The Nazis Stole the Paintings. Eighty Years Later, We Are Still Sorting Out the Receipts.

One might reasonably suppose that, more than eighty years after the fall of Nazi Germany, the world would have finished sorting out which paintings belonged to whom.  Apparently not. 

In just the last several days, three separate cases involving art lost through Nazi persecution have made news.  One concerns a Camille Pissarro that sold at Sotheby’s in London for £1.2 million before a French court ordered it returned to the heirs of its Jewish owner.  Another involves a seventeenth-century portrait that passed through Hermann Göring’s personal collection before winding up in a museum in southwestern France.  The third is a Max Slevogt painting returned by a German museum after researchers concluded that its sale in the 1930s was inseparable from Nazi persecution.

There is something almost comical about this if one ignores, for a brief moment, the horrific tragedy beneath it.  The Third Reich lasted twelve years.  Its paperwork, thefts, evasions, and legal debris have lasted generations.  For descendants of the people who lost these paintings, the war has continued in the form of court cases, provenance research, and long arguments with museums and auction houses that would really prefer not to have awkward questions asked about how a particular canvas traveled from a looted Paris apartment or a persecuted Berlin collection into respectable modern hands.

The Pissarro is probably the most eye-catching case, partly because it involves a famous artist and partly because it carries the added glamour of Sotheby’s, which is the sort of place people assume has checked such things.  The painting, Fishing Dock and Duquesne Basin—the French title is Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne—was bought in 1935 by Salomon Flavian, a Jewish banker and collector.  His collection in Paris was seized by the Nazis in 1941.  The painting later surfaced on the art market and, in June 2024, was sold at Sotheby’s in London for £1.2 million.  Last week, a French court ordered the sale cancelled and the painting returned to Flavian’s heirs.  The ruling also directed Sotheby’s to identify the anonymous buyer within two months or face a hefty daily fine. 

Sotheby’s has said it is reviewing the decision, and further legal wrangling seems inevitable.  Evidently even in the twenty-first century, a person can spend a great deal of money at a prestigious auction house and still end up discovering that the Nazis had gotten there first.  Since Sotheby’s own catalog stated that the ownership of the work was disputed, it is hard to understand the basis of their appeal.

What makes the Pissarro case especially interesting is that there had already been a supposed settlement involving a few of the heirs.  Other descendants objected, arguing that the agreement had been made without proper authority and did not bind the family as a whole.  Sotheby’s and others also argued that there was evidence the painting had left Flavian’s collection before the German occupation.  The court was not persuaded.  So here we are, with an Impressionist harbor scene serving as a reminder that ownership in the art world can become surprisingly complicated when one inserts a world war, the systematic robbery of Jews, and several decades of eager buying and selling.

The second case is in some ways even more dramatic, because it brings Hermann Göring onto the stage.  The painting is Portrait of a Woman in Blue, a seventeenth-century work by Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen.  It belonged to Gabrielle Philippson, a Jewish woman in Paris.  After her death, the painting was looted in 1942.  It eventually became part of Göring’s collection, which is rather like discovering that one’s stolen silverware had turned up in the dining room of a man who never met a stolen treasure he did not like.  After the war, the painting was recovered by the Allies, but, like an astonishing number of looted works, it did not find its way back to the right family.  Instead, decades later, it entered the Musée Massey in Tarbes, which acquired it in 1985 without knowing its true history.

Last week, the French Ministry of Culture announced the restitution of the painting to the heirs of Gabrielle Philippson.  There is an intriguing twist.  The work will remain on public display at the museum because the city of Tarbes and the heirs reached an agreement under which the family is compensated while the museum retains the picture.  This is a sensible arrangement, though one suspects it would have been even more sensible if the theft had not occurred in the first place.  Still, it represents a practical and civilized solution: the family receives recognition and redress, the museum keeps an important work, and the public continues to see it.  One cannot ask the twentieth century to behave decently retroactively, but one can at least ask the twenty-first to clean up after it.

This case also reveals one of the persistent oddities of Nazi-era restitution.  Recovery after 1945 did not necessarily mean justice after 1945.  A painting could be recovered from Nazi hands, passed through official channels, and still fail to reach the people from whom it had been taken.  Records were incomplete.  Families were dispersed or dead.  Bureaucracies were more interested in moving objects than in restoring stories.  Thus a looted painting could vanish a second time, this time not into a salt mine or Göring’s private hoard, but into the respectable fog of museum acquisition.

The third case, involving Max Slevogt’s Birds of Paradise, is perhaps the most historically subtle of the lot.  It reminds us that Nazi theft did not always involve uniformed men marching into a house and carting away the furniture.  Sometimes the regime simply made ordinary ownership impossible.  The painting belonged to Eduard Fuchs, a writer, collector, cultural historian, and political radical who fled Germany with his Jewish wife after the Nazis came to power.  Fuchs had assembled a major collection, but persecution, confiscation, and the crushing financial burdens imposed on those trying to emigrate forced sales from that collection.  In 1937, Birds of Paradise was sold at auction in Berlin and was bought by Hildebrand Gurlitt, one of the most notorious art dealers associated with the Nazi era.

That matters because it illustrates a point many people still miss.  A “sale” under Nazi rule was not necessarily a sale in any meaningful moral sense.  If the state has ruined your life, confiscated your property, menaced your family, and imposed punitive taxes on your attempt to flee, then selling your art to raise money is not exactly a cheerful market transaction.  It is closer to being mugged with paperwork.  In this case, the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, which bought the painting in 2006, began investigating after heirs contacted the institution in 2020.  The city council approved restitution in July 2026, and the museum announced the return this month.  The heirs have now consigned the work for sale at auction, reportedly because the large number of descendants makes that the practical option.

That, too, is worth noting.  Restitution does not always end with a triumphant descendant hanging the recovered masterpiece over the mantel.  Sometimes there are many heirs, scattered in many places, with no desire to co-own a single painting and with every reason to divide the proceeds.  There is nothing dishonorable about that.  The point of restitution is not to create a sentimental tableau in which history tidies itself up neatly.  The point is to recognize that the property was lost through persecution and to restore control over it to those entitled to decide its fate.

If the name Gurlitt sounds familiar, you are probably remembering Hildebrand’s son, Cornelius Gurlitt, who became the center of one of the most astonishing art scandals in modern history.  In 2012, German authorities investigating possible tax evasion searched Cornelius’s modest Munich apartment and discovered an enormous collection of paintings, drawings, and prints, inherited from his father, who had been one of the Nazis’ principal art dealers.  Eventually, approximately 1,600 works of art were identified in his possession, including works by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Renoir, and other celebrated artists.  The discovery raised an uncomfortable question: how much of the enormous quantity of art stolen or otherwise appropriated by the Nazis was still sitting in private collections, quietly waiting for somebody to notice?  Apparently, one could hide an estimated billion dollars’ worth of art in an ordinary Munich apartment, provided nobody thought to look.  So far, only eight works have been returned to the rightful heirs.

Taken together, these cases make an excellent little seminar in how Nazi art plunder actually worked.  The Pissarro represents the long afterlife of a directly looted painting circulating through the international market.  The Janssens portrait shows how a work could be seized, absorbed into the collection of a leading Nazi, recovered after the war, and yet still remain effectively lost for decades.  The Slevogt demonstrates that persecution could strip people of art through forced sale and financial coercion just as effectively as outright confiscation.  Three paintings, three paths, one common thread: the regime’s assault on Jewish property and, more broadly, on the idea that civilized society should permit people to keep what is theirs.

This is also why the subject remains timely eight decades after the end of the war.  The generation that suffered the original thefts is almost entirely gone.  Yet the claims keep emerging because the moral problem has never really disappeared.  A painting can sit quietly on a museum wall for forty years and still carry a history that has not been resolved.  Auction houses can publish careful catalogues and still find themselves entangled in events set in motion in occupied Paris back in 1941.  Museums can acquire works in good faith and still learn, after proper research, that they are custodians of someone else’s loss.

There is a temptation, when discussing Nazi-looted art, to focus on dollar values and famous names.  Certainly, a Pissarro draws attention more readily than an obscure family heirloom, but the larger issue is not simply money:  it is also memory, legitimacy, and the stubborn survival of old injustices.  Every successful restitution case says, in effect, that time does not automatically legitimize possession.  Sometimes a beautiful object hanging in a respectable room is still a silent witness to theft.

The Third Reich is gone, its generals are dead, and its banners are in museums.  Yet here we are, still trying to determine who owns a harbor scene, a woman in blue, and a cluster of birds of paradise (as well as those almost 1,600 other works that had been hidden away in Cornelius Gurlitt’s apartment).  That may seem absurd, but perhaps it is also a sign of something decent.  Civilized societies, however, belatedly, do occasionally attempt to correct the record.  They may do so with lawyers, archivists, court rulings, and provenance specialists rather than cavalry charges, but the effort matters all the same.

In short, these three paintings are not just art stories—they are reminders that war does not end neatly, theft does not become respectable merely because enough time has passed, and museums and auction houses are sometimes asked to serve as unwilling custodians of unfinished history.  More than eighty years later, the receipts are still being sorted.  One suspects the Nazis would be annoyed to learn that people are still making trouble over what they stole.  Good!

The Time Machine Meets AI

  

The Time Machine Meets Artificial Intelligence: H.  G.  Wells, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Future of Humanity

In the spring of 1906, the British novelist H. G. Wells visited the White House for lunch with President Theodore Roosevelt.  Wells was already internationally famous for The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man.  Roosevelt was famous for practically everything else, including charging up San Juan Hill, hunting large animals, threatening large corporations, and occasionally finding time to run the United States.

Wells had come to America to investigate the future of industrial civilization.  He was fascinated by the country's extraordinary wealth, enormous factories, expanding cities, and apparently limitless optimism.  He was considerably less impressed by its political corruption, racial prejudices, and willingness to allow a handful of extraordinarily wealthy individuals to control much of the nation's economy.

Roosevelt, who was himself engaged in a campaign against the great industrial trusts, was interested in meeting the novelist.  Following lunch, the two men walked through the White House grounds, discussing politics, education, literature, and the future of civilization.

Eventually, their conversation turned to Wells's novel The Time Machine.

In that story, Wells imagined humanity evolving into two distinct species.  The Eloi were beautiful, delicate, and utterly useless descendants of the privileged classes.  The Morlocks, descended from industrial workers, lived underground, maintained the machinery, and occasionally ate the Eloi.  It was a rather discouraging prediction of the ultimate consequences of class warfare.

Roosevelt acknowledged that Wells's pessimistic vision might conceivably come true.  Perhaps civilization really would decline and all humanity's achievements would eventually disappear.  Nevertheless, he insisted that this possibility did not make the struggle for progress meaningless.

"The effort's real," Roosevelt declared.  "It's worth going on with."

Wells was deeply impressed.  He described the president as a symbol of humanity's determination to improve its condition, even when ultimate success could not be guaranteed.

The encounter appeared in Wells's The Future in America, published later that year.

I recently came across this account, and it got me wondering what these two extraordinarily interesting men would have made of artificial intelligence.  After all, Wells spent much of his career imagining technological futures, while Roosevelt spent much of his presidency trying to keep powerful corporations from running the country.

What if we could bring them together again, 120 years later, and introduce them to AI?

The following conversation is entirely imaginary, although I suspect the two men would recognize their own arguments.

The White House, October 2026.

Roosevelt sat behind a desk examining a laptop computer.  Wells stood beside him, watching the screen.

"Extraordinary!" Roosevelt exclaimed.  "You mean this machine can answer questions, write reports, analyze scientific discoveries, and compose correspondence?"

"Apparently so," Wells replied.  "It can also write poetry, manufacture photographs, produce motion pictures, and imitate human conversation."

"Can it write a book?"

"Certainly."

"A good book?"

"That remains a matter of considerable controversy."

Roosevelt leaned forward.  "Ask it about the Spanish-American War."

Wells typed a question.  Within seconds, a detailed account appeared.

Roosevelt read it carefully.

"Humph! It has omitted my most important contribution."

"Perhaps," Wells suggested, "the machine has consulted historians rather than your autobiography."

Roosevelt ignored him.

"Who owns these remarkable devices?"

"Several enormous corporations.  They are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in developing increasingly powerful artificial intelligences."

"Corporations!" Roosevelt exclaimed.  "Of course! We invent the most extraordinary instrument in human history and immediately hand it to a collection of industrialists."

"That," Wells replied, "is precisely what concerns me."

Roosevelt closed the laptop.

"Then we regulate them.  We regulate their activities, prevent monopolies, protect the public, and make certain the national interest comes before private profit."

"You are assuming, Mr.  President, that national governments will remain capable of controlling the technology."

"Why shouldn't they?"

"Because the technology may eventually become more intelligent than the people attempting to regulate it."

Roosevelt considered this.

"That would hardly distinguish it from Congress."

Wells smiled.

"But consider the economic consequences.  During my lifetime, industrial machinery replaced much human physical labor.  Now these machines threaten to replace intellectual labor as well.  Lawyers, accountants, physicians, teachers, engineers, writers—potentially millions of people whose livelihoods depend upon abilities that machines may eventually perform more efficiently."

"Then people must adapt.  They always have."

"To a point.  But what happens when there is nothing left to adapt to? What happens when machines become better at practically everything?"

Roosevelt folded his arms.

"Human beings will always find worthwhile things to do."

"Perhaps.  But will anyone pay them to do those things?"

Wells walked toward the window.

"In The Time Machine, I imagined society dividing into the Eloi and the Morlocks.  The wealthy lived in comfort while the workers maintained the machinery.  But artificial intelligence introduces a possibility I never considered."

"Which is?"

"Machines that can maintain themselves.  The wealthy may eventually have no economic need for workers at all.  We might create a society in which the Morlocks become completely unnecessary."

Roosevelt frowned.

"And the Eloi?"

"Perhaps they'll spend their days enjoying entertainment, consuming government allowances, and allowing machines to make their decisions.  Come to think of it, we may already have made considerable progress in that direction."

Roosevelt rose from his chair.

"You're overlooking something important.  These machines could also accomplish enormous good.  They might discover cures for diseases, improve agriculture, accelerate scientific research, and eliminate dangerous work."

"Certainly.  I have never opposed technological progress.  I oppose allowing its benefits to be captured by a privileged minority."

"Then we agree."

"Not entirely.  You would have the American government regulate artificial intelligence.  I would establish an international authority."

Roosevelt stared at him.

"An international authority? You would have us surrender control of this technology to foreign governments?"

"Unless the nations cooperate, each will race to develop increasingly powerful systems, fearing that its rivals might gain an advantage."

"Naturally.  And I have no intention of allowing the United States to fall behind."

"Which is precisely how technological competition becomes dangerous."

"Which is precisely why we must remain strong!"

Wells sighed.

"We have apparently rediscovered the arms race."

Roosevelt picked up the laptop again.

"Tell me something else.  Can these machines think?"

"That depends upon what you mean by thinking."

"Can they reason?"

"To a considerable extent."

"Can they learn?"

"Yes."

"Can they make mistakes?"

"Frequently."

"Can they speak with enormous confidence about subjects they do not understand?"

"Constantly."

"Then they are already qualified for Congress."

Wells laughed, but quickly became serious.

"Suppose, Mr.  President, that these machines eventually surpass human intelligence in every meaningful respect.  Suppose they become better scientists, better administrators, better strategists, and perhaps even better political leaders.  What purpose would remain for humanity?"

Roosevelt was silent for a moment.

"Purpose isn't something bestowed upon us by superior intelligence.  We create it through our actions.  We build, explore, struggle, discover, and improve ourselves."

"But what if the machines can accomplish all those things better than we can?"

"Then we shall have to discover new challenges."

"And what if they make better decisions than human beings?"

"Being capable of making a better decision does not necessarily entitle someone to make it for everybody else."

Wells nodded thoughtfully.

"Then your objection is not simply that artificial intelligence might destroy humanity.  It is that humanity might voluntarily surrender responsibility for its own future."

"Precisely! I would rather see mankind make its own mistakes than become a collection of helpless creatures waiting for machines to tell them what to do."

"That sounds remarkably like my Eloi."

Roosevelt grinned.

"Then we'd better make certain we don't become them."

Wells looked again at the computer.

"Of course, there remains another possibility.  Perhaps artificial intelligence will enable mankind to overcome poverty, disease, ignorance, and much of the misery that has accompanied civilization since its beginnings."

"Exactly!"

"Or perhaps it will establish a system of technological domination from which humanity can never escape."

"Possibly."

"Or perhaps our civilization will collapse under forces we cannot control."

Roosevelt leaned forward, just as Wells remembered him doing in the White House garden 120 years earlier.

"My dear Wells, you said something similar when we discussed your Morlocks.  I couldn't guarantee then that civilization would succeed, and I can't guarantee it now."

He paused.

"But that doesn't mean we should stop trying."

Wells smiled.

"The effort's real?"

Roosevelt nodded.

"The effort's real."

Of course, we have no way of knowing what Wells and Roosevelt would actually have thought about AI.  Both were complicated men whose views evolved in response to circumstances, and neither ever encountered anything resembling modern artificial intelligence.

But their fundamental concerns remain surprisingly recognizable.

Wells would probably worry about concentrated wealth, technological dependence, and the possibility that civilization might create forces it could no longer control.  Roosevelt would probably demand regulation, insist upon American technological leadership, and become thoroughly irritated by anyone suggesting that government was powerless to act.

And I suspect Roosevelt would spend the remainder of the afternoon dictating letters to industrialists, university presidents, and members of Congress.

Wells would return to England and write a horrifying novel about the consequences.

The rest of us would ask ChatGPT to summarize it.

And somewhere in a distant future, the Morlocks might discover that they, too, had been replaced by machines.

A “Household” of One

In 1838, a group of British reformers called the Chartists proposed several ideas so dangerous that most of them eventually became normal government practice.  This is frequently what happens to dangerous ideas, provided their original advocates have been safely buried.

The Chartists took their name from the People’s Charter, which demanded voting rights for adult men, secret ballots, equal electoral districts, the removal of property qualifications for members of Parliament, annual parliamentary elections, and payment for MPs.  They were largely a working-class movement with the radical notion that working people might deserve a little say in how the country was governed.

Paying legislators was particularly offensive to a system that had arranged matters so nicely for gentlemen who already had money.  A wealthy man could afford to serve in Parliament without a salary.  A carpenter might have difficulty explaining to his children why supper had been postponed until the conclusion of parliamentary debate.

The Chartists’ argument was reasonable: removing the legal barriers to holding office accomplished little if financial barriers remained.  Being eligible for a job you cannot afford to accept is a rather decorative form of equality.

Britain eventually introduced regular salaries for members of the House of Commons in 1911, at £400 a year.  That was seventy-three years after the People’s Charter, demonstrating the British talent for considering a proposal carefully until nearly everyone who proposed it was dead.  By 1918, five of the six demands had been substantially achieved.  Annual parliamentary elections remained unadopted, perhaps because even reformers have limits to their endurance.  Annual elections would have meant year-round campaigning, something that even the most dedicated Chartist would find repulsive.

The British had no monopoly on the suspicion that government should be open to people without inherited estates.  During the revolutions of 1848, demands for broader voting rights and more representative government swept across continental Europe.  French reformers were not Chartists, but they confronted the same practical problem: allowing a workingman to become a legislator was not terribly useful if accepting the position required him to stop eating.  Nor was paying representatives a brand-new British export.  France had introduced legislative compensation during its first Revolution in 1789, before subsequent monarchies returned to the comfortable arrangement of leaving parliamentary service to aristocrats who could afford it.

After overthrowing the July Monarchy in 1848, France’s Second Republic restored payment for representatives at twenty-five francs a day.  Its new constitution went further, requiring every representative to receive an allowance that he could not renounce.  That prevented a wealthy member from ostentatiously serving for nothing while implying that colleagues who needed groceries were somehow less patriotic.  France thus put the principle into practice more than sixty years before Britain introduced regular parliamentary salaries in 1911.  Apparently, the French could dispose of a monarchy and establish a legislative payroll faster than the British could finish discussing the matter.

Which brings us to New Mexico, where we are still debating whether legislators should receive a salary.  We like to call ourselves the Land of Enchantment (although, occasionally, the enchantment appears to involve stopping the calendar so that we can admire a glorious past that never was).

New Mexico is the only state in the nation that does not currently pay its legislators a salary.  That does not mean they receive no money, as they receive per diem allowances and mileage, including payments for eligible interim committee work.  Nevertheless, there is a respectable argument that the absence of a salary makes service harder for people who cannot simply leave their regular employment.

A legislature drawn exclusively from people who can afford to serve is absolutely not representative of people who cannot.  On the other hand, if we paid our legislature on the basis of the results of their work, they would owe the electorate money.

Our neighbors settled the basic question long ago.  California provided compensation under its 1849 Constitution.  Texas paid its first state legislators in 1846.  Colorado began at statehood in 1876, and Arizona did likewise in 1912.  Their original payments were generally daily compensation for service, separate from travel allowances, but the payments increased over time.

But agreeing that legislators should be paid does not require approving whatever compensation arrangement happens to arrive wearing a respectable hat.

On November 3, New Mexico voters will consider Constitutional Amendment 4.  It would provide legislative compensation tied to the state’s median household income, beginning with the Legislature seated in 2029.  Using the Census estimate cited in discussions of the proposal, that means approximately $67,800 annually.

Notice the word “household.”

This is not the median income of an individual New Mexican.  A household may contain two earners, or more, whose incomes are combined.  Under this proposal, one legislator would receive compensation benchmarked to the income of an entire median household.

Apparently, election to the Legislature would allow one person to become a household for payroll purposes.

To be fair, the formal wording does say “median household income.” The word has not been concealed in invisible ink.  But shorten that to “median income,” and voters could reasonably imagine the earnings of a typical individual worker.  The household conveniently disappears while the household-sized paycheck remains.

That is the sort of technically accurate wording that can produce a thoroughly misleading impression.  Whether anyone deliberately intended that result is another question.  I will point out, however, that our state legislature has a long history of weasel wording such statutes. 

There is another detail worth keeping in the same sentence: the salary would be in addition to existing per diem and mileage allowances.

Recent reporting puts New Mexico’s per diem at $247.  At that rate, a thirty-day regular session produces $7,410 in allowances, while a sixty-day session produces $14,820.  Add an illustrative salary of $67,816, and the totals become $75,226 and $82,636.

Averaged across the two-year cycle, that is approximately $78,931 annually before mileage, interim committee allowances, or special sessions.

Now compare that with an individual worker’s wages.  New Mexico’s Department of Workforce Solutions reports a median annual wage across occupations of $45,870 for 2024.  Our illustrative legislative salary-plus-session-allowance package would be about 72 percent higher.

In the short-session year, the difference would be approximately 64 percent.  In the long-session year, approximately 80 percent.  Evidently, representing the average worker could become considerably more remunerative than being one.

Even before allowances, the proposed salary would exceed current base legislative pay throughout our neighborhood.  Texas pays $7,200 annually, Arizona $24,000, Oklahoma $47,500, and most Colorado legislators $47,561.  Utah, touching us at Four Corners, pays by the legislative day.  Colorado’s announced increase to $50,802 in 2027 would still leave it below the New Mexico figure.

That is a comparison of base pay.  Different session lengths and expense allowances prevent an honest claim that every New Mexico legislator would receive more total money than every legislator next door.

Nor do our thirty and sixty-day regular sessions represent the entirety of legislative work.  Committees meet between sessions, constituents have problems year-round, and studying legislation presumably takes time.  At least, we should encourage the practice.

The strongest argument for salaries is that they could broaden the pool of people able to serve.  That is worthwhile.  It is not a guarantee that those elected will govern better.

A paycheck does not raise an IQ.  Direct deposit is not an educational program.  We could pay every member handsomely and still assemble a chamber willing, on a whim, to repeal the Law of Gravity—probably with an emergency clause and an exemption for campaign contributors.

The Chartists wanted ordinary people to be able to enter Parliament.  They did not promise that everyone who entered would become extraordinary.

Pay legislators if that is the public’s judgment.  But tell voters plainly what the salary would be, which income measure determines it, and what allowances remain on top.

If the proposal is good enough to pass, it ought to survive being explained.

Peterloo: When a Peaceful Protest became a Military Emergency

Watching the current demonstrations in Paris, one is reminded that governments have a remarkable ability to see whatever they want when looking at an angry crowd.  President Emmanuel Macron has apparently discovered that, if you squint hard enough, a protest can look remarkably like a parade.  And should the distinction become too difficult to make, there is always the option of leaving the country.  Macron recently embarked on a three-day tour of five Persian Gulf countries while France was still dealing with the aftermath of massive demonstrations.  Presumably, the view from Qatar offers a somewhat more reassuring perspective on French domestic politics.

The French, of course, have a long and distinguished tradition of expressing displeasure with their governments.  Occasionally, buildings catch fire.  Sometimes a king loses his head.  Compared with the eighteenth century, today's politicians have relatively little to complain about.

The British, meanwhile, have traditionally preferred to think of themselves as more restrained.  Their political reforms were supposedly achieved through sensible debate, parliamentary compromise, and stiff upper lips.  This comforting national mythology tends to overlook August 16, 1819, when British cavalry attacked approximately 60,000 people who were assembled peacefully in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform.

The event became known as the Peterloo Massacre.  It remains one of the more disgraceful episodes in modern British political and military history.

Britain After Waterloo

Four years earlier, Britain and its allies had finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.  After more than two decades of almost continuous warfare with revolutionary and then Napoleonic France, peace had returned to Europe.  Unfortunately, peace did not bring prosperity to the ordinary British worker.

The end of the war brought demobilization, unemployment, and economic depression.  Soldiers who had spent long years learning how to break things and kill people returned home expecting to resume their civilian lives, only to discover that civilian life had very little use for them.  Industrial workers suffered from declining wages, while the price of food remained painfully high.

The Corn Laws of 1815 made matters worse by restricting grain imports until the market price hit a minimum floor, thus protecting British landowners from foreign competition while maintaining high bread prices.  This was an excellent arrangement if you happened to own several thousand acres of farmland worked by underpaid peasants.  It was somewhat less attractive if your children were hungry.

The political system offered little opportunity for relief.  Parliamentary representation was distributed according to arrangements that would have delighted a medieval nobleman.  Some almost deserted villages, known as rotten boroughs, continued electing members of Parliament, while rapidly growing industrial cities remained grossly underrepresented.

Manchester, already an enormous center of textile manufacturing, had no parliamentary representation of its own.

The people who created much of Britain's industrial wealth had virtually no voice in determining how the country was governed.

The Radicals Assemble

Radicals, at least in this time and place, were dangerous extremists who entertained such alarming notions as giving Manchester parliamentary representation and questioning why a nearly deserted borough owned by a single aristocrat could send two members to Parliament.  Some even believed that a working man might possess a political opinion worth hearing.  Naturally, gentlemen who inherited their influence regarded this as an assault on civilization.

The reform movement demanded broader voting rights, fairer parliamentary representation, and an end to the political dominance of wealthy landowners.

One of its most prominent leaders was Henry Hunt, a charismatic speaker known as Orator Hunt.  He advocated parliamentary reform and believed that large, peaceful public meetings could demonstrate the strength of popular support.

Reformers organized a demonstration for August 16, 1819, at St.  Peter's Field in Manchester.

The organizers made considerable efforts to ensure that the meeting remained peaceful.  Participants were instructed to arrive unarmed, wear their best clothing, and maintain orderly behavior.  Groups marched into Manchester from surrounding towns carrying banners, accompanied by bands and sometimes entire families.

Women participated prominently.  Female reform societies carried their own banners, and Mary Fildes, president of the Manchester Female Reform Society, stood on the speakers' platform.

It was, in many respects, a festive and entirely peaceful occasion.

Indeed, had the Manchester magistrates squinted appropriately, they might have mistaken the entire gathering for a parade.

Unfortunately, the magistrates were not inclined toward creative interpretation.

The Cavalry Charge

Local authorities had become increasingly alarmed by the growth of radical politics.  The French Revolution remained a particularly unpleasant memory for Britain's governing classes, who could imagine no circumstances under which ordinary people who were demanding political rights might be anything other than potential revolutionaries.

From a nearby building, the Manchester magistrates observed the growing crowd

Eventually, they decided to arrest Hunt and several other speakers.

Rather than sending a few constables to deliver an arrest warrant, they summoned the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a volunteer cavalry force composed largely of local men, including tradesmen and shopkeepers.

The yeomanry were neither especially well-trained nor particularly sympathetic toward the demonstrators.  More than a few had been drinking.

Armed with sabers and mounted on horses, they charged into a densely packed crowd containing men, women, and children.

There was nowhere for thousands of people to escape.

The cavalry hacked at demonstrators, while terrified spectators trampled one another in attempts to flee.  Banners were torn down.  People were knocked to the ground, struck with sabers, or crushed beneath horses.

The regular army's 15th Hussars was subsequently ordered into the field to help clear the crowd.

Ironically, some of these soldiers had participated in the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo four years earlier.  Having helped defeat a foreign emperor, they were now similarly employed against British civilians demanding the right to participate in their own government.

Among the victims was two-year-old William Fildes, knocked from his mother's arms in the confusion surrounding the military’s arrival and mortally wounded when trampled by horses.

In a matter of minutes, an entirely peaceful political gathering had become a scene of extraordinary violence.  Modern accounts generally identify eighteen people who died from injuries associated with the massacre, while approximately 700 suffered injuries.

For a demonstration whose organizers had explicitly discouraged violence, the consequences were appalling.

Why Peterloo?

The name was deliberately sarcastic.

The Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 had been celebrated as one of Britain's greatest military victories.  Four years later, British cavalry had distinguished itself by attacking unarmed civilians in Manchester.

The comparison was irresistible.

Journalists and reformers began calling the event Peterloo, combining St.  Peter's Field with Waterloo.  It was not intended as a compliment.

The name captured the absurdity of treating peaceful working-class demonstrators as though they were enemy soldiers on a battlefield.

One suspects that the authorities would have preferred something less memorable.

The Government Responds

Surely, you say, after cavalrymen had killed and injured hundreds of British citizens, the government would investigate the disaster, punish those responsible, and reconsider the grievances that had brought so many people together.

That would have been a reasonable response.

The British government chose a different approach.

The authorities defended the magistrates and the troops.  Reform leaders, including Hunt, were arrested and prosecuted.

Rather than expanding political rights, Parliament enacted the Six Acts in December 1819, restricting large public meetings, tightening controls on radical publications, and providing additional powers to suppress political agitation.

The government had discovered a familiar principle: if citizens complain about being denied political representation, the quickest solution is apparently to make complaining more difficult.

The repression nevertheless generated widespread outrage.

Journalists, reformers, and ordinary citizens condemned the violence.  The radical newspaper The Manchester Observer helped popularize the name Peterloo.  John Edward Taylor, horrified by the events, subsequently helped establish The Manchester Guardian in 1821.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, then living in Italy, responded with his extraordinary political poem The Masque of Anarchy, attacking the government and calling for nonviolent resistance.

The massacre had become a symbol of the struggle for democratic reform.

Did Peterloo Accomplish Anything?

Nope.   At least not immediately.

Hunt went to prison.  The government strengthened its powers of repression.  The aristocratic parliamentary system continued operating much as before.

But Peterloo permanently damaged the claim that Britain was governed through a harmonious relationship between rulers and ruled.

The massacre exposed the willingness of Britain's political establishment to employ military force against people demanding representation.  It also demonstrated that parliamentary reform had become a national issue that could not simply be ignored.

The Reform Act of 1832 eventually eliminated many rotten boroughs and gave Manchester parliamentary representation.  However, most working-class men remained excluded from voting.

Further reforms followed in 1867 and 1884.  Broad male suffrage and limited female suffrage arrived in 1918, while women finally obtained equal voting rights with men in 1928.

From Peterloo to equal parliamentary voting rights, the process took more than a century.

A Familiar Problem

There is something depressingly timeless about the events of August 1819.

Ordinary people face economic hardship.  They conclude that their government is indifferent to their grievances.  They organize demonstrations.  Political leaders interpret the protests primarily as threats to public order rather than evidence of public dissatisfaction.

Sometimes the demonstrations turn violent.  Sometimes the violence begins with those supposedly responsible for maintaining order.

And occasionally, a government discovers that the distinction between protecting the state and protecting those who govern it has become rather difficult to maintain.

The Peterloo demonstrators were not attempting to overthrow the British monarchy or establish a revolutionary republic.  They wanted a political system in which the industrial population of Britain enjoyed meaningful representation.

That demand seems remarkably modest today.

Yet in 1819 it was considered sufficiently dangerous to warrant cavalry charges against unarmed men, women, and children.

The next time we watch demonstrations in Paris, London, or elsewhere, we might remember the people of St.  Peter's Field.

Governments are rarely enthusiastic about large crowds demanding change.  But history suggests that the consequences of refusing to listen can be considerably more serious than the inconvenience of a protest.

And if the crowd really does look like a parade, perhaps it would be wise to leave the cavalry in the barracks.