6.9 Institutional Responses and Reform

Britain reformed step by step rather than through revolution. The Great Reform Act (1832), passed by Earl Grey's Whig government after fierce resistance in the House of Lords, took seats from nearly empty “rotten boroughs” and gave them to growing industrial cities like Manchester and Birmingham. It also set a uniform property qualification in towns. The electorate rose to roughly 650,000, around one adult man in five in England and Wales, so it mainly brought the middle class into politics.

Later acts went further. The Second Reform Act (1867), passed by the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli, roughly doubled the electorate by enfranchising many urban working men. The secret ballot came in 1872, and the Third Reform Act (1884) extended the vote to many rural men. Meanwhile the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) under Robert Peel, after a campaign by the middle-class Anti-Corn Law League, lowered bread prices and signaled a victory of free trade and industrial interests over landowners.

Cholera and filth forced action. Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842) argued that disease, not laziness, kept the poor poor, and that clean water and sewers would save lives and money. The Public Health Act of 1848 created a national board of health. After the Great Stink of 1858, when the sewage-filled Thames made Parliament nearly unbearable, the engineer Joseph Bazalgette built London's huge sewer system.

In Paris, Napoleon III appointed Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (prefect from 1853 to 1870) to rebuild the city. Haussmann tore down crowded medieval neighborhoods and built wide, straight boulevards, uniform apartment blocks, parks, new water supplies and sewers. The boulevards also made it harder to build street barricades and easier to move troops, so the project served order as well as health. Other cities copied the model, such as Vienna's Ringstrasse. Across Europe, cities added gas and later electric street lighting, public parks, public transport and some public housing.

• Education: France's Guizot Law (1833) required a primary school in every commune, and the Ferry Laws (1881–1882) made primary schooling free, compulsory and secular. Britain's Education Act of 1870 set up elementary schools where churches had none. Mass schooling spread literacy, prepared workers and soldiers, and taught national loyalty.
• Policing and prisons: Robert Peel founded London's Metropolitan Police in 1829, a model for professional urban police forces, and reformers redesigned prisons to reform inmates rather than simply punish them.
• Poor relief: Britain's New Poor Law (1834) forced the able-bodied poor into harsh workhouses, reflecting the liberal belief that relief should discourage dependence. It shows that not every reform was kind.

By the 1880s fear of socialism and the needs of industrial states pushed governments further. In Germany, Otto von Bismarck created the first national social insurance system: health insurance (1883), accident insurance (1884) and old-age and disability pensions (1889). He openly aimed to win workers away from the Social Democrats, while his Anti-Socialist Laws banned socialist organizations, meetings and newspapers. Britain's Liberal government followed with old-age pensions (1908) and the National Insurance Act (1911), which covered sickness and some unemployment.

Liberalism itself changed. New liberals argued that real freedom required basic security, so the state should guarantee minimum standards. This shift laid the foundations for the welfare states of the 20th century (9.6).