Re-imagining the Social Order

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw attempts around the Mediterranean world to replace an old order of privilege and delegated power with one in which all subjects were equal before the state. Across southern Europe, revolutionary France provided the model: under French and subsequently liberal regimes, privilege in state, church, and economy was cut back; there were analogous changes in the Ottoman world. Legal change did not always translate into substantive social change. Nonetheless, new conceptions of a largely autonomous ‘society’ developed, and new protocols were invented to relate state to ‘society’, often entailing use of tax status as a reference point for the allocation of rights and duties. The French Doctrinaires argued that the abolition of privilege made society ‘democratic’, posing the question, how was such a society best governed? By the middle of the nineteenth century, this conception was widely endorsed across southern Europe.

Democracy in Spain

Spanish traditions of mixed monarchy were revived in the face of Napoleonic occupation, and later championed by opponents of restored autocracy. Discussions of ‘democracy’ as an option for modern Spain were both encouraged and constrained by this setting. Popular support for the absolutist claimant in the civil war of the 1830s set the scene for endorsements of Doctrinaire liberalism, entailing vesting power in the propertied and educated, for the benefit of the people. But sharp differences over how inclusive such a governing class should be encouraged some to argue for something more radically inclusive. A ‘democratic party’ first emerged among left-liberals in the 1840s, persisting as a force in Spanish politics thereafter. During the 1850s and 60s, there were many calls for democracy, variously interpreted. Democracy provided a leitmotif of politics after the revolution of 1868, leading subsequent historians to describe it as having inaugurated a ‘democratic sexennio’.

Liberalism and Democracy

Liberalism was the most powerful emergent political ideology across early nineteenth-century southern Europe (this chapter does not deal with the Ottoman world). There was more support for ‘freedom’ and ‘liberal’ values than for ‘democracy’. Liberalism indeed initially aimed to realize some democratic aspirations, while averting the worst features of French revolutionary experience. Liberal revolutionaries of the 1820s advocated extensive political participation to support effective nation-building. But during the 1830s, the form of liberalism associated with the French Doctrinaires became ascendant; in this view, political skills were found only among people of ‘capacity’; the preferred form of representative government was one restricting political rights to higher taxpayers. Politically active people calling themselves ‘democrats’ (as became more common from this time) usually operated from within liberal ranks but were critical of narrow versions of this creed: the democratic cause gained new definition and point in this context.

Sovereignty, Governance, and Political Community in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa

Early modern Ottoman and European political cultures had more in common than is conventionally admitted. It was the dissolution of their shared world that produced accounts of the rise of democracy as an exclusively European story. In fact, through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the pattern of commonalities and differences remained complex, as contests over sovereignty, representation, popular movements, and forms of rule played out in uneven, changing, but still entangled worlds. Baki Tezcan’s model of a relatively participatory early modern empire provides a suggestive framework for understanding developments through the early nineteenth century. The fraying of authority and diverse reform attempts after 1780 prompted struggles over more and less accountable ways of ‘reviving’ the empire, and produced new forms of popular politics. Though in the 1860s Young Ottomans began to develop a vision of an Ottoman ‘democratic’ future, ultimately, from the 1880s, a top-down, dirigiste approach triumphed.

Religion, Revolution, and Popular Mobilization

In Mediterranean regions between the late eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, it proved difficult to separate politics from religion—because political communities were also conceptualized as religious communities, so governing them entailed taking a stance on their religious ordering. South European liberalism was not associated with religious toleration: the hope was to bind the national community together around shared beliefs; Ottomans, by contrast, fostered religious pluralism, though also solidarity within religious communities. Those who sought to change the political order along democratic or liberal lines often found some supporters among religious leaders—in southern Europe, especially among would-be church reformers, perhaps in a Jansenist tradition. Such leaders could play an important role in proselytising for new values—though religious—for example, Lamennaisian—visions of democracy did not necessarily align neatly with more political visions. Religious leaders were also often prominent among opponents of reforms and in mobilizing ordinary people behind conservative forms of politics.

Patris, Ethnos, and Demos

Greeks had experience of representation and political participation under Ottoman rule. They were also exposed to shifting currents in European thought, in the context of the ‘Greek enlightenment’, study and commercial activity abroad, and revolutionary/Napoleonic conflicts. Both traditions shaped their behaviour when they designed republican institutions in the context of their war of independence from 1821. When they accepted a king from Bavaria as the price for international recognition in 1833, limits were set to their ability to shape their own destiny. Nonetheless, intellectuals continued to synthesize ideas about politics and government for local use, and constitutional revolution in 1843 established a formal context for participatory politics. ‘Democracy’ in Greek did service for both ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’, but, by the time a new revolution prompted a change in dynasty in 1864, the term was being used both to reflect on Greece’s problems and to outline possible solutions.

Democracy without the People

In Portugal, as in Spain, traditions of mixed monarchy made it possible to conceive of ‘democracy’ as an element in the traditional constitution. The revolution of 1820, which instituted a broadly based representative system, reflected confidence in a people who had rallied against Napoleonic invasion, and wide agreement that the king’s absence in Brazil constituted a national crisis. But consensus proved hard to achieve: supporters of liberal solutions divided among themselves; an absolutist coup set the scene for civil war. Ultimately victorious liberals were prompted by their experiences to develop a notably thoroughgoing, top-down version of liberalism. Though distinctions between ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ liberals re-emerged, and progressives were sometimes labelled or claimed the name of democrats, in fact, a moderate form of liberalism generally held sway. As embodied in the so-called Regeneration regime, this came to present itself as leading the country towards democracy, but leadership remained the dominant theme.

Democracy in Italy

In the Italian peninsula, support for ‘democracy’ came relatively early, and it engaged some notable enthusiasts. Italy’s republican past encouraged interest in experiments with new forms of republicanism, first in the United States from the 1770s, then in France in the 1790s. The Thermidorian ideal of ‘representative democracy’ received at least as much support in Italy as in France. Democratic politics in practice though were often plebiscitarian: setting a template that would retain power for generations. With the advent of Napoleon, the rhetoric lost salience, and, under the Restoration, critics of autocratic regimes tended to call themselves liberals. In 1848, following (but again if anything radicalizing) French example, some Italian political actors once more vigorously championed ‘democratic’ versions of republicanism. Yet nationalists proved most effective at harnessing the rhetoric. Democratic aspirations were realised chiefly inasmuch as they were fulfilled by a plebiscitarian national monarchy.

Popular Consent and the European Order

New ideas about how people should relate to power played out in relations between as well as within states. The French revolution promoted rights of self-determination, and devices (later termed plebiscites) for legitimating both new regimes and transfers of territories. Napoleon further instrumentalized, then abandoned, such practices. His enemies criticized his pursuit of ‘conquest’—but thereby raised questions about their own habits. After the wars, fuzzier notions of consent featured in discourses around ‘legitimacy’. Revolutions, which continued to be employed to constitute would-be-lawful regimes, tested prevailing ideas. In the Ottoman world, instruments that could be conceptualized as constitutions played a part in negotiations around overlordship. From the 1850s, plebiscites came back into use, alongside other means of registering consent to boundary change. Increasing involvement of European powers in attempts to resolve conflicts within Ottoman domains (thus Mount Lebanon, Crete) encouraged cross-fertilization between what were in some ways already convergent practices.

Armed Forces

Any general account of democracy in the period 1789–1860 must consider ideologies and practices relating to armed force. Early decades were overshadowed by massive and prolonged warfare, raising questions about the relationship between armies and soldiers, on the one hand, nation and citizenry, on the other. In the subsequent era of peace (or smaller wars), small professional armies were relatively more important—but they nonetheless sometimes incubated reformist political ideologies. They often identified themselves with the interests of the nation, while providing scope for the talented to rise to positions of leadership that they might not otherwise have attained. Napoleon Bonaparte continued to offer a role model—but with political implications that were at best ambiguous. While military coups before 1860 were often staged in defence of liberal or popular governments, a pattern was set by which they might crush these and pave the way for autocracy.