violent.[1] His methods went down on Chartist platforms, but he never gained the ear of the House of Commons.
(3) Chartism and the Revolution of 1848
In 1848 a new impetus was given to the Chartist movement by the revolutionary disturbances which broke out in nearly every country of western Europe. The example of the foreign proletariat in revolt, and particularly the expulsion of the monarchy of July in favour of a French Republic with a social policy of national workshops, stirred up British malcontents to imitate the glorious doings of the Parisian revolutionaries.
Up to this point Chartism has presented itself to us mainly as a particularly British manifestation of specifically British grievances. But the problem of misery and its remedies had its universal as well as its insular aspect, and from the early days of the Working Men's Association, from which Chartism sprang, the cosmopolitan side of the common cause had not been lost sight of. The Chartist pioneer, Lovett, made it the pride of the Working Men's Association that, as early as 1836, it had introduced to Europe the mode of international addresses between working men of different countries.[2] For a decade the workers of the West, wrestling with legitimism, and the fruits of the Holy Alliance, and finding no salvation in the bourgeois rule which seemed the only alternative to traditional class domination, had looked for guidance from the comparative freedom of English political and social development. While Chartism stood in revolt against the middle-class ascendancy, established by the Reform Bill, the French Revolution of 1848 marked the triumph of the opposition to the similar principles of bourgeois ascendancy which had come in with the citizen king of the French. Thus the Continental democratic leaders hoped for assistance from the Chartist pioneers of proletarian revolt, while the Chartists themselves rejoiced to find brethren and allies among the workers beyond seas.
- ↑ Thus he addressed the Weekly Despatch: "You unmitigated ass! You sainted fool! You canonised ape! There is not a working man in England who has not more confidence in me than in any banker in the world, and so he ought, you nincompoop!" (Northern Star, September 25, 1847).
- ↑ Lovett's Life and Struggles, pp. 98-100. In that year the W.M.A. sent an address to Belgian workers and received an answer from them. In 1844 Lovett joined in forming a society of the "Democratic Friends of all Nations," largely composed of refugees, which aimed at promoting international brotherhood by pacific addresses.
