Revolutions of 1848
Revolutions broke out in more than fifty countries and states in 1848 and almost all of them were defeated within eighteen months. The causes were common across the continent: a potato blight and grain failure in 1845 and 1846 that raised food prices sharply, a financial crisis and industrial unemployment, and a generation of liberals and nationalists governed by the settlement Metternich had built in 1815. The sequence began in Palermo in January and became general in February when the French monarchy fell in three days and a republic was declared. Metternich resigned and fled to England in March. Berlin, Milan, Venice, Budapest, Prague, Kraków and the German states rose within weeks, and the news travelled by railway and telegraph faster than any previous political news had. The demands were constitutions, parliaments, press freedom, the end of manorial obligations, and national unification or independence. The defeats followed from the coalitions coming apart. The Frankfurt parliament spent a year debating a German constitution and offered a crown to a Prussian king who refused to take one from commoners; in Paris, the June days set the propertied republic against the Parisian workers with several thousand deaths; in the Habsburg lands, the monarchy used its nationalities against each other, sending Croats against Hungarians and Russians against both. What survived was the abolition of serfdom in the Habsburg lands, which was never reversed. Marx and Engels published their manifesto in February 1848 and it had no effect whatever on events. The year is sometimes called the turning point at which modern history failed to turn. Its immediate result was a decade of reaction, and its demands were substantially met within a generation by governments that had crushed them, which is a slower and less flattering kind of victory.
- Year: 1848 CE
- Category: Political
