Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONthough it did not reach anything like major proportions until the 1840s,when one and three-quarter millions crossed the North Atlantic (a littleless than three times the figure for the 1830s). Even so, the only majormigratory nation outside the British Isles was as yet the German, longused to sending its sons as peasant settlers to Eastern Europe andAmerica, as travelling artisans across the continent and as mercenarieseverywhere.We can in fact speak of only one western national movement organizedin a coherent form before 1848 which was genuinely based on themasses, and even this enjoyed the immense advantage of identificationwith the strongest carrier of tradition, the Church. This was the IrishRepeal movement under Daniel O'Connell (1785-1847), a goldenvoicedlawyer-demagogue of peasant stock, the first—and up to 1848the only one—of those charismatic popular leaders who mark theawakening of political consciousness in hitherto backward masses. (Theonly comparable figures before 1848 were Feargus O'Connor (1794-1855), another Irishman, who symbolized Chartism in Britain, andperhaps Louis Kossuth (1802-1894), who may have acquired somethingof his subsequent mass prestige before the 1848 revolution, thoughin fact his reputation in the 1840s was made as a champion of thegentry, and his later canonization by nationalist historians makes itdifficult to see his early career at all clearly.) O'Connell's CatholicAssociation, which won its mass support and the not wholly justifiedconfidence of the clergy in the successful struggle for Catholic Emancipation(1829) was in no sense tied to the gentry, who were in any caseProtestant and Anglo-Irish. It was a movement of peasants, and suchelements of a native Irish lower-middle class as existed in that pauperizedisland. 'The Liberator' was borne into leadership by successivewaves of a mass movement of agrarian revolt, the chief motive force ofIrish politics throughout that appalling century. This was organized insecret terrorist societies which themselves helped to break down theparochialism of Irish life. However, his aim was neither revolution ornational independence, but a moderate middle class Irish autonomy byagreement or negotiation with the British Whigs. Hc was, in fact, not anationalist and still less a peasant revolutionary but a moderate middleclass autonomist. Indeed, the chief criticism which has been not unjustifiablyraised against him by later Irish nationalists (much as' the moreradical Indian nationalists have criticised Gandhi, who occupied ananalogous position in his country's history) was that he could haveraised all Ireland against the British, and deliberately refused to do so.But this does not alter the fact that the movement he led was genuinelysupported by the mass of the Irish nation.138