6. Chartist Movement
Protest can come in many forms. We have covered the violent uprisings of Wat Tyler and Toussaint Louverture, as well as the religious protests of Martin Luther and the symbolic gestures of Samuel Adams and the Boston Tea Party and now we can move on to one of the most enduring of all protest methods: the petition.
The humble petition as a demonstration of public feeling is not a new idea, but it first came to mass prominence through the Chartists, a reform movement in the North of England in the mid-19th century. The Chartists represented the first genuine mass movement of the Industrial Age, a group that had been brought together as much by their social class and their collective bargaining power as they were by their shared political goals or their shared backgrounds.
They drew their strength from their numbers and used the petition as a method of demonstrating those numbers to the powerful in the most theatrical manner possible. Their demands were simple. They wanted one man one vote in elections, rather than the property qualifications that disenfranchised the majority of working-class people, as well as a secret ballot, to dissuade intimidation and electoral fraud. They wanted elected members to be paid, in order that working-class people have the means to contest elections, and that constituencies be equal in size, to bring the creaking British parliament in line with the new population centers that had sprung up with the Industrial Revolution.
From the heart of industry in Manchester and outwards, they collected signatures and presented them to Parliament: in 1839 the “People’s Charter” featured 1.3 million signatures, but Members of Parliament ignored it. In 1842, they held mass strikes in industrial areas in the Midlands, the North, and Scotland, and there were attacks of sabotage against the means of production. In 1848 mass demonstrations were held, among the first-ever protest marches that we would recognize today, with 150,000 gathering on Kennington Common in London to hand over a petition that organizers claimed numbered 6 million signatures.
The Chartists were eventually smashed by the state: hundreds of leaders were imprisoned or transported to Australia, while countless more suffered repression. The demands of the Charter would go unfulfilled until the 20th century, but the effect that the movement had would persist, not just on the composition of British society but also in the manner by which the working classes of all industrial societies could represent themselves.