The Revolutions of 1848

Much of the information for this post is taken from Jonathan Sperber, Revolutionary Europe, 1780-1850 (Longman, 2000) and Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2003). The pictures above are of the proclamation of the Roman Republic in the Piazza deo Popolo and the Frankfurt Parliament (see below).

The revolutions of 1848 ignited the countries of Europe in a way that would not be repeated until 1989. Violence broke out because legal and parliamentary movements for change were frustrated. The only countries were revolution was avoided were those were adequate concessions were made in time (Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands) of where opposition was negligible and repression total (Russia).


The earlier revolutions of 1830 had resulted in the replacement of the Bourbon monarchy by the Orleans monarchy in France and by Belgium’s independence from Holland; but the Polish revolt against Russian rule had failed. The overall result was the tacit partition of Europe into a western part dominated by the liberal powers, France and Britain, and a central, southern and eastern portion, dominated by the three conservative powers, Austria, Prussia and Russia.

Metternich

The dominant figure of Europe between 1815 and 1848 was Austrian Chancellor, Prince Klemens Metternich (1773-1859), the champion of post-Napoleonic conservatism. He had been made Minister of Foreign Affairs in October 1809, six days before the signing of the oppressive treaty of Schönbrunn. In this position he brokered the marriage between Napoleon and Marie-Louise. From a distance he observed the growth of German nationalism, which he disliked and he had no enthusiasm for the German national rising against Napoleon. He was now a strict exponent of the doctrine of the balance of power in Europe. Until the summer of 1813 Austrian policy was pro-French or neutral. However in August 1813 Austria declared war on France, though Metternich was always fearful of the ambitions of Russia and Prussia. In October he was given the hereditary title of prince (Fürst).

The Congress of Vienna (September 1814-June 1815) was the climax of his work of reconstruction. His aim was to secure Austrian predominance by forming two confederations, one German and the other Italian under Austrian dominance. With British support he sought to prevent the elimination of France, which he saw as a necessary counter-weight to Prussia, and he prevented Prussia’s annexation of Saxony.

Metternich’s role in Vienna shows his brilliant diplomacy but also the limitations of what he was able to achieve. He was unable to prevent the spread of nationalism (especially Italian and German) and liberal ideals. He had intended the Diet of the German Confederation to suppress revolutionary thought all over Germany. But in 1818 Bavaria and Baden promulgated constitutions that reflected not Metternich’s ideas but those of limited monarchy.

In the 1820s his influence waned. Britain abandoned his policy by insisting on the right of national self-determination for the South American colonists in revolt against Spain and for the Greek insurgents against Turkey. He was powerless to prevent the July Revolution in France. The death of Francis I and the accession of his feeble-minded son the archduke Ferdinand in 1835 further lessened his influence.

Before 1848
Britain: the Chartists
In 1832 the British parliamentary system had been partially reformed. More people were given to the vote and the previously unrepresented cities of Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham became parliamentary constituencies. But this still left the great majority of working men without the right to vote at a time of great economic uncertainty and hardship. In May 1838 the People’s Charter contained the famous Six Points, a manifesto for radical reform: manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, the secret ballot, payment of MPs, equal electoral districts, the abolition of property qualifications for parliament. By the end of 1838 the Chartist newspaper, the Leeds-based Northern Star (priced 4½d) was selling 50,000 copies a week. On 4 February 1839 about 50 delegates finally assembled in London for a National Convention (calling itself the People’s Parliament). In July they presented a National Petition to Parliament; it was three miles long and contained 1,280,000 signatures, but the House refused to consider it.

The Chartist leaders were divided over whether to use simply persuasion and argument (‘moral force’) or to use physical force. The most celebrated example of the latter was the Newport rising of 3/4 November 1839 when some 7,000 colliers and ironworkers led an armed march on Newport in South Wales. The Chartists were fired on by a company of the 45th Foot. 24 people were killed or died from their injuries (more than twice the death toll at Peterloo). On 2 May 1842 a second Chartist petition was rejected by the Commons. In the summer of 1842 the authorities rounded up the leading Chartist strikers and brought them to trial. .

Italy

Italy in the 1840s was what Metternich called a ‘geographical expression’. Following Guiseppe Mazzini’s failed insurrection in the 1830s, it lacked national unity, parliamentary representation or any guarantees of civil liberties. The most repressive part of the peninsula was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Only the small north-western Kingdom or Piedmont-Savoy was free of Austrian rule (or patronage).

In 1846 the arch-reactionary Pope Gregory XVI died. His successor, the bishop of Imola, took the title of Pius IX (‘Pio Nono’). He was reputed to be a man of liberal sympathies and he took cautious steps to reform the extremely reactionary government of the Papal States. Between July 1846 and July 1847 he released about 2,000 political prisoners, relaxed press censorship and invited provincial delegates to a consultative assembly. Much to the fury of Metternich, Charles Albert of Piedmont and Leopold of Tuscany responded by granting a freer press.

The German States
The thirty-nine states of the German Confederation presented a very diverse picture. Some of the states in the south had constitutions and elected legislatures, but Prussia and Austria were absolutist powers. Southern Germany became increasingly politicized in the 1840s, returning a growing number of liberal deputies at each election. Prussia lacked the public political space for the expression of dissenting views but unofficial liberal and/or nationalist associations flourished, many of them centred on the churches.

From 1 January 1834 the Zollverein, the All-German Customs Union, provided a model for national unity. It incorporated the majority of Germans outside Austria.

In 1840 the rigid absolutist Frederick William III of Prussia died, and was succeeded by Frederick William IV (right) a romantic conservative who dreamed of restoring the Holy Roman Empire.

In view of the dominance of conservative governments, radicals and liberals remained hard to tell apart in Germany. The main ideological difference was in economics. Liberals believed in laissez-faire while the radicals believed that government intervention was necessary to redress the balance between capital and labour. They also became impatient of gradualism and began to consider forms of political mass mobilization. Their disagreements took place against a background of economic hardship and declining standards of living.

The Austrian Empire

This was a very diverse territory comprising many groups of people and many nationalisms: Germans, Czechs, Italians, Hungarians, Croatians, Slovenes, Romanians, and Poles. In the rural eastern parts of the empire there was mass illiteracy and the institutions of civil society were poorly developed. In the larger cities with student populations such as Vienna, Prague, Milan, Venice, Budapest, Krakow, Ljubljana and Zagreb crypto- political associations developed. Whereas in many other parts of Europe the oppositionists were middle class (or even working class) in the Empire they comprised a large proportion of nobles. But the most noted abolitionist by the 1840s was the lawyer Lajos Kossuth, a member of the Hungarian Diet, a lawyer, journalist and talented public speaker.

The problems faced by liberal oppositionists in the Empire can be seen in the uprising of 1846 in the Polish province of Galicia. The noble conspirators called on the bulk of the population, the serfs, to join in them, but instead the serfs turned on the conspirators and murdered them.

France: the July Monarchy
In 1830 the deposed Charles X was succeeded by Louis-Philippe, the 57 year old head of the Orléanist family. His regime of Louis-Philippe was conservative but it lacked the legitimacy which was essential to true conservatives. It was not a divine right monarchy and Louis-Philippe was designated 'king of the French' not 'king of France'. The tricolore replaced the white flag of the Bourbons as a sign that Louis-Philippe, who had fought at Jemappes and was the son of the revolutionary Philippe Égalité was a ‘Citizen King’. ‘His raison d’être was to stand between France and a republic’. Censorship was abolished and the king had to share his power with a Chamber of Deputies. Only 2.8% of the male population had the right to vote by 1846. France was governed by the class of landed proprietors who had done well out of the Revolution.

The early years of Louis-Philippe’s reign were marked by social disturbances, royalist plots, a republican assassination attempt, and unstable ministries. But by 1840 the dynasty seemed secure. The former history professor, Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874), was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs and became the dominating figure in the government. Hopes of a Napoleonic restoration seemed to have ended with the death of the young duc de Reichstadt (Napoleon II), Napoleon’s son, in 1832. In 1836 and 1840 Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, son of Louis, king of Holland and Hortense de Beauharnais (Josephine’s daughter) attempted a coup at Strasbourg and Boulogne, but these were fiascos.

The July monarchy’s security turned out to be an illusion. Within the Chamber opposition mounted to what was seen as government corruption and there were renewed demands for the extension of the franchise. Guizot resisted this demand on the grounds that any extension of the right to vote would lead to universal (manhood) suffrage. In July 1847 the opposition organized the first of a series of political banquets, where tickets were sold for a nominal sum and equally nominal amounts of food and drink provided. Leading orators denounced government corruption and called for parliamentary reform. At a banquet in Lille on 7 November 1847 the left-wing politician, Ledru-Rollin, advocated manhood suffrage. In January 1848 the king and Guizot prohibited further banquets. The opposition backed down rather tamely but their newspapers took up the cause.

The ‘Hungry Forties’
The 1840s were a time of great hardship throughout Europe. Most of Western Europe had been affected by the bad harvest of 1845 and the potato blight. By 1847 food prices had doubled and though the harvest of that year was good, the European economies had slipped into recession. In April there were food riots in Berlin, nicknamed the ‘potato revolution’.

The Revolutions of 1848 (a very brief summary)
The first uprising was in the Bourbon kingdom of Sicily and Naples in January, forcing Ferdinand II to form a liberal ministry and authorize a constitution, modelled on the French constitution of 1830. In March the Sicilians deposed Ferdinand and set up a regency.

On 22-24 February a revolution broke out in Paris. Guizot’s ministry fell, and Louis Philippe, unable to form another ministry, abdicated and fled. On 25 February the moderate provisional government was forced by angry crowds to set up the Second Republic.

All the subsequent revolutions followed the same pattern: the news of revolution in France would attract excited crowds in the major cities, groups of men (mostly journalists, lawyers, and students) met to discuss the rumours. The government, in fear of revolution, would call out the army, which would begin to skirmish with the citizenry. Barricades would come up and mob action would ensue.

The most symbolic event was the flight of Metternich to exile in London in March, which was followed by an uprising in Berlin [right] that panicked Frederick William IV into abolishing censorship and introducing a constitutional system in Prussia. But it was only in France that the initial wave of revolution led to the proclamation of a republic.

Some aspects of the revolutions harked back to 1789. National or civic guards were formed, trees of liberty were planted and tricolore flags were raised. This revolutionary euphoria was described by contemporaries as the ‘springtime of the peoples’.

The mass movements of early 1848 were accompanied by an unprecedented wave of communication, organization and assembly. The newly installed liberal governments abolished censorship and newspapers circulated as never before. New voluntary associations of workers, professionals and even soldiers sprang up. The formation of political clubs was reminiscent of the French Revolution, though on a much larger scale.

Each country experienced the revolution in different forms. Some avoided revolution. In the Low Countries and Scandinavia, governments quickly introduced reforms. For entirely different reasons, Britain and Russia were both relatively untouched. Russia saw sporadic serf uprisings that were put down by the tsar’s troops. In Britain a Chartist rally on Kennington Common on 10 April passed off peacefully.

But even without Britain and Russia the Revolutions of 1848 covered an enormous area, ranging from the Atlantic to the Ukraine and the Mediterranean to the Baltic. It was the most widespread of all the waves of revolution from 1789 to 1989. The revolutions took many forms. In central and eastern Europe they were primarily serf riots against their lords and the burning of castles. With the disturbances, serfdom came to an end in the Austrian Empire and the German states. In Italy and in parts of the Austrian empire the peasants tried to gain control of the woods. In the more economically advanced parts of Europe the urban lower classes attacked new technologies: craftsmen and labourers destroyed machines and bargeman attacked steamships on the Rhine.

The development of the 1848 revolution can be divided into four parts:

1. January – March 1848: the initial struggles on the barricades (eg in Paris, Berlin and Milan) and the coming to power of liberal regimes;
2. Spring of 1848: the generally unexpected development of political conflicts in these regimes;
3. May-November: a series of violent confrontations ending in the defeat of the revolutionary forces;
4. 1849-51: a new round of organization and agitation but also of a growing political polarization.

Why did the Revolutions Fail?
Some of the seeds of the failure of the 1848 Revolutions lay in their success. Elections were held for constituent assemblies in France, Germany, Prussia, the Austrian Empire and Denmark. The franchise was broad and participation was high. The most prominent of the bodies that sprang up from the revolutions was the all-German Parliament at Frankfurt. But the bulk of the electorate was conservative and the resulting parliaments were opposed on principle to revolutions.

Liberals and radicals were unable to agree. Radicals pressed for manhood suffrage and social reform, but liberals simply wanted a wider franchise. Even the radicals were predominantly middle class and often out of touch with the working classes and the peasants. This can be seen in the ‘June Days’ in Paris. When the Assembly decreed that all unmarried workers in the National Workshops (which had been set up to provide work for the unemployed) should join the army and the remainder disperse to the provinces, the barricades went up again. In six days of bitter fighting, the army under the command of the conservative republican Cavaignac, reinforced by the National Guard, recaptured the city street by street. Thousands of prisoners were held in terrible conditions before being sent to Algeria. Victor Hugo said that in the June Days civilization defended itself with the methods of barbarism.

The revolutions were faced with clashes of nationalist demands. Both the new liberal government in Denmark and the German National Assembly at Frankfurt laid claim to Schleswig. The Assembly attempted to take over the conduct of a war with Denmark, but in August Frederick William IV, under international pressure, renounced German claims, and destroyed the credibility of the Assembly. Germans and Poles also contested Posen (Poznàn). The clashes were most severe in the Habsburg Empire: liberal Czech nationalists forcibly prevented the participation of Bohemia and Moravia into the German National Assembly; Poles and Ukrainians clashed over Galicia; Croatians refused to participate in the Hungarian National Assembly. The revolutions showed the complex interactions of the forces that had brought about the revolutions. In Transylvania nationalism clashed with feudalism. The noble landlords were Hungarian nationalists, the Romanian-speaking peasants supported Romanian nationalism. The Transylvanian civil war cost 40,000 lives, by far the greatest death toll in the revolutions.

The conservative rulers and army officers such as Radetsky (left) and Windischgrätz were able to exploit these divisions and complexities. Hungarian units fought with Radetsky against the Italians. Liberal nationalist movements in the Habsburg Empire turned on each other and thus preserved the Empire’s existence.

France played an important role. The Second Republic dissociated itself from the military policies of the Revolution and thus refused to support revolutionary movements. In 1849 President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte sent troops to suppress Garibaldi's Roman Republic and restore papal rule.

The Frankfurt Parliament was very significant for the future history of Germany. At the end of October 1848 the deputies voted to adopt a ‘greater German’ (grossdeutsch) solution to the national question: the Habsburg German (and Czech) lands would be incorporated in the new German Reich; the non-German Habsburg lands would be formed into a separate constitutional entity ruled from Vienna. But the Austrians had no intention of accepting this. In November Schwarzenberg, the new chief minister, announced that he intended the Habsburg monarchy to remain a unitary political entity. This forced the Frankfurt deputes to adopt the kleindeutsch solution, in which Austria would be excluded from the new German polity and the pre-eminence would inevitably pass to Prussia.

In April, delegates travelled to Berlin to offer the crown to Frederick William, but he refused the crown on the grounds that he would only accept it if the other German princes agreed. This sealed the fate of the Frankfurt Parliament. In 1850 Prussia and Austria agreed to work together. In 1851 the German Confederation was restored.

However, 1848 brought profound changes in Prussia. Frederick William’s constitution remained, though the franchise was altered and skewed towards men of property. The press was no longer censored though there was much surveillance of radical groups.

Conclusion
In the immediate reckoning, 1848 was a series of disasters for liberalism. But it can be argued that the reactionary regimes had triumphed at such a heavy cost that they could not bear a repeat performance. The basic liberal principle of government by consent could not be denied and one by one over the next two decades government by consent steadily gained widespread acceptance. Metternich’s Europe had gone for ever.