This exhibition offers a wider European perspective on the forms of protest and contention that developed between 1815 and 1850? There are a number of reasons for taking that perspective: The period can be seen as a final wave of reactions to the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleonic France. It is not an exaggeration to say that Europe was convulsed by the quarter of a century from the initial crisis of debt in the French monarchy in 1787/8, through the widespread domination of Europe by French forces, to the final stuttering end in Napoleon's Hundred Days. Portugal, Spain, Italy, North Africa, the Habsburg Empire, the low countries, Russia, and the lands of central and Eastern Europe were all profoundly affected by the changing constellations of power, the redrawing of boundaries, the mobilisation of mass armies, and the emergence of new ideas of government, administration and citizenship. The Congress of Vienna, which sat following the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig and his exile to Elba, was intent on re-establishing the old monarchical order where possible, and with consolidating the supervisory role of the great powers in relation to the wider European scene. It had not finished its deliberations when Napoleon reappeared on the southern shores of France in the Spring of 1815 and marched without opposition back into power. His final defeat at Waterloo and exile to St Helena laid one ghost to rest, but the legacy of French republicanism and of Bonapartism remained powerful currents in French politics, and much more widely influential among those who looked for more popular control over their governments. The genie could not be securely returned to the bottle. Out of Vienna came a number of new forms of governance and partition: great power supervision of the Italian and German states; the carving up of Poland; the creation of 'protectorates', such as the Ionian Islands and Malta; and a sense of remaining tutelage for states such as Portugal, under British guidance. These new experiences were also linked to an explosion in constitutional thinking and the emergence of 'chartes' or charters of government - becoming a central bone of contention, for example, in France, but also becoming a demand in many states for a set of terms of agreement about the conditions of rule and the preservation of personal and civil liberties. And while European war between the Great Powers was avoided, we can see ongoing attempts to police the 'lesser' states, and to expand their reach and order their peripheries - in particular, the wider Mediterranean - with action in Algiers in 1816, the Iberian peninsular in 1823, Greece in 1827-32, Poland in 1830, Rome in 1848-9, and so on. Treating events in entirely national terms fails to recognise this wider convulsive state and a shared set of forces driving more local events. This exhibition draws together a number of the interlocking themes that connect the very diverse range of materials to be found on the web-site.

There are several important dimensions of comparison that cut across the continent. This was a continent largely of monarchies, which ruled with greater or lesser, more or less formal processes of consultation, and in many cases were accompanied by an aristocratic elite rooted in land, title, ritual and an acutely sensitive hierarchical order. Those orders felt and looked increasingly fragile in the wake of the French Revolution. Many reacted in draconian fashion to popular initiatives and demands for reform, and in doing so served to justify (for some of their subjects) the legitimacy of popular demands and their criticisms of the prevailing order. And the aristocracy, the emerging bourgeois elites, state servants, and the professional classes, all found themselves questioning where their allegiance lay, and how far they should ally with more popular forces. Throughout Europe, albeit at very different paces, we can recognize a process of agrarian societies developing urban centres and a degree of industrial activity, that was both dislocating for those who sought work there - and freeing. If historiography has celebrated the emergence of public spheres in the form of coffee houses and print culture in the 18th century, in the 19th we can see something similar as traditional communities fracture and men and women encountered each other in the facory and workshop, in markets and fairs, and in queues for jobs and food. In such contexts people talked and shared experiences and news. At the same time this is an era of the rise of mass communication and the widespread circulation of cheap print. Many states fought this, few were entirely successful. Printing presses became an essential weapon in the search for news, information, education and entertainment. And as print proliferated many people with only rudimentary education sought to express their views and their voice as part of a wider community demanding to be heard. If the mobility from countryside to town was one movement, there was also a much wider process of mobility - with populations in Southern Europe seeking livelihoods in North Africa, and with sizable populations of displaced people seeking new settlement, and political exiles moving to tolerant urban centres from where to plan new futures for their homelands. This increased mobility also intensified communication and the exchange of ideas, and did so across national and traditional language and cultural barriers. Moreover, it also, in many cases, generated demands from women for labour rights and for wider civil and political participation – especially in extensive urban areas and perhaps most among the professional and middle classes - but this was, in many cases, a new component of the reform agenda. One consequence is often overlooked: In the 18th century there was a common European language linked to diplomacy, dynastic rule, court languages and etiquette, and state and military ritual. In the first half of the nineteenth century we see the emergence across Europe of an common (and increasingly widely used) vocabulary of politics: one that created a new set of 'isms' with which to characterize and condense ideas, even if the serttling of exact reference was a protracted part of the process of contention itself and varied in different places depending on their traditions and experiences. But there is no doubt that we see both new terms - liberalism, republicanism, democracy, socialism, communism, conservativism - and a reinvestment and shift in meanings of older terms - radical, republic, moderate, and so on.

In these ngrams, we can see the slow development of this new lexicon of ideas and terms referring to change. Clearly, a great deal takes place after 1850, but it is in the first 50 years of the century that these new terms are first forged and then become a wider currency within the European world. (The term liberal has not been included because it has much wider use throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and it a feature of character or an understanding of culture and the arts, more than a political badge). LIberalism, on the other hand, is very much the product of the Spanish world, starting with the Constitution of Cadiz in 1812 and the subsequent two years of rule, before the reassertion of Ferdinand's heavy handed monarchy; and then most strikingly in 1820-23 - the trienio liberal - also forcibly shut down by Ferdinand (with French help)).

These ngrams chart the positive and negative uses of terms associated with political rule, suggesting the extent to which, in Britain, France and Italy, monarchy increasingly confronts discussions of despotism and tyranny. The exceptional case is Spain. For the most part the negative terms are well established 18th century terminology, often hailing back to the classical world (in the case of tyranny) or to discussions of forms of rule in the early to mid 18th century (as with Montesquieu and the discussion of despotism). Terms such as autocrat are much more modern. What we find, in many cases, is that monarchy continues to have positive associations - after all, it remains the standard model. But criticisms of political rule can draw on the languge of despotism and tyranny to characterize the threat they pose to citizen's liberty, without necessarily being anti-monarchical.

The recognition that in times of social crisis words often change their meanings and new terms are invented goes back to Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian Wars and his account of the Fall of Corcra in Book III. For Thucydides, as for THomas Hobbes whose first book was a translation of Thucydides, this was understood as the breakdown of order involving the breakdown of mutual understanding and its medium, communication. But innovation is also a feature of such periods. One change in the British context is the use of the term 'demonstration' to convey a form of protest - rather than its use as a 'scientific demonstration' or a show of military force. In the 1830s the term came to encompass forms of public march or rally expressing an opinion about a political or other issue. The emergence of the term with this reference raises a number of questions: how did people know that they were making a demonstration? What were its parameters and rules? How did those to whom it was directed first understand it as somethng different from a riot or a form of menace? How was it understood in relatio to the occupation of certain spaces - for example, did a demonstration have to be in public space, or could it be in mill yeards, or private areas of ports? Was it (is it now) tied to an idea of a public statement from a public space about a matter that may have private elements but addresses also a larger public matter? Linguistic innovation is also conceptual innovation and is tied to tactical and practical innvation. Similar transformations occur with the term 'protest - which by 1850 had taken on the following sense: The expression of social, political, or cultural dissent from a policy or course of action, typically by means of a public demonstration; also, as an instance of this, a protest march, a public demonstration. And both follow an earlier evolution of the idea of agitation to introduce the idea that it could involve 'the arousing of public concern about a political or other issue, by appeals, discussion, propaganda etc., in order to bring about action.' Britain is far from alone in such innovations: Bullunga is similarly an innovtive term: From 1837, the word 'bullanga' was used repeatedly to portray uproar, mutiny, or revolt in a pejorative sense. Joaquín del Castillo y Mayone, journalist and Romantic liberal writer, in his work Las bullangas de Barcelona (1837), was the first to use it to describe the seven revolts that took place in Barcelona between 25 July 1835 and 4 May 1837. In using this word, the liberal reform process was dissociated from popular violence. The success of the term was unprecedented and it was quickly used disparagingly to describe the popular riots as a violent and uncontrolled action of the populace, in which there were no traces of liberalism. In the following decades the concept was popularised through different literary genres (theatre, novel, poetry, and history) and to a lesser extent journalistic genres (press or brochures).

Just as new words and ideas emerged, often crossing national boundaries, so too did pratices of opposition develop and migrate. See, for example, below on the Carbonari. Of course, some practices were distinctly local: in Berlin and Potsdam smoking was restricted to 'smoking shops' - but in the opening days of the 1848 protests, people took to smoking in the streets, and blowing smoke into the faces of members of the armed forces, who were there to keep order. Older traditions might also be reinvested with meaning - as in the case of barricades. According to the French historians Mireille Huchon and Eric Hazan, the word 'barricade' made its first appearance in French in the Commentaries of Blaise de Monluc in the 1570s. On 13 May 1588, barricades were used in Paris for the first time after the King had summoned troops into the city, in violation of the city's privilege of not receiving soldiers within its walls (and these were mainly Swiss Guards, and thus foreign troops and doubly offensive!). So extensively were the streets blocked that the King was forced to leave the city and the troops ignominiously withdrew. Mark Traugott has, however, shown that there is evidence of earlier use, and a complex relationship between barricades and the more common (and earlier) practice of stretching metal chains across streets to prevent the passage of horses and carriages. That relationship is complicated because a chain is not a barricade, and the practices were not described using the same terminology. Nonetheless, the chain came to be used in a way that prefigures the barricade - appearing when citizens attempted to control movement in the city, especially in relation to royal attempts to impose authority - so much so that the city was deprived of its chains in the 1380s, and they returned in a bid to win popular support only after 1415. The barricade did not contribute much to the French Revolution, since there was little fighting in the streets of the city, at least until the fall of Robespierre and the rise of protest from the poorer areas about the the price of provisions (and the abandonment of the principles of the Revolution). In May 1795, the faubourgs of St Antoine and Marceau rose in revolt and invaded the National Convention on 20 May/4 prairial. When the government regained control, they sent troops to suppress the insurgents in St Antoine. As government troops entered the faubourg, the people set up barricades to prevent their retreat, and the military responded by forcing their way through and seizing the cannons of the insurgents - thirty six of whom were arrested and condemned to death. The barricade did not reappear in Paris until November 1827, when the rue St Denis was blocked, unblocked, and re-blocked over two days, in protest at a series of decrees strengthening the increasingly unpopular government and the King. Although short-lived, the events served as a model for citizen action against the crown in the Revolution of 1830. Thereafter, their use spreads: Brussels, Liege, Ghent in 1830; Grenoble, and Paris, 1832; Lyonand Paris 1834; Paris in 1839; Toulouse, Auch, Lot Clermont-Ferrand in 1841; Geneva 1843 and 1846; Berlin, Ulm, Stuttgart 1847; and then Palermo, Paris, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, Venice, Milan, Madrid, Iasi (Moldova), Ghent, Freiburg, Mannheim, Limoges, Rouen, Elbeuf, Lyon, Trier, Naples, Vienna, Prague, Marseille, etc. in 1848. Mark Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade (University of California Press, 2010) Mireille Huchon, 'Petit Historie du mot barricade' in Alain Corbin, Jean-Marie Mayeur (dir.), La barricade. (Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 1997) Eric Hazan, A Hidtory of the Barricade (Paris, 20143; London, 2015).

One practice that is relatively conspicuous by its absence in the years after the Congress of Vienna is assassination. A lot of people were killed in these years across a wide swathe of Europe. But the express, targeted elimination of leading actors – kings and Queens, Presidents, Prime Ministers, and leaders of political and religious groups was not something that happened widely, and was not a shared European tradition. Indeed, assassination was rare – strikingly so across the region, as it had been in the earlier centuries – but as it would not be from the 1880s onward. America was a little more modern – there had been an attempt on Aaron Burr in 1807, and then on Andrew Jackson (1835), Lilburn Boggs, the ex Governor of Missouri (1842), Abraham Lincoln (1861) and William H Seward (1865) – and successful attempts on Joseph Smith (Church of the latter day saints 1844) and, of course Lincoln in 1865. Europe, was a great deal quieter in this respect: in Britain, the Prime Minister, Spencer Percival being killed in 1817, and there were attempts on Queen Victoria in 1840 and 1842 – and there was the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1820, although this was kept firmly under the control of the government’s secret agents, and may well not have developed as far as it did without their encouragement. In France, despite the development of some appalling equipment launched at Louis Philippe in 1835 (as in the item The Infernal Machine) and the attempt on Napoleon III in 1858, the only successful assassination was of the Duc de Berry (younger son of the future Charles X) in 1820. In Germany the playwright Alexander Kotzebue was killed in 1817; there was also an attempt on Franz-Joseph I, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor in 1853. In Serbia, a series of clinical killings of opposition leaders occurred in 1815, 1816, 1817, removing Kara-Marko Vasić, Melentije Nikšić and Karađorđe Petrović. In Italy the Minister of the Papal states, Pellegrino Rossi was killed in 1848; in Greece, in 1831, Ioannis Kapodistrias, first President of Greece was dispatched; and in Russia, Mikhail Miloradovich. military governor of St Petersburg was assassinated in 1825. What is clear from this is that assassination was not a widely used tactic in this period. That it became so later, might be in part an issue of technology and its reliability, but ii is much more likely to be a consequence of how people saw their struggle. They wanted to persuade, and to increase the incentives for their opponent to make concessions, but people did not widely approach the issues as ones in which royal heads had to roll; nor did they see the elimination of particular individuals as necessary for the achievement of their ambitions. The weight of opinion, and the weight of numbers, and the weight of foreign support, were all invoked, but there was not a sense that assassination was an acceptable, let alone optimal route to take. Those who took it tended to be loners, with particular grievances. Perhaps only in the Cato Street case and in 1835 in France were there small groups of men prepared to plot the removal of government through assassination. At this point in history, it is the route less taken. Of course, in protesting people might identify individuals who they wanted to make sure would hear their message and they might target them - Mill owners in their mills, or landlords on their estates. And occasionally, people identified particular individuals whom they held responsible for their condition and who might arouse such strong antipathy that their lives were at risk. But this was often a very local affair. On the West coast of Ireland in January 1820, a young gentleman of property, Edward Brown, was shot dead as he rode through the country - mistakenly identified as the much hated Clerical Magistrate Rev. O'Rourke, who required military protection for the rest of his stay in Galway. See Malcolm Chase, 1820 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2013), pp. 60-1. La 'Machine Infernale' The "infernal machine" consisted of twenty-five rifle barrels arranged on an inclined plate and bound together by an iron band. These guns were loaded with shot, lead ingots and scrap metal. The device was put into action by Giuseppe Fieschi on July 28, 1835, on the Boulevard du Temple when Fieschi attempted to kill King Louis-Philippe I during a review celebrating the "Three Glorious Days” of 1830. When fired, five of the guns failed; three others exploded, causing Fieschi serious head injuries. The king survived the attack unscathed but nineteen people, including a Marshal of the Empire (Mortier), lost their lives on the spot or in the days that followed. Forty-two other people were injured. Fieschi acted without clear political motives, in contrast to his accomplices Pepin and Morey, who were both Republicans. All three were found guilty of regicide and were guillotined in February 1836. Louis-Philippe was the victim of numerous assassination attempts throughout his reign; the attempt of July 1835 is nevertheless distinctive for its spectacular character and the high number of casualties. The laws of September 1835 signal of the accentuation of the repressive response to the attacks on the regime and the government and in particular to Fieschi’s desperate machine.

Filippo Giuseppe Maria Ludovico Buonarroti (1761-1837) was born in Pisa, developed connections wth Freemasonry, and declared his commitment to the French Revolution on its outbreak.  He went to Corsica shortly thereafter where he joined a Jacobon Club and formed connections with the Bonaparte family.After being expelled from Corsica in 1791 he was arrested and imprisoned in Tuscany, and then went to Paris in 1793, where he was placed in charge of organising Italian exiles.  After the fall of Robespierre he was recalled to Paris and imprisoned until October 1795, during which time he met Gracchus Babeuf, and became an enthusiastic supporter of his insurrectionary egalitarian ideaology.  Following the collapse of Babeuf's 'Conspiracy of Equals' in May 1796.  He was sentenced to departation but languished in jail until the Consulate.  He was eventually released and allowed to live in Geneva in 1806.  He remained there for much of the next fifteen years and became active in a number of radical societies.  His account of Babeuf's project in his Conspiration pour l'egalité dite de Babeuf (History of Babeuf’s 'Conspiracy of Equals) was published in 1828 and became a founding text for insurrectionary movements in Europe.  The distinctive feature of Buonarroti's account was that insurrection was conceived of as instigated and led by a revolutionary élite, rather than as a function of a popular uprising.  This accentuated and legitimized the use of secret societies and conspiratorial methods, and forged a link between the masonic activities of the late 18th century, and the conspiratorial carbonari of the 19th century. From 1815 he became active in establishing a network of secret soieties across Italy, France, Switzerland and Germany through the Sublimes Mâitres Parfaits, whose activities were exposed to the Austrian authorities in 1821.  Buonarroti was ordered to leave Switzerland, but remained under a false name before leaving for Belgium in 1824.  He set up a further set of societies and remained there until the revolution of 1830, when he went back to Paris.  He was arrested briefly in 1833, but remained in France and died there in 1837.J. M. Roberts, describes Buonarroti as 'a pest to European policemen' in his The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London, 1972) p. 233.

The Carbonari (from 'charcoal burners' - an allusion to an imagined historical conection to charcoal burners in the German Forests who united against brigands and robbers by developing secret signs by which one's 'friends' could make themselves known, and who were subsequently credited with collective acts both of preventing crimes and of forcing the abandonment of cruel and unjust law) were secret societies in Italy that formed initially in opposition to Napoleon (with the encouragement of the British and the Austrians in the early 1800s as a way of undermining French influence).  They probably had antecedents in societies in France, Germany and the Low Countries in the eighteenth century. In Italy they grew under French rule and were re-enforced when the Vienna settlement made Italy subject to Austrian influence. The societies then  became the seedbed for reformers from across the political spectrum, demanding independence.  They recruited wider liberal support after the collapse of the short-lived republics of 1820 in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Piedmont. They were also influenced by Jacobin and egalitarian ideas. The lower orders of Italian society were resolutely anti-French  and made their grievances felt through traditional forms of rexpression, such as rioting. But for the more educated and wealthier parts sectors of society these secret societies offered a new form of commitment and expression. In the initial developments in the 1800 and 1810s, the carboneria  was strong in the South of the region, the fidadelfia  and the adelfi were more northern, often in the early years influnced by more Jacobin elements.  In central Italy, the guelfia were more developed.  But in the wake of Napoleon's defeat in Russia, there was an expansion of activity and these groups often interpenetrated - the adelfi, for example, bringing an emphasis on smaller cells and greater sectrecy.  They remained an important element in Italy into the 1830s, but were largely discreited by the uprisings in the early 1830s, and became displaced by Mazzini's 'Giovini Italia' - which turned against th idea of French support and sought the involvement of a new generation, untarnished by the struggles of the past.  The societies were marked by oath taking, rituals of admission, links to freemasonry, and a hierarchy of inclusion which had a number of gradations - with people serving their apprenticeships in junior orders and gradually and successively being inducted into the most secret and arcane  reaches of the order.The carbonari model, with oath-taking and various rituals (and often links to freemasonry) were also influential in France, Spain, Greece and elsewhere.  Their spread was doubtless facilitated by Italian members of these societies taking refuge (especially after the revolts of 1820) in Spain and then in France.