Two important ideologies, nationalism and liberalism, emerged to have a significant effect on Europe during the nineteenth century. The Congress of Vienna and the Concerts of Europe were a conservative response to these ideas. After Napoleon’s fall, most European nations wanted to restore the old order and prevent future revolutionary outbreaks. Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia and France met at the Congress of Vienna in September 1814, led by the guidance of the Austrian foreign minister Prince Klemens von Metternich, who set the postwar order through enforcing stability, censorship and police cooperation in a new conservative order on a continental scale. The rulers of every European country were anxious to safeguard new peacetime conditions with established safeguards to prevent any recurrence of the revolutionary disturbances that had kept Europe in turmoil for twenty-five years. However, there were also many individuals, especially among the middle classes, who admired the revolution and hoped to be able to establish the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality and fraternity firmly in all of Europe.
Hence, the defeat of France did not remove the threat of international revolution and war, while the Vienna Settlement at the end of the wars was intended to maintain peace and stability. The years between 1815 and 1871 saw an almost incessant struggle between the rulers and the ruled, but as the years passed, conservatives yielded ground and their opponents split into fairly distinct segments: bourgeois liberals who demanded civil rights and personal freedoms, including equality before the law enshrined in constitutions, a free press and regular elections, nationalists who shared these aims, as well as national unification, especially in the Italian and German states, or at least greater regional autonomy, and socialists demanding greater respect for improved working and living conditions in the cities and the countryside in view of the increasing pace of industrialisation. European governments failing to act to address these popular demands led to outbreaks of protests throughout Europe at an unprecedented scale.
The Congress of Vienna that had been interrupted by Napoleon’s return from Elba, resumed its sessions after his final defeat. It had the task of deciding what to do with all the states whose rules had been overthrown and whose borders had changed as a result of revolutionary and Napoleonic expansion, and thereby re-draw the borders of Europe. The two principles of restoration and legitimacy guided the assembled statesmen of Europe in reestablishing old dynasties and boundaries, with monarchs to be restored as a key feature as the ideal form of government. Nations, states and territories were to be rearranged to create a balance of power among the European nations while no single state was to be rewarded so greatly as to upset the balance of power. France was to be returned to its 1789 borders, and borders were redrawn to create a barrier around France while also compensating the victors for lost territory and preserving the balance of power accordingly between the five great powers that emerged from the wars: Russia, Britain, France, Austria and Prussia. Belgium was removed from Austrian control, and Belgium and Holland were combined to form the kingdom of the Netherlands, being a larger state able to defend itself in order to prevent any revival of French military aggression. The German states were likewise to compose a bulwark against any potential restoration of a revolutionary movement in France in the form of a loose confederation, with Prussia receiving extensive territories along the Rhineland on France’s eastern border. In practice, much of the Napoleonic reorganisation of the German states remained in place.
Austria ceded the Austrian Netherlands in exchange for land in Venetia and Lombardy and along the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic Sea, and Bavarian Tyrol. The pope was restored as ruler of the Papal States in Italy, and most of Italy’s kingdoms and principalities were re-established and placed under Hapsburg control. Spain and Portugal got their rulers back. Poland was divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, with Russia being given most of its territory and the Tsar set up as the king of Poland, while Prussia was compensated for its loss of Polish land with forty percent of Saxony, the Duchy of Westphalia, Swedish Pomerania, and most of the Rhineland. Great Britain was granted overseas possessions as potential naval bases and staging posts for trade, including Heligoland, Malta, Cape Colony in South Africa, Ceylon, and part of Guiana. Meanwhile, little attention was given to the different nationalities and ethnic groups within these territories, without consideration for the emerging nationalist movement.
The German states largely maintained the same boundaries as they had possessed during the time of the Confederation of the Rhine. The French occupation of the German states from the 1790s to 1814 helped to modernize and consolidate Germany, and later sparked the first upsurge of German nationalism that contributed to the eventual German unification. Napoleon reorganised many of the middle-sized German states by having them absorb large numbers of small independent territories, mostly bishoprics, church lands, and local principalities. The more powerful German princes, in alliance with France, seized this chance to aggrandize their lands and later refused to restore the annexed units to independence after Napoleon’s defeat. There had been roughly a thousand independent and semi-independent German states in 1790, with between three and four hundred fully independent units), were greatly reduced to thirty-six in a new German Confederation that superseded the Holy Roman Empire. The empire could not be restored owing to competition for influence between Austria and Prussia, and the unwillingness of Bavaria and Wurttemberg to sacrifice their independence. The roughly three hundred and sixty states were consolidated into thirty-nine states that formed a loosely united German Confederation. Each state was independent in their domestic matters, while the purpose of the confederation was merely the regulation of affairs equally common to all German states. A permanent diet consisting of envoys of the states were to meet in Frankfurt-am-Main, with presiding representatives of the Austrian Hapsburgs.
This territorial reorganisation disappointed the aspirations of nationalists in the German states, which caused rivalry between Austria and Prussia as the predominant powers, in a way that was comparable to the effects of Soviet-American dualism on the United Nations during the Cold War. Nearly all of the princes repressed the nationalist movement that became popular particularly among students and professors after 1815. The German princes opposed nationalism and national unification since they realized that national unity required a reform or even destruction of the traditional monarchic states. They would have to cede some rights to a central authority in a united Germany. The nationalists often voicing liberal demands, such as the granting of constitutions and parliaments, further alarmed the princes and their aristocratic supporters.
The future maintenance of peace also exercised much of the attention of the assembled diplomats, who set forth the principle of intervention, by which European states could act together against the threat of revolutionary outbreaks. The war against France had also been won by cooperation, so it was natural for the powers to consider keeping the peace by continuing that cooperation. On the initiative of Czar Alexander I, a Holy Alliance was concluded between the rulers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria in May 1815, by which the respective absolutist sovereigns agreed to conduct their governments according to Christian principles and to “remain united by the bonds of a true and indissoluble fraternity” in order “on all occasions and in all places to lend each other aid and assistance.” On a more practical plane, the leaders of Austria, Russia, Prussia and Great Britain formed the Quadruple Alliance in November 1815, and agreed to hold periodic congresses called Concerts of Europe to discuss problems, to preserve peace, and to take steps to maintain the status quo should it be threatened by revolutionary disturbances in any part of Europe.
One of the consequences of the French revolution was the lesson that had been learned by the ruling classes of Europe – once change started, it got out of control. The French revolution had produced chaos, a bloody reign of terror, military dictatorship and international war. To conservative politicians, there were two possible responses to this situation. One was “riding the tiger,” while it was impossible to completely dam the forces of revolution. For example, Prince von Hardenburg of Prussia and his colleagues intended to attract support for the government and weaken the revolution by making moderate reforms, which enabled the aristocracy to maintain the real power and attract support of the middle classes. Another alternative was to stop the process of change before it had a chance to start.
The system of congresses that been established was soon in the business of crushing risings in favour of the then radical idea of constitutional government, by which the government would provide guarantees of individual liberties and rights as basic restrictions on the government and other individuals, and also distributing and controlling the use of political power. Despite the Concert of Europe’s efforts, the ideas of the Enlightenment and revolution spread throughout the continent, particularly the ideas of liberalism and nationalism. Liberalism was a philosophical movement based on the ideas of the Enlightenment asserting several loose tenets. First, people were to be as free as possible from government restraint. Government was to be used only to protect civil liberties of the people, especially with religious tolerance and the separation of church and state. Liberalism also put an emphasis on the use of representative assemblies in which voting and office was to be limited to men of property and the rule of constitutions. Nationalism, which became one of the most gripping concepts of the nineteenth, was also based on the ideas of the Enlightenment and spread indirectly with the conquests of Napoleon when there emerged a great consciousness about nationhood as a new modern idea. Most nationalists thereafter believed that a nation should be composed of people who had a common language, traditions, religions and customs, and each nationality should have its own government. However, neither the liberals nor the nationalists had any clearly expressed programmes.
The French monarchy was restored under Louis XVIII, under which there was to be a confrontation between the returned émigrés who “learned nothing and forgotten nothing,” and the new classes of bourgeois, propertied men and professional officials, which would threaten the stability of the post-revolutionary regime. Divisions between the classes became apparent from the beginning. Firstly, the new constitutional charter was based on royal prerogative, rather than coming from an elected assembly. However, it also guaranteed “public rights” of citizens, which confirmed equality and freedom that had been gained early in the revolution. A parliamentary system was also established with a Chamber of Deputies of substantial property holders to be elected by voters restricted by age and property qualifications, which represented one in a hundred French males. There was also a hereditary Chamber of Peers, and the monarchy was given considerable powers, including a veto over legislation, the dissolution of the Chamber, appointment of the ministers, control over foreign policy and the armed forces, and a royal power to issue emergency ordinances.
The divisions existing in France became apparent during the royalist “White Terror” that took place after the Hundred Days, when Napoleon had escaped from exile and threatened to upset the restoration. There was a suspension of some of the liberties of the constitution, and repression of Protestants, republicans and Bonapartists. The Chamber of Deputies was dominated by the “Ultras,” or conservative supporters of the monarchy, while they faced representatives of the urban middle class known as the Independents who spoke for liberals, Bonapartists and republicans, and the Doctrinaires who saw the charter as the basis for stability.
Flaws soon developed in the system that had been set up at the Congress of Vienna on an international scale. The Greek revolt against the Turks from 1821 to 1830 provided a particularly difficult diplomatic problem for the conservative European statesmen. Liberal and religious sympathy with the Greeks, combined with ambitions of the great powers to extend their control over the Ottoman Turks, while Austria was opposed intervention by Russia, which could lead to disturbing the balance of power if they gained influence in Greece and then Turkey. Russia, Britain and France eventually staged an intervention on behalf of the revolutionaries against their lawful rulers in 1827, which was organised by the British foreign secretary George Canning to prevent Russia from acting alone and thereby increasing its power in the Near East while there was also great popular support in Britain for the Greek cause. Turkey was persuaded to grant self-government to Greece, and the Holy Alliance link between Russia, Austria and Prussia was broken.
The political situation in France underwent rising tensions from the time of his coronation of Charles X in 1824, due to passing further conservative measures while ruling like the kings of the old regime, not realising that times had changed. Émigrés were compensated for the confiscation of their property at government expense and giving greater authority to the church, such as persecuting anti-clerical critics, including the introduction of the death penalty for sacrilege in 1826, and re-establishing clerical control over education. Press censorship was re-established, and a new electoral law was passed that gave 16,000 of the wealthiest citizens a double vote France suffered from bad harvests and economic recession, which increased opposition in the Chamber. Charles X reacted by attempting a political coup on 26 July 1830 through ordinances that called for virtual suppression of free expression through two ordinances. The first suspended the liberty of the press, established censorship over public journals and periodical writings, and the second altered election law. The electorate was reduced from 100,000 to 25,000, and a new election was fixed to counteract the revolutionary tendency among the Chamber deputies. The national guard, having demonstrated opposition to the government, was likewise suppressed. After the Concert of Europe had already been badly strained, the first revolts against the restored regimes began in July 1830, beginning in France where French liberals overthrew Charles X, while giving way to the deputies who had a major influence in conservative policymaking.
The press called for the revolution that broke out from 29-31 July while most French army troops were in Algeria, and the reduced numbers of troops could not be easily used in narrow streets against demonstrations by students and workers. On 30 July, a group of opposition deputies nominated Louis Philippe, the duke of Orleans, as Lieutenant General of the Kingdom with the support of the National Guard. On 2 August, Charles abdicated and the House of Bourbon was overturned. King Louis Philippe I became the “citizen king” on 9 August, and set out to create a constitutional monarchy while royalists partly withdrew from politics and the new regime was supported by wealthy business and commercial interests.
The Chamber of Deputies produced a new Charter in 1830 that extended liberty in different ways. The Chamber of Peers became an upper house of permanent members, and the franchise was extended the electorate from about 90,000 to 170,000 with property qualifications for office-holding and voting, making control remained firmly in the hands of men of property. Censorship was abolished, except against “radical agitation,” and Roman Catholicism was recognized as the religion of only “the majority of the French.” The king also lost the power to veto legislation, and the recruitment to the National Guard became more selective to ensure it would become a defensive bulwark of the regime.
News of the July revolution in Paris stirred liberals in Belgium to revolt against the Dutch in August 1830 to separate from Holland, with which there were many economic, religious and cultural differences, with hostilities breaking out on 25 August 1830. King William II of the Netherlands pre-empted the outbreak of revolutionary violence by supporting the promulgation of a constitution and instituting popular reforms. Fighting against Holland with French intervention continued until 23 August 1832. Peace was eventually restored in the Treaty of London, signed on 19 April 1839 between the major European powers, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Kingdom of Belgium, following negotiations at the London Conference of 1838–1839 that sought to maintain the Concert of Europe. The European powers recognised and guaranteed the independence and neutrality of Belgium, and established the full independence of the German-speaking part of Luxembourg.
The Poles revolted against the Russians. There was a major rising in Warsaw that drove the Russians out, who come back the following year and crush the short-lived republic. Revolutionary movements in Italy and Germany also manifested themselves. Following the French example, Germans in Saxony, Brunswick and Hannover staged revolts and gained liberal constitutions, but following the accession of Ernest Augustus to the throne of Hanover in 1837, the constitution was repealed with the approval of the Confederation Diet. In Italy, where after 1814, Metternich set out to “extinguish the spirit of unity and ideas about constitutions, positive changes had been made through modernizing reforms of several enlightened rulers, and all of the various Italian states had experienced a degree of constitutional government for a reasonably lengthy period under Napoleon. There also emerged a new middle class that was aware of the benefits of unification that would include economic integration. Revolts took place in northern and central Italy, including in Parma, Modena and the papal state, which were crushed by the Austrians. While the revolts in central and eastern Europe were suppressed, it succeeded in Belgium, and the great powers agreed to accept the independence of this new state at an international conference while guaranteeing its neutrality. The revolution in Belgium was the only successful one, but it left open the possibility of further revolutions.
The growth of industrialism also had a profound effect on the continent after 1830. The accompanying shifts of wealth and population, associated with very poor living conditions among workers who lived on the edge of crisis caused by recession, price rises or unemployment, gave new impetus to revolutionary aspirations. The middle class and an increasing group of proletarians aspired to an active part in government. Socialist movements in France and elsewhere, inspired by with the vision of a new and more egalitarian society, split off from the main liberal revolutionary movement. A second differentiation in the revolutionary movement arose as a result of political disunity of the peoples of Germany, Italy and Poland. In these regions, many individuals felt that national unification must come first and foremost before the liberal and egalitarian elements of the revolutionary tradition.
The growing differences were expressed by the events of 1848. France was torn after 1830 by government deputies who demanded further change and those who saw the revolution as complete, which persisted throughout Louis Philippe’s government. Louis Phillippe’s government suffered from inactivity, and economic depression in France starting in 1846 caused suffering among the lower middle and working classes. The landless middle class, which was composed the majority of educated and professional people, also wanted a right to vote, which the king refused and therefore lost having sufficient bourgeois support.
The German states had been politically fragmented before having had been overrun by Napoleon, and 90 percent of the population earned their living from agriculture while economic development had been stymied by the absence of a unified market. The Napoleonic revision of the German territories opened the way for a view toward the benefits of unity. Defeat has also stimulated Prussia into modernisation, which enabled it to become a leader in the unification movement, and there emerged a German form of cultural and political nationalism. Under the leadership of Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenburg in Prussia, a body of administrators set out to reform Prussian institutions, and try to win the support of the people in the state, which were influenced by the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and the French example. These reforms included the emancipation of the serfs, relaxing the class system to allow the nobility to enter trade and industry and the bourgeois to own land, giving self-government to the towns, educational reforms, and military reforms under Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, including opening up the officer corps to the middle class men of merit, and introducing military service. These reforms made Prussia the most modernised state in Germany.
German intellectuals also contributed to the idea of German unification, including Herder, Fichte and Hegel who developed the view that the German people were a unique nation, or “Volk,” who were unified by the language. Friedrich Jahn also propagated unification in students’ unions, and his “gymnasium” movement called for instructions of students in drill, physical activities and the national spirit, which disguised these meetings political rallies, in comparison to political discussions taking place in France under the guise of banquets, and in Italy as scientific societies.
The only form of unification that the German states had was the 39 state Confederation, which Metternich intended to use to establish a stable and controllable system in Europe, but it had several handicaps in terms of unification. This confederation was merely a diplomatic congress representing the states’ rulers, rather than the people. Moreover, it also had limited powers, since its jurisdiction was circumscribed by how member states could refuse to accept laws, and a two-thirds majority was needed for major issues. In addition, there was no federal army. Besides, most Germans were apathetic about unification, with some exceptions, such as students who converted the Wartburg Festival in 1817 from a celebration of the battle of Leipzig into a demonstration against princes and militarism.
On the other hand, Metternich coordinated repression through the Confederation, with key elements being the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, whereby the Confederation Diet introduced closer supervision of political activities at universities, censorship of the press, pamphlets and literatures, and a central commission to track down revolutionary secret societies. In the Final Act of Vienna in 1820, the Confederation Diet agreed to limit the subjects that elected assemblies could discuss, and confirmed its rights to intervene in individual states. After a crowd of 25,000 at the Hambach Festival in 1832 denounced the Holy Alliance and supported a unified German republic, the Diet passed the Six Acts in 1832 that banned public meetings and obliged German princes to resist any attempt to reduce their sovereignty.
At the same time, economic developments were adding force to the movement for unification and political reforms. Prussia standardised its own internal customs service into the Zollverein, and then moved into tariff agreements with the states separating Prussian territories in 1819. Other states began to try to form similar unions, and in 1834, the Prussian-dominated Zollverein was formed from all of these units. This strengthened the cause of German unification since the economic and financial prosperity of the members of this economic union were revealed, as well as boosted Prussian economic growth that outweighed the economic strength of the Hapsburg monarchy, while the Zollverein also reduced its influence in Germany, while construction of railways also served to contribute to the economic unification of the German states.
An assembly of representative of the states of the German Confederation met in Frankfurt-am-Main for a united and liberal Germany, but these delegates found themselves facing insoluble difficulties. Republicans quarreled with advocates of constitutional monarchy, and the question of whether or not to include Austria with its extensive non-German possessions was a second stumbling block. When the Prussian king Frederick William IV refused to accept an invitation made by the Frankfurt assembly to become emperor all of Germany as a constitutional monarchy without the support of the autocratic rulers of the German states, practical hope of success vanished, and the revolution petered out.
Austria constituted a truly multinational nation consisting of Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Poles, Croats, Serbians and Italians, likewise faced an eruption of nationalist sentiment while it uniquely lacked any dominant majority ethnic group. The constructive forces of nationalism were therefore potentially destructive for the Hapsburg monarchy since there was not any logic to the ethnic composition of the state. It therefore depended on the personal loyalty of the subjects to the emperor, the authority of the aristocracy loyal to the Hapsburgs, an extensive bureaucracy led by a German-speaking central administration, a professional army in which the general language of command was German, the Roman Catholic Church that represented 60 percent of the population while the higher clergy were German, and usually German majorities in the towns who dominated commerce.
Meanwhile, the integrity of the Hapsburg monarchy was endangered by two factors. One factor was the tendency for administrative reformers and liberals to support more centralised control of the Monarchy, because provincial divisions were seen as an obstacle to more efficient management. However, this would involve provoking the provincial nobility with the risk of losing their local legal and administrative powers to imperial bureaucrats, which would weaken the loyalty of the aristocracy. Moreover, opposition to absolutist centralization would provide impetus to popular support. Another consequence of centralization would mean over-identification with the Germans, while German liberals were supporters of a unitary state with a more equal and rational administrative system. Other national groups could consider this to be biased in the interest of one nationality, which was worsened in the 1830s and 1840s when there was a tendency for some Austrian Germans to see Germanisation as a vital step to modernisation, and to include the Hapsburg monarchy in a united Germany. A second threat was nationalist pressures toward decentralization among the eleven nationalities of the empire, including among intellectuals who were seeking to break through the German monopoly of employment in official posts. A second source was the traditional nationalism of the smaller nobility in Hungary who identified themselves with this nation that they had created. They were especially united by common privileges, such as exemption from land tax and their representation at the Diet in Budapest, the occupation of official positions in local government, their use of Hungarian, and membership in a staunchly Calvinist church. A third force was popular nationalism, which grew after 1848 as literacy grew and peasants moved into the towns where tensions developed between labourers and employers of different ethnic backgrounds. As a result, national resentments were sharpened by social and economic divisions.
As a result of various forms of tensions, western Europe exploded simultaneously into a wave of revolutions in 1848, when there were uprisings in fifteen capital cities, especially in central Europe, where liberal, national, democratic, republican, and socialist sentiments freely mingled in their common antagonism to the old order. Despite all of Metternich’s efforts, the forces of reaction were uncoordinated and all of the revolutions were fought out internally. As a result, although they seemed successful at first, they were limited in their results. While the first French revolution of 1789 was a great success that was inspired by impulse for rational reform based on philosophical principles, the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe were largely failures with reactions that followed leading to affairs that were less favourable to the development of institution than the preceding conditions, apart from in Prussia where a modest constitution was proclaimed by the monarchy.
Parisians staged another revolution on 24 February 1848, in reaction to soldiers firing into a crowd of demonstrators. Louis Philippe resigned the next day, and a provisional government was created by moderate republicans and socialists to establish a republic, supported by the Parisian mob, who called for an election based on universal male suffrage to create a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution for France. The government also instituted freedom of the press and of assembly, opening of the National Guard to all citizens, abolition of the death penalty, and many emergency measures to cope with the rapidly deteriorating economic situation. Among the most famous of its actions was the creation of the National Workshops, which were open-air public works projects, which soon degenerated into simple ditch-digging and eventually into straight welfare payments for the unemployed workers, rather than the nationalized industries that Louis Blanc had envisioned, and could not accommodate all of the unemployed.
The Provisional Government also decreed elections for a Constituent Assembly to be held under universal manhood suffrage – the first time such a bold experiment in democracy had been tried in Europe. The new Constituent Assembly then had a dual task: to draw up a new constitution for the Second Republic and to govern it in the interim. None of its members were drawn from the radical left, and the assembly and the Parisian workers at once conceived an almost instinctive hostility for one another. The workers, most of whom were unemployed and hungry, demanded immediate and far-reaching economic and social reforms, which the parliamentarians, as members of the propertied classes, had no intention of granting. A group of workers invaded the assembly on May 15, declared it dissolved, and named a new’ provisional government. This time the National Guard, which had sided with the people against the government in February, came to the aid of the assembly, dispersed the mob, and arrested its leaders. The social cleavage between the moderates and the workers now became more marked. The assembly immediately took steps to dissolve the National Workshops.
The National Workshops, which could potentially form a mob against the government, were dissolved on 22 June and 100,000 workers were offered the choice of army service or employment on provincial public works. On the next day, revolts continued in Paris and resulted in savage street fighting in which the revolts were purged by 26 June in the first clear-cut full-fledged class warfare in modern history. The military thus ended the first major attempt of the working classes to take the reorganization of society into their own hands.
By 4 November 1848, a new constitution was written that set up the Second Republic, and was the most democratic form of government that France had seen. It provided for a single-chamber Legislative Assembly and a president to wield executive power. Both the assembly and the president were to be elected by universal male suffrage, the former for three years, the latter for four. The first election was held in December 1848, and Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon, won by a huge margin. However, the failure of the revolutionaries to work together resulted in the ultimate failure of France’s 1848 revolution, which was only successful in terms of overthrowing the monarchy.
Within weeks of the abdication of Louis Philippe in France, a series of popular demonstrations and constitutional changes also took place throughout southern and western Germany. In Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, Brunswick, Thuringia, and the free cities of Frankfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, and Liibeck, the rulers bowed to demands for constitutions and responsible ministries where none existed, and liberalised them where they did in the face of the widespread popular opposition that threatened aristocratic rule. Preparations also went forward for the convocation of an all-German constituent assembly. For the most part, this mainly non-violent activity was the work of middle-class liberals – the progressive business leaders and professional men of the thriving commercial centers of western Germany who had grown impatient with the restrictive and conservatism of existing governments. The rulers of the German states, along with everyone else, had been taken by surprise by the sudden collapse of the monarchy in France. When they discovered with relief that the reformers in their own jurisdictions would be satisfied with liberal reforms and did not demand republican government, they went along almost gladly. There were also more radical tendencies among peasants and artisans attacking officials, landowners and moneylenders, and socialist demands in support of a republic in the Prussian Rhineland, Hanover and Baden that were crushed by constitutional forces in Kandern in April.
Revolts began in Cologne on 3 March, and were followed by other revolts in Vienna on 13 March and Berlin on 16 March. Mobs in Berlin besieged the royal palace, and people fought with soldiers in the streets. King Frederick William IV conceded to the demands of the revolts on 18 March by announcing Prussia would be merged into Germany, as well as promised to summon an elected Constituent Assembly that would provide for the creation of a representative assembly, or Landtag, that would create a new constitution in cooperation with the monarchy. Nevertheless, the former civil service and military administrations remained in place while the institution of the monarchy was preserved, along with the reactionary camarilla of advisers surrounding the king that remained enabled to limit the extent of constitutional reforms. Additional military forces were dispatched to Berlin to maintain order, which led to street fighting between these troops and civilians, before the king ordered the troops to leave the city as a result, and promised to promulgate a new national constitution.
Soon thereafter, delegates from across Germany were assembled to debate the future of a united Germany. The German National Assembly (Nationalversammlung), the first ever of its kind, met in St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt on 18 May 1848. More than two months previously, a group of about fifty western German liberals had met in Heidelberg and issued a call for a preliminary parliament, which gathered in Frankfurt on March 31. This Vorparlament (preliminary parliament) did not have any legal standing, but it assumed responsibility for the task of arranging for the election of delegates to the National Assembly from all the German states. The resulting assembly was nearly six hundred. To give it a vestige of legality, the frightened Diet of the old Germanic Confederation had approved the elections, and after the Assembly met, the Diet actually dissolved itself. However, their debates revealed four different areas of weakness that prevented an agreement on how to unite the German states.
First was the definition of frontiers. All delegates agreed that Germany had to be united, but the character of the union proved a problem. A republic was out of the question, as well as any form of highly centralized state, because too many vested interests were involved, especially those of the ruling princes. Some sort of federal empire seemed to be indicated, in which the component parts would retain local autonomy. Moderate and anti-Prussian groups advocated, including the Hapsburg monarchy apart from Hungary. In contrast, there was a “Kleindeutsch” argument for excluding the non-German Hapsburg provinces was favoured by radical nationalists, which would give Prussia the paramount influence. By 28 October, it was finally agreed that the latter should be the case, while the Hapsburg monarchy was beset with internal difficulties and was in no position to respond.
There were also divisions over the form of a constitution for unified German states. A draft document was produced in October 1848, and a bill of fundamental right was agreed on. A system of representative and responsible state governments with a federal government responsible to a nationally elected legislature were proposed. An upper house would represent state interests, and the head of state could not veto decisions. Besides, there was a lack of absence of lower class support. Although the Assembly advocated the abolition of feudal privileges, it supported compensation to uphold respect for property rights, and in general the Assembly could not attract the popular support. In addition, there was also the inability to combine liberalism and nationalism, supporting Prussian and Austrian interests in the face of opposition from subject peoples, including the Czechs and Italians in the territories of the Hapsburg monarchy, and the Poles in Prussian territories while also supporting the fighting against Denmark to incorporate the duchies Schleswig and Holstein that belonged to the kingdom of Denmark. The duchies revolted against the new Danish king and declared their sympathy for the German parliament. When the Danish army occupied them, the assembly in Frankfurt commissioned Frederick William to send Prussian troops on its behalf to “liberate” their fellow Germans. Frederick William did so, but in August he succumbed to pressure from Britain and Russia to conclude an armistice and evacuate his troops.
Meanwhile, there were growing strains in Prussia. The powers of the Prussian Landtag were ill-defined, and the monarchy retained control of the army and the administration. After the liberal middle classes received concessions from king Frederick William IV who sought to restore order in Berlin, a Civic Guard citizen militia, and an upper middle class cabinet under Ludolph Camphausen, and the pledge of promulgating a constitution, there was a rift between them and the radical workers that grew with the latter’s more extreme political and social demands. In May, June and October, outbreaks of disorder revealed the inadequacy of the Civil Guard, and the propertied people began to support conservatism. Conservatives organised under Otto von Manteuffel also began to organise for an anti-democratic and anti-liberal counterattack, while the Assembly elected in May on universal male suffrage played into reactionary hands by making radical demands, such as advocating the abolition of titles of nobility. A virtual coup took place in October 1848, when Berlin was declared to be under military siege and the king’s uncle, the count von Brandenburg became the leader of the government with military force before the assembly was dissolved in December 1848 after Frederick William was encouraged by the success of the Austrian government in retaking Vienna.
Following the restoration of order by force in Prussia, a new modest constitution was proclaimed in April 1849 on his authority. The executive remained extensive powers to suspend rights, to revise the constitution and to govern by emergency decrees. The constitution provided for a bicameral legislature, the Diet, with the upper house (Herrenhaus) reserved for the privileged orders. The lower house, nominally elected by universal manhood suffrage, actually gave a preponderance of influence to the wealthy by means of a complex three-class electoral system based on tax payment that gave 5 percent of the population to elect a third of the deputies, and another 20 percent selected another third. The ministers of the government did not form a cabinet responsible to the Diet but were individually responsible to and directly dependent upon the king. When the Diet was not in session, the king could rule by decree. In spite of some superficial concessions to parliamentarianism, the Prussian state retained its authoritarian and aristocratic character that vastly increased the power of the Prussian Junker aristocracy of great landowners.
With its authority re-established, the Prussian government undertook a reactionary policy. It repealed earlier liberal legislation, such as that curtailing the privileged position of the nobility, and enacted new and repressive measures directed against freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and other liberties that peoples with constitutional governments had come to regard as rights. The nobility and the Junker aristocracy monopolized the posts of power and prestige in the court, the government, and the army. Not only the radicals but even those who regarded themselves as liberals were driven of the government and, in some cases, out of the country.
The deliberations in Frankfurt continued throughout this time where the last hope of German liberals rested on the Frankfurt Assembly where the delegates sought to establish a framework for popular political reform, but this hope also faded. This Assembly reached some consensus by March 1849 from among 28 states, who agreed to offer the crown of Germany to Frederick William IV as hereditary “Emperor of the Germans” without the Austrians who ruled themselves out of any participation in the proposed federation. However, he refused to accept the offer, partly because of concerns about the Hapsburg reaction, and also because he refused to take what he called “a crown from the gutter” of popular acclaim, which his conservative advisors argued was inconsistent with his “divine right” as King of Prussia, and thus refusing to govern rather than rule with a representative mandate. He therefore announced on 21 April that under no circumstances would he accept the crown from an elected assembly. The Assembly then became rather purposeless, and began to disintegrate. This announcement shattered the last illusions of the Frankfurt Assembly. Prussia and Austria ordered their delegates to return home, and the delegates from other states soon followed. Only a small band of the most radical deputies remained. When driven from their meeting place by Austrian troops in June 1849, they tried to continue their sessions in Stuttgart, but again the soldiers dispersed them, imprisoning some and driving others into exile. With this failure, Germany lost its opportunity for peaceful unification under a liberal constitution, and Otto von Bismarck, who was one of the delegates to the German Confederation from Prussia, considered how the 1848 improvised revolutions would not lead to optimal results for the unification of the separate German states, which he expected could be attained under the leadership of Prussia, and excluding the influence of Austria, through controlled change by instituting applying leverage and establishing alliances, prior to engaging in confrontations to achieve results in Prussia’s favour.
Nationalist demonstrations took place in all of the major cities across Austria In March 1848, and each separate nationality demanded self-government. The news of the revolution in Paris encouraged the opponents of Metternich’s regime in Vienna to press for liberal reforms. The reformers included persons from all social classes: business and professional men who resented economic controls and exclusion from political power, workers, peasants in the countryside, and a few aristocrats who were against the restrictions of the government. Students from the university, the sons of aristocracy and the upper middle classes, actually took the initiative in fomenting revolution. Metternich was pressured to resign on 15 March to save the situation, and fled to England to help prevent further fighting. Metternich’s resignation and flight triggered signals for the disruption of the entire system he had instituted in the Hapsburg empire, as the liberal sentiments that had been effectively contained led to widespread outbreaks. Within a few days, Ferdinand I gave in to demands for the abolition of censorship, promised to convoke a constitutional convention to draft a constitution, and permitted the formation of a volunteer National Guard while the secret police was abolished. In May, the government attempted to reassert its authority but backed down when it met determined opposition. On 15 May, Vienna was left in the hands of a Committee of Artisans, National Guards, and students while the emperor and the court fled to Innsbruck.
At the same time as the disturbances in Vienna, there were outbreaks of revolts national minorities in the dominions of the autocratic empire. The most dangerous and bloody revolts took place in the Lombard-Venetian provinces where hatred of Austrian domination had long been intense led to outbreaks of revolt following the news of the success of the revolution in France and Metternich’s fall, beginning with street fighting in Milan on 18 March. The Hungarian Diet under the leadership of Lajos Kossuth proclaimed a constitution on 15 March that made Hungary entirely independent of Austria, retaining only the link of a common king-emperor. Hungarian nationalists demanded universal suffrage, a free press and parliamentary reform with independence from Austrian rule. Hungary was granted its own legislature in April 1848, along with the creation of a National Guard. The nationalist Hungarian government created a new constitution that would unite all of Hungary into a single nation and restrict participation in the process to Hungarian speakers only. The Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia convened a Pan-Slavic Congress in Prague at the same time, and demanded autonomy from Vienna in a deputation to the emperor on 19 March. Lombardy and Venetia revolted, and most of the other subject nationalities – Croats, Slovaks, Serbs, Slovenes, Poles, Ruthenians, and others – demanded either autonomy or extensive reforms. The government was powerless to resist, and it appeared for a time that the ancient Hapsburg monarchy would simply disintegrate, as the emperor was forced to yield to revolutionary demands in the Austrian provinces that were granted a constitution on 25 April.
The Constituent Assembly met in Vienna on 22 July, which was riddled with divisions as a result of two debates. One was the question of federalism versus unitarianism. The Slavs tended to be in favour of greater federal devolution, but rivalries between different Slav groups meant that the 190 Slavs in the total of 400 delegates did not vote as a bloc. On the other hand, the 140 Germans were largely moderate liberals who believed in the unity of the monarchy as the route to liberalism and modernization, while Hungary would be treated separately. Another problem was the relationship with Germany, and the division of the Frankfurt Assembly was paralleled in the monarchy. The most significant of the Assembly was the abolition of all feudal dues on 7 September, which effectively cancelled out the peasantry as a revolutionary force.
The tide began to turn against the revolution in June 1848, when imperial armies in Bohemia and Lombardy scored victories over the rebellious subjects. Even more ominous for the national movements were their relations with one another. In spite of common grievances against the ruling German-speaking minority, they could not agree on joint action and mutual support. Although the Hungarians were insistent on independence for themselves, they turned down requests for autonomy from the Croatians and other minorities within the boundaries of the kingdom of Hungary. The imperial forces gradually regained control of the Austrian provinces of the empire, and retook Vienna in October and then Budapest in January 1849.
Resistance in Hungary continued, and for a few months, it appeared that the Hungarians might succeed in winning their independence, but during the summer the Russian tsar sent his army to the aid of his fellow monarch, ending with the suppression of the revolution there. The reaction also continued in Austria, where In March, 1849, the new Prime Minister Schwarzenberg dissolved the newly elected national assembly, discarded its draft constitution providing for a decentralized, federal form of government, and promulgated one of his own that provided for a highly centralized administration. The provisions for a representative diet and a responsible ministry never took effect. In 1851 the constitution itself was permanently “suspended.” Schwarzenberg’s policies were carried on thereafter. In addition to extreme centralization and bureaucratic rule, the system was characterized by a vigorous policy of “germanisation” and the strict repression of all liberal elements.
Following events in France, a revolt in February 1848 in Palermo forced Ferdinand II to grant Sicily a constitution that gave it virtual independence, and this movement spread to Naples where he had to concede a constitution for the whole kingdom, which was followed by a constitution being granted in the separate states in Piedmont and Tuscany. The revolutions in Paris and Vienna also led to the Pope Pius IX granting a constitution to the Papal States on 15 March, and a republic was proclaimed in Venice on 22 March. On the same day, King Charles Albert of Piedmont, under pressure from the liberals and patriots who had earlier compelled him to grant a constitution, declared war against the Austrians in support of the Milanese. In a matter of weeks, contingents of soldiers and volunteers from all Italy, including the States of the Church, joined in the attack. For a few days it seemed that Italy would soon be free of foreign domination.
These hopes were then doomed to quick extinction. Pope Pius IX, who had earlier given his blessing to the papal volunteers, now disclaimed any intention of making war on Catholic Austria, cutting the ground from beneath those patriots who had looked to him to head an Italian confederation. In March 1849, the Austrians delivered another and final humiliating defeat to Charles Albert who had renewed the fighting, without having the support of the peasants and poorer classes who could not expect any gains from the revolutions. In May, a successful counterrevolution in Naples resulted in the withdrawal of Italian troops led by Charles Albert. Finally, the Piedmontese failed to follow up their early successes in the field. The Austrians on July 24 delivered a crushing defeat against Italian troops at Custozza. In August, the Austrians again controlled all of Lombardy. Nevertheless, Italian patriots continued the struggle.
After Pius fled Rome in November, the people of the States of the Church reacted by electing a constituent assembly in January 1849, which proclaimed the Roman Republic on 9 February 1849 and the abolition of the Papal temporal powers. Giuseppe Garibaldi now put his legion of volunteers (called Redshirts from the only vestige of uniform they wore) at the service of the Roman Republic. This republic also fell on 2 July 1849 to French forces sent by Louis Napoleon appealing for Catholic support in France, before the Pope later returned to power in April 1850. On 28 August 1849, the Venetians, besieged by the Austrians without and by starvation and cholera within, finally capitulated, and the last spark of revolutionary nationalism in Italy seemed to expire. Thus ended Italy’s attempt to “constitute itself.”
The 1848 revolutions failed for different reasons. The conservatism of the peasantry in France and the Hapsburg monarchy partially blocked revolutionary movements. There were internal rivalries and antagonisms between the revolutionary forces, while the propertied classes later allied themselves with the forces of authority and order as the prospect of social order developed. The decisive use of military force could also stop or turn the tide of revolution. The revolutionary confidence in the effectiveness of popular action had been discredited in central Europe. If any part of the revolutionary program were to be made a reality, it seemed necessary to find support from existing state, i.e. from Sardinia and Prussia. This step meant at least a temporary renunciation of the more liberal aspirations that the revolutionaries had fostered, but many felt that national unification had to come first before liberal reform. Equally significant was the split between socialism and liberalism that events in France had made evident, and from 1848 onward, the latent antagonism between liberal and socialist ideals became clear and definite.
Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels, who published the Communist Manifesto on the eve of the revolution, and devoted themselves to agitation on behalf of an international socialist revolutionary movement, elucidating that history was divided into separate stages based on maternalistic economic activity: 1. primitive communism based on collectively exchanging available commodities; 2. slavery headed by a minority social class holding a vast majority of available commodities maintaining political power over them; 3. feudalism, in which commodities based on land were held by a minority social class who were likewise subject to their political power; 4. capitalism, when the means of production held by a minority economic class holding control over a majority of available assets opened for rapid economic development that were operated by a majority of the population, and ultimately 5. communism in the indefinite future, when all available resources would be shared on an equitable basis, and the means of production would be operated by the workforce, superseding those who had owned all of the means of production. The notion of socialism would later be introduced as an interpretation of eventually attaining communism as an intermediary state during “a dictatorship of the proletariat” representing collective interests over those of individuals, when workforces would hold all political power in society. Marx advocated how socialism would be implemented in The Communist Manifesto, in which he stated that the proletariat, or unprivileged workforces composing the majority of populations, would seize and centralise all of the instruments of production, and then place them under state in which they would exercise political power as the ultimate ruling class, and would be free to engage in any form of activity while earning a livelihood in a society of unrestricted social mobility, without restrictions on the division of labour. The question of how such an optimal society without free market mechanisms to enable any necessary economic regulations would remain to be formulated in practice in a new form of social reality.
What were the motivating factors for attempting to restore the old order in Europe?
What movements pushed back against attempts to “turn the clock back,” and how were they expressed?
What were highlights in different European regions that led to changing the face of European political life?
Collaborative writing
1.Form groups of three to write a paper for any topic for this time period.
2. Generate a rough initial outline to be modified further with supporting ideas
3. Continue with adding qualifying details, before formulating a draft to be presented during the mid-term exam. The final draft is also going to be evaluated for the final assignment grade for the semester. Each group member needs to be responsible for different supporting ideas.
4. Submit outlines and drafts for review and peer review. These are to be judged on the basis of stating facts and expressing personal interpretations and views in its focus, organisation, and development.
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