William Rathbone Greg has not been well served by the historiography of Victorian ideas. An exceptionally prolific and wide-ranging writer on political, social, religious, and economic issues, his name is a familiar sight across the literature on mid-nineteenth-century British thought and culture. Greg may not have stood in the front rank of public moralists, but there is no question that he was a conspicuous figure in the intellectual landscape of the period.Footnote 1 His essays, however, are more often cited than they are studied. Historians cannot really claim to know what his overarching vision of politics was, or what themes unified his output. Most scholars classify Greg as a Liberal, but what his work can tell us about the intellectual architecture of mid-Victorian Liberalism remains unclear.
The few existing studies of aspects of Greg's politics hint at important possibilities, as well as highlighting how elusive he has been. Richard Helmstadter's examination of Greg's biblical criticism and economic thought argues that his work had a definite unity, with his views on different issues forming “a coherent mosaic in which the parts clearly interrelate.”Footnote 2 Greg's rejection of orthodox Christianity was, in this analysis, of a piece with his condemnation of an effete and outworn aristocracy.Footnote 3 For Gregory Conti, writing more recently, Greg was by contrast an unsystematic thinker who did not prioritize theoretical consistency.Footnote 4 Nonetheless, he was “as interesting as any figure from the period,” and his reflections on parliamentary representation were distinctive.Footnote 5 Conti has also drawn attention to the striking resemblances between Greg's political thought and that of Walter Bagehot, his intimate friend and a fixture in the Victorian canon.Footnote 6
Most historians deal with Greg more cursorily. Scholars have drawn on his writings in relation to many of the leading creeds and problems which organized Victorian Britain, including utilitarianism, “Manchesterism,” industrialism, political economy, social science, democracy, the slave trade, the women's movement, statesmanship, higher criticism, and Darwinism.Footnote 7 With most discussions of Greg resting on one or two of his articles, it is no surprise that his politics have not been characterized consistently. A. V. Dicey, writing in the 1900s, saw Greg both as one of a number of “rigid utilitarians” who had turned towards a “peculiar conservatism” after mid-century, and as “the representative of economists and mill-owners”; A. W. Benn picked him out as an agent of Unitarian intellectual trends.Footnote 8 Historians working more recently have offered a wide variety of readings. Some place Greg as a “conservative,” others as a “Whig,” others even as a “Whig of the traditional school.”Footnote 9 More often he is a “liberal journalist,” a “good liberal,” “a spokesman for Manchester liberalism,” or, more precisely, “essentially a conservative member of the Manchester school.”Footnote 10 The soundest estimate is offered by Jonathan Parry, who describes Greg as an “ex-Manchester School radical” and “utilitarian,” one of a number of “[h]ard-headed rational intellects” aligned with the Liberals who supported interventionist policy in the field of social reform, belonging ultimately to the expansive category of “Whig–Liberal.”Footnote 11 What nearly all this work has in common, however, is that it treats Greg as an insular thinker, focused on problems in Britain. This was emphatically not the case, and appears to be an artefact of the omission of nearly all Greg's writing on foreign politics from the published collections of essays on which most historians have relied.
This article attempts to do two things. The first is to pin down the foundations of Greg's political thought. The article positions Greg as a leading spokesman for the rationalistic, antidemocratic strand within mid-Victorian Liberalism. It argues that his thinking centred on the idea that politics was a science, and that scientific statesmanship offered the best hope of solving the social and political problems of his age. In elaborating these claims, Greg wrote extensively about politics overseas, and especially about the internal politics of the major Continental states. The second aim of the article is to do justice to Greg's thinking on Europe, and especially his real overseas fascination: France. That he had an interest in French politics has been noted by Georgios Varouxakis, but Varouxakis follows Greg only as far as the Revolution of 1848.Footnote 12 This was before Greg's writing career had begun in earnest, and in fact he went on to become one of the most authoritative mid-Victorian interpreters of Napoleon III's Second Empire. Even The Spectator, which often took issue with his claims, conceded after his death that “[n]o writer of the day forced Englishmen to look so closely at those French facts which were most disagreeable to them, as Mr. Greg,” and it is certainly true that Greg subjected Bonapartist despotism to one of the closest political-scientific anatomies of the period.Footnote 13 The broader purpose of the article, then, is to explore where European politics—and especially European politics of the “Caesarist” variety, often seen as a defining counterpoint to Liberal aspirations and doctrines in the nineteenth-century world—fitted within the intellectual landscapes of conservative Victorian Liberalism.Footnote 14
The rest of the article is in three parts. The first examines Greg's environments, his assumptions, and his guiding political principles. The second deals with his attitudes towards Continental politics in general. The last part then explores his analysis of French politics in particular, and especially of the imperial rise and fall of Napoleon III.
W. R. Greg and scientific Liberalism
Even the writer of one of the only nineteenth-century memoirs of Greg admitted that the circumstances of his life “offer little that is striking to record.”Footnote 15 His experiences are, nonetheless, important for making sense of his mature political views. William Rathbone Greg, born in 1809, was a scion of the Greg family of industrialists, headquartered at Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire. He was raised a Unitarian, and sent to Lant Carpenter's school in Bristol and to university at Edinburgh, where he associated with Charles Darwin.Footnote 16 There he became fascinated with animal magnetism and phrenology, the latter the subject of his first publication.Footnote 17 He began writing on politics overseas in 1833, in a pamphlet on Greece and Turkey, based on his travels around Europe after graduation.Footnote 18 Most of the next two decades were spent working increasingly disconsolately in the family textile business, which Greg succeeding in running into the ground in 1850. During these years he became heavily involved in Manchester cultural and political life, cofounding the Manchester Statistical Society in 1833, standing unsuccessfully for Parliament for Lancaster in 1837, and campaigning for Corn Law Repeal in the early 1840s.Footnote 19 In 1847 Greg became a contributor to the Economist newspaper, and from 1850 he devoted himself fully to literature.Footnote 20 These pursuits were leavened by his accession to a seat on the Board of Customs in 1856 (secured for him by the Liberal minister George Cornewall Lewis), which necessitated a move to London, and translation to the Stationery Office as controller in 1864, in which capacity Greg materially reduced governmental consumption of quill pens.Footnote 21 He continued to travel widely, as far afield as Egypt. He became well connected in London society, thanks especially to his intimate relationship with Walter Bagehot after 1858, and to memberships of the Athenaeum and the Metaphysical Society later on. His acquaintance was a litany of the mid-Victorian intellectual aristocracy: A. H. Clough, Herbert Spencer, James Fitzjames Stephen, J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, Nassau Senior, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, James Martineau, Cornewall Lewis, Earl Grey, Francis Newman.Footnote 22 He also moved in elevated circles in France, corresponding and sometimes staying with Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in complimentary terms of Greg's work.Footnote 23 It is not clear whether he met John Stuart Mill, but Mill certainly read some of his publications.Footnote 24 All the while Greg wrote like a train. He published more than 150 lengthy periodical articles, which form the main basis for this article.Footnote 25 He was responsible for six collections of essays, made up mainly of his periodical writing.Footnote 26 He produced a major work of biblical criticism, The Creed of Christendom, in 1851, and two books on politics and religion towards the end of his career.Footnote 27 He died in 1881, attracting neither a Life nor a collected works thereafter.
Greg's contemporaries recognized him as a significant figure. Various literary and political luminaries, of the order of Goldwin Smith and John Morley, engaged critically with his writing, and offered appraisals of his thought.Footnote 28 Lord Acton cited two of Greg's essay collections in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge.Footnote 29 Thomas Carlyle, more summarily, called him “a writing Hodman of some name.”Footnote 30 But Victorian commentators were split over whether Greg was a distinctive thinker or a representative man. In some accounts he wrote with unusual independence from all sections of opinion, and with considerable originality of conception.Footnote 31 In others he had no views of his own, and simply reflected middle-class trains of thought.Footnote 32 There was further debate about whether his attitudes had changed over time, or whether he had remained consistent.Footnote 33 Greg was strikingly described by the Liberal politician and imperial administrator Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, writing in the 1890s, as “an almost perfect example of the typical English liberal, as English liberals were during the first thirty years of the reign of the Queen .”Footnote 34 As we will see, it is not a coincidence that Grant Duff's time frame ends with the Second Reform Act in 1867. Taking their judgments together, it is clear that Greg's contemporaries recognized him as a Liberal, and one deserving of serious consideration. But what kind of Liberal?
We might begin with the terminology and the reference points Greg himself used. He did not regard himself as a Utilitarian, and in fact explicitly rejected the philosophy. He certainly did not see himself as a Whig, believing that the party and the creed had run their course by 1850.Footnote 35 While he owed part of his political education to Manchester, Greg was never a political “radical” in any sense beyond supporting free trade, and he maintained that the “Manchester school” had turned in the wrong direction after 1848.Footnote 36 He did think that “Liberalism” was the great political tendency of his age, and that its advance was to be welcomed. And he did fitfully describe himself and his views as “Liberal.”Footnote 37 But he was anything but an enthusiastic supporter of the Liberal Party. Greg found all its leaders distasteful, for different reasons. Russell was too partisan and doctrinaire; Palmerston's character made him unfit to lead at times of crisis; Gladstone was exceptionally able, but erratic, and dangerously wrong about the merits of popular judgment in politics.Footnote 38 As this suggests, Greg's Liberalism had (as his memorialist put it) “strong conservative elements,” and he apparently talked when a younger man about becoming a conservative after Corn Law repeal and education reform had been achieved.Footnote 39 But by the 1850s Greg was positioning himself as a “conscientious opponent” of the Conservative Party.Footnote 40 He abominated Disraeli, a “mere gladiator,” and it was his opposition to Beaconsfieldian foreign policy that prompted him to break an established habit of not voting in 1880.Footnote 41 It is true that some contemporaries came to see Greg as a crypto-conservative: the London Review charged him in the 1860s with having “sacrificed everything of Liberal but the name.”Footnote 42 Most such criticism, however, centred on his opposition to the extension of the franchise, on which subject Greg was quite consistent.Footnote 43
So despite his support for religious liberty, free trade, and the principle of constitutional freedom, Greg was no partisan cheerleader. After the repeal of the Corn Laws, he celebrated few major legislative developments. Nor was he especially concerned with prognosticating the political future.Footnote 44 What he was mainly interested in was dissecting political systems. Appropriately for a manufacturer who had cut his journalistic teeth writing on political economy, Greg's abiding preoccupation was with how the gears in machines of state meshed together. He spent his life ruminating on the connections between organic reform, public opinion, and political leadership, and on the relations between institutions, national character, and political virtue. Greg rarely spelled out precisely what concrete measures ought to be taken in order to secure the best possible practical outcomes, in any area of policy: his emphasis was typically on the structures through which the best decisions would be reached.Footnote 45 Understanding modern politics at this more abstract level necessarily involved looking beyond Britain's shores, and thinking about how other advanced polities worked.
In undertaking these inquiries, Greg never strayed far from the concept of “science.” Doubtless this owed something to the centrality of the natural sciences within the Unitarian culture in which he had been raised.Footnote 46 But for Greg it became an organizing idea of unusual range and flexibility. At one time or another he referred to “social science,” “religious science,” “moral science,” “economic science,” “military science,” “agricultural science,” the “science of taxation,” the “science of statesmanship,” the “science of self-government,” and even “scientific fortresses.” For Greg, however, “science” was much more an ideal than it was a particular method. It was, moreover, a framework he took for granted, not one which required explanation, or assertions of allegiance to specific schools of thought. The kinds of categorical distinction Greg drew were between the “moral preacher” and the “scientific thinker,” and between the “scientific and mathematical” and the “practical and empirical”, rather than anything more precise.Footnote 47 If a distinct concept of “science” and “scientific” practice can be distilled from Greg's writing, the term seems simply to have denoted the systematic study of general principles, and in certain contexts, their comprehensive application. Very often the concept was placed closely in harness with, and sometimes acted as a synonym for, the more basic notion of “system.”Footnote 48 Greg saw merit in both the “mechanical” and “organic” modes of Victorian political and social science that historians have often ranged against one another: his steady commitment was to the value of rational, systematic, sustained inquiry.
For Greg, politics as much as anything else needed to be seen through this “scientific” lens. It was neither a game nor a high art: properly understood, it was “a science, on the thorough knowledge and right appreciation of which hang the progress, the welfare, and the dignity of nations.”Footnote 49 Greg's first collection, Essays on Political and Social Science, was one of the first volumes published in Victorian Britain to refer in its title to “political science.” Greg became one of the most prolific members of a mid-Victorian generation of writers who were seeking to develop new codifications of the workings of politics—and so influence its practice—through appropriately intensive study and reflection.Footnote 50 He deplored political commentators for whom “politics is not a science but a taste,” and often used analogies drawn from medicine and the physical sciences to make his framework unambiguously clear.Footnote 51
Greg's writings were, accordingly, heavy with references to other authorities. His main intellectual touchstones were the men he regarded as the great modern masters of political science: Tocqueville, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Burke.Footnote 52 Burke's writings, above all, were “perfect arsenals of political wisdom,” and what contemporaries would have started to regard as a classically “Burkean” hostility to radical reform infused Greg's political thinking.Footnote 53 John Stuart Mill stood slightly behind these figures, treated as significant mainly for his work on political economy, and by no means above criticism.Footnote 54 As the character of this pantheon suggests, there was little room for the past in Greg's vision of politics.Footnote 55 The romantic, backwards-looking schemes of Thomas Carlyle and Young England were anathema to Greg, as much on account of their philosophical underpinnings as of their practical Toryism.Footnote 56 His favourite historian, by a distance, was Thomas Arnold, for the simple reason that Arnold believed in laws of political science, and regarded them as the main lesson to be learned from history.Footnote 57 Greg wrote with warm approval of how Arnold's opinions on the general principles of politics were derived not from party affiliation, but from “the deliberate, scientific deductions of a mind profoundly versed in the rich stores of historical wisdom.”Footnote 58
In focusing his work in this way, Greg felt he was supplying an important deficiency in British politics. He is recorded as speaking in conversation of how surprised and disappointed he was by the indifference of leading public men, including giants like Sir Robert Peel, “to anything like general views and abstract principles of politics and society.” They might, Greg thought, listen to such views with reasonable interest, “but only as matters lying quite apart from their own business in the world.”Footnote 59 This meant that there was a gap in the market. By educating public opinion about political and social principles, Greg argued, political writers could play a decisive role in shaping the nation's future.Footnote 60 Greg thought, then, that politics should be studied systematically, rationally, and with due attention to general principles and leading authorities. He took these precepts seriously. At the same time, however, he was a controversialist, who wanted to demonstrate the superiority of a particular vision of social and political order for Britain. In his writing on domestic affairs, his arguments about how politics did work were almost invariably linked to claims about how politics should work.
In looking for the anchor of Greg's political thought, it is hard to improve on the abstract offered by the Liberal statesmen and scholar John Morley. Morley, who was well read in Greg's work, claimed at one point that his politics were impossible to classify.Footnote 61 Doing his best nonetheless, Morley contended that “Greg's theory of government from first to last” was that “[t]he few ought to direct and teach, the many to learn,” and that this vision was likely derived from Burke.Footnote 62 As Morley showed, Greg had been insisting on this point since he was an undergraduate, and it remained the anchor of his politics throughout his life. His writing career can be understood as an effort to discharge his duties as a self-identified member of the directing class. Greg assumed that, whatever advances they might make, the masses would always be more ignorant, more unqualified to consider the remote consequences of decisions, and more unable to deal patiently and consistently with the questions that affected the life of nations, than the classes to whom wealth gave leisure to grow wise.Footnote 63 Convictions of this kind about the permanent inferiority of the working classes did not, of course, necessarily issue in hostility to democracy. Greg, however, did not share the faith of Gladstonians that the uneducated might somehow be able to see more promptly and keenly to the heart of major political questions, or that of Tory Democrats that the mass of the population was at least capable of selecting those most fit to rule. For Greg, the masses were inevitably driven primarily by their passions, and lacked the power to do justice to the reasoned arguments of their superiors in rank—indeed, they were often unable follow the advice even of their own recognized leaders. He always feared the prospect of the working population acting as a class interest, and placing its own selfish interests before those of other parts of the community.Footnote 64
Greg's views on the changing shape of the English constitution were consistent with these principles. The Great Reform Act of 1832 had been a boon, because it had brought the House of Commons into harmony with the influential, propertied, and educated portion of the national community which properly deserved the name of “the people.” It had corrected proven abuses, infused a spirit of progress into the whole political system, and made it possible to pursue the practical social and administrative reforms which the country sorely needed.Footnote 65 In doing so, it had instituted necessary safeguards against the dangers presented by both democracy and oligarchy. Greg did not dismiss the potential merit of further instalments of parliamentary reform after 1832, provided they were based on equally sound premises. But any change which tended to advance the constitutional preponderance of those without property was anathema.Footnote 66 For Greg, therefore, the Second Reform Act was a calamity, inverting the sound propertied principle on which the First had rested, and dealing not in the correction of real abuses but in the pursuit of false theories. Greg understood that measure as assimilating England's representative institutions to those of the United States and Europe, where they had altogether failed to secure the great desideratum: reflective leadership.Footnote 67 Certainly, he considered the tone and quality of the Commons much lowered after 1867.Footnote 68
The second main plank in Greg's political thought was the conviction that society followed rigid laws. He believed in the improvability, even the perfectibility, of the world: no other conception was compatible with his notion of a benevolent Creator.Footnote 69 He believed in the inevitability, and desirability, of progress, in politics and society alike, asserting that the age was one in which new discoveries might take human happiness to fresh heights. But he claimed that progress could be secured only by the rigorous observation of natural laws. Despite his Unitarian upbringing, and his later slide towards deism, Greg was firmly a man of the Age of Atonement, and a student of Thomas Chalmers on the inviolability of general Providence.Footnote 70 All human misery and degradation, Greg argued, could be traced to the violation of divine ordinances.Footnote 71 God's punishments were “consequences, legitimate, logical, inevitable results, flowing from crime in natural course.”Footnote 72 Schemes of social amelioration, then, demanded “close observation and humble imitation of the plans of Providence, as far as it is given to man to discern them.”Footnote 73 These Providential schemes were played out in the market, and the rules of political economy were of the same order of certainty as God's law.Footnote 74 So while it was the duty of the wealthy and powerful to offer assistance to their less fortunate fellow subjects, this was to be done by creating conditions in which energy, intellect, and virtue would have free play, not by dispensing enervating charity.Footnote 75 This would not be achieved, however, by brute application of the felicific calculus. Greg abhorred hollow utilitarianism, and the reduction of political and social questions to arithmetical standards.Footnote 76 Government could not be left safely in the hands of either the masses or the mathematicians.
Greg insisted, third, on certain positive points about how government ought to work. In the first place, it ought to be active. After the repeal of the Corn Laws he argued consistently that England's rulers were working in good faith to mitigate social misery and to rectify abuses.Footnote 77 Those who continued to represent the governing class as a body hostile to the people, driven by incurable jobbing propensities, were describing a condition which had long since passed away.Footnote 78 By the 1860s he was suggesting that it was time to think of “enlarging the functions of central Government, and … teaching ourselves a new-born confidence.”Footnote 79 Greg always argued that while economy in the public finances was a meaningful political value, there were higher values to which Britain ought to aspire, both at home and on the global stage. The implementation of effective interventionist social measures, moreover, might help neutralize pressure for further democratization. Second, and more fundamentally, Greg believed that government ought to be integrative.Footnote 80 The most profound enemy of good government was class legislation. The Corn Laws before their repeal were “the triumph of class legislation”; universal suffrage “would be the most flagrant piece of class-legislation on record”; while the doctrine that the poor should be removed from the tax system was similarly “class legislation of the most sweeping, flagrant, and demagogic character.”Footnote 81 Government by an insulated caste apart, as existed in corners of contemporary Europe, was equally to be despised.Footnote 82 Sound government, in short, was dynamic, disinterested, and conducted with a view to harmonizing potentially conflicting groups and interests.
All this meant that Greg was deeply concerned with the problem of political leadership. He claimed that statesmanship was the highest “branch of practical science,” and his corpus of writing around the issue is probably the most serious and detailed of the mid-Victorian era.Footnote 83 If politics was to be structured around a public-spirited elite interpreting the laws of nature and governing the masses for their own good, then the circumstances and characteristics of that elite mattered enormously.Footnote 84 Political leadership ought to be rational: statesmen should be allowed to mature their plans in isolation from the erratic pressures of partisan politics, in order to be able to act for the benefit of the state as a whole, rather than that of lobbies or interest groups.Footnote 85 It ought to be educated: those without leisure and the correct training could never grasp the breadth of interests in a polity, or the laws by which social and political progress was to be achieved. And it ought to be unswerving: Greg always maintained that Britain would gain incalculable benefits if it were to pursue a policy more definite in its principles, purposes, and means, at home and abroad. In the 1850s and 1860s, Greg brimmed with practical proposals for alterations to the English parliamentary and cabinet systems which might promote this kind of scientific statesmanship. But as far as Britain was concerned, he knew that he was offering counsels of perfection. Under constitutional self-government, especially after 1832, only approximations to his ideal were possible.Footnote 86 The partisanship, materialism, and doctrinal politics which were inevitable corollaries of party government placed insuperable obstacles in the way of the construction of longer-term political schemes, and the rational application of state power. Attempts at reform hence invariably became “a mass of anomalous, contradictory, confused elements.”Footnote 87 There were, however, parts of the globe where leadership closer in form to Greg's ideal model could be found. One was in the tropical quarters of the British Empire. India, in particular, he regarded as the grandest arena for doing good which political science had ever faced: Greg argued that whatever was “truly great and far-seeing” in English statesmanship had long been found in the East.Footnote 88 In the wake of the Mutiny, he set out a series of measures by which “for once, and in one quarter of the globe, British policy shall be systematic, uniform, and persistent.”Footnote 89 The other possible site of more concerted scientific statesmanship, as we shall see, was continental Europe.
In summary, then, Greg's fundamental political commitments were to enlightened, educated, scientific leadership, and to promoting the understanding and observance of the laws of nature and political economy. His concrete political positions all flowed from these premises. In imperial policy, he argued that national duty demanded the retention of an empire which had lost its economic rationale after 1846.Footnote 90 Distancing himself further from the Manchesterism of Cobden and Bright, he maintained that the British possessed an exceptional capacity not just for colonial self-government, but also for authoritarian imperial rule.Footnote 91 While disclaiming any desire for further territorial expansion, he supported Rajah Brooke's extraordinary regime in Sarāwak, and claimed that British tutelage would be the best thing for China and Japan.Footnote 92 The communication of civilization to underdeveloped parts of the world by advanced European states was to be welcomed in general, and Napoleon III's 1860s intervention in Mexico struck Greg—unusually among Liberals—as eminently reasonable.Footnote 93 As far as the United States was concerned, he was certain that the American Civil War meant the end of the Union, and that this would be a positive development—the war ultimately being a conflict not over slavery, but over the tyrannical and unconstitutional policy of the North, which had turned away from integration and towards sectional interests. American politics was in any case an object lesson in the dangers of democracy.Footnote 94 On the basis that the Irish race benefited from intermixture with and the leavening influence of other nationalities, Greg strongly supported the Union.Footnote 95 If he had lived to see the Liberal Party split in 1886, Greg's sympathies would unquestionably have lain with the Liberal Unionists. His views on the principles behind Home Rule were unambiguous, and it was obvious that scientific statesmanship would be less attainable than ever if the government was handed over to democratizing Gladstonians.
W. R. Greg and European politics
European issues mattered enormously in the shaping of mid-Victorian Liberalism. Most work around this theme, however, has focused either on partisan or “high” politics, or on tracing broad currents of opinion.Footnote 96 Historians have spent less time on the more elaborate analyses of European affairs developed by reflective writers on politics, and most such studies deal with representatives of the more “advanced” varieties of Liberalism.Footnote 97 Greg wrote as extensively on Continental affairs as anyone of his class and generation, and represents an important case study in how conservative Liberals handled European questions.
It makes sense that someone of Greg's cast of mind should have taken an interest in Continental affairs. Mid-Victorian Liberals who aimed to neutralize pressure for domestic constitutional reform and democratization were often the most enthusiastic about celebrating the advance of “liberty” abroad. In 1850s Manchester in particular, as Anthony Howe has pointed out, an interest in Continental politics became “the hallmark of a conservative liberalism at home.”Footnote 98 But Greg's concern with developments on the other side of the Channel had deeper roots. He had travelled across Europe as a young man, and in adult life returned regularly, especially to Paris and northern France. His claims about the general tendencies of European politics were sharply drawn, and his understanding of the forces involved characteristically systematic. His writing on France was of a different order of sociological specificity, and ambition, and is dealt with separately in the following section.
Most of Greg's writing on Europe dates from between 1848 and 1871, when European affairs were at their most arresting, and when they bore most strongly on British domestic politics.Footnote 99 Before the “year of revolutions” in 1848 Greg's European articles were more concerned with religion than with politics, and after the Franco-Prussian War he turned his attention back to domestic affairs and to more abstract issues.Footnote 100 In the 1850s and 1860s, however, Greg consistently made the case that Continental developments ought to be subjects of consuming interest to the public. With Britain's most pressing political and social challenges temporarily resolved after 1846, there was an opportunity to devote more attention to politics overseas.Footnote 101
Greg was far from the only writer to arrive at these conclusions, and far from the only Liberal to start to emphasize the fundamental significance of “national character” in the operation of political systems after 1848. But his “scientific” perspective lends particular interest to his analyses of the structures of European politics in the mid-nineteenth century. Though Greg commented on most of the major Continental developments of this period, he always sought to reach beyond particular circumstances, and to distil general political principles. His observation of Europe not only added depth to his understanding of English politics, but also helped clarify his arguments about the relative merits of different kinds of political system.
For Greg, European politics in the 1850s and 1860s provided quantities of new evidence for the exploration of two major problems in political science. The first was about the relations between political institutions and national character. Greg shared the common post-1848 view that institutions alone were not enough to secure lasting political progress.Footnote 102 Dissenting sharply from doctrinaire Utilitarians, he placed national character far above constitutional or legal mechanisms as a factor in the success and failure of polities. He complained that too much political philosophy was vitiated, and too many schemes of policy doomed, by their architects’ failure to consider “the fundamental characteristics, intellectual and moral, which distinguish different nations.”Footnote 103 To imagine that the same political institutions would fit all peoples alike was a dangerous mistake. Greg was particularly frustrated by the strand of domestic thinking which wanted to see every country as an embryo England, and to introduce English institutions everywhere. English liberty had flourished, he argued, not because of, but in spite of, the nation's “anomalous and defective” constitution, and rather as a consequence of national virtues without which it would have been completely unworkable.Footnote 104 Institutions did not supply wisdom and virtue, but were rather instruments by which wisdom and virtue could work out wider benefits.Footnote 105 And some nations needed, and were accustomed to, more government than others.Footnote 106 Europe demonstrated all these truths, and incidentally helped Greg to refine his arguments about the determinants of England's political success.
The second problem was, as anticipated, about statesmanship. Contemporary Britain, as we have seen, did not permit the realization of scientific political leadership; the United States, suffering under a Procrustean tyranny of the majority, was in an even worse position. But the Continent was still a field for farsighted, trained, systematic statesmanship. Greg was openly fascinated by the “glorious power which belongs to the rulers of autocratic states” to decide on sweeping measures, and to carry them out.Footnote 107 Whereas in England ministers had to frame legislation with a view to getting them through a hostile Parliament and press, autocrats and their creatures could formulate policy with sole regard to the public good.Footnote 108 Peter the Great, Colbert, Stein, and Richelieu had been able to mature their schemes over decades, and act precisely as the situations they faced demanded.Footnote 109 Napoleon I had been, for all his obvious flaws, a great civil ruler, and France had continued to throw up visionary statesmen since.Footnote 110 Even Metternich had shown consistency, firmness, and lofty powers.Footnote 111 There was something to be learned from all this about public policy. But Greg was emphatically not one of the few mid-Victorians who thought despotism the best form of government in the abstract.Footnote 112 There were circumstances in which it might make sense: he eventually came to the view that Ireland was effectively ungovernable under a constitutional regime.Footnote 113 But he argued that while despotisms could be beneficent, they were always crushing and sadistic when resisted.Footnote 114 They tended to destroy patriotism and citizenship, and to dissolve social bonds.Footnote 115 He agreed that democracy was preferable to autocracy, or even oligarchy.Footnote 116
Greg's scientific interest in the systems of Continental politics, then, was married to a more commonplace conception of what was at issue in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. There were “two great parties in the Continental struggle”—the causes of despotism and of freedom.Footnote 117 For all their fascination, the despotic states were on the wrong track. Rome under the popes stood as “the most corrupt, imbecile, mischievous administration of the western world.”Footnote 118 Further east, the “deadening, benumbing, iron rule of Austria and Russia” mobilized all the machinery of Church and state to repress mental development and intellectual freedom.Footnote 119 The advance of freedom, then, was to be celebrated, and Greg was gratified that “the great European movement towards free institutions” had been “the key-note of history since 1815.”Footnote 120 Britain's own responsibility towards Europe was obvious, and the diametric opposite of the “narrow, selfish, and insulting” views of international policy promoted by Greg's former Corn Law comrade Richard Cobden.Footnote 121 Britain ought to act as the friend of constitutional freedom everywhere, whether the despotism against which it struggled was embodied in an emperor or a mob, and with no regard to Britain's own national interests.Footnote 122
Greg argued that Europe had been in a provisional state ever since the Congress of Vienna. The arbitrary lines which the Great Powers had drawn on the map had not respected concrete affinities of nationality and race.Footnote 123 The rise of free trade, and of the cause of democracy, had hammered additional nails into the coffin of the old international order.Footnote 124 What 1848 had done was reveal the hollowness behind the apparently solid edifice of European polity.Footnote 125 While the despots eventually managed to reassert themselves, the weakness of their positions was clear from the ease with which their thrones had fallen, and the revolutionaries’ defeat was not as total as it appeared. The most important lesson Greg drew from the events of 1848–51 was that the prestige of absolutism had been fatally undermined, and that monarchs had learned that they held their power only by their peoples’ forbearance.Footnote 126
The year 1848 also underlined that securing durable freedom was not as easy as pulling down a throne. It was axiomatic for Greg that the stable possession of political power depended on the fitness to possess it, as much for the working classes at home as for struggling nationalities abroad.Footnote 127 Constitutional liberty could be won only by the gradual extortion, and judicious exploitation, of concessions from sovereigns. It was safe neither where it was conferred too easily, nor where it was seized by sudden uprisings of democracy.Footnote 128 Paper constitutions, therefore, were invariably dead letters: the growth of real freedom was slow, painful, and laborious, concessions having to be extorted one by one.Footnote 129 Greg sympathized most ardently with the cause of Italian freedom, and the processes by which Italy's liberation and unification were achieved came the closest to meeting his general strictures.Footnote 130
Greg's ultimate vision for Europe was “stable equilibrium.”Footnote 131 This meant a political system and a set of territorial arrangements which were permanent and enduring, because they were in harmony with the laws of justice, and the fixed desires of the human mind. No longer would unnatural arrangements be forcibly upheld.Footnote 132 Arriving at such a state of equilibrium would require the wider recognition of the twin irrepressible principles of constitutional freedom and of nationality.Footnote 133 Greg's scheme did not include the liberation of all discontented nationalities under alien sway, since not all had the capacity for independent existence—he admitted that “nationality” was, for all its political importance, a “somewhat vague term.”Footnote 134 But nationality was a fact, and there could be no stability for political unions which did not in some way respect it.Footnote 135 By the 1870s, Greg had become confident that his vision would be realized by a predictable mechanical process. All that was required was that the general principle of nonintervention in the disputes of other nations should be acknowledged, by those on both sides of the struggle.Footnote 136 With foreign spokes removed from the wheels of domestic politics, and the system cleansed of artificial interpositions, freedom would be the inevitable output.
W. R. Greg and the Second Empire
France was the European nation in which Greg was primarily interested, and his analysis of its politics was considerably more sustained and detailed than in the case of any other country. This was conventional enough, given that France was unquestionably the most significant foreign country in the Victorian political imagination.Footnote 137 In the 1850s and 1860s, in particular, claims about the character and foreign policy of Napoleon III's Second Empire proved an essential bond of unity for a Liberal Party that was badly divided on many domestic issues.Footnote 138 Georgios Varouxakis has examined how certain Liberal intellectuals, including John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, and Matthew Arnold, made sense of France in this era, and there is more to be said about the ideas of Henry Reeve, editor of the Edinburgh Review, on the subject.Footnote 139 But Greg was the equal of these men in the quantity of his writing on French politics, and went beyond all of them in the intensity of his interest. He offered probably the fullest mid-Victorian dissection of how the machine of the French state worked.
There were substantial overlaps between Greg's analysis and that of Bagehot, as might be expected, given their shared connection with the Economist newspaper and their personal intimacy. Both men emphasized the curious specificities of French “national character,” and the unsuitability under present circumstances of English institutions for France; both initially welcomed the Napoleonic regime. Where Bagehot largely maintained his enthusiasm for the empire, however, and even looked back fondly on it after its collapse, Greg was much more quickly disappointed.Footnote 140 This was, essentially, because Napoleon III proved obstinately unwilling to fulfil his duty of moving Europe in the proper constitutional direction.
Greg's reasons for paying such close attention to French politics were clearly expressed. Britain and France were “the two greatest powers in the world.”Footnote 141 They were far ahead of the rest of Europe in literature, material progress, wealth, and the science of administration, and indeed made the Continent what it was.Footnote 142 So much was obvious. But Greg's investigations of France went well beyond commonplaces. Tocqueville's comment to him, in a letter of 1853, that ‘of all countries this is the one as to which it is most dangerous to form an opinion by what usually takes place in others,’ dovetailed neatly with attitudes Greg had already formed.Footnote 143 Greg had an encyclopedic knowledge of the French press, a vividly detailed grasp of French history, and a network of well-placed Parisian contacts.Footnote 144 His periodical writing was able to probe the prospects and social constitution of all the competing parties in French politics in a lucid and up-to-date fashion. He was convinced that he understood France: British politicians who did not attracted some of his sharpest strictures.Footnote 145
In exploring French specificities, however, Greg was also pursuing broader scientific goals. He saw France as a laboratory of political pathology. Contemporary French politics was “a perfect mine of political wisdom,” and the country's annals since 1789 constituted a “vast dissecting room … where physiological experiments are carried on on a gigantic scale, and where operations of every degree of cruel ingenuity are performed on the unhappy victims.”Footnote 146 At the same time, Greg insisted that the French, more than any other nation, possessed social and moral peculiarities which made it impossible to prescribe remedies for them as an “average” civilized people.Footnote 147 So he was cautious about drawing analogies between British and French politics—another point on which Tocqueville had insisted in their correspondence.Footnote 148 His diagnosis of political evils, however, clearly applied to both countries. He explained the 1789 Revolution as a rebellion against his two great hatreds: class legislation and the abdication of social responsibility on the part of elites.Footnote 149 His writing on France, as this suggests, combined themes visible in both his domestic and his European thought. But Greg's abiding concern was with the issue of why the French polity kept failing.
In the years between 1848 and 1852, Greg conducted an extended inquiry into France's inability to support free government. Louis Philippe's regime, which the 1848 Revolution had cast down, had aimed to shackle and demoralize the country, and its collapse was not worth regretting.Footnote 150 But Greg did not see the revolution as a new dawn, and insisted that any attempt to erect a republic on the ashes of the Orléanist order was doomed to fail. His explanation for why no democratic constitution could produce political stability in France was exceptionally thorough: but the problem, in essence, was that the French national character, reshaped to some extent by the recent institutional history of the nation, could not tolerate it. At the core of Greg's analysis was the idea that no government of any kind could achieve stability without a critical, albeit nebulous, mass of wisdom and virtue supporting it. That wisdom might pervade the masses, in which case democracy was conceivable; if it did not, then it had to be concentrated in the men who were to govern.Footnote 151 France after 1848 possessed neither an appropriately virtuous populace, nor any great men who could compensate for that absence.
Greg's writing on French politics after the 1848 Revolution consisted of a catalogue of exhibitions of this absence of necessary political virtues. These fell into two main categories. The first were the incapacities and eccentricities connected to the fact that the essential principle of French government had for so long been centralized and bureaucratic. Having been kept in leading strings, the French felt an instinctual need to be governed.Footnote 152 Without the requisite training in self-rule they could not even conceive of changing the despotic principle of their administration: and without the ability to understand liberty, there was no chance of a revolution conferring it.Footnote 153 Under these conditions even universal manhood suffrage offered “not liberty, but merely the selection of your head oppressor.”Footnote 154 As such, French attempts to force republicanism to work in defiance of history, social structure, and national character could only ever be unavailing.Footnote 155 The year 1848 offered no plausible foundation for effective and stable government, and Greg interpreted it instead as an “aggressive negation.”Footnote 156
Alongside these arguments stood broader claims about how the nature of French culture and society vitiated its politics. Greg argued that durable freedom could be maintained only where genuine patriotism pervaded the nation, where there was habitual respect for established law and a rigid love of justice, and where sobriety of character prevailed.Footnote 157 France possessed none of these qualities. As a Celtic people the French sought always after national power and grandeur: they were “essentially and above all, a military people.”Footnote 158 Their lack of true patriotism, and disrespect for the law, were manifested in the “vague, greedy, illimitable Gallic thirst for territory, influence, and dominion.”Footnote 159 There was also the fundamental problem of irreligion. Since the Edict of Nantes, Greg argued, the intellect of the French people had ranged itself on the side of skepticism, and this “national deficiency in the religious element,” undermining belief in a supreme being whose laws were above question, made it all but impossible to build up society or government.Footnote 160 Pervasive urban irreligion also led directly to materialism, “the deepest and most dangerous malady which the state physician has to deal with.”Footnote 161 It was closely linked to the licentiousness and barbarity which had overrun metropolitan France, and the prevalence of a low tone of public morality was another bad augur for the nation's future.Footnote 162 The morally reprehensible nature of so much French literature was both a key culprit and a key piece of evidence for this absence of necessary sobriety of character.Footnote 163 So until the French learnt the lesson that Greg sought to teach—that institutions were of little value without the requisite virtues and habits—their experiments would continue to end in failure. France had sought “in the barren and narrow range of the mechanical, what can only be found in the rich resources of the moral world,” and it was fruitless to abolish the ancien régime when “each man carried his ancient regime within himself.”Footnote 164 What the country needed in the short term was a ruler who understood it.
All this was the context for Greg's extended, detailed, and highly engaged encounter with the French regime of Louis Napoleon. Most Liberal intellectuals of the era who wrote for publication on the Second Empire produced an essay or two on the subject. Greg, however, followed it from its inception in 1852 to its collapse in 1870, writing hundreds of pages of articles specifically on France, and exploring aspects of Napoleon III's policy in pieces on other subjects. Existing scholarship does not adequately stress the sheer amount of time and energy devoted by the mid-Victorians to divining the motivations behind Napoleon III's initiatives in both domestic and foreign policy: but few were as devoted to the theme as Greg.
Louis Napoleon earned a cautious welcome from Greg as he first assumed command of France.Footnote 165 His assumption of the presidency with unlimited powers was certainly illegal, but it was not necessarily wrong. Power seized criminally could still be used for good.Footnote 166 And his uncle Napoleon I, after all, had been a truer representative of the wishes and opinions of France than any assembly the country had ever elected.Footnote 167 If France's new ruler was wise and patriotic, he might be able in time to cultivate that solemn reverence for law without which no government could achieve stability.Footnote 168 He needed to avoid militarism, trenching upon the free press, neglecting the demands of the middle classes, or relying on the priesthood.Footnote 169 It was no surprise when the nation converted President Louis Napoleon into the Emperor Napoleon III: Greg claimed that this was less because he dazzled its imagination than because voters felt that he best suited the position and the character of France.Footnote 170 This point was supported by a forensic discussion of the degree of his support among different groups in French society.Footnote 171 Greg disclaimed any intention to be an apologist for a tyrant, however, presenting himself rather as an analyst of the choice of political evils facing France.Footnote 172
Though Greg was not always sure what to make of Napoleon III, it is clear that the emperor fascinated him. We have seen that Greg had a sneaking admiration for Continental autocrats: here was a leader with untrammelled power, the more secure for being endorsed by the populace, who might reshape France in his own image. By the mid-1850s it seemed to Greg that the character of Louis Napoleon had become the single most influential element in the state of France.Footnote 173 It was unclear whether the emperor knew right from wrong: but he at least had a definite goal, which was to govern his country, and probably to govern it well.Footnote 174 In many respects, in fact, he came to fit Greg's notion of the ideal “scientific” statesman, in outline if not in the details of his policy.Footnote 175 He had a strong notion of doing his work; he had his own distinct ideas, even if not consistent ones; and he sought to make France great and prosperous.Footnote 176 As a result, Napoleon III produced effects almost as great as had his uncle.Footnote 177 He was, as Greg once put it, the worst and most vulgar man of genius in the Western world.Footnote 178 In this vein, after the passage of the Second Reform Act, Greg was particularly struck by the analogy between Louis Napoleon and Disraeli. Both possessed an unshakeable self-belief; both began their careers on unlikely paths; both had a patient and persistent disposition; and both were possessed by the same idea in politics, of taking their authority from the masses.Footnote 179
During the early years of the empire Greg made allowances for the emperor's more questionable acts. His haste to remodel Paris was certainly a mistake; much more so his needlessly draconian restrictions of press freedom.Footnote 180 But the existence of elements of danger and disorder in France which did not exist in England, especially the extreme political excitability of the country, made it reasonable to postpone judgment.Footnote 181 The problem, by the middle years of the 1850s, was that the emperor had offered no sign of regarding his arbitrary sternness as transitional.Footnote 182 The absence of any incipient moves in the right direction made it increasingly difficult to defend him. Greg argued that it was sensible to continue supporting his regime, nonetheless, if only as a guarantee of the Anglo-French alliance, but that it was impossible to feel confidence or ease with regard to the empire.Footnote 183 By the end of the 1850s, however, Louis Napoleon had disappointed Greg's more optimistic expectations. It was clear that he was not, in fact, the man to unite necessary repressive energies with desirable temperate freedom.Footnote 184 After the clampdown following the attempt on his life in 1857 it had finally become obvious that the tendency of his measures was not, after all, towards liberty or the encouragement of constitutional action.Footnote 185 Napoleon had achieved great things on the international stage, but at the cost of paralyzing his state politically, and strengthening its materialistic tendencies.Footnote 186
When Greg looked back on the empire after its fall, the picture was barren. Napoleon III had spent unwisely, gone to war unnecessarily, lowered the tone of public morality, and corrupted French politics and government.Footnote 187 His policy, boiled down, had been to make men rich as compensation for not making them free, a policy which had “narcotised the conscience.”Footnote 188 Prussia's victory in the war of 1870–71, then, was to be welcomed.Footnote 189 It was not a glorious demonstration of Prussian might, but a reflection on the indolence, conceit, incapacity, and rottenness of France, and on “the astounding incapacity of the Imperial rule.”Footnote 190 If France learned the lessons of the conflict, it might be able to regenerate itself, stop disturbing the peace of Europe, and finally find a stable system of government.Footnote 191 But given the selfishness, decadence, and degeneracy which had overrun the people of France in the years of the Second Empire, there was not much hope.Footnote 192 Greg returned, finally, to the analysis of 1848 he had offered twenty years earlier, maintaining again that nugatory revolutions provided no foundation for robust government.Footnote 193 The Second Empire, for all its early promise, had ultimately ended up encouraging and accentuating all the worst characteristics of French politics, rather than finding any means of moving France down the path to political freedom.
Conclusion
William Rathbone Greg was a Liberal of a very particular kind. His politics were non-partisan, but he was philosophically committed to fundamentally Liberal values of progress, rational inquiry, and natural law. He combined a profound faith in political economy with a commitment to a domestic constitutional settlement which steered a middle path between aristocracy and democracy, and which allowed as much room as possible for the free play of responsible elite leadership. He idealized the notion of a “scientific” approach to the practice of politics, although he considered it unrealizable in Britain. This fastidious, antidemocratic, paternalist Liberalism at home was married to a commitment to the spread of constitutional freedom abroad, which dictated hostility to Continental despots, despite the dark glamour of the power they wielded. In Napoleon III Greg found a figure who brought his established interests in both French politics and scientific statesmanship into sharp focus. Ultimately, however, the emperor's failure to tackle the moral bases of France's congenital political instability led Greg back towards the negative estimation of his leadership shared by most mid-Victorian Liberal thinkers and commentators. The case study underlines that Greg's version of a “science of politics” after 1848 was not utilitarian and universal, but intricately detailed and national. The two developed systemic analyses he offered, of Britain and France, demonstrated how particular forms of government were only appropriate to, and could only be operated by, particular peoples. Few other mid-Victorians offered such full dissections of the relationships between institutions, opinion, political leadership, and “national character.”
Even though he moved socially in the world of the mid-Victorian intellectual aristocracy, Greg is rightly omitted from its very highest ranks. But his contemporaries thought that he mattered nonetheless, and historians of nineteenth-century Liberalism and Liberal politics can benefit from taking him more seriously. The point is not that his claims about the science of politics, the ideal forms of social and political order, or the details of public policy, were particularly distinctive. In most cases they were not, and Greg did not claim any great originality for himself. Greg's real significance is, first, as a leading member of an important class. There is much which can yet be learned about patterns of political thinking and argument in nineteenth-century Britain by looking more systematically at the ideas of extra-canonical figures like Greg, whose writing did not aspire to permanent relevance, but who aimed to teach the educated Victorian public what to think.Footnote 194 Such characters clearly played a vital part in moulding the intellectual contexts within which both practical politics and more rarefied theorizing took place, and in mediating the ideas of the greater names privileged in the history of political thought to a wider audience.Footnote 195 They mattered especially in framing thinking about the internal politics of foreign states: a subject which demanded expert knowledge and interpretation, and to which most of the best-known thinkers in mid-Victorian Britain did not pay sustained attention.Footnote 196
Greg is significant, second, in offering privileged access to the intellectual switchboard of the rationalistic, conservative Liberalism of which he was a prominent representative. He wrote on all the central dilemmas that confronted mid-Victorian Liberals, including the discontents of democracy, the virtues of political economy, the government of Ireland, and the paradoxes of ruling India. He sought to rationalize his positions on all these issues by reference to what he represented as general “scientific” principles, and ineluctable laws. He deserves, as such, to be treated by historians not just as a convenient fount of brisk “Liberal” viewpoints on discrete contemporary phenomena, but as a more significant way into the nineteenth-century Liberal mind in all its complexity.
Finally, what does this reading of Greg add to larger current debates about the character of nineteenth-century Liberalism? Though this article has not focused on Greg's attitudes towards empire—because the subject was not one of his major preoccupations—he was an unusually enthusiastic Liberal supporter of Britain's (and other European nations’) imperial projects in all their forms, even the most fantastical. He will prove of service in elucidating some of the murkier intellectual and political hinterlands behind “liberal imperialism,” a subject on which there have been so many important advances in the last twenty years.Footnote 197 As far as even broader attempts to pin down the nature of Liberalism are concerned, Greg’s implications are ambiguous. Helena Rosenblatt's recent bid to recast Liberalism as a fundamentally ethical project, essentially concerned with moral reform, has been met with an equally powerful reply by William Selinger and Gregory Conti, arguing instead that the lowest common denominator of Liberalism was a particular set of claims about representation and representative institutions.Footnote 198 Greg, like most Liberals, cared about both ethical uplift and constitutional architecture, though the bent of his thought led him to write more about the latter. Like most English Liberals, he was at least equally committed to finding the best possible means of “integrating and harmonising different classes and interest groups within the political nation.”Footnote 199 An individual case study cannot, of course, demand the upending of cross-national interpretive schemes. But it is worth reminding ourselves of the existence of a current of nineteenth-century thought, exemplified by Greg, in which Liberalism rested as much on a commitment to “science” as it did on morals or institutions.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to audiences at Oxford and UEA for listening to earlier versions of this article, and to the editors and reviewers at Modern Intellectual History for their comments.
