To what extent did individuals perceive themselves as members of mutually conflicting social classes? While liberals such as Guizot defended class divisions as open, equal, fair, and rational, critics on the right and left presented a very different interpretation. On the right, ultras such as Bonald and de Maistre and liberal Catholics such as Villeneuve-Bargemont lashed the bourgeois elite for their selfish disregard of higher values. Radicals and socialists condemned capitalist competition. Socialists refused to acknowledge that class divisions were part of the natural order in the same way as species of butterflies and geological formations.
Before Marx, with a few exceptions, socialists hoped to transform class conflict into harmony by peacefully replacing capitalist competition with co-operation. They proposed a variety of strategies ranging from Utopian experiments to government-primed co-operative workshops. The philanthropic British industrialist Robert Owen initiated experimental Utopian communities and artisan associations. For Proudhon a classless society would emerge when everyone took a hand at a variety of trades and skills. Cabet thought it would need the elimination (by persuasion) of private property and total equality and sameness in everything, including housing. Marx claimed that capitalist exploitation and class consciousness were unavoidable stages in economic development. A final revolution by a class-conscious proletariat would eliminate class and exploitation alike.
The first half of the nineteenth century was a time of popular unrest and protest. The impact of economic change and repeated economic crises like that of 1816-18 made rural areas as well as towns the scene of repeated violent upheaval. Popular unrest became endemic: at Peterloo in 1819, in the Captain Swing riots of 1830-1, among silk weavers in Lyons in 1831 and 1834, among tailors and printers in Paris, Berlin, and other cities in 1830, culminating in Chartism in Britain, and in the revolutions of 1848. The target of protesters was ‘government’, which, they claimed, was responsible for iniquitous taxes and tariffs and decreasingly willing, evidenced by recent legislation dismantling guilds and attacking freedom of association, to protect the traditional (rosily romanticized) moral economy.
Rioters were almost never committed to the overthrow of neglectful governments; they wanted government help to check damaging innovations. Grievances were specific and limited, involving attacks on property, especially new machines, forced grain sales, threats, but very little serious physical assault and almost no theft. The immediate target was often other workers, sometimes foreigners, sometimes women. Journeymen tailors complained that the growth in ‘ready-made’ production methods using cheap female labour reduced their income and belittled their trade. Printers were Luddites and rebels because they feared that new machinery would threaten both their skills and jobs. Silk weavers resented their increasing financial dependence on merchants. Poorer peasants protested about the erosion of communal rights, the better off that the vagaries of the market left them dependent on money-lenders, or that tariffs on imported manufactures blocked their foreign wine market— and that was just in France. Factory workers were seldom involved in protest. There was no concerted class consciousness, but a series of particular, often regionally limited, issues which sometimes coincided in depression years. The rhetoric of class conflict was aired in the cheaper, sometimes worker-run, newspapers of the day, but it only had a wide audience when food prices soared and work was scarce.
Governments responded to popular protest with violent repression. Real and mythical recollections of the Terror of the 1790s in France convinced all governments of the need to repress disorder before it could escalate. Socialists had far more success in convincing ruling elites of the imminence of class war than they had in converting and uniting working people. In 1843 Flora Tristan complained of artisan indifference and hostility to her idealistic plan for a single Union of all Workers. Military repression at Peterloo, Lyons, Paris, Milan, and St Petersburg did far more to create a sense of lower-class solidarity than the writings of the socialists or the inequities of the capitalist economy.
World History
