Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals

Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals Read Free

Book: Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals Read Free
Author: Niall Ferguson
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reforms of the reign of Louis XVI, implemented by Necker, ended the era of administrative decay which had threatened to undermine the monarchy’s power relative not only to the parlements - which had effectively vanished by the 1770s - but to the Paris mob as well. As in England, the mob was a very visible part of public life in the 1780s and 1790s, and at times of food shortage threatened to wreak havoc. But without some kind of institutional focus for opposition to royal power, even of the limited sort which the British parliaments still provided, it could do little but riot for cheaper bread, albeit in the name of ‘liberty’. The same pattern of relatively inarticulate urban protest was to recur in 1830 and - throughout the continent - in 1848. However, rising living standards as a consequence of increasing industrialisation in northern and central France as well as rapidly growing transatlantic trade with Canada and Louisiana tended to diminish popular political protest in the second half of the century. In view of the economic developments of the nineteenth century, it seems idle to speculate about what a successful popular rebellion against either the Bourbons or the Stuarts might have achieved in the 1790s.
    In any case, contemporaries were more impressed by the extent of religious revival than by inchoate urban bread riots. In England, this took the form of a relatively conservative Methodism. In Ireland, Poland and northern Scotland, there were significant but relatively unremarkable revivals of Catholic piety. But France and Spain experienced sporadic outbreaks of violent iconoclasm (a pattern which repeated itself in Russia in 1905 and 1915-16); while in Central Europe the millenarian Jewish prophet Karl Marx attracted a considerable number of followers, by no means all of them Jews, with his predictions of an impending apocalypse. Marx was of course arrested by the Mainz authorities in 1847 and spent most of his life in prison. Few of his writings survived the strict censorship of the period. Yet he indirectly influenced a host of Orthodox imitators in Russia, notably the priest Vladimir Ulyanov, whose brother was executed for his part in the abortive assassination attempt against Alexander II in 1881. If successful, it is worth noting, that could have postponed the creation of a representative assembly in Russia, the Duma, for a generation by putting Alexander’s reactionary son on the throne. Revisionist historians are fond of arguing that in fact material ‘class’ divisions played a more important part in such popular movements; but it is hard to see how the leading role of well-educated and relatively prosperous figures like Marx and Ulyanov can be explained in such terms.
    Faced with the twin threats of food riots and religious cults, the monarchical states of Europe responded in two ways. Firstly, they sought to create more sophisticated and efficient forms of policing and administration. Secondly, they sought (as in the past) to export domestic problems by encouraging emigration.
    However, the former strategy often implied a greater degree of centralisation than had hitherto existed. The resulting opposition to centralisation gave the age its distinctive political language. On the one hand, ‘unitarists’ and ‘federalists’ supported the drive for more efficient government, arguing not only for centrally controlled police forces and bureaucracies, but also for centralised revenue-raising agencies and banking systems - even, in some cases, common currencies. On the other hand, so-called ‘particularists’ or ‘states’ righters’ sought to defend what they saw as their traditional ‘liberties’. (Those few enthusiasts for French philosophy who sought to define their positions as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ soon came to sound quaintly old-fashioned.) The classic confrontation between the centralisers and the particularists came in British America, between the centralists who wished

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