ABSTRACT
The closer the view that is taken of the political developments of the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century, the more the attention is drawn to what did not happen, and what did not change during those two decades. It is easy to assume that, whereas in continental Europe what is rather loosely called ‘Reaction’ was triumphant, England provided, by contrast, the shining and singular spectacle of ‘Reform’. This distinction is rendered more plausible by over-complacent contrasts between the dramatic tottering of thrones in Europe in 1848 and the sad death of Chartism in that year in a pathetic drizzle of English rain and feeble Victorian puns. Yet there are parallels between the English and continental stories as well as contrasts. Continental governments rode out the squalls of 1820 as Liverpool’s Tory governments outrode Spa Fields, the Blanketeers, Peterloo and Cato Street. In England, the Whigs
‘betrayed’ many of the supporters of the Reform Bill of 1832 hardly less than Louis Philippe ‘betrayed’ the French revolutionaries of 1830. The aftermath of 1846 and 1848 in England was a twenty-year suspension of social and political conflict not wholly unlike that over which Louis Napoleon presided for the two decades after 1851. And though Chartism failed with a whimper and the 1848 Revolutions failed with a bang, they both still failed; and governments emerged from them stronger than ever. Throughout the 1850s, both in England and on the Continent, governments were less disturbed by the rumblings of a discontented populace than for almost a century past. A good case can be made for regarding the nineteenth century in political matters as a counterrevolutionary century.1 Those who agitated for radical or socialist revolution were everywhere defeated; their positive achievements were negligible. The presiding genius of the age was neither Bentham nor Marx but Burke.
