Radicals, Revolutionaries and Change

Dear all,

Today I want to bring you a post on something big, something that I hope will be a fulfilling read for all of you. It is about the nature of radical change. Specifically, I want to describe how radical change happens. From what I just said, this topic may seem a bit abstract. Do bear with me, I promise to de-mystify it.

Radical, revolutionary change often seems to be both almost instantaneous and inevitable. Revolutions, looked at from the future are seen in the light what eventually happened. The regicide of the French or English Revolutions give a misleading picture of both events. This sort of radical ending gives an impression that the breakdown in an existing regime leads directly and almost inevitably to said radicalism.

This could not be further from the truth. In fact, revolutions are often result from many smaller revolutionary moments. Each smaller revolutionary moment adds up, little by little, to create something transformative. It is this what I want to establish – that fundamentally, revolutions and radical change are incremental in character.

What interests me the most, then, is how existing authorities allow this sort of radical change to happen. If radicalism is slow and incremental, then why don’t the existing authorities end it? This is a good question, and I think I have an answer. Radical change, revolutions specifically, often have some initial degree of consent with existing authorities. Existing authorities often ‘co-opt’ the legitimacy of new ideas to mitigate their weaknesses. What in fact happens when they do this, is that they tacitly accept the legitimacy of these new ideas. By doing this, they normalise them, give them political space and often come to rely on them for political legitimacy. In fact, often, this act of ‘co-option’ of new ideas actually heightens the shedding of political support for the regime – as I will explain.

What this blog post aims to establish is how this happens. I will attempt to explain it first by looking at the ‘incremental’ nature of revolutions. The second part will look at how ‘co-option’ of radical ideas is often counterproductive.

PART 1 - ‘Incrementalism’

Before I look at Revolution and radical change, I want to give a working definition of what I actually mean. Revolution and radical change involves two key things. The first is that the government both significantly and rapidly changes path because of domestic political forces. The second is that this change is informed by radical ideas. ‘Radical’ in this sense means that it tackles essential structures in the existing order. Often, but not always, this involves changing either the power of the political elites or replacing them entirely.

As I mentioned in the introduction, often some forms of radical change are seen as instantaneous. Take say, Revolution. The time in which a Revolution takes – often less than a year – seems to misleadingly suggest that they are one discrete event. I want to pose a different model of radical change – this is one of many ‘mini revolutions’ leading into a bigger event. Often this is a slow process where the radicals and conservatives co-exist in a shared framework with no monopolisation of legitimate force. Radicals tend to gain, but this is slow and does not destroy this framework, merely alters it.

Let’s look at an example of radical change first as a case study in how this works. For the first part of my argument I will use the 1789 French Revolution. The French Revolution seems like a quick moving set of events that can be roughly summarised as the following: Louis XVI calls the Estates General, Louis XVI loses control of the situation, then Louis XVI gets his head chopped off and a the First Republic is established. This is not a bad simplistic interpretation - it is roughly what happened. However, this view from above is quite misleading. For one, it assumes that the moment Louis XVI lost control was practically instantaneous and this led to him also to lose his head. In reality things are a lot more confusing. When we look into the events as they happened, things look a lot more like an inescapable tug of war. Like a tug of war, each failure brings Louis XVI closer to the guillotine, but no one failure puts him there. Like a tug of war, Louis sometimes wins, but ultimately these victories are not sufficient to save him in the face of his bigger failures. It is in essence a struggle, and each part of the struggle is needed to understand the whole thing.

‘Incrementalism’ in the French Revolution

To see what I’m on about let’s have a look at the events as they actually happened. The story does not actually begin in 1789, but many years earlier. The critical loss of authority was gradual – it had to be for Louis to lose so much power. In 1774, Louis XVI came to the throne. He inherited a monarchy that most would be envious of. It was politically stable – no one could question his legitimacy to rule – and although it had some problems, these were not existential. As time went on, Louis slowly but surely burned through financial and political capital – albeit with some successes. In order to repair the international reputation of France, which had been badly hit by losses in the 7 Years’ War, Louis bet on American Independence. As a result, after the USA won the war of American independence in 1783, the French regained its international prestige, and Louis won significant domestic approval. At the same time, however, he put the French state under unprecedented financial pressure. The loans taken out in the war were crippling for France. It was this financial pressure which would eventually make the French state bankrupt, and force it to take the steps that would lead to revolution. The one lesson we should take from this, is that this was start of a long game of ‘tug-of-war’. One failure brought Louis incrementally closer to his eventual fate. However, like a tug-of-war, this was not a shedding of political power – instead Louis did see some victories as well. The winning of the American War of Independence provided him with immense domestic and foreign prestige, which enabled him to establish a reputation as a good king.

The financial crisis necessitated Louis took radical steps to retain control. Long story short, this involved asking a series of representative institutions to legitimise tax-reform policies needed to stave off a debt default. First came the Assembly of Notables. They said no to the reforms. Poor communication, poor politics and poor management by Louis’ minister Calonne made a handpicked group of nobles oppose essential tax-reforms. Next came more mismanagement with another institution, the Paris Parlement. The Parlement was exiled and refused to assent to Louis’ reforms. Eventually Louis called another institution – the ‘Estates General’ - as he was not able to inspire enough confidence in his regime to continue borrowing money from foreign lenders. For Louis, this was a major defeat. To understand this, I should point out that the Estates General were especially worrying for Louis. Why? Well, this institution had an element of popular legitimacy. It had three ‘estates’, each one of which represented a different portion of the population. It was therefore feted as something approximating a French version of the English Parliament. Louis, an absolute monarch, was therefore reluctant to call it. Again, this is another ‘mini revolution’. He lost authority slowly through a series of political failures. Each failure made progression of the revolution possible. What is also important to point out here is that the existing regime lost control before radical ideas could affect change. It was only to retain financial solvency that Louis took his first step towards revolutionary change – in this sense the regime has to lose or cede authority before revolution.

The process of ‘incrementalism’ continued. At the opening of the Estates General, the previous regime lost a considerable degree of political capital. Louis accidently fell asleep at the opening session. His chief minister, Necker, who was popular almost universally, gave a dull speech that failed to inspire confidence in a Royal-led Estates General. As this was going on, new ideas started to abound about what the Estates General actually meant. Increasingly, those in the Third Estate of the Estate General saw themselves as something close to a ‘French Parliament’. There were calls for some degree of popular legitimacy in a new French constitution. These ideas, unimaginable less than a year earlier had come about because of very specific conditions. If the Estates General had not been called, those in the Estates General would not have had an outlet for their demands for reform. In this sense, those wanting relatively conservative constitutional reform in 1789 could only do so because of a critical loss of authority from the centre. The events of this period of 1789 are very complex, and can be broken down again and again. The point is, though, that Louis makes a series of bad decisions and eventually loses control of the Estates General. The former members of this assembly form a new ‘National Assembly’ which is declared sovereign and representative of the nation. This is radical for France at the time, but we should not kid ourselves of the nature of this radicalism – Louis still has considerable power within the system. He had a loyalist monarchist base in the Assembly, had a veto and also was extraordinarily popular across the whole political system. For many in 1789, this constitutional settlement seemed like the end of the revolution – Louis was not the object of hatred that for many he would later become. He was a patriot-king, and if anything recent events seemed to provide proof for this narrative. To get rid of him in mid-1789 was unthinkable.

What happened? Well, in the words of Harold MacMillan, ‘events, my dear boy’. Again, its complex, and the act of describing it in a word limited blog post is difficult. In one sentence, though, there was a radicalisation of politics in Paris. This was slow, but as people began to interpret the importance of the ‘Revolution’, new things became acceptable, mainstream and conceivable. The ideas of the most radical philosophers of the past 50 years, like Rousseau, were taken to their extreme. An absence of coercive force monopolised by one party allowed unpalatable radicalism to develop. This needs to be emphasised, for it is this lack of coercive power that allowed incremental advances to slowly build up into something so radical. However, this is not the whole story. There were three things that specifically pushed radicalism forward in 1791-2. The first was the failed attempt by Louis XVI to flee to Austria. This up-ended the narrative of Louis being a patriot-king. Now he was tarred with the brush of being a traitor to France. It would be very hard for him to retain any real power under these conditions. When he tried to use his Veto after this failed flight, he was met by the mob in Paris. He was almost killed, but due to his own personal bravery survived, albeit with his real authority permanently damaged. The second was a declaration of war on Austria. In radical communities, this heightened fear significantly. The revolutionaries justifiably worried that a loss of a war to Austria would mean the end of the revolution. The end of the revolution would almost guarantee the end of everything they stood for as well as their deaths. This fear made the third thing that happen. Power was given to the Jacobins. The Jacobins were extremists who wished to defend the revolution at any cost. In the paranoid atmosphere of 1792, they saw enemies to the Revolution everywhere. Most notably they saw this threat in the form of Louis XVI, and it was this perception of the threat that led to Louis XVI’s death in January 1793.

Conclusions about Incrementalism

This passage shows a few key things. The first is that it, as the historian William Doyle argues, that revolutionary change was only possible after the collapse of monarchical authority. This is true, but one more thing needs to be drawn out here. This is that Louis often consented to the loss of his authority, mainly because at any one time the perceived loss of authority was relatively small. Louis more or less allowed his authority to dissipate. However, he only did this because it was a question of losing all his power at once. It was a gradual process, and in this context the event of the Revolution make a lot of sense. The only way that such a politically stable and strong monarchy would have allowed the loss of its authority is if it never had to make a decision to lose it all at once. Louis and his ministers believed that he could retain a lot of his authority through compromise. As it turned out, this was a fatal mistake, but it does go a long way to explaining events.

In essence then, Louis continued to have a significant degree of initiative throughout the process, and was more or less responsible for his loss of power. This explains a lot, especially how constitutional change could happen so quickly, but it does not explain everything.

There is something else that needs to be explained. This is the way the radical constitutional changes became imaginable. Like the loss of monarchical authority in the revolution, this was a fundamentally incremental process. Only with the collapse of authority in mid-1789 was it possible to imagine a French ‘Parliament’. Before this, French liberals had generally pointed to past models for models of resistance. They had asserted the rights of the French Parlement, and generally, wanted restrictions on absolute monarchy, rather than a wholesale restructuring of it. From mid-1789 onwards radicalism changed. Now that a National Assembly was the accepted fact of political order in France, radicalism gained a different hue. It became possible to imagine popular sovereignty in new, more radical ways because their previous aims had been achieved. This took time, and only as the revolution became quasi-sacred for liberal revolutionaries would better, newer ideas gain coherence. The Jacobins started to demand more things, now that their initial aims had been achieved. They took notions loosely accepted in 1789 as the basis for the new order and reasoned to their most radical logical conclusions. This was the birth of those radical ideas that became associated with the revolution – like the Terror and the death of the King.

Both of these processes described need to be understood through ‘incrementalism’. Each event only made sense in the light of the conditions it came from. The end-result of total revolution in 1793-4 was completely unimaginable in 1780. Incremental changes occurring rapidly in sequence to one another allowed change to become something that we would call ‘radical’. Before I move on, I would like to establish that this is common to other types of radical change too by illustrating that this is a characteristic of other periods of radical change.

‘Incrementalism’ in English and Russian Revolutions

In both Russian Revolution and in the English ‘Revolution’ really radical change was only possible in similar conditions to France. Like in France, in Russia, the Tsar gradually lost authority. After political instability in 1905, he came to rely on a form of constitutional monarchy for legitimacy. Reform was attempted by the Stolypin ministry, but the Tsar eschewed reform by 1911 once he felt politically able to do so. As a result, the Tsar was supported by a decreasing numbers in the political elite. This process was sped up by the First World War. In this, socio-economic and political troubles turned septic. By early 1917, the Tsar had lost support across the political spectrum. His core allies in the established elite abandoned him in favour of a liberal government. This was a Russian ‘mini revolution’ that allowed previously inconceivable ideas to gain currency. The war continued, and the liberals increasingly allied themselves with workers parties to maintain legitimacy. As the war dragged on, the socio-economic pressures on Russia intensified and the Russian state became unpopular once again. Now, even more radical ideas became possible, thinkable and popular. Among these was Vladimir Lenin’s radical Bolsheviks. As in the French Revolution, the fact these ideas occupied political space was only possible due to the previous ‘mini revolutions’. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, it was as a result of several cumulative ‘mini revolutions’. Movement, gradual and accepted as reasonable by the elites at any one time accumulates slowly to up-end everything.

In England in the 1640s something similar happened. Like the two other revolutions mentioned, there was a long pre-history where Charles I got himself into a weak position. Like the French Revolution, he was forced to call a representative institution that he initially had eschewed to resolve a financial crisis. In 1640, parliament was called to raise finance to fight Scottish rebels. Unfortunately for Charles, parliament also had significant grievances. At first parliament was relatively conservative in redressing these. It legislated to end the universally unpopular ship money and forest fines. This continued, but as time went on things changed. The most radical in Parliament gained in confidence and began the process of whittling away the prerogatives of the king. This was deeply unpopular for some, who saw parliament as overstepping its traditional role. Like in 1789, this was only possible in light of previous circumstances. It was only because there was such consensus with earlier reforms that parliament no longer had much it could agree on. Realising this division, Charles created a loyalist base and fled from London. It was from here that Charles began the English civil war. Charles, despite initial successes, lost the war. During the civil war, in the absence of authority, there was growing radicalism in the parliamentary army. As in the French Revolution, the model of political organisation desired was only imaginable in the conditions of the civil war. Parliament’s New Model Army allowed the development of new ideas to spread which threatened the centrality of previous forms of legitimacy. For some radicals, returning to a monarchical system was not ruled out, but not the key aim. After the Civil War, Charles and the other parties of the conflict attempted to reach an agreement. Charles started playing off the Army, Scots and Parliament against each other, by doing so he tested each of these parties to their limits. Unfortunately for Charles, it turned out that some parties cared more about other things than his political and physical survival. The army, realising what Charles was doing, and under pressure from the ideologically motivated rank-and-file put Charles on trial and executed him. In this sense, Charles lost authority gradually. His loss of authority provided the conceptual space for new ideas. More new ideas developed as the previously radical ideas became normalised. As in 1789 and 1917 radical change that was not conceivable at the start of the process became so, and became a dominant political force in its own right due to incremental change.

PART 2 - ‘Co-option’

Introduction to the theory of ‘co-option’

I want to look in how radical change can actually happen in the face of authorities so utterly opposed to it – how can a strong regime lose so much power to such an opposed force? In the previous section, I hinted at the need for consent of the existing regime in most forms of radical change. The fact this is the case is very interesting, and something that is worth exploring. I think there are a few things to highlight crucial to this part of my argument. The first is, as I’ve said, that consent of the existing regime is often essential to lose its authority. The second is that often existing regimes try to ‘co-opt’ the legitimacy of new ideas to meet their objectives in times of perceived crisis. This often can occur to when the option is either this or the complete overhaul of the system. The third is that this act of ‘co-option’ weakens the foundations for the legitimacy of the regime at a time when it most needs it. This is key. The fact that new forms of legitimacy have been integrated into the old order often gives official sanction to the ideas that underpin this new form of legitimacy. They become normalised, and the standard point of reference for politics. As a result, the institutional pillars of the previous order become non-essential. At a time of radical change, where the existing regime is already weak, this is often results in far more radical change than leaders bargained for.

A thing to emphasise here is that for ‘co-option’ of a different sort of political legitimacy to translate into radical change needs one major condition. This is that the existing regime does not have complete control of the situation. This needs to be emphasised, as if existing authorities have complete control, ‘co-option’ can often actually be the best thing to shore up the legitimacy of the existing regime. I will go into more detail of this precise point on my next blog post, and this argument will be implicit throughout the rest of the post.

As with last time, these ideas need some clarification through reference to actual radical change. This time, I will be looking at Italian Unification. As you will no doubt know if you are at all familiar with this blog, I am really keen on this topic. I happen to also think it is also a fascinating example of the interaction of ‘co-option’ of radical ideas leading to further revolution. In essence, Italy was mostly divided as a political entity before 1860. Many felt strong ties to their local community or state rather than ‘Italy’. However, there was a growing number of individuals who believed that Italy needed to unite. This nationalist movement was relatively limited in scale, but seemed to be stronger than it actually was. From the 1830s onwards, there seemed to be clamouring for a United Italy. This movement was closely associated with demands for liberal reforms of the economy and constitution. The evidence for demand for change was found across the peninsula. Books were being published by those such as Gioberti, d’Azeglio and Balbo that looked for practical steps to achieve Unification. More threatening, however, was there was a radical streak to the nationalist movement – specifically in the organisation ‘Young Italy’. This organisation, led by Giuseppe Mazzini, provided a shock to those in Italy with political power. Several ‘revolutions’ were sparked across Italy by Mazzini. They all failed. Realistically, they stood no chance of success - the amount of people that wanted Italian Unification was very small indeed. However, don’t think that this didn’t mean that these ‘revolutions’ were a complete failure. They provided a false signal of the scale, strength and vitality of the Italian national movement to political elites. ‘Nationalism’ was seen as a force to be reckoned with, even if this perception was largely false.

In 1848, there was an outbreak of Revolution across the Italian peninsula. These can provide us with the first example of what I mean in Italy. Numerous states across the peninsula had revolutions. Two are worth focusing on. The first, in the Papal States – the temporal realm of the Pope – saw attempts to ally with revolutionaries to maintain control. The Pope, from his election in 1846 made liberal and nationalist noises. When revolution struck across Europe in 1848, he reacted to stave it off in his realm. Instead of taking a tough line, he tried to control liberalism by working with it. He appointed a liberal Prime Minister – Pellegrino Rossi. By doing so, he tacitly accepted the legitimacy of liberalism. Moderate liberalism, once extreme, became commonplace. Radical liberalism, once unthinkable became politically and legally acceptable.

Example of ‘Co-option’, Papal States 1848

Across the Papal States, liberals and radicals supported the Pope’s rule. They also controlled the streets in these turbulent months. As they supported the Pope’s liberalism, this was acceptable for both parties and a somewhat happy compromise. However, the liberals’ commitment to the Pope was only as deep as the Pope’s commitment to radicalism. When the Pope refused to support efforts to establish an Italian-wide state and his chief minister was assassinated, the Pope realised the weakness of his position. By accepting the demands of the liberals he had allowed power to be tacitly shared with them. He came to rely on their goodwill for control in the streets, which was fine, but only if the Pope and radicals happened to be ideologically aligned. He therefore had accidentally allowed himself to lose real power, and when he tried to exercise his nominal power, he lost control in Rome.

The Pope fled, saving his life, but formally losing his political dominance. In the place of the Pope’s political dominance came the Roman Republic. This Republic, headed by the radicals Mazzini and Garibaldi, was truly radical. It wanted a national liberal state, and it would not settle for anything less. It wanted to destroy every aspect of the previous order to achieve this. This therefore provides a good explanation of how radicalism can be allowed to develop by existing regimes.

Piedmont and ‘Co-option’ in 1848

1848 also began a much longer and more interesting trend in mid-19th Century history. It began the process of Piedmont using nationalism to meet its traditional dynastic objectives. The Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, as Piedmont was formally known, was a predominantly Italian state that straddled today’s Franco-Italian borders. It was relatively powerful, controlling almost all of North West Italy. Most importantly perhaps, it was outside of the influence of Austria which was politically dominant over the peninsula post-1815. It should be noted that the Piedmontese monarchy had a long-standing ambition to oust the Austrians as the politically dominant force of northern Italy. It is into this context that the events of 1848-1860 should be understood.

In both 1848 and 1860, Piedmont would attempt to ‘co-opt’ nationalism to justify expansion. Carlo Alberto, the King of Piedmont spearheaded this in 1848. In March 1848, having seen that ‘revolution’ was spreading across Europe, most notably in the Southern Italian Kingdom of Naples and in France, he became worried about radicalism in Piedmont. Carlo Alberto attempted to ‘co-opt’ radical liberalism and nationalism to achieve his traditional dynastic aims and avoid revolution. He did this by appealing to liberals and nationalists. For the liberals, he attempted to compromise with the liberals of Piedmont through granting a constitution – known as ‘the Statuto’. To appease the nationalists, he declared war on the Austrians in the name of creating a united Italy. In reality, this was an attempt to establish Piedmontese dominance over the north while simultaneously staving off real revolution. For varying reasons, the conquest failed. For one, it became really clear what Carlo Alberto’s real motives were when he focused on establishing dominance of the north rather than whole of Italy. In addition, the Pope condemned the venture just before the critical battle, meaning many Catholic Italian volunteers refused to contribute. In any case, the numbers of Italian nationalists volunteers was so small that Piedmontese victory would have always been unlikely. By late 1848, Carlo Alberto had abdicated after two defeats at the hands of the Austrians.

‘Co-Option’ in Piedmont in 1848

The later attempt for Piedmont to use nationalism to expand was more effective. In 1860, the ‘co-option’ of nationalism by Piedmont created unprecedented and radical change on the Italian peninsula. This time, unlike in 1848, change on the peninsula was initiated by Piedmont. This is important to emphasise. Camillo di Cavour, the Prime Minister of Piedmont in the 1850s saw that we had to negotiate a ‘juste mileau’ – middle road – to control and temper progress. ‘Progress’ Cavour saw as inevitably moving forward through history and was often desirable. However, he believed that as with the French Revolution, if it happened too rapidly it could have disastrous, destructive consequences. It is in this context, that in the late 1850s Cavour courted Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, to help in a war against Austria who controlled large swathes of Italy. He wanted war in order to establish some form of ‘juste mileau’ to take the sting out of nationalism while simultaneously meeting traditional Piedmontese dynastic aims. The important thing here was Cavour was the initiator of change and was not forced into a corner by a crisis. This shows that the process of ‘co-option’ can either be offensive or defensive. Cavour was lucky, as it just so happened that Napoleon III was looking for a war to shore up his popularity. It is important to emphasise Cavour’s aims were moderate here. The plan was for an Italian federation, with the Pope as President and France as protector. He wanted northern Italian domination for Piedmont, but nothing more than this. This was not that radical.

However, things did not end up like this. After two really bloody battles – Magenta and Solferino – the French and Austrians made peace. The Franco-Piedmontese forces were winning, but total victory had not been achieved. The peace gave only Lombardy to Piedmont, and ensured Austria continued political dominance over the peninsula. This should have been an Austrian victory. However, Austria was diplomatically and militarily weak and did not have sufficient resources to implement what this peace gave it by right. Due to Austria’s weakness, Piedmont was able to move in. Piedmont used the rhetoric of Italian nationalism to establish political dominance of the whole of Northern Italy. This included places that Piedmont never really intended to take, but it was politically difficult to refuse. As Piedmont had dressed up its blatant expansion in the clothes and rhetoric and nationalism, it was politically difficult not to. Piedmont took the Austrian dominated north. The stable centre and south of Italy were left as independent – these regions did not rely on Austrian support.

Drawing out the fact the act of dressing up aims in politically radical rhetoric put constraints on Piedmont is important. This would put Piedmont in a political straightjacket over the next year. The first example of this is that in 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi, a radical soldier and nationalist, was able to take roughly a thousand troops to attack Sicily. Let me tell you why. Garibaldi was dangerous to Cavour. He threatened to create a new state that was legitimate because it was Italian. This would inevitably threaten the legitimacy of the half-Italian hybrid that Cavour had created in 1859 with Piedmont. This Piedmontese hybrid would be shown for what it was – an attempt at Piedmontese exapansion. It is interesting that Garibaldi was allowed to leave for Sicily in the name of Italy. It would have been possible for Cavour to stop him, as he left from the Piedmontese port of Genoa. However, Cavour was not able to do so because he was politically trapped. Piedmontese expansion could only be justified if it was dressed up as a form of nationalism. He therefore was constrained in his ability to stop the actions of prominent Italian nationalists. Why would a state that claims legitimacy from being ‘Italian’ stop further unification? It wouldn’t have made any sense. It was politically impossible for Cavour to stop Garibaldi. So, understandably, Cavour let Garibaldi leave for Sicily. This process of ‘co-option’ putting political constraints on the Piedmontese state would continue.

Garibaldi’s significance would not end here. Let us refocus on his expedition to Sicily. Up until this point, Sicily had been ruled by Naples. In 1860, however, Sicily was in revolt against these rulers. This made it easy for Garibaldi to gather support against the authorities. He made progress and conquered the whole of Southern Italy. This alarmed Cavour. Garibaldi threatened to create an Italian state in the South of the peninsula. As we have seen already, Cavour’s worry was that this would expose the extent to which he was relying on Italian nationalism as a tool, rather than an end in itself. Piedmont would no longer be the state pushing for Italian nationalism, and would have no claim to the territories it was occupying. It was a recipe for instability or civil war. Cavour therefore really had very little choice at this point. Either Garibaldi would attempt to establish a truly Italian state or Piedmont would have to reach some agreement with Garibaldi. Cavour rushed south with the Piedmontese army, and fortunately for him, Garibaldi accepted a Piedmontese-led Italy. The ‘handshake at Teano’ formalised Italian unity. Therefore, radical change happened in Piedmont against the wishes of Cavour. Cavour had ‘co-opted’ an idea. This new idea then became a force in its own right, and pushed against the boundaries of the possible.

The conclusions we should draw from Italian unification is that radical change can happen through ‘co-opting’ new ideas in a moderate form. In order to expand, Piedmont ‘co-opted’ a new, potentially radical idea, that of nationalism. Piedmont then lost control because of its simultaneous reliance on this new form of legitimacy and the development of events. As events progressed in an already unstable environment, Piedmont had to choose. Either abandon its previous commitments or lose its essential legitimacy. It chose the only sensible option, and this is the root of the creation of Italy.

‘Co-option’ in the French Revolution

Finally, I want to show that this is not just a phenomenon unique to Italy, but is rather common. I will quickly show how it also applied to the French Revolution.

Let’s look at France first. As we have seen, Louis at certain points was able to occupy what seemed like a happy medium between liberalism and monarchism. After he had legitimised the National Assembly in mid-1789, Louis XVI increasingly relied on liberalism and liberal forces. Authority became blurred. Louis more or less allowed it to become blurred. What I did not mention in my previous summary is the events that occurred between 1789 and 1791. These events saw the slow waning of his real authority as he came the revolutionaries slowly assumed his powers.

In October 1789, one of the most key of these events meant he lost a critical degree of real power. On the 5th October 1789, several thousand marchers, mainly women, dragged the King from his Palace at Versailles to Paris. The marchers feared that Louis, the good king, was being influenced by a dangerous cabal of reactionary aristocrats in his Palace at Versailles. Louis did not have sufficient troops to repel the mob. He was taken to Paris, where the mob was common and he had even fewer troops. He was therefore, unquestionably, at the mercy of the mob.

It is important to add that at the same time, the people of Paris did not want to get rid of him. He was a figurehead for the revolution, and many loved him for the’ liberty’ he had provided them. He was therefore reliant on the goodwill of the people of Paris and the National Assembly. This was made possible by his ‘co-option’ of the legitimacy of the new liberal ideas. Louis was a legitimate monarch not because he was the monarch, but because he was sympathetic to radical liberal concerns. This meant he lost authority without a confrontation with the protestors. He lost his authority because he became a part of a bigger system. He was undoubtedly part of this, but his presence was not essential for the existence of this new system. He lost his centrality to the system. At a time of instability and rapid political shifts, this was a very dangerous position to be in. As we have seen, he quickly lost authority as the shallowness of his commitment to liberal reform became clear. It ultimately explains why he could lose his authority so easily – he was no longer a central player, just a figurehead. This shows, again, how ‘co-option’ of new ideas can be very dangerous indeed for an existing regime.

Conclusion

In this way, the process of ‘co-option’ of the legitimacy of new ideas is often the crux around which radical change occurs. It provides an explanation of how a regime can lose authority so unwillingly so easily. By relying on new forces, things that were valued as central to the old regime become secondary, and therefore dispensable. At a time or rapid political change, which tends to be when regimes have some real or perceived need to change, this is often deadly.

Yours,

WFF