Had the French Revolution of 1789 been defeated after the fall of Napoleon? That was what conservatives like the Austrian Count Metternich hoped. Or would a new revolution fulfill the promise of 1789, and meet the new demands generated by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of nationalism? That was the hope of people like Joseph Mazzini and Karl Marx. The wave of revolutions that began in France in February 1848 and soon spread to all the major regions of Germany, Italy, and the Austrian (Habsburg) Empire proved that the force of revolution was not dead. The failure of those revolutions, however, suggested that fundamental change in Europe would not be brought about by popular uprisings.
I. A Cocktail of Causes
A. the complaints of the middle classes
1. liberalism and demands for constitutional government
2. nationalism and its complications
B. the contributions of the lower classes
1. reactions against industrialization
2. the ‘hungry ‘40s’
II. An Overflow of Revolutions
A. France: middle-class and popular movements
1. the proclamation of the Republic
2. universal manhood suffrage
3. workers and women
B. Germany, Austria, Italy
1. nationalism in Germany and Italy
2. revolution in a multi-national empire
C. Countries that stayed high and dry, and why
1. Britain: middle class too strong
2. Russia: middle class too weak
III. The Revolutions Down the Drain
A. conflicts among the revolutionaries
1. workers and bourgeoisie
2. the contradictions of nationalism
B. The conservative counter-offensive
1. armies and bureaucracies
2. the absent peasantry
C. The lessons for the future
1. the power of the state
2. nationalism vs. socialism
Bourgeois reaction to the February 1848 Revolution in France (from the novelist Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education): “The fall of the monarchy had been so swift that, once the first moment of stupefaction passed, the middle classes felt a sort of astonishment at finding that they were still alive… everybody paid lip service to the tricolor, each party seeing only one color in the flag—its own—and resolving to remove the other two as soon as it had the upper hand.”
Alexis de Tocqueville recalls the June Days fighting in Paris: “I had guessed before this that the whole of the working class backed the revolt, either actively or in its heart; this proved it to me. In fact, the spirit of insurrection circulated from end to end of that vast class and in all its parts, like blood in the body…”
A German nationalist proclamation (speech in the Frankfurt Parliament, June 1848): “The liberated German nation is eager to reap the fruits of its political emancipation. It demands law and order, it demands the revival of industrial activity. It demands the political unity of Germany so that it can break the chains which bind domestic commerce… It demands the political unity of Germany so that it can win for its country the eminent position in foreign commerce and in world trade to which it can rightly lay claim…”
Francis Palacky, Czech nationalist, responding to a German invitation to send delegates to the Frankfurt parliament, April 1848: “The declared aim of your Assembly is to put a Federation of the German people in the place hitherto held by the Federation of Rulers, to make the German nation attain real unity, to strengthen its national feeling, and to enhance Germany’s power at home and abroad… I am not a German… I am a Bohemian… The rulers of our people have for centuries participated in the Federation of German rulers, but the people never looked upon itself as part of the German nation.”