Revolutions of 1848

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The Revolutions
of 1848
Prelude
Revolutions in France
Revolutions in the Habsburg areas
Revolutions in the German states
Revolutions in the Italian states
Revolutions in Poland
Aftermath

The European Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations or the Year of Revolution, appeared to be a revolutionary wave which erupted in Sicily and then, further triggered by the revolutions of 1848 in France, soon spread to the rest of Europe and as far afield as Brazil. These European revolutions were the violent consequences of such a wide variety of causes that it is difficult to view them as resulting from any kind of movement or coherent social phenomenon. Changes had been taking place in Europe in the first half of the 19th century. In politics, both bourgeois reformers and radical politicians were seeking change in their nations' governments. In society, technological change was creating new ways of life for the working classes, a popular press extended political awareness, and new values and ideas such as liberalism, nationalism and socialism began to spring up. The spark that lit the fire was a series of economic downturns and crop failures that left the peasants and the poor working classes starving.

In Brazil, the rhetoric surrounding the Praieira revolt took cues from European events, as did its thorough repression. The United Kingdom, Russian and Ottoman Empires were the only major European states to go without a national revolution over this period. Russia's ability to remain generally stable was because of its revolutionary group's inability to communicate between eachother. An exception to this was the Kingdom of Poland, where uprisings took place in 1830-31 (November Uprising), 1846 (Kraków Uprising) and in 1863-65 (January Uprising). Similarly, while there were no uprisings in the Ottoman Empire as such, there were in some of its vassal states.

Chartist meeting on Kennington Common in 1848.
Chartist meeting on Kennington Common in 1848.

In the United Kingdom, the middle classes had been pacified by general enfranchisement in the Reform Act 1832, with the consequent agitations, violence, and petitions of the Chartist movement that came to a head with the petition to Parliament of 1848. The repeal of the protectionist agricultural tariffs - called the "Corn Laws" - in 1846, had defused some proletarian fervor. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, revolution was far from the minds of those in Ireland, struggling and dying through the Potato Famine (the exception being William Smith O'Brien's debacle in County Tipperary). The United States saw the Seneca Falls Convention and the birth of feminism.

Switzerland was also spared, having been through a civil war the previous year. However, the introduction of the Swiss Federal Constitution in 1848 was a revolution in itself, laying the foundation of Swiss society as it is today.

Although the revolutions were put down quickly, in their span there was horrific violence on all sides, with tens of thousands tortured and killed. Most obvious, immediate political effects of the revolutions were quickly reversed; nonetheless the long-term reverberations were far-reaching.

Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in his Recollections that "society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, and those who had anything united in common terror."

Contents

[edit] Before 1848

Large swathes of the nobility were discontented with royal absolutism or near-absolutism. In 1846 there had been an uprising of Polish nobility in Austrian Galicia, which was only countered when peasants, in turn, rose up against the nobles.[1]

Next the middle classes began to get agitated. Whatever aspirations Karl Marx and his followers may have had as laid out in The Communist Manifesto (published in German February 1, 1848), the workers had little solidarity, and practically no organization.[citation needed] Both the lower middle classes and the working classes wanted liberal reform, and finally a group with some organization pushed for it. While much of the impetus was from the middle classes, much of the cannon fodder came from the lower. The revolts first erupted in the cities.

[edit] The poor

French rural areas had grown fast, spilling population into the cities. The "respectable" classes feared the working poor, who had shown their muscle in 1789, and the uneducated, teeming masses seemed a fertile breeding ground of vice.

There had always been alcoholic drink, freethought, crime, itinerancy, illiteracy, and food riots, and despite leftish analysis, in many ways the French working class was no worse off under industrialization than before. But there were salient facts: the worker toiled from 13 to 15 hours per day, living in squalid, disease-ridden slums. Traditional artisans felt the pressure of industrialization, having lost their guilds. "Dangerous" writers such as Marx became popular. Secret societies sprang up.

The situation in the German states was similar. Prussia had quickly industrialized. Worker living standards had dropped; alcohol consumption had gone up in the 1840s. Feudalism was inarguably horrible for the poor, but the worker saw little gain from the new socio-economic system of capitalism and the accompanying social change.[citation needed]

[edit] The rural areas

Rural growth had of course led to food shortages, land pressure, and migration, both within Europe and out from Europe (for example, to the United States). Population concentration led to disease, specifically, cholera, which at the time had not been tied to water supplies. The Irish potato famine exploded in 1845 and had migrated to the rest of the continent; there were poor harvests in 1846. But some lived relatively well.

Aristocratic wealth (and corresponding power) was synonymous with the ownership of land. Owning land at this time was practically synonymous with having peasants under one's control, often duty-bound to labor for their masters. In a problem mirroring that of slavery in the United States, a principal aristocratic problem was controlling one's sometimes-dangerous source of wealth. Their grievances exploded in 1848.

[edit] The early rumblings

Until 1789 (the French Revolution), no one had earnestly contested the rule of kings on the Continent. In 1815, after Napoleon, a close semblance of the Ancien Régime was restored at the Congress of Vienna. This was no sooner established when the monarchies, the church, and the aristocracy were again threatened. There had been revolutions or civil wars in England (1640s-1650s), France (1789 and after), Ireland (1798), and the born-of-revolution United States, which seceded in 1776 from Great Britain, as well as Mexico, having split from Spain. A revolution against the Netherlands produced the seceding country of Belgium in 1830, a year that also saw another revolution in France. Unrest was in the air.

"Dangerous" ideas kept upwelling, despite forceful and often violent efforts of established powers to keep them down: democracy, liberalism, nationalism, and socialism.

In short, democracy meant universal male suffrage. Liberalism fundamentally meant consent of the governed and the restriction of church and state power, republican government, freedom of the press and the individual. Nationalism believed in uniting people bound by (some mix of) common languages, culture, religion, shared history, and of course immediate geography; there were also irredentist movements. At this time, what are now Germany and Italy were collections of small states. Socialism was a then-fuzzy term with no solid definition, meaning different things to different people, but it roughly meant more rights for workers in a typically collectivist system.

[edit] Legacy

. . . We have been beaten and humiliated . . . scattered, imprisoned, disarmed and gagged. The fate of European democracy has slipped from our hands. Pierre Joseph Proudhon [2]

Ten years after the 1848 Revolutions, little had visibly changed, and many historians consider the revolutions a bloody failure.

On the other hand, both Germany and Italy were unified in somewhat over 20 years, and there were a few immediate successes for some revolutionary movements, notably in the Habsburg lands. Austria and Prussia eliminated feudalism by 1850, improving the lot of the peasants. European middle classes made political and economic gains over the next twenty years; France kept its universal manhood suffrage. Russia would later free the serfs on February 19, 1861. The Habsburgs finally had to give the Hungarians more self-determination in the Ausgleich of 1867, although this in itself resulted only in the rule of autocratic Magyars in Hungary instead of autocratic Germans.

But in 1848, the revolutionaries were idealistic and divided by the multiplicity of aims for which they fought -- social, economic, liberal, and national. Conservative forces exploited these divisions, and revolutionaries suffered from mediocre leadership. Middle-class revolutionaries feared the lower classes, evidencing different ideas; counter-revolutions exploited the gaps. As some reforms were enacted and the economy improved, some revolutionaries lost heart. When the Habsburgs lightened the burden of feudalism, many peasants lost heart; similar failures occurred elsewhere. International support likewise lacked.

Autocratic Russia did not support such revolutions at home, but actively helped the Austro-Hungarian Empire in her war with a restive Hungarian splinter group. Both Britain and Russia opposed Prussia's plans on Schleswig-Holstein, tarnishing their view among Germany's liberal nationalists.

The net result in the German states and France was more autocratic systems, despite reforms such as universal male suffrage in France, and strong social class systems remained in both. What reforms were enacted seemed like sops thrown to quell dissent, while privilege remained untouched. Nationalistic dreams also failed in 1848.

The Italian and German movements did provide an important impetus. Germany was unified under the iron hand of Bismarck in 1871 after Germany's 1870 war with France; Italy was unified in 1861 as the United States was split into two nations and exploding into internecine civil war.

Some disaffected German bourgeois liberals (the Forty-Eighters, many atheists and freethinkers) migrated to the United States after 1848, taking their money, intellectual talents, and skills out of Germany and siding with the Union in the American Civil War, as they found slavery (and by implication, the Confederacy) distasteful with their image of America. Over 177,000 German Americans served the Union cause. Like 1861 for the United States, 1848 was a watershed year for Europe, after which things were never again the same.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change, Routledge, 1998. ISBN 0-415-1611-8. p. 295–296.
  2. ^ Breunig, Charles (1977), The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789 - 1850 (ISBN 0-393-09143-0)

[edit] References

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