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AFTER 1848: THE EUROPEAN REVOLUTION IN GOVERNMENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2012

Christopher Clark
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Abstract

This paper revisits the question of the impact of the 1848 revolutions on governance and administration across the European states. Few historians would contend that the immediate post-revolutionary years saw a ‘return’ to pre-1848 conditions, but the transitions of the 1850s are usually presented as episodes within a narrative that is deemed to be specific to the respective nation-state. This paper argues that the 1850s saw a profound transformation in political and administrative practices across the continent, encompassing the emergence of new centrist political coalitions with a distinctively post-revolutionary mode of politics characterised by a technocratic vision of progress, the absorption into government of civil-society-based bodies of expertise, and changes in public information management. In short, it proposes that we need to move beyond the restrictive interpretation implied by the tenacious rubric ‘decade of reaction’ towards recognising that the 1850s were – after the Napoleonic period – the second high-water-mark in nineteenth-century political and administrative innovation across the continent. The paper argues, moreover, that these transitions took place on an authentically European basis and that they only come fully into focus when we survey the spectrum of governmental experiences across the European states. The paper closes with some reflections on the broader implications of this reappraisal for our understanding of European history in the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century.

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Research Article
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Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 22 , December 2012, pp. 171 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2012

It is a commonplace in the historiography of nineteenth-century Europe that the failure of the revolutions of 1848 ushered in a ‘decade of reaction’. It is not difficult to see why. In many parts of Europe, the collapse of the revolutions brought harsh repressions and concerted efforts to erase the memory of insurrection from public awareness. During the decade that followed, police forces were consolidated and their sphere of responsibility extended. It is perhaps in part a consequence of this grim scenario of repression and political stagnation that the 1850s remain, for most of the continental states, the least-researched decade of the century. For this decade falls, as it were, into a crevasse between the revolutions of 1848 on the one hand and the era of liberal revivals and national unifications on the other. It tends to be seen, moreover, through the eyes of those whose hopes were dashed when the revolutions collapsed. While few historians would contend that the immediate post-revolutionary years saw a ‘return’ to pre-1848 conditions, most narratives of the era proceed from the assumption that this was a period of political stasis, in which the historical forces mobilised by the revolutions of 1848/9 were temporarily dammed up. It goes without saying that this idea has had a deep impact on the historiographies of modern Europe.

Over the last twenty years or so, a process of revision has been underway – my own interest in this project was sparked by a piece called ‘The Austrian Experiment’ published in 1994 by Robert Evans, which argued for a radical reappraisal: the post-revolutionary decade, Evans argued, was ‘not restorative at all, but innovative, on a broad front, with a clear and ambitious programme’.Footnote 1 But although there have been parallel revisions in many of the European historiographies, there has to date been no attempt to draw together their implications for the political history of Europe as a whole.Footnote 2 Indeed, one of the most striking features of work on this era has been the reluctance of scholars working within specific nation-state traditions to look sideways at the experience of governments in other parts of Europe. Instead, the transitions of the 1850s are presented as episodes within a narrative that is deemed to be specific to the respective nation-state. Thus, studies of Louis Napoleon focus on the emperor's effort to recapture the legacy of the first Bonaparte or, alternatively, identify him as the inaugurator of a distinctively French Gaullist tradition characterised by a pragmatic policy blend that transcends the left-right divide, or of a distinctively French mode of ‘providential politics’.Footnote 3 The innovations of the Cavour government in Piedmont are likewise set in the context of Italy's ‘pre-unitarian’ situation – the innovative politics of its leader are deemed to prefigure the specifically Italian tradition of pragmatic cross-partisan alliances known as ‘trasformismo’.Footnote 4 The administrative reforms enacted in Hungary after the revolution are placed within a tradition that culminates in the modernising Hungarian police state of the later twentieth century.Footnote 5 In the case of the German states, the older writing on the 1850s noted that the period was marked by an historic compromise between the forces of liberalism and the conservative elites of the old regime, but this analysis was generally framed within the more protracted narrative of a German (or Prussian) Sonderweg defined by the ‘failure’ of the bourgeoisie to fulfil its emancipatory mission. The effect of this paradigm was not merely to highlight the specifically ‘German’ character of the compromise reached after 1848, but also to set it in a negative moral light.Footnote 6 Among the many historians who have set about demolishing the thesis of the ‘special path’ are a few who have focused specifically on the 1850s. David Barclay, James Brophy, Günther Grünthal and Abigail Green, for example, all highlight from different perspectives the dynamism and potential for change within the political systems established in the wake of the revolutions of 1848 and reject the teleology implicit in the Sonderweg.Footnote 7 But these studies are concerned with specific territories; the challenge they offer to the ‘special path’ pertains to the teleological distortions of the paradigm, not to its national focus.

In this paper, I propose an alternative view. I argue that the 1850s saw a profound transformation in political and administrative practices across the continent, a European ‘revolution in government’.Footnote 8 The new politics of the decade was characterised by the dominance of pragmatic, centrist coalitions whose rhetoric and outlook marked a clear departure from the ideologically polarised positions of left and right in the pre-March era.

The European governments of the 1850s sought to legitimate themselves, furthermore, by reference to their capacity to stimulate and maintain economic growth. They launched public works projects on a scale that exceeded anything attempted during the Restoration era. These projects were driven by the conviction that government had a crucial role to play in creating the preconditions for growth, and that growth, in turn, would ultimately neutralise the ‘social question’ that had haunted the 1840s. The intensified interest in infrastructural investment also signalled a transition from the ad hoc crisis-management characteristic of the pre-March regimes to a more systematic approach to the formulation of economic policy. Moreover, in the economic sphere, as in other areas of policy formation, the revolution dramatically accelerated the ‘professionalisation’ of government through the integration into the policy-making process of groups and organisations representing various forms of technical expertise.

The years following the revolutions of 1848 also saw, I argue, fundamental changes in the relationship between government and its public. The rigid and unimaginative governmental press regimes of the Restoration – with their cumbersome pre-publication censorship and drastic sanctions – gave way to a more flexible, collaborative and systematic approach to the press and more broadly to the problem of public opinion which had loomed so large in the pre-March era. In short, I would contend that we need to move beyond the restrictive and one-sided interpretation implied by the tenacious rubric ‘decade of reaction’ towards a recognition that the 1850s were – after the Napoleonic period – the second high-water-mark in nineteenth-century political and administrative innovation across the continent. The new political synthesis achieved in these years set a pattern for politics whose imprint can still be discerned in the political cultures of our own day.

In what follows, I first of all expand my claims about the salient features of European politics in the post-revolutionary decade, arguing that all were consequences, more or less directly, of the revolutionary upheaval and the crisis of legitimation that gave rise to it. I should stress, moreover, that my aim is not merely to establish that such a transformation took place, but to argue that it occurred on an authentically European basis, that it cannot be captured from the perspective of nation-state history; indeed, that it only fully comes into focus when we survey the spectrum of governmental experiences across the European states. The paper closes with some reflections on the broader implications of this reappraisal for our understanding of European history in the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century.

New constellations

How different was the political life of the European states after the revolutions of 1848? The revolutions brought about the promulgation of a number of new constitutions, but it is only relatively recently that historians have taken a concerted interest in assessing the impact of these important documents on the conduct of politics in individual states.Footnote 9 Yet, it is clear that in several states, the concession of a constitution created an entirely new point of departure for political developments. The Prussian constitution of 1849 was imposed by the crown, not drawn up by an elected assembly, yet it was extremely popular with the great majority of liberals and the majority of the moderate conservatives.Footnote 10 The political climate in post-revolutionary Württemberg was marked by the more confrontational style of the conservative first minister, Freiherr von Linden, but here too, as in Saxony, a gradual decline in the intensity of oppositional sentiment and a willingness among many of the liberals to collaborate with the government ensured that the administration could generally count on a majority during the early post-revolutionary years (1851–5).Footnote 11

In Piedmont, likewise, the constitution granted in 1848 and retained thereafter (the Statuto Albertino) proved a more dynamic and open-ended compromise than most contemporaries could have predicted. The contradictions in the new settlement were gradually exploited to prune back the powers of the monarchy. What emerged in Piedmont, as in Prussia, was a completely new constitutional and political reality. The tone was set throughout most of the 1850s by a pragmatic coalition within the fledgling parliament of conservative and moderate liberal interests. In 1852, after a brief era of conservative hegemony, Count Camillo di Cavour, who had been known in the mid-1840s for his eccentrically reactionary and confrontational politics, entered into an alliance, known as the connubio, with the bourgeois liberal leader Urbano Rattazzi. The ideologically flexible ‘governmental coalition’ that resulted allowed Cavour to secure parliamentary support for a wide range of modernising initiatives.Footnote 12

In Spain and Portugal, allowance has to be made for the rather different historical and political setting. In both countries, politics was structured by the existence of two competing dynastic factions, one constitutional, the other reactionary (carlistas in Spain, miguelistas in Portugal). In both countries, the reactionary option had been (temporarily) banished by mid-century as a result of conflicts in which the moderate and radical liberals had joined forces to defeat the common enemy on the right. As a consequence, the key fault-line in Iberian politics during the middle decades of the century was not that between liberals and conservatives, but that between conservative/authoritarian and radical brands of liberalism (moderados and progresistas). There are, moreover, some variations in chronology: only in 1854 was there an upheaval in Spain whose scope and violence compares with those of 1848 in the rest of Europe.Footnote 13 The peak of the unrest during that year saw the construction of over 500 barricades across Madrid and fighting more intense than anything before the Civil War of the 1930s.Footnote 14

The Spanish administrations that emerged after the upheavals in Madrid conformed to the European post-revolutionary pattern. First, there was the period of unstable coalition government known as the ‘Bienio Progresista’ (1854–6). When this collapsed in the political crisis of 1856, it was succeeded by a new force in Spanish politics. Known originally as the ‘parliamentary centre’ and later as the Unión Liberal, it was led by moderados, but built around a pragmatic coalition of left-wing moderados (known as puritanos) and pragmatic progresistas (known as resellados), supplemented by a cohort of younger political figures with ‘eclectic and centrist attitudes’.Footnote 15 It developed a composite programme, in which the traditional social and constitutional conservatism of the moderados were juxtaposed with progressive reformist impulses (especially in the sphere of economic policy). A very similar picture can be discerned in neighbouring Portugal – here too an episode of acute upheaval, the Revolution of Maria da Fonte in 1846 followed by the Patuleia of 1846–7, set the scene (after vain efforts by Costa Cabral to locate and occupy an elusive political ‘middle ground’) for the emergence in 1851 of a new regime under Field Marshal Saldanha. Saldanha adopted the name ‘Regeneração’ for his government, whose ministry was composed of a ‘strange coalition’ of prominent centrist figures from both camps and liberalised the old conservative constitution by incorporating some of the demands of the opposition (including direct elections and the abolition of the death penalty).Footnote 16 The political system thereby established was known as rotativismo because it involved the rotation of power between the two main political factions.Footnote 17 There followed a period of political stability unparalleled in Portugal between the Napoleonic invasion and the later twentieth century.Footnote 18

Even within the highly authoritarian setting created by Louis Napoleon's coup d'état in France, it has become increasingly clear that that the stability of the regime depended upon its success in constructing a consensus from the post-revolutionary remnants of moderate republicanism and constitutional monarchism. In this respect, the ‘Bonapartism’ of the post-revolutionary period was quite distinct from its pre-revolutionary predecessor – it was a more ‘composite’ entity, in which leftist elements flowed together with forces of order seeking firm government.Footnote 19 Even in Austria, where for historical reasons options were more narrowly limited and counter-revolutionary measures especially severe, the policies adopted by the neo-absolutist administrations of the 1850s reflected a new order of priorities – more on this below – that took account of a much broader range of social and economic interests than the policies pursued by Austrian administrations before 1848. In short, the precise form taken by the new political constellation varied according to constitutional conditions, but across the European states the agenda was set by a post-revolutionary rapprochement that proved capable of answering to the aspirations both of the more statist and moderate elements of the old liberalism and of the more innovative and entrepreneurial elements among the old conservative elites.Footnote 20

So effective was this new constellation in controlling the middle ground of politics that it successfully marginalised both the democratic left and the old right. In Spain, the accommodationist resellados of the Progressive movement joined the Unión Liberal, while the left-wing puros were left sulking on the margins.Footnote 21 The same fate awaited those setembristas in Saldanha's Portugal who refused to make their peace with the new dominant coalition. In France, the radical elements of the old republicanism were marginalised – along with the legitimists – as the post-revolutionary regime consolidated its popular base.Footnote 22 In Piedmont, Prussia and Austria, conversely, the old aristocratic right – the Hoch- or Altkonservativen, or the codini, as they were known in northern Italy – were displaced, set aside, even denounced, by the state power. Cavour's connubio with Ratazzi set the Piedmontese government on a course that alienated and isolated the old aristocratic right of which he had once himself been an intermittent representative. In Spain, the ‘astonishing feebleness’ of the Carlist rebellion of 1855 merely demonstrated how isolated the extreme right now was.Footnote 23 The politics of the traditional conservatism, with its pious legitimism and its attachment to corporatist structures now appeared narrow, self-interested and retrograde. It was unthinkable, the Prussian minister-president, Otto von Manteuffel, pointed out to the conservative rural opponents of fiscal reform, that the Prussian state should continue to be run ‘like the landed estate of a nobleman’.Footnote 24

Regeneration

The programmes and rhetoric adopted by the post-revolutionary governments naturally varied from state to state in accordance with specific circumstances and traditions. But even a very cursory comparison reveals a number of common features that distinguish these regimes from their Restoration-era predecessors. Of these, the most significant are concerned with the making of economic policy. First, there was a transition from profit or revenue-oriented policies towards those aimed at the stimulation of medium- and long-term economic growth. This transition was achieved in part through permissive reforms – such as the abolition of regulations preventing the formation of joint stock companies – whose aim was to dismantle the various old-regime laws and regulations that obstructed capital concentration and investment.Footnote 25 But the state was also involved in more proactive ways in encouraging growth. Across Europe, there was a substantial expansion in public spending on various forms of domestic investment. At the centre of this public spending boom was a new concern for those forms of territorial infrastructural investment that – because they were likely, in the first instance, to be unprofitable – only the state could be entrusted to undertake. In Saldanha's Portugal, a new ministry of public works launched a vast programme of public building financed by lending on a huge scale. In 1850, Portugal had lacked railways or telegraph connections of any kind and disposed of fifty-three steam engines in all, generating a total of 777 horsepower. By 1856, when Saldanha's ‘Gabinete Largo’ came to an end, Portugal possessed the beginnings of a railway and telegraph network, a substantially improved road system and an array of government-sponsored credit institutes specialising in the investment needs of the farming sector.Footnote 26

In Spain, the abortive uprisings of 1848 prompted an almost immediate shift within the moderado regime towards a more proactive and consistent approach to economic policy – a new ministry of commerce, education and public works was founded in the autumn of 1851, whose task would be the provision of infrastructure; ‘the construction of public works, roads and railways, canals, ports and lighthouses is a necessity that none will contest, because it constitutes the routes of circulation, the single open avenue to the future for our producers’.Footnote 27 These trends were further reinforced during the Bienio Progresista and under the Unión Liberal, which in 1858 created an ‘extraordinary budget’ of 2 billon reales, funded by the secularisation of church properties, for ‘a general plan, to be realised within eight years of refurbishment, completion and new construction of roads, canals, ports, lighthouses and other works of this kind’.Footnote 28 Between 1854 and 1863, thanks to consistent investment and support from the government, an electric telegraph network was constructed that linked Madrid with all the provincial capitals, including the Balearic Islands and Ceuta in northern Africa.Footnote 29 As a consequence of this new commitment to the stimulation of growth, public investment came to constitute a higher proportion of total investment in Spain during the years of the Unión Liberal than at any time (leaving aside a brief upsurge in 1912) until the early 1930s.Footnote 30 The result was an improvement and expansion of infrastructural networks that established – for the first time – an integrated national market and made possible the gradual modernisation of traditional sectors of production over the following decades.Footnote 31 Far from starving other industrial sectors and thereby hindering growth, as some analysts have suggested, the infrastructural investments realised under the Unión Liberal broke the bottleneck in the mid-century Spanish transport system and triggered a substantial growth in national income.Footnote 32

The role of the state in stimulating economic growth in France is well known and needs no detailed treatment here: it has often been observed that a ‘technocratic romanticism’ was at the heart of the regime's economic policy and the emperor's commitment to economic development is beyond doubt. The Second Empire was, as Alain Plessis has put it, ‘the first regime in France to have given such distinct priority to economic objectives’.Footnote 33 In Prussia, too, there was a heightened emphasis on the right of the state to deploy public funds for the purpose of modernisation.Footnote 34 Such arguments benefited from the congenial climate of contemporary German economic theory, which underwent a reorientation during the middle decades of the nineteenth century away from the stringently anti-statist positions of the German ‘free trade school’ towards the view that the state had certain macro-economic objectives to fulfil that could not be achieved by individuals or groups within society.Footnote 35

In Piedmont, after Cavour's accession to the ministry of finance in 1851, measures were taken by the government to promote industry and agricultural credit, encourage joint stock companies and reduce various overheads, such as grain and navigation duties. By 1854, Cavour, now prime minister, had spent more than 200 million lire on railways alone.Footnote 36 In Hanover, Saxony, Württemberg, Piedmont and the Austrian empire, projects sustained by heavy borrowing were launched under state supervision – tunnels through the Alps, railways, canals, port facilities, schools, administrative buildings, bridges.Footnote 37 They served to bind peripheral regions to the metropolitan centres, and to legitimate state authority in a general sense; they also constituted a new form of state patronage: in France, for example, a railway terminus might be offered in return for a favourable vote in the plebiscite; under Franz Joseph in Austria, public works became an instrument of nationalities policy.Footnote 38 For the first time, as one historian of nineteenth-century France has noted – though it applies across the continent – ‘the state was seen to give, not simply to take’.Footnote 39

These policies were a direct consequence of the centrist constellation forged by the revolutions, in the sense that their realisation reflected the marginalisation of those conservative political groups whose political influence had previously prevented or delayed the implementation of such liberalising measures.Footnote 40 In Prussia, the major public expenditures of the 1850s would have been impossible without the revolutions of 1848, which enabled the administration to escape from the shackles of the ‘State Indebtedness Law’ that had limited public spending in the Restoration era. As one deputy of the Prussian Landtag declared in March 1849, the previous administration had ‘stingily refused’ to provide the sums necessary to develop the country. ‘However’, he added, ‘we now stand at the government's side and will always approve the funds required for the promotion of improved transport and for the support of commerce, industry and agriculture.’Footnote 41 Neither the new income tax introduced in 1851 (whose legitimacy was perceived as deriving from the suffrage) nor the reform of the old land tax in 1861 (which redressed the traditional fiscal imbalance in favour of the eastern provinces), would have been possible before the revolution.Footnote 42

The economic interventions of the post-revolutionary governments were distinctive not merely for their greater ambition and generosity with state resources, but also for their insistence upon the need to develop administrative measures in accordance with an over-arching pre-conceived plan. Whereas railway construction in Saxony and Württemberg before 1848 had proceeded in a more or less haphazard and fragmented way, administrators after 1848 insisted that railway policy must be focused on the creation of a unified and rational territorial network: ‘The state can and must see its state railways as a whole’, wrote the Saxon foreign minister, Friedrich Beust, in 1857.Footnote 43 In France, too, after 1848, the government encouraged a more coordinated approach to the laying of tracks and the framing of policy at a regional rather than a local level.Footnote 44 During the business crisis of 1846–8, some prominent Prussian liberals had called upon the state to take over the administration of the kingdom's railways and unite them into ‘an organic whole’.Footnote 45 In the 1850s, the Prussian finance minister, August von der Heydt, himself a liberal entrepreneur, presided over a gradual ‘nationalisation’ of the Prussian railways, motivated by the conviction that only the state was capable of ensuring that the resulting system was rational in terms of the state as a whole – private interests alone would not suffice.Footnote 46

These efforts to tie individual railway concessions into a larger policy framework reflected a more general shift in governmental rhetoric. The 1848 revolutions marked a transition from the ad hoc management of specific revenue sources that had been typical of the pre-March administrations towards the concerted generation by government of an economic ‘policy’ informed by holistic perspectives. The organic connectedness of economic systems was the fashionable commonplace of the era. In a letter of 15 January 1860 to his minister of state, Achille Fould, Napoleon III expressed his conviction that ‘the mediums of exchange must be increased in order for trade to flourish; that without trade, industry stagnates and maintains high prices that hamper the growth of consumption; that without a prosperous industry that ensures capital growth, even agriculture remains in its infancy’.Footnote 47 Measuring and improving the performance of this living entity required the collation of consistent statistical information, and it is no coincidence that the post-revolutionary decade saw the establishment or consolidation in a number of states of centralised statistical offices, whose task was to get the measure of the ‘national economy’.Footnote 48

The emergent technology of national statistics – many of whose most prominent exponents had long been active in the cause of political and social reform – in turn became a platform for the cooption by the post-revolutionary state of reformist forces within civil society.Footnote 49 In Germany, ‘statistics as an autonomous science’ had been a predominantly progressive cause and the new statistical bureaus established after the revolution became important agents of administrative modernisation.Footnote 50 In Spain, too, the ministers of the Unión Liberal insisted on the formation of a new statistical administration, on the grounds that without the ‘investigation and knowledge of the fiscal and moral conditions of a nation’, no government would be able to facilitate the ‘germination of the seeds of prosperity’ or remove ‘the obstacles that oppose the progress and well-being of peoples’.Footnote 51 The coalition cabinets of the Unión Liberal facilitated a merger of moderado and progresista statistical approaches: whereas the moderados tended to see statistics as an instrument of societal control and centralisation, the progresistas saw it as an instrument for supporting the state's progressive intervention in the economy – the former preferred to place statistics within the remit of the Ministerio de la Gobernación – in effect, the ministry of the interior, the latter in the Ministerio de Fomento. In the event, it was not until 1861 that a new unionist statistical administration was created in the form of the Junta General de Estadística – a structure that would remain in place until 1945.Footnote 52

In France, the responsibilities of the Statistique Générale de la France (founded in 1833) were greatly expanded in 1852 to allow for the integrated compilation of national data on an independent basis. Moreover, the long-standing rivalry between the official ‘administrative statisticians’ and the progressive, extra-governmental circles of ‘social investigators’ and ‘moral statisticians’ was resolved by the foundation, in 1860, of the ‘Statistical Society of Paris’, a voluntarist grouping that sought and obtained official endorsement from the ministry of trade.Footnote 53 I am not suggesting here that the preoccupation with statistics was something new – the European statistical movement was well underway by the 1830s, when the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) complained that his era was an ‘age of statistics’ whose needs were measured in the growing number of ‘markets and offices’.Footnote 54 What was distinctive about the 1850s was the transformation in the relationship between statistics and the state. This period witnessed – across much of the European continent at least – the transition from a purely governmental to a civil-society-based statistical regime in which assumptions that had gained ground within reformist circles before the revolution could be brought to bear directly upon government. The resulting administrative effects were not confined to the uppermost tiers of government; rather, they penetrated deep into the regional and local management structures in the form of demands for information, which was to be tabulated in accordance with detailed instructions on newly designed, standardised forms.Footnote 55

Even if the talk of an economic ‘policy’ was sometimes little more than a mask for pragmatic muddling through, the new emphasis on the formulation of ‘policy’ as a crucial dimension of domestic administration was itself significant. It was connected with a growing tendency to conceptualise the state as distinct from society.Footnote 56 In Portugal, the Maria da Fonte uprising, which was provoked by government efforts to introduce a new and more efficient system of taxation, stirred panic among the political elites. The conclusion was drawn that the government must henceforth do more than appeal to ‘order’ and provide the population with prior knowledge not only of the intentions of the government, but also of what it planned to do to realise them. From this moment onwards, one historian has argued, we see not just the emergence, but the swift diffusion of the concept of a political ‘programme’.Footnote 57 The insistence on a more or less coherent and binding programme could even generate alterations in the structure of government.Footnote 58

Post-ideological politics

A corollary of these developments was the growing prestige of ministries of finance and of the men who led them. In Piedmont, control of the finance ministry was pivotal to Cavour's exercise of power. The Spanish finance minister, Manuel Alonso Martinez, exercised a dominating influence in the cabinets of the Bienio Progresista, and in Portugal the former revolutionary and sometime minister of finance and public works, António Maria de Fontes Pereira de Melo, became the most prominent representative of the Regeneração. The term fontismo was coined to denote the dramatic expansion of government investment and promotion that took place after 1851.Footnote 59

Economic policy came to occupy a central place in the efforts of the various post-revolutionary regimes to legitimate themselves in the eyes of the public. The use of ‘developmentalist’ arguments as such was not new, nor was the concept of unitary transport networks or the employment of circulatory metaphors;Footnote 60 what was distinctive about the post-revolutionary era was the prominent place such topoi now occupied in government pronouncements and propaganda. Once again, it is France that provides the most extravagant example: Napoleon III's appeals to the French public consistently foregrounded the economic achievements of the regime, and sought to legitimate it in terms not of a higher moral order, but of the material betterment of the French.Footnote 61 For the Murillo and O'Donnell governments in Spain, the ‘appeal to material interests’ became a recurrent theme. In Saldanha's Portugal, ‘Regeneração’ became the buzz-word of the decade, encapsulating as it did the fashionable preoccupations of the new regime. Official statements on economic policy were couched in a celebratory, propagandistic language that promised all things to all men.Footnote 62 The financial and economic managers of this era were elevated to the status of gurus, technocratic saviours entrusted with the redemption of humanity. In the sessions of the Conseil Général of the Département du Nord of 1858, there is a ‘Report on Domestic Water Transport’ in which we find extraordinary but entirely characteristic panegyrics on the subject of engineers and planners: ‘Honorons les hommes auxquels l’État a confié le soin de réaliser les biefaits que cette admirable création de l'esprit humain nous promet; [esperons] que leur activité, que leur intelligence [trouvera] une large remuneration.’Footnote 63

What underlay this emphasis on material achievement was the belief – highly characteristic for the post-revolutionary era – that material ‘progress’ (the word was often used in this connection) would ultimately do away with the need for the ideologised, confrontational politics of the old regime. In Spain, it was the Fomento, the ministry of development, that took responsibility in 1851 for creating a commission tasked with ‘harmonising the reciprocal interests of the factory owners and textile workers of Barcelona’ – conceptualising ‘the economy’ as a network of interdependencies encouraged legislators to believe that sage government provision could bridge the social divide.Footnote 64 ‘Peace, order and contentment reign throughout the country’, Marshal Saldanha told Queen Maria II in the summer of 1854. ‘The people renounce politics in order to busy themselves with their own affairs’; the country was so prosperous, he told another correspondent, that it was ‘beyond the power of any individual or party to disturb the public tranquillity’.Footnote 65 A report of 1856 by the French ministry of agriculture, commerce and public works made the link between economic growth and political tranquillity explicit: at the time of the February Revolution, it pointed out, there had been 3,600 km of railways in France. But the three years of political turmoil that followed had seen total stagnation – not a single track had been laid. Only since the Bonapartist seizure of power had there been a surge in construction of an asset which ‘in our modern civilisation has become an essential condition of prosperity, indeed for the very existence of a country’.Footnote 66 The point is that this was not just about what Hans Ulrich Wehler once called ‘counter-revolutionary innoculation’, namely pursuing prosperity as a means of muting the forces of revolution; more and more it was the other way around: political peace was valued for the sake of prosperity and progress. It was material progress itself that came to constitute the ultimate public and political good. The reordering of priorities after 1848 was reflected in the ‘economisation’ of political discourses, as liberals, disillusioned ex-democrats and government administrators alike sought in economic liberalisation and the promotion of growth the remedy for all social ills and thus, ultimately, for all political conflict.Footnote 67

Urban improvement

The management of urban space is one area in which the challenge posed by revolutionary upheaval, the new emphasis on infrastructural improvement and a readiness to embrace substantial programmes of public spending combined to generate closely analogous initiatives across the capital cities of the European states. Paris, Berlin and Vienna had all seen street-fighting and the erection of barricades in 1848, and the same occurred in Madrid on an unprecedented scale during the disturbances of 1854. All four cities saw substantial programmes of improvement during the 1850s. The best-known case is of course Paris, where the local prefect, Baron Haussmann, launched a massive programme to restructure the centre of the old city, extend and modernise its sewerage system and provide it with clean running water. A central concern was the perceived need to clear away the obstacles posed by the old inner city to the circulation of persons and goods – ‘circulation’ was as resonant a concept to the urban planners as it was to liberal economic theorists.Footnote 68 Madrid witnessed a restructuring programme that displayed many similar features – the laying down of broad avenues, the clearance of slums, the clarification and embellishment of key junctions (the Plaza del Sol is the best-known example), the standardisation of building regulations and first halting efforts at the construction of salubrious working-class housing. The most ambitious project of these years was the construction of a system of dams, syphons, aqueducts and reservoirs to bring clean fresh water to the city. Launched in 1851 and upgraded after financial difficulties in 1855 with the help of a huge public loan, this innovation transformed the prospects of the city, sweeping away one of the most important obstacles to its expansion. Here, as in Paris, the rationalisation of the inner structure of the city went hand in hand with municipal expansion. The expansion of the outer borders of Madrid was promoted above all as a means of bringing the largely improvised and under-serviced new quarters on the city's periphery under the control of the municipal authorities, of imposing order, in other words, upon a process of spontaneous expansion that was already well underway. Urban planners aimed to create a rational and hygienic urban civic space, characterised by a salubrious blend of air and light, harmoniously proportioned apartment houses, parks and tree-lined avenues, as well as the various other necessities of city life – marketplaces, slaughterhouse, hospitals and prisons.Footnote 69 Madrid may never have achieved the kind of dramatic transformation that reshaped the city of Paris, but the enhanced prominence and political voice of urban planners testified to a new sensitivity on the part of the state authority to the needs of the city as a living system. What was distinctive about the projects of planners such as Mesonero and Castro in Madrid was a ‘global conception of the city’ that aimed to heighten its ‘socio-spatial homogeneity’ while at the same time accommodating the exigencies of the urban class structure.Footnote 70 In Haussmann's writings, one finds, similarly, a ‘global and systematic approach to the urban problem and a conception of the totality of methods appropriate to its treatment’.Footnote 71

Vienna was not subjected to the kind of structural reform that transformed Paris, mainly because it was felt that the city's spacious baroque centre already provided a serviceable urban environment. Here, as in Paris and Berlin, the debate focused on the ‘lessons’ of the revolution. Should specific quarters be created for the various nationalities, so that visitors and immigrants from all corners of the Vielvölkerstaat would develop a positive attachment to the capital, as one politician suggested in 1858? Outlandish as it sounds, this proposal actually exercised a brief influence on planning policy for the city: the Dogenhof in the Praterstraße, for example, was constructed with a view to developing the Lepoldstadt into a kind of Italian quarter.Footnote 72 Of particular concern, however, was the future of the ring of fortifications that surrounded and enclosed the inner city. On this issue, the lessons of the revolution were difficult to read. During the upheavals of 1848, the insurgents had themselves scaled the fortifications and used them as firing positions against the troops deployed to restore order within the city. It was also argued by some that the retention of walls would have the effect of splitting the garrison into ineffectual units who would have difficulty working together. But the military leadership, whose authority in security matters was paramount during the immediate post-revolutionary years, took the view that the walls offered an indispensable line of defence against a potential uprising from without, and argued that the early modern line of fortification should in fact be further extended and strengthened. Only in 1857 was the debate resolved in favour of those who favoured the dismantling of the walls and the use of the resulting space for the construction of a broad ring road flanked by representative buildings, green areas and high-quality housing.Footnote 73 The result was the laying out of the spacious Ringstraße that still runs around the inner city of Vienna.

The desire for a more ordered urban setting was hardly a product of the revolution – both in Paris and in Madrid the improvement of the urban fabric had been a theme of public discussion for much of the first half of the century. In Vienna, there had been calls for the opening up of the inner city for at least fifty years. But the revolution changed the situation in a number of ways: first, it further reinforced the association between overcrowding, poor sanitation, disease and political upheaval.Footnote 74 And a further consequence of this concern was the increasing involvement in urban management of extra- or semi-governmental committees of hygiene experts, whose advisory role was now formalised under new legislation.Footnote 75 In this area, as in various other ‘technical’ spheres of administration, governments drew increasingly on the expertise accumulated within progressive circles of civil society. Secondly, the revolution shifted the balance of power between the state and the municipal authorities, enabling the former to override the entrenched opposition of municipal elites to major public expenditure.Footnote 76

Press and publicity

The years following the revolutions of 1848 also saw a renegotiation of the relationship between government and its public. In many continental states, the revolutions of 1848 triggered a transition towards a more organised, pragmatic and flexible handling of the press than had been the norm in the Restoration era. A central feature of this transition in many states was the abandonment of censorship. Censorship – in the sense of the vetting of printed material for political content prior to publication – had been an important instrument of government power in the Restoration era and the call for its abolition was one of the central themes of liberal and radical dissent before 1848. In the course of the revolutions, censorship regimes across Europe were dismantled and the freedom of the press enshrined in laws and constitutions. To be sure, many of the permissive press laws issued in 1848 did not survive the reimposition of ‘order’. On the other hand, this did not imply – in most states – a return to pre-March conditions. The focus of press policy in the German states, for example, shifted from the cumbersome pre-censorship of printed material to the surveillance of those political groups that produced it. A substantial component of the liberal programme thus survived the debacle of the revolution.Footnote 77

This was an important shift, because the transition from ‘preventive’ to ‘repressive’ measures brought governmental measures into the open. Newspapers and journals could only be penalised after they had begun to circulate, that is, after the ‘damage’, as it were, had been done. The administration was thus under increasing pressure to find other, less direct means of influencing the press. At the same time, differences between the police authorities, the judiciary and responsible ministers as to what constituted an illegal printed utterance meant that efforts by the former to deploy repressive measures to the full were often thwarted.Footnote 78 In Spain, the constitution of 1856, one of the foundational documents of the Unión Liberal, also explicitly prohibited (art. 3) the confiscation of newspapers before their distribution to the public had commenced.Footnote 79 Just as in Prussia, where press controls were tightened in 1851, stiffer regulations (the Ley Nocedal) were introduced in Spain in 1857, during the brief return to power of the moderado leader Narváez. This law was not abandoned by the unionist government that succeeded Narváez, but it was not rigorously applied. Whereas in Prussia, ideological divisions within the administration undermined the effectiveness of repressive legislation, the same effect was achieved in Spain by the tug-of-war between moderado, progresista and unionist factions within the post-revolutionary political elite. As a consequence, the dramatic expansion of political print brought about by the revolution of 1854 proved irreversible: the number of periodicals published in Madrid tripled and the size of the editions also increased.Footnote 80

In France, the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon in December 1851 was followed by severe measures against the oppositional press; many journalists were arrested and a number of journals simply disappeared. The republican press in the provinces virtually vanished altogether and only eleven newspapers remained in operation in Paris.Footnote 81 Small wonder that the conservative Prussian minister-president, Otto von Manteuffel, contrasted the high-handedness of French policy with the relative liberty enjoyed by press organs in Prussia.Footnote 82 But the severity of the new legislation should not be exaggerated. Once the new regime had established itself, the suspension of journals, though permitted in theory, became very rare in practice. Far more common were official police warnings to dissenting editors, but even these became much less frequent from the summer of 1853, with the accession of Persigny and later of Billault to the ministry of the interior.Footnote 83 More importantly, perhaps, the overall circulation of newspapers as a whole went up sharply as these were sold at lower prices (subsidised by advertising) in the railway stations rapidly proliferating across the country.Footnote 84 In France, then, as in Spain, Prussia and a number of the lesser German states, the expansion of political print and of the politicised reading public proved irreversible.

Governments dealt with this expansion by adopting a more supple and coordinated approach to the business of shaping public attitudes. On 23 December 1850, the coordination of press policy in Prussia was for the first time given a secure institutional basis in the ‘Central Agency for Press Affairs’ (Zentralstelle für Pressangelegenheiten). The Agency's responsibilities included the administration of funds set aside for the purpose of subsidising the press, the supervision of subsidised newspapers and the cultivation of ‘relationships’ with domestic and foreign papers, in the hope that this would inaugurate ‘an organic exchange [Wechselwirkung] between all arms of the state and the press’.Footnote 85 The new agency thus oversaw the transition from a system based on censorship to one based on news and information management.

Analogous transitions can be observed in many of the other continental states. In the more authoritarian climate of the early Bonapartist regime in France, Interior Minister Persigny argued that repressive measures ought to be supplemented by ‘energetic intervention on the part of the administration in favour of good social principles’, and added that such intervention could best be accomplished by means of ‘publications and pamphlets encouraged and, if need be financed, by the administration’.Footnote 86 In France, too, the advent of the new regime brought a more proactive and coordinated approach to the management of public opinion, which in some respects militated against the use of repressive measures. As Pierre Latour-Dumoulin, founder and chief of the new Directorate for Publications (Direction générale de la Librairie) observed in a report to the emperor in 1856, official warnings and prosecutions had a negative effect on public opinion. It was therefore preferable to ‘prevent the excesses of newspapers in order not to have to repress them’ and to ‘temper the rigors of the law by moderating its enforcement’.Footnote 87

A survey of press policy elsewhere in Europe reveals many parallels.Footnote 88 In any case, even the non-governmental press was very substantially penetrated by government sponsorship – throughout the states of the German confederation, almost all major newspapers accepted material from journalists and correspondents in the pay of the various press offices.Footnote 89 Less work has been done on the press policy of the Unión Liberal after 1856, but here too there were efforts to cultivate what was called the ‘good governmental press’ under a relatively liberal system of controls; this in itself amounted to a substantial advance on the approach of their predecessors, the conservative moderados, whose leader Narváez remarked that ‘it is not enough to confiscate papers. To finish with bad newspapers you must kill all the journalists.’Footnote 90

Conclusions

What difference will a study of this tableau of political realignment and administrative innovation make to the way we think about the history of Europe's nineteenth century? I think it is important for three reasons. First, it makes us think again about the impact of the revolutions of 1848. These upheavals may have ended in failure, marginalisation, exile, imprisonment, even death, for some of their protagonists, but their momentum communicated itself like a seismic wave to the fabric of the European administrations, changing structures and ideas, bringing new priorities into government or reorganising old ones, reframing political debates. In any case, it is also important to remember those ‘men of 1848’ who did not fall or fail, but passed into the structures of authority. One of the curious characteristics of the post-revolutionary regimes is how prominently they were served by men of 1848: Rattazzi and his liberal ministerial colleagues in Piedmont, the Piétrie brothers, Rouher and de la Guérronière in France; Alexander Bach, the Krauss brothers, Kleyle, Meyer, Pipitz, Hock and many others in Austria, or formerly radical figures within the Spanish Progressive movement.Footnote 91 The prominence of former democrats in the post-revolutionary police structures is particularly noteworthy.Footnote 92

Re-reading the 1850s in this fashion also has the potential to change the way we think about the era of national unifications. The attractiveness of the Piedmontese model to the southern and central Italian elites cannot be understood without reference to the distinctive compromise achieved after 1848. Indeed, one could take this argument further and argue that the very different constitutional settlements reached in the wake of the unifications of Italy and Germany – the former unitary, the latter federal – can be explained in part by the impact of 1848. In Germany, the modernising compromise forged after 1848 enabled Prussia to overcome, or at least reduce, its ‘constitutional deficit’ and allowed a number of the lesser territorial states both to master the challenge of revolution and further to consolidate their domestic legitimacy. In Italy, by contrast, the same transition merely widened the political and economic ‘modernisation gap’ between Piedmont and the lesser Italian states, accentuating the leadership role of Turin and ruling out a genuine compromise with the forces of traditional provincial authority.

Third, there is the European dimension of the argument. I stressed at the outset that my aim was not merely to establish that a significant realignment of political forces took place within specific post-revolutionary political cultures, but to argue that this occurred on an authentically European basis. The 1848 revolutions were European revolutions in a sense that does not apply to the great upheavals of 1789–99, 1830–1, 1871 or 1917. For all the diversity of context, occasion, ethnicity and language, the rhetoric and political demands of those liberals who challenged traditional authority in 1848 were remarkably consistent across the cities of Europe. In the light of this fact, it is perhaps unsurprising that the process of accelerated adjustment and accommodation that followed took such analogous forms across the continent. Perhaps we need to modify to some extent the notion that the revolution, in opening the Pandora's box of nationalism, divided the continent against itself. After all, the developments we have considered suggest that the revolution had a homogenising, or ‘Europeanising’ impact on the continental administrations.

What we need in order to understand this process is not the kind of comparative history that ends up by reenacting narratives of national or ethnic difference. We need instead to work towards a better understanding of the international networks and the routes of transmission that made such simultaneity possible. Some valuable work has been done on Europe-wide radical and liberal networks before the revolutions of 1848, but much less is known of the inter-state networks that informed policy-making in the era of counter-revolution. How exactly did the free-trading model overcome its detractors to achieve such dominance within the European political elites during the decades after 1848? Where did the arguments and legislative models for reformist initiatives come from and through which agencies or individuals were they conveyed? How exactly was the ‘English model’ – often encapsulated for continental politicians in the person of Peel – transferred, interpreted and received across the European states and how did it feed into the assumptions guiding the formulation of policy?

How did the international congresses and exhibitions of professionals that proliferated so dramatically during this era – hygienists, penal reformers, statisticians – interact with policy cultures in the individual states? It is clear, to take just one example, that the statistical movement was from its beginnings a trans-national affair, involving the exchange of ideas and techniques across an informal network of enthusiasts that encompassed Belgium, France, the German states and Great Britain.Footnote 93 Those exponents of ‘political economy’ or ‘moral statistics’ who sought to enter into a partnership with specific administrations were also positioned within their own trans-national networks, both through the exchange of individual and corporate correspondence and through attendance at professional jamborees, such as the International Congresses of Statistics that began in 1851 and continued into the mid-1870s.Footnote 94 Though little is yet known of the precise impact of such organisations upon policy formation in specific national centres, it is clear that they opened new and capacious conduits for knowledge transfer, and that they encouraged policy-makers to conceive of their tasks in comparative/competitive, trans-national terms.Footnote 95 The weekly ‘Scientific Review’ published by the ministry of development in Madrid printed numerous articles bristling with statistics on ‘industrial progress in Belgium’, ‘English industry and the expansion of London’, ‘revenues of the English and French Railways’, ‘wool imports to England’ and so on.Footnote 96 Of course, we have to beware of overstating the case: in the files of the ministry of development in Madrid, I found copies of the Mittheilungen aus dem Gebiet der Statistik issued by the Directorship of Administrative Statistics in the Austrian empire's ministry of commerce and dutifully forwarded to Madrid by the Spanish embassy in Vienna, but closer inspection revealed that the pages were uncut!Footnote 97

Nevertheless, the existence of such networks, and of the emergent European ‘administrative intelligentsia’Footnote 98 that sustained them, is important to the argument set out in these pages, because it helps to explain the striking simultaneities that can be observed in the post-revolutionary accommodations of the European states. We are accustomed to thinking of the clock of European history as geared in accordance with the variable geometry of relative backwardness. While this is doubtless true for broader processes of societal modernisation, it has less bearing on those educated trans-national elites whose culture and learning were in many respects genuinely European.

Lastly, we might ponder on the historical location of the political synthesis that emerged after 1848: we know the coalitions that sustained the politics of the 1850s eventually frayed and came undone under the pressure of internal divisions and an increasingly inauspicious economic climate. The ‘Social Question’ returned in an even more challenging form. The ‘end of politics’ was not in sight for them and it is not in sight for us. But the idea itself feels familiar, perhaps because this was an idea whose appeal has been felt more than once. There are suggestive parallels between the transitions of the 1850s and the authoritarian reformism of the Napoleonic era, another moment in which states were reshaped to absorb and lend institutional expression to the waning energies of a revolution. And the realignments of the 1850s might also prompt us to consider contemporary resonances. The tendency to place economic policy at the centre of government and to assume (or hope) that growth will bring the answer to our problems, the inclination to respect public opinion while seeking proactively to manage it, a certain tiredness and disappointment with the great slogans and categories of left and right and an enthusiasm for technical solutions – these aspects of the post-revolutionary settlement remind us that the statesmen of the 1850s were in some respects our contemporaries.

Footnotes

1 Evans, R. J. W., ‘From Confederation to Compromise: The Austrian Experiment, 1849–1867’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 87 (1994), 135–67, here 137.

2 For discussions of the vast literature on the Second Empire, see McMillan, J. F., Napoleon III (Harlow, 1991), 1–6 ; Plessis, A., The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852–1871, trans. Mandelbaum, Jonathan (Cambridge, 1979), 1–11 ; the quotations are from R. Sencourt, The Modern Emperor (1933), and Plessis, Second Empire, 3; Barclay, D., Friedrich Wilhelm IV and the Prussian Monarchy 1840–1861 (Oxford, 1995); Bazillion, R. J., Modernizing Germany. Karl Biedermann's Career in the Kingdom of Saxony, 1835–1901 (New York, 1990); Green, A., Fatherlands. State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, 2001); R. J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution. Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (1997), 284; the same point is made in Evans, R. J., Tales from the German Underworld (New Haven, 1998), 109, 218; Brandt, H.-H., Der Österreichische Neoabsolutismus: Staatsfinanzen und Politik, 1848–60 (2 vols., Göttingen, 1978) – a vast compendium on governmental practice in the post-revolutionary era; Barany, George, ‘Ungarns Verwaltung 1848–1918’, in Die Habsburgermonarchie, ii: Rechtswesen, Verwaltung und, Wandruszka, A. and Urbanitsch, P. (Vienna, 1975), 306–468 , esp. 328–38; G. Szabad, Hungarian Political Trends between the Revolution and the Compromise (1977); Rua, N. Durán de la, La Unión Liberal y la modernizacion de la España Isabelina. Una convivencia frustrada, 1854–1868 (Madrid, 1979), esp. 339–46; Mónica, Maria Filomena, Fontes Pereira de Melo (Lisbon, 1998); Caracciolo, A, ‘La storia economica’, in Storia d'Italia, iii: Dal primo Settecento all'Unità (Turin, 1973), 509–693; Nada, N., ‘Il regime di Vittorio Emanuele dal 1848 al 1861’, in Notario, P. and Nada, N., Il Piemonte sabaudo. Dal periodo napoleonico al Risorgimento (Turin, 1993), 343–442 , here 364–7 (both with references to the historiography).

3 Plessis, Second Empire, 4–6; Garrigues, Jean, Les hommes providentiels: histoire d'une fascination française (Paris, 2012); Choisel, Francis, Bonapartisme et Gaullisme (Paris, 1987).

4 Rogari, Sandro, Alle origini del trasformismo. Partiti e sistema politico nell'Italia liberale, 1861–1914 (Rome, 1998); Tullio-Altan, Carlo, La nostra Italia: clientelismo, trasformismo e ribellismo dall'unità al 2000 (Milan, 2000); Sabatucci, Giovanni, Il trasformismo come sistema: saggio sulla storia politica dell'Italia unita (Rome, 2003); on this tendency in the Italian historiography, see also Woolf, S. J., ‘La storia politica e sociale’, in Storia d'Italia, iii: Dal primo Settecento all'Unità (Turin, 1973), 5–510 , here 472.

5 Barany, ‘Ungarns Verwaltung’, 344.

6 For a critical analysis of this historiographical tradition, see Brophy, J. M., Capitalism, Politics and Railroads in Prussia 1830–1870 (Columbus, 1998), 1–18 .

7 Barclay, Friedrich Wilhelm IV and the Prussian Monarchy; Brophy, Capitalism; Grünthal, G., Parlamentarismus in Preussen 1848/49–1857/58: preussischer Konstitutionalismus, Parlament und Regierung in der Reaktionsära (Düsseldorf, 1982); Green, Fatherlands. The classic demolition of the Sonderweg thesis, Blackbourn, D. and Eley, G., The Peculiarities of German History. Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984), points suggestively at the need for a trans-national approach to the problem of nineteenth-century revolution and political change; see esp. 83–5 (Eley) and 173–5 (Blackbourn).

8 Cf. Elton, G. R., The Tudor Revolution in Government. Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1969), which deals of course with a very different subject matter, but speaks of a period ‘when the needs of good government prevailed over the demands of free government’ and ‘order and peace seemed more important than principles and rights’ (1) and perceives in administrative innovation a process of ‘controlled upheaval’ (427).

9 A useful comparative survey of constitutional innovation across Europe is Verfassungswandel um 1848 im europäischen Vergleich, ed. M. Kisch and P. Schiera (Berlin, 2001); see esp. the introductory essay by M. Kisch, ‘Verfassungswandel um 1848 – Aspekte der Rezeption und des Vergleichs zwischen den europäischen Staaten’, 31–62.

10 Barclay, Friedrich Wilhelm IV and the Prussian Monarchy, 183; Wegge, H., Die Stellung der Öffentlichkeit zur oktroyierten Verfassung und die preußische Parteibildung 1848/49 (Berlin, 1932), 45–8; Grünthal, Parlamentarismus, 185.

11 Brand, H., Parlamentarismus in Württemberg (1819–1870). Anatomie eines deutschen Landtages (Düsseldorf, 1987), 654–5; for an important study that reaches some analogous conclusions for Saxony, see Neeman, Andreas, Landtag und Politik in der Reaktionszeit. Sachsen 1849/50–1866 (Düsseldorf, 2000).

12 Caracciolo, ‘Storia economica’, 612–17; Smith, D. Mack, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the Risorgimento (Oxford, 1971), 56–76 ; idem, Cavour (1985), 94–106; Perticone, Giacomo, Il regime parlamentare nella storia dello Statuto albertino (Rome, 1960); Ghisalberti, Carlo, Stato, nazione e costituzione nell'Italia contemporanea (Naples, 199); Romeo, Rosario, Vita di Cavour (Rome, 1984); idem, Dal Piemonte sabaudo all'Italia liberale (Turin, 1963); Merlini, Stefano, ‘Il governo costituzionale’, in Storia dello Stato italiano, ed. Romanelli, Raffaele (Rome, 1995), 3–72 , here 3–10, 13–15, 17–19.

13 There were a number of separate uprisings in Spain in 1848, but they represented diagonally opposed interests and their impact was muted by the repressive measures adopted by the Narvaez government. Madaria, J. M. García, Estructura de la Administración Central (1808–1931) (Madrid, 1982), 124 .

14 Burgos, M. Espadas, ‘Madrid, centro de poder politico’, in Madrid en la sociedad del siglo XIX, ed. Carvajal, L. E. Otero and Bahamonde, A. (Madrid, 1986), 179–92, here 188.

15 Seoane, M. Cruz, Historia del periodismo en España (3 vols., Madrid, 1983), ii: El siglo XIX, 241–2; Kiernan, V. G., The Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History (Oxford, 1966), 6 ; Goitia, J. R. Urquijo, ‘Las contradicciones politicas del Bienio Progresista’, Hispania, 57 (1997), 267–302 ; Esdaile, C. J., Spain in the Liberal Age. From Constitution to Civil War, 1808–1939 (Oxford, 2000), 109–22; de Urquijo y Goitia, José Ramón, La revolución de 1854 en Madrid (Madrid, 1984),

16 For contemporary British comment on Saldanha's ‘strange coalition’, which seemed to fly in the face of Portuguese political tradition, see the Times, 31 May 1851, 4, col. F, also 11 June 1851, 4, col. b. On the Patuleia and the Maria da Fonte insurrection, see Bonifácio, Maria de Fátima, História da guerra civil da patuleia, 1846–47 (Lisbon, 1993); Casimiro, Padre, Apontamentos para a história da revolução do Minho em 1846 ou da Maria da Fonte, ed. Silva, José Teixeira da (Lisbon, 1981), Brissos, Jose, A insurreição miguelista nas resistências a Costa Cabral (1842–1847) (Lisbon, 1997). For a brilliant study of the Regeneração, see Sardica, José Miguel, A regeneração sob o signo do consenso: a política e os partidos entre 1851 e 1861 (Lisbon, 2001). On Costa Cabral's vain efforts to inaugurate a centrist politics before the new regime, see Bonifácio, Mari Fátima, ‘Segunda ascensão de Costa Cabral’, Análise Social, 32 (1997), 537–56, esp. 541.

17 Neves, J. L. César das, The Portuguese Economy: A Picture in Figures. XIX and XX Centuries (Lisbon, 1994), 45 .

18 Durán de le Rua, Unión Liberal, 345–6; for interesting reflections on the parallels between Spanish and Portuguese developments, see Gonzalo, Ignacio Chato, ‘Portugal e Espanha em 1856: a dispar evolução politica do liberalismo peninsular’, Análise Social, 42 (2007), 55–75 .

19 Ménager, B., Les Napoleon du peuple (Aubier, 1988), 355–7.

20 For an excellent comparative discussion of ‘conservative-liberal modernisation’ in Prussia and Austria, see A. Schlegelmilch, ‘Das Projekt der konservativ-liberalen Modernisierung und die Einführung konstitutioneller Systeme in Preußen und Österreich, 1848/49’, in Verfassungswandel, ed. Kisch and Schiera, 155–77.

21 Seoane, Historia del periodismo, 244; Kiernan, Revolution of 1854, 5.

22 Payne, H. C. and Grosshans, H., ‘The Exile Revolutonaries and the French Political Police in the 1850s’, American Historical Review, 68/4 (July 1963), 954–73.

23 Kiernan, Revolution of 1854, 5.

24 Grünthal, Parlamentarismus, 476.

25 Trebilcock, C., The Industrialization of the Continental Powers (Harlow, 1981), 152 ; Price, R., The French Second Empire. An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge, 2001), 228 , on Spain: Aceña, P. Martin, ‘Development and Modernization of the Financial System, 1844–1935’, in The Economic Modernization of Spain, ed. Sanchez-Albornoz, N., trans. Powers, K. and Sañudo, M. (New York, 1987), 107–27, here 110; Durán de la Rua, Unión Liberal, 162–3; on Germany and Austria: Sheehan, J. J., German History 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989), 734 ; Brandt, Neoabsolutismus, 231–438.

26 Durán de la Rua, Unión Liberal, 345; Mónica, Fontes Pereira de Melo.

27 Royal Decree of 20 Oct. 1851, cited in Garcia Madaria, Estructura, 129.

28 Royal decree of 10 Dec. 1858, cited in: Durán de la Rua, Unión Liberal, 137–8; on economic reforms of the Bienio, see Urquijo Goitia, ‘Bienio Progresista’.

29 Carvajal, E. Otero, ‘El telégrafo en el sistema de comunicaciones Español 1800–1900’, in Antiguo Regimen y liberalismo. Homenaje a Miguel Artola, ed. Donézar, J. M. and Ledesma, M. Perez (3 vols., Madrid, 1994), ii, 587–98, here 593.

30 de Odriozola, A. Carreras, ‘Gasto nacional bruto y formación de capital en España 1849–1958: primar ensayo de estimación’, in La nueva historia economica en España, ed. Aceña, P. Martin and de la Escosura, L. Prados (Madrid, 1985), 32–3.

31 Durán de la Rua, Unión Liberal, 151.

32 A. Gomez Mendoza, ‘Los ferrocarriles en la economia Española, 1855–1913’, in La nueva historia economica, ed. Martin Aceña and Prados de la Escosura, 101–16, here 113. Gomez Mendoza estimates that national income (excluding earnings that reverted to foreign investors) would have been between 6.5 and 12 per cent lower by 1878 without the infrastructural programme launched in the 1850s. This conclusion is broadly supported in N. Sanchez Albornoz, ‘Introduction: The Economic Modernization of Spain’, in Economic Modernization, ed. idem, 1–9, here 5. The contrary view is set out in G. Tortella Casares, Los orígenes del capital financiero en España (Madrid, 1972), esp. chs. 5–6; see also Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age, 113–14; there is a broadly analogous debate on France, see Mitchell, A., ‘Private Entrepreneurs or Public Service? The Eastern Railway Company and the French State in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997), 18–41 , esp. 18–21.

33 Trebilcock, Industrialization, 152; Price, Second Empire, 211; Plessis, Second Empire, 62; Anceau, Éric, Napoléon III. Un Saint-Simon à cheval (Paris, 2008), 343–66; Milza, Pierre, Napoléon III (Paris, 2004), 464–99; Olivesi, Antoine and Nouschi, André, La France de 1848 a 1914 (Paris, 1993), 49–70 ; Barjot, Dominique, Chaline, Jean-Pierre and Encrevé, André, La France au XIXe siècle 1814–1914 (Paris, 1995), 377–405 .

34 Tilly, C., ‘The Political Economy of Public Finance and the Industrialization of Prussia 1815–1866’, Journal of Economic History, 26 (1966), 484–97, here 492; Grünthal, Parlamentarismus, 476.

35 Winkel, H., Die deutsche Nationalökonomie im 19. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt, 1977), 86–7, 95; on this view as an instance of the German engagement with ‘Smithianism’, see E. Rothschild, ‘Smithianismus’ and Enlightenment in Nineteenth-Century Europe, King's College Cambridge: Centre for History and Economics, Oct. 1998.

36 Cameron, R., ‘French Finance and Italian Unity: The Cavourian Decade’, American Historical Review, 62 (1957), 552–69, here 556–61.

37 On infrastructural investment in Hanover, Saxony and Württemberg, see Green, Fatherlands, 223–66.

38 Evans, ‘Austrian Experiment’, 138–9.

39 R. P. Tombs, France, 1814–1914 (Harlow, 1996), 107.

40 Plessis, Second Empire, 62, stresses the influence of Saint-Simonianism on the emperor; McMillan, Napoleon III, 138–9, is sceptical. On the Orleanist sympathies of the old financial establishment, see Plessis, Second Empire, 76.

41 Tilly, ‘Political Economy of Public Finance’, 490.

42 Ibid., 494.

43 Cited in Green, Fatherlands, 251.

44 M. Blanchard, ‘The Railway Policy of the Second Empire’, trans. J. Godfrey, in Essays in European Economic History 1789–1914, ed. F. Crouzet, W. H. Chaloner and W. M. Stern (1969), 98–111, here 104.

45 David Hansemann, cited in Brophy, Capitalism, 50.

46 Ibid., 56. The quotation (from David Hansemann) is on 50. Von der Heydt's policy of nationalisation was reversed in the 1860s.

47 Cited in Plessis, Second Empire, 62.

48 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990), 33–4; T. Huertas, Economic Growth and Economic Policy in a Multinational Setting: The Habsburg Monarchy, 1841–65 (New York, 1977); W. Goldinger, ‘Die Zentralverwaltung in Cisleithanien – Die Zivile Gemeinsame Zentralverwaltung’, in Verwaltung und Rechtswesen, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, 100–89, here 135, 177; Bazillion, Modernizing Germany, 268.

49 This process is well known for Britain, thanks to Lawrence Goldman's work on the early and mid-Victorian statistical movement and its increasingly intimate relationship with government; Goldman, L., ‘Statistics and the Science of Society in Early-Victorian Britain: An Intellectual Context for the General Register Office’, Social History of Medicine, 4 (1991), 415–34; idem, ‘The Social Science Association 1857–1886: A Context for Mid-Victorian Liberalism’, English Historical Review, 101 (1986), 95–134. This kind of work is yet to be done for most of the continental states.

50 Bazillion, Modernizing Germany, 268.

51 Presidency of the council of ministers, preamble to royal decree founding a statistical commission, 3 Nov. 1856, in: Colección legislativa de España (segundo trimestre de 1856), vol. 68 (Madrid, 1856), 194–6.

52 Juan Pro Ruiz, ‘Statistics and State Formation in Spain (1840–1870)’, working paper produced as part of the research project PB97–0056 of the Dirección General de Investigación Científica y Técnica of Spain, viewed online at: citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.202. For a good example of the moderado view of growth and development, which acknowledged the need for state intervention but defined the task of the state in terms of the need to contain and minimise the impact of change, see the 1848 prospecto of the ministry of commerce, education and public works in Boletín Oficial del Ministerio de Comercio, Instrucción y Obras Públicas, 1 (1848), 1–3.

53 Desrosières, A., ‘Official Statistics and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century France: The Statistique Générale de la France as a Case Study’, Social History of Medicine, 4 (1991), 515–37.

54 On the statistical movement, see Patriarca, Silvana, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, 1996); Goldman, Laurence, ‘The Origins of British “Social Science”: Political Economy, Natural Science and Statistics, 1830–1835’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 587–616 ; Hacking, Taming of Chance; Cullen, Michael John, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (Hassocks, 1975); for an anthology of contemporary treatises, see Comparative Statistics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Richard Wall (Farnborough, 1973), cited in Rothschild, Emma, ‘The Age of Insubordination’, Foreign Policy, 119 (Summer 2000), 46–9.

55 See, for example, the efforts of the ministry of justice in Spain to improve its crime statistics through the circulation of a new standardised form (hoja) and the ‘instrucción para llenar con exactitud las hojas de la estadistica civil creada por Real decreto de Diciembre de 1855’ which insists that respondents reply ‘in uniform fashion to the questions that the form contains’ – an injunction strongly suggestive of the novelty of this procedure for the functionaries obliged to carry it out. Colección legislativa de España (primer trimestre de 1856), vol. 67 (Madrid, 1856), 109.

56 Nolte, P., Die Ordnung der Gesellschaft (Munich 2000), 52–3.

57 de Macedo, José Borges, ‘O aparecimento em Portugal do conceito de programa politico’, Revista portuguesa de História, 13 (1971), 396–423 .

58 On efforts to unify the structure of government in Spain, see Garcia Madaria, Estructura, 128; royal decree of 29 Feb. 1856, cited in Garcia Madaria, Estructura, 142; cf. the ‘Instrucción para promover y ejecutar las obras publicas de Caminos, Canales, Puertos y demas análogos aprobada por Real Decreto de 10 de Octobre de 1845’, Archivo Histórico Nacional Madrid, FC OP, leg. 2; on Austria: Evans, ‘Austrian Experiment’, 138; Barany, ‘Ungarns Verwaltung’, 329–62.

59 Urquijo Goitia, ‘Bienio Progresista’, 282–3; César das Neves, Portuguese Economy, 46–7; in general, see the important recent study by Mónica, Fontes Pereira de Melo.

60 On the use of developmentalist arguments in relation to canal building before the advent of the railways, see Hernandez, J. M. and Olivares, J. Vidal, ‘Infraestructura viaria y ferrocarriles en la articulación del espacio economico Valenciano, 1750–1914’, Hispania, 51 (1991), 205–43, here 225; on continuity in public infrastructural planning in France, with specific reference to the dirigiste tradition of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, see Smith, C. O., ‘The Longest Run: Public Engineers and Planning in France’, American Historical Review, 95 (1990), 657–92; Smith stresses long-term continuity of statist construction projects in France, but also notes that the early 1850s saw a restructuring of railway development marked first by the consolidation of the twenty-eight French railway companies into six regional monopolies and secondly by highly successful government stimulation of private investment (677).

61 McMillan, Napoleon III, 137–41.

62 See Urquijo Goitia, ‘Bienio Progresista’, 270, citing the Acta del Consejo of 19 Dec. 1854: ‘[our objective is] to open the springs of civilisation, to bring them to our country by means of those mighty vehicles [i.e. steam trains] that constitute the glory of modern civilisation, to reinforce our political unity by facilitating communication among all the provinces; to bestow movement and value upon our products’.

63 Conseil Général du Département de Nord, session de 1858, rapport par M. F. Kuhlmann, Archives Nationales, F/12/6848/B, 14.

64 Ministerio de Fomento, ‘Real decreto, creando una comisión para que proponga los medios de armonizar los intereses recíprocos de los fabricantes y trabajadores de Bercelona’, 10 Jan. 1851, in Colección legislativa de España (primer cuatrimestre de 1851), vol. 64 (Madrid 1855).

65 Cited in Memoirs of Field-Marshal the Duke of Saldanha with Selections from his Correspondence, ed. J. A. Smith, Conde da Carnota (2 vols., 1880), i, 315, 326.

66 Ministry of agriculture, commerce and public works, report to the emperor, Paris, 30 Nov. 1856, Archives Nationales Paris F/14/8508A.

67 Sheehan, German History, 734.

68 Papayanis, N., Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris. The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge, 1997), 92–5. On the same obsession in a British context, see M. Daunton, ‘Introduction’, Cambridge Urban History of Britain, iii: 1840–1950, ed. idem (Cambridge, 2001), 1–56, esp. 1–13. There is now a vast literature on the restructuring of Paris under Haussmann; among those studies I found most useful are Pinkney, D. H., Napeoleon and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, 1958), and Shapiro, A.-L., Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850–1902 (Madison, 1985).

69 Juliá, Santos, Ringrose, D. and Segura, C., Madrid. Historia de una capital (Madrid, 1994), 288–313 .

70 Fernando Roch, ‘Reflexiones sobre le reordenación urbanistica en el Madrid de mediados del siglo XIX’, in Madrid, ed. Otero Carvajal and Bahamonde, 89–96, here 92–3.

71 Choay, F., ‘Pensées sur la ville, arts de la ville’, in La ville de l’âge industriel: le cycle haussmannien, ed. Agulhon, M. (Paris, 1983), 159–271 , here 168; Gaillard, Jeanne, Paris. La ville 1852–1870. L'urbanisme Parisien à l'heure d'Haussmann (Paris, 1976); on similar developments in Berlin, see Barclay, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, 75, 237–8; Frank Joseph Thomason, ‘The Prussian Police State in Berlin 1848–1871’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Baltimore, MD, 1978), 185. Although it is formulated within the framework of the older ‘decade of reaction’ school, this study remains useful as the only detailed study of Hinckeldey's policies for Berlin; the best interpretative discussion of Hinckeldey is in Barclay, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, esp. 237–44, 273–5.

72 Masanz, M. and Nagl, M., Ringstraße. Von der Freiheit zur Ordnung vor den Toren Wiens (Vienna, 1996), 66 .

73 Wagner, W., ‘Die Stellungnahmen der Militärbehörden zur Wiener Stadterweiterung in den Jahren 1848–57’, Jahrbuch des Vereins für die Geschichte der Stadt Wien, 17/18 (1961/2), 216–85, here 223; Masanz and Nagl, Ringstraße, 65–71.

74 C. Díez de Baleón, ‘Barrios obreros en el Madrid del siglo XIX: solución o amenaza para el orden burgues?’, in Madrid, ed. Otero Carvajal and Bahamonde, 117–34; Guerrand, R. H., Les origines du logement social (Paris, 1967). On the association of disease with political unrest, see R. J. Evans, Death in Hamburg. Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830–1910 (1990), 118–19.

75 Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 16–28.

76 Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 96–7; E. Bendikat, Öffentlicher Nahverkerhspolitik in Berlin und Paris 1890–1914: Strukturbedingungen, politische Konzeptionen und Realisierugsprobleme (Berlin, 1999), 66–70; Santos Juliá, Ringrose and Segura, Madrid, 288–313; on the same phenomenon in Berlin: B. Schulze, ‘Polizeipräsident von Hinckeldey’, Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands, iv (Tübingen, 1955), 81–108, here 93–4.

77 Fischer, D., Handbuch der politischen Presse in Deutschland, 1480–1980. Synopse rechtlicher, struktureller und wirtschaftlicher Grundlagen der Tendenzpublizistik im Kommunikationsfeld (Düsseldorf, 1981), 60–1, here 65; Koszyk, Kurt, Deutsche Presse im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1966), 123 ; Schneider, F., Pressefreiheit und politische Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied, 1966), 310 .

78 Wappler, K., Regierung und Presse in Preußen. Geschichte der amtlichen Pressestellen, 1848–62 (Leipzig, 1935), 94 ; Kohnen, R., Pressepolitik des deutschen Bundes. Methoden staatlicher Pressepolitik nach der Revolution von 1848 (Tübingen, 1995), 174 .

79 Seoane, Historia de periodismo, 228.

80 Kossok, M. and Saravia, Mauricio Pérez, ‘Prensa liberal y revolución burguesa. Las revoluciones en Francia y Alemania en 1848 y en España en 1854’, in La prensa en la revolución liberal: España, Portugal y America Latina, ed. Novales, A. Gil (Madrid, 1983), 390–444 , here 433–4.

81 Guiral, P., ‘La presse de 1848 à 1871’, in Bellanger, C., Godechot, J., Guiral, P. and Terron, F., Histoire générale de la presse française (Paris, 1969), 207–382 .

82 Wappler, Regierung und Presse, 94.

83 Guiral, ‘La presse’, 252; Bellet, R., Presse et journalisme sous le Second Empire (Paris, 1967), 11 .

84 Bellet, Presse et journalisme, 284–5.

85 Wappler, Regierung und Presse, 16–17, 5.

86 Cited Isser, N., The Second Empire and the Press (The Hague, 1974), 15–16 .

87 Cited in Price, Second Empire, 172.

88 Green, Fatherlands, 148–88; Guiral, La presse, 250; Isser, Press, 16. For an account of the ‘offiziöse Presse’ in the German states that comes to less sanguine (but also in my view less persuasive) conclusions on the success of such journals, see Naujoks, E., ‘Die offiziöse Presse und die Gesellschaft (1848/1900)’, in Presse und Geschichte. Beiträge zur historischen Kommunikationsforschung, ed. Blühm, E. (Munich, 1977), 157–70.

89 Kohnen, Pressepolitik, 150.

90 Cited in Carr, R., Spain 1808–1975, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1982), 240 n. 2.

91 Evans, ‘Austrian Experiment’, 146–7; Durán de la Rua, Unión Liberal, 345.

92 Ménager, Les Napoléon du peuple, 128–9.

93 Goldman, ‘The Origins of British “Social Science”’, esp. 594–5.

94 On the ‘transfer function’ of international exhibitions and the paucity of work in this area, see W. Kaiser, ‘Inszenierung des Freihandels als weltgesellschaftliche Entwicklungsstrategie. Die “Great Exhibition” 1851 und der politischer Kulturtransfer nach kontinentaleuropa’, 2. I am grateful to Professor Kaiser for allowing me to see a copy of this essay before publication.

95 On these and other dimensions of the still only nascent history of international networks, see The Mechanics of Internationalism, ed. M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (Oxford, 2001), esp. the introductory essay by the editors, 1–25.

96 ‘El progreso industrial en Bélgica’, ‘Importación de lanas en Inglaterra’, ‘La industria inglesa y la expansión de Londres’, ‘La industria algodonera en Alemania’, ‘Ingresos de los ferro-carriles ingleses y franceses’, in Revista Cientifica del Ministero de Fomento, 2 (1863), 28–9, 50–5, 60–1, 193–211, 225–34, 250–1.

97 Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, FC OP (Fomento) leg. 236.

98 I borrow this term from Goldman, ‘Social Science Association’, 100.