Episode 519: Do You Hear The People Sing?

position more or less, and revolution had been banished. But beneath the polished surface of order, the continent remained restless. As we talked about in a previous episode, industrialization was starting to sweep the continent and cities were swelling. Ideas were also circulating faster than armies ever had, and a new generation, too young to remember the terror or the Battle of Waterloo, was beginning to ask why kings got

to rule it all? And so the spark came, as it often did, in the city of Paris in July of eighteen thirty, King Charles the Tenth, stubbornly clinging to the divine right and aristocratic privilege that he thought had been restored, as with everything else, during the Congress of Vienna, issued the July Ordinances. The July Ordinances dissolved the Chamber of Deputes, the really only elected body of the French government at that point. He restricted the press, and he

narrowed who was allowed to vote even further. And so for three days Letois Lurias Paris positively erupted. Students, workers and shopkeepers, tore up paving stones and raised barricades. The tricolor flag, which had been banned since the days of Napoleon, suddenly reappeared in the streets. Charles the tenth fled, and once again the Bourbon monarchy found itself toppled. However, this was not seventeen eighty nine. Once again, power did not

pass to the people, but to the liberal bourgeoisie. In this case, the crown was offered to Louis Philippe, the citizen king, who would rule not by the grace of God, but as the king of the French. Louis Philippe Orleans was born in Paris in seventeen seventy three into a branch of the Bourbon family that was close enough to the throne to enjoy its privileges, but far enough away,

luckily to feel its resentments. His father Louis Felippe the second, the Duke of Orleans, was a prince of the blood who styled himself as kind of a reformer, flirting with the Enlightenment ideas and disastrously with revolution from the start. The younger Louis Fleebey grew up in a household where royalty and rebellion were constantly kind of rubbing shoulders altogether uneasily. As a boy, his education was deliberately modern. Tutors emphasized science, languages,

and history over court etiquette. He learned English early, he read Brousseau, and he absorbed the idea dangerous for a prince, that monarchy might only survive if it adapted to the will of the nation. These lessons wouldn't make him a revolutionary, but they would critically make him a survivor. The French Revolution tested that flexibility almost immediately in seventeen eighty nine, when Paris exploded, Louis Fleebey was only sixteen years old.

Two years later, as France slid toward war, he joined the revolutionary army, not as a court ornament but as an actual officer, and in seventeen ninety two he fought at the Battle of val May, the cannon smoked battle

that saved the Revolution from foreign invasion. It was an extraordinary moment, a boorbomb prince standing in the ranks of a Republican army, cheering the retreat of Prussian troops, and for a time it looked like Louis Felipe might become a new kind of royal, one forged by revolution rather than crushed by it. But that hope did not last. In seventeen ninety three, his commander, General du Morees, defected

to the Austrians. Though Louis Felipe had absolutely no part in the burial, suspicion just clung to him and worse, back in Paris, his father actually voted for the execution of King Louis the sixteenth and renamed himself Felipe Egalite. The gesture, however, did not save him, and he was guillotined later that year. With his family named poison and his safety gone, Louis Philippe fled France and exile became

a rather long apprenticeship for the young man. For the next two decades, he lived as a wanderer, moving through Switzerland, Scandinavia, and eventually the United states in America in the seventeen nineties, he traveled the length of the Young Republic, down the Ohio River, across the frontier, and through cities that still smelled of fresh lumber and fresh ambition. He taught French

in classrooms just to get along. He lodged and modest ends, and he learned firsthand what a society without an aristocratic privilege actually looked like. It was not a Romantic democracy, he admitted that, But it seemed practical and energetic, and he never forgot that lesson. When Napoleon seized power in France, Louis Philippe remained distant. He refused to serve the empire, but he also avoided loud opposition. Instead, he just waited.

By the time the Romans were restored in eighteen fourteen, he had become something rare among European princes, a man who had lived like a commoner and who actually understood the modern world. The restoration ultimately brought him home, but not back into favor. King Louis the eighteenth tolerated him, wary of his popularity and liberal reputation. Under his son Charles the tenth, that weariness turned into open hostility. Louis

Felipe cultivated a careful image, neither reactionary nor radical. He lived quietly at the Palais Royal, walked the streets of Paris without excessive ceremony, dressed plainly, and presented himself as the citizen prince. This was not humility so much as it was a strategy. He knew that legitimacy in post revolutionary France could no longer rest on divine right alone. Throughout the eighteen twenties, he became a focal point for

liberal opposition. Journalists, bankers and constitutional monarchists whispered his name as an alternative. He never openly plotted against Charles the Tenth, but nor did he ever do anything to discourage the rumors. And so he waited as he always had it. And then, ultimately, as I mentioned in July of eighteen thirty, that patience finally paid it off. Louis Felipe emerged just as Charles the Tenth attempted an illiberal crackdown that cost him his throne.

He presented himself not as king by God's will, but as a constitutional monarch would be chosen by the nation, and he would be king of the French, not of France, a subtle but profound shift in its meaning. Sovereignty, at least in theory, flowed upward from the people, not downward from heaven. His regime promised constitutionalism, property rights and order, liberty, but not, of course democracy. France had changed its king,

but not a social hierarchy. Still, the July Revolution sent a shockwave across Europe, proving that the Viennas system could actually be challenged and beaten, because after all, it was not Louis Philippe who had been restored to the throne. Neder Niche's careful policies were starting to come undone, and the aftershocks quickly rippled outward. In the southern Netherlands, Catholic

and French speaking Belgians revolted against Protestant Dutch rule. By the end of eighteen thirty Belgium declared its independence, and in eighteen thirty one Europe's great powers begrudgingly accepted a new constitutional monarchy. It was the first successful national secession of the post Napoleonic era, a dangerous precedent for a continent stitched together from empires and dynasties. Britain, watching events on the with a mixture of fear and fascination, ultimately chose

reform over revolution. As I mentioned before, the Peterloo Massacre still lingered, and industrial cities like Manchester Birmingham still had no parliamentary representation. In eighteen thirty two, Parliament passed the Great Reform Act, expanding the electorate and redistributing seats. It didn't necessarily create democracy, after all, most working class british Men still couldn't vote, but it signaled something crucial. In Britain,

political pressures could lead to change without the rise of barricades. Elsewhere, reformers took a harder line in Poland and elsewhere, rulers took a harder line. In Poland, a nationalists uprising against Russian rule in eighteen thirty to eighteen thirty one was crushed with brutal efficiency. The Polish Constitution was abolished and the country was absorbed ever more tightly into the Russian Empire. The lesson was clear, reform depended not only on ideas,

but power and armies. In Germany and Italian lands, unrest simmered rather than exploded in the early nineteenth century, as Europe struggled to settle out for the fall of Napoleon. Italy was not a nation, but it was a puzzle of broken kingdoms. It was duchies, papal lands, and still foreign possessions. The Congress of Vienna had restored old rulers and old borders, but had never restored legitimacy to a

country yearning for its own nationhood. And it was in that simmering heat that some really interesting secret societies start to flourish. The most famous and most fear of these was the Carbonari. The Carbonari took their name from charcoal burners, men who worked in forests and mountains, living outside of society. It was a perfect disguise. Like their namesake, the Carbonari operated in the shadows, gathering in secluded places, speaking in

coded language and swearing elaborate oaths. Their rituals were theatrical, often medieval. Honestly, if you look at them, initiations could be by candlelight, symbols of fire and smoke, allegories of tyranny and liberation. But honestly, beneath all the medieval pageantry and drama, there was a real modern anger. The Carbonari were not revolutionaries, and like the Jacobin sense right. They didn't want to tear society down to its foundations. They

wanted a constitution, They wanted limits on royal power. They wanted, especially an end to foreign domination, particularly Austrian domination in northern Italy. And they wanted the fair rule of law. These men were lawyers, army officers, minor nobles, and educated professionals. They were men caught between two worlds. They were too modern for absolutism, too cautious for radical democracy. Their moment

finally came in the wake of Napoleon's fall. During the Napoleonic era, Italians had tasted centralized administration, legal quality, and careers open to talent. When the old regimes returned after eighteen fifteen, those gains vanished almost overnight. Censorship returned, constitutions were revoked, Austrian troops marched openly through Lombardy and Venetia. For many Italians, restoration didn't seem like peace at all.

It seemed like a return to suffocation, a return to subjugation, and so in eighteen twenty and eighteen twenty one, the Carbonari moved from conspiracy to action. In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, officers linked to the society forced King Ferdinand I to finally grant a constitution. For a brief intoxicating moment, it seemed as though Italy might follow Spain and Portugal down the path of constitutional reform, but that dream collapsed just as quickly. Austrian armies intervened, crushed the

movement and restored absolutist rule. Executions, imprisonment, and exile quickly followed. A similar fate met Carbonari inspired uprisings in Piedmont. The pattern became grimly familiar, whispered meetings, sudden revolt, short lived success, and then brutal, brutal repression. By the mid eighteen twenties, the Carbinari were weakened, infiltrated and hunted men. Their secrecy had protected them from the police, but it had also limited their reach. They could ignite sparks, but they could

never sustain a general conflagration. But out of that failure emerged something new. One of the men watching closely was Giuseppe Nazzini born in genu One, eighteen oh five. Mazzini had flirted briefly with the Carbonari as a young man, and he had paid the price. Arrested in eighteen thirty and imprisoned. He was released into exile, an experience that would define his life. From abroad, he reflected bitterly on what had gone wrong. The Carbonari, Mazzini concluded, were doomed

by their very nature. They were too secretive, too cautious, too dependent on elites and military officers. They spoke in symbols, is that of principles. Worst of all, they lacked a clear vision of Italy itself. They wanted constitutions, yes, but for what country and under what identity. In exile, Mizzini began to imagine a different kind of movement, not a secret societ wrapped in the throes of ritual but something more open, a national mission grounded in moral purpose and

popular participation. And so in eighteen thirty one, in Marseilles, he founded Young Italy. Young Italy was radical in the way that the Carbonari had never been. Its goal was explicit and uncompromising. It wanted a united, independent Italian republic, no foreign rulers, no patchwork of states, no restored dynasties softened by constitutions. Italy, Menzini insisted, was not merely a geographic region. It was a nation with its own destiny.

The movement rejected propaganda secrecy. Instead of whispered oaths, Young Italy used pamphlets, newspapers, manifestos. Mizzini wrote endlessly, passionately, framing nationalism as a moral duty. He believed were instruments of human progress, each with a role assigned by providence. Italians divided and humiliated had a sacred obligation to rise, not for material gain, but for the soul of humanity. Young Italy targeted the young deliberately, students, artisans, junior officers, people

with energy and little to lose. It encouraged insurrection not as a coup by elites, but as a popular uprising. Where the Cobbinari had feared mass politics, Mizzini embraced it now yet honestly, in practice, I hate to say it, but Young Italy didn't fare hardly any better than its predecessor, of the Carbonari insurrections in the early eighteen thirties. All

failed leaders were arrested, supporters were executed. Mazzini himself lived a life perpetual exile, pursued by police and mocked by monarchs. To many contemporaries, he seemed a romantic failailure, brilliant sincere, but totally impracticable. But here's the thing, guys ideas sometimes they have long lives. The Carbonari had cracked the facade of restored absolutism. They proved that resistance was possible, that

constitutions could be demanded at gunpoint, even briefly. Young Italy transformed that resistance into something larger, more enduring, a national ideology. Where the Carbonari whispered about reform, Mazzini shouted about unity. Where they sought concessions, he demanded transformation. And together they marked the opening chapters of a period of Italian history that will get into later called the resor Jimiento, the reorganization. The Carbonari had first lit these fires in secrets, and

now Young Italy would carry the flame into the streets. Unification, though still decades away, had been written, and it would not be erased. In the German Confederation, similar tensions emerged the Humback Festival of eighteen thirty two, through tens of thousands waving black, red and gold banners, colors that symbolized a united German nation. Speakers likewise demanded constitutional governments, civil liberties, and national unity. But the response, in this case from

conservative rulers was swift. There was censorship tightening, student groups were simply dissolved, and police surveillance was expanded everywhere. The message was unmistakable. Dreams of unity in Germany would not be tolerated, at least for the moment. By the eighteen forties, Europe was changing faster, honestly than its political systems could absorb. Railways now crisscrossed the continent, collapsing distances and accelerating commerce.

Factories were drawing millions into cities where housing was cramped, wages low, and disease common. A new social class, the industrial working class, was growing and it was increasingly aware of itself. Economic hardship sharpened political tension. Poor harvests in the mid eighteen forties drove up food prices while industrial downturns threw thousands out of work. And then in Britain, the Chartist movement demanded universal mail, suffrage and secret ballots.

And it's worth kind of digging into this for a moment because I think it's indicative of what's going on in Europe at the time. There were a lot of

contradictions right now in the British political system. You know, we're talking about an industrialized nation that's honestly governed by a political system that excludes most of the people who made it run because it just hadn't been a lot of changes to Britain's political systems since the Middle Ages, and out of those contradictions emerged the Chartist movement, which was the first mass working class political movement in modern

British history. Chartism was born in the eighteen thirties, a decade, to be honest with you, deep disappointment. The Reform Act that I mentioned earlier of eighteen thirty two had promised changed, but for working people it delivered very little. Rotten boroughs disappeared, and the middle class gained new political power, yet the vast majority of adult men, especially industrial workers, remained voteless.

At the same time, industrialization was reshaping human life, long hours, dangerous factories, child labor, and economic cycles of boom and bust produced insecurity rather than prosperity. When the Poor Laws were reformed in eighteen thirty four, were placing outdoor relief with grim workhouses. Many workers concluded that Parliament governed against them, not for them. The response was not immediate, rebellion, but

an organization. In eighteen thirty eight, a group of reformers drafted a short document that would give the movement its name, the People's Charter. It contained six demand simple and radical in their implications. They wanted universal mail suffrage, secret ballots, equal electoral districts, payment for members of parliament, annual parliaments, and the abolition of property qualifications for members of parliament.

None of these proposals addressed wages, food prices, or factory hours directly, but together they struck at the heart of political power. The message was unmistakable. Social reform was impossible without political democracy. Chartism spread rapidly because it spoke the language of injustice that working people already understood. Mass meetings filled open fields and town squares. Petitions were circulating in factories, hubs and workshops. Newspapers carried Chartist arguments into homes that

had never before seen political writing aimed at them. Leaders such as Fergus O'Connor gave the movement a fiery public face, while quieter organizations built local associations across Britain. When made the Chartism revolutionary was not violence, but it was the sheer scale honestly. For the first time, there were hundreds of thousands of working men acting together as one political class.

They didn't ask for favors, they claimed rights. Parliament was inundated with petitions bearing millions of signatures, an unprecedented assertion of popular sovereignty. The state, however, was not impressed. The first Great Chartist petition in eighteen thirty nine, was rejected overwhelmingly by the House of Commons. Frustrations billed into unrest. In Newport, Wales, armed Chartist clash with troops in an

uprising that edited in bloodshed and executions. Elsewhere, strikes and demonstrations rattled authorities, Yet the movement remained divided over strategy. Some believed simple moral force, peaceful persuasion, and political pressure would bring the day. Others argued for physical force, convinced that power would never healed without coercion, and that division haunted Chartism throughout its life. Despite setbacks, the movement endured.

A second petition in eighteen forty two carried even more signatures, only to be rejected again same year. Economic depression triggered the plug plot strikes, as workers pulled plugs from factory boilers to halt production. Once more. Repression followed arrests, transportation, imprisonment, but Chartism, for a little bit at least, refused to die. Its final great moment came in eighteen forty eight, a

year when revolution swept across Europe. In Britain, chartists planned a massive demonstration at Kennington Common, accompanied by another petition, this one claiming nearly six million signatures. The government panicked quietly, mobilizing troops and enrolling special constables. When the day came, the demonstration was peaceful and the petition, once examined, proved inflated. Parliament rejected it again, and the movement never recovered its

former momentum. By the early eighteen fifties, Chartism had faded. None of its six points had become law, and to many contemporaries it looked like a failure. But history judged it differently. Chartism changed Britain by changing political expectations. It normalized the idea that working people belonged in national politics. It trained a generation and organization debate and protest, and over time, slowly, grudgingly, almost every single Chartist demand became law.

Secret ballots finally came in eighteen seventy two, property qualifications slowly vanished, members of parliament were paid, electoral districts were reformed, and universal mail suffrage followed by the early twentieth century. Still, Chartism failed in the short term because Britain's rulers simply refused to yield. It succeeded in the long term because industrialization and changed to society made opposition to it quite

frankly untenable. The movement ultimately proved that democracy was not a gift bestowed from above, but a demand built from below. Now back on the continent, socialist ideas were actually gaining traction, and that brings us to another actor in our story, Karl Marx. Karl Marx was born in eighteen eighteen in the quiet Rhineland town of Trier, a place that looked ancient but lived under modern pressures. Roman ruins actually were

directly next to Prussian bureaucratic offices. Catholic tradition co existed uneasily with Enlightenment rationalism. Marx's family embodied these tensions. His father, Henrik Marx, was a lawyer, Jewish by birth Lutheran by conversion, who embraced both Voltaire and Kant with the fervor of a man who believed reason could liberate society from him. Karl inherited both skepticism towards its authority at a confidence

in the power of ideas. And we know that Marx was a difficult child, but brilliant, sharp tongued, restless, and impatient with convention. At the University of Bong and later Berlin, he immersed himself in philosophy, particularly the work of Heigel. But Marx was never content to admire systems from a distance. He wanted to expose their contradictions. He wanted to open

up the machine and show everybody how it worked. While his peers debated metaphysics, Marx sharpened his talents for polenic, learning how to argue not just persuasively, but honestly, a little mercilessly. In Berlin, he fell in with the young Hegelians, radical intellectuals who used Hegel's philosophy to critique religion, monarchy, and tradition. Marx quickly emerged as one of the most aggressive voices among them. But even there he was dissatisfied philosophy.

He started to suspect, explained the world brilliantly and never changed it, and so the realization pushed him towards journalism. In eighteen forty two, Marx became the editor of the reichland Zetunde, a liberal newspaper published in Cologne. For the first time, his ideas collided directly with political reality. Writing on censorship, poverty, land rights, and the plight of the

rural poor, Marx discovered the limits of abstract liberalism. Prussian officials did not argue with his logic, they just shut the paper down. The experience radicalized him. If rational criticism could be silent so easily, perhaps the problem wasn't bad policies, but it was the structure of the system itself. Forced into exile, Marx moved to Paris in eighteen forty three, and there, amid the cafes, his thinking transformed. Paris exposed him to socialism not as a philosophy, but as a

lived experience. He met with workers, artisans, and revolutionary who spoke not of ideas but of hunger, wages, and exploitation. It was also in Paris that Marx met the man who would become his lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Angeles was everything that Marx was not He was financially secure, socially graceful, and already emerged in the reality of industrial capitalism through his family's textile business. Yet intellectually they were two peas

in a pod. Angles brought empirical observation, factories, slums, labor conditions, Marx brought theoretical firepower. Together they forged a new understanding of society history, driven not by ideals alone, but by material conditions and class struggle. By the mid eighteen forties, Marx's thinking had hardened into coherent worldview. He rejected utopian socialism as naive and liberal reform as insufficient. Capitalism, he argued, was not unjust because of moral failure. It was unjust

because exploitation was the foundation of capital's very structure. The bourgeois didn't choose to exploit, they had to in order to survive in the system within which they controlled. Workers, meanwhile, were alienated from their labor, from their products, and ultimately

from themselves. Prussian pressure followed Marx even into exile. In eighteen forty five, he was expelled from France and settled in Brussels, where he continued writing and organizing, and here his tone sharpened, gone was any lingering faith in the idea that gradual reform could work. Revolution, Marx now believed, was not only inevitable, it was necessary. Class conflict was not a tragic deviation from history, was actually the engine

that drove everything. And as Europe drifted towards crisis in the late eighteen forties, Marx found himself increasingly at the center of radical networks. When a small group called the Communist League asked him to draft a statement of principles, he jumped at it. The result that was published in February of eighteen forty eight was the Communist Manifesto. It opened not with a cautious argument, but with a challenge quote,

a specter is haunting Europe, the Specter of Communism. And a few explosive pages, Marx and Engles laid out their vision of history as a succession of class struggles, culminating in a conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariats. Capitalism, they argued, had created its own grave diggers. The working class would overthrow the system and would build a classless society. And as we will see in future episodes, the timing

was perfect. Now. Meanwhile, while this was going on Europe's conservative guardians, figures like meta Niche believe that repression could still preserve order. Metternich's system of censorship, surveillance, and alliance building had kept revolution at base since eighteen fifteen, but by the late eighteen forties it was clear that fear alone could no longer hold back the demand for constitutions, nations, and social justice. By the eve of eighteen forty eight,

Europe was a consonant in the change. Liberalism had won some partial victories, nationalism earned without fulfillment, and industrial capitalism had now created massive inequalities and new political actors. Yeah, that's true. Kings still sat on their thrones, but their legitimacy was wearing thin. Next time, when revolution finally comes in eighteen forty eight, honestly, it doesn't erupt from nowhere.

It's the release of pressures that have been building steadily since eighteen thirty And I hope this episode has sort of emphasized a lot of those changes, a lot of those that gunpowder barrel that's just being steadily and slowly packed, and in eighteen forty eight it all explodes and will be a reminder at the age of barricades is far from over.