Why Did Revolutions Break Out so Widely Across Europe in 1848 and Why Did They Fail?

The revolutions of 1848 were born from the legacy of peasant grievances and the appalling conditions of the urban working classes, honed to a peak by the agricultural and financial crises of the two previous years. At the same time, the liberal and inexperienced middle-classes all over Europe saw this as their opportunity to gain more political power. The sheer variety of short-term triggers: the collapse of the French stock market, and the resignation of Metternich on 13 March, begins to explain the failure of these uprisings. These different reasons illustrate the divisions between groups that meant that none could fulfil its aims; the Bourgeoisie were too small a group to gain their political concessions, while the workers lacked a true leader to deliver them better conditions. In the end, as the rebellions got out of control, it was the middle classes that came down on the side of order and helped to quell them, while internationally Britain and Russia flexed the muscles of the ancien régime.

The Industrial Revolution, which had begun late in the previous century, had caused massive social and demographic change. By 1846, the population of Paris had reached 1, 053, 900, almost double her figure for fifty years earlier. Rapid urbanisation was a symptom of this social change with its creation of a new urban working class, but also one of the causes of their hardship.

Thomas Malthus had predicted starvation as birth rates outstripped many times annual increases in harvest yields; this population growth brought the urban centres closer to their resource limit, so that the poor crops of 1846-7 would be the final straw. Overcrowding took place as industrial towns like Rouxbaix increased four-fold in only ten years, and the spread of diseases like Typhus brought life expectancy in Naples down to a meagre twenty-four. The growth of the industrial workers had equally marginalised the Handwerker (independent craftsman), in particular in the German states, and they registered their desire for protectionism in the creation of the Artisan Congress in Prussia. The real wages of the average worker in central Europe fell every year between 1817 and 1846, so that by the time of the revolutions, despite a broad lack of political agenda, fifty years of hardship meant that urban areas were full of potential rebels waiting for an opportunity and a spark to register their disaffection with society.

Industrialisation also created a new urban elite, with enough wealth and time to educate their children and begin to question the status quo. This group was suffering disaffection at their lack of political power throughout Europe in 1848, manifested strongly in Prussia, where nine of eleven cabinet ministers and twenty-nine out of thirty diplomats were Junkers, from the old Aristocratic families. In addition, it was primarily among this group that the new political philosophies of Liberalism, Nationalism and Republicanism flourished in the 1840’s. Parts of Northern Italy had been oppressively controlled by Austria since the Vienna Settlement of 1815 had redrawn the map of Europe, and so this area, along with the Poles, Czechs, Croats and Slovaks of the Habsburg lands was a hotbed of Nationalism, with a desire to throw off foreign rule. These ideological precursors had grown out of patriotic organisations and the publications of texts like Balbo’s Summary History of Italy (1846). Nationalism manifested itself in the form of Mazzini’s republicanism in Italy, where he helped to organise the overthrow of the Papal government, and similar feelings in France, where it was thought that this new system of government would better represent the interests of the people; the French political commentator Lamartie expressed this feeling as “La France s’ennuie”(France is bored [of Monarchy]). The Grossdeutch and Kleindeutsch liberals within the Bund also saw this as a chance to create a united Germany. Liberalism had formed from a desire for the economic benefits of free trade and discussion societies such as the Legal-Political Reading Club in Vienna, and the middle-classes knew that its realisation was impossible without the movement to a form of constitutional government. This outbreak of radical new political thought led to the part of the crisis of 1848 that Jones calls: ‘a middle-class liberal revolution that demanded constitutional reform and responsible government.’

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Coupled with these movements within the urban areas were the long-standing grievances of the agriculturalist peasants. The French Forest Code of 1827, allowing private landowners to fence off communal forests was part of a much wider movement for enclosure. Communal lands were something that the ordinary people simply could not afford to lose, and yet by 1846, nearly all the farming land in Hungary was split between just 200 aristocratic families. Despite urbanisation, the growth of population in the countryside was also very fast with the rural area of Pomeraria in Prussia achieving 75% growth between 1800 and mid-century, triggering the threat of Malthusian hunger. Overall in Europe, two thirds of the population still worked on the land, therefore this was a group which could mobilise huge support should its troubles get out of hand and this was the force that would come into play when food became scarce in 1846. The first area to experience revolution was Sicily, and this was not a revolt of the workers or the liberal middle classes, but simply a spontaneous peasant rebellion because the machinato (grain tax) of Ferdinand II had worsened their hunger and they no longer wanted him to rule them.

Therefore, three distinct groups all over Europe each had their separate reasons for revolution, whether because of poor conditions and hunger, or in order to gain liberal governmental concessions. It was the years of crisis of 1846-7 that sharpened the vexations of worker and peasant alike, and brought home the need for a new system of government to the middle classes. Potato blight struck the Paris basin and elsewhere in 1846 and at the same time, the grain harvest was particularly poor and bread prices in France doubled in that one year. Considering that the typical citizen is thought to have spent 70% of their income on food alone, this represented a considerable reduction in standards of living. At the same time, the working classes were suffering unemployment in Prussia where collapsing demand caused stocks to build and factories to shut and in Austria, since the government were blockading the Italian port of Trieste where industrial raw materials were imported. Prussia, France and the Kleindeutsch states also endured a Bourgeois financial crisis, as the Banque de France share index collapsed and banks refused to provide credit, bringing bankruptcies to small businesses.

Despite the widespread similarity of conditions and long-term motivations across Europe, the short-term triggers for revolution were somewhat localised. In France, the banning of a protest banquet in Paris brought crowds onto the streets on 22 February, who were fired upon by troops; by the next morning 1500 barricades had been set up in the streets of Paris in protest. The news of the February Revolution in France helped to initiate the proceedings in northern Italy, Vienna and Budapest both because it illuminated the possibility of revolt to others and because France was now too tied up internally to suppress rebellion elsewhere: “the crowing of the Gallic cock will once more awaken Europe”. By far the most vital short-term trigger in Italy and Austria was the fall of Metternich on 13 March, since he was the living symbol of oppressive rule in these states, but the Italians also looked to the successful Swiss Civil War against Austrian rule in 1847 for inspiration.

Revolutions broke out so widely in Europe in 1848 because working class hardship after the Industrial Revolution, agricultural discontent and ideological change had been flourishing in all of its states. The crises of 1846-7 in terms of food and finances affected all of them, through trade if not directly, and once one state had gone into revolution, the peoples of others recognised an opportunity to express their troubles or force political change upon their nations.

It would be unfair to see these revolutions as having achieved nothing, for they bred a new more moderate kind of conservatism that acted as a ‘coalition of propertied interests’and created the Piedmontese constitution that would survive to govern all Italy by 1871. However, it is possible to identify flaws within these uprisings that meant they could never achieve their full aims or potentials. As the different causes of revolution between the groups we have already identified would suggest, the primary causes of failure were those deep divisions between the groups of revolutionaries, in terms of tactics as well as what they wanted to get out of it. Although the class groupings already used are an area of historical debate, and are undoubtedly not steadfast and without exception, it is still useful to examine the 1848 revolutions as the uprisings of three distinct categories. Peasant unrest caused by long-standing poor conditions led to calls for independence in Sicily, and constitutions in the other states of Italy to protect the lower classes. In a similar fashion, the urban workers who were aggravated by poverty and unemployment took to the streets, while middle-class intellectuals strove for republican government in Paris, and national-liberal concessions all over Europe. Conflicts of interest immediately appear, since the capitalist factory owners, no matter their political beliefs, would not want their workers rising in rebellion since it would lose them profits, nor would the urban workers take kindly to peasant revolts that would cut off their food supplies.

The main failure of the 1848 revolutions also lay in the impossibility of coordination and cooperation when there was so little common ground. For instance, Sicilian farmers had few desires for liberal government and unification, simply wishing to overthrow Ferdinand II in Naples, while the liberal revolutions raged in the North with the prime objective of expelling Austria. These two aims were completely incompatible since the overthrow of existing state governments in Italy would create instability that prevented a strong and decisive victory against Austria. Therefore, as Peter Jones puts it: ‘[they failed because there was] no common ground among the revolutionaries.’

One associated problem was that the Bourgeoisie was still small and therefore lacked enough support to make serious constitutional changes. This led them at first to side with the workers, especially in France, where battalions of the largely middle-class National Guard who were called out to quell the February rebellion defected and handed over their arms to the protestors. However, while the liberals undoubtedly wanted political change and increased influence, they tended to have been more affluent people, often with their own businesses, who had had a good standard of living. Therefore, this group was not only of different aims, they tended to come down on the side of order and help to suppress the rebellions when it came to a direct choice between this and anarchy which would serve to destroy their former prosperity. In Vienna, it is clear that the lynching of Count Caton made the middle-class Liberals fear for their lives and realise things had gone too far, at that point the Bourgeois politicians in Paris had already begun to stop the riots there. Although it was not the most vital factor, Karl Marx writing months earlier stated almost prophetically: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’

These Revolutions failed to elect solid leadership figures, which might have helped them to stay focused and organised, one of the main blows to the Italian revolutions came when Pope Pius IX, a potential leader for a united nation, made his allocution of April 1848: ‘ such a measure [unity] is altogether alien from our counsels’. In addition to this problem of no clear leaders to spur on and direct the revolts, many potential leaders sought to use these occurrences to their own advantage. Charles Albert, to name one example, was ready to invade Lombardy and Venetia in the name of unification and the expulsion of Austria, when his internal aims were little more than Piedmontese expansion: ‘we have ordered our troops as they move into Lombardy and Venice to carry the cross of Savoy imposed on the tricolour flag of Italy.’

The 1848 revolutions were weakened by equally important divisions between race and nation. Within the Habsburg Empire, many separate peoples wished to rise up with nationalist zeal and throw off Austrian rule, but the traditional racial divisions between Magyars and Slovaks prevented any kind of collaboration. The destabilisation of central Europe was undesirable in the eyes of Britain and Russia, and their combined foreign policies worked to maintain the status quo on the continent. Britain, scared of Irish nationalism did not support the Italian movement despite liberal sympathies, and her opposition to Prussian annexation of Schleswig-Holstein discredited that state in the eyes of the liberal-nationalists at Frankfurt. Russia, on the other hand, took a more active role in suppressing the Magyar rebellion in Austria, both on principle of defending dynastic influence in Europe and because she feared the spread of insurrection to her own lands.

The action of Russia and Britain to help quash these insurgences was merely the outward manifestation of the fact that the old order would inevitably take back control unless these revolutions presented a uniform and strong face. While revolutionaries had successfully overthrown the existing regimes in the European states, where they failed was, with the exception of France, in not getting the army on their side, or providing their own organised force for protection. The power vacuum left by the resignation of Metternich on 13 March could not be filled by spontaneous revolutionaries with no clear leaders and a huge range of objectives. As soon as General Widishgrätz began to bombard Prague with the Imperial Army, it had fallen to him within three days, while Radetzky crushed the entire Piedmontese army at the battle of Custozza over just four days (23-27 July).

A revolution whose causes split the insurgents so divisively could never work without the leadership of men who could successfully draw some of these forces together, and a collaboration and compromise between social classes. No such selflessness ever developed in 1848, each group or individual like Charles Albert, King of Piedmont, was simply out to fulfil his personal aims, so that when the rebellions became too violent and radical the middle classes, thinking of their own socio-economic well-being, gravitated to the side of order and suppressed them. The intervention of Britain and Russia and the defeat of Italian and Austrian rebels by the Habsburg armies showed that only one set of forces were united and determined enough to make a difference, those of the ancien régime.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The European Revolutions 1848-1851 Jonathan Sperber (1984) pp. 1-53, 64-95, 105-116
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