The pursuit of glory, p.43
The Pursuit of Glory, page 43
It was on this occasion that the cry ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ was first heard on the streets of London. With the help of his various constituencies, Wilkes enjoyed considerable success during his decade in the political limelight–it was Earl Temple who got him released from the Tower of London on a writ of habeas corpus; it was the working-men of London who gave him his extra-parliamentary muscle, shouting slogans like ‘Wilkes and the coal-heavers for ever!’ as they intimidated his opponents. But it soon became apparent that he was too self-seeking (even by the standards of politicians), too irresponsible and too raffish to attract a genuinely cross-class appeal. His limitations were exposed brilliantly by Hogarth’s caricature of 1763, which shows him leering out with undisguised cynicism, his wig curled to resemble the Devil’s horns. Behind him can be seen two numbers of his scandal-sheet North Briton: number forty-five, in which he attacked the King’s speech to Parliament and number seventeen, in which he attacked Hogarth. This was more than an act of personal revenge on Hogarth’s part, for in his diabolic presentation of Wilkes and his cap of liberty he struck a responsive chord with many. For his part, Wilkes soon nestled back inside the establishment, becoming Lord Mayor of London in 1774 and playing a leading role in the suppression of the Gordon Riots in 1780. It was a reconciliation celebrated in a famous caricature of the day entitled The New Coalition, in which George III embraces Wilkes, saying ‘Sure! the worthiest of Subjects & most virtuous of men’, to which Wilkes replies: ‘I now find that you are the best of Princes’. As he himself once said contemptuously of a supporter: ‘he was a Wilkite, I never was’, confessing that he had been ‘a patriot by accident’.
Popular support did help Wilkes to register two lasting achievements: the judicial decision that general warrants were unlawful, and de facto permission to report the proceedings of Parliament in the press. More generally, he demonstrated how a skilful politician could make use of the public sphere. A poor public speaker, Wilkes reached his public through the written word and printed image, in pamphlets, periodicals, newspaper letters, handbills, ballads, verses and political cartoons. Showing a remarkable attention to detail, he sent a card of thanks to anyone who voted for him in his various election campaigns and kept a careful register of all who could be identified as supporters.
Out of the Wilkite agitation of the 1760s came a movement for political reform that was aimed as much at the House of Commons as at the royal prerogative. By 1770 demands were being made for annual elections, a secret ballot, a widening of the franchise to include all householders of substance, the exclusion of place-holders, the increase of county members and the abolition of rotten boroughs. The aspiring reformers had also created an organization, had learnt how to mobilize City interests and opinion and how to make use of popular agitation, and had discovered that there was support to be mustered in the provinces. What they failed to address satisfactorily was the obstinate fact that the only body which could reform Parliament constitutionally was Parliament itself. Yet all members of Parliament were necessarily beneficiaries of the existing order, with a vested interest in its continuation. So what was needed was a group with an ideology or a special interest strong enough to override this fundamental inhibition.
The best candidate was the group of Whigs which came to be known after their nominal leader, the Marquis of Rockingham, for they positively sought to construct an alliance with public opinion: in the words of Edmund Burke, Rockingham’s secretary, ‘we must strengthen the hands of the minority within doors by the accession of public opinion, strongly declared’. Burke also wrote to a journal about his associates: ‘they respect public opinion; and, therefore, whenever they shall be called upon, they are ready to meet their adversaries, as soon as they please, before the tribunal of the public’. This promising way forward to real constitutional change proved to be a cul-de-sac. The exit was soon barred by the realization that the objectives of reformers inside and outside Parliament were fundamentally different. The Rockingham Whigs included in their ranks some of the biggest borough-mongers in England, including their leader and his heir, Earl Fitzwilliam. Any measures aimed at eliminating rotten boroughs and redistributing seats would have cut at the roots of their power and were correspondingly unacceptable. Nor did these aristocrats feel comfortable with any kind of initiative stemming from below. As Rockingham himself put it: ‘I must say that the thing which weighs most against adopting the mode of petitioning the King is, where the example was first set.’ Edmund Burke’s articulation of the same reservation was even more condescending. He told the House of Commons: ‘I cannot indeed take it upon me to say that I have the honour to follow the sense of the people. The truth is I met it on my way, while I was pursuing their interest according to my own ideas’, adding in a private letter to Rockingham, ‘To bring the people to a feeling, such a feeling, I mean, as tends to amendment or alteration of system, there must be plan and management. All direction of public humour and opinion must originate in a few.’ For their part, the radicals outside the political establishment found the ‘Economical Reform’ favoured by the Rockingham Whigs so pitifully inadequate as to be almost worse than nothing. John Jebb later found the perfect simile: ‘moving the People of England to carry so small a Reform would be tempesting the Ocean to drown a fly’. Yet Jebb and his friends could never mobilize enough middle-class opinion even to start to look like an irresistible force. For many it was the Gordon Riots that advertised the dangers of letting the beast out of its cage. One Londoner, J. Brasbridge, recalled: ‘From that moment, trusting to the evidence of my own senses, I became a convert to loyalty and social order. I shut my ears against the voice of popular clamour, & have, I trust, ever since maintained the character of a true love of my king, and a well-wisher to my country.’ As we shall see later in this chapter, the outbreak of the French Revolution delivered the coup de grâce to parliamentary reform and popular politics.
Although the progress of the people towards democracy was fitful even in such a relatively commercialized country as Great Britain, where universal adult suffrage was not achieved until the twentieth century, across Europe there was a discernible increase in the popular element in politics. This can be traced through the politicization of the public sphere. As the number of public spaces proliferated during this period, so did opportunities for the exchange of information, ideas and criticism. An exemplar was the coffee-house. Within fifty years of the founding of the first in Europe–in Venice in 1645–it had spread across the continent, reaching London in the early 1650s. By 1659 Samuel Pepys could record that he had been to the Turk’s Head coffee-house in New Palace Yard, close to Parliament, and had heard ‘exceeding good argument against Mr Harrington’s assertion that overbalance of propriety [property] was the foundation of government’. For the price of a cup of coffee (although many other beverages were on offer), anyone decently dressed could join in debating the issues of the day. The newly restored Charles II took a dim view of the freedom of expression that prevailed there; according to Clarendon he:
complained very much of the License that was assumed in the Coffee-houses, which were the Places where the boldest Calumnies and Scandals were raised, and discoursed amongst a People who knew not each other, and came together only for that Communication, and from thence were propagated over the kingdom; and mentioned some particular Rumours which had been lately dispersed from the Fountains.
An attempt to close these resorts of ‘Idle and disaffected persons’ at the end of 1675 ended in fiasco when it had to be abandoned in the face of fierce opposition. As Andrew Marvell observed in a poem entitled ‘A Dialogue between Two Horses’ with more wisdom than command of rhyme:
When they take from the people the freedom of words,
They teach them the sooner to fall to their swords.
Let the City drink coffee and quietly groan;
They that conquer’d the father won’t be slaves to the son.
By that time coffee-houses had spread so far so fast across the country as to have become ‘a British institution’ (Markman Ellis). In 1739 there were 551 in London alone.
Coffee-houses were first opened in Hamburg in 1671, Paris in 1674, Vienna in 1683, Regensburg and Nuremberg in 1686, Frankfurt am Main in 1689, Würzburg in 1697 and Berlin in 1721. The first Viennese coffee-house was opened by a Pole called Koltschitzky, who had served as an Austrian spy during the Turkish siege and was given the concession as a reward by a grateful government. There too discussion of current affairs was the norm. In 1706 a French visitor reported that ‘there is an incredible degree of liberty in these places, where not only generals and ministers but even the emperor are torn to shreds’. Things had not changed a generation later, when an observer found ‘every kind of discussion of current affairs and loud-mouths sounding forth about the actions and plans of great sovereigns and a thousand-and-one other bits of political business’. Attempts by the city government to control them could not prevent their continuing proliferation: there were forty-eight in Vienna by 1770, sixty-four in 1784 and over eighty by 1790. By that time Johann Pezzl could write that ‘as everyone knows coffee-houses are now one of the most indispensable necessities of every large town’.
The coffee-houses were important centres of recreation, with card-games, chess and billiards being played, often for money. Also very popular in bringing in customers was the supply of newspapers and periodicals. César de Saussure reported from London in 1727: ‘What attracts enormously in these coffee-houses are the gazettes and other public papers. All Englishmen are great newsmongers. Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news…Nothing is more entertaining than hearing men of this class discussing politics and topics of interest concerning royalty.’ Both the social mix and the propensity for political argument greatly impressed foreign visitors to London. Fleeing France from a letter de cachet, a suitably impressed Abbé Prévost reported in 1729:
I have had pointed out to me in several coffee-houses, a couple of lords, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine-merchant and some others of the same sort, all sitting round the same table and discussing familiarly the news of the court and the town. The government’s affairs are as much the concern of the people as of the great. Every man has the right to discuss them freely. Men condemn, approve, revile, rail with bitter invectives both in speech and in writing without the authorities daring to intervene. The King himself is not secure from censure. The coffee-houses and other public places are the seats of English liberty. For two pence you have the right to read all the papers for and against the government and to take a cup of tea or coffee as well.
If the public sphere in England was precociously political, it was not unique. A German writer in 1745 likened the coffee-house to a ‘political stock-exchange’ where bold spirits and sharp minds from all classes came together to swap information, opinions and judgements. An anonymous account of conditions in Vienna in 1780 revealed that just about everything was discussed in the coffee-houses there, often simultaneously: affairs public and private, high finance, literature, commerce, law suits, academic matters and the fine arts.
The coffee-house was only one kind of social space that reached its first flowering in the eighteenth century. Also important were the various forms of reading clubs discussed below in Chapter 10; voluntary associations such as literary and musical societies; and masonic lodges. Modern freemasonry was the creation of the eighteenth century, dating from the founding of the Grand Lodge of England in London in 1717. From there it spread with amazing speed until, by the late eighteenth century, there was no town in Europe of any importance without at least one lodge. In England by the end of the century there were more than 500 lodges, 140 of which were in London, figures which include only those affiliated to the Grand Lodge, so the real total was appreciably higher. In France there were more than 700 lodges by 1789, including about 70 in Paris, with a total membership of at least 50,000, representing perhaps as much as 5 per cent of the urban adult male population.
From this welter of activity in the public sphere, there came a new source of legitimation: public opinion. Its novelty, however, was more a question of scale than kind. The need to attract the approval of the public had been long recognized in England. Writing about the troubled middle decades of the seventeenth century, Kevin Sharpe has observed that, while it had long been a cultural arbiter, now the verdict of the public was sought in politics too and ‘such a recognition in turn not only validated the politics of party, it also created a public sphere of news, squib, and coffee-house, a space in which the audience joined in all the action’. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke discussed three kinds of law: divine, civil and ‘the law of opinion or reputation’, that is to say the ‘approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which by a secret and tacit consent establishes itself in the several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world’.
On the continent, despite an early nod from Pascal, who referred to ‘public opinion which, as the proverb goes, is the queen of the world’, it took much longer to establish itself. In 1750 Rousseau was still referring to it as immutable collective prejudice, as in ‘neither reason nor virtue nor the laws will subjugate public opinion, so long as one has not discovered the art of changing it’. By 1770 something of a breakthrough had occurred, for in that same year Raynal opined that ‘in a nation that thinks and talks, public opinion is the rule of government’, and Marsais posed the rhetorical question: ‘is not public opinion stronger than fear of the law or even religion?’ In 1775 Malesherbes used his maiden address to the Académie française to proclaim the coming-of-age of public opinion: ‘A tribunal has arisen independent of all powers and that all powers respect, that appreciates all talents, that pronounces on all people of merit. And in an enlightened century, in a century in which each citizen can speak to the entire nation by way of print, those who have a talent for instructing men and a gift for moving them–in a word, men of letters–are, amidst the public dispersed, what the orators of Rome and Athens were in the middle of the public assembled.’ Rousseau also changed his tune, writing in 1776: ‘among the singularities which mark out the age we live in from all others, is the methodical and sustained spirit which has guided public opinions over the last twenty years’. Now the recognition of a new source of legitimation were coming thick and fast. Two examples must suffice. In 1782 the journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier claimed: ‘During the past thirty years a great and significant revolution has occurred in the way we think. Today public opinion enjoys a power in Europe which is preponderant and irresistible…It is men of letters who deserve the credit, for in the recent past it is they who have formed public opinion in a number of very important crises. Thanks to their efforts, public opinion has exercised a decisive influence on the course of events. And it also seems that they are creating a national spirit.’ By this time, this new source of legitimation had found its way into the commanding heights of government. In 1784 Jacques Necker, who had resigned as finance minister in 1782, published On the administration of finances in France, in which he proclaimed that ‘the spirit of society, and the love of praise and consideration, have constructed in France a tribunal where all men who attract the attention of others are obliged to present themselves. There, public opinion, as from the heights of a throne, distributes prizes and crowns, it makes and unmakes reputations.’ He clearly struck a resonant chord with the public, for his treatise proved to be one of the great best-sellers of the century, going through twenty editions during the next five years and selling 80,000 copies.
All this seems unequivocal enough, but there was a serious problem with public opinion, revealed by the two contrasting remarks made by Rousseau quoted in the previous paragraph. He was making a distinction between public opinion that is vulgar prejudice and so should be ignored, and public opinion that is legitimate and should be respected. But who was to decide what was what? One man’s prejudice was another man’s opinion. To paraphrase George Orwell, who observed that the best books are those that tell us what we know already, legitimate public opinion is what confirms our own opinion. Unfortunately for enlightened intellectuals, more often than not ‘the people’ proved to be not just unenlightened but positively reactionary, just as likely to riot against attempts to remove discrimination against Jews or Catholics as to demonstrate in favour of ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ In the Habsburg Monarchy they were far more likely to turn out to greet the Pope, as more than 100,000 proved in April 1782, than to welcome the enlightened reforms Joseph II was trying to thrust down their throats. Indeed, what prompted Joseph to put the brakes on his liberalization of the public sphere towards the end of his reign was the awful realization that it was not being used to propagate enlightenment, as he had hoped, but rather to incite conservative resistance to his reforms. As so often before and since, it was the reactionaries which proved the more adept at exploiting the written word, not least because their arguments struck a much more responsive chord than those of their progressive opponents. The public sphere was a neutral vessel, as receptive to effusions from the right as from the left.
On the other hand, the public sphere was not a space reserved for political dissidents. Its various institutions–the Masonic lodges, for example–were positively eager to parade their loyalty. As the more intelligent European rulers realized, when properly managed it could become a powerful source of support. Frederick the Great proved to be a master of the art of public relations. Despite his conspicuous war-mongering, militarism, snobbery and contempt for German culture, his deft use of gesture-politics and active personal involvement in the public sphere earned him such encomia as this from Moses Mendelssohn:
