Lecture NotesBritain and Europe
Britain and Europe, 1815-1924
Dr Robert Saunders, Jesus College
Figure 1: The outraged English tourist prepares to dish it out to a foreign policeman…
Figure 2: John Bull, assisted by Mr Punch, shows the rulers of Europe how to make a constitutional plum pudding (Punch, 1848). Its ingredients include ‘Liberty of the Press’, ‘Common Sense’, ‘Order’, Trial by Jury’, ‘Religion’ and ‘True Liberty of the Subject’ – not, it should be noted, continental notions of democracy or universal suffrage. All this rests on a historical basis stretching back to Magna Carta. The man with a head like a turnip is Louis Philippe, the recently deposed king of France. He is pictured saying “ah, we made a nice mess of it’.
Figure 3:Britannia reminds a stunted revolutionary of the results of republicanism in France(Punch, 1871).
Figure 4: In another image from Punch, the British Lion stares down a French invasion scare – a common topic in the 1850s. Palmerston traded very effectively on such images of national strength, contrasted with the perfumed puppies of the Continent.
Figure 5: A Protectionist cartoon from 1904. The ‘large loaf’, symbolising cheap and abundant food, was the motif of the free trading movement. Here it is subjected to an X-Ray device, showing a German ‘dumper’ hidden inside it.
Figure 6: A typical anti-Labour cartoon from the Daily Mirror, November 1922. Note the presentation of ‘Laboursky’ as a Russian Jew. Reproduced from A. Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-war Britain (2004).
Lecture 6: Britain and Europe, 1815-1914.
1‘England is no longer a mere European Power; she is the metropolis of a great maritime empire … she is really more an Asiatic power than a European’ (Disraeli, 1866).
2 ‘[The railways] have afflicted our generation with one desperate evil; they have covered all Europe with Tourists, all pen in hand, all determined not to let a henroost undescribed … and all pouring their busy nothings on the “reading public”, without compassion or conscience’ (Blackwood’s, 1848).
3. ‘I look round upon Europe at the present moment, and I see no country of any importance in which political liberty can be said to exist’ (Disraeli, 1860).
4 ‘I have never been able to get rid of the idea that, after all, Roman Catholicism is an exotic in Flanders; that its redundance – for there is no country where it is more repulsively prominent – is forced and artificial; and that in this temperate, methodical, cabbage-bearing, cattle-breeding land, the hips and haws of Protestantism should have been indigenous. The people have a Protestant look’ (George Augustus Sala, From Waterloo to the Peninsula, 1867).
5 ‘If a book is written, containing new opinions on subjects of philosophy and literature, we are told to avoid them, for to Voltaire and Rousseau is to be attributed the French Revolution. If an ignorant cobbler harangues a ragged mob in Smithfield, we are told the state is in danger, for the fury of a mob was the beginning of the French Revolution. If there is a discontent in the manufacturing towns, we are told that the discontent of the manufacturing towns in France was the great cause of the French Revolution’ (Lord John Russell, The History of English Government, 1823 edition).
6 ‘[It] was the fatal error of the French rulers, that they permitted wealth and knowledge to increase without adapting their institutions to the altered state of the nation’ (Russell, Causes of the French Revolution, 1830).
7 ‘There are people alive who remember the whole of the first Revolution, and we of middle age are familiar with the second; but this, the third, transcends them both, and all the other events which history records’ (Diary of Charles Greville, 1848).
8 ‘We need not try on our own precious persons the experiments of vote by ballot, universal suffrage, or equal apportionment of representatives, as long as we can read every day the … proceedings of the national assemblies constituted in those principles. If France chooses to be so besotted, we must let her do the office of the drunken helot, and learn to eschew the sad example’ (The Times, 1848).
9 ‘This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of [1789]. Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs … any longer exists. There is not a diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away … We used to have discussions in this House about the balance of power … The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most … is England’ (Disraeli on the Franco-Prussian War, 1870).
10 ‘Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis … one and all, bag and baggage, shall … clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned … There is not a criminal in a European gaol, there is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not arise and overboil at … that which has been done’ (Gladstone, The Bulgarian Horrors, 1876).
Bibliography.
Diplomacy:
R. Seton-Watson,Britain in Europe, 1789-1914 (1937) [still useful, despite its age]
M. Chamberlain,“Pax Britannica”? British Foreign Policy, 1789-1914 (1988)
Perceptions of Europe:
B. Porter,‘“Bureau and Barrack”: Early Victorian Attitudes Towards the Continent’, Victorian Studies (1984)
P. François,‘Belgium – Country of Liberals, Protestants and the Free: British Views on Belgium in the mid-Nineteenth Century’, Historical Research (2008)
G. Varouxakis,Victorian Political Thought on France and the French (2002)
P. Mandler,The English National Character: the History of an Idea (2006)
Europe in British Politics:
D. Brown,Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846-55 (2002)
L. Mitchell,‘Britain’s Reaction to the Revolutions’, in R. J. W. Evans and H. Pogge von Strandmann, The Revolutions in Europe, 1848-49 (2000)
J. Parry,The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830-1886 (2006)
J. Parry,‘The Impact of Napoleon III on British Politics, 1851-1880’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series (2001)
R. Quinault,‘The French Revolution of 1830 and Parliamentary Reform’, History (1994).
R. Quinault,‘1848 and Parliamentary Reform’, Historical Journal (1988)
R. Saunders,Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848-1867 (2011), esp. chapter 5
R. Shannon,Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876 (1975)
F. Trentmann,Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society (2008)
Contemporary:
W. E. Gladstone,The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (1876) – on Google books