European Reform Movements and the Making of the International Congress, 1840–1860

The International History Review ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rinh20 European Reform Movements and the Making of the International Congress, 1840–1860 Jakob Kihlberg To cite this article: Jakob Kihlberg (2020): European Reform Movements and the Making of the International Congress, 1840–1860, The International History Review, DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2020.1808506 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2020.1808506 © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 24 Aug 2020. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rinh20 THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2020.1808506 European Reform Movements and the Making of the International Congress, 1840–1860 Jakob Kihlberg Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden ABSTRACT KEYWORDS In historical research on internationalism and the international sphere, Internationalism; the rise of the international congress during the nineteenth century has international congresses; long played a prominent role. This article investigates the making of the reform movements; international congress as a phenomenon by comparing three early ser- public speaking ies of meetings – anti-slavery conventions, peace congresses and philanthropic congresses during the 1840 s and 1850 s – as communicative events. The analysis shows that their staging was influenced by the fact that these meetings were organised to mobilise reform movements, and that they relied on a public sphere where elite groups, gathered in the metropoles of Europe, could expect that their speeches would reach geographically dispersed audiences through print media. A general conclusion is that these meetings pioneered a new way of being international – called ‘representative internationality’ in the article – through how they were arranged as independent actors beyond local contexts that could both ‘speak for’ and ‘speak to’ different collectives. Introduction At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austrian pacifist and Noble Peace Prize laureate, Alfred H. Fried, wrote a survey that he called a Baedeker to ‘the international land’; the purpose was to show that many of the ideas about international cooperation that were once regarded as utopian had already been realised and to provide a map of ‘the recently discovered realm of the international’.1 The rise of this realm, made up of international meetings and organisations, has later been charted and analysed in a range of publications that focus on the history of internationalism and the international sphere, in recent years for example in the field of transnational history.2 The creation of the international congress plays an important part in these histories and many studies have described how an ever increasing number of international meetings were organised during the latter part of the nineteenth century in fields such as science, culture, public administration, and social reform.3 If by international congresses we mean not diplomatic meetings, but civil society gatherings organised to assemble participants from different countries and with ambitions to be something more than national or local events, then the phenomenon of the international congress was born in Europe during the 1840s. During the 1840s and 1850s the first ‘conventions’, ‘meetings’ and ‘congresses’ with such aspirations were organised in European cities like London, Paris, Brussels and Frankfurt. All these gatherings shared the ambition of being something more than national or local events, whether the designation used was ‘world convention’, ‘general meeting’ CONTACT Jakob Kihlberg [email protected] ß 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 2 J. KIHLBERG or ‘international congress’ (an expression first used in this context in the mid-1850s). These early international congresses or meetings – the terms will be used interchangeably in what follows – have been treated in several historical studies and the gatherings analysed as important nodes in the establishment of transnational networks of both people and information.4 Even though many of these early congresses are well known on a general level, they have not been much studied as events in themselves.5 The focus in earlier research on networks and the transmission of information, means that it has not been much discussed how the meetings were organised with specific audiences in view, or how they used available media to communicate. This is arguably a lack since it makes it difficult to specify in what way these congresses represented something new, and as a consequence, how the birth of the international congress as a phenomenon can be understood. In this study I approach such ques- tions through a comparison of early international congresses as communicative events.Thatis,I put the staging of the meetings at the center of attention and analyse how they used different media to address audiences in a historically specific media culture.6 The general aim is to investigate the birth of the international congress as a phenomenon by analysing what kind of ‘internationality’ the first generation of such meetings created, and how it was related to the particularities of a mid-nineteenth century public sphere where public speaking played a prominent role. Empirically, the study focuses on three early series of international meetings: the Anti-Slavery Conventions of 1840 and 1843, the Peace Congresses of 1848, 1849, 1850 and 1851, and the so called Philanthropic Congresses of 1855, 1856, 1857 and 1862. These meetings have been treated in earlier research on anti-slavery agitation, peace activism and social reform but not systematic- ally compared as events. The analysis is based on the printed proceedings and the periodicals published by the organisers behind each meeting series, but also considers a range of separate publications such as travel narratives and specialised journals aimed at professional communities. With the help of databases of digitised news media, it has also been possible to examine how the meetings were reported in a selection of important newspapers and illustrated magazines in both Great Britain, France, Belgium and Germany.7 To be able to compare different series, the analysis of each meeting will necessarily be brief in terms of content and instead focus on how they functioned as communicative events on a general level. Most importantly, in what follows I will concentrate on how these meetings were arranged to mobilise reform movements. The meetings all revolved around representative practices that we can, with political theorist Michael Saward, summarise as ‘representative claims’.8 These claims sought to bring communities of reform into being by speaking for different collectives but were often contested by those in disagreement with the cause. In the terms Saward uses the organisers of these meetings can be described as ‘makers’ of a representational relation, where the meetings functioned as ‘subjects’ that represented reform movements as ‘objects’ in front of different ‘audiences’.9 In what follows I will describe how these practices also created a new form of internationality that can be called ‘representative’ to underline the importance of such claims. The focus is both on how the meetings claimed to represent communities of reform-minded individuals and how they addressed audiences at a distance (people not attending the meetings) in efforts to gain influence, primarily but not exclusively with the help of print media. How the efforts to mobilise reform movements impacted on the way the meetings were staged will be analysed in more detail in three separate sections below dealing with each meeting series. In this context I will discuss both how different collectives were represented and by what means they were addressed. In a concluding discussion I will then return to the question of how these meetings established a specific way of being international that can be labelled ‘representative internationality’. A general conclusion is that they appeared as international in the sense of independent actors, above or beyond local or national contexts, that could both ‘speak for’ specific groups and ‘speak to’ different audiences. THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW 3 European cultures of reform and the importance of public speaking Almost all the early gatherings during the 1840s and 1850s that can be classified as international congresses dealt with issues of social reform, and the organisers were also connected in a dense transnational network of reform-minded individuals and associations. The early ‘conventions’, ‘assemblies’ and ‘congresses’ dealt with issues such as slavery (1840 and 1843), the reorganisa- tion of prisons (1846 and 1847), free trade (1847 and 1856), the promotion of peace (1843–1851), public health (1852), statistics (1853–), and philanthropy

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