The Liberal Revolution

Over the course of the nineteenth century, one by one all the European countries would become “nation-states”, according to the aforementioned new liberal model, with the exception of tsarist Russia, where the autocratic model of absolute mon­archy would endure until the Revolution of 1905.

Of course, this phenomenon unfolded in a different way in each different country. In England, for example, although the monarchical principle was respected, the liberal model clearly triumphed, as the parliamentary regime was firmly entrenched, with the monarch reigning but not ruling. In other countries Liberalism’s triumph was more tempered because, despite the appearance of representative assemblies, the government remained in the hands of the king. Such was the case in Spain, with its system in which the Cortes shared sovereignty with the king, and in Prussia, where government was entirely entrusted to the monarch, with the representative assembly limited to legislative and budgetary functions. Finally, in other states the triumph of the liberal regime marked a definitive rejection of monarchy, as in France, which in 1875 definitively shifted to a republic featuring a powerful representative assembly and a weak executive— though the system functioned thanks to the existence of the all-powerful adminis­trative state established by Napoleon.

The lack of a single approach when it came to carrying out the bourgeois revolution was because of the fact that European liberals were divided into two camps: those who tried to move gradually towards the limitation of monarchical power, from within the system (doctrinaire or moderate liberalism) and another, more extremist class whose members sought a radical break with the Ancien Regime and monarchy itself (Revolutionary Liberalism).

16.4.1 Moderate Liberalism

The liberal state model was vigorously advanced in England because of the consolidation of a parliamentary system which effectively limited royal preroga­tive. However, it was in France during the era of the Restoration, however, where liberal thinkers, without endorsing the extremism of the revolutionaries, advocated a model of the state under which power was limited, as citizens were afforded greater freedom and capacity for initiative.

These liberals, who viewed the monarchy as compatible with the establishment of a constitutional regime, were called “doctrinaires” (Craiutu 2003), and in France were led by Pierre Paul Royer-Collard (1763-1845). The most eminent of these political thinkers, however, was Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), who in a famous speech in 1819, openly called for individual liberty vis-a-vis the state and the establishment of a regime characterized by civil and political freedom and based on adequate education.^[869] In response to the influence exercised by these moderate liberals, the French King Louis XVIII, despite not having renounced the principle of absolute, divine right monarchy, in 1814 granted a Charte which, among other things, instituted the election of a legislative assembly. Although government formally remained the king’s exclusive purview, the “parliamentary system” has triumphed ever since, although voting would be censitary until 1848.28

The “constitutional” principle embraced by France since 1814, also affected the German territories, despite the fact that after the Congress of Vienna, most of the German sovereigns had restored absolute monarchy. Thus, for example, the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, following the example of Louis XVIII, also granted his subjects a “constitution”, an action applauded by the Burschenschaft, an association of university professors and students which had begun to spread liberal principles in Germany under the slogan of “freedom, honor and homeland” (Boime 2004,179).

These decisions, however, perturbed Metternich, who convened the German princes in Carlsbad (Bohemia) and managed for the Burschenschaft to be abolished (Spevack 1997, 88). He was unable, however, to persuade the southern German states to eliminate their constitutional regimes, which set an important precedent in the Germanic-speaking territories.

16.4.2 “Revolutionary Liberalism”

Going further than the doctrinaire liberals, there continued to be radical revolution­aries in Europe who called for the re-establishment of Jacobin principles, arguing that sovereignty lay not with the king but in the nation, and that nations, through their representatives, should adopt constitutions setting down national principles and regulating the functioning of the state.

These reformers, dedicated to establishing the nation-state at all costs, were persecuted by the Restoration monarchs’ police,^[872] as they struggled to spread their ideas by way of revolutionary activities. The best known of these were the Masonic Lodges which emerged in the eighteenth century, and saw spectacular growth in the nineteenth.^[873] Not to be overlooked are Italy’s Carbonari; Germany’s Tugendbund, born of the patriotic uprising against Napoleonic rule; and the Society of Prosperity, founded in Russia in 1816, by liberal groups within the army. In Spain the Freemasons, who began their activities under the reign of Ferdinand VI and became well entrenched under Charles IV, were already well organized into secret societies during the reign of Ferdinand VII. The ultimate aim of revolutionary liberals, however, was to seize power through a military coup, generally organized by Masonic lodges (Hamnett 1984, 222-237), a practice which initially spread in Spain after the end of the Peninsular War and which came to be termed a pronunciamiento^[874] Spain will become initially the reference for revolutionary rivals thanks to the Riego’s uprising.

16.4.3 Spain, Spearheading the Liberal Revolution: Riego’s Revolt (1820)

In 1814, General Elio, Captain General of Valencia, had defied the Spanish National assembly, the Cortes (Parliament), and placed his troops at the service of Ferdinand VII, who openly restored absolutism in May of that year. Following this precedent, 6 years later a revolt by Spanish liberals was led by Major Rafael del Riego, a prominent Mason, who in early 1820 managed to orchestrate a rebellion at Cabezas de San Juan (Seville) by the troops that Ferdinand VII intended to send to America to subjugate pro-independence rebels (Stites 2014, 28-121). Fernando VII ended up capitulating and restored the 1812 constitution, not so much due to the force of the revolt as the weakness of his own government (Payne 1967, 19).

16.4.3.1 Revolution Extends to Italy

The triumph of the “Spanish Revolution” had important repercussions. Firstly, it prevented the deployment of reinforcements to Spanish America, thereby ensuring the rebels’ victory there. Most important was that Riego inspired European radical liberals to undertake the same defiance of their absolute monarchs (Mirkine- Guetzevitch 1938, 211-215). Three months after Riego’s success, a liberal revolu­tion broke out in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies when troops occupying Naples also revolted (Stites 2014, 121-185).

It should be noted that for the first time, Italy had extricated itself from the structures of the Ancien Regime as a result of a campaign which allowed Napoleon to wrest almost all of Italy from Austria (1796-1797). This shift led to the formation of the first independent Italian republics: in Lombardy, the Cisalpine Republic (which, in 1804, came be called the Kingdom of Italy); in Genoa, the Ligurian Republic; and in Naples, the Parthenopean Republic. Following Napoleon’s fall, the ensuing Congress of Vienna reinstalled the respective sovereigns of the differ­ent Italian states (Meriggi 2000, 49-64). Thus, in 1815, Italy continued to be nothing more than, as Metternich termed it, a “geographical expression” (Clark 2006, 1).

16.4.3.2 Revolts in Greece and Russia

In 1822, the Greeks rose up against the Ottoman Empire, and in December of 1825, taking advantage of the death of Alexander I and the accession to the throne of Nicholas I, a group of progressive Russian officials managed to lead a rebellion backed by 3,000 soldiers against the tsar in what was called the Decembrist Uprising (Taylor 2003, 42-46).

16.4.3.3 Metternich Reacts: Congresses and Interventions in Italy and Spain

These revolutionary outbreaks troubled the leaders of the European powers, who were quick to set the machinery of the Metternich system into motion. Represen­tatives of the rulers of Austria, Prussia, Russia, England and France met at the Congresses of Troppau (1820), and Laibach (1821). Despite the formal protest by Britain’s Foreign Minister, Lord Castlereagh, Metternich ultimately convinced the delegates to accept his proposal for foreign intervention in Italy, to put an end to the revolutionary upheaval there.

Intervention was entrusted to Austria, the power which had occupied the greater part of Italy, since the Peace of Utrecht (1713). In March of 1821, an Austrian army entered Naples, defeated the liberal troops, and restored absolutism there. That same army then moved on to the Piedmont, where another military uprising had broken out, and put it down as well. The occupation was followed by a relentless crackdown on any form of rebellion or dissent.

After the subjugation of Italy the powers met again in 1822, this time in Verona, where the conservative powers agreed to send a French army to Spain to “liberate” Fernando VII from his submission to the Cortes. In Verona, however, the unity of the alliance began to crumble. The tsar wished to intervene both in the Iberian Peninsula and in Spanish America, while England, where the liberal Canning had replaced the conservative Robert Jenkinson, supported intervention only in Spain— in reality because the government of his Gracious Majesty believed that the independence of Spain’s overseas territories favored Britain’s colonial interests.

In the end, thanks to the pressure exerted on the representatives by writer Francois Rene de Chateaubriand, then France’s Foreign Minister, it was agreed to intervene in Spain.

338- 343). The intervention in Spain was the last military operation inspired by the Metternich System and unanimously backed by its powers, as Britain’s withholding of support prevented the restoration of the Ancien Regime in Spanish America and in Greece.

16.4.3.4 The Metternich System Falters: The Independence of Spanish America

Britain’s opposition prevented the powers from getting involved in Spanish Amer­ica to suppress the uprisings which had begun in 1808, after the outbreak of the Peninsular War. The rebellions initially took the Spanish by surprise, and the authorities quickly lost control of all their territories in the Americas, except for Peru. However, after the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814, Spain was able to recover the control it held in America before 1808, with the exception of Argentina (McFarlane 2014, 111-144).

Spain’s hold on the new continent, however, would soon weaken, as the rebels received support from the English (who dispatched military commanders they no longer needed on the Continent after the end of the Napoleonic wars) and from the Americans (who sent weapons).^[875] The turning point, however, came, as has been mentioned, with the rebellion led by Colonel Rafael de Riego (a member of the same Masonic Lodge as Colonel San Martin), who in 1820, prevented Spanish reinforcements from reaching the country’s American colonies. The refusal of the powers gathered at Verona to intervene in Spanish America was pivotal, ending more than 300 years of Spanish rule over its overseas territories.

In 1821, Iturbide proclaimed the independence of Mexico (Iguala Plan). In Argentina, San Martin formed a small army with which he crossed the Andes and was able to dominate Chile and Peru between 1817 and 1821, while Simon Bolivar occupied Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. Finally, in 1824 Bolivar’s subordi­nate, General Sucre, defeated the last regular Spanish army at Ayacucho (Peru). At that point Spain, which had just sold Florida to the United States, only maintained an overseas presence in Cuba and the Philippines. Bolivar envisioned bringing the new states together into a “federal union”, modeled on the United States. To this end in 1826, he convened delegates from all the new Spanish American countries, and also from the U.S. The Congress of Panama was a failure, however, and Spanish America ended up fracturing into 15 independent republics.^[876] The sole “kingdom” remaining in the Americas was Brazil, where in 1822, Emperor Don Pedro, a son of the Portuguese king, had been proclaimed a constitutional emperor.^[877]

The English, who had supported the revolt in the hopes of taking advantage of the Spanish Empire’s demise, saw their hopes dashed when in 1823, U.S. President James Monroe declared his determination to prevent any European intervention in the Americas (Gleijeses 1992, 481-605), though this did not stop Napoleon III from seeking to conquer Mexico (1862-1867), seizing upon the outbreak of the Amer­ican Civil War to do so (Hanna and Hanna 1971). This enterprise, however, led to a complete debacle, with the execution of Emperor Maximilian I in Queretaro on June 19, 1867.

16.4.3.5 The Independence of Greece: A Fatal Blow to the Metternich

System

Having suffered a severe setback from the emancipation of Spanish America, the Metternich System was finally dealt a definitive blow when the Greeks revolted against the Ottoman Empire in 1822. The Turks managed to regain control of Greece in 1827, despite the separatist sympathies harbored by European intellec­tuals, such as Lord Byron (1788-1824). However, the Greeks ultimately won their independence, in the end thanks to Russia: in 1825, Tsar Alexander I died and Nicholas I rose to the Russian throne. Determined to augment Russia’s influence in the Mediterranean, the new tsar declared war on Ottoman Turkey (Crawley 2014, 43-62). The Russians went on to win their campaign and in the ensuing Treaty of

Andrinopolis (1829) the Ottoman Empire recognized, among other concessions, Greece’s independence.^[878]

16.4.4 France Comes to Lead the Liberal Revolution (1830)

The model of the liberal revolution based on a military uprising, inspired by the coup led by Colonel Riego, was succeeded by another approach: the “popular revolution” through which in July of 1830, the people of Paris took to the streets to overthrow the absolutist Charles X and impose a constituent assembly, from which emerged a new regime: the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe of Orleans, also known as the “July Monarchy” (Pilbeam 2002, 37-40).

Its triumph triggered a new revolutionary wave across Europe. The rebellions in Italy, the German territories and Poland, however, would fail, as the reactionary powers, essentially Austria and Russia, were fierce in their stamping out of sub­versive activities. Liberalism, however, prevailed in the Netherlands, Spain, Por­tugal and Switzerland. It also had major repercussions in England, where it inspired historic electoral reform in 1832.

16.4.4.1 The Birth of the Belgian State

The powers gathered at the Congress of Vienna agreed that the United Provinces of the North (Protestant), and the lands to the south (Catholic), would be unified into one single State: the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Beginning in 1815, however, the Catholics of the southern provinces entered into perpetual conflict with King William I (1815-1840). Seizing upon the triumph of parliamentary monarchy in France, in 1830 the southern provinces rebelled and created a new state: the Kingdom of Belgium (van Berlo 2005,43-45). In 1831, the corresponding constitutional assembly approved a liberal constitution “installing” a parliamentary monarchy under King Leopold I (1831-1865). Two legislative chambers were also created, whose members were elected by a very restricted censitary suffrage system which guaranteed that the government would remain in the hands of the high bourgeoisie.^[879] The Catholic Church was separated from the State, but received all its traditional privileges. Belgium established itself as a nation-state because its two major parties, liberal and Catholic, which only diverged on the issue of public education, forged a ruling coalition until 1847 (Goldstein 2010, 177), after which they would grapple for power.

16.4.4.2 The Triumph of the Liberals in Spain and Portugal

Liberalism also triumphed in Spain and Portugal, although this had less to do with the French Revolution of 1830, than it did with two civil wars.

In Spain, the death of Fernando VII (1833), who left no male heir, sparked the dynastic conflict known as the “Carlist Wars”. When the absolutists endorsed the dynastic rights advanced by Carlos Maria Isidro,^[880] a brother of the deceased king to place her daughter Isabella II on the throne, regent Maria Cristina had no choice but to ally with the liberals. After an attempt to grant a royal charter (the Estatuto Real of 1834), a rebellious group of Royal Guard sergeants, in 1836, in what was called the Mutiny atLaGranja, forced the restoration of the 1812 Constitution. At the end, the Constitution of 1837 was ultimately approved, clearly inspired by the Belgian Constitution of 1831,^[881] definitively consolidating the constitutional principle in Spain. With the rise of the conservatives to power in 1843, however, the principle of the constitutional state would be replaced by a Napoleon-inspired administrative state (Esdaile 2000, 65-82), a system which would endure all the way down to 1923, with the constitutions of Narvaez in 1845 and Canovas in 1876 (save for the “Revolutionary Sexennial” from 1868 to 1874).^[882]

In Portugal, the support of traditionalist forces for a separate candidate, the second son of Joao VI, D. Miguel, crystallized more rapidly, as Portuguese miguelismo emerged a couple years before Spanish carlismo (Payne 1994, 513­558). After 1834, the political struggle pitted moderates, defenders of the Consti­tution of 1824, against “Septembrists”, or progressives, supporters of the Constitu­tion of 1822. The latter group managed to seize power thanks to a September 1836 coup, although they were removed in 1842 by the Count of Tomar, who established a much more authoritarian regime than that introduced by Narvaez in Spain, which led his political opponents to ally and triggered several dramatic overthrow attempts, such as the Oporto Revolt (1846). Tomar was eventually forced to step down, although he would return to power from 1849 to 1851.^[883]

16.4.4.3 England and the Electoral Reform Act of 1832

Finally, mention must be made of England, where there was no revolution but a major law introducing electoral reform, approved by Parliament on June 4, 1832, thanks to the endorsement and leadership of Lord Grey.^[884] The Electoral Reform Act introduced a sweeping redistribution of electoral districts. Through it 165 rotten boroughs were eliminated, while new industrial cities such as Manchester and Glasgow acquired Parliamentary representation for the first time, while the income requirement to vote was also lowered. This expansion of the right to vote essentially favored the urban bourgeoisie, altering the English political landscape in just a question of years. Although universal suffrage would not be introduced until after the First World War, the Electoral Reform Act of 1832 was a decisive step towards the democratization of Britain’s parliamentary regime.^[885]

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