ABSTRACT
The term Chartism was coined in 1837 to designate a set of principles which were subsequently embodied in the famous “People’s Charter”. In time Chartism became ever more crystallized as a distinct labor struggle for the reconstruction of society. The form of the demands were purely political, but the object was strictly economic. Long before the Chartist demands were framed in the People’s Charter, political reform, of one kind or another, had been urged by the friends of the people. The French Revolution led some of the English aristocracy to realize that abstract ideas of equality and natural rights meant absolutely nothing to the common people, unless they went hand in hand with concrete equality in distribution of wealth. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, published in 1790, preached a crusade against Republican France, as well as against French principles in England.
