- Location
- Edmonton
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I aint fearmongering. Half that statement was sarcasm.
I only care about the trees.
Edit: corrected on the crown corps thing.
Im going back to my forest spreadsheets.
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Paths of Civilization II: Paths of Industrialization
I only care about the trees.
Edit: corrected on the crown corps thing.
Im going back to my forest spreadsheets.
- Location
- Panama City
not likely unless a new industry pops up that is critical to get initial state investment in to get going (like say, electricity generation/distribution)
- Location
- Illinois
Not likely, because it already exists.
We do Develop Industry to expand/create a Crown Corporation, and then we sell them off as needed. Every 2 DI equals 1 new CC we can sell.
pbluekan
Somethin's Fucky ...
- Location
- Trumpistan
Why do you say that? Because the Great Depression is scheduled for something like 70 years from now?
This is from the first part of the quest. Basically take IRL geography and shift it south by something like 10 to 15 degrees latitude. That's a rough description, but it gives the Black Sea a more Mediterranean climate, and Kyberi isn't a frozen tundra. It's more of a dry prairie like the Great Plains of the Americas
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Have another paper
Impressive that you can predict the future
It's 1837 right now.
HanEmpire
Delicious
Because the Sketch economy is growing a massive bubble on the back of the grain trade. The moment that the Hung food situation stabilizes, all that invented wealth is going to disappear into the ether and bring down the Sketch economy.
Stock market crash followed by a cascade of bank runs, bankruptcies, riots, and suicides.
- Location
- Illinois
Impressive that you can predict the future
It's 1837 right now.
Real Life Revolutions of 1830
Dutch
Bored Spearman of the Wind
- Location
- CET
The Road to Revolution: 1830
In France Louis XVIII began his reign in 1814 with an amnesty to the regicides of 1793. But the regicides, like all republicans, found the France of 1814 ab uncomfortable place, exposed as they were to the unofficial vengeance of counterrevolutionaries, and most of them had rallied to Napoleon when he returned from Elba. This exasperated the royalist counterrevolutionaries beyond all measures. A brutal "white terror" broke out after the Bourbon monarchy regained power in 1815. Upper class youth murdered Bonapartists and republicans; catholic mobs seized and killed protestants at Marseille and Toulouse. The Chamber of Deputies chosen in 1815 (by a tiny electorate of 100.000 landowners) proved to be more reactionary and royalist than the king. The king himself could not control the mounting frenzy of reaction, which he was sensible enough to realize would only infuriate the revolutionary elements further, as in fact happened. In 1820 a fanatical workingman assassinated the king's nephew, the Duke of Berry. Those who said that all partisans of the French Revolution were criminal extremists seemed to be justified. The reaction deepened, until in 1824 Louis XVIII died and was succeeded by his brother Charles X. Not only was Charles X the father of the recently murdered Duke of Berry, but for over 30 years he had also been the acknowledged leader of implacable counterrevolution. As the Count of Artois, youngest brother of Louis XVI, he had been among the first to emigrate in 1789. He was the favorite Bourbon among the ex-seigneurs, nobles and churchmen and leader of the Ultra-Royalist Faction. Regarding himself as hereditary absolute monarch by grace of God, he had himself crowned at Reims with all the romantic pomp of ages past, and proceeded to stamp out not only revolutionary republicanism but liberalism and constitutionalism as well.
In Poland the Vienna settlement had created a constitutional kingdom with the Russian Tsar Alexander as king, joined merely in personal union with the Russian Empire. The new machinery did not work very well. The Polish constitution provided an elected diet, a wide suffrage by the standards of the day, the Napoleonic civil code, freedom of press and religion, and exclusive use of the Polish language. But the Poles discovered that Alexander, though favoring liberty in the abstract, did not like to have anyone disagree with him. They could make little use of their much touted freedom in any actual legislation. The elected duet could not get along with Alexander's viceroy, who was a Russian. In Russia the serf-owning aristocracy viewed Alexander's idea of a constitutional kingdom of Poland with a jaundiced eye. They wanted no experimentation with liberty on the very borders of Russia. The Poles themselves played into the hands of their Russian enemies, in part because the Poles were among the first central European peoples to develop strong nationalist aspirations. They were dissatisfied with the boundaries accorded to Congress Poland, and they dreamed of the vast kingdom that had existed before the First Partition of 1772. Professors and university students in particular began to join secret societies.
In Germany those who had felt national stirrings during the wars of liberation were disillusioned by the peace treaty, which maintained the several German principalities as Napoleon had left them and purposefully united them only in a loose federation, or Bund. National ideas were most common in the numerous universities, where students and professors were more susceptible than most people to the doctrines of an eternal Volksgeist. National ideas tended to glorify the German common people and thus carried with them a kind of democratic opposition to aristocrats, princes, and kings. Students in man of the universities in 1815 formed college clubs, called collectively the Burschenschaft, which, as centers of serious political discussion, were to replace the older clubs devoted to drinking and dueling. The Burschenschaft, a kind of German youth movement, held a nationwide congress at Wartburg in 1817. Students listened to rousing speeches by patriotic professors, marched about in "Teutonic" costumes and burned reactionary books. This undergraduate performance posed no immediate treat to any established state, but the nervous governments took alarm. In 1819 a theology student assassinated the German writer Kotzebue, known as an informer in the service of the tsar. The assassins received hundreds of letters of congratulations, and at Nassau the head of the local government barely escaped the same fate at the hands of a pharmacy student. Metternich now chose to intervene. He had no authority in Germany except in that Austria was a member of the German Federation. He regarded all these manifestations of German national spirit, or of any demand for a more solidly unified Germany, as a threat to the favorable position of the Austrian Empire and to the whole balance of state power in Europe. He called a conference of the principal German states at Carlsbad in Bohemia; the frightened conferces adopted certain resolutions. These Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 dissolved the Burschenschaft and the equally nationalistic gymnastic clubs (some of whose members then joined secret societies). They provided for government officials to be placed in the universities and for censors to control the contents of books and the periodical and newspaper press. The Carlsbad Decrees remained in force for many years.
In Britain…..
At the Congress of Vienna the powers agreed to hold meeting in the future to enforce the treaty and take up new issues as they arose. A number of congresses of the Great Powers resulted, which were of significance as an experimental step toward international regulation of European affairs. The congresses resembled, in a tentative and partial way, the League of Nations. The powers had also, in 1815, in alarm after the return of Napoleon, subscribed to Alexander I's Holy Alliance, which became a popular term for the collaboration of the European states in the congresses. The Holy Alliance, on the fact of its statement of Christian purpose and international concord, gradually became an alliance for the suppression of revolutionary and even liberal activity, following in that respect the trend of the governments that had created it. The first general postwar congress took place at Aix-la-Chapelle (or Aachen) in 1818. The principal item on the agenda was to withdraw the allied army of occupation from France. The French agued that Louis XVIII would never be popular in France as long as he was supported by a foreign army. The other powers, because they all wanted the French people to forget the past and accept the Bourbons, withdrew their military forces without disagreement. They also arranged to have private bankers take over the French reparations of dept (700 million Francs), the bankers paid the allied governments, the French paid the bankers. Tsar Alexander, still the most advanced internationalist of his day, suggested a kind of permanent European Union and proposed the maintenance of international military forces to safeguard recognized states against changes by violence. He argued that governments safeguarded against the threat of violent upheaval would be more likely to make (liberal and constitutional) reforms. The other attendees disagreed, especially the British. Who reserved the right to make independent judgement of foreign policy. The Congress also addressed the Atlantic slave trade and the attacks on commercial shipping by the Barbary pirates. Is was unanimously agreed that both should be suppressed. To suppress both, however, strong naval forces were required, which only the British possessed. It also meant that naval captains had to be authorized to stop and search any vessel at sea. The continental states refused to countenance any such use of the British fleet, they feared for the freedom of the seas. The British, meanwhile, would not even discuss placing British warships in an international naval pool or putting British squadrons under the authority of an international body. Therefor, nothing was done. The slave trade continued, fueled by the demand for cotton and other commodities, and the Barbary pirates were not removed until France invaded Algeria in 1830.
Just after the conclusion of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, the next congress was called when revolutionary agitation came to a crisis in southern Europe. It wasn't that liberal or revolutionary sentiment was stronger here than in the north, but rather that the governments in question, those of Spain, Naples and the Ottoman Empire, were more inefficient, flimsy, and corrupt. Many of the revolutionaries were hardly more than middle-class liberals. In Spain many of them had at first accepted the Napoleonic occupation as a progressive development but then turned against it and proclaimed a new constitution in 1812, modeled after the French constitution of 1789-1791. After Napoleon's final defeat they attempted to force the restored Bourbon kings of Spain and Naples to adopt this constitution of 1812. In 1820 the governments of both Spain and Naples collapsed with remarkable ease before the demonstrations of revolutionaries. The kings of both countries reluctantly took oaths to the Spanish Constitution of 1812. But Metternich saw the insurrections as the first symptoms of a revolutionary seizure against which Europe should be quarantined. It was a fact that revolutionary agitation was international, easily leaping across frontiers, because of the operations of secret societies and of political exiles and in any case the same ideas had spread in all countries after the French Revolution. Metternich considered Italy in particular to be within the legitimate sphere of influence of the Austrian Empire. He therefor called a meeting of the Great Powers at Troppau in Austrian Silesia, hoping to use the authority of an international congress to put down the revolution in Naples. The governments of France and Britain, not eager to play Austria's game, sent only observers to the congress. Metternich's main problem was, as usual, Alexander. What would be the attitude of the Liberal Tsar, the friend and patron of constitutions, toward the idea of a constitutional monarchy in Naples? At an inn in Troppau Metternich and Alexander met alone, and there held a momentous interview over teacups. Metternich reviewed the horrors of revolutionism, the unwisdom of granting any concessions lest revolutionaries be encouraged. Alexander was already somewhat disillusioned by the ungrateful feelings of the Poles and believed that constitutions should be granted by legitimate sovereigns, not extorted from them by revolutionaries, as had happened in Naples. He declared that he had always been wrong and Metternich had always been right; and he announced himself ready to follow Metternich's political judgement. Thus fortified, Metternich drew up a document, the protocol of Troppau, for consideration and acceptance by the five Great Powers. It held that all recognized European states would be protected by collective international action, in the interest of general peace and stability, from internal changes brought about by force. It was a statement of collective security against revolution. Neither France nor Great Britain accepted it. The British told Metternich that if Austria's interests were threatened in Naples it should intervene in its name only. The British did not object to the repression of the revolution in Naples, but rejected the principle of binding international collaboration. Metternich could only get Russia and Prussia to endorse his protocol, in addition to Austria. These three, acting as the Congress of Troppau, authorized Metternich to dispatch an Austrian army into Naples. He did so, the Neapolitan revolutionaries were arrested or put to flight, the incompetent and brutal Ferdinand I was restored as an absolute king, the revolution seemed banished for now. But the congress system, which was meant to be a Europewide international body, had in effect been used as an antirevolutionary alliance of Prussia, Russia and Austria. A gap had opened between the Western and Eastern powers.
Thousands of revolutionaries and liberals fled from the political terror raging in Italy. Many went to Spain, now dreaded by conservatives as the main seat of revolutionary infection. The Middle East also seemed to ignite in conflagration. Alexander Ypsilanti, a Greek who had spent his adult life in military service in Russia, in 1821 led a band of armed followers from Russia in Romania, then part of the Ottoman Empire, hoping that all Greeks and pro-Greeks in the Ottoman Empire would join him. He expected Russian support, because Russia had wanted to use Greek Christians in a campaign to weaken its Imperial rival in the south. The possibility of an Ottoman Turkish Empire converted into a "Greek" Empire and dependent on Russia was unpleasant to Metternich. To deal with these matters another international congress was called, this time in Verona in 1922. Alexander in shifting from liberal to reactionary views, had not changed his believe in the need for concerted international action. Had pure power politics determined his decisions, he would have doubtlessly favored Ypsilanti's Grecophile revolution. But he stood by the principle of international solidarity against revolutionary violence. He refused to support Ypsilanti, who found less enthusiasm for Greek culture amongst the Romanians and Balkan peoples than he had expected and was soon defeated by the Turks. As for an intervention to repress the uprising in Greece itself, the question did not arise, because the Ottoman government proved quite able for a time to handle the matter without assistance. The question of the revolution in Spain was settled by foreign intervention. The Bourbon regime in France had no taste for a Spain in which revolutionaries, republicans, political exiles, and members of secret societies might be harbored. The French government proposed to the congress that it be authorized to dispatch an army across the Pyrenees. The Congress welcomed the offer, and despite predictions of ruin and memories of Napoleon's Spanish disaster, a French army of 200.000 men moved into Spain in 1823. The campaign proved to be a military promenade through a cheering country. Spanish liberals, constitutionalists, or revolutionaries were a helpless minority. The Spanish people saw the invasion as liberation from Masons, Carbonari and heretics and sprouted with satisfaction at the restoration of church and king. Ferdinand VII repudiated his constitutional oath and let the most reactionary Spaniards have their way. The revolutionaries were savagely persecuted, exiled, or jailed.
After the congress of Verona no more meeting of its kind were held. The attempt at a formal international regulation of European affairs was given up. In the broadest retrospect, the congresses failed to make progress towards an international order because, especially after Alexander's conversion to Metternich's conservatism, they came to stand for nothing except preservation of the status quo. They made no attempts at accommodation of the forces that were now shaping Europe, so they could not evolve into a modern transnational system for managing conflicts and social change. It was not the policy of these congresses to forestall revolution by demanding that governments institute reforms. They simply repressed or punished revolutionary agitation and propped up governments that could not stand on their own feet. In any case the congresses never succeeded in subordinating the separate interest of the Great Powers. Perhaps Alexander's repudiation of Ypsilanti was a sacrifice of Russian advantage to international principle; but when the Austrian government intervened in Naples and the French in Spain, they acted in their own interest even though they had an international mandate. The interest of Britain was to pull away from the system entirely and stand aloof from permanent commitments, they were also more willing to take a benevolent view towards revolution in other countries. When France pulled away the system became nothing more than a counterrevolutionary league of the three eastern European Autocracies. The cause of liberalism in Europe was thus advanced by the collapse of this highly conservative international system.
Alexander I, "the man who defeated Napoleon," the ruler who had led his armies from Moscow to Paris, who had frightened European diplomats by the Russian shadow that he threw over the continent, who had been a pillar in liberal constitutionalism and international order, died in 1825. His death was the signal for revolution in Russia. Officers of the Russian army, during the campaigns of 1812-1815, had become acquainted with many unsettling ideas. Secret societies were formed even in the Russian officer corps; their members held all sorts of conflicting ideas, some wanting a constitutional tsardom in Russia, some demanding a republic, some even dreaming of an emancipation of the serfs. When Alexander died it was for a time uncertain which of his two brothers, Constantine or Nicholas, would succeed him. The restless coteries in the army preferred Constantine, who was the older brother and who was though more to be more favorable to innovations in the state. In December 1825 they proclaimed Constantine in at St. Petersburg, having their soldier shout "Constantine and Constitution!". But the fact was that Constantine had already renounced his claims in favor of Nicholas, who was thus the rightful heir. The uprising, known as the Decembrist Revolt, was soon put down. Five of the mutinous officers were hanged; many others condemned to forced labor in Siberia. The Decembrist Revolt was the first manifestation of the modern revolutionary movement in Russia, of a revolutionary movement inspired by an ideological program, as distinguished from the mass upheavals of Pugachev or Razin in earlier times.
The reactionary dam broke open in 1830, and in western Europe the stream never stopped. The seepage had already begun. By 1825 Spanish America was independent; the British and French had pulled away from the congress system; and the Greek Nationalist movement had become a popular liberal cause across all of western Europe. With the defeat of Ypsilanti in 1821 the Greek nationalism turned somewhat away from the idea of a neo-Greek Empire and began promoting the idea for independence for Greece proper, the islands and peninsulas where Greek was the predominant language. Tsar Nicolas was more willing than Alexander to assist this movement. The governments of Britain and France were not inclined to let Russia stand as the sole champion of the Balkan peoples. Moreover, liberals in the west thought of the embattled Greeks as ancient Athenians fighting the modern despotism of an unenlightened Ottoman Empire. The result of these converging interests and ideas was a joint Anglo-French-Russian naval intervention, which destroyed the Turkish fleet off the Greek coast at Navarino Bay in 1827. Russia again, as often in the past, sent armies into the Balkan. A Russo-Turkish war and a great Middle Eastern crisis followed, in the course of which the rival powers agreed in 1829 to recognize Greece as an independent kingdom. The Balkans states of Serbia, Wallachia and Moldavia were also recognized as autonomous principalities within the badly shaken Ottoman Empire. From the same crisis Egypt emerged as an autonomous region under Mehemet Ali and in time became a center of Arabic nationalism, which reduced Ottoman power in the south just as Balkan nationalism did in the north.
It was in 1830, and first of all in France, that the wall of reaction really collapsed. Charles X had become king in 1824, the next year legislative chambers voted for an indemnity, in the form of perpetual allowances totaling 30 million francs a year, to those who as émigrés 30 years ago had lost their property to confiscations by the revolutionary state. Catholic clergy began to take over classrooms in the schools. A law pronounced the death penalty for sacrilege committed in church buildings. But the France of the restored Bourbons still had a mostly free publish sphere for political and cultural debates; and against these apparent efforts to revive the Old Regime a strong opposition developed in the newspapers and in the chambers. In March 1830 the Chamber of Deputies passed a vote of no confidence in the government. The king, as was his legal right, dissolved the Chamber and called for new elections. The elections produced clear majorities for those who had denounced the king's policies. He replied on July 26, 1830, with four ordinances (decrees) issued on his own authority. One dissolved the newly elected Chamber before it had even met; another imposed censorship on the press; the third amended the suffrage as to reduce the voting power of banks, merchants, and industrialists and concentrated it in the hands of the aristocracy; the fourth called for an election on the new basis. These July Ordinances provoked the July Revolution on the next day. The bourgeois liberals were enraged by their brazen ouster from political life. But it was the republicans, the revolutionary workers, students and intelligentsia in Paris, who actually moved. For three days, from July 27 to 29, barricades were erected in the city, behind which a swarming populace defied the army and the police. Some protestors were killed, but most of the army refused to fire. Charles X, in no mood to be made captive by the revolution like his brother Louis XVI, abdicated and headed for England. A few of the leaders now wished to proclaim a democratic republic. Working people hoped for better conditions of employment. The political liberals, however, supported by bankers, industrialists, various journalists, and intellectuals, had other aims. They had been satisfied in general with the constitutional charter of 1814; it was only to the policies and personnel of the government that they had objected, and they wished now to continue with the constitutional monarchy, somewhat liberalized, and with a king they could trust. A solution to the deadlock was found by Lafayette, the aging hero of the American and French revolutions, who became the commander of the reorganized National Guard and a popular symbol of national unity. Lafayette brought the Duke of Orleans onto the balcony of the Paris Hôtel de Ville, embraced him before a great crowd of people, and offered him as the answer to France's need. The duke was a collateral relative of the Bourbons; he had also, as a young man, served in the republican army of 1792 and had later lived for a time as an exile in the United States. The militant republicans accepted him, willing to see what would develop; and the Chamber of Deputies on August 7 offered him the throne, on the condition that he would faithfully observe the constitutional charter of 1814. He reigned, until 1848, under the title of Louis Phillipe, king of the French. The regime of Louis Phillipe, called the Orléanist, bourgeois, or July monarchy, was viewed very differently by different groups in France and in Europe. To the other states of Europe and to the clergy and legitimists within France, it seemed shockingly revolutionary. The new king owed his throne to an insurrection, to a bargain made by republicans, and to promised made to the Chamber of Deputies. He called himself not king of France but King of the French, and he flew the tricolor flag of the Revolution in place of the Bourbon lily. He cultivated a popular manner, wore sober dark clothing (an ancestor of the modern business suit), and carried an umbrella. Though privately he worked stubbornly to maintain his royal position, in public he adhered to the constitution. The constitution remained substantially what it had been in 1814. The main political change was the tone; there would be no more absolutism, with the notion that constitutional guarantees could be abrogated by a reigning prince. Legally the main change was that the Chamber of Peers ceased to be hereditary, to the chagrin of the old nobility, and the Chamber of Deputies was to be elected by a somewhat enlarged body of voters (from 100,000 before 1830 to 200,000 after 1830). The right to votes was still based on the ownership of considerable quantity of real estate. About 1 in 30 of adult male population of France now elected the Chamber of Deputies. The beneficiaries of the new system were the upper bourgeoise, to them the July Monarchy was the stopping place of political progress. To others, and especially to the radical democrats, it proved as years passed by to be a disillusionment and annoyance to which they would respond with new forms of political agitation.
The immediate effect of the three-day Paris revolution of 1830 was to set off as series of similar explosions throughout Europe, most notably in Belgium and Poland. These in turn, coming after the collapse of the Bourbons in France, brought the whole peace settlement of 1815 into jeopardy. The Congress of Vienna had joined Belgium with the Dutch Netherlands to create a strong buffer state against a resurgent France and had done what it could to prevent direct Russian intervention in central Europe by way of Poland. Both of these arrangements were undone. The Dutch-Belgian union proved economically beneficial, Belgian industry complemented the commercial and shipping activity of the Dutch, but politically it worked poorly, especially because the Dutch king William I had absolutist and centralizing ideas. The Belgians, though they had never been independent, had always stood stiffly fir their local liberties under their former Austrian rulers (and the Spanish and Burgundians before them); now they did the same against the Dutch. The Catholic Belgians disliked Dutch Protestantism; those Belgians that spoke French (the Walloons) objected to regulations requiring them to speak Dutch. About a month after the July Revolution in Paris disturbances broke out in Brussels. The leaders asked only for local self-government and a deal was negotiated by the Dutch crown prince (the future William II), but William I rejected the compromise and sent in the army. The Belgians in turn declared independence. A Belgian National Assembly met and drafted a constitution. Nicholas I of Russia wished to send troops to stamp out the Belgian uprising. But he could not get his forces safely through Poland.
In Poland, too, in 1830, a revolution broke out. The Polish Nationalists saw in the fall of the French Bourbons a timely moment to strike. They objected also to the appearance of Russian troops bound presumably to suppress freedom in western Europe. One incident led to another until in January 1831 the Polish diet proclaimed the dethronement of the Polish King (i.e. Nicholas), who in turn sent in a large army. The Poles, outnumbered and divided among themselves, could not put up a successful resistance. They obtained no support from the West. The British government was unsettled by agitation at home. The French government, newly installed under Louis Phillipe, had no wish to appear disturbingly revolutionary, and in any case feared the Polish agents who sought its backing as international firebrands and republicans. The Polish revolution was therefor crushed. Congress Poland disappeared; its constitution was abrogated, and it was merged into the Russian Empire. Thousands of Polish exiles settled in western Europe, where they became familiar figures in republican circles. In Poland the engines of repression rolled. The tsar's government sent thousands of Poles to Siberia, began to Russify the eastern border and closed the universities of Warsaw and Vilna. Because the Polish revolution prevented the tsar from moving toward a possible intervention in Belgium, it can be said that the sacrifice of the Poles contributed to the success of the revolution of 1830, as it had to that of the French Revolution of 1789-1795.
It was true enough, as Nicholas had maintained, that an independent Belgium presented great international problems. Belgium for 20 years before 1815 had been part of France. A few Belgians now favored a reunion with it, and in France the republican left, which regarded the Vienna treaty as an insult to the French Nation, saw an opportunity to win back its first and dearest conquest of the First Republic. In 1831, by a small majority, the Belgian National Assembly elected as their king the son of Louis Phillipe, who, however, not wishing trouble with the British, forbade his son from accepting it. The Belgians therefor elected Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, a German princeling who had married into the British royal family and became a British subject. He was in fact the uncle of the 12 year old girl who was to be Queen Victoria. The British and French negotiations led to the creation of Belgium as a perpetually neutral state, incapable of forming alliances and guaranteed against invasion by all five Great Powers. Belgium settled down in into a stable parliamentary system, somewhat more democratic than the July Monarchy but offering the same type of bourgeois and liberal rule.
The three day Paris revolution of 1830 had direct repercussions across the Channel. The quick results following on working-class insurrection gave radical leaders in England the idea that threats of violence might be useful. On the other hand, the ease and speed with which the French bourgeoisie gained the upper hand reassured the British middle classes, who concluded that they might unsparingly embarrass the government without courting a mass upheaval. The Tory regime in England had in fact already begun to loosen up. A group of liberal Tory leaders came forward in the 1820s (notably George Canning and Robert Peel). This group was sensitive to the need of British business and to the liberal doctrines of free trade. They reduced tariffs and liberalized the old Navigational Acts, permitting British colonies to trade with countries other than Britain. The Liberal Tories also undermined the legal position of the Church of England, forwarding the conception of a secular state, though this was hardly their purpose. The repealed the old laws (from the 17th century) that prevented Protestants from holding office, except for when they pretended to Anglican. The allowed the Test Act to be repealed and Catholic Emancipation to be adopted. Catholics in Great Britain and Ireland received the same rights as others. Capital punishment was abolished for about a hundred offenses. A professional police force was introduced in place of the old fashioned and ineffectual local constables. The new police were expected to handle protests meetings, angry crowds, or occasional riots without having to call for military assistance. Despite their willingness to introduce moderate reforms, there were two things the Liberal Tories could not do. They could not question the Corn Laws, and they could not change the elite membership of the House of Commons. By the Corn Laws, which set the tariff on imported grain, a tariff raised to new heights in 1815, the gentlemen of England protected their rent rolls; and by the existing structure of the House of Commons they governed the country, expecting the working classes and the business interests to look to them as natural leaders. Never in 500 years of its history had the Commons been so unrepresentative. No new borough had been created since the Revolution of 1688. The boroughs, or urban centers having the right to elect members of Parliament, were heavily concentrated in southern England. Although the Industrial Revolution was shifting population noticeably to the north, the new factory towns were not represented in Parliament. In a few boroughs real elections took place, but in some of them it was the town corporation, and in others the owners of certain pieces of real estate, that had the right to name members of Parliament. Many boroughs were entirely dominated by influential persons called borough mongers by their critics. As for the rural districts, the "forty shilling freeholders" chose two members of Parliament for each county, in a convivial assembly much influenced by gentlefolk. It was estimated in 1820 that fewer than 500 men, most of them members of the House of Lords, really selected a majority of the House of Commons. Some two dozen bills to reform the House of Commons had been introduced in the half-century preceding 1830. They had all failed to pass. In 1830, after the Paris revolution, the issue was again raised by the minority party, the Whigs. The Tory prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo and a most extreme conservative, so fanatically defended the existing system that he even lost the confidence of some of his own followers. The existing methods of election in England, he declared, were more perfect than any that human intelligence could contrive at a single stroke. After his outburst a Whig minister took over the government. It introduced a reform bill. The House of Commons rejected it. The Whig ministry resigned. The Tories, fearing popular violence, refused to take the responsibility for forming a cabinet. The Whigs resumed office and again introduced their reform bill. This time it passed the Commons but failed in the House of Lords. An angry roar went up over the country. Crowds milled in the London streets, rioters were in control of Bristol for several days, the jail in Derby was sacked, and Nottingham castle was burned. Only the passage of the reform bill, it seemed, could prevent an actual revolution. Using this argument, the Whigs got the king to promise to create enough new peers to change the majority in the House of Lords. The Lords yielded rather than be swamped, and in April 1832 the bill became law.
The Reform Bill of 1832 was a very English measure. It adapted the English or medieval system rather than following the new ideas of the French Revolution. On the Continent, constitutional political systems in countries such as France rested on the idea that each representative should represent roughly the same number of voters and that voters should qualify to vote by a flat uniform qualification, usually the payment of a stated amount of property taxes. The British held to the idea that members of the House of Commons represented boroughs and counties, in general without regard for the size of population. In other words, no attempt was made to create equal electoral districts, and the vote was still distributed in the reformed boroughs and counties on the basis of economic status, reliability, and permanence. The total effect on the size of the electorate was to raise the number of voters in the British Isles from about 500,000 to about 813,000. Some persons actually lost their votes, namely, the poorer elements in the handful of old boroughs that had been fairly democratic, like the borough of Westminster in greater London. The most important change was not the increased size of the electorate but its redistribution by region and by class. The Reform Bill reallocated the seats in the House of Commons, moving more than 140 parliamentary seats from small, older, boroughs, to the new industrial towns. Many previously excluded middle-class men in the growing northern cities gained the right to vote, factory owners and businessmen and their principal employees, doctors, lawyers, brokers, merchants, and newspaper people. Relatives and connections of the well-off. The Reform Bill of 1832 was more sweeping than the Whigs would have favored except for their fear of revolution.
Sauce: R.R. Palmer, A History of Europe in the Modern World.
In France Louis XVIII began his reign in 1814 with an amnesty to the regicides of 1793. But the regicides, like all republicans, found the France of 1814 ab uncomfortable place, exposed as they were to the unofficial vengeance of counterrevolutionaries, and most of them had rallied to Napoleon when he returned from Elba. This exasperated the royalist counterrevolutionaries beyond all measures. A brutal "white terror" broke out after the Bourbon monarchy regained power in 1815. Upper class youth murdered Bonapartists and republicans; catholic mobs seized and killed protestants at Marseille and Toulouse. The Chamber of Deputies chosen in 1815 (by a tiny electorate of 100.000 landowners) proved to be more reactionary and royalist than the king. The king himself could not control the mounting frenzy of reaction, which he was sensible enough to realize would only infuriate the revolutionary elements further, as in fact happened. In 1820 a fanatical workingman assassinated the king's nephew, the Duke of Berry. Those who said that all partisans of the French Revolution were criminal extremists seemed to be justified. The reaction deepened, until in 1824 Louis XVIII died and was succeeded by his brother Charles X. Not only was Charles X the father of the recently murdered Duke of Berry, but for over 30 years he had also been the acknowledged leader of implacable counterrevolution. As the Count of Artois, youngest brother of Louis XVI, he had been among the first to emigrate in 1789. He was the favorite Bourbon among the ex-seigneurs, nobles and churchmen and leader of the Ultra-Royalist Faction. Regarding himself as hereditary absolute monarch by grace of God, he had himself crowned at Reims with all the romantic pomp of ages past, and proceeded to stamp out not only revolutionary republicanism but liberalism and constitutionalism as well.
In Poland the Vienna settlement had created a constitutional kingdom with the Russian Tsar Alexander as king, joined merely in personal union with the Russian Empire. The new machinery did not work very well. The Polish constitution provided an elected diet, a wide suffrage by the standards of the day, the Napoleonic civil code, freedom of press and religion, and exclusive use of the Polish language. But the Poles discovered that Alexander, though favoring liberty in the abstract, did not like to have anyone disagree with him. They could make little use of their much touted freedom in any actual legislation. The elected duet could not get along with Alexander's viceroy, who was a Russian. In Russia the serf-owning aristocracy viewed Alexander's idea of a constitutional kingdom of Poland with a jaundiced eye. They wanted no experimentation with liberty on the very borders of Russia. The Poles themselves played into the hands of their Russian enemies, in part because the Poles were among the first central European peoples to develop strong nationalist aspirations. They were dissatisfied with the boundaries accorded to Congress Poland, and they dreamed of the vast kingdom that had existed before the First Partition of 1772. Professors and university students in particular began to join secret societies.
In Germany those who had felt national stirrings during the wars of liberation were disillusioned by the peace treaty, which maintained the several German principalities as Napoleon had left them and purposefully united them only in a loose federation, or Bund. National ideas were most common in the numerous universities, where students and professors were more susceptible than most people to the doctrines of an eternal Volksgeist. National ideas tended to glorify the German common people and thus carried with them a kind of democratic opposition to aristocrats, princes, and kings. Students in man of the universities in 1815 formed college clubs, called collectively the Burschenschaft, which, as centers of serious political discussion, were to replace the older clubs devoted to drinking and dueling. The Burschenschaft, a kind of German youth movement, held a nationwide congress at Wartburg in 1817. Students listened to rousing speeches by patriotic professors, marched about in "Teutonic" costumes and burned reactionary books. This undergraduate performance posed no immediate treat to any established state, but the nervous governments took alarm. In 1819 a theology student assassinated the German writer Kotzebue, known as an informer in the service of the tsar. The assassins received hundreds of letters of congratulations, and at Nassau the head of the local government barely escaped the same fate at the hands of a pharmacy student. Metternich now chose to intervene. He had no authority in Germany except in that Austria was a member of the German Federation. He regarded all these manifestations of German national spirit, or of any demand for a more solidly unified Germany, as a threat to the favorable position of the Austrian Empire and to the whole balance of state power in Europe. He called a conference of the principal German states at Carlsbad in Bohemia; the frightened conferces adopted certain resolutions. These Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 dissolved the Burschenschaft and the equally nationalistic gymnastic clubs (some of whose members then joined secret societies). They provided for government officials to be placed in the universities and for censors to control the contents of books and the periodical and newspaper press. The Carlsbad Decrees remained in force for many years.
In Britain…..
At the Congress of Vienna the powers agreed to hold meeting in the future to enforce the treaty and take up new issues as they arose. A number of congresses of the Great Powers resulted, which were of significance as an experimental step toward international regulation of European affairs. The congresses resembled, in a tentative and partial way, the League of Nations. The powers had also, in 1815, in alarm after the return of Napoleon, subscribed to Alexander I's Holy Alliance, which became a popular term for the collaboration of the European states in the congresses. The Holy Alliance, on the fact of its statement of Christian purpose and international concord, gradually became an alliance for the suppression of revolutionary and even liberal activity, following in that respect the trend of the governments that had created it. The first general postwar congress took place at Aix-la-Chapelle (or Aachen) in 1818. The principal item on the agenda was to withdraw the allied army of occupation from France. The French agued that Louis XVIII would never be popular in France as long as he was supported by a foreign army. The other powers, because they all wanted the French people to forget the past and accept the Bourbons, withdrew their military forces without disagreement. They also arranged to have private bankers take over the French reparations of dept (700 million Francs), the bankers paid the allied governments, the French paid the bankers. Tsar Alexander, still the most advanced internationalist of his day, suggested a kind of permanent European Union and proposed the maintenance of international military forces to safeguard recognized states against changes by violence. He argued that governments safeguarded against the threat of violent upheaval would be more likely to make (liberal and constitutional) reforms. The other attendees disagreed, especially the British. Who reserved the right to make independent judgement of foreign policy. The Congress also addressed the Atlantic slave trade and the attacks on commercial shipping by the Barbary pirates. Is was unanimously agreed that both should be suppressed. To suppress both, however, strong naval forces were required, which only the British possessed. It also meant that naval captains had to be authorized to stop and search any vessel at sea. The continental states refused to countenance any such use of the British fleet, they feared for the freedom of the seas. The British, meanwhile, would not even discuss placing British warships in an international naval pool or putting British squadrons under the authority of an international body. Therefor, nothing was done. The slave trade continued, fueled by the demand for cotton and other commodities, and the Barbary pirates were not removed until France invaded Algeria in 1830.
Just after the conclusion of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, the next congress was called when revolutionary agitation came to a crisis in southern Europe. It wasn't that liberal or revolutionary sentiment was stronger here than in the north, but rather that the governments in question, those of Spain, Naples and the Ottoman Empire, were more inefficient, flimsy, and corrupt. Many of the revolutionaries were hardly more than middle-class liberals. In Spain many of them had at first accepted the Napoleonic occupation as a progressive development but then turned against it and proclaimed a new constitution in 1812, modeled after the French constitution of 1789-1791. After Napoleon's final defeat they attempted to force the restored Bourbon kings of Spain and Naples to adopt this constitution of 1812. In 1820 the governments of both Spain and Naples collapsed with remarkable ease before the demonstrations of revolutionaries. The kings of both countries reluctantly took oaths to the Spanish Constitution of 1812. But Metternich saw the insurrections as the first symptoms of a revolutionary seizure against which Europe should be quarantined. It was a fact that revolutionary agitation was international, easily leaping across frontiers, because of the operations of secret societies and of political exiles and in any case the same ideas had spread in all countries after the French Revolution. Metternich considered Italy in particular to be within the legitimate sphere of influence of the Austrian Empire. He therefor called a meeting of the Great Powers at Troppau in Austrian Silesia, hoping to use the authority of an international congress to put down the revolution in Naples. The governments of France and Britain, not eager to play Austria's game, sent only observers to the congress. Metternich's main problem was, as usual, Alexander. What would be the attitude of the Liberal Tsar, the friend and patron of constitutions, toward the idea of a constitutional monarchy in Naples? At an inn in Troppau Metternich and Alexander met alone, and there held a momentous interview over teacups. Metternich reviewed the horrors of revolutionism, the unwisdom of granting any concessions lest revolutionaries be encouraged. Alexander was already somewhat disillusioned by the ungrateful feelings of the Poles and believed that constitutions should be granted by legitimate sovereigns, not extorted from them by revolutionaries, as had happened in Naples. He declared that he had always been wrong and Metternich had always been right; and he announced himself ready to follow Metternich's political judgement. Thus fortified, Metternich drew up a document, the protocol of Troppau, for consideration and acceptance by the five Great Powers. It held that all recognized European states would be protected by collective international action, in the interest of general peace and stability, from internal changes brought about by force. It was a statement of collective security against revolution. Neither France nor Great Britain accepted it. The British told Metternich that if Austria's interests were threatened in Naples it should intervene in its name only. The British did not object to the repression of the revolution in Naples, but rejected the principle of binding international collaboration. Metternich could only get Russia and Prussia to endorse his protocol, in addition to Austria. These three, acting as the Congress of Troppau, authorized Metternich to dispatch an Austrian army into Naples. He did so, the Neapolitan revolutionaries were arrested or put to flight, the incompetent and brutal Ferdinand I was restored as an absolute king, the revolution seemed banished for now. But the congress system, which was meant to be a Europewide international body, had in effect been used as an antirevolutionary alliance of Prussia, Russia and Austria. A gap had opened between the Western and Eastern powers.
Thousands of revolutionaries and liberals fled from the political terror raging in Italy. Many went to Spain, now dreaded by conservatives as the main seat of revolutionary infection. The Middle East also seemed to ignite in conflagration. Alexander Ypsilanti, a Greek who had spent his adult life in military service in Russia, in 1821 led a band of armed followers from Russia in Romania, then part of the Ottoman Empire, hoping that all Greeks and pro-Greeks in the Ottoman Empire would join him. He expected Russian support, because Russia had wanted to use Greek Christians in a campaign to weaken its Imperial rival in the south. The possibility of an Ottoman Turkish Empire converted into a "Greek" Empire and dependent on Russia was unpleasant to Metternich. To deal with these matters another international congress was called, this time in Verona in 1922. Alexander in shifting from liberal to reactionary views, had not changed his believe in the need for concerted international action. Had pure power politics determined his decisions, he would have doubtlessly favored Ypsilanti's Grecophile revolution. But he stood by the principle of international solidarity against revolutionary violence. He refused to support Ypsilanti, who found less enthusiasm for Greek culture amongst the Romanians and Balkan peoples than he had expected and was soon defeated by the Turks. As for an intervention to repress the uprising in Greece itself, the question did not arise, because the Ottoman government proved quite able for a time to handle the matter without assistance. The question of the revolution in Spain was settled by foreign intervention. The Bourbon regime in France had no taste for a Spain in which revolutionaries, republicans, political exiles, and members of secret societies might be harbored. The French government proposed to the congress that it be authorized to dispatch an army across the Pyrenees. The Congress welcomed the offer, and despite predictions of ruin and memories of Napoleon's Spanish disaster, a French army of 200.000 men moved into Spain in 1823. The campaign proved to be a military promenade through a cheering country. Spanish liberals, constitutionalists, or revolutionaries were a helpless minority. The Spanish people saw the invasion as liberation from Masons, Carbonari and heretics and sprouted with satisfaction at the restoration of church and king. Ferdinand VII repudiated his constitutional oath and let the most reactionary Spaniards have their way. The revolutionaries were savagely persecuted, exiled, or jailed.
After the congress of Verona no more meeting of its kind were held. The attempt at a formal international regulation of European affairs was given up. In the broadest retrospect, the congresses failed to make progress towards an international order because, especially after Alexander's conversion to Metternich's conservatism, they came to stand for nothing except preservation of the status quo. They made no attempts at accommodation of the forces that were now shaping Europe, so they could not evolve into a modern transnational system for managing conflicts and social change. It was not the policy of these congresses to forestall revolution by demanding that governments institute reforms. They simply repressed or punished revolutionary agitation and propped up governments that could not stand on their own feet. In any case the congresses never succeeded in subordinating the separate interest of the Great Powers. Perhaps Alexander's repudiation of Ypsilanti was a sacrifice of Russian advantage to international principle; but when the Austrian government intervened in Naples and the French in Spain, they acted in their own interest even though they had an international mandate. The interest of Britain was to pull away from the system entirely and stand aloof from permanent commitments, they were also more willing to take a benevolent view towards revolution in other countries. When France pulled away the system became nothing more than a counterrevolutionary league of the three eastern European Autocracies. The cause of liberalism in Europe was thus advanced by the collapse of this highly conservative international system.
Alexander I, "the man who defeated Napoleon," the ruler who had led his armies from Moscow to Paris, who had frightened European diplomats by the Russian shadow that he threw over the continent, who had been a pillar in liberal constitutionalism and international order, died in 1825. His death was the signal for revolution in Russia. Officers of the Russian army, during the campaigns of 1812-1815, had become acquainted with many unsettling ideas. Secret societies were formed even in the Russian officer corps; their members held all sorts of conflicting ideas, some wanting a constitutional tsardom in Russia, some demanding a republic, some even dreaming of an emancipation of the serfs. When Alexander died it was for a time uncertain which of his two brothers, Constantine or Nicholas, would succeed him. The restless coteries in the army preferred Constantine, who was the older brother and who was though more to be more favorable to innovations in the state. In December 1825 they proclaimed Constantine in at St. Petersburg, having their soldier shout "Constantine and Constitution!". But the fact was that Constantine had already renounced his claims in favor of Nicholas, who was thus the rightful heir. The uprising, known as the Decembrist Revolt, was soon put down. Five of the mutinous officers were hanged; many others condemned to forced labor in Siberia. The Decembrist Revolt was the first manifestation of the modern revolutionary movement in Russia, of a revolutionary movement inspired by an ideological program, as distinguished from the mass upheavals of Pugachev or Razin in earlier times.
The reactionary dam broke open in 1830, and in western Europe the stream never stopped. The seepage had already begun. By 1825 Spanish America was independent; the British and French had pulled away from the congress system; and the Greek Nationalist movement had become a popular liberal cause across all of western Europe. With the defeat of Ypsilanti in 1821 the Greek nationalism turned somewhat away from the idea of a neo-Greek Empire and began promoting the idea for independence for Greece proper, the islands and peninsulas where Greek was the predominant language. Tsar Nicolas was more willing than Alexander to assist this movement. The governments of Britain and France were not inclined to let Russia stand as the sole champion of the Balkan peoples. Moreover, liberals in the west thought of the embattled Greeks as ancient Athenians fighting the modern despotism of an unenlightened Ottoman Empire. The result of these converging interests and ideas was a joint Anglo-French-Russian naval intervention, which destroyed the Turkish fleet off the Greek coast at Navarino Bay in 1827. Russia again, as often in the past, sent armies into the Balkan. A Russo-Turkish war and a great Middle Eastern crisis followed, in the course of which the rival powers agreed in 1829 to recognize Greece as an independent kingdom. The Balkans states of Serbia, Wallachia and Moldavia were also recognized as autonomous principalities within the badly shaken Ottoman Empire. From the same crisis Egypt emerged as an autonomous region under Mehemet Ali and in time became a center of Arabic nationalism, which reduced Ottoman power in the south just as Balkan nationalism did in the north.
It was in 1830, and first of all in France, that the wall of reaction really collapsed. Charles X had become king in 1824, the next year legislative chambers voted for an indemnity, in the form of perpetual allowances totaling 30 million francs a year, to those who as émigrés 30 years ago had lost their property to confiscations by the revolutionary state. Catholic clergy began to take over classrooms in the schools. A law pronounced the death penalty for sacrilege committed in church buildings. But the France of the restored Bourbons still had a mostly free publish sphere for political and cultural debates; and against these apparent efforts to revive the Old Regime a strong opposition developed in the newspapers and in the chambers. In March 1830 the Chamber of Deputies passed a vote of no confidence in the government. The king, as was his legal right, dissolved the Chamber and called for new elections. The elections produced clear majorities for those who had denounced the king's policies. He replied on July 26, 1830, with four ordinances (decrees) issued on his own authority. One dissolved the newly elected Chamber before it had even met; another imposed censorship on the press; the third amended the suffrage as to reduce the voting power of banks, merchants, and industrialists and concentrated it in the hands of the aristocracy; the fourth called for an election on the new basis. These July Ordinances provoked the July Revolution on the next day. The bourgeois liberals were enraged by their brazen ouster from political life. But it was the republicans, the revolutionary workers, students and intelligentsia in Paris, who actually moved. For three days, from July 27 to 29, barricades were erected in the city, behind which a swarming populace defied the army and the police. Some protestors were killed, but most of the army refused to fire. Charles X, in no mood to be made captive by the revolution like his brother Louis XVI, abdicated and headed for England. A few of the leaders now wished to proclaim a democratic republic. Working people hoped for better conditions of employment. The political liberals, however, supported by bankers, industrialists, various journalists, and intellectuals, had other aims. They had been satisfied in general with the constitutional charter of 1814; it was only to the policies and personnel of the government that they had objected, and they wished now to continue with the constitutional monarchy, somewhat liberalized, and with a king they could trust. A solution to the deadlock was found by Lafayette, the aging hero of the American and French revolutions, who became the commander of the reorganized National Guard and a popular symbol of national unity. Lafayette brought the Duke of Orleans onto the balcony of the Paris Hôtel de Ville, embraced him before a great crowd of people, and offered him as the answer to France's need. The duke was a collateral relative of the Bourbons; he had also, as a young man, served in the republican army of 1792 and had later lived for a time as an exile in the United States. The militant republicans accepted him, willing to see what would develop; and the Chamber of Deputies on August 7 offered him the throne, on the condition that he would faithfully observe the constitutional charter of 1814. He reigned, until 1848, under the title of Louis Phillipe, king of the French. The regime of Louis Phillipe, called the Orléanist, bourgeois, or July monarchy, was viewed very differently by different groups in France and in Europe. To the other states of Europe and to the clergy and legitimists within France, it seemed shockingly revolutionary. The new king owed his throne to an insurrection, to a bargain made by republicans, and to promised made to the Chamber of Deputies. He called himself not king of France but King of the French, and he flew the tricolor flag of the Revolution in place of the Bourbon lily. He cultivated a popular manner, wore sober dark clothing (an ancestor of the modern business suit), and carried an umbrella. Though privately he worked stubbornly to maintain his royal position, in public he adhered to the constitution. The constitution remained substantially what it had been in 1814. The main political change was the tone; there would be no more absolutism, with the notion that constitutional guarantees could be abrogated by a reigning prince. Legally the main change was that the Chamber of Peers ceased to be hereditary, to the chagrin of the old nobility, and the Chamber of Deputies was to be elected by a somewhat enlarged body of voters (from 100,000 before 1830 to 200,000 after 1830). The right to votes was still based on the ownership of considerable quantity of real estate. About 1 in 30 of adult male population of France now elected the Chamber of Deputies. The beneficiaries of the new system were the upper bourgeoise, to them the July Monarchy was the stopping place of political progress. To others, and especially to the radical democrats, it proved as years passed by to be a disillusionment and annoyance to which they would respond with new forms of political agitation.
The immediate effect of the three-day Paris revolution of 1830 was to set off as series of similar explosions throughout Europe, most notably in Belgium and Poland. These in turn, coming after the collapse of the Bourbons in France, brought the whole peace settlement of 1815 into jeopardy. The Congress of Vienna had joined Belgium with the Dutch Netherlands to create a strong buffer state against a resurgent France and had done what it could to prevent direct Russian intervention in central Europe by way of Poland. Both of these arrangements were undone. The Dutch-Belgian union proved economically beneficial, Belgian industry complemented the commercial and shipping activity of the Dutch, but politically it worked poorly, especially because the Dutch king William I had absolutist and centralizing ideas. The Belgians, though they had never been independent, had always stood stiffly fir their local liberties under their former Austrian rulers (and the Spanish and Burgundians before them); now they did the same against the Dutch. The Catholic Belgians disliked Dutch Protestantism; those Belgians that spoke French (the Walloons) objected to regulations requiring them to speak Dutch. About a month after the July Revolution in Paris disturbances broke out in Brussels. The leaders asked only for local self-government and a deal was negotiated by the Dutch crown prince (the future William II), but William I rejected the compromise and sent in the army. The Belgians in turn declared independence. A Belgian National Assembly met and drafted a constitution. Nicholas I of Russia wished to send troops to stamp out the Belgian uprising. But he could not get his forces safely through Poland.
In Poland, too, in 1830, a revolution broke out. The Polish Nationalists saw in the fall of the French Bourbons a timely moment to strike. They objected also to the appearance of Russian troops bound presumably to suppress freedom in western Europe. One incident led to another until in January 1831 the Polish diet proclaimed the dethronement of the Polish King (i.e. Nicholas), who in turn sent in a large army. The Poles, outnumbered and divided among themselves, could not put up a successful resistance. They obtained no support from the West. The British government was unsettled by agitation at home. The French government, newly installed under Louis Phillipe, had no wish to appear disturbingly revolutionary, and in any case feared the Polish agents who sought its backing as international firebrands and republicans. The Polish revolution was therefor crushed. Congress Poland disappeared; its constitution was abrogated, and it was merged into the Russian Empire. Thousands of Polish exiles settled in western Europe, where they became familiar figures in republican circles. In Poland the engines of repression rolled. The tsar's government sent thousands of Poles to Siberia, began to Russify the eastern border and closed the universities of Warsaw and Vilna. Because the Polish revolution prevented the tsar from moving toward a possible intervention in Belgium, it can be said that the sacrifice of the Poles contributed to the success of the revolution of 1830, as it had to that of the French Revolution of 1789-1795.
It was true enough, as Nicholas had maintained, that an independent Belgium presented great international problems. Belgium for 20 years before 1815 had been part of France. A few Belgians now favored a reunion with it, and in France the republican left, which regarded the Vienna treaty as an insult to the French Nation, saw an opportunity to win back its first and dearest conquest of the First Republic. In 1831, by a small majority, the Belgian National Assembly elected as their king the son of Louis Phillipe, who, however, not wishing trouble with the British, forbade his son from accepting it. The Belgians therefor elected Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, a German princeling who had married into the British royal family and became a British subject. He was in fact the uncle of the 12 year old girl who was to be Queen Victoria. The British and French negotiations led to the creation of Belgium as a perpetually neutral state, incapable of forming alliances and guaranteed against invasion by all five Great Powers. Belgium settled down in into a stable parliamentary system, somewhat more democratic than the July Monarchy but offering the same type of bourgeois and liberal rule.
The three day Paris revolution of 1830 had direct repercussions across the Channel. The quick results following on working-class insurrection gave radical leaders in England the idea that threats of violence might be useful. On the other hand, the ease and speed with which the French bourgeoisie gained the upper hand reassured the British middle classes, who concluded that they might unsparingly embarrass the government without courting a mass upheaval. The Tory regime in England had in fact already begun to loosen up. A group of liberal Tory leaders came forward in the 1820s (notably George Canning and Robert Peel). This group was sensitive to the need of British business and to the liberal doctrines of free trade. They reduced tariffs and liberalized the old Navigational Acts, permitting British colonies to trade with countries other than Britain. The Liberal Tories also undermined the legal position of the Church of England, forwarding the conception of a secular state, though this was hardly their purpose. The repealed the old laws (from the 17th century) that prevented Protestants from holding office, except for when they pretended to Anglican. The allowed the Test Act to be repealed and Catholic Emancipation to be adopted. Catholics in Great Britain and Ireland received the same rights as others. Capital punishment was abolished for about a hundred offenses. A professional police force was introduced in place of the old fashioned and ineffectual local constables. The new police were expected to handle protests meetings, angry crowds, or occasional riots without having to call for military assistance. Despite their willingness to introduce moderate reforms, there were two things the Liberal Tories could not do. They could not question the Corn Laws, and they could not change the elite membership of the House of Commons. By the Corn Laws, which set the tariff on imported grain, a tariff raised to new heights in 1815, the gentlemen of England protected their rent rolls; and by the existing structure of the House of Commons they governed the country, expecting the working classes and the business interests to look to them as natural leaders. Never in 500 years of its history had the Commons been so unrepresentative. No new borough had been created since the Revolution of 1688. The boroughs, or urban centers having the right to elect members of Parliament, were heavily concentrated in southern England. Although the Industrial Revolution was shifting population noticeably to the north, the new factory towns were not represented in Parliament. In a few boroughs real elections took place, but in some of them it was the town corporation, and in others the owners of certain pieces of real estate, that had the right to name members of Parliament. Many boroughs were entirely dominated by influential persons called borough mongers by their critics. As for the rural districts, the "forty shilling freeholders" chose two members of Parliament for each county, in a convivial assembly much influenced by gentlefolk. It was estimated in 1820 that fewer than 500 men, most of them members of the House of Lords, really selected a majority of the House of Commons. Some two dozen bills to reform the House of Commons had been introduced in the half-century preceding 1830. They had all failed to pass. In 1830, after the Paris revolution, the issue was again raised by the minority party, the Whigs. The Tory prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo and a most extreme conservative, so fanatically defended the existing system that he even lost the confidence of some of his own followers. The existing methods of election in England, he declared, were more perfect than any that human intelligence could contrive at a single stroke. After his outburst a Whig minister took over the government. It introduced a reform bill. The House of Commons rejected it. The Whig ministry resigned. The Tories, fearing popular violence, refused to take the responsibility for forming a cabinet. The Whigs resumed office and again introduced their reform bill. This time it passed the Commons but failed in the House of Lords. An angry roar went up over the country. Crowds milled in the London streets, rioters were in control of Bristol for several days, the jail in Derby was sacked, and Nottingham castle was burned. Only the passage of the reform bill, it seemed, could prevent an actual revolution. Using this argument, the Whigs got the king to promise to create enough new peers to change the majority in the House of Lords. The Lords yielded rather than be swamped, and in April 1832 the bill became law.
The Reform Bill of 1832 was a very English measure. It adapted the English or medieval system rather than following the new ideas of the French Revolution. On the Continent, constitutional political systems in countries such as France rested on the idea that each representative should represent roughly the same number of voters and that voters should qualify to vote by a flat uniform qualification, usually the payment of a stated amount of property taxes. The British held to the idea that members of the House of Commons represented boroughs and counties, in general without regard for the size of population. In other words, no attempt was made to create equal electoral districts, and the vote was still distributed in the reformed boroughs and counties on the basis of economic status, reliability, and permanence. The total effect on the size of the electorate was to raise the number of voters in the British Isles from about 500,000 to about 813,000. Some persons actually lost their votes, namely, the poorer elements in the handful of old boroughs that had been fairly democratic, like the borough of Westminster in greater London. The most important change was not the increased size of the electorate but its redistribution by region and by class. The Reform Bill reallocated the seats in the House of Commons, moving more than 140 parliamentary seats from small, older, boroughs, to the new industrial towns. Many previously excluded middle-class men in the growing northern cities gained the right to vote, factory owners and businessmen and their principal employees, doctors, lawyers, brokers, merchants, and newspaper people. Relatives and connections of the well-off. The Reform Bill of 1832 was more sweeping than the Whigs would have favored except for their fear of revolution.
Sauce: R.R. Palmer, A History of Europe in the Modern World.
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Can anyone help me figure out how much progress we supposed to make?
(Education x2 + Institution + Random) x Research Bonus
Education = 5
Institution = 1
Random = 1
Research bonus = 1.5
(5* 2) + 1 + 1 = 12 * 1.5 = 18
This is fairly conservative, but isn't the institution type supposed to provide slight bonus?
(Education x2 + Institution + Random) x Research Bonus
Education = 5
Institution = 1
Random = 1
Research bonus = 1.5
(5* 2) + 1 + 1 = 12 * 1.5 = 18
This is fairly conservative, but isn't the institution type supposed to provide slight bonus?
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I argue that it should advances Personal Initiative.
Slight correction
Theunderbolt
"Prepare for trouble..."
- Location
- USoA
...
Cornuthaum lives!
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
No, what gave you that idea?
Or, you can read the thread further.
Panicking in the first minutes of upheaval.
Theunderbolt
"Prepare for trouble..."
- Location
- USoA
I saw.
The ghost of Jefferson Davis shall haunt us now.
HanEmpire
Delicious
That was just me panicking about the crisis and trying to make sense of what happened.
- Location
- Voidbetweenstars
He never said that we don't have a revolt or don't lose the war mind you.
Those things could still happen this turn,
HanEmpire
Delicious
Nah he said on Discord that the revolt was prevented and that the war is still on.He never said that we don't have a revolt or don't lose the war mind you.
Those things could still happen this turn,
That said:
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A Question of Resources and Capability
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A Question of Resources and Capability
[] Infrared
[] Red
[] Orange
[] Yellow
[] Green
[] Blue
[] Violet
[] Ultraviolet
No, you don't know what each means yet, you still have to choose
Consider this a weighted RNG at this point.
[] Infrared
[] Red
[] Orange
[] Yellow
[] Green
[] Blue
[] Violet
[] Ultraviolet
No, you don't know what each means yet, you still have to choose
Consider this a weighted RNG at this point.
