The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 | Hacker News Reader

The Peterloo Massacre of 1819

theguardian.com

95 pointspepys42 comments

If you haven't read it already I highly recommend reading "The Making of the English Working Class", by E. P. Thompson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Work...). I know it's almost required reading in many Anglo-Saxon countries but as a guy who grew up and lives in (Eastern) Europe I only found out about it pretty recently, and I was pretty fascinated by it (and I say that as a guy who leans to the right of the political spectrum).

In the same vein I also recommend Jacques Rancière's "La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier." (link to English translation on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Proletarian-Nights-Workers-Nineteenth..., I've read the book in French, can't vouch for the translation), which writes about the French worker movements active around the 1840s-1860s and their relation to utopian ideas. There are also a couple of chapters on Étienne Cabet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_Cabet), a pretty interesting character.

> In 1848, Cabet gave up on the notion of reforming French society. Instead, after conversations with Robert Owen and Owen's attempts to found a commune in Texas, Cabet gathered a group of followers from across France and traveled to the United States to organize an Icarian community.[6] They entered into a social contract, making Cabet the director-in-chief for the first ten years, and embarked from Le Havre, February 3, 1848, to take up land on the Red River in Texas. Cabet came later at the head of a second and smaller band. Texas did not prove to be the Utopia looked for, and, ravaged by disease, about one-third of the colonists returned to France.[2]

I would add Peter Linebaugh's "The London Hanged". Using the court records of capital offences at the Old Bailey (which included a mass of prosopographical detail) he works outwards to examine the composition of English society just as mercantile capitalism was taking flight. https://www.amazon.com/London-Hanged-Eighteenth-Linebaugh-Pa...

Peterloo was taught in my (Northern English) school and when I lived in Manchester I walked past the site where it happened (St. Peter's Square, near the Midland Hotel) every day.

It laid the foundations for the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act which in turn laid the foundations for the abolition of slavery in 1833, the bedrock needed for the universal suffrage movement, and a wider sense of political entitlement for the average working person in Britain.

That in turn led to the end of the British Empire, a concept fawned over by modern day Imperialists, but was clearly a cruel and barbaric exploitation to any reader of history who looks beyond the headlines and prejudice it was built on top of.

Peterloo gave away the lie that a fair and just society can exist without fair and just democracy. Where there is bias, corruption or injustice in our democracies, we will find shadows of those injustices in our society.

> That in turn led to the end of the British Empire

I'd say that's a bit of a stretch, given that the British Empire lasted for more than a century after that. Certainly until after the Second World War, and arguably in rump form until the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.

The U.K. still has the Falkland Islands. But for the most part, once India achieved independence, the British empire was pretty much toast.

The UK still has many overseas posessions, but they are mostly minuscule specs of land in the world’s oceans. By that argument, Ecuador has an empire, insofar as it possesses the Galapagos archipelago.

I’d argue that the last century and a half were a state of inevitable decline for Britain’s imperialistic ambitions - the vast majority of their time was occupied with putting down (or failing to put down) insurrections and vainglorious military conquests which served to continue to project the image of empire both domestically and internationally, as the structure itself hollowed out.

The period of decolonisation following the war was just that - decolonisation - but the empire had already ended.

There is a corollary argument, founded by PKD and expounded upon by Baudrillard and others, which is that “the empire never ended” - and while that relates to the Roman Empire, which we arguably reside within the vestiges of, it could perhaps be applied to the lasting effects of any empire.

Anyway. I’ve just argued against myself so I’ll end this here.

Unusual thing to see on HN.

But yes, you can draw a line of history through Peterloo, Croke Park, the Troubles, the Miner's strike, and the wider colonial policing such as the Amritsar massacre. And between the Tory party of those days and the Tory party of today.

Peterloo was a dreadful event killing 18 people and injuring many more. The French Revolution 30 years earlier resulted in the execution of thousands and the deaths of at least 40,000. A line of history through that event is interesting as well.

> The French Revolution 30 years earlier resulted in the execution of thousands and the deaths of at least 40,000

Let's not forget millions of people suffering in serfdom under the Ancien Regime.

Is that an excuse?

It's a justification, and a good one at that. Starving millions to death is not less violent than guillotining thousands, even if it is less abrupt.

This is never a justification. Read war of Vendee.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/3964...

I claim only that the ends are just, not that they justify ALL the means. Thanks for the link - I learned something today.

And the American Revolution which inspired both. I note from the article that slogans from both revolutions appear:

> Banners bearing slogans such as “Liberty and Fraternity” and “Taxation without Representation is Unjust and Tyrannical” flapped in the breeze

Unpleasant contingencies for sure, but I don't think you can in good faith compare a gratuitous massacre carried out by a tyrannical ruling class against peaceful protesters, and a popular uprising that ended a millenium of tyranny and was a major step towards freedom and democracy in the West.

I think members of the Tory party would dispute that.

Of course they would. Modern toryism needs voters of all classes to believe they act in their interests, in a way they never needed to when only male landowners were allowed to vote. What hasn't changed is that they still actually only represent rich landowners interests, whereas now they have to lie to the wider electorate. The "Hang them and flog them" herrenmoral is never far away. Or indeed shoot them (the Troubles), or let them burn (cf. Grenfell Tower)

I think there is a large proportion of working class conservative voters, especially in the south east of England. I realise many groups have tried to make political capital out of the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, but it's more cock-up than conspiracy.

> I think there is a large proportion of working class conservative voters

There's a difference between having the voters and serving the voters. One might reasonably ask how tax cuts and spending cuts serve working class voters, and the answer would inevitably involve trickle-down economics, which is a theory for which startlingly little evidence exists. Modern laissez-faire parties instead play on the aspirations of working class voters... the argument that when you're rich you'll want low taxes, as well as fears, the dangerous foriegner coming to take your job.

> but it's more cock-up than conspiracy.

This is demonstrably not the case. There has been an active policy of reducing regulation (eg. the "one in two out" policy), which included regressive decisions around fire safety regulation both at a central policy level and in large numbers of individual cases.

Here's Jacob Reese Mogg, poster-boy of a particular strain of the Tory party, and an elected Tory MP, arguing in 2016 (before the Grenfell fire) that safety regulations should be rolled back from EU standards to the (cheaper) standards used in India:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-safety-...

Well, presumably working class people are as able as anyone else to decide what is in their best interest. And we will have to disagree on laissez faire economics.

With Grenfell, exactly the same cladding that exacerbated the fire has been applied to buildings in Labour as well as Conservative boroughs. And the cladding only existed in the first place to meet climate change targets. I really don't think that you can claim that Grenfell is a party political issue.

> Well, presumably working class people are as able as anyone else to decide what is in their best interest.

This is a fallacious argument based on the assumption that people are all engaged and informed, which is not the case, and working class people aren't alone in that.

People make decisions based on the information environment available to them. When your information environment consists of The Sun and The Daily Mail making up fictional anti-EU anti-immigrant headlines (then issuing retractions a few weeks later in small print) then your decisions are being... framed... by a very small number of very influential people.

You can try and argue that propoganda doesn't work, but you'd be arguing against the history of the 20th century, from Goebbels to Madison Avenue.

> With Grenfell, exactly the same cladding that exacerbated the fire has been applied to buildings in Labour as well as Conservative boroughs.

I haven't seen reports on that.

> And the cladding only existed in the first place to meet climate change targets.

What's the relevance of this? Are you blaming climate change now?

> I really don't think that you can claim that Grenfell is a party political issue.

Nonsense. Go listen to Mogg argue for fire safety deregulation. He wouldn't be able to do that as a Labour MP, and he certainly wouldn't garner support.

>This is a fallacious argument based on the assumption that people are all engaged and informed, which is not the case, and working class people aren't alone in that.

I would rather see people hang themselves with their own rope than be told how to tie a noose by others who supposedly know what's best for them.

> I would rather see people hang themselves with their own rope than be told how to tie a noose by others who supposedly know what's best for them.

I don't see the relevance of this.

I assume you don't literally mean you don't want people to be taught to tie knots...

This is an extremely one-side account of the event, but even from it I think if you squint right you can see the other side of things just a bit.

The crowd were carrying 'Liberty and Fraternity' flags (which echoed the bloody French Revolution's 'Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité' slogan); they had poles with Phrygian caps (a symbol of the French Revolution). The civil authorities were deeply concerned about an English Revolution, and not without cause. Remember how ghastly the Terror was, and how much you'd want to protect yourself and your family from it, even if you agreed with the protesters. Those symbols weren't wholly peaceful symbols; they could legitimately be seen as violent threats.

Should the authorities have issued a warrant for the arrest of Messrs. Hunt, Johnson, Knight & Moorhouse? I don't know; it's arguable that it was necessary to preserve the peace. Did they need to use cavalry to execute the warrant? It's arguable that in the circumstances they needed to. But it's also arguable that they should have issued the warrant, and that even if they had they shouldn't have executed it the way they did.

At this distance in time, it's impossible for me to be firmly on one side or the other (kinda like the Free Silver issue in the United States, also in the 19th century). The questions they were arguing about and the premises they had in common are alien to us now.

It may be even that the immediate repression which followed the event was what enabled a longer-term, peaceful reform of the English government, whereas a lighter hand might have resulted in revolution and far more bloodshed. I certainly don't feel certain one way or the other.

Looking at the wikipedia article about the incident:

> Fatalities resulting from Peterloo

> John Rhodes

> Cause: Sabre wound to the head

> Notes: Rhodes's body was dissected by order of magistrates who wished to prove that his death was not a result of Peterloo. The coroner's inquest found that he had died from natural causes.

Yesterday I saw news that the coroner investigating the air accident of a judge, appointed to investigate the most important corruption charges of the last years in Brazil, said that there was no evidence of assassination.

The arguments were plausible, but I am very cynical of these evaluations.

history repeats itself.

I always remember watching the Paul Greengrass drama about Bloody Sunday with my son who was about 12 at the time - at the end he was genuinely shocked that something like that could have happened in the the UK quite so recently.

If the 2011 London riots had gone on a bit longer, it's possible that the people calling for the use of live ammunition against rioters would have prevailed.

(2011 was not very like Peterloo and much more like the LA riots)

Presumably things hadn't got quite so bad that they were considering sending in the Paras to quell the London riots.

Edit: I can recollect a family member (who was a senior firearms officer in the Glasgow police and very much on one particular side of the sectarian divide) describing with some glee the effects of using an SLR in a built up area. This would have been in the mid 70s.

There's some suggestion that it was considered, and subsequently planned for in 2012 (possibly as part of public order / antiterrorism planning for the Olympics): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9046668/UK-ri...

Certainly the usual rightwing media suspects were happy to demand tanks on the streets: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/263973/UK-riots-92-per-cen... (look at all the commentators bemoaning the idea that the Human Rights Act prevents the Army shooting unarmed protestors. Plus ca change.)

"All of the Army's riot equipment was in Scotland at the time"

:-)

> describing with some glee the effects of using an SLR in a built up area.

And what are those effects? (besides killing people and making a noise)

I am assuming in this case an SLR is a Self-Loading Rifle.

Shots from an SLR were apparently prone to going through people, then through walls, furniture and other walls and keeping on going for quite a long time....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L1A1_Self-Loading_Rifle#United...

Edit: Being rather young at the time (under 10) I had no idea about sectarianism and quite how ugly it can be.

In the rest of the world the "SLR" is referred to as a "FAL" and it's 7.62x51mm / .308 Winchester ammunition is a "medium" caliber firearm.

Quite a bit weaker than what was used commonly in WW1/WW2 but stronger than the standard 5.56mm / .223 Remington round that is used today by the armed forces. It's still a very common round and used in various applications around the world.

"Quite a long time" is a bit of fear pandering, it's what you would use to kill a deer humanely.

Any sort of a firearm is dangerous when used against people massed in tight quarters.

Don't worry, my criticism was very much intended for the person telling me this story who seemed to think that army bullets traveling as far as possible through Catholic housing was a good thing :-|

Single Lens Reflex?

Apologies, the name of the standard issue rifle for the British Army at the time.

Self-Loading Rifle. A semi-automatic version of the Belgian FN FAL. Used in the Falklands War by both sides, interestingly.

Could be made to fire fully automatic if you knew the trick but with a 20-round magazine there wasn’t much point!

The one that really got me was jury vetting (look for ABC)[1]

1: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/nov/13/lord-hutchinson-...

In a similar vein a hundred years later Sweden had the Adalen shootings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85dalen_shootings

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