Was repression the price of peace in Metternich’s Europe?

The short answer

• The fear behind restoration. At Vienna, rulers remembered how the French Revolution had been followed by war and the fall of monarchies. Censorship and policing seemed a modest cost if they could prevent another upheaval. Yet arresting conspirators did not remove the reasons for opposition. Literacy, railways and factory towns were changing society, while the settlement treated political agitation chiefly as a danger to control.
• A changing economy. Restoring a monarch did not restore the society over which that monarch ruled. Between 1815 and 1848, steam power, cotton manufacturing and railways transformed towns; a growing middle class read, traded and lent money, and workers crowded into industrial districts. Handloom weavers were among the crowd at Peterloo. The Lyon silk workers’ risings of 1831 and 1834 brought wages and work into politics, raising questions that a settlement concerned with dynasties had left unanswered.
• National movements in exile. National movements could be driven out of public life without disappearing. Activists organized through Carbonari lodges, Mazzini’s Young Italy, German gymnastic societies and student Burschenschaften. After the Polish rising of 1830–31 was crushed, exiles carried its cause abroad. Secrecy protected some organizers; emigration also carried their arguments and contacts between European capitals.
• Why Greece was different. European sympathy for Greek rebels drew on Christian solidarity and memories of ancient Greece. The Eastern Question gave governments reasons of their own to act: Russia sought influence at Ottoman expense, while Britain wanted to contain Russian gains. Each could prefer a Greek settlement in which it had influence to one dominated by its rival. Sympathy for rebels and strategic interest thus came together, despite the powers’ usual defense of established rulers.

What it changed

Different political paths. The settlement left different kinds of government on either side of the Rhine. In France, the “citizen king” ruled under a constitution, but the pays légal was narrow: roughly one man in 170 could vote. Farther east, Metternich’s influence remained strong. Russia crushed Poland’s 1830–31 rising with an army reported at 250,000 and abolished its constitution. Demands met by restricted constitutional government in the west and repression in the east would return in 1848.

Reform in Britain. After two years of intense crisis, the 1832 Reform Act removed many rotten boroughs and enlarged Britain’s electorate by roughly 50 percent. Some supporters hoped to preserve the system by making a concession; others wanted to change it. Many people still could not vote. Slavery abolition followed in 1833, as did factory legislation. Britain passed through 1848 without the continental wave of barricades, having given some grievances a parliamentary outlet.

Belgium and the powers. Belgium’s revolution became a new state through negotiation as well as fighting. It acquired an invited king and a constitution in 1831 that liberals elsewhere admired and copied. The powers negotiated its place in Europe and guaranteed its neutrality, later described in 1914 as a “scrap of paper”. Together with Greece, Belgium showed that diplomacy could accommodate a new state without a general European war.

Workers and the social question. The July barricade fighters helped bring a monarchy associated with bankers to power. Lyon’s silk workers raised a different demand in 1831, under the banner “Live working or die fighting.” Constitutions and nations mattered to opponents of the old order, but so did food, wages and the right to work. Political and social demands would meet, and sometimes conflict, in 1848.