The Year That Failed Everywhere

In January 1848 there was a rising in Palermo. In February, Paris. By March there were revolutions in Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Milan, Venice, Munich, Prague, Copenhagen and a long list besides. Within weeks, rulers across Europe had conceded constitutions, dismissed ministers or fled.

By the end of 1849 almost every one of them had been defeated.

The simultaneity is the first thing to explain, and it has a boring answer and an interesting one. The boring answer is a common background: the potato blight and grain failures of 1845-47 produced the last great subsistence crisis in western Europe, a financial crisis followed, and unemployment was severe in cities full of people who had no political representation at all. Grievance was general because the harvest failure was.

The interesting answer is speed. Railways and the telegraph meant that news of Paris reached Vienna in days rather than weeks, faster than governments could formulate a response and fast enough for a crowd in one capital to know it was part of something. 1848 is the first revolution conducted at the speed of the news, and the sensation of a continent moving at once was itself part of what moved it.

Then why did it collapse so completely?

Because the coalitions that made it were built out of groups whose aims were incompatible, and winning is what exposes that. On the barricades in February were middle-class liberals who wanted constitutions and property qualifications, nationalists who wanted states, artisans being destroyed by industrial competition, and workers who wanted the right to a job.

Once the king had fled and a constitution was on the table, the liberals had substantially what they came for. The social demands that followed (the national workshops in Paris, the right to work) looked to them less like the next stage of the revolution than like a threat to everything they had just secured. In June the workers of Paris rose again, and the republican government that February had installed sent the army in. Several thousand were killed and thousands more deported.

The February and June crowds overlapped heavily. That is the whole lesson of 1848 in one city: a coalition of opposition is held together by what it is against, and the moment it wins enough to begin deciding things, the differences become live.

Nationalism made it worse, because the nationalists collided with each other. Hungarian revolutionaries demanding liberation from Vienna faced Croat, Slovak, Serb and Romanian demands for liberation from Hungary, and refused them. The Frankfurt Parliament spent months on the question of what Germany was, and found no boundary that included Bohemia without incorporating unwilling Czechs or excluded it without abandoning Germans. The Habsburg monarchy survived in substantial part by playing these claims against one another; it was Croatian troops under Jelačić who marched on Budapest.

The problem that 1848 could not solve (that in central and eastern Europe nations and territories do not correspond, and any line drawn leaves minorities on both sides) is the same problem that produces 1914, the settlement of 1919, the crisis of 1938 and the expulsions of 1945. It was not solved. It was eventually resolved by moving people, which is a different thing.

And yet.

Serfdom was abolished in the Habsburg lands in 1848 and never restored, which changed the lives of tens of millions of people permanently. Absolute monarchy without even the appearance of a constitution became very difficult to sustain in western and central Europe. The techniques of mass politics (parties, newspapers, public meetings, national organisation) entered ordinary practice and did not leave.

Most strikingly, the programme of 1848 was largely enacted within twenty-five years by the people who had defeated it. Bismarck unified Germany from above, with universal male suffrage for the Reichstag and a constitution that left the army and the chancellor answerable to the Kaiser. Cavour unified Italy under a monarchy. Napoleon III ran an empire on plebiscites. National unity and a wide franchise, delivered by conservatives, in a form that left conservatives in charge.

A defeated movement whose demands are implemented by its opponents has not exactly lost. It has also not won, and the difference between those two outcomes is most of European politics for the following seventy years.