ABSTRACT
In the first half of the nineteenth century, nascent capitalism faced a political crisis caused by mass poverty, starvation, disease and social dislocation. As Hobsbawm (1969, p. 24) put it, ‘waves of desperation broke time and again over Britain’. At the same time the working population began to organize on its own behalf. In 1831 a National Union of the Working Classes was formed in London and other such ‘working men’s associations’ were organized in industrial cities throughout Britain. These associations formed the Chartist movement, demanding an extension of democracy: adult male suffrage, annual parliaments, the secret ballot, equal electoral constituencies, payment of members of parliament and the abolition of property qualifications for parliamentary candidature. Militant working-class movements developed all over Europe. In the 1840s the Communist League spread its influence as an international revolutionary organization. In France, ‘under the forbidding eye of the Minister of the Interior, French workers, peasants, bourgeois and political activists persisted in forming clubs, secret societies, compagnonnages, associations for mutual aid, rudimentary trade unions and parties’ (Tilly, 1975, pp. 40, 41). In the 1840s violent protest broke out all over Europe.
