Chartists

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Drawing of a Chartist uprising.

The Chartists were a political reform movement in Britain in the first half of the 19th century . They are "sometimes referred to as the first independent labor movement to be formed on British soil."

They mainly represented the following demands:

  1. Admission of trade unions
  2. Reduced working hours (ten-hour days) and better working conditions
  3. Extension of the right to vote
  4. Abolition of the grain tariffs

The goals were only partially achieved, in particular not the requirement for universal suffrage, which was formulated in the People's Charter . But the following were achieved (in some cases with a considerable delay): in 1842 and 1844 labor protection laws, in 1844 the establishment of the consumer cooperative movement, in 1846 the abolition of grain tariffs, in 1847 the ten-hour day.

Chartists advocated the abolition of female factory work in order to secure the supply of the family by women and the family by men.

course

Beginnings

The origin is believed to be due to the Reform Act of 1832 , which gave the majority of the bourgeois middle class the right to vote but not the working class.

Since a large number of organizations are attributed to the Chartists, some researchers do not speak of a movement, but of a time when the workers believed that their problems could be solved through political reforms. (" For a short period, thousands of working people considered that their problems could be solved by the political organization of the country. " - Dorothy Thompson in The Chartists ).

On May 8, 1838, the People's Charter formulated by William Lovett was published. It contained the following objectives:

This electoral reform movement was combined with pre-existing, mostly socially oriented forms of self-organization among the workers, which were now formulating political demands for the first time. From 1836 onwards there was a wave of workers' organizations founded, also encouraged by the repeated British economic crises in the middle of the 19th century. The London Working Men's Association (LWMA) became the sponsor of the People's Charter . It claimed for itself the representation of the interests of the qualified skilled workers. Political influence should be gained for this group through peaceful and legal means. It was a matter of asserting oneself against the landowners as well as against the aspiring upper bourgeoisie who dominated the economy and who jointly dominated parliament. From the People's Charter speaks the demand to open the way to the lower house for the workers themselves and to increase their influence in the elections in order to achieve social improvements for the workers. The tool to achieve this goal should be a petition to the House of Commons, based on numerous popular signatures .

First charter

The six demands quickly spread across the country after they were published in 1838. The Irish Member of the House of Commons, Feargus O'Connor, made a significant contribution to this. Although he was in opposition to the LWMA with his support for violent forms of action, the so-called physical force , he brought the new movement to the public with his newspaper Northern Star and various radicals Groups united in Leeds to form the Great Northern Union . The LWMA, which until then had only had a few hundred members, also experienced a growth phase. In addition to the LWMA, numerous other radical organizations supported the People's Charter. In addition to London, Birmingham formed a center of early Chartism, albeit with the Birmingham Political Union (BPU) as an independent organization and the National Petition as its own basic document. A prerequisite for the success of Chartism was the strong support from the trade unions, which offered leadership figures experienced in agitation and an organizational network that spanned the country and was particularly dense in industrial centers. Numerous publications, pamphlets, speeches and meetings on programmatic questions and the preparation of the petition as well as a national meeting of the representatives of Chartism determined the year 1838.

In February 1839 the first national convention met with delegates from the various Chartist movements, which elected a moderate in LWMA leader William Lovett as its spokesman. The actual task of the assembly was to prepare the handover of the petition to parliament. However, the main discussion was how the movement should proceed in the event of the petition being rejected. It was clear to the participants in the convention that the petition would not be accepted. The question remained, whether this and the feared repressive measures of the state should be answered with physical force or still with moral force , i.e. the mere display of the large supporters. After various moderate groups left, the advocates of physical force largely prevailed. In the event of the petition being rejected, violent resistance as well as strike actions and mass gatherings were announced as ulterior measures . The Chartists' propensity for violence also increased in the local branches, particularly in the north of England.

1.3 million signatures in support of the People's Charter were given to the House of Commons on May 7, 1839 . Only a minority of MPs was willing to even discuss the demands. In London, a strong police force was brought together. Most members of the movement were more shocked by the failure of the petition than that they saw it as a source of uprising. A considered general strike was never tackled. Numerous delegates left the convention, which continued to meet in Birmingham from May. Due to internal disputes, the meeting dissolved in September 1839.

After the unsuccessful petition, violent clashes broke out in the area of ​​Chartism, also as a reaction to the wave of arrests and lawsuits that began, which affected almost all leaders. However, these were not the ulterior measures discussed . They were not implemented consistently or even according to a country-wide plan. The general strike, which was planned for a month, turned into a three-day stoppage of work in some regions, but this resulted in numerous arrests. The Chartist leaders, and especially the participants in the Convention, tried to ease the situation. Nevertheless, the Chartists increasingly appeared in militia-like formations in the streets, trained in the use of weapons and intensified the propaganda work on site. The public also expected an imminent confrontation between the movement and the state.

Particularly serious was the attempt by a large number of workers, an estimated 3,000 to 7,000, to free the Chartist leader Henry Vincent from prison in Newport, Wales . The uprising, thought by its leaders as the beginning of a revolution, failed due to massive resistance from the police. There were no uprisings in the rest of Great Britain, as the authorities there too launched a wave of arrests against the Chartists.

Second charter

By the beginning of 1840, Chartism had lost much of its appeal with the apparent failure of the first petition and the arrest of numerous leaders. The positive economic development also weakened the movement. However, an organizational reorganization began almost at the same time. In 1840 the National Charter Association (NCA) was formed, to which the majority of the active Chartists joined. The new organization relied more on influencing public opinion through lectures and pamphlets. In addition, the coordination of the local chartist groups, for which the Northern Star continued to play a central role, and the raising of funds were promoted. However, the following years were also marked by the splitting off of individual circles, disputes between Chartists and other reform groups, the formation of religiously motivated groups and increased involvement in local politics. Above all, the Chartist churches and the Chartist abstinence movement, both particularly strong in Scotland, broke away from the overall movement and saw themselves increasingly less as a part of the current and more as an alternative.

By 1842 the NCA had grown into a mass movement with 70,000 members. Despite the failure and persecution of 1839, few Chartists turned their backs on the movement. Leading representatives of the moral force group in particular were deterred by the violent events. However, the Chartist "foot soldiers" kept moving. Shortly after his release from prison in August 1841, Feargus O'Connor extended his influence to the NCA. As an authoritarian leader, he transformed Chartism in the direction of an organization closed under him. His physical force course led to a break with parts of the organization under Lovett and other local groups, especially in Scotland. At the same time, attempts to ally with the bourgeoisie in the Complete Suffrage Union failed .

Even when the NCA was founded, the organization of a new national petition was a central goal of the Chartists. In the winter of 1841/42, leading Chartists, above all Feargus O'Connor, ran massive propaganda campaigns to collect signatures that were far better organized than the preparatory work for the first petition. The petition campaign received additional impetus from the previous change in government. The Chartists hoped to find friendly contacts in the Tory government and the newly assembled House of Commons.

The second petition with 3.3 million signatures was submitted to the House of Commons on May 4, 1842. In addition to the demands of the original People's Charter, the document contained a large number of precisely defined political demands, including complaints about the cruel wars against liberty and the unconstitutional police force . In addition, the Poor Law of 1834, the working conditions in the factories and the collection of church taxes on nonconformists were criticized and Queen Victoria personally attacked. This list of signatures was also rejected. This dealt a far stronger blow to the movement than the failure of 1839.

For contemporaries, the petition was less important than the renewed labor unrest in which the Chartists were also involved. In the economic crisis year of 1842, the local groups worked more closely with the trade unions and organized strikes in the industrial centers of Great Britain. The leaders of Chartism at the country level, however, behaved inconsistently towards the strikes. While Feargus O'Connor and the Northern Star in particular opposed the strikes, they met with approval from many other leading Chartists. In contrast to the previous wave of movement, they were more willing to resort to violent means. The rejection of the second petition by the House of Commons had contributed significantly to the frustration of the workers. She had made it clear again that peaceful attempts at political participation had no prospect of success. Workers often included people's charter enforcement in the demands they sought to enforce in their strikes. When the strikes turned into unrest and machine storms in August 1842, there were military actions against the strikers and a new wave of arrests, which resulted in a further weakening of Chartism. At the same time, following a good harvest, the general situation in Great Britain eased and the strikes ebbed without having had any political effects. Such close cooperation between organized labor and Chartists as in 1842 never developed again. The NCA, and at its head O'Connor, remained together with a network of Chartist schools, associations and places of worship even during the following period of a smoothly running economy in order to bring the movement back to life in the event of a crisis.

Third charter

In the years that followed, Chartism, under the ideological leadership of O'Connor's Northern Star, turned increasingly to economic issues. The newspaper called for the population to return to rural life in order to break the influence of industrial big business. During a convention in Birmingham in September 1843, MPs approved O'Connor's plans for land reform . The land plan provided for the establishment of a society that was to acquire arable land with the weekly payments of its members. Members should be settled on small plots of this area, who should enable the acquisition of further areas with their lease payments. A chartist meeting in London in 1845 decided to found this country company. A brisk influx began immediately. At its peak in 1847-1848, the land reform movement had up to 70,000 members. But as early as 1850, with the collapse of O'Connor's personal finances, the Land Plan also ended .

The Chartists' rally on April 10, 1848 in London / Kennington Common (photography by William Kilburn )

Inspired by the success of Chartist candidates in the lower house election of 1847, the third and last flare-up of Chartism dated to 1848, the year of the revolution and the last crisis year in the middle of the 19th century. The delegates met again in April in London for a national convention. The handover of the signature list of two million names to the House of Commons was to be accompanied by a large demonstration. Faced with the revolutionary events on mainland Europe and fearing it would spread to Great Britain, the government cracked down on it. However, the large number of police officers and volunteers from the bourgeoisie met fewer demonstrators than expected. The declining chartist supporter was already reflected in the participation in the rally on April 10th. It fell far short of organizer O'Connor's target of 300,000 people. Contemporary estimates range between 15,000 and 50,000 chartist participants. In addition, the attempted petition was associated with an embarrassment for the movement, as numerous signatures turned out to be forgeries. The fact that a demonstration so close to the parliament building was illegal was, in contrast to the previous handover of the petition, prosecuted for the first time. April 10th had no mobilization effect for the movement. The National Convention continued to meet, but did not come to any results. Even the leaders could not agree on a common reaction to the renewed failure of the petition.

Decline

At this point the movement had also lost its supporters in the middle classes. The middle class was largely satisfied with the Whig government and shared its fear of revolution . The labor unrest in London in spring 1848, condemned by the bourgeoisie, was associated with Chartism. The working class also had doubts about the chances of success of the old Chartist forms of action , such as petitions. The workers increasingly split: some of them opted for violent overthrow in small radical groups, following the example of mainland Europe. The other workers tried to break away from these radical elements by working in cooperative organizations to achieve their social goals in smaller steps. Political reforms , the main concern of the Chartists, were less and less trusted to offer solutions to social problems. On the other hand, the state also dealt with social problems more and more effectively. In addition, the Chartists were increasingly associated with the Irish independence movement, which met with widespread opposition. Chartism itself also changed. Branches of the movement radicalized in the spring and summer of 1848. These tendencies were promoted by the large number of young members who flocked in during the revolutionary year. With this, the revolutionary hysteria seemed to come true and the state authorities again took action against the remnants of the movement.

In the years that followed, numerous rival groups formed. Attempts to reunite these organizations and to forge an alliance with other social movements are unsuccessful. With O'Connor's bankruptcy, the Northern Star began to decline . The fraying movement no longer offered a firm readership potential and the newspaper itself had lost its central theme. In 1852 the successor Star of Freedom was discontinued. For the funeral of Feargus O'Connor in London in 1855 another 20,000 people came together.

In 1858 the last Chartist Convention came about, in which only 41 delegates took part. In this last phase, since 1850, George Julian Harney and Ernest Charles Jones gain increasing influence. They gave Chartism an increasingly socialist orientation. Both knew Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels personally and were in contact with them. Marx and Engels, in turn, closely followed the development of Chartism and commented on it in letters and articles. In 1860 the NCA dissolved.

Chartist forms of agitation

Petitions

Petitions to Parliament were not an invention of Chartism. They represented the oldest form of peaceful political influence in Great Britain. In the three great petitions of the Chartists, the mass platform was to be expressed in its purest form. The large number of signatures was intended to convey the will of the people to the deputies. The handing over of the big roles with the signatures of the supporters at the head of a demonstration march of several thousand represented an underpinning of the demands and made the mass platform immediately tangible. In addition, the nationwide organization that was needed to collect the signatures formed an efficient network.

Chartist assemblies

Assemblies were a central element of Chartist culture and took many forms. They ranged from reading the latest edition of the Northern Star together, through the church services of the Chartist congregations, collecting signatures for the petitions and lectures by prominent Chartists to the large conventions and the handing over of the petitions.

Chartist gatherings served several purposes: they provided information on current developments in the movement and provided the space for programmatic discussion of goals and approaches. It was through them that a nationwide movement emerged from numerous fragmented radical groups. In addition, they were a forum for the movement's speakers, who were able to reach a large number of people in often charismatic appearances before meetings and convince them to support the charter. At the same time, the mass platform of the Chartists was formed during these gatherings for the public and the government to see with up to six-digit numbers of participants . Especially in the later phase of the movement, gatherings were often banned or accompanied by a massive police and military presence.

Chartist press

Numerous men were already represented in the leadership of the LWMA who had previously appeared as publishers and authors of radical magazines. The LWMA itself developed from the Association of Working Men to Procure a Cheap and Honest Press . Radicalism had been widespread among publishers and journalists since the struggle against stamp duty , which aimed to make publications unaffordable for workers. The continuity from early radicalism to chartism was mainly represented by them. In the anti-stamp campaign, the founders of Chartism learned how to draft political demands, mobilize the public and organize the infrastructure for a political movement. Numerous publications were newly formed in Chartism itself. Other pre-existing radical magazines quickly joined the new movement. Williams Lovett's The Charter , as well as The Champion and the Weekly Police Gazette represented the moral force majority position in Chartism.

As early as 1836, the first issue of the weekly Northern Star appeared under the editorship of Feargus O'Connor. The radical paper quickly adopted Chartism and saw itself as the mouthpiece of the physical force . The Northern Star was immediately successful, also economically, and quickly became the most important organ of Chartism. One reason for this was professional journalism, which, unlike other chartist periodicals, did not exclusively publish the publisher's opinion, even though O'Connor presented himself with editorials and his unabridged speeches. In addition, the Northern Star alone offered comprehensive, informative and non-streamlined coverage of the activities of the Chartists and other radicals in London and the province. New printing techniques as well as the financial resources of O'Connor and his supporters enabled a quality previously unattainable in radical publications. By 1839 the circulation rose to around 50,000 copies. The practice of reading the newspaper together is likely to have reached a much larger number of people. O'Connor's rise can be traced back in no small part to the success of his magazine. The Northern Star was quickly followed by numerous other publications by the physical force chartists.

In addition to its role as a defining publication, the Northern Star had even more extensive functions in Chartism. Through his appearance in the times of crisis in Chartism, he contributed significantly to the cohesion of the movement. His sales and correspondent network formed an important and legal strand of the nationwide organization and also enabled numerous radicals to finance their livelihoods. O'Connor invested the magazine's profits in the movement.

In addition to the periodicals, a flood of pamphlets and short-term magazines appeared that represented various currents within Chartism and different focuses.

Chartism and Strikes

The idea of ​​the Grand National Holiday played a major role in the radical movement even before Chartism. A general strike was intended to enforce political demands on the one hand, and on the other hand to create free space during this time that the population should use for personal education and to become aware of and articulate their own political program.

This idea found its way into Chartism in 1839. William Benbow and George Julian Harney enforced them against O'Connor, but were largely unsuccessful in their calls for a general strike. The general strike was discussed several times as a chartist tactic, but only rarely and to some extent seriously propagated. The government responded to such calls with great severity, which helped to decimate the supporters of the general strike.

Strikes in the narrower sense of pure work stoppages limited to individual companies, sectors or regions were the domain of the workers and the trade unions. However, there were also links to Chartism. Above all, to the rejection of the petition of 1842, the workers reacted with work stoppages and dismantling of industrial plants ( plug plot riots ).

The extent of the Chartist participation in the strikes of 1842 is disputed in research. Dorothy Thompson proves that local Chartist leaders called for strikes early on and that supporting the Chartist demands was more important to many workers than fighting for higher wages. The top level of the Chartists, especially Feargus O'Connor, reacted cautiously. On the one hand, they tried to promote national mobilization, but at the same time they tried to discipline the strikers in order to avoid violent clashes with the state. However, the strikes were unsuccessful. The massive military action by the Dukes of Wellington ended the strikes in August 1842.

literature

  • Thomas Frost: Forty Years Recollections of the Chartist Movement . London 1880
  • Hermann Schlueter : The Chartist Movement. A contribution to the socio-political history of England . Socialist Literature Comp., New York 1916
  • Mark Hovell: The Chartist Movement . Manchester 1918
  • Theodor Rothstein: From Chartism to Laborism . London 1929
  • Max Morris (Ed.): From Cobbett to the Chartists. 1815-1848. Excerpts from contemporary sources . Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1954
  • AR Schoyen: The Chartist Challenge. A portrait of George Julian Harney . London 1958
  • Frank Gees Black; Renee Métivier Black (Ed.): The Harney Papers . Van Gorcum, Assen 1969

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In German translation after William Brustein and Louisa Roberts: The Socialism of Fools ?: Leftist Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism. Cambridge University Press. New York 2015, p. 144. (excerpts can be read on google books. [1] )
  2. ↑ Chartism . In: Dictionary of History . Volume I. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1984, p. 153.