Was 1848 the turning point where history failed to turn?

The short answer

• 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.

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?