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Special pages :
The Chartist Banquet in Connection with the Elections of 1847
Written: on November 1, 1847;
First published: in La Réforme, November 6, 1847.
The banquet in London on October 25, 1847 was to celebrate the election of the Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor and a number of radicals to Parliament. The elections took place on August 5, 1847 in Nottingham. The account of the banquet used by Engels in this article was published in The Northern Star No. 523, October 30, 1847.
In a letter of the day before yesterday I was concerned to defend the Chartists and their leader Feargus O'Connor against the attacks of the radical bourgeois press. Today, to my great satisfaction, I can tell you something which confirms what I suggested about the spirit of the two parties. You will judge for yourselves to whom French democracy ought to give its sympathy: to the Chartists, sincere democrats without ulterior motives, or to the radical bourgeois who so carefully avoid using the words people’s charter, universal suffrage, and limit themselves to proclaiming that they are partisans of complete suffrage! [1]
Last month a banquet took place in London to celebrate the triumph of democratic opinion at the last elections. Eighteen radical members of Parliament were invited, but since the Chartists had initiated the banquet all these gentlemen defaulted, with the exception of O'Connor. The radicals, as we see, are behaving in a way which makes it quite predictable how they will honour their pledges made at the last elections.
One dispensed with their presence the more readily as they had sent one of their worthy representatives — Doctor Epps, a timid man and a petty reformer, conciliatory towards everybody except the active and energetic men of our opinions; a philanthropic bourgeois who burns, he says, to free the people, but who does not want the people to free themselves without him; in fact, a worthy partisan of bourgeois radicalism.
Doctor Epps proposed a first toast to the sovereignty of the people, but so generally lukewarm apart from a few slightly livelier passages that several times it aroused murmurs among the assembly.
“I do not think,” he said, “that the sovereignty of the people can be obtained through a revolution. The French fought three days [2] ; they have been cheated out of national sovereignty. Nor do I think that it can he obtained by long speeches. Those who speak least do most. I do not like men who make a lot of noise; big words do not make big deeds.”
These indirect sallies against the Chartists were received with numerous marks of disapproval. It could not be otherwise, above all when Doctor Epps added:
“The bourgeoisie has been slandered among the workers; as if the bourgeoisie was not the very class which alone can obtain political rights for the workers. (“No! No!”) No? Is it not the bourgeois who are the electors? And is it not only the electors who can give the vote to those who do not have it? Is there anyone among you who would not become a bourgeois if he could? Ah! If the workers would give up their pots and their pipes, they would have money to support their political agitation, they could do much to contribute towards their freedom,” etc., etc.
Such is the language of the men who reject O'Connor and the Chartists!
The speakers who succeeded Dr. Epps energetically rebutted the strange doctrines of the radical doctor, amid much applause by the assembly.
Mr. MacGrath, member of the executive committee of the Chartist Association,[3] recalled that the people ought not to have confidence in the bourgeoisie, that they had to win their own rights by themselves; it was not proper to the dignity of the people to beg for what really belonged to them.
Mr. Jones reminded the assembly that the bourgeoisie had always forgotten the people; and now that the bourgeoisie sees the growth of democracy, he said, it wants to use it to overthrow the landed aristocracy, and crush the democrats as soon as it has attained its objective.
Mr. O'Connor, replying still more directly to Dr. Epps, asked him who had crushed the country with an enormous debt, if it were not the bourgeoisie? Who had deprived the workers of their political and social rights if not the bourgeoisie? Who had, that very evening, refused to respond to the people’s invitation, if it were not the seventeen honourable bourgeois to whom the democrats had so unfortunately given their votes? No, no, capital never represents labour! The lion and the lamb would lie down together before capitalists and workers were united by interests and feelings!
Mr. Harney, editor of The Northern Star, gave the last toast: “Our democratic brethren throughout the world! May their present struggle for liberty and equality be crowned with success!” Kings, aristocrats, priests and capitalists of all countries, he said, are allied together. May democrats of all lands follow the same example! Everywhere democracy marches forward. In France, banquet follows banquet in favour of electoral reform; and the movement is developing on such a scale that it must lead to a happy result. Let us hope that the masses, this time, will profit from this agitation, that the reform won by the French will be worth more than what we won in 1831.[4]
There can be no true reform as long as sovereignty does not wholly belong to the nation; there is no national sovereignty as long as the principles of the constitution of 1793[5] are not a reality.
Mr. Harney then gave a picture of the progress of democracy in Germany, Italy and Switzerland, and ended by disavowing, for his part, in the most energetic terms, the strange doctrines of Dr. Epps about the rights of the bourgeoisie.
- ↑ The demand for so-called complete suffrage, expressed vaguely in a way capable of varying interpretation, was proposed by the representatives of the English radical bourgeoisie in the early 1840s to counter the Chartist social and political programme laid down in the People’s Charter and the Chartist petitions. Early in 1842 the radical J. Sturge, who was close to the free traders, tried to found a universal suffrage league in Birmingham with the aim of diverting the workers from revolutionary struggle for the Charter. However, the efforts of Sturge and his adherents to influence the Chartist movement and use it for their own ends were resolutely rebuffed by the Chartist revolutionary wing. Later, however, the radicals went on trying to replace the Chartists’ struggle for universal suffrage and fundamental reform of the parliamentary system with a movement for moderate parliamentary reforms
- ↑ The reference is to the July revolution of 1830 in France
- ↑ The National Chartist Association, founded in July 1840, was the first mass workers’ party in the history of the working-class movement. In the years of its upsurge it numbered up to 50,000 members. It was headed by an Executive Committee which was re-elected at congresses and conferences of delegates. The Association initiated many political campaigns and Chartists’ conventions. However, its work was hindered by lack of ideological and political unity and a certain organisational vagueness. After the defeat of the Chartists in 1848 and the ensuing split in their ranks the Association lost its mass character, but nevertheless under the Leader ship of the revolutionary Chartists waged a struggle for the revival of Chartism on a socialist basis. It ceased its activities in 1858
- ↑ The 1832 Reform Act in England granted the franchise, to property owners and leaseholders with no less than £ 10 annual income. The proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie, who were the main force in the struggle for the reform, remained unenfranchised.
- ↑ The reference is to the Constitution of the French Republic adopted by the Convention during the Jacobins’ revolutionary rule, the most democratic of bourgeois constitutions in the 18th and 19th centuries: it established the republican system, proclaimed freedom of the individual, of conscience, of the press, of petitioning, of legislative initiative, the right to education, social relief in case of inability, resistance to oppression