
The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 - pepys
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/04/peterloo-massacre-bloody-clash-that-changed-britain
======
paganel
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Working_Class)).
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...](https://www.amazon.com/Proletarian-Nights-Workers-Nineteenth-
Century-France/dp/1844677788/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8), 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](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]

~~~
frabbit
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...](https://www.amazon.com/London-Hanged-
Eighteenth-Linebaugh-Paperback/dp/B015X546C4)

------
PaulRobinson
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.

~~~
mrec
> _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.

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

~~~
madaxe_again
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.

------
pjc50
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.

~~~
vixen99
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.

~~~
wz1000
> 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.

~~~
afsina
Is that an excuse?

~~~
torstenvl
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.

~~~
afsina
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/3964...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/3964724/Vende-
French-call-for-revolution-massacre-to-be-termed-genocide.html)

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

------
zeveb
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.

------
badosu
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.

~~~
jlebrech
history repeats itself.

------
arethuza
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.

~~~
pjc50
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)

~~~
arethuza
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.

~~~
executesorder66
> 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.

~~~
arethuza
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L1A1_Self-
Loading_Rifle#United_Kingdom)

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

~~~
p90puma
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.

~~~
arethuza
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 :-|

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

