maintained respectability and don't try trod out their
Irishness too much. So, if anyone wants to know why
these issues become so extraordinarily bitter at almost
any time you can think of, Ulster in the 1970s and 1980s
or even into the 1990s, or Ireland in 1916,
1848 plays a major role in that. Now, this is not to say that
all people who saw themselves as British were necessarily nasty,
aggressive people. But it does simply remind us,
and here again I counsel Linda Colley's book called
Britain, as a very eloquent summary of
all of this, that part of the construction
of any kind of identity, and I'll talk more about this
when I talk about Eastern and Central Europe,
is what you're not, and what you're not for the
British in 1848--afraid of catching this cold coming from
the continent was, again,
you are not French. You are not Catholic.
This, if anything,
was going to further sour the relations between Irish and
British authorities, particularly given the fact
that the British Protestants owned the land in Ireland.
I was in New York the other
day, and I heard a talk and I saw
some pictures of these marvelous things called "mass
slabs," or "mass rocks," that were in rural
Ireland, where priests in the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries said
mass in secret using these slab rocks,
rocks that they happened to find, as altars.
Practicing your religion was
illegal, and the Protestants have the law on their side and
they own the land anyway. So, in 1848 there was no
revolution in Britain. You know clearly why this is
not the case. It's almost surprising to think
that they could have imagined the lines between the Irish
confederation and other Irish groups and physical force
Chartists. But 1848 has another role to
play in British identity. I've tried to convey that to
you today. Have a wonderful weekend.
See you on Monday.
Bye.
