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June 18 - June 23, 2018
The 1848 Revolutions have often been dismissed in retrospect as half-hearted failures, but that is not how they seemed at the time. Nothing in Europe would ever be the same again after the events of January to July 1848.
Already in the 1840s rival nationalisms were beginning to rub up against one another. This was above all the case in east-central Europe, where the revolutions in Berlin and Vienna gave a powerful stimulus to movements for national unity and autonomy. These movements in turn were to have a major effect on the further development of the revolutions in Germany and Austria, opening up massive contradictions between liberalism and nationalism and giving conservatives and reactionaries the opportunity to recover the initiative.
The end in Vienna came quickly. On 16 October 1848, after Windischgrätz arrived in Olmütz, a new proclamation from Emperor Ferdinand condemned the ‘reign of terror’ in Vienna, in a deliberate reference to the events of 1793–4 in Paris, and gave Windischgrätz, who helped draft the document, full powers to restore order. An imperial army numbering 70,000 surrounded the city and cut off its food supplies. On 28 October it began a sustained bombardment,
The recovery of nerve by the Habsburg Monarchy and the reconquest of Vienna and Prague in the summer and autumn of 1848 had profoundly negative effects on the prospects of German unification.
Since Austria and Bohemia had definitively rejected inclusion in a unitary German nation state, the Parliament was left with no choice but to go for a smaller Germany, with the King of Prussia as hereditary sovereign, able to delay legislation but not reject it.
Thousands of people assembled in front of the papal residence at the Quirinal Palace demanding a republic. Some started firing weapons. The Pope’s secretary was shot by a bullet entering through his office window, and a cannon was pointed at the palace gate. Thoroughly terrified, Pius IX fled to Naples in a carriage, disguised as a parish priest. He withdrew his troops from northern Italy, alarmed by the nationalists’ declaration of the war as a holy crusade: the Austrians, after all, were good Catholics as well.
Unprepossessing, dismissed by many as a ‘cretin’, to use the term applied to him by Thiers, and a stranger to France (he spoke French with a German accent as a result of his education in exile in Germany),
Almost everywhere, the bourgeois liberals who led the revolution took their inspiration from British parliamentarianism, which underpinned Britain’s world hegemony and industrial growth, while radicals and democrats were inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789–93. Moderate liberals sought the destruction of inherited authoritarian constitutions and the end of traditional, legally inscribed social hierarchies, while more radical spirits wanted a democratic republic. At the beginning, whatever their constitutional beliefs, revolutionaries everywhere thought of themselves as
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The crisis hit Europe at a time when monarchs, from the weary Louis-Philippe in France to the nervous Friedrich Wilhelm IV in Prussia, from the epileptic Ferdinand I in Austria to the irresponsible Ludwig I in Bavaria, were peculiarly unfit to deal with it.
Democrats’ attempts to ride the tiger of popular insurrection only pushed moderate liberals further in the direction of counter-revolution. Memories of the Reign of Terror exercised by Robespierre in 1793–4 were simply too strong. The revolutionaries were also undermined by the failure of the peasantry in most parts of Europe to lend their support to them. In many countries, most notably France, serfdom had long since been abolished or, as in Prussia and Austria, watered down by attrition until only its last vestiges remained. The peasants did not harbour the overwhelming sense of grievance
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Most serious of all were the divisions that so quickly opened up in the revolutionary camp: not merely between liberals and democrats, or constitutional monarchists and republicans, but above all between rival nationalisms. The principle of national self-determination ran up against the confusion of national boundaries in many parts of Europe.
The core of the European resistance to nationalism, democracy and parliamentarianism was indeed located in Vienna; and the Habsburg Monarchy came out of the conflicts of 1848–9 with its integrity intact and its position as Europe’s hegemonic power restored.
In Britain the economic crisis of the late 1840s prompted a revival of the Chartist movement, which staged a series of massive demonstrations in Glasgow and London, with railings being torn up and shop windows smashed. Rioters in Manchester attacked a workhouse, and a national Chartist Convention staged a demonstration in South London in April 1848 attended by an estimated 150,000 people.
The British governments of the period, anxious not to impose extra tax burdens on the population at a time of economic hardship and potentially rising discontent, cut back sharply on expenditure on the large armed forces kept in the colonies, and stopped subsidising colonial planters and sugar growers at the expense of domestic consumers by an extension of free trade to the colonies. This in turn caused widespread unrest in the colonies, with Jamaican planters refusing to pay taxes and the governor of Canada pelted with eggs, while rebellious Anglo Loyalists burned down the parliament building
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Moderate liberals across Europe continued after 1848, indeed, to point to Britain’s gradualist reforms as the way to defuse social tension. For mid-Victorian Britons, the idea of progress legitimized the nation’s global hegemony and informed the politics of improvement. Lord Palmerston, a leading figure in the Whig governments of the late 1840s and 1850s, and Prime Minister (with a short break in the middle) from 1855 to 1865, encouraged liberal movements on the European Continent in the belief that the British model of society and politics was the way to be followed by all.
The social harmony and liberal individualism of the 1850s and 1860s in Britain were reflected in the relative stability of the political system, in which the Whigs were largely dominant following the split in the Tory Party over the Corn Laws in 1846, though internal divisions and frequent dependence on the radicals weakened their effectiveness.
Corrupt practices during elections were reduced by the outlawing of bribery in elections in 1854 (though it was not until 1883 that it was eliminated altogether), while the secret ballot was introduced in 1872 and the uneven distribution of seats according to population rectified in 1867.
a scepticism underlined by the rigorous financial policies of the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1852 to 1855 and again from 1859 to 1866, William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98), who had come over to the Whigs with the Peelites. Over this long period, he abolished hundreds of tariffs and excise duties and reduced income tax to four pence in the pound. Money, he believed, should not be handed over to the state to waste, but should be allowed to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’. Further reforms included the liberation of the press through the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers (1855) and
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As Tory governments were led from the House of Lords by the sickly Earl of Derby, Disraeli came to be the party’s effective leader in the House of Commons. As such, he steered through a second Parliamentary Reform Bill in 1867, which increased the electorate by 88 per cent, from just over one to just under two million adult men, and abolished many remaining abuses.
In securing the approval of the Bill, Disraeli aimed to enfranchise a sizeable sector of men who were not well off but earned enough to give them a stake in the country and, as he hoped, vote Conservative. Similar considerations motivated the new French President, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, in retaining the universal male suffrage introduced in 1848.
Everywhere on the Continent the state took over the central direction of railway-building, the major source of the economic boom of the 1850s. Governments set up statistical bureaux to assess the state of society and the economy, not only as an adjunct to police repression but also as a basis for economic, social and administrative reform.
Napoleon III has some claim to be the first modern dictator. He realized that his legitimacy depended on popular support, not on some old-established religious or secular principle or tradition. Thus his coup and later the Senate resolution declaring him emperor were both put to a national vote. Other votes followed on other issues. This was, in other words, a plebiscitary dictatorship.
Meanwhile, he too invested heavily in economic development to keep the people happy. He encouraged the creation of new banks, which helped finance a huge boom in railway construction during the 1850s – by the end of the decade, the total length of railway lines in France was three times what it had been at the beginning. This stimulated the iron, steel and engineering industries, and the emperor was also careful to ensure full employment by embarking on a major programme of public works, much of it privately financed.
The regime was bolstered by a huge increase in the police force – tenfold in Paris, with the reforms of 1854. The number of police commissioners was doubled, and the rural gendarmerie, 14,000 strong under Louis-Philippe, was strengthened until it had 25,000 officers all told. The police hounded opponents of the regime and imprisoned those who dared publish attacks on it, sometimes after trials in which the critics could gain valuable publicity, sometimes without any kind of trial at all.
For much of the nineteenth century there had been a simmering conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Russia desired to expand its influence in the Balkans, most of which was still ruled by the Ottomans, and to gain an ice-free port in the Mediterranean. The increasingly rickety Ottoman Empire, dubbed by Tsar Nicholas I ‘the sick man of Europe’, still controlled much of the region, as well as the Middle East. Nicholas was well aware, of course, of the dangers of pushing too far or too fast; the last thing he wanted was the Ottoman Empire to disappear altogether; paradoxically, perhaps,
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The Russian navy destroyed the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Sinope in November 1853. The British were now seriously concerned about the growth of Russian naval power in the Mediterranean and the potential threat to the route to India, and indeed in the long run India itself. They were also alarmed about what they regarded as an upset of the balance of power in Europe through the Russian intervention in Austria-Hungary in 1848–9. So the British joined the French in sending a naval expedition to the Black Sea.
Napoleon for his part was aware of the fatal consequences of staging a full-scale land invasion of Russia, in view of his uncle’s disastrous experience in 1812. So together with the British, he decided on an invasion of the Crimea, where troops could easily be supplied by sea instead of having to cover vast distances over land.
As these figures suggest, if the Anglo-French conduct of the war was incompetent, the Russian conduct of the war was even more so.
A sizeable technological gap had opened up between the Russian forces and those of the Allies. The Russian Black Sea fleet, for example, had easily defeated the Ottoman navy, but its ships were mostly made of softwood from Russia’s vast coniferous forests and were unseaworthy, they were poorly armed, very few of them were steam-driven, and their crews were badly trained. As soon as the French and British navies arrived on the scene, the Russians were clearly outsailed and outgunned. Russian troops still had flintlock muskets with a range of 200 yards, compared to that of 1,000 yards covered by
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The Russian swords were blunt and easily broken, and were no match for the industrially produced Sheffield steel of their British counterparts, which could slice through enemy greatcoats with ease, whereas the Russian sabres simply bounced off them.
Above all, perhaps, the Russian state was unable to finance the war effort, so that at the beginning of 1856 the State Council issued a warning to the new tsar, Alexander II, that state bankruptcy was likely unless he called a halt to the conflict.
The Crimean War proved to be the most destructive European war Since Napoleon’s day, with around half a million killed in action or dying from wounds or disease. Yet it was very limited in geographical scope. It involved a very small proportion of the forces available to the belligerent powers, and it was fought for strictly limited aims.
Russia was beaten back to the margins from the central position it had taken in European politics in 1815. France re-entered European politics, its power and prestige greatly enhanced. The Ottoman Empire survived more or less intact, with the loss only of the Danubian principalities.
The inadequacies of the respective performances of the various armies led to far-reaching reforms in military organization and supply both in Russia and the United Kingdom. In Britain the absence of a system of conscription meant the army was relatively small and had few reserves.
But it was not until the late 1860s and early 1870s that reforms came into effect, increasing expenditure on the army and abolishing the system through which wealthy and mostly aristocratic young men had been able to purchase commissions instead of training for them and acquiring them by merit.
The most significant of these was the emancipation of the serfs, carried out after lengthy preparations in 1861. Creating an army whose soldiers had a positive stake in Russia’s military success was one of the motivations for the emancipation, which was followed by a reorganization of government in the provinces. The abolition of serfdom had significant implications for rural Russian administration.
Milyutin was also concerned by the low level of literacy among recruits – a mere 7 per cent in the 1860s – and set up educational schemes within the army that resulted in a swift increase in the literacy rate among soldiers, half of whom were able to read by 1870 and a quarter of whom could write as well. Thus Russia entered the second half of the 1870s far better prepared for war than it had been two decades before. The blow dealt to Russia’s position in Europe by defeat in 1856 was only temporary, though it lasted for a crucial period of almost two decades.
The Habsburgs had alienated Russia by supporting the Allied side, destroying the partnership that had been at the core of the Holy Alliance after 1815. But Austria’s contribution to the Allied war effort had been brief, hesitant and half-hearted, so that the Habsburgs became relatively friendless, with fatal consequences for their position in Europe. Of all the combatant powers, France came out the best.
France felt no particular obligation to Austria as a result of the war; a far more significant alliance was formed between France and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, now in the hands of moderate liberal reformers led by Cavour. Towards the end of the Crimean conflict, Cavour had supplied a small contingent of 15,000 troops to the Allied war effort, and begun to cultivate the friendship of Napoleon III;
In addition, armed neutrality in the Crimean War caused government indebtedness to rocket. To try and deal with this situation, railway lines were privatized and taxes raised, but in 1857 a general European financial crisis hit the banks in Vienna particularly hard and required further economies. Under severe financial pressure, the government was forced to make savage cutbacks in expenditure on the army.
France under the Second Empire was the obvious candidate. As a young man, Napoleon III had fought with the carbonari against the Austrians in the uprisings of 1831. He had long supported the idea of Italian unity. Intervention offered the prospect of further military glory and political advantage.
When the Austrians began drafting Italians into the imperial army, Piedmont mobilized. Nationalist associations sprang up all over Italy in a fervour of excitement. After Vittorio Emanuele refused to stand down his troops, Franz Joseph foolishly declared war, making Austria appear the aggressor and entirely losing the sympathy of Britain and Prussia. Hostilities were duly opened, and a largely French force outflanked a superior Austrian army at Magenta, forcing it to retreat, and then defeating it in June 1859 at the decisive Battle of Solferino, which involved a total of nearly 300,000
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His cult knew no bounds; it paralleled but exceeded by far the celebrations held for the exiled Kossuth, and marked a first high point in the hero-worship that was to become such a marked feature of European politics and culture in the later nineteenth century.
After an almost unanimous vote of approval in both cases, Garibaldi resigned his command and returned to Caprera. In March 1861, Vittorio Emanuele declared himself King of Italy. The end result was the effective extension of Piedmontese institutions to the rest of Italy.
The French troops were to remain in Rome, keeping it out of the unified Kingdom of Italy, until they were needed for other purposes in 1870, when the Italians promptly moved into the city themselves. The Pope and his successors were left walled up in the Vatican until the papacy finally conceded the legitimacy of the Italian state with the signing of the Lateran Treaty in 1929.
The consequences of the Italian war, for all its limited scope and duration, were decisive and Europe-wide. All over the Continent, Italian unification gave a tremendous boost to the idea of the nation state, which had been so badly defeated only a decade before.
Even the name Poland was wiped off the map; it became the Vistula Land. In Lithuania a military occupation razed recalcitrant villages to the ground, confiscated estates, and tortured and killed suspected rebels. Polish intellectual life was crushed; an entire generation of nationalists was taken out of circulation. Across the rest of Europe, these draconian measures caused shock and outrage and confirmed liberal opinion, not least in Britain, in its hatred and suspicion of the Russian colossus. Indeed, from the outset, the Polish uprising attracted sympathy from across Europe.
Writers and left-wing figures as varied as Garibaldi and Marx polemicized against the Russians. But the bitter truth was that no major power had any interest in helping the Poles. Britain, France and Austria sent two joint diplomatic notes requesting the tsar to make concessions, but they got nowhere. The Prussians even suggested joint action with the Russians against the rebels, though eventually thought better of it. Intervention was in any case logistically difficult. Unlike the Italians, the Poles were on their own, and they paid the price.
By the second half of the 1860s, Napoleon III was beginning to face increasing opposition to his dictatorship from the growing economic and financial power of the middle classes. He was forced into granting a series of reforms that inaugurated the final phase of his rule, the so-called Liberal Empire. His foreign adventures, outside Europe as well as within, had proved extremely costly, and further expense was incurred by military reforms approved in the Army Law of 1868. His public works required massive loans for which the retrospective approval of the legislature was required.
The travails of the Frankfurt Parliament had made it clear that the Czechs in Bohemia would not be absorbed into a state dominated by German-speakers. And just as important, the Habsburgs, as the reassertion of their authority in 1849 had shown, were not going to allow the parts of their empire that fell within the borders of the German Confederation simply to be lopped off and assigned to a new German nation state.
