1848 - The Year of Revolutions

In 1848, conditions were pretty awful for the peasantry;a potato blight swept across Europe, grain yields were low and prices for bread and other staples rose in the cities - the initial impetus for revolt was aggravated everywhere by the social conditions yet it wasn't socialism or even liberalism that seemed to play the larger role but an unlikely alliance of nationalism and monarchy.

The French Revolution though was the pre-eminent model which mobilised support for the 1848 disturbances. I'm reminded here of Heinrich Heine who grew up under the censorship and militarised ethos of 1820's Prussia. He could never forgive the English for defeating Napoleon whom he regarded as having introduced a much more enlightened system of administration and justice under the Napoleonic Code. Sick of Prussia he found in Paris, even under the soon to be deposed July monarchy, more civil liberties and could publish his work freely. We also see Marx and other Young Hegelians flocking to France during this time to avoid the repressive apparatus of the Prussian state. The inspiration was certainly French since the principle grievance was authoritarian monarchy and their revolution had posed an existential threat to the ancien regime. Witness the multiple foreign delegations dispatched to Paris calling for French backing, principally in the form of armed support, to oust their respective tyrannies. Poles, Italians, Germans and Irish decamped at the headquarters of Lamartine to make entreaties but even though Metternich had been toppled the forces of conservatism still held sway among the French provisional government. Apparently Palmerston was kept constantly informed of events in Paris and received assurances from the French that they would not be embarking on any more revolutionary wars. I think it was only in France and England where the social question became a significant factor. The Chartist meeting in April is often excluded as part of the revolutionary cycle but the numbers that turned out and particularly the timing points to an evident connection with the events in Europe. In France the 'right to work' was adopted as an early principle by the provisional government but successful counter-revolutionary propaganda ensured a loss of support for its continuance amongst the peasantry who were induced to blame (with some justification) their increased taxes on the funds required to sustain the work programmes and entitlements.

In fact, too many historians pay scant attention to the potential of the Chartist meetings and demonstrations evolving into an effective revolutionary force. The April 48 meeting was certainly interpreted as such by the British government judging by the precautionary measures they took - the sandbagging of key buildings, a massive police recruitment drive, steps taken to evacuate the royals; to the Isle of Wight apparently via Waterloo Station which was closed down specifially for that purpose. The potential synergy with the Irish Repealers was arrested by O'Connell's conservatism who threw in his lot with the Whigs - particularly now that the Foxite Russell was in the helm. The Foxites traditional cry was "Justice for Ireland" - attempting to kill Repeal through reform in distinction to the Landsdowne and Bowood Whigs whose ties to aristocracy pre-empted these sympathies. The Irish Confederation composed of the more radical Young Irelanders which had split from the Repeal movement in 1847 certainly done its best to cultivate links with the Chartists but this support was hampered (in Ireland at least) by the opposition of the Catholic clergy who continued to back O'Connell. So there was no shortage of potential for a radical movement with cross-channel ties and there is much evidence to suggest the British working classes were sympathetic to the more radical programme of Confederate Ireland.

Elsewhere, in Italy, populist feeling was exercised mainly in defiance of Metternich's 'forest of bayonets' and Austrian control over the revenues of Lombardy and Venetia. Getting the Habsburg claws out of the Italian peninsula and unifying the statelets and duchies along with achieving a liberal constitution seems to be the main driving force. Perhaps there were social demands in the minds of some of the revolutionaries but this was not the rhetoric they used to mobilise popular support. Germany was quite similar to Italy I feel (calls for liberal constitutions and unification) but the bulk of objectors who met in the short-lived Frankfurt Assembly were middle class and lower nobility who would have been aghast at the radicalism of the French programme for reform. Certainly this disjunction between the aims of the revolutionaries contributed to its failure.

In Austria the Habsburgs could exploit the fears of minority groups such as the Czechs and Poles over the Frankfurt Assembly's calls for a unified Germany (whether along the lines of the pre-existing Bund or encompassing a smaller territory) by pointing to the rights that they nevertheless did possess under the Habsburg administration and which they could lose if absorbed into a "Greater Germany". You can see this in the Hungarian clamour for autonomy led by Kossuth which was essentially an aristocratic movement for "national" independence but which couldn't bring itself to recognize similar tendencies amongst the Croatian populations whom they continued to lord it over. The Poles in their turn having had their kingdom assimilated by Russia, Prussia and Austria and who had contributed to the revolutionary zeal of 1848 by seeking French support in their own drives for autonomy continued to regard the Ruthenian peasants on their estates as little more than beast of burden.

Having further regard to the social question I don't think we can say its absent on the continent but it's just that it doesn't take hold to the same extent as it did among the provisional government in Paris. It simply doesn't seem to be shaping events in Germany, Italy or the Habsburg domains. Liberalism is ubiquitous of course; all parties to the struggle are attempting to wring stronger constitutions from their monarchs but the nationalist question seems to have been all along the primary force in Italy whereas in Germany it only assumes this role after the initial liberal concessions have been made; the expanded franchise, trial by jury, formation of a people's parliament and so on. As the committees get to work on the promised constitutions, though, the drive for unification in the German states then becomes the principle concern with the debate over a "Greater" or "Smaller" Germany threatening to engross all the revolution's energies with the exception of the republican radicals in Baden (led by Hecker) who obviously want to sever all ties with monarchy and reformers such as Gottschalk in Cologne who is one of the few prominent figures (apart from Marx) in Germany talking about socialist reform; he's demanding the right to work, free education and welfare measures to protect the poor. This latter programme of Gottschalk's and the republican attempts to foment support for an uprising becomes utterly subsumed by the "national question" which is it what now attracts most German's attention and the reason for this appears to be not because of what is happening in France, where Lamartine is about to issue his pacific decree (and therefore exclude the factor of French intervention), but because of what is happening in the crumbling Habsburg domains.

If the Hungarians succeed in their bid for secession and if Radetzky continues to be held back in Italy the "Greater" Germans would become a strong suitor to an enfeebled Habsburg throne desperate to reconsolidate. In the midst of social revolution the "people's" negotiators are all forced to raise their game to encompass the "imperial question". This is the case too in Polish Galicia, for the Romanian populations in Transylvania, for the Serbs and Croats in southern Hungary and for the Czechs and Slovaks in Bohemia and Vienna - in fact all of the minorities within the Habsburg domains. In the early localised revolts within the Austrian empire liberal reforms and the amelioration of the worst social conditions (such as the Robot and serfdom, use of their vernacular and so on) are quickly attained by the minorities but as this larger nexus appears which connects the events in Germany directly with the Habsburg domains where there is now a possibility of their being subsumed within a greater Germany (or a greater Hungary) almost all the minorities chose to support the integrity of the Austrian empire.

This conservative backlash comes mainly from a peasantry who see no prospect of improvement under the new status quo; long-suffering Ukrainian peasants in Galicia now offer unconditional support for the Habsburgs thereby scuppering Polish drives for autonomy, the Czechs under Palacky shock the "Greater" Germans by talking of the old kingdom of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia and demanding parity of esteem for their language ultimately bringing them back into the Habsburg fold, and the Romanians, Serbs and Croats recoil utterly from an uncompromising Magyar nationalism - Kossuth's programme assumes they'll all be happy to 'become Magyars' (just like he did - a born Croatian). The conservative volte face of the minorities re-animates the Habsburgs and seems also to provide the spur for the Prussian authorities who, no longer burdened with the uncertainty of a "Greater" or indeed a "lesser" Germany emerging are now left free to dispense with the whole tiresome charade of constitution building. The Croats and Serbs who constitute the bulk of the Austrian army are now reinforced in their allegiance and proceed with greater force in assisting Radetzky to route the Italian risorgimento.

It is an extraordinary fact that it was the long suffering peasantry who bailed out the monarchs in the end through their own inaction. Can this be explained merely though a lack of literacy, a lack of connectedness with the sweeping programmes of liberal reform, the ubiquitous presence of (mainly Catholic) church organisations urging loyalty to the throne and the fact that having been now freed from their seigneurial obligations - (serfdom being largely abolished in Eastern and Central Europe within a couple of months of the February revolution) - they had willingly disconnected themselves from the further thrust towards democratic and constitutional reform.

In fact, there is much evidence that 'nationalism' in its early configurations simply bypassed much of the European peasantry as many Czech and Slovak cultural revivalists discovered to their despair. The peasantry of the minorities within the Habsburg domains often tended to side with the Emperor whom they saw as a natural protector against the worst depredations of the landlord class. Also, the broader the franchise that was given in France and Germany, ie. the deeper the vote extended into the rural regions the greater the likelihood that a conservative monarchist candidate would be returned. We are still though, talking about “hands up” open ballots here, are we not, which makes voting patterns pretty meaningless to analyse as you are still casting your vote in the presence of your feudal overlord - recently unserfed or not. The candidates too are still subject to the usual property qualifications so the only contenders in the provinces will be the aristocracy or petty nobles and neither of these groups wishes the revolution to develop a Jacobin tinge. As Palmerston said; “the revolutions in Europe are now a fight between those who have no property and those who have property and do not wish to lose it”. Palmerston himself lost in a landslide to a Chartist candidate when the popular vote was taken but then took recourse to the veto wielding electoral committee who had him duly nominated - "democracy" was clearly a rank imposter being in actuality nowhere to be seen.

Once you move away from the (frankly) parasitic class who depend on the power of the monarchy and its network of embedded privileges and rotten boroughs (such as Palmerston) there is an immense variation of interests at play. Robert Blum, during the period of the Frankfurt Assembly was calling for a unified German federation of monarchies and republics and represented something of a half-way house between the republicans and liberal monarchists. Marx, once he got to Cologne, dissolved the Communist League and tried to distance himself from its Seventeen Demands whilst attempting to fuse the heterogeneous elements which then comprised the opposition to Frederick William IV; transforming himself into a liberal democrat in the process and dropping all references to the struggle of the proletariat.

Mazzini too differed from many of his contempories in his calls for a unitary democratic republic (though they were all nonetheless united against the Austrians). Gioberti for instance advocated a federal union of city states with the Pope 'as moral and spiritual leader'. This was the type of vaguely worded programme that would find favour with many of the Italian state monarchs who were desperate to cling to power. The fractious support offered by the duchies and statelets to the Piedmontese king Charles Albert also points to another dimension of the Italian situation - many were reluctant to offer unqualified assistance for fear of depleting their armies of the defence capabilities needed against internal struggles and in fact many of these 'local' revolutionaries once having secured their own liberal reforms were happy to cling to their loyalty to the city state; thus civic pride topped considerations of fighting for a unified mainland. The Romanian Frata (brotherhood) whose members comprised much of the liberal opposition by 1848 were caught in an unenviable crossfire; their situation was clearly intolerable. A Magyar dominated Transylvanian Diet and an aloof Austrian Emperor made them look southwards to their kinsmen in Wallachia and Moldova and the possibility of uniting Transylvania with these territories to form a greater "Romania" - albeit this would entail disturbing the Ottoman Turks who held nominal control and Tsar Nicholas I who had also had claims via the Organic Statutes and who continued to offer support for the notion of a pan-Slavic ethnic identity.

Taking a panaromic view of the varied struggles you do see a number of worlds hastening to be born but nationalism has yet to really catch fire, not enough, that is, to consume the old world - the peasantry appear indifferent - perhaps it is the technical impediments (mass literacy, mass publication of the vernacular) which has forestalled the emergence of those 'imagined communities', as Benedict Anderson has put it. Marx and Engels wrote scathingly of the Czech resistance to German expansion - above all their greatest crime was to be counter-revolutionary in their support of the Habsburgs - saying they could not consider themselves 'a nation' in the proper sense of the term. Where was their history, their culture, their great literature? Surely Germany couldn't be held back in its historic mission by these misguided attempts to forge a Czech/Slovak or for that matter "Illyrian" national unity out of such a paucity of material?

Here we see the first lineaments of the threshold approach to accepting the credentials of a nascent nationalism - if the purported nation hasn't got the wherewithal to defend itself and exist independently it scarcely has any right to bring itself into being. By contrast, Marx and Engels loudly supported Polish attempts to be reconstituted denouncing the 'barbarous means' by which Prussia, Austria and Russia had originally carved her apart. I suppose it is admirable in a way that these nascent nations secretly nurtured themselves within the protective interior of the Austrian Empire as clearly they would have been engulfed otherwise (German and Magyar self-conceptions being too totalising) - consciously choosing loyalty to this “realm of necessity” at the expense of every prevailing current. So, whilst the leaders of the revolutionary impulse certainly exploited the unrest elsewhere as a means to galvanize their respective masses it doesn't appear probable that the almost synchronized revolts had any chance of synergising more effectively based on a correlation of respective grievances and this is perhaps the biggest tragedy of the setbacks in 1848 - that there was an incapacity to achieve a middle ground.