The Revolutions of 1848

On the eve: the crisis of 1845–1847 and the "social question"

The revolutions of 1848 grew out of the short- and long-term socioeconomic changes of industrialisation together with the political legacy of the French Revolution. In the countryside the privatisation and enclosure of common land stripped peasants of their customary right to take wood from the forests. France abolished that right in law with the Forest Code of 1827, and in the Bavarian Palatinate the number convicted of wood theft rose from 37,500 in 1821–1822 to 185,000 in 1846–1847, a third of the population. Where feudalism survived in Central and Eastern Europe, risings against the lords were common; the largest peasant revolt before 1848 broke out in Austrian Galicia in 1846 and put an end to the Kraków Uprising of the Polish nobility. 1

In the towns, migrants from the countryside flooded the labour market and real wages fell. Most workers in 1848 were artisans rather than factory hands, and as the guilds weakened, masters clashed with journeymen and, in the putting-out system, merchants with outworkers; the risings of the Lyon silk weavers in 1831 and 1834 and of the Silesian weavers in 1844 expressed that grievance. The educated middle class could not find posts either. In Germany the sociologist Riehl described an "intellectual proletariat" of underpaid junior officials, journalists and schoolteachers, and professionals without careers turned to journalism and became leaders of the revolutions of 1848. 1

Politically, liberalism, radicalism and nationalism were the main currents opposed to the governments. Liberals wanted equality before the law, civil liberties and constitutional monarchy, but sought to confine the vote to men of property. Radicals demanded universal manhood suffrage and gave greater weight to the "social question", what to do about the growing working poor of the capitalist economy; among them democrats looked to regulation and state intervention, socialists to the abolition of capitalism and redistribution. The franchise was very narrow: in France only 241,000 people out of 26 million, 0.5 per cent, could vote. Where parties were banned, newspaper editors and secret societies led the opposition, Mazzini's Young Italy the most famous of them. 1

The immediate trigger was the economic crisis of 1845–1847. In 1845 the potato blight ruined harvests across Northern Europe, and in Ireland the Great Famine killed more than a million of eight million people. The drought of 1846 damaged the grain harvest and sent food prices soaring; there were more than 400 food riots in France in 1846–1847 and 164 in the German states in 1847. Dear food and a poor cotton crop in the American South brought an industrial recession in 1847, and the economic historians Berger and Spoerer found a strong correlation between the countries hit hardest by the industrial shock of 1847 and those that had a revolution in 1848. 1

The "springtime of the peoples": from Palermo to Paris, Vienna and Berlin

The revolutionary wave began at Palermo in Sicily on 12 January 1848. Before that the Greater Poland rising of 1846 and the Sonderbund War in Switzerland in November 1847 had already been violent struggles over reform. But what counted for contemporaries was the rising in Paris on 22–24 February: protests against the ban on the reform banquets grew into a revolution, Louis Philippe abdicated and the Second Republic was proclaimed. The news spread across the continent within a week, and Metternich is said to have exclaimed, "it's all over". The French sub-event tells this in detail. 1 2

Within weeks there were risings in Munich, Vienna, Buda and Pest, Venice, Kraków, Milan and Berlin. The demands were much the same everywhere: a representative parliament, freedom of the press and of association, universal manhood suffrage, and the arming of the people in a national guard. In Vienna, after clashes from 13 to 15 March, Metternich resigned and went into exile and Emperor Ferdinand I promised a constitution; the Hungarian Diet then won Hungarian sovereignty within the Habsburg monarchy. When the news from Vienna reached northern Italy, revolutionary governments were proclaimed in Milan and Venice and Piedmont–Sardinia declared war on Austria, opening the First Italian War of Independence. In Berlin, after brief but deadly barricade fighting on 18 March, Frederick William IV withdrew the army and appointed a liberal ministry. 1

Over the spring new parliaments were elected on a broad franchise: the French Constituent Assembly, the Austrian Reichstag, the Hungarian Diet and five other parliaments in the Habsburg lands, and the Frankfurt National Assembly, the first parliament to represent all Germany, which met in St Paul's Church on 18 May. With censorship relaxed, political clubs and newspapers multiplied, and workers' associations spread for the first time, though less organised than the clubs. In what contemporaries felt as a "revolutionary psychosis", French priests blessed trees of liberty and in Transylvania Romanians and Hungarians embraced. Yet in the towns machines were broken and tax collectors attacked, and in the countryside peasants occupied common land and attacked their lords. 1 3

Nations in collision: Posen, Schleswig and Bohemia

From late spring, national conflict began to divide the revolution. In the Prussian Grand Duchy of Posen, Ludwik Mierosławski and others sentenced to death for preparing the 1846 rising were amnestied in the Berlin revolution on 19–20 March and formed a "Polish Legion"; there was talk, under the black-red-gold flag of the German revolution, of a common fight against Russia. On 20 March a Polish National Committee was set up in Poznań as well. But when the Poles demanded "national reorganisation", the local Germans came to see them as enemies, and the king promised the Polish delegation autonomy while secretly ordering preparations to crush the movement. 4 5

Under the Jarosławiec agreement of 11 April the Poles received a promise of autonomy and disbanded most of their volunteers, but the Prussian army did not keep it. The remaining units won at Miłosław on 30 April, yet a capitulation was signed on 8 May and Mierosławski's main force laid down its arms at Bardo on 9 May. Some 1,500 Poles, mostly peasants, were imprisoned and abused in the Poznań citadel. In the "Poland debate" of the Frankfurt National Assembly in July, deputies who had once been friendly to the Poles called the restoration of Poland "insanity". The Neue Rheinische Zeitung of Marx and Engels treated that betrayal as a touchstone of the German revolution. 4 6

In the north, Schleswig became the meeting point of Danish and German nationalism. In Copenhagen a march to Christiansborg on 21 March led Frederick VII to appoint a National Liberal cabinet, and Denmark gained a parliamentary constitution the next year, a rare case that reaction did not reverse. But when that government moved to incorporate Schleswig into Denmark, the German-speaking population of Schleswig and Holstein rose in the same March and set up a provisional government and army, and the German Confederation and Prussia sent troops. This First Schleswig War was broken off by the armistice of Malmö on 26 August, in which Prussia, under pressure from the great powers, gave way to practically all the Danish demands; the armistice exposed the impotence of the Frankfurt parliament and provoked the September risings. The war resumed in 1849, but the Battle of Idstedt in 1850 and the London Protocol of 1852 confirmed the Danish king's sovereignty. 1 7

In the multinational Habsburg Empire, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Croats, Ukrainians, Romanians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs and Italians each sought autonomy, independence or even hegemony over others. In Bohemia the German population, which wanted to join a greater Germany through the Frankfurt parliament, faced Palacký's Austroslavism, which sought Czech autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy. The Czechs held a Slavic congress in Prague from 2 to 12 June. In Galicia the Supreme Ruthenian Council, founded on 2 May 1848, demanded the division of Galicia into a Polish west and a Ukrainian east. In Hungary, Croats, Serbs and Romanians resisted a Magyar nation-state, a conflict the Hungarian sub-event follows. 1 8

At the edges: Switzerland, the Danubian principalities, Britain and Ireland

Switzerland was where the revolution won first. When seven Catholic cantons formed the Sonderbund against centralisation in 1845, the Federal Diet declared it unconstitutional in October 1847 and ordered it dissolved by force. General Dufour's federal army of 100,000 defeated the Sonderbund within a few weeks from 3 November, with about 100 dead, and the constitution of 1848 turned Switzerland from a loose confederation of cantons into a federal state. Belgium and the Netherlands escaped revolution by granting reforms in advance; Belgium stopped the "Belgian Legion" of some 6,000 émigrés from Paris at Risquons-Tout in March and expelled Marx from Brussels in early March. 9 1

Revolution reached the Danubian principalities too, governed under the Russian-imposed Regulamentul Organic. After the failed revolt in Moldavia, young intellectuals and officers in Wallachia around the secret society Frăția, Nicolae Bălcescu among them, proclaimed at Islaz on 21 June the abolition of boyar privilege, the freeing of the peasants and autonomy. Prince Gheorghe Bibescu stepped down and a provisional government took over, but radicals and conservatives split over land reform. On 18 September crowds burned the Regulamentul and the register of boyar ranks. Under Russian pressure, Ottoman troops entered Bucharest on 25 September and ended the revolution, and the Russian and Ottoman occupation lasted until 1851. 10 11 1

In Britain, Chartism, the working-class movement for political reform under the People's Charter of 1838, reached its third peak in 1848. After the news from Paris there were protests and bread riots in Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin in March, and a meeting was called on Kennington Common for 10 April, after which a procession was to carry a third petition to Parliament. Parliament made seditious acts felonies punishable by death or transportation on 7 April and recruited 100,000 special constables. Feargus O'Connor addressed up to 50,000 people and called off the procession, and the petition went to Parliament in three cabs. Those who planned armed action from June were prosecuted, and the meeting's organiser William Cuffay was transported to Australia. Chartism declined rapidly after 1848. 12 13

In famine-stricken Ireland, Young Ireland rose in July in response to the Prevention of Crime (Ireland) Act 1848, but failed in a gunfight with some fifty police at Ballingarry in South Tipperary and collapsed when its leaders were arrested. The Russian and Ottoman empires saw no major revolution. Nicholas I intervened instead in Hungary and the Danubian principalities, and at home expanded the secret police and tightened censorship. The wave also reached beyond Europe, influencing reform in New Granada, the Chilean revolution of 1851 and the Praieira revolt in Pernambuco in Brazil. 1

The counter-revolution of summer and autumn (June–December 1848)

By summer the revolutionary coalitions broke apart. In Paris the elections of 23 April returned a conservative majority, and after the radical attempt on the Assembly on 15 May the government jailed left-wing leaders, closed clubs and newspapers and dissolved the Luxembourg Commission. The closing of the national workshops on 21 June provoked the June Days, in which 40,000 to 50,000 insurgents fought on barricades across Paris; General Cavaignac, given dictatorial powers by the Constituent Assembly, crushed them with great bloodshed. In the same June the rising in Prague provoked by Windisch-Grätz was put down by bombardment, the first victory of the Habsburg counter-revolution. 1 8

In northern Italy Radetzky defeated the Piedmontese at Custoza on 24 July, leaving Austria almost in full control of its Italian provinces. The strengthened conservatives in Vienna sent Jelačić, the Ban of Croatia, into Hungary. When the Hungarian War of Independence began on 11 September, a second rising broke out in Vienna on 6 October and radicals held the city for three weeks until the forces of Jelačić and Windisch-Grätz crushed them on 31 October. In Germany anger at the Malmö armistice led to risings in western Germany in September, and the Frankfurt parliament's Central Power backed the princes' troops that put them down. The execution by Austrian troops of Robert Blum, a Frankfurt deputy who had joined the Vienna rising, further discredited the parliament. 1 2 14

By the end of 1848 the springtime of the peoples was effectively over. In Prussia Frederick William IV, backed by the army, moved the National Assembly to Brandenburg on 9 November, then dissolved it and imposed a constitution. In Austria Ferdinand I abdicated on 2 December in favour of his nephew Franz Joseph I, a monarch who would not be bound by the concessions of the revolution. In France on 10 December Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew, was elected president with 75 per cent of the vote, backed by conservatives who wanted order, peasants angry at the tax increases, and urban workers who hated Cavaignac for June. 1 3

The second wave and the end (1849)

At the end of 1848 the revolution had subsided where it began, in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Milan. But the political activity opened up in 1848 let radicals organise outside the big cities. In France and Germany the left turned to the provinces and gained support among rural workers in the elections of 1849. In central Italy radicals took power in Tuscany and the Papal States and proclaimed the Tuscan Republic and the Roman Republic in February. Piedmont–Sardinia, where radicals won the elections, resumed the war with Austria but was decisively defeated at Novara in March, and Charles Albert abdicated. 1

In the Habsburg Empire the army dissolved the Kremsier Reichstag on 7 March and the government imposed the "March Constitution". Applying to the whole empire, it ended Hungary's autonomy, and on 14 April at Debrecen Hungary dethroned the Habsburgs and declared full independence. When the spring campaign recovered most of the country, Austria appealed for Russian intervention in "the holy struggle against anarchy". 200,000 Russian troops joined 175,000 Habsburg troops against 170,000 Hungarians; Austria offered no concessions for this and Russia demanded none. 1 14

In Germany the Frankfurt National Assembly completed in March the constitution for a German Empire, a federal constitutional monarchy with universal manhood suffrage under the King of Prussia as hereditary emperor, and elected Frederick William IV. He refused the crown on the ground that the Assembly had no authority to confer it, and from May to July the Imperial Constitution campaign brought risings in Dresden, the Palatinate, Baden and elsewhere; the May Uprising in Dresden lasted from 3 to 9 May. The insurgents of Baden and the Palatinate, commanded by Mierosławski, held out longest, but Rastatt capitulated on 23 July and the German revolution was over. 1 3 5

By the summer of 1849 the only revolutionary regimes left were in Rome, Venice and Hungary. The Roman Republic fell in July to a French expeditionary force, the Second Republic of the country that had started the revolution overthrowing the republic of another. Venice surrendered to Austria in August after more than a year of siege. Hungary, on the defensive once Russia entered the war, suffered defeat after defeat from late June until Görgei surrendered to the Russians at Világos on 13 August, and the last holdouts in the fortress of Komárom surrendered on 2–5 October, ending the revolutions of 1848. On 6 October thirteen Hungarian generals were executed at Arad and the former prime minister Batthyány in Pest. 1 14

The Communist League and the workers' movement

One of the smallest organisations of 1848 left the deepest mark on the later socialist movement. The Communist League was founded in London on 1 June 1847 by the merger of the League of the Just, a secret society of émigré German artisans led by Karl Schapper, with the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels led by Marx and Engels; the League of the Just had joined the Paris rising of May 1839 and then moved its centre to London. Commissioned by the League, Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto at the end of 1847, and it appeared anonymously in London in late February 1848 as a 23-page German pamphlet. Marx was expelled from Belgium on 4 March, and around 20 March a thousand copies reached Paris, and Germany in early April. 15 16

During the revolution the League dropped its clandestine character for a time but could not work effectively. The Manifesto's influence was confined to Germany, and in practice to the League in Cologne and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung edited by Marx. The Workers' Brotherhood founded by League members became the most significant revolutionary workers' organisation in Germany. Engels fought the Prussians in the Baden campaign of June and July 1849 as aide-de-camp to August Willich. When the paper was suppressed in May 1849 and Marx expelled from Germany, the leadership moved to London. A French translation appeared just before the June Days were crushed. 15 16

Re-formed in London at the end of 1849, the League published the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue in 1850. In the 1850 "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" Marx set out a theory of permanent revolution: the proletariat should push the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary forces forward while keeping its own organisation until it was ready to seize power itself. But by the end of the year the League split between the Willich–Schapper group, which wanted to restart the revolution at once, and Marx and Engels, who wanted to build an international workers' movement over time. In 1850 the Prussian spy Stieber obtained the register of members; in 1851 members of the central board were arrested, and at the Cologne Communist Trial of November 1852 they received three to six years. The League dissolved immediately afterwards. 15 1 16

Assessment

The revolutions of 1848 were the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history. More than fifty countries were affected, but there was no significant coordination or cooperation among the revolutionaries. Tens of thousands were killed and more driven into exile, and most of the revolutions were quickly suppressed. Yet the abolition of serfdom in Austria and Hungary, the end of absolute monarchy in Denmark, representative democracy in the Netherlands, the Swiss federal state and universal manhood suffrage in France endured. The reaction was deep as well: the Prussian Junkers recovered their manorial police powers in 1852–1855, and arrests in the Habsburg lands rose from 70,000 in 1850 to a million by 1854. 1

Interpretations diverged from the start. Liberal democrats looked back on 1848 as a democratic revolution that in the long run secured liberty, equality and fraternity; nationalists remembered it as a "springtime of hope" in which new nations rejected the old multinational empires. Communists denounced it as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the legitimate demands of the proletariat. The view of 1848 as a bourgeois revolution is also common in non-Marxist scholarship, and many accounts agree that tension between moderate bourgeois revolutionaries and radicals played a major role in the failure. Christopher Clark has called the period after 1848 a "revolution in government" in which states learned to manage the public sphere, and Priscilla Robertson judged that many of the revolutionaries' aims were achieved by the 1870s, largely by their enemies; Andrássy and Deák, who led the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, had been revolutionaries in 1848. 1

In the Marxist tradition 1848 was a laboratory of theory. Marx was disappointed by the bourgeois character of the revolutions; he analysed the June Days in France as the first great battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and Louis Bonaparte's coup as state power resting on a balance of classes (see the French sub-event). Engels argued that the German liberal bourgeoisie, afraid of the workers, compromised with the princes (see the German sub-event). The permanent revolution of the 1850 Address passed half a century later into the debates of Russian revolutionaries, above all Trotsky's theory. At the same time Engels's support for the Hungarian revolution, in which he called the South Slavs and others "non-historic peoples", became a long-running dispute over Marxism and the national question (see the Hungarian sub-event). 1 16

After the defeat, many exiles known as the Forty-Eighters scattered to Australia, Brazil, Canada, Britain and the United States. Of the roughly 4,000 who went to America many were anti-slavery, and Willich, Hecker, Struve and others fought for the Union in the Civil War. London became the centre not only for Marx and Engels but for exiles from many countries, Mazzini, Kossuth and Herzen among them, and those encounters prepared the ground for the International Workingmen's Association of 1864. The Communist Manifesto was nearly forgotten in the 1850s and 1860s and was widely read again only in the early 1870s, after the Paris Commune and the First International. The barricades and defeat of 1848 returned in the Paris Commune of 1871. 17 1 16