Le Club des Femmes

There are several important dimensions of comparison that cut across the continent.  

This was a continent largely of monarchies, which ruled with greater or lesser, more or less formal processes of consultation, and in many cases were accompanied by an aristocratic elite rooted in land, title, ritual and an acutely sensitive hierarchical order.

Those orders felt and looked increasingly fragile in the wake of the French Revolution.  Many reacted in draconian fashion to popular initiatives and demands for reform, and in doing so served to justify (for some of their subjects) the legitimacy of popular demands and their criticisms of the prevailing order. And the aristocracy, the emerging bourgeois elites, state servants, and the professional classes, all found themselves questioning where their allegiance lay, and how far they should ally with more popular forces.

Throughout Europe, albeit at very different paces, we can recognize a process of agrarian societies developing urban centres and a degree of industrial activity, that was both dislocating for those who sought work there - and freeing.  If historiography has celebrated the emergence of public spheres in the form of coffee houses and print culture in the 18th century, in the 19th we can see something similar as traditional communities fracture and men and women encountered each other in the facory and workshop, in markets and fairs, and in queues for jobs and food. In such contexts people talked and shared experiences and news.

At the same time this is an era of the rise of mass communication and the widespread circulation of cheap print.  Many states fought this, few were entirely successful.  Printing presses became an essential weapon in the search for news, information, education and entertainment.  And as print proliferated many people with only rudimentary education sought to express their views and their voice as part of a wider community demanding to be heard.

If the mobility from countryside to town was one movement, there was also a much wider process of mobility - with populations in Southern Europe seeking livelihoods in North Africa, and with sizable populations of displaced people seeking new settlement, and political exiles moving to tolerant urban centres from where to plan new futures for their homelands.   This increased mobility also intensified communication and the exchange of ideas, and did so across national and traditional language and cultural barriers.  Moreover, it also, in many cases, generated demands from women for labour rights and for wider civil and political participation – especially in extensive urban areas and perhaps most among the professional and middle classes - but this was, in many cases, a new component of the reform agenda.

One consequence is often overlooked:  In the 18th century there was a common European language linked to diplomacy, dynastic rule, court languages and etiquette, and state and military ritual.  In the first half of the nineteenth century we see the emergence across Europe of an common (and increasingly widely used) vocabulary of politics: one that created a new set of 'isms' with which to characterize and condense ideas, even if the serttling of exact reference was a protracted part of the process of contention itself and varied in different places depending on their traditions and experiences.  But there is no doubt that we see both new terms - liberalism, republicanism, democracy, socialism, communism, conservativism - and a reinvestment and shift in meanings of older terms - radical, republic, moderate, and so on.