What did it mean to be a democrat in the Age of Revolutions?

This blog is part of a series on 'Democratic Identity in the Age of Revolutions'. Click here to see other posts in the series.

Historians sometimes retrospectively bestow the identity of democrat on people who lived in the age of revolutions. This is as common in German as it is in Italian writing. This can be a quick and relatively harmless way of positioning someone within the political spectrum. The danger is  that in doing this we overwrite the more complex, perhaps tentative and shifting ways in which people developed identities for themselves. There’s an allied danger that, because we use the term to do broad positional work, we fail to attend to its precise meanings in the moment – or to the specific personal meanings with which particular individuals imbued it. At worst, we so completely fail to attend to the distinct meanings and challenges that being a democrat had for people at specific times and places in the past, that we recruit these past democrats into a heroic march towards our present: we make them our own precursors, and miss the opportunity to widen our horizons by seeing how they were different from us.

This is the first of a series of posts in which we complement previous work we have undertaken with others on discourses of democracy in the age of revolutions, in an attempt to develop a more historically sensitive form of enquiry into what it meant to a series of individuals to be democrats in central and northern Europe (roughly, Germany and lands adjacent) between 1780 and 1870. This region and time-span will define the scope of the next (and final) book in the Re-imagining Democracy series. We hope that the enquiry pursued through these posts will provide the basis for a chapter in that book.

In these posts, we contextualise what made it possible for people to be democrats in three ways: by looking at how talk about democracy figured in their environment (Context 1), at the support networks, virtual or real, which formed and sustained political identities (Context 2), and at the subjective and experiential life-paths that brought them into contact with those languages and networks and shaped both their opportunities and responses (Context 3).

Being a democrat was a creative experience. We aim to look at how people acquired (and perhaps subsequently shed) this identity, what they brought to it, and what they did with it: what personal hopes, fears and fantasies they invested in it. Often they operated under the pressure of events that put their ideals to the test. In that context, people sometimes forged new and more radical commitments; sometimes they trimmed back or abandoned those they had. Political cultures are created and reproduced through the cumulative choices of the individuals who inhabit them. In these posts, we experiment with exploring political culture from the angle of individuals and their political identities.

Revolutionaries in the streets of Berlin during the revolution of March 1848.

Context 1: Words and Meanings

People were not equally likely to assume the identity of democrat at all times and places. The moment had to be propitious, the identity in some way available. This meant that there had to be talk about democracy or things being democratic. The talk might be largely negative and the identity imposed on people, or largely positive (at least positive in a particular milieu) and willingly embraced. Being a democrat was a partisan identity: had it been possible to take for granted that everyone was a democrat, it would have lacked interesting substance. People would not have bothered to negotiate it.

In central and northern Europe – Germany and lands adjacent – at the start of our period, 1780, democracy had not yet been vernacularised into all the region’s languages. It was an established word in Latin, French and English; in Germany it was still sometimes treated as a loan word, and therefore written in Latin, not German script. Scholars knew the word, as did some members of the educated reading public. It was sometimes paraphrased into vernaculars as popular government, Volksregierung and the like. Dictionaries and encyclopedias associated it especially with the ancient world, a few Swiss cantons, and perhaps modern city republics, or mixed monarchies like the British (where the House of Commons represented the democratic element). It was in local use in some Swiss mountain cantons, where people had learned to describe their form of self-rule in that way; in some cities; and in the Dutch Republic during the upheavals of the 1780s, though critics of oligarchy who campaigned there at that juncture most often called themselves Patriots.

It was the French Revolution that above all spread knowledge of the term and familiarity with its Latinate form. The effect for some was to renew the negative connotations it had from the ancient world (in that context, it was often linked with mob rule, anarchy and tyranny); for others it became for the first time an object of aspiration. The French example encouraged people to associate democracy with the pursuit of liberty, an expansive vision of citizenship, the abolition of privilege, and the assertion of equality in previously scarcely imagined ways that became linked to hopes of a progressive ‘modern’ future. 

Carrying with it this mix of old and new associations, the word and its cognates waxed and waned in favour for the next century.  They enjoyed a boost with the ending of the Terror, renewal of the French Republic and establishment of sister republics; fell from use in the era of Napoleon’s stern reforming rule, and then for a while gave way to a term he and his followers had been among the first to promote, ‘liberal’. From 1830, it regained some currency among critics of increasingly influential liberalism, meanwhile also becoming linked to the anxiety-inducing ‘Social Question’ (how to respond to the extensive inequality that the abolition of legal privileges had brought into even sharper focus). It exploded into use in 1848, as a name for the hopes and fears associated with a new wave of revolutions.

In his 1835 De la démocratie en Amérique, Alexis de Tocqueville articulated a growing sense on the part of both conservative and liberal elites that democracy – more egalitarian manners, more equality of rights, more voice for the people in government – was what lay ahead; it was most advanced in the United States, but it was coming to Europe too. Though the failure of the 1848 revolutions dashed the extravagant hopes that some had invested in democracy, many concluded that since in some form it was inescapable, responsible citizens had to confront the question of whether it was possible to shape its form and how it could be managed. Those concerns impelled a current in political debate that grew ever more powerful as the second part of the century advanced.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) by Théodore Chassériau, 1850, at the Palace of Versailles.

So, changes in the currency of the word, and its various rises and falls in favour, shaped the availability of ‘democrat’ as an identity. Alongside variations across time, there were variations in space, shaped by local political circumstances and the character of local political cultures. Not just the prominence of the word but its meanings and associations also changed and varied, as – to name just two influences mentioned above – the French revolution reshaped ideas about it, and the Social Question coloured it.

Context 2: Networks

Institutional and social support available for individuals embracing the identity varied by time, place and the juncture in the person’s life-course. In certain milieux there were newspapers and pamphlets propagating what were presented as democratic ideas; clubs of the like-minded, even parties to vote for. Of course, these supportive institutions themselves had to be created and sustained and some individuals played key roles in developing or sustaining them. Threats varied too: in some contexts, or for some people, the identity might be unproblematic, even officially blessed; in others, adherents risked punishment.

Times in which the term had currency also tended, naturally enough, to be times at which support networks developed to sustain it and it became the subject of more talk by more people. When censorship allowed, some newspapers carried positive accounts of it. French Jacobin clubs developed and propagated variants on existing associational forms. In the 1790s, clubs of this genre were sometimes primarily discussion groups, perhaps fomenters of local improvements; later in France and in the sister republics they were encouraged as rallying points for sympathisers. More-or-less officially endorsed clubs often threw themselves into political life. In less sympathetic climates, by contrast, they had to meet secretly. Democracy seems to have remained a watchword in secret society networks through the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the more relaxed atmosphere of the 1840s, there was more chance that clubs would be public, open, widely networked, and serve as organisational nodes for competitive political movements.

It is harder to penetrate the informal milieux which bred and sustained ‘democrats’ and to grasp how these changed and varied. They clearly included university milieux – the worlds of radical lecturers and exuberant student societies; familial and domestic networks and circles, and café and tavern cultures. We might hope to get glimpses of these more informal milieux by tracing the lives of individual democrats, but nonetheless penetrating these worlds becomes harder as one moves down the social scale. What, we might wonder, had been the world of the several thousand German small farmers and agricultural workers who supported armed risings against the forces of reaction in 1849, and then fled alongside their leaders into exile abroad? Did they see themselves as democrats or republicans? how had they formed and supported these commitments?

Context 3: Identity, Creativity, and Life Paths

Perhaps the most fascinating opportunity provided by the mapping of individual and group lives is the chance to nuance and enrich our understandings of what democracy meant, in these times and places, for those who came to identify with it. What took them to the ideas and networks, what understanding did they pick up from what they read or heard, and how did they select among and reshape these ideas on the basis of their own experiences and in terms of their reading of the needs and opportunities of the moment?  In endorsing the term and the identity, what did they take it to stand for and what did they see it as expressing about them and as requiring of them? 

Being a democrat may sometimes have been little more than a slogan or badge of belonging in a milieu in which one happened to find oneself. It may equally sometimes have represented a partly defensive move – a democrat maybe, but not a Jacobin! – and we need to explore how it sat alongside other available identities, including socialist, communist and liberal.  But for some it provided an important vehicle for efforts to understand, engage with, and perhaps change the world.  In what ways did those efforts change such people’s lives, taking them down unanticipated roads and challenging them in new ways, and how did they negotiate that?  What did it mean to identity as a democrat not only at the level of thought, but in terms of experiences undergone, opportunities gained and lost, and experiments in life undertaken?

In tracing the careers of people for whom ‘democrat’ becomes a badge of identity and a set of often deeply practical engagements, we hope to shed a distinctive light on the histories and contents of an identity that has now largely lost its partisan colouring and come to be taken for granted.

Joanna Innes, University of Oxford