The newest interpretation of the French revolution argues that the problem with the government of Louis XVI was not that it was old-fashioned, but rather that it tried to put into effect the newest ideas of the physiocrats and catastrophically failed.  Instead of trying to assure food at fair prices by having the state set prices, the government embraced supply and demand.  But British food was being produced more cheaply and flooded the market, driving French food producers out of business.  Moreover, with her backward internal transportation system, food grown in one area could not be transported easily to another, and so such food rotted in the fields or ports.  Likewise, British textiles were let in when the French government removed the tariffs which the mercantilists had previously enacted to keep out foreign competition.   But again, the British were producing goods more cheaply and so drove French textile businesses to ruin.  Newer historians also point out that the French Enlightenment was far more violently anti-clerical than others had been, and the struggle with the Caholic church helped produce a backlash and the Terror.
     There were in fact two Frances; one was the bustling maritime France near the northern and western coasts which embraced free trade and which could easily compete with foreigners.  This area tended to produce the Girondins, a group interested in change but not radical change.  The other France was composed of the southern and central regions.  Here, Frenchmen felt passed by and threatened by new ideas, knowing they could not compete internationally and resenting someone, everyone, for their fate.  This area produced most of the revolutionary zeal of the Jacobins, including their hatred of capitalists, technology and cities.
     Conditions in France were bad, but not the worst in Europe.  A small group of privileged classes, about one percent of the population, controlled one-half of all arable French land and the best positions in the church and army.  Peasants who made up 80% of the population were saddled with intolerable tax burdens such as the taille(a land tax), the tithe(a church tax) and the gabelle(a salt tax.) The middle class squeezed between them resented the extravagance of the nobility, the unfair tax system which penalized them, and the vestiges of mercantilism which remained.  The selling of offices had become an epidemic, with people, including commoners, going into debt to purchase offices so as to avoid being taxed in the future.  There were 46,000 office holders of which 40,000 at least were unnecssary.  The selling of offices drained the French budget to pay their slaries, and it held back French investment as capital was put into office buying rather than trade or industry.  Although these conditions made France unstable, they were not the worst in Europe.  France after all had the most populous middle class outside of England.  But one out of every five people on the continent were French, which meant that when France exploded in violence, a substantial portion of the Europe was affected.
     The immediate issue of the revolution was France's enormous debt.  By 1788, one-half of the French budget was going for the interest on the debt (not to pay it off), one fourth for the military which still managed to lose wars on the continent and New World, and 6% went for the upkeep on Versailles, leaving less than 20% of French revenues to actually run the state.  The debt was not the largest in Europe, however.  The British were actually spending 70% of their revenues to service their debt.  The problem was that France could not find a way to pay off the debt without provoking a political upheaval.  In England, a Parliament which represented the wealthy commercial classes increasingly had a say in how taxes were levied and on whom, while France did not have such a representative assembly. The Estates General, the closest the French had to an English Parliament, had not even met since 1614. Nor could the French simply print more money, thus devaluing the currency and paying the debt off with inflated currency.  France had no paper currency at all and had no central Bank, where Britain had both pound notes and the Bank of England.
     When France aided the American colonies in our independence drive from England, her help was quite limited, but even this little bit plunged France into bankruptcy. To deal with this, the king was obliged to call the Estates General into session in Paris in 1789, to devise a method of paying off the debt by requiring more taxes from more people.   But the calling of the Estates allowed dissent to be voiced in Paris itself instead of having people grumbling far away from the center of power, and many representatives came to the capital nursing age-old grievances against the king, his court at Versailles, and Paris.
     The moderate stage of the French revolution began in the summer of 1789, when the Third Estate was locked out of its meeting place, stormed off to the tennis court nearby, and took the Tennis Court oath.  The Estates General was made up of three estates: the nobles, the clergy, and the Third Estate made up of everyone else.  Since each estate had only one vote, the first two almost always outvoted the third.  Demanding one man, one vote, the Third Estate feared it was being cut out of power, and so they reconstituted themselves as the National Assembly and vowed to make fundamental changes in France.  This was a movement of the elite and priviledged classes, an attempt to roorganize the monarchy rather than abolish it.
     While the representatives were at Versailles worrying about the rights of man, desperate people in Paris were starving.  The economic poverty in France was extreme.  Following poor harvests in 1788 and 1789, bread in Paris had reached 4 sous a pound, meaning the total income of the poor would have to go literally to put bread on the table, leaving nothing for housing or clothes. By July, 1789, 150,000 out of the capital's population of 600,000 were out of work.  With so much unemployment and with food so expensive, the demand for manufactured goods collapsed, throwing artisans and small tradesmen out of work as well.
     Thus on July 14, a mob attacked the Bastille, an old fortress in Paris then being used as a prison and important as a symbol of the hated repression of the government.  Again, modern research shows that the crowd was really after gunpowder they believed was stored in the Bastille, but they later claimed they were releasing French political prisoners.  In fact, only seven prisoners were released, none political.
     The attack on the Bastille convinced the National Assembly to put forward the Declaration of the Rights of Man, based on the naturals laws French philosophes had been advocating for years.  This declaration, however, did nothing for the food shortage in Paris.  Thus, a group of desperate Parisian women marched on Versailles, some 15 miles outside of Paris, demanding that the king come and live in the city so he could see the poverty they endured.  The women murdered the king's guards and stormed the palace; the king and his family were saved only by the timely arrival of Lafayette, the hero of the American revolution, who threw himself in front of monarchs. The king and the National Assembly now agreed to return to Paris.
     The Assembly, emboldened by the attack of the women, now passed a huge number of laws which created a moderate revolution.  Taxes would now be paid by all, meaning the tax rate could go down, serfdom and the game laws were abolished, and a more participatory democracy was established.  The effect was to create a constitutional monarchy, where the king had a suspensive veto, and became "Louis, by the grace of God and the constitution, king of the state."
 The debt, however, remained.  To get the necessary money, the Assembly decided to secularize the French Catholic church, seizing its lands for the public good.  Bishops and priests were now to be elected by the people and had to swear allegiance to the constitution or be removed. The Assembly would issue assignats, paper currency, to be financed by the sale of church lands.
     The moderate revolution failed, in part because there were still not enough changes for the peasants and lower classes which even the philosophes like Voltaire had sneered at.  The lower classes still could not vote, the enclosure movement which threw them off their land continued, and they were left to the not so tender mercies of the marketplace as the philosophes and physiocrats had wanted.
     The debt remained intractable.  The French could not renege on it as had Philip II of Spain, twice, because the debt was owed internally to Frenchmen: if the government reneged, it would bankrupt French citizens and thus France herself. The assignats were readily accepted, but so much so the government began printing too many.  Inflation resulted making the paper currency almost worthless.  The reforms were undermined by the king who attempted to flee in 1791, only to be returned a virtual prisoner to Paris.  The Civil Constitution of the Clergy which had secularized the church was condemned by the pope who claimed that only he could appoint bishops and priests and that the seizure of the church's land had been a crime.  The pope threatened to excommunicate any priest who took the oath of allegiance to the constitution; in the desperate world of 1790, when many Frenchmen feared starving to death, they did not want to die outside a state of grace which an excommunicated priest could not provide. Devout Catholics began hiding refractory priests who would not take the oath.  Factionalism tore the Assembly apart, as Girondins and Jacobins, unused to making compromises, squabbled over fine points of doctrine while the business of the state did not get done.
     And then France was invaded by Austria and Prussia.  These two autocratic military powers had ignored the revolution in France at first, because anything which weakened their enemy France, the most powerful nation on the continent, suited them to a tee.  But by 1792, the events in France threatened to spill out over French border, perhaps even destabilizing the crowns of the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns.  By August, Austrian and Prussian troops were encamped Paris.  In the same month, a carefully orchestrated revolt broke out in the capital forcing the king to flee the Louvre and to take refuge with the Assembly, which put Louis under arrest.
 The wild rhetoric of revolution the radicals encouraged could be nourished only by blood, but constant bloodletting would exhaust the nation, and in the long run, decimate the radicals themselves as they turned on one another for ever purer forms of revolutionary spirit.  But the immediate problem was hostile troops at the gates of the city. The French army was decimated as officers either refused to fight at all, fought only under duress, or went over to the enemy.  France's army had fallen back to the city.
     Paris responded to this potential catastrophe by setting up the Commune, with Danton as Dictator of France, empowered to repel the invaders.  In September, a massacre started in Paris which in five days saw 2000 people killed.  Most of these were refractory priests, some as young as 18.  It used to be thought that this execution was simply of royalists, as Parisian crowds feared the victory of Austria and Prussia would put Louis back on the throne as absolute monarch, and in a panic eliminated as many of his supporters as they could find.   In fact, the September massacres, as this incident is called, were merely a slaughter, brought on perhaps by fear, but which remained unpunished when the Commune refused to track down the killers.
     Now a new legislative body was set up, the National Convention, which pushed back the invaders in the fall of 1792. This body was dominated by journalists and writers whose influence had grown because of their incendiary publications, but who had little experience in running a government.  These radicals tended to be anti-capitalist, anti-technology and anti-cityóexcept for Paris which they controlled.  The Convention declared France a republic in which a king would have no role to play.  No longer a constitutional monarchy, France would have to decide what to do with a superfluous kingóand the answer was to try him and execute him in February, 1793, thus beginning the Reign of Terror.  The Reign of Terror lasted from 1793-4, killing 5000 in Paris and maybe 20,000 in the provinces.  As in many explosions of violence of this kind, sometimes revolutionary rhetoric was used merely to settle old scores.
     And the violence produced a counterattack, as one would expect.  A revolt in the Vendée in March, 1793, saw a rebellion against the revolutionary excess in Paris, as the people in that area slaughtered whatever army personnel and municipal officials appointed by the capital they could get their hands on.  The violence of the Reign of Terror turned much of the rest of the world against France as well, including the United States where Washington sternly professed his "neutrality."
     The Convention did however, produce the major social and economic changes lacking under the Assembly.  A national system of education was established and peasants were given land forcibly taken from the aristocrats. The Convention began fixing prices of basic commoditiesósomething the physiocrats had denouncedóin order to bring inflation under control and guarantee people enough to eat.   But the government went much farther.  In an attempt to root out counterrevolutionaries like the Catholic church,  the radical sought to de-Christianize France, putting in a new calendar with a ten day week and renaming Notre Dame cathedral the Temple of Reason.  Such moves only alienated maritime France even more.  The Convention even mandated new terms of address, supplanting terms like Monsieur and Madame with the more democratic Citizen and Citizeness.
     A reaction against the violence was sure to occur even in Paris and it did in the summer of 1794, in what is called the Thermidorian Reaction because it occurred in Thermidor, one of the new months of the de-Christianized calendar. A series of military victories overseas had reassured the French, who no longer believed the violence of the Terror was still needed.  Moreover, the radical Jacobins had turned on one another: Danton was guillotined in April, 1794, by Robespierre, who in turn went to the scaffold in July.
     This Thermidorian Reaction was led by the same middle class lawyers and liberal aristocrats as had led the first or moderate stage.  A recent analysis of execution rolls shows that in fact the middle class had been the chief victims of the Terror.  A Directory was formed in 1795, a weak five man dictatorship which came to rely increasingly on the army to stay in power.  Napoleon first made his mark by dispersing a bread riot in Paris at the Directory's command "with a whiff of grapeshot."
     The Directory continued the war against the First Coalition organized and led by Britain.  France would be almost constantly at war from 1793 to 1815.  These battles did solve some of France's economic problems, however: the unemployed were put to work and the army lived off the territory it plundered, reducing the strain on French finances at home.  In October, 1799, one of the men most responsible for this change in French fortunes, Napoleon, abandoned his army in Egypt to return to Paris where he formed the Consulate.  This was a three man dictatorship, but the First Consul, Napoleon, was really in charge.  From 1799-1804, he ruled as First Consul, conjuring up memories of ancient republican Rome and the Roman Senate.  In 1804, however, he dropped the fig leaf, and took over as emperor to save France from the Second Coalition also organized and financed by his old nemesis, Britain.
 In power, Napoleon centralized the government with a series of prefects.  He made peace with the Catholic church in the 1801 Concordat; Catholicism was reinstated as the state religion of France, but confiscated church lands remained with the middle class which had acquired them following their seizure under the Assembly.  Napoleon believed in a meritocracy, as did Thomas Jefferson, that is, an aristocracy not of birth, but of accomplishment.  To recognize these accomplishments, Napoleon invented the Legion of Honor.  He also established the Bank of France, after having seen how useful the Bank of England had been to the British in the long, drawn out struggle; the Bank would make money available for investment, thus pleasing the middle class which had put Napoleon in power and which supported him most consistently.  The achievements of the revolution were summarized and written into law in the Civil Code of 1800, which guaranteed religion toleration, for example, while at the same time outlawing the labor strikes the middle class found so disruptive to their business practices.
     Napoleon's problem was Britain, every bit as much as it had been Louis XIV's problem a century before.  British seapower meant British commerce and wealth increased while France's declined. When Napoleon tried to engage the British fleet in battle, the British under Admiral Lord Nelson wiped out the French fleet at Trafalgar. The French lost 6000 men in this engagement, while the British lost only 449, including Nelson himself. This French defeat made any invasion of the British Isles impossible, and so Napoleon sought another way to sabotage his enemy.
     If France could not get to Britain, Napoleon would forbid the British to get to France.  In the Continental System the emperor announced, the continent which was mostly controlled by Napoleon or his puppets was declared off limits to British trade and goods. Napoleon would force Britain to sue for peace by ruining her trade.  In fact, British trade with the continent was reduced by one-half, but enough smuggled, contraband goods, a thriving Mediterranean market, and a robust internal market all conspired to keep Britain afloat financially.
     As the British held on and France found herself blockaded by British ships, the economic situation on the continent deteriorated.  As Napoleon felt himself losing his grip, he undid much of the revolutionóincluding his own Civil Codeóin order to maintain control.   He muzzled the press, reducing the number of newspapers from 73 to 4, all of which were government mouthpieces, and this in spite of the guarantee of freedom of speech. He even tried to reinstitute slavery in Haiti.  And he established an internal spy system to keep watch on possible threats inside France.  The emperor even had to capture more countriesówhich he then would have to defend, stretching his army ever thinneróin order to keep British goods out.  In 1808, for example, he invaded Spain which promptly rebelled, creating a long drawn-out civil war which even Napoleon called his "Spanish ulcer."
     The back door to Europe through which English goods flowed was Russia.  As long as English goods could get to Russia for transshipment to the continent, Napoleon would never be able to bring the British to their knees.  The only solution appeared to be to invade Russia.  The invasion began in June, 1812.  The Russians used a scorched earth policy, fighting some battles, almost all of which Napoleon won, but retreating farther and farther inside the Eurasian land mass.  The emperor thought they would surrender when his troops reached Moscow, but instead, the Russians abandoned and then burned their capital, denying Napoleon a place to winter over.  He had no choice but to retreat in the middle of a Russian winter.  Of the 600,000 soldiers who went in, only 100,000 got out alive.
     The loss of this army broke Napoleon's hold on France.  He went into exile, only to return a short time later for one final battle, the Battle of Waterloo, in which he was simply outgeneraled by Wellington, who had learned Napoleonic tactics in years of fighting French troops in Spain.  Napoleon was sent into exile yet again.  Wellington's veterans, sick and tired, were nonetheless herded onto ships and dispatched to New Orleans by the British, to fight the rebellious Americans in what we call the War of 1812.  When they arrived, they came up against the well fed and rested troops of Andrew Jackson, who inflicted an humiliating defeat on Wellington's men.  This victory, won after the war was technically over, ushered in the Era of Good Feelings in the United States, when Americans allowed themselves to believe that since they had beaten the troops who beat Napoleon, they could have been Napoleon himself had they wanted to.

Industrial Revolution

     The term industrial revolution is misleading.  One ought to think of these events as an industrial evolution, because they happened gradually over time.  Better yet, think of it as an industrial chain reaction, where one invention impacts on industry in ways that cannot be foreseen and which produces new inventions to come.
     The classic industrial revolution story is the textile industry in England which industrialized between 1760 and 1815.  England benefited from the vast market system she had built up through her highly developed colonial system.  Surplus capital from her trade with the Americas and the Orient were plowed into industry.  Moreover, war had not been fought on English soil during her struggle with France; indeed, the whole idea of her navy was to engage the enemy before he could damage the homeland.  England was well off financially as well, with private property being secure here, unlike in Russia, where the tzar frequently just seized profitable enterprises.  British society was relatively mobile and innovative; persons with money could rise socially and frequently found themselves sitting in Parliament.  Britain had also been on the forefront of developing internal improvements like canals, turnpikes and eventually railroads.  The British fleet was large as was her merchant marine, and no part of the island was very far from the sea.  Water transport was still the safest and cheapest way to transport the bulky goods of the early industrial revolution.  Perhaps most important, Britain mass produced simple, common items, like buttons, cloth and iron pots; in such industries, one settles for a smaller profit margin per item, but makes a good profit by selling large amounts.  By contrast, France had always specialized in luxury items, like silk cloth, perfumes, and fancy dress.
     The industrial revolution slowly replaced the cottage system, sometimes called the domestic system, which had developed serious defects by the mid-18th century.  There was a serious imbalance in a family enterprise, with four to five spinners having to work constantly to keep one weaver consistently employed.  Relations between workers and employers were not always harmonious either, with employers claiming that workers were diverting some of the raw cotton or wool to their own use or delivering a sub-standard product, while workers insisted they had been given poor quality cotton or wool to work with and impossible time lines to meet.  People tended to work in spurts in the cottage system which meant that employers could not count on having the right amount of cloth to fill an order on time. People were paid on Saturday, and sometimes drank steadily to Monday, which got the name Holy Monday because, like Sunday was supposed to be, no work was done.
     One solution for these difficulties would be to put all the operations under one roof so as to ensure nothing was diverted for personal use and to monitor all stages of the production of cloth.  And so the factory was born.  Soon, however, factories began using new machinery to speed up the process.  In 1765, for example, the spinning jenny was invented.  It began by producing 16 spindles of thread, and soon mushroomed to 120 spindles.  Now thread production was not the problem, but rather the slow rate of weaving on a hand loom.  Thus, the power loom was invented to get rid of the bottleneck in the cloth production process, and to guarantee uniform woven cloth.  Using the spinning jenny, cotton production increased 800% between 1780 and 1800.  But the expensive machinery used in factories led to a greater concentration of wealth, since the start-up costs of such a factory operation were beyond the means of most workers.  As in any industrial revolution, the 18th century textile revolution saw an increasing gap develop between the haves, who owned the factories and machinery, and the have-nots, who worked in them.
     One major bottleneck was the poor supply of cotton.  In the 18th century, most cotton came from India which, like Egypt, produced long staple cotton which was easy to gin, that is,  remove the seeds from.  The United States did not have a long enough growing season or moderate enough weather to grow long staple cotton in large quantities.  All that changed when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin which allowed greenseed cotton to be ginned easily.  This revitalized the cotton industry of the United States, and in the process revitalized slavery which had been on the wane.  Cotton became king in the ante-bellum South only in the 19th century.
     To make the new machines go, new machines were required.  The most important was surely the steam engine, invented in 1785.   It ran on coal and created an symbiotic relationship with coal.  Coal was dug out of deep mines in England, so deep they were below the water table.  A constant danger was that water would deluge the mine shafts.  Indeed, the single most common cause of death among miners was drowning.  Steam engines ran the pumps which removed the water, while the coal mined was used to feed the steam engines and the growing factory system of England.
     The problem was that coal polluted in a way that water power did not.  The United States favored water power until well into the 19th century, partly because it was cheap and plentiful, and partly to avoid pollution.  Water power, however, ceased in the winter when lakes and  streams froze, preventing the drop of water which ran the water wheels.  Thus, when British citizens marveled at the cleanliness of factories in Lowell, Mass, they were really commenting upon the difference between clean water power and dirty coal.
     The new industrial revolution called forth new support systems to maximize profit.  The steel used for machines like the steam engine was so expensive, the use of steam was retarded, until the Bessemer process halved the price of steel by 1850.  More important was the need for improvements in transportation which would create a real national market which would in turn call forth mass production.  There would be no need to produce vast quantities of any item if it could not be sold except in the immediate area.  Only when a true mass market existed, where businessmen could sell throughout England and overseas, would entrepreneurs really engage in mass production, producing huge amounts of any item, to serve the mass market created by improvements in transportation.
     The most important method of moving goods in the period was water transport, because it was cheaper and easier to float something bulky than it was to drag it over virtually nonexistent roads.  There was therefore a boom in canal building such as the Erie canal in 1825, in upstate New York, which proved how lucrative such internal improvements could be.  For Europe, the most important canal was the Suez canal built in 1869, which provided a direct link to the British holdings in India and the Far East.  However, the Suez canal meant the end of sailing ships which could not negotiate the canal under their own power as a steamship could, but instead had to be dragged from the shore. As a result, the clipper ship gave way to the first steamboats.  The first trans-Atlantic steam run was in 1838.  Americans sneered at the ungainly steamboats, preferring the beautiful lines of the clipper ships, but the clippers were the end of the line as far as sailing ships went, since they carried as much sail as could be put on a ship without turning it upside down. The ugly duckling steam boats, with their screw propellers, were in fact the wave of the future, for once the technology of building and maintaining them was understood, the only question was how big they would become. This would not be the last time the United States put its money into an aging technology instead of trying something new.
     The most important transportation development may have been the railroads which could operate 365 days out of the year and could be put wherever they were needed, rather than having to depend on streams or rivers which might be in the wrong place.  Again, England took the lead in producing railroad track, criss-crossing the country with a rail line that remains even to this day model for others to follow.
     Agriculture too benefited from the industrial revolution.  The reaper thresher was invented which could reap as much in a day as 40 men.  The steel plow was able to turn over even the unpromising soil of northern Europe, thus aerating it and increasing its productivity.  And improvements in canning and refrigeration helped preserve food to allow a more balanced diet year round.   All these inventions had the effect of freeing up labor for industry, since more food could be grown by fewer people.
     The continent was slow to begin an industrial revolution .  The continent lacked transport as advanced as Britain's.   France had poor roads, for example, and seaports were farther away from the interior.  Moreover, internal tolls and tariffs discouraged transportation over large distances.  The continent also had fewer raw materials, especially coal, and especially in eastern Europe which was effectively landlocked, no merchant marine or navy to get raw materials from overseas or ship produced goods out.  Moreover, the rich invested less in industry on the continent, considering it "ungentlemanly."  Finally, the wars associated with the French revolution had consumed time, money and manpower which these countries did not have to give to industry.  Once the wars were over, however, the continent quickly picked up the pace of industrialization.  But on the continent, the government played a much larger role in stimulating industry than was the case in Britain, especially in the case of heavy industry, utilities, and transportation.
     There were many consequences to the industrial revolution, but we should look at some of the less obvious ones.  Cotton cloth became much cheaper, with prices dropping 85% between 1780 and 1850.  This allowed the widespread use of cotton underwear at low cost which in turn meant that people could change their underwear frequently, thus eliminating the body lice and fleas which had made life both uncomfortable and dangerous before.
     People did not like to work in the early factories, because they looked like poorhouses which they hated, so factories employed young children, especially orphans.  The use of children allowed entrepreneurs to cram more machines together in the same space, since children were of smaller stature than adults, but this also increased the possibility of accidents since the machines were so close together.  Children worked under appalling conditions, calling forth the first attempts to reform the industrial revolution.
     The industrial revolution stimulated foreign trade as well.  As more goods were produced than could be consumed on the home markets, countries became more aggressive in finding markets overseas.  This was especially important as European countries were not increasing their trade with their traditional European partners.  Some came to believe that colonies would be needed, along with overseas trade, to take up the slack. These beliefs, plus the search for raw materials like cotton which Europe simply could not produce given the climate, led to the search for formal and informal colony holdingóimperialism.
     A larger population made possible by greater agricultural production and improved medicine provided plenty of workers for the new industries, so many in fact that wages fell.  When one group demanded a wage hike, employers could find others willing, even desperate, to work for the older wageóor even less.  As the population of Europe grew, many abandoned the continent to become emigrants in North and South America.
     The brutality of the early industrial revolution caused some to begin a reform of the system.  This reform wuld be spearheaded not by the middle class but by the liberal aristocrats.

Early Reforms Of The Industrial Revolution

     The early reforms of the industrial revolution were not launched by the middle class which was enjoying a privileged lifestyle, but rather by the liberal aristocrats who were motivated by a sentimental view of the past.  In fact, the middle class world view and economic theory were hostile in the extreme to reform.
 Merchants were now engaged in real capitalism and manufacturing, as opposed to mere trading of raw materials like furs and tobacco. To succeed as a capitalist entrepreneur, vast sums of money would be needed, and so the corporate form was increasingly adopted to raise the money (capital) it would take to compete in the industrial revolution.  The virtue of the corporation was that, by dividing itself into many small shares, it made it possible for those with small sums to invest to buy into the economy.  In short, it tapped into the small reservoirs of money, instead of relying on one or two vast fortunes as the old partnership arrangement did.  Thus the corporation harnessed the full investment potential of a country instead of that of only the rich.  But to do so it separated ownership and management; in theory, the shareholders actually owned the company, but since there were so many of them, it was almost impossible for them to make their will felt on the management of the company.
     The middle class also firmly believed in laissez-faire economics which argued that it was impossible to control or correct the social evils of the industrial revolution, for government was to maintain a hands-off policy at all costs.  While in theory the middle class wanted as little regulation as possible on the grounds of laissez faire, in fact, governments were involved deeply in the economy with their approval: tariffs which kept out foreign competition, a favorable immigration policy which kept the wage pool large enough to prevent unions from forming, taxes and bounties for relocating businesses in certain areas, an empire for cheap raw materials, and of course the stability and peace a powerful nation could provide were welcomed by middle class entrepreneurs.  What they objected to was any regulation in exchange for the government's bounty.
     The middle class were also now fortified by Malthus' views on population.  He argued that pain and poverty were inescapable and that helping the unfortunate of the industrial revolution would result in overpopulation with catastrophic results for all humanity.  Poverty, the middle class believed, was clearly the result of vice; you are poor because of some character flaw.  If that was so, no government reform program was possible or desirable, since the government could not legislate morality.  Only when people came to see that poverty was at least partly the result of the environment was a reform program acceptable to the middle class, for they could agree that the state could legislate ventilation, work hours, minimum wage, etc., even if it could not mandate "goodness."
     The smug, self-satisfied view of the middle class which regarded reform as unnecessary and even counterproductive was challenged by the great potato famine in Ireland.  The Irish had quickly adopted the potato as a subsistence crop, since one acre of potatoes could feed the same number of people it took four to five acres of grain to do.  As more potatoes were crammed into smaller plots, the possibility of disease went up, culminating in the 1845-6 potato crop failure, which recurred in 1848 and 1851.  The horrors of starvation and death the collapsing economy produced, starvation clearly due not to personal vice but to disease of the potato, began to convince the middle class that the environment might play a role in causing poor people to go bad.
     Given the middle class world view, it is not surprising to learn that it was the older, land-owning aristocracy which led the move to reform the industrial revolution, but they did so for reasons not always as altruistic as they would have believed.  True, they were under the influence of humanitarianism as well as a revival of Christianity and religious observances; taking care of the poor and unfortunate was to them a Christian duty.  But in no way were these aristocrats interested in democracy, or extending the franchise to the poor.  Their reforms were a gift, not something the poor could demand as a right.  The aristocrats were further influenced by a sentimental view of the relationship between the aristocracy and peasants of the Middle Ages.  It was part of the Gothic revival which saw Europe go crazy over medieval romances, ballads and stories, as opposed to the stiff formalism they denounced in the Enlightenment.  The mania for building Gothic structures, from the 19th century palaces of the rich to the Parliament buildings in London, is evidence of their respect for the Middle Ages and the great architectural style it produced.  According to this guzzied up, sentimentalized view of the medieval period, the nobles had "taken care" of "their" peasants, under the principle of noblesse oblige, meaning that such nobles were obliged by their station in life to be generous. Such a view on the part of 19th century aristocrats in no way regarded the workers they were trying to help as their equals either socially or politically.  In fact, one clear motive of these aristocrats was to curtail the power of the uppity middle class that had grown rich on the spoils of the industrial revolution and were challenging the nobles socially.
     Aristocratic reform, for whatever motives, began in England with attempts to limit children's labor. Note that the beneficiaries of noble largesse were in fact those least able to protect themselves, thus fulfilling noblesse oblige, and those also least likely to ask for or be granted the right to vote or strike. The Factory Act of 1833 decreed that no child under nine could work and no one under the age of 18 could work at night, and furthermore provided government inspectors to administer the act.  Laws were enacted limiting the work of children in the mines.  And in a small nod in the direction of adults, labor unions were legalized when the 1824 Combinations Acts were repealed; while labor unions were now legal, the right to strike was not, at least not until 1874.
     As automation through machines increased, many formerly skilled workers, then as now, were driven into the ranks of the unskilled and either could find no work or worked for much less than they had made before.  As their poverty increased, workers were obliged to send their children out to work, robbing them of their childhood and an education, and increasing the wage pool so wages stayed low. Crowding in industrial centers lead to disease, and industry was especially difficult for women who worked hard for lower wages than men.  Pregnancy remained life-threatening to most women; if they survived the birth, it meant more mouths to feed and less ability to earn wages.   As the 19th century wore on, women were increasingly victims of wife beating as their husbands took out their frustrations on their wives.  In droves, women joined temperance movements to outlaw alcohol so as to protect themselves from drunken husbands.  The law was no help.  Wife-beating was legal; the only thing the law regulated was the size of the rod the husband used to beat her with.  If it was smaller than the man's thumb, it was acceptable.
     The pace of industrial life was difficult for peasants or former artisans to adjust to. In the factory, the machines set the pace and never seemed to get tired.   New industrial workers came to realize how much control their had hadóand now lostóto the machine.  The work place was exceedingly dangerous as well, with poor ventilation and lighting increasing the possibility of accidents. In this repetitive and dangerous environment, many workers escaped into heavy drinking.  The middle class frequently claimed these alcoholic binges were yet proof again of the vice gripping the proletariat and refused to see any cause and effect relationship between heavy drinking and the inhumane working conditions of the poor.
     Partly because of the difficulties faced by the workers, many criticized humanitarian reform, claiming it did not go far enough in alleviating distress.  Workers wanted the right to vote so they could represent themselves, and they did not want either the land-owning aristocracy or the middle class representing them.  Utopian Socialists like Robert Owen tried to establish communities based on he idea of no ownership of property and equal work from all.  His experiments like New Lanark, a model factory town that existed from 1815 to 1825, and later New Harmony in the United States, failed because they lacked good leadership.  More successful were the Christian Socialists who drew on Christianity for their inspiration to reform, especially the Sermon on the Mount, and in so doing helped to reconcile socialism and Christianity in a highly religious age.  They made atheistic socialism seem more acceptable when they offered Jesus himself as the model reformer.
     But the most important critic of humanitarian reform was Karl Marx.  He united sociology, economics and all human history in one understandable story thatpredicted the ultimate victory of the proletariat.  Marx believed in economic determinism, that is that economics determines the course of all human history.  He posited he idea of a class struggle between the exploited and exploiters.  Mankind was in the last stage of this struggle that would end in revolution and in a classless society.  Socialism was inevitable, he claimed, because the economic situation would only get worse.  Thus, he was not in favor of reforming the capitalist system as it then existed, arguing that to do so would only postpone the final victory of the proletariat revolution he predicted.
     Marx described a society that of course had never yet existed.  He was, therefore, not constrained by reality, since he was describing something in the future; he did not have to make this proposed society conform to the known world since it would exist in a world never known before.  Later communist leaders like Lenin would have grave difficulties translating this dream world into reality after seizing power during the revolution Marx had foretold.
     The failure of the continent to respond positively to the disasters of the industrial revolution as England had begun doing increased workers' dissatisfaction and accordingly worker violence.  Dictatorial governments responded by creating ever more repressive regimes.  Ironically, the overthrow of the capitalist system would eventually occur in one of the least industrialized countries which fit few if any of Marx's prerequisites for a communist stateóRussia.

Challenge to the Congress of Vienna

     The Congress of Vienna met between 1814 and 1815 to discuss the disposition of Europe following the Napoleonic period.  It was under the influence of Prince Metternich, who tried to undo the effects of the French Revolution of which he profoundly disapproved, and who attempted to reestablish the Old Order.  This initiated in Europe a reactionary period from which no country was immune.  Metternich wanted to restore control to the so-called "legitimate" monarchsóas opposed to the self proclaimed emperor Napoleonóand thus put the Bourbons back on the throne of France.  He redesigned the map to surround France and prevent future French aggression.  France was reduced in size from the Napoleonic period, but still treated as a respectable power, unlike what happened to Germany after World War I.  Metternich tried to keep a careful balance between the Big Four, Austria, Prussia, Russia and Britain, but in so doing he ignored the national aspirations of European nations like Poland, Italy and Germany, all of which remained hopelessly DISUNIFIED against the people's desires.  Metternich formed the Quadruple Alliance with the Big Four, but quickly admitted France in 1818, making it the Quintuple Alliance.  Foreign occupying forces were removed from French soil and her indemnity reduced to win her cooperation to concert diplomacy which proclaimed that no action would be taken without the consent all of the Big Five.
     Support for the return of the Old Guard was widespread. They at least promised to keep the peace after decades of war, and the revived church, both Catholic and Protestant, supported these legitimate monarchs and associated themselves with the kings.  Large landowners, who were still the bulk of power of the continent supported the return of the Old Order as safer than the attacks on their property and social standing the French revolution had produced.
 But the settlement at Vienna was weakened by various events, especially as Britain moved away from concert diplomacy to adopt her usual role of balancing the powers of Europe by supporting the underdog.  One sees this first in Britain's support of the American Monroe Doctrine in 1823, when Britain let it be known that she would enforce the ban against further colonization or exchange of colonies the American President had announced but was in no position to defend himself.   Britain also aided the Greek rebels when Greece rebelled against the Turks in 1820, because that opened more trade for Britain.
     But the first real challenge to the Congress' settlement was the 1830 French revolution.  No where had Metternich provided for any country, let alone France, to change its government without asking everyone else, and yet the French did and got away with it.  Louis XVIII, the Bourbon put back on the French throne, was relatively moderate, but many of his royalist supporters wanted revenge for predations against their families during the revolution.  From 1820 onward there was more censorship, but things came to a head in 1830 when Louis' successor, Charles X, had himself crowned with almost medieval splendor at Reims, the coronation place of the absolutist monarchs of old.  Charles openly professed his belief in divine rights of kings and an alliance of church and state, and followed up by gagging the press and limiting voting rights.  Paris revolted and took to the barricades.  Charles decided it would be healthier for him to abdicate and flee.  This is called the July Revolution.
     Now the French knew what they did not want, the Bourbons and absolutism, but they did not know what they did want.  The liberals wanted a new Republic based on the republic of the French revolution, but that republic had created the Reign of Terror and so the very idea of republicanism was associated by many Frenchmen with violence and bloodshed.  Thus the middle and upper classes wanted a constitutional monarchy, but not under the recalcitrant Bourbons.  They prevailed, choosing a new king, Louis-Philippe, the so-called citizen-king, who was pro-bourgeois.  His father had voted for the execution of Louis XVI and so he came to the people with excellent liberal credentials.  He was presented to the adoring Parisian crowds by none other than the aged Lafayette himself.
     The 1830 French revolution was socially conservative.  The liberals who put Louis- Philippe in power showed little concern or sympathy with the plight of the lower classes whose concerns were economic in orientation, including job protection, better wages, shorter working hours, etc.  Nor was this 1830 revolution provided for in the Congress system, where no change was to occur without the Big Five's approval.  Metternich opposed it, but the French had demonstrated that a people could change their government and get away with it, a lesson others would learn later.
 Even Britain had immediately after the Napoleonic period undergone a reactionary period. The 1819 Peterloo incident and government moves to curb the press and suspend habeus corpus are only a few examples.  But by the 1820s, England was back on her piecemeal reform track.  Equal voting rights for Catholics was enacted in 1829, labor unions were recognized in 1824, and a police force was created for London. Capital punishment was abolished for some 100 offenses and even the Corn Laws which had taxed incoming agricultural products to subsidize inefficient English agriculture were relaxed, thus lowering the price of food.
     Britain still had to deal with inequalities in voting rights.  Rotten boroughs existed where there was no or very little population but which still sent members to Parliament.  Pocket boroughs controlled by political bosses like the landed aristocracy were also an affront to English democracy.  And large industrial centers like Manchester and Birmingham were not represented at all.  A bill to reform these abuses passed the Commons but stalled in the House of Lords.  King William IV of Britain then threatened the Lords that either they would enact this Reform Bill of 1832 or he would create enough new peers to sit in the House of Lords to pass the bill.  The king had been influenced by the 1830 French revolution and feared the violence which plagued Paris.  The House of Lords, forced to choose between its social exclusivity and political power, chose exclusivityóand passed the bill.
     The Reform Bill of 1832 did not enfranchise the workers, but it did increase the number of voters by 50% by lowering property qualifications to vote.  The net effect was to increase the representation of the industrial north when 143 seats were reallocated.  But the Bill did not destroy the strength of the landed aristocracy, a fact which probably encouraged some wavering Lords to vote for it.  Reforms in the 1830s in England gradually increased the powers of the non-aristocracy, but the reforms were evolutionary, not revolutionary, as England rejected the violence urged by people such as the Chartists whose Charter of Six Demands they were prepared to use violence to obtain.  Revolution in England became unnecessary because those seeking reform and change were actually part of the government where they could legislate change in piecemeal fashion.   The great hole in the British reform movement, however, was Ireland, where the government failed to accommodate rising Irish nationalism or to help the wretched Irish peasants.
 In 1848, Europe exploded in revolutionóexcept in Britain.  There had been severe food shortages since 1846, which in turn caused a severe commercial and industrial downturn.  Once again, the desire for change was led by political liberals in the aristocracy and middle class who wanted peaceful change.  They allied with the urban workers to put pressure on governments, but these urban workers wanted more than just political reform like the secret ballot or the right to vote.  They wanted to follow political reform with economic reform, such as minimum wage, right to strike, etc. and were prepared to use violence to get it. Liberals on the continent sealed their fate and caused the collapse of the revolutions of 1848 when they failed to follow political reform with social or economic reform.
     Once again, it was France who began the revolution.  Louis-Philippe seemed unaware that the industrial revolution in full swing in France was creating vast inequalities of wealth and a politically conscious proletariat at the same time.  The proletariat could not vote and hence was excluded from power, so its desires were never addressed.  Widespread corruption in Louis' government made taxes increase and lessened the king's prestige.  In February, 1848, Louis- Philippe was  obliged to abdicate following general rioting.  A provisional government created a second French Republic on the basis of universal male suffrage, meaning all adult men could vote.  This government was beset with factionalism, however, in part because the French still lacked the centuries-old tradition of self government England had known. Moreover, radicals and socialists were not content with the republic, wanting basic economic reforms as well.  In June, a massive rebellion occurred in Paris with 10,000 dead or injured.  The capital had never seen such violence, not even in the Reign of Terror.
     The violence of the June days created a backlash among the middle class and aristocrats.  They were angry the proletariat had not shown sufficient "gratitude" when they had been "given" the right to vote.  They sought out Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Bonaparte, to be the president of the Second Republic.  The fear of proletariat violence united the middle class and aristocracy against the workers whose needs they did not understand.  Louis Napoleon was welcomed by the Catholic Church which feared radicals as much as the aristocracy did, remembering the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.  In 1852, Louis Napoleon abolished the republic and proclaimed himself emperor.  The Second Empire had begun. The rise of Louis Napoleon shows the power of the middle class to makeóand then breakóa revolution, and it also shows that proletariat desires were being ignored on the continent.
     The Germans as well revolted in 1848.  Inspired by France, Germans revolted and created the Frankfurt assembly to write a constitution for Germany. But what exactly was Germany?  Did it include all German speakers, in which case the crown should go to the Hapsburgs in Vienna who had ruled a huge empire for centuries.  This so-called greater Germany theory foundered on the fact that the Austrians were backward and moreover had what some Germans considered "mongrel" races in their empire, people like Poles, Czechs, Slavs, etc.  The Little Germany theory preferred creating a new Germany, a purified one, under Prussian leadership, giving the crown of the new constitutional monarchy to the Hohenzollerns of Prussia.  The Frankfurt assembly constitution was a typically middle class and liberal document offering the usual political reforms, but offering no economic aid or reform to urban workers whose needs the writers of the constitution did not appreciate.
     The problem arose when the assembly finally offered the crown to Frederick William IV of Prussia who refused it.  He wanted a unified Germany but only on his terms.  If he took the crown from the assembly, the assembly might take it back some day, and this he would not tolerate.  The assembly slowly melted away and was finally dispersed by Frederick William's army. Many German liberals who had been at the assembly gave up on Germany and fled to the United States, especially to new areas then opening up, like Texas, where they founded cities like Fredericksburg and New Braunfels.
 Frederick tried his own plan for unifying Germany under Prussian dominance, but the plan failed when Austria and Russia let it be known they were prepared to use force to stop a unified Germany being created at their doorstep.  Russian fears of a united Germany were well founded; a united Germany invaded her twice in the twentieth century with devastating loss of life.
     All the revolutions of 1848 ultimately failed.  One reason was lack of experience and realism among its leaders.  More devoted to broad principles than practical results, they tended, as in the case of Italy, to concern themselves with writing the national anthem before there was a safe government.  Nationalism moreover resulted in factionalism, pitting one state against another.  Class consciousness pitted the middle classes against the proletariat as well.  The former did not want to forgo their privileged economic position and thought political reform was sufficient.  Finally, Austria and Russia were prepared to support reactionary governments with military might while no one, including Britain, was prepared to defend liberal governments with force if need be.
     As Europe reached the mid-century mark, Britain was developing an evolutionary path to reform, creating more democracy but following it up with economic reforms like increasing the food supply at lower cost.  She had already moved away from concert diplomacy, and France had defied the Quintuple Alliance, twice, by changing her government in 1830 and 1848.  After 1850, therefore, the Congress of Vienna concert diplomacy system would not be able to deal with a new crop of leaders, hard-headed realists all, who began to accomplish what the romantics of 1848 had failed to do.   The unification of Italy and Germany was achieved, but the arrival of these two countries on the world scene, especially the last, set the stage for World War I.