Age of Revolutions · EPILOGUE ·
Revolutions of 1848
Chapter 12 of The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848: “1848: The Springtime of Peoples”
Harvest failure, unemployment and blocked reform set off revolutions in 1848 from Palermo and Paris to Vienna, Berlin, Milan and Budapest. Monarchies conceded constitutions, Metternich fled and the Habsburgs abolished serfdom, but the revolutionaries divided, loyal armies recovered and Russia helped defeat Hungary in 1849.
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The map above is the world of Europe, March 1848 — The springtime of peoples.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1850 · Europe in 1850.
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SHORT EXPLANATION
Harvest failure and unemployment brought hardship to a Europe where demands for reform had long been gathering. In 1848 revolt spread from Palermo and Paris to Vienna, Berlin, Milan and Budapest. Railways, newspapers and telegraph lines carried news between cities; monarchs conceded, Metternich fled Vienna, and Habsburg authorities abolished serfdom.
Victory over an old government left the question of what should replace it. Workers and liberals disagreed over social policy, while German, Magyar, Czech, Croat and other national movements made overlapping claims. Loyal armies recovered and Russia helped defeat Hungary. Most regimes regained control, but the end of serfdom, several constitutions and mass politics survived. Later governments would have to confront reform and unification by different routes.
The full story
By 1848, failed harvests and high food prices had joined a credit crisis and urban unemployment to put Europeans under severe strain. In February Parisians overthrew the July Monarchy, and the new republic established universal male suffrage. The news traveled quickly. Within weeks Vienna had risen and Metternich had fled; Budapest had won the April Laws; Berlin’s king had conceded after street fighting; and Milan had driven out its Austrian garrison. At Frankfurt, delegates began drafting a constitution for a united Germany that did not yet exist. Habsburg authorities abolished serfdom, relieving more than forty million people of feudal obligations.
A common opponent had brought different groups together. Once governments conceded, their differences became harder to contain. In Paris the closing of the National Workshops brought workers into the streets in June, and the republic crushed the rising, killing or deporting thousands. National claims divided revolutionaries too: Frankfurt’s proposed Germany included lands with Polish or Czech populations, while Hungarian leaders resisted autonomy for Croats and Romanians. Habsburg authorities could use these conflicts as loyal armies regrouped.
The military recovery took time. Radetzky defeated Piedmont, Windischgrätz retook Prague and Vienna, and Russian intervention defeated Hungary in 1849. France destroyed the Roman Republic, and Venice fell after siege and cholera. On the map, the revolutionary zones disappear more slowly than the first capitals had risen. The risings were nearly simultaneous, but their participants lacked a shared command and had not resolved competing national claims. Monarchs still had organized armies and eventually helped one another, as Russia did in Hungary.
Defeat did not restore Europe intact to 1847. Governments reversed much of the sharing of power, yet retained changes that had altered the societies they governed. Serfdom remained abolished, Prussia and Piedmont kept constitutions, and mass suffrage endured in France. The revolutionary governments fell; some of the questions they had forced onto the political agenda remained.
FULL EXPLANATION
News and the limits of common action
Revolutionary news had traveled by print and rumor before 1848. This time, railways, steam transport, telegraph lines and a cheap press carried it between larger cities with unusual speed. A report that a monarch had conceded could make action elsewhere seem less dangerous. One rising encouraged another, without a central body directing them. Their timing gave movements an advantage: governments faced crises in several places at once and could not immediately help every threatened ruler. But a rapid agreement to act was not an agreement on what should follow. A constitutional liberal protecting property, a worker seeking employment and a nationalist claiming territory might all oppose the same government. Once it conceded, they still had to decide who would govern and whose claims would prevail. Communication helped coordinate revolt; it could not settle those questions.
Defeat and a lasting agenda
Judged by whether revolutionary governments stayed in power, 1848 was largely a failure. Armies restored dynastic authority, and the Frankfurt delegates did not unite Germany by consent. But those victories did not restore every old institution or obligation. Serfdom’s abolition changed life across much of Central Europe, several states kept constitutions or parliaments, and universal male suffrage made mass electoral politics a force in France. National unification also remained an aim, although its agents and methods changed. Cavour and Bismarck used monarchy, diplomacy and war to help build Italy and Germany. Their achievement answered a national demand while falling short of the liberal settlement many revolutionaries had imagined. To assess 1848, we must consider both the aims that survived and the different means later used to pursue them.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Hunger and unemployment. Potato blight and failed harvests in 1845–47 drove food prices sharply upward, in some places to around twice their earlier level. A credit crisis and urban unemployment followed. Families faced a subsistence crisis in a society already being changed by industry. Ideas about constitutions and nations gave opposition its political aims; expensive bread helped bring desperate people into the streets. The revolutions ebbed as the 1848 harvest improved, although better crops alone did not defeat them.
Demands left unresolved. Arguments over constitutions, press freedom, national unification and the emancipation of serfs and Jews had occupied Europeans since 1815. Governments suppressed many movements, although opportunities for legal reform varied between countries. In 1848 people with different demands could unite against a common regime. Their agreement on removing an obstacle did not settle what ought to take its place.
News travels quickly. News of victory gave opponents elsewhere a reason to think action possible. Reports of the February revolution in Paris reached Vienna within days, carried through a network of railways, steamships, telegraph lines and cheap newspapers linking growing cities. A monarch who had seemed immovable had conceded; perhaps another could be made to do so. This helped synchronize the risings, though news could not supply a common program or resolve the disputes among them.
The armies regroup. Concessions made under pressure left monarchies with a means of recovery: organized troops. Radetzky and Windischgrätz had forces available to suppress revolution, as did Nicholas I, who sent Russian troops. Many soldiers came from rural communities and could be deployed against urban movements; some belonged to national groups different from those they confronted. Their loyalty and organization mattered greatly, though willingness to fire alone cannot explain every revolution’s course.
THE TURNING POINT
Paris, 22–24 February 1848. The Paris authorities banned a reform banquet. Troops then fired on the Boulevard des Capucines, and protesters carried the dead through the streets by torchlight. By the morning of 24 February the July Monarchy, established after the revolution of 1830, had fallen. Within weeks uprisings and concessions followed from the German states to the Habsburg lands. No army had marched from Paris to bring them about: news of its victory encouraged action elsewhere. Paris also showed how difficult agreement after victory could be. In June the republic suppressed workers; later that year voters chose an emperor’s nephew as president by more than five million votes. A people able to bring down a government had not agreed on how its successor should act.
What it changed
Changes that endured. Restored rulers recovered authority without reversing everything that had happened. The abolition of serfdom affected more than forty million people across much of Central Europe. Piedmont and Prussia kept constitutions, while Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland retained constitutional changes; Switzerland’s 1848 federal constitution continued in amended form. France retained universal male suffrage, and several states kept parliaments. Rulers could recover powers they had conceded while preserving reforms that weakened feudal obligations or changed administration.
Unification by other means. Frankfurt’s delegates had tried to unite Germany through constitutional deliberation. Their failure left the national ambition alive, but others would pursue it differently. Within 23 years Cavour and Bismarck helped build Italy and Germany through monarchy, diplomacy and war. Bismarck had opposed the revolution as a young Prussian conservative in 1848. National unification answered one revolutionary demand; whether it was a delayed victory or a defeat also depends on the importance given to the liberals’ hopes for how it should be achieved.
Exiles carry the arguments abroad. Revolutionaries carried their arguments into exile. Kossuth toured the United States, Mazzini continued to plot, and Carl Schurz became a Union general. An estimated quarter-million Forty-Eighters reached the United States, though the size of that migration is disputed. Marx, a German journalist, worked in London and the British Museum; his interpretation of bourgeois revolution would influence later movements. Defeat scattered these people, but did not end their political work.
The age in the balance. From Lexington to Világos, the conflicts in this atlas cost several million lives. They also helped leave republics as an established form of government, slavery abolished or challenged across much of the hemisphere, declarations of rights as a constitutional model, and national statehood as a goal for peoples without a state. These gains and the deaths belong in the same account. How should we weigh them against the violence through which they emerged?
DISCUSSION QUESTION — “1848: the turning point at which modern history failed to turn.” How far is that verdict justified?
The verdict captures the immediate outcome: revolutionary governments fell, liberal national unification by consent failed, and restored armies prevailed. But the rulers who recovered power did not recover an unchanged society. Serfdom ended across much of Central Europe, several constitutions survived, and mass electoral politics remained in France. Within a generation, rulers and armies pursued Italian and German unification by methods very different from those envisaged at Frankfurt. The revolutionaries lost control of states, yet governments still had to answer questions about nations, constitutions and social provision.
An interesting fact
Around 21 February 1848, an émigré press in Bishopsgate, London, printed the Communist Manifesto in German. Paris rose about a day later. The coincidence was striking, but the first printing numbered only a few hundred copies and its small early circulation gave it no significant role in the revolutions. Its much wider political career developed later, especially from the 1870s.
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