Chapter 47: Springtime of the Peoples
In 1848, the effects of the industrialization and financial modernization combined with the forces of burgeoning ideologies and class and national identities to create a year of revolutions. Uprisings against the existing order swept across Continental Europe – although these missions failed almost everywhere. It marked a turning point in world history – a flashpoint in the political and economic transitions underway – and for us, it will mark the end of the First Industrial Revolution.
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Sources for this episode include:
Duncan, Mike. “Revolutions.” Season 7. 2017.
Rapport, Mike. 1848: Year of Revolution. Basic Books. 2008.
Saville, Amanda C et al. “Historic Late Blight Outbreaks Caused by a Widespread Dominant Lineage of Phytophthora infestans (Mont.) de Bary.” PloS one vol. 11,12 e0168381. 28 Dec. 2016, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0168381
Full Transcript
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In the United States today, depending on where you live, you might well spend more than half your income on housing – whether that be in the form of a home mortgage or paying rent. And if a new industry moves to your area, or a Whole Foods pops up in your neighborhood, that rent might start going up beyond your ability to pay. Property values rise and then the house you have your eye on might be out of reach, financially. It’s little wonder, then, why homelessness is growing so rapidly in California, for example, where housing prices and rents are skyrocketing.
Well, in 19th Century Europe, it wasn’t housing that caused that concern, it was food. The average household spent more than half its income on food. So if food prices shot up, it meant hunger and desperation.
Where exactly the crisis originated from is debated, but it was most likely either Mexico or the Andes Mountains: a parasitic microorganism called Phytophthora infestans. In the early 1840s, a strain of it called HERB-1 spread through the United States, where it infected potato crops and turned them to mush.
Using new industrial tools to increase the efficiency of agriculture, as well as the efficiency of transporting agricultural products, the U.S. was becoming a major exporter of food to the global economy. Around 1844, a ship carrying potatoes left the eastern seaboard bound for Europe. Unbeknownst to anyone on board, some of these potatoes had been recently infected by HERB-1. By the time they showed up in Europe, the goods had been ruined and – much worse – the disease they carried spread.
The next year, the blight destroyed one out of every three potatoes grown in Europe.
The impact was felt most acutely in Ireland. The British had gradually subdued their western neighbors over the centuries, and by the 19th Century, British landlords converted their Irish lands for purposes like cattle and sheep grazing, using that same practice of enclosure that I mentioned way back in Chapter 4. And as I mentioned in Chapter 45, much of the food being cultivated in Ireland was being shipped to Britain.
As a result, the availability of land the Irish had to grow their own food was in short supply. So for this and other reasons, they turned to the potato.
About one third of all agricultural land in Ireland was used for potato cultivation and potatoes were the staple of the Irish diet. When the Great Famine hit, about one million Irish died, another one-to-two million were forced to emigrate in a world-wide diaspora, including some of my own ancestors and perhaps some of yours too. Sympathy from the British government and British landlords was limited, as were policies to address the crisis.
Over the past 300 or so years, the potato had been slowly introduced to the mix of European crop cultivation. This picked up quite a bit around the time of the French Revolution, and it allowed the growing population to keep growing. Potatoes are dense with calories. An acre of potatoes can provide the population with 6 to 8 million calories, whereas an acre of wheat provides roughly half that.
Nowhere else did people experience the same degree of misery as in Ireland. On the European Continent, there was a great deal more diversity in the agricultural portfolio. Bread was still the primary staple of the European diet. But the loss of so many potatoes still meant a decline in the overall food supply, and food prices rose beyond many Europeans’ ability to pay. So while Ireland was the hardest hit, it was far from the only hit. Roughly 100,000 Continental Europeans also died as a result of the potato famine. And those who weren’t literally starving were nonetheless getting desperate.
And then came 1846, which was a bad harvest year in general. Cereal crops in many places yielded only about half what they normally did. Food prices doubled in some areas. And as a result, there was little to no disposable income left over for anything else.
So consumer spending plummeted. That forced manufacturers and artisans to lay off workers, who were – you know – already struggling to afford food with the incomes they had. Now they had no incomes. In Vienna, one-in-ten workers were let go. In France, 700,000 workers were dismissed, including 50% of Parisians. And don’t forget, there’s no welfare state yet. Unemployment insurance is virtually nonexistent. Some workers accepted wage cuts to keep their jobs. Industrial textile workers in Rouen, for example, took a 30% cut. In cities across Europe, tens of thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of residents were starving by the winter of 1846 to 1847, which is – oh yeah – also harsher than usual.
The economic crisis then created a financial crisis. Credit froze up, because what banker in his right mind is going to lend your business money when it has no income for the foreseeable future? Those guild masters who had maintained their businesses in spite of growing industrialization now saw their businesses collapse.
Besides, the bankers and other bourgeois investors had way too much capital tied up in the recently constructed railways, which were only beginning to yield returns. And this railway mania had led to a stock bubble. So, when the agricultural sector failed and the impact spread across the rest of the economy, the bubble burst and stock prices collapsed. These capitalists had not yet recouped on their investments and now, it seemed, many never would. The lucky few who did would need to wait a lot longer for it.
The civil engineers and construction workers building the factories and railroads and other projects of the future were effectively furloughed for an indefinite period of time. Investors in the banks, meanwhile, saw the credit crunch as a sign of the times and decided to withdraw their savings. So on top of everything else, there are now dozens of bank runs happening up and down the Continent, and several banks went into dissolution.
Merchants, facing the realities of supply and demand, sold food at higher prices than usual. But this only enraged their customers, who were deeply suspicious of price gouging. (And with many of the merchants, like the bankers, being Jewish, the response carried more than a hint of anti-Semitism.) Food riots broke out against merchants in several cities, as the mob demanded a return to the “just price” of bread and other staples. Women in Berlin ransacked the local markets for four days until the Prussian army was called in. Crime went up considerably as people became desperate, especially with theft, fraud, and prostitution, but also murder in cases of armed robberies going awry.
The governments of Europe were slow to react to the crisis, but across the Continent they tried subsidizing food to keep prices down, and in a few places they even tried something akin to food stamps. But of course, these governments were also facing a massive shortage of tax revenue as a result of the recession, and so they had to take out very unfavorable loans.
On New Year’s Eve, 1847, Europe was in a state of transition. Modern financial systems were expanding. Industrialization was beginning to take off. New military, political, and administrative ideas had spread and, in some places, were implemented, thanks to the French Revolution and Napoleon. But the crisis created an abrupt halt and fostered doubt for the future. And as the new day and the new year came, so too did a wave of Revolutions. Across the Continent, people rose up to take the uncertain future into their own hands. And for us, it marks the end of the First Industrial Revolution.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 47: The Springtime of the Peoples
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Okay, let’s cover some administrative notes before we get into it.
First of all, you heard me correctly, we have reached the end of the First Industrial Revolution. Did we get to every topic I hoped to cover? No. But that’s okay. This a podcast that will go on for a while, but not forever.
So what’s next?
Well, I’ll do one more chapter after this – appropriately, it will be Chapter 48 – which will be a ‘wrap-up’ of this first Industrial Revolution. We’ll review what’s been covered so far and discuss how we might analyze this history.
Then in mid-November, I’ll be releasing a new AMA bonus episode! That’s right, you listening will have the opportunity to ask me anything. (And I will do my best to answer.) Now, I did one a while ago, but many fans have told me they want another. So if there’s some topic I didn’t cover and you wish I had, or if you want to learn more about a topic I did cover, or if you want to know more about me or…anything…please ask me.
You can submit your questions at www.IndustrialRevolutionsPod.com/contact, or by tweeting at me (@IndRevPod) or however else you feel. Just please send me your questions by Friday, November 6th so I have enough time to do any necessary research for you.
After that I’ll do another Holiday Special in December and then I’m going to take a little time off – not much, only a little – so I can catch up on some other projects and get ready for the next batch of episodes. There will be 6 or 7 episodes about events between the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, and then another short break, and then we’ll start the Second Industrial Revolution in earnest before the end of 2021.
Second, I know episodes of the Industrial Revolutions can be a bit…intense sometimes, especially since I made them longer earlier this year. So, if you’d like to mix it up with a podcast of a more digestible length, I want to recommend “Math! Science! History!” to you. Every couple weeks, Gabrielle releases a 10-to-15 minute episode about the history of people, theories, and discoveries that have moved our scientific progress forward and spurred us on to the previously unimaginable. So check out “Math! Science! History!” on your podcast app.
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Okay then – to the Year of Revolutions. This is going to be a long, intense, and complicated episode. Consider yourself warned. Now, let’s dive in.
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We’ll begin with an overview of Europe on the eve of this tumult.
By 1848, industrialization had come full-swing in Great Britain, but not really anywhere else. As I talked about in Chapter 22, modern industry was pretty limited to certain urban pockets of France, Belgium, Germany (mostly the Ruhr valley), and Bohemia, which is the western half of today’s Czechia (also known as the Czech Republic). There was also a small number of factories starting to pop up in Barcelona and – important to our story today – Milan.
People moved into these cities faster than the job market was actually growing. Plus the cost of living was high. New dwellings weren’t great. The water supply was fouled by cholera. Pauperism was a common site. Workers had to accept longer hours, in part thanks to the introduction of gaslighting. (Shout out Chapter 36!) Much like in Britain, the situation was even worse out in the country, where the population of landless laborers kept growing while the availability of jobs for them dried up. Those who were tied to the land as peasants were forced to provide their lords with a certain amount of unpaid labor, usually for public works projects like road maintenance.
Construction of the railroads and telegraph lines was also underway, bringing visual symbols of the future to people across the vast rural stretches of Europe, and helping transport people, products, and ideas to and from the major cities, as were river navigations, canals, steamboats, and steamships.
Newspapers were being printed in such quantities that they could be sold and distributed cheaply, thus, more people were becoming informed about current events. This was important because Europe was becoming increasingly literate. Some 60% of French citizens could read, as could 55% of Habsburg subjects and a whopping 80% of Prussians. Compare that, for instance, to heavily-feudal Russia, where only 5% of the population could read.
Even for those areas that had not industrialized, they were facing the pressures of industrialization, as cheap imports from Britain flooded the market, crowding out locally-made goods by artisan craftsmen. This was especially the case with textiles.
The experiences of the Napoleonic Wars were still fresh in many minds. Obviously some of these memories were quite negative: violence, imperialism, subjugation, etc. But other experiences were more positive. Meritocracy was introduced to government, meaning folks were getting some rational and effective administration. The Napoleonic legal code had undone feudalism, created freedom of contract, introduced paper currency and joint-stock corporations. As governments slid away from these reforms, many Europeans wondered why and pondered what should be done instead.
Nowhere was this legacy more relevant than in France, where – for the past 18 years – the liberal Louis-Philippe I reigned. (Shout out Chapter 40!) But as the years went by, Louis Philippe got a little stuck in his ways. He was very committed to his own constitution and, by extension, his government.
While the constitution guaranteed many civil liberties to the French people, only about (and this is a rough estimate) 1 out of every 140 French citizens could vote for their representatives to the Chamber of Deputies. On top of that, they had their own problem of rotten boroughs just like the British had before the Great Reform Act, with which the government could buy votes for their candidates from a small number of voters in really outdated constituencies – constituencies that ignored the growing industrialization and urbanization of France over the previous two decades.
For a while, the government moved left under the leadership of our old friend Adolphe Theirs, before swinging back to the right under François Guizot. But no matter who was in charge, the most powerful interests were those of the bourgeoisie who embraced capitalism. In fact, the first two prime ministers were the bankers, and our old friends, Jacques Laffitte and Casimir Perier.
This didn’t sit super-well with the masses, who felt their 1830 revolution had been appropriated by their landlords and bosses, and other special interests.
Revolts against the July Monarchy started happening almost as soon as it began. Riots broke out in February 1831. The Society of the Rights of Man was founded in 1832, preparing its members for another revolution. Insurrections were staged in April 1834. Several industrial uprisings by silk workers in Lyon – known as the Canut Revolts – led to government violence and deportations. Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, attempted a coup in 1836 before he was exiled. Fearing where all this was headed, the monarchy began cracking down on some of those civil liberties.
But thanks to the civil liberties they had, France was also moving in a more Radical direction than most of Europe. Utopian socialists like our old friends Henri de Saint-Simone and Charles Fourier were being read and discussed. Some, like Louis Auguste Blanqui – who insisted all citizens had a “right to existence” – called for the redistribution of wealth and organized militant revolutionaries for that goal. Another, the super-wealthy Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, helped start a newspaper to challenge the left-wing Le National from the further left. It was called La Réforme, and it not only called for fuller democracy, but social reform too.
In Germany, the Zollverein was now allowing merchants to sell goods across the states that once made up the Holy Roman Empire – with Austria being a key exception. With this as a foundation, many hoped to create a new, unified German nation-state. But for now, liberalized trade was all they got. This was great for traders, bankers, industrialists, and consumers, but it was bad for the traditional guild masters and journeymen who focused on their crafts and wanted to keep prices high.
They wanted to resist the deskilling of labor. They wanted to avoid being forced into the struggling, industrial Proletariat. But by the 1840s, policy makers ignored the pleas of the guilds and were freeing up labor mobility.
A few states adopted some liberal political reforms. But for the most part, the German Confederation was still dominated by the conservative regimes of Prussia and Austria, which pressured their neighbors into reactionary conservatism. These restrictive regimes adopted strict press censorship, bans on public associations and labor unions, and restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly. Thus, the highly-educated German people felt stifled.
The stifling was the work of our old friend, Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich, who had little sympathy for either the liberalism or nationalism growing across the Austrian Empire. Now, let’s talk about that empire.
In addition to his holdings in, you know, Austria, the Habsburg emperor also controlled many realms around it, like much of northern Italy, Hungary, and Czechia, as well as parts of several more modern states like Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Ukraine, and some I’m no doubt forgetting. This means there was a great variety of languages spoken and cultural norms found throughout the empire – and as a result, there wasn’t much in the way of unity or loyalty to the empire.
The emperor personally made the laws for the many peoples across his empire, but the emperors Metternich served under weren’t exactly the most strategic or disciplined rulers. The present one, Ferdinand I, actually had some disabilities which were so severe he was basically relegated to the status of figurehead. The finances of the state were constantly in disarray, with soldiers and bureaucrats frequently not getting paid what they were owed.
A big reason for that was their hesitation to adopt more modern banking practices like the British and French, as well as the low levels of industrialization outside of Bohemia. It meant there was less economic growth, which meant they had less credit and less new taxable income than other European powers did. (Interestingly, the low level of industrialization also meant there was still a strong guild system in the Austrian Empire, and that guild system played into the conflict in 1848, with apprentices and journeymen fighting the oppressive powers of their guild masters.)
So, the extent of the bourgeoisie was basically university graduates trying to get jobs in law or the bureaucracy. They were highly educated but very poorly paid. And throughout history (and even today), it is typically the people who are highly educated and poorly paid who advocate the most radical and revolutionary ideas because they (a) have learned these ideas and (b) are pissed off. (You want to know why so many Millennials identify as socialists today? This is why.)
This bourgeoisie wanted government to generally conform to more rational decision making, they wanted to be able to participate in the decisions of government, they wanted basic civil liberties, and they wanted meritocratic hiring and promotions. This is a pretty classically liberal agenda, they’re not advocating a destruction of state power and redistribution of wealth. But it was way too far left for Metternich.
Outside Austria-proper, the most significant holding in the empire was the Kingdom of Hungary. With an 800-odd-year history, a separate language, etc., the Hungarians – or Magyars, as they’re called in their own language – had a keen sense of their national identity.
They also had a sense of constitutional norms, going back to the Golden Bull of the 1200s (basically the Hungarian Magna Carta) and the National Diet (basically a Parliament). At the end of the Middle Ages, as other monarchies were becoming more centralized and powerful, Hungary saw more and more power go to the national diets.
Then, in 1526, Hungary was defeated by the Ottoman Empire at the first Battle of Mohács, splitting the kingdom into three – an Austrian/Bohemian-dominated west, an Ottoman-ruled central Hungary, and a semi-independent Transylvania in the east. Then in the late 17th century, the Austrians and their allies defeated the Ottomans in a long war, at the end of which, the Turks ceded their lands in Hungary to the Habsburgs.
By the 1840s, several issues opened up between the liberal nobles of Hungary and the reactionary Habsburgs in Vienna:
Constitutional power (The Hungarians wanted a strong diet, the Austrians wanted central imperial control.) To this end, Hungary also wanted political equality with Austria.
Religious pluralism (The Hungarians were religiously tolerant, Austria was fiercely Catholic.)
Taxes (In theory, the diet was supposed to approve new taxes, but in practice they kept getting forced by imperial decree.)
Language (The emperor had made German the official language of the whole empire, including Hungary.)
Additionally, reformers in Hungary wanted to see development of their country’s infrastructure and industry, something that wasn’t happening much under Metternich’s government.
Now, it’s probably best I don’t get into the weeds with all this, but the Kingdom of Hungary included a lot of lands that are no longer part of Hungary. These were lands held by Hungarian lords, but worked by local peasants of other nationalities – including Slovaks, Romanians, and Croats, all of whom had their own languages and burgeoning senses of identity. And the peasants also tended to like strong monarchs, who they saw as protecting them from their landlords who dominated the diets. This sticking point would turn out to be true in Poland, Czechia, and Italy as well – not that any of those countries yet existed as nation-states.
Italy was actually much like Germany – a single people divided by Medieval boundaries. At this point, there hadn’t been a unified Italy for over a thousand years.
The southern half of the Italian peninsula was known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilys, which included the island of Sicily up to Naples, where the king and government sat. Moving northward was a territory called the Papal States, where the Pope was monarch in the capital of Rome. North of there was Tuscany, with its capital in Florence. There were also a couple small duchies called Parma and Modena. Then in the very northeast was the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, which stretched from Milan to Venice, and was part of the Austrian Empire.
In fact, most of the peninsula was more-or-less controlled by the Habsburgs, who made sure to install their family members in the various polities and secure favorable treaties. The one and only exception was the last state I need to mention: the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. It included the far-away island of Sardinia, but also the northwest part of Italy, where the capital, Genoa, was.
Across Italy, the political elites were so focused on their own local rivalries that they would invite the foreign powers in to help. Just like in Germany, the different peoples spoke different dialects (sometimes totally different languages). But also like up in Germany (and for similar reasons) this was starting to change. A movement to unite Italy was emerging – a movement called Risorgimento.
Inspired by the rational government they had seen under Napoleon, Italians began to rise up for constitutional monarchy across the peninsula in the early 1820s – most notably in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilys. Risings also took place in Modena and the Papal States in the 1830s, inspired by France’s recent July Revolution. Among the goals of these risings were to strengthen Piedmont-Sardinia and weaken the Austrians. But all these attempts at Risorgimento had failed. Nevertheless, they birthed strong networks of nationalist revolutionaries.
Of course, to push out the Austrians and unite Italy, who do you get behind? In effect, there were three options:
King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia. Though a conservative who did not particularly like the idea of constitutional monarchy, he very much liked the idea of being be king of a unified Italy.
Pope Pius IX. After years of conservative popes, the cardinals had finally elected this liberal pope in 1846. Upon taking power he freed all the Papal States’ political prisoners and relaxed censorship. This was a guy just about every Italian could get behind.
No monarch at all. Though relatively small, there was a hardcore republican movement in Italy, led by the revolutionaries Giuseppe Garibaldi (exiled by Charles Albert and fighting in South America), and Giuseppe Mazzini, the founder of Young Italy.
In fact, across Europe there was a great many opinions about what the new political order should look like. On the right you had absolute monarchists and religious establishmentarians who thought there should be no new order. In the center-left you had the liberals, who generally believed in constitutional monarchy, though some even leaned republican. Then on the far-left you had the Radicals, who tended to be republicans and democrats. Now, some democrats just wanted an expansion of the franchise – like what happened in Britain – but others wanted to go so far as having universal adult male suffrage. (Not too many were advocating women’s suffrage yet.)
And that was just the political question. Complicating things further was the social question. In addition to a new form of government, what form of economy do we want? This ranged from your conservative, landed nobility advocating for their “ancient rights” of feudalism, to liberals who wanted to push forward with capitalism and industrialization, to Radicals advocating for socialism or anarchism, or even this brand-new thing called “communism”. But of course, a political conservative could be a social liberal or vice versa. Many political Radicals, meanwhile, were far from being social Radicals.
And on top of all this, there were the complexities of nationalism. You want to build a nation-state where your nationality has autonomy? Great! But what about the minority nationalities in that state? What do they get? Aren’t they going to feel dominated, just like you do now?
All of these issues would need to get worked out. But first the fire needed to spread. And for that, a spark would need lighting.
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On January 29th, 1848, the politician and theorist Alexis de Tocqueville got up to speak in the French Chamber of Deputies on the need for parliamentary reform.
“I believe that right now we are sleeping on a volcano… can you not sense, by a sort of instinctive intuition… that the earth is trembling again in Europe? Can you not feel… the wind of revolution in the air?”
Not even Tocqueville knew just how right he was. The volcano erupted less than a month later.
It happened because of a banquet – or, rather, a banquet that didn’t happen. After the French government cracked down on civil liberties, banquets became one of the few outlets for speakers to address a crowd and talk politics publicly. Now the government said not even the banquets were allowed. On the night of February 21st, the liberal opposition leader – Odilon Barrot – decided to test the government, but to make it look as respectable as possible, moved the banquet out of the 12th (a working class neighborhood) and into the ritzy 8th. This infuriated French Radicals, who decided to hold a protest the next day. So the liberals decided to just cancel the banquet.
That night, the republican writers at La Réforme held an emergency meeting and decided to go through with the protest anyway. The next morning, hundreds of unemployed workers joined with students and crossed the Seine singing “La Marseillaise.” From there they marched on the Chamber of Deputies, demanding reform. Pushed back by the National Guard, they started hurling bricks. Violence between the protesters and Guards rapidly escalated. Iron railings were town down to be used as weapons, and the crowd starting running back to the narrow streets to gather firearms. That evening, barricades went up across the city, preparing for the urban warfare Paris was famous for.
The next day, Louis-Philippe swallowed a bitter pill and summoned his prime minister, François Guizot, to relieve him of his duties. It was the only way to prevent revolution. Crowds celebrated that night outside Guizot’s home.
But then something went horribly wrong. An army regiment saw the crowd and the commander marched them over to protect Guizot. They got between his house and the protesters when, suddenly, a random gun went off. The soldiers panicked and fired into the crowd, killing 50 protesters.
News of the ‘massacre’ quickly spread throughout the city. People started coming out en masse, shouting things like “Vengeance! Vengeance!” The king, terrified, invited Theirs and Barrot (neither of whom he loved) to form a new ministry. But when Barrot went out to proclaim the good news, he was stunned by the massive, Radical reaction: “We don’t want cowards! No more Thiers! No more Barrot! The people are the masters!” La Réforme writers went from barricade to barricade shouting “République! République!”
The next day, February 24th, the National Guard joined the protesters and took the Hôtel de Ville – the French seat of government. Surrounded by his courtiers, an exacerbated Louis-Philippe collapsed in his chair, listening to their conflicting advice. Finally our old friend – La Presse publisher Émile de Girardin – stepped forward and explained exactly what time it was: “Abdicate, Sire!” So he did, drafting an official abdication, leaving the crown to his grandson.
But if young Louis-Philippe II was ever going to be coronated, it wasn’t going to be anytime soon. The palace was deserted. Working-class revolutionaries then burst in and started taking turns sitting on the vacant throne before ceremonially burning it and smashing all the royal family’s worldly possessions. A provisional republican government was established, including the moderate poet and historian Alphonse de Lamartine, as well as socialists Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, and a revolutionary laborer known simply as “Albert.”
The news of what happened triggered a chain reaction across Europe, as it moved faster than ever before. Railroads, steamboats, and telegraph cables transported the details of these shocking events at previously unthinkable speeds. Just 18 years earlier, news of the July Revolution took several days to reach all of France. This time it took hours.
When the news reached Germany, liberals literally stopped what they were doing and began celebrating. Rallies were immediately organized to demand an end to Metternich’s oppressive laws. Feeling the pressures of these “March demands”, several German rulers announced liberal ministries and reform packages. Radicals in Heidelberg then called for a convention to unify Germany under a national constitution.
By March 1st, the news from Paris reached the city of Pressburg in Hungary (today it’s actually called Bratislava and it’s in Slovakia) where the national diet was meeting and debating what to do about serfdom in their kingdom. The revelation gave a jolt to the liberal members, who took the opportunity to greatly expand their reformist ambitions. Then the fiery liberal and Magyar nationalist Lajos Kossuth rose up to speak, declaring Habsburg rule, “the pestilent air which… dulls our nerves and paralyzes our spirit.” He went on argue Hungary should be “independent, national, and free from foreign interference.”
Much like the news from Paris, news of this heart-racing speech spread rapidly across the Austrian Empire. When it reached Vienna, it excited a local Radical named Alexander Bach to start a petition. Carried by him personally, on horseback, through the streets, he collected thousands of signatures demanding parliamentary government and some form of German unification. Students at the University of Vienna did the same, demanding freedom of speech, press, and religion, as well as academic freedom and popular representation in government – for all Germans in a new Germany.
From there the students organized a march to present the petition to the Lower Austrian Estates. Realizing they alone were not enough, they went to the suburbs to recruit the working-class to the cause. The morning of March 13th, some 4,000 students, workers, and petite bourgeois professionals descended on the seat of government and delivered the petition. Then they waited for the government’s response. As they did, some of them started making speeches, and one read out loud Kossuth’s speech.
Now, a lot of folks had heard about this speech, but didn’t know the full extent of it. When they heard it, they got even more riled up. They soon had one more demand: Metternich’s resignation.
Finally, the government ordered its soldiers to intervene, under the leadership of Archduke Albrecht. They tried to disperse the crowd, but, by this point, it had grown far too large to simply move. Across the city, shopkeepers started boarding up their shops, preparing for a riot. Clashes between the soldiers and protesters did, in fact, break out. Vienna’s new gaslight street lamps were torn out to use as battering rams on the city walls. The gas hissed out of the holes left in the ground until it was ignited, casting an eerie halo around the city. From their the angry workers went all-out Luddite (shout out Chapter 24!) breaking into factories and smashing the machines. They also ransacked bakeries, grocers, and the homes of landlords.
When Archduke Albrecht was struck by a rock, a terrified regimental commander shouted the order that would put the entire empire in jeopardy: “Move forward with fixed bayonets and fire!” Four protesters were killed and a woman was trampled to death as the crowd stampeded away.
If the rioting had been bad before, well, I don’t even know how to describe what happened next. The entire city erupted in fighting. Barricades went up, workers finally smashed down the city gates, and even tried to storm the arsenal. Finally, at 5:00pm a truce was successfully negotiated. The government agreed to remove the army from the city, a bourgeois militia and student militia – the Academic Legion – took their place to ensure order, a constitutional convention was called, and Chancellor Metternich was dismissed from his service. Like Louis-Philippe had done days earlier, he fled to England.
If the first major domino was the revolution in Paris, the second – and arguably more significant – was the fall of Metternich. Now that news was rapidly spreading across Europe.
First it made its way back up the Danube to Pressburg, where the Hungarian Diet seized the opportunity and agreed to form their own national government. Days later, the imperial government gave in and allowed them to move forward. Hungarian Radicals, meanwhile, went a step further and drafted a petition, calling for a series of reforms called the “Twelve Points” – most of which were standard liberal doctrines, but they also included the full integration of Transylvania into Hungary proper, which would become a major sticking point with the ethnic Romanians.
In Prague, Radicals led a demonstration through the rain and read out a petition calling for a constitution, civil rights, peasant rights, a united Czechia, and – most radically – the “organization of work and wages” for Bohemia’s new Proletariat. The mayor, meanwhile, declined to allow the local, mostly German-speaking, industrial bourgeoisie to bear arms. By the end of the month, the Czechs were calling for an independent kingdom – or even a republic. Vienna agreed to let them form a parliament.
Up in Prussia, news of Metternich’s fall set off a fiery debate within the royal court. News of the revolution in France already had people calling for King Frederick Wilhelm to make constitutional reforms, and the army had been called in to prevent violent protests. Now, the creation of a liberal German nation-state was feeling inevitable, and the king was persuaded to make concessions. On March 18th, a herald read out two proclamations to a crowd outside the royal place – the first abolishing censorship, the second calling on the Prussian Estates to meet and discuss joining a united Germany. The king even came out for it and he was happy to see the crowd cheering the news.
But then, as he started heading back inside, someone in the crowd shouted “Away with the military!” and soon the entire crowd was chanting it. They wanted the same as the Viennese – they wanted the soldiers out of Berlin. Well, nobody had planned for that. And the conservative general in Berlin decided to break up the crowd by having his men advance on them. Then two mysterious shots were heard. No one was hurt, but it led to shouts of “Betrayal!” and “They’re killing the people!” Within hours, the streets of Berlin were filled with barricades. 9,000 locomotive workers – still wearing their oily smocks – marched with their iron bars and hammers in hand to join the throngs of petite bourgeoisie, students, and artisans in the insurgency.
The ensuing street battle was perhaps the most intense of any battle in 1848. Cannonballs ricocheted along the city corridors as the artillery fired on the barricades; soldiers and workers fought in hand-to-hand combat; blood was literally flowing down the streets.
It is said the king wept that night. By morning, about a hundred soldiers and 800 insurgents were dead. Finally, the king sat down at his desk and wrote out a third proclamation, promising to remove the bulk of the army from Berlin – leaving only a few guards to defend the palace – if his “dear Berliners” would dismantle the barricades and return “to their peaceful ways.”
An uneasy truce was held the next day, but that conservative general – in what I’d call a pretty darn infantile move – decided to remove all the soldiers from the city, including those guarding the palace. The people took this as an opportunity to march on the palace, carting their dead. The king calmed them by appearing on the balcony and removing his hat in respect. A few days later, he began wearing the German national colors – black, red, and gold – and he promised a constitution. Then, for their safety, he and his family got the Hell out of Berlin. With them was a cadre of conservative hardliners who began prodding the king for a counter-revolution. Feeling humiliated by the uprising, he later commented, “we crawled on our stomachs.”
Down in Italy, the fall of Metternich emboldened the revolutions already underway. Technically it had been in Milan where the first revolutionary violence of 1848 had broken out, way back on January 3rd. A few days earlier – New Year’s Day, to be precise – the local liberals had decided to stage a boycott. Inspired by the Boston Tea Party nearly 75 years earlier, they decided to all quit smoking, since tobacco taxes were such a significant part of Austrian revenue. Well, the Austrian garrison stationed in Milan was given extra rations of cigars in response, to smoke brazenly and puff in the faces of the Milanese. If you’re a former smoker, like me, you can imagine how the Milanese reacted.
A huge riot broke out, leaving six Milanese dead and 50 wounded. The Austrian commander, the 81-year-old Joseph Radetzky von Radetz told his men that Italy’s “fanaticism and insane mania for innovations” (i.e. liberal reform) would be crushed by their courage “like fragile surf against a hard rock.”
Meanwhile, down in Palermo, separatists staged an insurrection for independence from their Neapolitan king on his birthday, January 12th. Barricades went up, people started flying the Italian tricolor, and there were cries of “Long live Italy, the Sicilian Constitution, and Pius IX!” These respectable liberals were then joined by gangs of peasant bandits from the countryside, as well as something called the squadre, which was an early version of the Mafia. When he heard about the uprising, the king sent about 5,000 troops south on a steamship to crush it.
But then a rumor spread across Naples that the struggling, unemployed masses of southern Italy were about to descend on the city in huge numbers – pitchforks and torches in hand, no doubt – to terrorize the rich. That got the local nobility and bourgeoisie to demand the king make some kind of political concessions. After a massive rally was organized outside the palace, the king finally promised a constitution.
Up in Rome, Pius IX held a day of prayer for the southern kingdom, but it led to a night-time demonstration of torch-wielding Radicals who – while cheering on their liberal pope – also started calling for some more Radical demands, including their own constitution and an army to go fight the Austrians in the north. At a follow-up demonstration a few days later, some began shouting “Death to the cardinals! Death to the priests!” since these rank-and-file officials were more conservative than their church’s leader.
In Tuscany, meanwhile, Grand Duke Leopold went ahead and granted a constitution before there was even the threat of an uprising. And in Piedmont, King Charles Albert released his own on March 4th – with civil rights and taxes approved by a parliament – hoping it would give him the trust among Italians he would need to become king of the peninsula.
Then on March 17th, Milan learned of Metternich’s dismissal. That night, Milanese liberals met and decided to organize a demonstration. The next day, men marched through the streets as women waived Italian tricolor handkerchiefs from the windows above. At the Palazzo del Governo, hundreds of people rushed into the council chamber and took the vice-governor hostage. And with that, Radetsky decided to have his soldiers start sniping off Milanese residents from the marble needle of the city’s great Cathedral. Bells rang from the church towers, summoning the masses to defend the city. Barricades went up and, on March 20th, gruesome street fighting began in earnest. Horrible atrocities were committed by both sides in the process.
When Radetzky sent an officer to negotiate a truce, though, a division opened up between Milan’s constitutional monarchists – who wanted to buy time for Charles Albert to come save them – and the republicans, who wanted to keep fighting on. In the meantime, though, the Milanese used their balloon-powered air-mail service to start sending out appeals to their fellow Lombards to join them. Some balloons drifted all the way to Piedmont, where Charles Albert began preparing for his long-awaited war of Italian liberation and unification – under his rule, of course.
Fighting in Milan dragged on until Radetzky was finally beaten back. With his siege broken, he fled into the country. After five “Glorious Days”, Milan was secure, the republican revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini made his way to the city, and Charles Albert declared war on Austria.
Venice learned about Metternich the same day as Milan and they too staged an insurrection. A crowd swept into Saint Mark’s Square, demanding the release of two prominent political prisoners, including another very important character in this story: a pragmatic republican lawyer named Daniele Manin. They staged a jail break, and Manin was instantly made the leader of the Venice revolution.
Manin sought peaceful negotiation with the Austrians, but was overruled by a mass of 1,500 local workers, who were pissed off at their Austrian employers. They planned an insurrection for March 22nd and it largely succeeded, thanks to many Italian troops in the Austrian garrisons defecting. The next morning, Manin was proclaimed president of a provisional government for the new Venetian Republic. The imperial army marched out. A report was sent to Vienna, which – trying to ward of incredulity straight away – opened with the line “Venice has really fallen.”
The revolutions of 1848 were off to a great start. But in the end, they more-or-less all failed. The dominant regimes of the past would win the day. Because, as soon as they had beaten these regimes down, the cracks between the revolutionaries began to appear.
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Back in France, the new republic got reports about all the revolutionary developments elsewhere. Radicals hoped the government would send French armies across the continent again, just like in the 1790s, to spread – what the new, socialist prefect of police called – the “sacred promise of emancipation for all the peoples of Europe.”
Acting Foreign Minister Lamartine suppressed these aspirations. And anyway, the social Radicals had a more pressing issue to worry about: Economic recovery. As far as they were concerned, the free market system expanded by the July Monarchy was unable to address the needs of the French people during this massive downturn. Industry was not back on its feet.
The socialists began organizing “popular societies” to debate ideas and push for change. On February 25th, they delivered a petition demanding a “guaranteed right to work”, “an assured minimum for the worker and his family in case of sickness” and the “organization of labor”, which basically meant worker-controlled cooperatives.
To address these needs, the government decided to set up the infamous “National Workshops”, which promised jobs for the poor, as well as the so-called Luxembourg Commission, which gave laborers and artisans a direct line of communication with the government to address grievances and such.
The workshops were directed not by a socialist minister but, actually, an anti-socialist minister who looked down on the project. The jobs provided in the workshops were tedious and purposeless, which didn’t give the poor workers any kind of work satisfaction. Despite this, unemployed laborers flooded into the cities trying to find a spot in the workshops, leading to overcrowded cities. Plus, the workshops were very expensive, and – coupled with the short tax revenues due to the crisis – led to an explosion of the deficit. The government was determined to make good on their loans, so they decided to increase property taxes by a whopping 45%, creating a deep resentment between the urban and rural populations. One rural newspaper complained that the already hard-pressed farming population was “tired of nourishing… lazy men who… make a trade of avoiding work.”
The socialists took a walloping in the April elections, due to the perceived failures of the National Workshop policy – although they blamed it on a campaign timeframe that was insufficient to educate the people. Also in April, frustrated workers protesting in the industrial textile city of Rouen suddenly found themselves fighting the National Guard, leading to 23 deaths.
The Saint Bartholomew’s massacre of workers – as it was called – created outrage among socialists across France. On May 15th, a socialist rally in Paris turned violent when the speakers failed to address the tragedy. Liberals began to worry that this was all headed toward what happened in 1792, when the populist tendencies of the Jacobins led to the Reign of Terror. It was also giving ammunition to the conservatives who were openly advocating the return of monarchy – even a return of the Bourbons.
Five days later, the government began preparations to disband the workshops, which they found were creating social instability. One month after that, they officially dissolved them and ordered the workers either be drafted into the army or help finish delayed railroad projects, draining marshland.
Unemployed workers responded with nightly demonstrations, calling for a recognized “Right to Work” and democratic socialism. Some went further still, crying “Napoleon forever! We won’t go!” Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte – recently elected to the National Assembly – was being called to the stage.
Fighting broke out in Paris on June 23rd, where an army of workers some 40-to-50,000 strong faced off against about 15,000 National Guard and 25,000 regular troops. For a short time, the terrified government installed a military dictator to restore order. Fighting continued for days. atrocities were committed on both sides. By this point, even the socialist politicians believed their side was going too far. In the end, at least 1,500 workers were killed and nearly 12,000 were arrested.
The “June Days” permanently divided the liberals and Radicals. The Radicals hoped to take advantage of the country’s new democracy – which guaranteed universal male suffrage for those over 21 – because they figured they would win the numbers game come election time. But conservatives decided to do the same, and out in the provinces, the landlords and priests of rural France turned the peasant population against the urban Radicals.
With the nation so politically and socially fractured, it is remarkable how completely France turned to one man: Bonaparte.
Born in 1808, he was the nephew of the emperor, Napoleon I. After the death of Napoleon’s son, Napoleon II, Louis-Napoleon considered himself the rightful heir of the Bonapartist line. After his failed coup of 1836, he was imprisoned, and while in prison he began writing down the philosophy of Bonapartism in his 1839 book, Napoleonic Ideas. Government, he argued, was the “necessary means to open a smooth and easy road for advancing civilization.” To achieve this progress, the government should be led by an imperial dictator whose legitimacy is derived from a will of the people. There would be a Parliament, elected indirectly by the people, to support this mission.
His follow-up book, The Extinction of Poverty, addressed the social question. Published in 1844, it criticized the free market and called for state intervention along moderate socialist lines. And even though he is decisively not thought of as a socialist today, he liked to identify himself as one.
Whatever the case, in 1848, cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” resounded among the urban working-class. The terrified Lamartine led the effort to prevent him from taking his seat in the National Assembly. In what turned out to be a political masterstroke, Bonaparte resigned his seat on June 16th, with “deep regrets” and the hope it would prevent disorder.
As a result, he was spared from voting on the contentious issue of dissolving the National Workshops. And when, in September, the new constitution created an office of president – to be elected in December – Bonaparte quickly became the frontrunner.
The working class liked him because of his name, his identification with their needs, and because his main opponent was the military dictator who suppressed them back in June. Conservatives liked him because he would divide radicals and liberals, and anyway they supported authoritarian monarchy and suspected he would make himself an authoritarian monarch. Peasants saw him as a protest vote against social and economic elitists.
When all the ballots were counted, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had won about 5.4 million out of 7.5 million votes cast. In Parliamentary elections the next year, what remained of the liberal center entirely collapsed, and conservatives won two-thirds of the seats, many of them monarchists.
Understandably, this alarmed the Radicals, who believed that – by rejecting republicanism – these conservatives had forfeit their right to hold office. Yet another insurrection was attempted. When it failed, the government decided it was time for a crack-down. Censorship laws were passed and suffrage was taken away from roughly 30% of the electorate – especially among poor industrial workers. President Bonaparte was happy to approve the laws. And by 1851, he had enough power to stage a coup d'état against the constitution, and was made Emperor Napoleon III.
Radical demands in Vienna prompted a similar reaction and counter-revolution.
While they were trying to address the economic crisis with programs not all that unlike France’s National Workshops, the government there was not moving super-fast toward constitutional reform, and so the students kept protesting. When a new suffrage law declared that servants and wage-earning workers would be denied a vote, Radicals joined in. Intimidated, the government approved universal male suffrage and the creation of a parliament on May 15th.
Two days later, the city woke up to a shocking proclamation: The imperial family had fled Vienna the previous night. The political vacuum triggered bewildered confusion and panic. And with that, the so-far silent majority of Viennese conservatives came alive. Radicals literally had to run away to escape lynch mobs. The civic militia and Academic Legion were shamed into submitting to the authority of the military. Censorship was re-imposed. The university was ordered to close shop.
Meanwhile in Germany, the calls for a national, constitutional convention were heeded by liberal regimes as well as nervous conservative ones. 574 delegates were sent to a “pre-parliament” in Frankfurt to hammer it out. Lot’s of creative ideas for the constitution started coming in from around Germany. Even our friend, Prince Albert, got in on the action, frantically scribbling out his ideas for it and sending them to his homeland – although by this point the Germans thought him just as British as the British thought him German.
The first question they faced was pretty straightforward: Should a united Germany be a constitutional monarchy or a democratic republic? The answer was pretty straightforward too. A minority of Radicals supported a republic. The majority believed a constitutional monarch was necessary, albeit, one who would be elected to get the dynastic ball rolling.
The majority pressed their advantage and created a provisional government which excluded the Radicals, some of whom stormed out. So not only were the revolutionaries fractured between liberal and Radical, the Radicals were fractured between compromise and no compromise. Far-left Radicals Gustav Struve and Friedrich Hecker set out to unilaterally declare a republic and organize an armed force to defend it.
The liberals were outraged, claiming these republicans betrayed the revolution by sewing the seeds of disorder.
As the revolution within the revolution got going, the delegates in Frankfurt dealt with the second, more difficult question: What should be the boundaries of this new Germany?
This was difficult for many reasons.
Number One was the infamous Schleswig-Holstein conundrum, which I am not going to get into because this episode is already way too long. I’ll discuss it in the footnotes for you Patreon supporters. But, basically, the Germans and the Danes both wanted the old duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, and they went to war over it.
Number Two was Poland. Now, technically there was no Poland anymore – it was divided between Prussia, Russia, and a tiny bit in Austria. But now, in the Springtime of the Peoples, Poland wanted to become a thing again. The Germans weren’t necessarily opposed to this because they kinda liked the idea of a buffer state between them and super-conservative Russia. But on the other hand, there were a lot of Germans living in Polish Prussia who wanted to be part of Germany. The Poles, though, felt dominated by their German bosses (as we saw in Chapter 22, with the Silesian Weaves, which, by the way, took place just four years prior to all this).
Number Three was Austria. The Habsburg Empire was huge and included so many non-Germans. If Austria was admitted, would that necessarily break up their empire? Or would this German nation-state have to include all the Italians and Serbs and Croats and Magyars and Ukrainians and Romanians and Slovakians and Czechs and everyone else? The whole point was to have a common language and culture, so where do these people fit in? Plus, the northern German Protestants didn’t want to be dominated by southern German Catholics. And on the topic of religion, there was also a lot of Orthodox Christians out east and a lot of Jews too. What about them?
But everyone agreed that one part of the Austrian Empire (besides Austria) would be part of Germany: Bohemia. The Czechs would get a constituent assembly of their own, but their lands had to be included in the new Reich. After all, Bohemia was always part of the old Holy Roman Empire. Plus, German capitalists were successfully industrializing Bohemia.
But when the provisional government invited a prominent Bohemian historian to join them, they were stunned by his reply. In a published letter, he told them “I am a Czech of Slavonic blood… That nation is a small one, it is true, but from time immemorial it has been a nation of itself and based upon its own strength.” In other words, the Czechs wanted their own state. They did not want to be part of Germany.
As was the case with Poland, though, the Germans living in Bohemia really did not like the idea of an independent Czechia. Their property, and perhaps even their lives, were at stake. One popular Czech song included the lyrics “Forward against the German, forward against the murderer, against Frankfurt.”
The first blow to the Czechs’ cause came not from the Germans, but from the eastern province of Moravia, where their own diet voted against uniting with Bohemia, mostly to protect their local interests. Thus, there would be no unified Czechia. Then on June 3rd, Czech textile workers in Prague marched to protest the working conditions imposed by the mostly German mill bosses, which city authorities and Austrian soldiers quickly beat back.
Finally, on June 12th, a crowd of students and unemployed workers marched on the office of the military commander in the city, when they encountered another crowd of his German supporters. Fighting broke out, the commander was taken hostage and his wife was shot by a stray bullet in the confusion.
With that, Prague became a war zone. Over the next five days, Austrian garrisons shelled the city into submission.
Things went no better for the revolutionaries in Hungary, where the Magyars grew more and more frustrated with the kingdom’s minority ethnic groups. Like everywhere else, Hungary also had to deal with the economic crisis. In Budapest, the city’s German and Czech working classes marched to demand easier entry into the guilds. In mid-July, the “Society for Equality” and it’s newspaper, the Radical Democrat were established. Out in the country, the Worker’s Newspaper was distributed for free to the peasants, many of whom were not Magyar. All of this tested the patience of the liberal Magyar nobility leading the revolution.
In April, the Diet approved a bill sponsored by Lajos Kossuth to abolish feudalism, but it did not go far enough to protect the rights of the peasantry, who rioted until the Hungarian minister had to declare the entire kingdom under a state of siege. The Austrian Emperor played to these class and ethnic anxieties, recruiting the newly-appointed Ban of Croatia – Josip Jelačić von Bužim – to march a 53,000-man army on Budapest in September.
Though still angry at him over the economic issues, Hungarian Radicals called for Kossuth to be made dictator to defend the city. When Parliament refused, an angry mob surrounded the carriage of an Austrian diplomat, dragged him out, and beat and stabbed him to death. And with that, Austria declared war on Hungary.
That declaration, though, triggered a revolt in Vienna, where – in solidarity with the Magyars – the Radicals made once last push against the government. The emperor skipped town yet again with his government, and they instructed Jelačić to change course and march on the imperial capital. His army combined with 70,000 Austrian troops and they surrounded the city. An army of Magyars raced to defend their allies, but it would be too late. The city was bombarded with cannon fire, all night every night, for over a week. At least 2,000 people died. When the Hungarian troops finally showed, they were easily defeated. Vienna capitulated on October 31st. Another 2,000 revolutionaries were arrested and 25 were executed.
On December 2nd, the government persuaded Emperor Ferdinand to abdicate the throne to his 18-year-old nephew, Franz Joseph. The young emperor, they knew, would not be bound to the liberal concessions his uncle had made. The revolution in Austria was now over.
Imperial forces then turned their attention back to Hungary. Over the next 10 months, the Hungarians bitterly hung in there – and I mean bitterly. They tried declaring a republic, they tried bringing Transylvania to heel (burning some 230 villages and killing about 40,000 Romanians), but it was all for naught. The Austrians got the Russians to join them. The combined invasion finally killed the dream of Hungarian sovereignty.
Back in Germany, the Radical uprising of Struve and Hecker had been put down and the two were exiled. But that didn’t stop Radical aspirations. In July, German artisans sent delegates to a Congress of Craftsmen and Tradesmen in Frankfurt, to pressure the new German parliament to restore the guilds and do away with modern industry. But the journeyman broke away to form their own congress, which accepted the inevitability of modern industry, but still wanted labor to be skilled and adequately compensated. They also called for free, universal education, so that eventually the working classes could be elected to government.
Needless to say, this is all a bit out of the bounds of what the German liberals in Frankfurt believed in.
In Prussia, a parliamentary commission rejected the king’s draft of the constitution and began writing their own. Then in June, when a controversial resolution of the Radicals was voted down, they staged yet another insurrection. Armed workers rioted. Suddenly, public opinion began to turn against the revolution, as Berliners now saw the working-class left as out of control. Liberals got anxious about the situation and many started siding with the conservatives.
So when in late July, the commission presented its draft of the constitution – an incredibly liberal document that abolished virtually all royal power and feudal traditions – conservatives bulked, decrying it as Radical and republican in all but name.
Sensing the winds shifting in their favor, the conservatives began organizing too. This came at the suggestion of a young, up-and-coming politician of noble birth – someone who has been hanging around the fringes of the royal court this whole time – named Otto von Bismarck. And yes, we’ll be talking a lot more about him in future episodes.
Bismarck knew the times were changing and the old conservative order of Junkers (the landed elite) was impossible to maintain. But he also knew that the Prussian people were much more conservative than the liberals and Radicals in Berlin.
So Bismarck created the rather clunky-named Association for the Protection of the Interests of Landed Property and for the Maintenance of the Prosperity of All Classes of the People. The liberals derided it as the “Junker Parliament”. But Bismarck used it to call for the abolition of any remaining remnants of feudalism and, from there, made the argument to the peasantry that “Hey, our interests and your interests are actually pretty similar. The liberals are a small group of elitists who want to up-end our way of life for their interests. And in the pursuit of those interests they are bringing chaos to our kingdom.”
And the argument seemed to resonate. A far-right newspaper called Kreuzzeitung was established and roughly a hundred chapters of the far-right Association for King and Fatherland spread across the country, with some 60,000 members total.
When yet another uprising of Radicals took place in Berlin that October, the liberals decided enough was enough. They were tired of losing credibility with the general public over the actions of the far left.
In the new National Assembly, they voted to disarm the city’s Radical associations and declare the mostly middle-class Civic Guard and the only legitimate police force. Protests erupted across the city. When canal workers began destroying the steam pumps, which they saw as a threat to their livelihoods, the Civic Guard shot 11 of them dead. Days later, more than a thousand protesters carrying red flags marched to the National Assembly with a petition to send troops to back up the protesters in Vienna. When it was rejected, torches started flying and a massive street brawl broke out.
The conservatives took this as an opportunity to regain control. The right-wing press called for an end to the “anarchy” and “lawlessness”. The king appointed the conservative Count Brandenburg prime minister. The National Assembly was forced into recess by royal proclamation. When additional protests broke out, Brandenburg declared martial law, brought in the army, disarmed the civic guard, and reimposed censorship. Finally, in December, the king “granted” his own constitution which – despite its abolition of feudal vestiges – was much more conservative.
The liberals down in Frankfurt soldiered on. But when the Prussian king formally turned down the hypothetical German crown in April 1849, their efforts quickly spiraled to the ground. They desperately issued a declaration demanding all German governments accept the constitution they drafted and – should Frederick Wilhelm continue to reject the crown, they’d find another German ruler who’d take it. But this was seen as yet another insubordinate revolution way, way after the time for appeasing revolutionaries had come to an end.
Prussia threatened to use force to break up the parliament. They fled Frankfurt and reassembled in Stuttgart. But Stuttgart yielded to Prussian pressure and ordered the parliament to disband. Soldiers came in, smashed the assembly’s furniture up, and tore apart the German flag.
Liberal and Radical insurrectionaries attempted some last stands in the Rhineland and Saxony, where some legit battles took place, but conservative forces overwhelmed them in both. Many of them fled to the United States – many to my home town of Milwaukee, in fact – to settle in a land that could actually offer them freedom and opportunity. In fact, they would go on to become some of the most inspired Union soldiers come the U.S. Civil War, as they romanticized the ideals of freedom and equality in the crusade to end slavery.
Even more cracks between revolutionaries opened up down in Italy, where – in addition to the split between constitutional monarchists and republicans – a new rift was blown wide open between Italian nationalism and Roman Catholicism.
Pope Pius IX, not much of a hawk to begin with, faced a lot of pressure to join the war against Austria up in the north. But in addition to being an Italian monarch he was also, you know, head of the Catholic Church – the same Catholic Church in which the Hapsburgs were very loyal and devout members.
Pius acquiesced to the Italians, sending troops north, but he deeply regretted it – and he came to resent the Italians for it. Across Catholic Europe, Pius faced a backlash, as leaders warned him to reconsider, less he create a schism. So on April 29th he rescinded his original order, decrying “the treacherous advice… of those who would have the Roman Pontiff to be the head and to preside over the formation of some sort of novel republic of the whole Italian people.” The people of Rome were stunned and incredulous, and then they became enraged. As one frustrated Radical put it, “the Papacy is unchangeable, it is the chief enemy of Italy, and Rome must not suffer it any longer.”
The Romans became more and more Radical in the weeks and months that followed, even as the Austrians invaded the Papal States, and protesting against even fairly liberal appointments to the Papal ministry. The protests slowly became violent, as demonstrators attacked Papal officials and screamed down conservative and moderate members of the new parliament. The liberal prime minister was stabbed in the throat, setting off a tidal wave of republican agitation in the streets. Finally, when the ministry ceded to pressure and declared war on Austria, the Pope had enough. Disguising himself as a humble parish priest, he fled to Naples the night of November 24th. There he disavowed his own government and called on the new Austrian Emperor for assistance. All of Europe was shocked.
Roman Radicals were as incensed as ever. But most ordinary Italians were deeply embarrassed. Their support for revolution and unification had landed them opposite the Holy Father.
Down in Naples, the revolution hadn’t been going well anyway. The urban guilds rampaged through workshops, smashing the new machinery that threatened their jobs. Peasants began taking over lands, calling for a redistribution of property. King Ferdinand pointed to these developments to shame the liberals who had pressed for constitutional reform, and used the opportunity to demand concessions. He then turned the army on the people. By May 17th, he dissolved the parliament. Sicily was then brought to heel too.
Up in the north, the coalition of republicans and constitutional monarchists continued fighting off the Austrians, dreaming of Italian unification. On May 29th, over half a million voters in Milan turned out for a referendum. 99.8% voted for immediate fusion with Charles Albert’s Piedmont. Giuseppe Mazzini accepted the results, arguing that independence and unification were priority #1 – a republic was #2. In Venice, Daniele Manin was a bit more intransigent about the question, but the Venetian Constituent assembly – facing an onslaught of pro-monarchist propaganda that July – also voted for fusion.
So, the northern Italians are not making the same mistake of fracturing like everyone else in Europe. So what went wrong? Well, frankly, Joseph Radetsky was a really good military commander… and Charles Albert was not. Pushed back over the course of July, he signed an armistice with the Austrians on August 9th. Milan was now at the mercy of Radetsky.
Needless to say, the Italians felt betrayed. But the republicans knew this was their moment. They called for a constituent assembly to unite the peninsula with no monarchs. Mazzini fled Milan and joined up with Giuseppe Garibaldi to begin a guerrilla warfare campaign.
Manin stayed in Venice and, determined not to see the monarchists abandon him, now that they were united, declined to redeclare a republic. It turned out to be a major political error, as Mazzini’s followers broke with him instead. Eventually, Manin had them rounded up and deported. Still, most Venetians supported him, and even forced him to take the position of dictator when times got tough enough.
With limited finances, Venice had to impose new taxes and forced loans, and seize jewelry to help pay their soldiers. When that wasn’t enough, they sold off shares in the Milan-Venice railway and took out a new loan using their artwork and historic buildings as collateral. Then they established a new savings bank and used it to print their own banknotes as “patriotic” currency. But ultimately it would never be enough, because once the Hungarians were defeated, the Austrians turned their sights on the Serene City. For three weeks they shelled Venice. The shells themselves weren’t all that effective, but the siege led to hunger and outbreaks of cholera and typhus. Manin addressed the people for the final time on August 13th, 1849: “Such a people! To be forced to surrender with such a people!”
Charles Albert, meanwhile, now faced a revolution against him at home for his capitulation. When an insurrection broke out in Genoa, he abdicated the throne to his son, Victor Emmanuel II – the future first king of a united Italy. The Piedmontese Parliament accepted the succession and peace was restored.
Mazzini and Garibaldi wound up in Rome, where they pushed the Eternal City to become a republic. On February 9th, the constituent assembly proclaimed The Roman Republic revived from its 1,876-year sleep. But it was never as strong as it was way back then. And in June, it was finally put to bed again by – guess who? – Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. That’s right, in a move that seriously pissed off French republicans, he sent down troops to crush the Romans and reinstall the pope. And that’s how the Revolutions of 1848 (now 1849) come full-circle.
As you can probably tell, the Springtime of the Peoples was a culmination of forces we’ve been discussing over of the last 46 chapters – the convergence of new political ideas with the social and economic changes underway, thanks to industrialization and all its effects (urbanization, the spread of news, the rise of an enriched capitalist bourgeoisie, the dawn of a Radical Proletariat, etc.). And the way these revolutions played out varied a lot, based not only on local histories, but local experiences with economic and technological modernization.
The Revolutions of 1848, therefore, mark a turning point in world history. And so it’s here where we mark the end of the First Industrial Revolution – the impact of it had come full-swing.
The failures of cooperation between the Liberals, the Radicals, the constitutional monarchists, the republicans, the socialists, the various nationalists, the peasantry, the Church, and others brought to the surface the underlying divisions and resentments among those Europeans newly primed for upward political and social mobility.
Historians and hopeful revolutionaries would study this momentous year for decades to come. And among them was a thinker who actually participated in the turbulent events – and who published a radical manifesto about the dawn of a new Europe earlier that year: Karl Marx – when the Industrial Revolutions returns in 2021.
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But before that, don’t forget, we’re doing our wrap-up episode in November, and then two bonus episodes before New Year’s. Remember to submit your questions for the AMA episode by November 6th.
Thank you to everyone supporting the podcast on Patreon, including new patrons Michele Gersich and Jason Hayes, as well as John Bartlett, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Jeppe Burchhardt, Tara Carlson, Molly Des Jardin, Herbyurby, Jeremy Hoffman, Eric Hogensen, Peter Kirk, Brian Long, Emeka Okafor, Kristian Sibast, Brandon Stansbury, Ross Templeton, and Walter Torres.