FINAL DRAFT:-

“REVOLUTIONS OF 1848”
Submitted by: SHIVANGI SINHA

ROLL NO. 2162

2 nd Semester B.A. LL.B. (Hons.)

Submitted to: Dr. Priya Darshini (Faculty of Legal History)

This Synopsis is submitted in the fulfilment of course in Legal History

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Writing a project is one of the most difficult academic challenges I have ever faced. Though
this project has been presented by me but there are many people who remained in veil, who
gave their support and helped me to complete this project.

First of all, I am very grateful to my subject teacher Dr. Priya Darshini without the kind
support of whom and help the completion of the project would have been a herculean task
for me. She took out time from his busy schedule to help me to complete this project and
suggested me from where and how to collect data.

I acknowledge my family and friends who gave their valuable and meticulous advice which
was very useful and could not be ignored in writing the project.

I want to convey most sincere thanks to my faculties for helping me throughout the project.
Thereafter, I would also like to express my gratitude towards our seniors who played a vital
role in the compilation of this research work.

I would also like to express my gratitude towards the library staff of my college which
assisted me in acquiring the sources necessary for the compilation of my project.

Last, but not the least, I would like to thank the Almighty for obvious reasons.

Shivangi sinha
 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the work reported in the B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) Project Report entitled
“revolutions of 1848” submitted at Chanakya National Law University, Patna is an authentic
record of my work carried out under the supervision of Dr. Priya Darshini. I have not
submitted this work elsewhere for any other degree or diploma. I am fully responsible for
the contents of my Project Report
REVOLUTIONS OF 1848

 Series of revolutions in European countries which broke out within a few months of each
other. The general cause was the frustration of liberals and nationalists with the governing
authorities, and a background of economic depression. Of the major waves of revolution in
modern European history—1789 to 1799, 1848 to 1851, 1917 to 1923, and 1989 to 1991—
those of the mid-nineteenth century extended across the largest territory and among the
greatest diversity of political and socioeconomic regimes.

The 1848 revolutions occurred in lands from the Atlantic to Ukraine, and from the Baltic to
the Black Sea, including France, Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, as well as the smaller and midsized
German states; the Kingdoms of the Two Sicilies and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia,
the Papal States, and the smaller Italian states; and, in the far southeastern corner of
Europe, the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Walachia. The revolutionary movement
had a strong effect on the Scandinavian lands and the Low Countries, with major mass
movements in Norway, and important reforms in Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
The states of the Iberian Peninsula and the two peripheral Great Powers, the Russian and
British Empires, were the only parts of Europe not directly affected in their domestic politics.

The 1848 revolutions were directed against absolutist regimes, such as the Italian states, the
Austrian Empire, and the Prussian kingdom, and against constitutional monarchies in France
or in a number of the smaller German states. If one includes the Swiss civil war of 1847, seen
by contemporaries as the beginning of the midcentury revolutions, then they affected one of
the very few republican governments in Europe.

There was a similar diversity in socioeconomic settings and issues in the 1848 revolutions.
Abolition of serfdom was central to events in the Austrian Empire and in the Danubian
principalities, while in northern France, western Germany, Saxony, and large cities across
Europe, trade unions, cooperatives, and workers' associations were formed, whose
members raised socialist demands.
This diversity contrasts with previous and subsequent revolutionary events. The
revolutionary wave of 1789 to 1799 was largely a French affair, and the Revolution was
brought to other parts of Europe primarily by invading French armies. The post-1917
revolutions occurred among the defeated powers of World War I, and those of 1989 to 1991
against communist regimes.

This description by Carl Schurz (1829–1906), of the democratic club in the German university
town of Bonn during the revolution of 1848, demonstrates the growing radicalism of
revolutionary activists and the powerful example of the French Revolution of 1789. Another
difference from previous and successor waves of revolutions was that the 1848 revolutions
did not lead to new regimes. Instead, the revolutionary governments established in the
spring of 1848 were short-lived and gave way, generally within a year and a half, to
counterrevolutionary successors, closely related to the regimes overthrown in 1848.
Important nationalist projects of the 1848 revolutions—the national unification of Italy or
Germany, the liberation of Poland, the reorganization or outright destruction of the
multinational Habsburg Monarchy along national lines—were not accomplished. Many of
the social and economic questions raised in the revolution were not resolved and
organizational initiatives were suppressed.

A full consideration of the 1848 revolutions must take into account these opposing features
—the wide spread of the mid-nineteenth century revolutions and the remarkable political
mobilizations accompanying them, but also their ultimate failure.

August 1846:

Margaret Fuller arrives in England.

March 1847:

Fuller, in Italy, begins her "Things and Thoughts in Europe" series for the New-York Daily
Tribune.

October 1847:

Ralph Waldo Emerson arrives in England.

February 1848:

Louis-Philippe abdicates after street demonstrations in Paris. Samuel Goodrich (Peter Parley)
and other Americans congratulate the provisional government.

March 1848:

Riots in Vienna and Berlin. Metternich falls. Hungary declares separation within Austrian
Empire.

April 1848:

Constituent Assembly elected in France. Caroline Matilda Kirkland, author of Holidays

Abroad; or, Europe from the West (1849) sets sail for England.
May 1848:

Frankfurt Assembly convenes. Emerson, Kirkland arrive in Paris.

June 1848:

Pan-Slavic Assembly meets in Prague; dispersed by Austrian troops commanded by

Windischgrätz. Emerson returns to England. Kirkland in Genoa

24–26 June 1848:

June Days: army puts down workers in Paris. Donald Mitchell (Ik Marvel) arrives in Paris to
report for James Watson Webb's New York Courier and Enquirer; Charles A. Dana arrives to
report for Horace Greeley's New-York Daily Tribune.

October 1848:

Vienna falls to Windischgrätz.

November 1848:

Pius IX flees Rome following the assassination of his prime minister, Pellegrino Rossi.

December 1848:

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte elected president of the Second Republic.

April 1849:

Frankfurt Assembly offers crown of united Germany to Frederick William IV. He refuses.

The Assembly dissolves.

June 1849:

French troops storm Rome; republican forces defeated.

August 1849

Hungarians defeated; Lajos Kossuth flees.

October 1849

Herman Melville sails to Europe via England.

April 1850

Pius IX returns to Rome, now under French-Austrian occupation.

July 1850:
The Elizabeth sinks off Fire Island; Margaret Fuller, her child, and husband drown; her
manuscript on the history of the Roman Republic is lost.

December 1851:

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte dissolves Assembly and reinstates universal manhood suffrage.

Elected president for ten-year term.

December 1852:

Louis-Napoleon dissolves Second Republic; proclaims himself Napoleon III.

Most of these uprisings were snuffed out nearly as soon as they had begun. A week before
Paris's June Days, Field Marshal Alfred Windischgrätz shelled Prague into submission. Three
thousand Viennese died when the army cleared the streets, after which Austrian leaders
moved swiftly to curb the revolutions in Hungary and Italy. Roman Republicans fought
heroically but proved no match for Napoleon's troops. Only Kossuth's Hungarians resisted
the Austrian counterrevolution successfully. They declared their independence in April 1849
after forcing Windischgrätz to abandon Budapest. But soon after Tsar Nicholas (1796–1855),
applying Metternich's principles, sent in Russian troops and put an end to Hungarian
independence. The Hapsburgs were supreme again.

Germany also was warmed by revolutionary winds, albeit briefly and superficially. In mid-
March troops violently dispersed a crowd of demonstrators in Berlin. Word of events in
Vienna emboldened Prussian liberals. After violence threatened to break out more
generally, Frederick William IV (1795–1861) promised a constitution and invited liberals to
form a ministry. But it came to nothing. Frederick William was no constitutional monarch,
and few Germans wanted a republic anyway. Their priorities were unification and moderate
liberalization. The constituent assembly that soon gathered at Frankfurt offered Frederick
William the crown of "smaller Germany" (an empire short of Austria). He refused, declining
to limit himself to constitutional rules imposed from his subjects. The Frankfurt Assembly
dis-integrated in impotence. Germany's springtime, like its counterparts across Europe, was
over.
ORIGINS AND BACKGROUND

The crisis years from 1845 to 1847, leading up to the 1848 revolutions, showed, in extreme
form, political, social, and economic tensions that had been mounting for
decades. Population growth, increasing across Europe since the 1750s, placed pressure on
existing resources. The size of average agricultural landholdings declined, and the number of
totally landless rural families increased substantially. Ever more urban craftsmen and
shopkeepers were competing for a customer base with, at best, constant purchasing power,
as real wages fell. Even university graduates in the Italian and German states as well as the
Austrian Empire—less so in France—had difficulty finding employment, because there were
too many of them for the available positions.

The ultimate response to these difficulties, already apparent in Great Britain, and practiced
in continental Europe on a wide scale after 1850, would be the growth of mechanized
industry and the spread of a more productive and specialized agriculture, both of these
developments made possible by the construction of a rail network. Although, particularly in
the 1840s, the regionally scattered beginnings of industrialization in western and central
Europe, as well as the first steps in rail construction had occurred, the chief measures taken
before 1850 to increase output tended to sharpen social pressures. Increasing grain
production, by introducing new systems of crop rotation and dividing common lands,
worsened the prospects of villagers with little or no property, who depended on the
commons to feed their animals or to gather wood. Expansion of nonfarm production
occurred primarily via the spread of outworking, which subjected nominally independent
master craftsmen to the control of merchant contractors.

If these measures to expand the market created social conflicts in the pre-1848 decades, so
did institutions restricting the market, such as serfdom and seignorialism, still widely
practiced in central and eastern Europe, whose burdens were increasingly resented by the
peasantry, and the guild system, which made life difficult for journeymen artisans, excluded
from the guilds, dominated by master craftsmen.
The difficulties of this economic situation were exacerbated by the way European states
increased their claims on the population—raising taxes, imposing customs duties, drafting
young men into the army, garrisoning or quartering soldiers, imposing rules on the use of
forestlands—when the lower classes were having a hard time making ends meet. While
demanding more from their subjects, most Continental states lacked a police force to
establish their authority and, in crisis situations, had to depend on soldiers, the use of which
to restore order was provocative and created more disorder.

Opposing the existing regimes were scattered and informally organized groups of activists,
"the party of movement" as contemporaries said. Supporters of this trend advocated the
creation of constitutional governments, whose charters would guarantee basic civil liberties
and the powers of an elected legislature. They favored the equality of all (male) citizens
before the law, took aim at privileges of the nobility, and called for an end to religious
discrimination—if sometimes reluctantly, when it came to the Jews. Particularly in western
Europe, although to a certain extent elsewhere, this party of movement was divided into
radicals, demanding a democratic republic, and moderates, who advocated a constitutional
monarchy. Also primarily in western Europe, there existed a current of socialist or
communist thought, popularized in vague phrases such as the French socialist Louis Blanc's
"organization of labor," containing elements of democratic ideals, heterodox forms of
Christianity, visions of women's emancipation, and artisans' desires for a revival of the
guilds.

An ideology central to the party of movement was nationalism, the doctrine that nations
should be the basis of individuals' political loyalty, and that national groups should be free to
create their own nation-state. Conservatives of the 1840s, supporting

the linked principles of dynastic legitimacy and the political significance of revealed religion,
strongly condemned nationalism. They perceived, correctly, the potential disruption and
warfare that would come from trying to apply nationalist principles to the many German or
Italian states, the multinational Austrian Empire, or the Poles, divided by the eighteenth-
century partitions among Prussia and the Austrian and Russian Empires.

The party of movement was not a modern political party, since such organizations were
generally illegal in pre-1848 Europe, and limitations on communication and transportation
would have made them hard to create in any event. Rather, supporters of political change
worked through the expanding network of organizations of civil society: the press (often
heavily censored or otherwise restricted), public meetings, when allowed, and, above all,
voluntary associations. Political ideas were propagated in social clubs, popular among the
middle class; or in learned and literary societies, and gymnastics, sharpshooting, and choral
societies, intellectual and popular reservoirs of nationalism, respectively. Where
constitutional regimes existed—in France, the Low Countries, and most midsized German
states—such efforts had ties to the law-making and oratorical efforts of parliamentarians.
They also extended to the underground world of conspiratorial secret societies. The
insurrections launched by these groups were all failures, but their sometimes-substantial
membership (Giuseppe Mazzini's "Young Italy" movement may have had as many as fifty
thousand members by 1834) helped spread oppositional political ideals.

The crisis years from 1845 to 1847 began with the potato blight of 1845 and the failed grain
harvest of 1846, which led to a doubling of food prices and near-famine conditions. Although
mass starvation was avoided (except in Ireland), real wages and standards of living
plummeted, culminating a two-decade-long trend; demand collapsed; and 1847 saw a credit
crisis, widespread bankruptcies, and a severe recession. There were hundreds, probably
thousands, of bread riots and other subsistence disturbances in Europe, as well as more
widespread disorders, such as the famous 1844 rising of the outworking Silesian weavers
against the merchant contractors who employed them. Declining tax receipts put state
budgets under stress, particularly that of the Austrian Empire, whose chancellor, Prince
Metternich, had led the fight against revolution in Europe for three decades, but whose
government now teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.

At the same time, supporters of the party of movement launched a political offensive in
many parts of Europe. Best known are the banquet campaigns of the French opposition,
mass meetings, thinly disguised as public meals, where speakers demanded a more
democratic franchise. The election of the reputedly liberal bishop of Imola as Pope Pius IX in
1846 raised hopes among Italian liberals for constitutional governments and a union of the
states of the peninsula. The victory of the opposition in elections to the 1847 Hungarian
Diet, the clash between the king of Prussia and the liberal majority in the United Diet of that
year (which reminded contemporaries of the Estates-General in France in 1789), and the
confrontations between liberals and their erstwhile hero Pius IX in the consultative assembly
he summoned for the Papal States, were all evidence of growing political tensions. Finally,
the Swiss civil war of 1847, pitting the more left-wing and Protestant cantons against the
conservative and Catholic ones, and resulting in a very quick victory of the radicals,
suggested that violent change was on the agenda. Financial difficulties prevented a
unilateral Austrian intervention; Metternich's inability to create a coalition of Great Powers
to rescue the Swiss conservatives was striking evidence that the post-1815 order was
crumbling.
REVOLUTION AND REACTION: 1848

Since 1845 Europe had suffered an agricultural crisis that impoverished farmers and
confronted urban workers with high food prices and unemployment. These conditions made
French peasants and workers ripe for revolution, but economic distress did not bring down
the July Monarchy. Rather, frustration with the glacial pace of parliamentary reform among
liberals precipitated the crisis. Reformers took to holding banquets to protest stagnation and
corruption. When François Guizot (1787–1874), the prime minister, abruptly banned a
liberal banquet and march scheduled for 22 February in Paris, crowds began setting up
barricades. Guizot and King Louis-Philippe (1773–1850) fled for England when units of
the National Guard refused to fire on the rebels; on 24 February a provisional government
assumed power.

This edifice was creaky from the beginning. It was dominated by moderate republicans led
by the poet-statesman Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869). To placate radicals, the
government set up national workshops to provide out-of-work laborers with employment
or, failing that, direct financial support. These workshops became centers of dissent. In June
Parisian radicals took once again to the barricades, where troops under General Eugene
Cavaignac dispersed them; thousands of soldiers and radicals were killed. This street battle is
known as the June Days. Conservative forces, promising order before liberty, were soon
ascendant. The Second Republic came to a quick end when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the
conqueror's nephew, declared himself emperor in late 1852 after handily winning the
presidency in 1848.

Inspired by news from Paris, revolutionists also challenged the Hapsburgs in Central Europe.
Crowds gathered in Vienna's squares when word of Louis-Philippe's abdication reached the
city at the end of February. Radical workers demanded a constitution, to which the emperor
consented. He also abolished manorial obligations, including forced labor. Despite these
moves, the Hapsburg monarchy seemed to be teetering in late March. Developments in the
provinces added to this perception. Rebellions in Venice and Milan forced Austrian troops to
withdraw from these cities in mid-March. Revolutionary sentiment spread to Rome,
driving Pius IX out of the city. In Hungary, a Magyar revolt led by Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894)
sought independence from Vienna. Bohemian Czechs pressed for autonomy within the
empire. When it became clear that Vienna would not accept even limited reforms, Czech
nationalists took control of Prague.

INITIAL REACTION

As in 1789 and 1830 Americans in 1848 responded warmly to news of the demise of the
French monarchy. Street celebrations broke out in cities across the country. Newspapers
outdid one another in expressing satisfaction with the events in Paris. Diplomats hastened to
offer the congratulations of France's twin republic across the sea. Richard Rush (1780–1859),
the American minister in Paris, granted diplomatic recognition to the new government. The
Senate unanimously passed a resolution introduced by the Ohio Democrat William
Allen (1803–1879) offering France the official congratulations of the United States; on 10
April the House overwhelmingly concurred. Intellectuals also lined up to praise the French
for their apparently bloodless republican revolution. On a speaking tour of Britain early in
1848, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), initially assumed his hosts' skepticism toward the
events in France. But the earnestness of Parisian socialists forced him to reconsider. "I have
been exaggerating the English merits all winter, & disparaging the French," he wrote in his
journal. "Now I am correcting my judgment of both, & the French have risen very fast"
(Journals 10:312).

It was the same story with the revolutions that followed. Demonstrators lined the streets
and squares of American cities, offering speeches and toasts in support of the insurgents in
Italy, Austria, and Germany. The press, which had traditionally devoted far more newsprint
to foreign than to domestic affairs, became even more engrossed with events across the
Atlantic. Profiles of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), Kossuth, and other revolutionary leaders
appeared on front pages. Diplomats rushed to recognize republican governments,
sometimes with more enthusiasm than discretion. A minor diplomatic row ensued when
word leaked out that an American diplomat had been sent to Hungary in hopes of
recognizing a new republic. Writers and intellectuals stood in awe of the revolutionary wave
that had swept through Europe. They were delighted to witness the downfall of monarchies
and the realization of national aspirations by hitherto oppressed minorities and rejoiced in
the enhanced status of the United States, whose own revolution they assumed had inspired
the events of 1848.

From the beginning, however, critical voices marred this apparent consensus. France was
the most common target of these skeptics. History justified circumspection, critics explained;
the precedents of 1789 and 1830 did not auger well for the prospects of French
republicanism, or even for peaceful, orderly change of any kind. Some critics of democracy—
Herman Melville (1819–1891) and his Knickerbocker friends were prominent among these—
idealized the culture of monarchial France and were loath to see it toppled by the mob.
Overall, conservatives had little faith in the prospects for change inaugurated by
revolutionary violence, particularly when history seemed to indicate that events would
inevitably spin out of the control of moderates. Whig organs, such as the North American
Review and National Intelligencer, made this argument most forcefully. Congratulating
France was premature, they maintained, until the revolution had run its course.

Some antislavery activists made much of the provisional French government's abolition of
slavery in its colonies and pointed up the hypocrisy of the slave-holding United States
congratulating Europeans for achieving freedom. A few southerners stressed the dangers
for the South in praising revolutionary change against constituted authority.

But sectionalism was not a strong determinant of support for or opposition to the European
Revolutions of 1848. When Kossuth toured the United States in 1851–1852, he alienated
both apologists for slavery and antislavery activists. The former objected to his association
with dubious "isms," and the latter recoiled from his refusal to endorse abolition. Southern
voices, including that of Jefferson Davis (1808–1889), the future president of
the Confederate States of America, were prominent in support of the Allen resolution in
early 1848. Many northerners, from George Ticknor (1789–1871) to Daniel Webster (1782–
1852), expressed caution or skepticism toward the prospects for liberalization in Europe.
Such views were far more strongly rooted in ideology than sectional identity.

Prejudices against French national character fed American skepticism toward its mid-century
revolution. The French were widely believed to be dissipated, undisciplined, perfidious, and
volatile, all qualities that were inconsistent with republican institutions. Ticknor, John C.
Calhoun (1782–1850), and George Kendall (1809–1867), the European correspondent of
the New Orleans Daily Picayune, were just a few of the prominent voices who doubted
whether the people of France were capable of governing themselves.

By mid-century, these convictions were informed by emerging concepts of scientific racism.

Group features that had been attributed to environment and history began to be seen as
hereditary, innate, and unchangeable. These concepts influenced American perceptions of
revolutions in Austria and on the Italian peninsula. Nathaniel Niles (1741–1828), the
American minister at Turin, felt that prospects for republicanism in Italy were doomed
because the "Italian character is so thoroughly imbued with intolerance and sentiments of
hatred personal and political . . . as to forbid the establishment of any form of government
founded on mutual concession and a partial surrender of rights and interests for the
common good" (quoted in Noether, p. 383)

THE OUTBREAK AND SPREAD OF REVOLUTION

The first six months of 1848 saw a chain of revolutionary uprisings across the European
continent. They began in mid-January in Palermo, chief city of Sicily, then spread at the end
of the month to the Italian mainland with barricade fighting in Naples, capital of the
southern Italian Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The insurgents were victorious and King
Ferdinand II agreed to grant a constitution and appoint new, liberal government ministers.
The following month, participants in the banquet campaign poured into the streets of Paris,
clashed with police and the army, and began building barricades—a signature feature of
urban street fighting in 1848. Three days of barricade fighting, 22–24 February 1848, with
the National Guard either neutral or joining the insurgents, and the regular army distinctly
reluctant to fight, ended with the flight of King Louis-Philippe to London, and the
proclamation of a republic.

This dramatic news encouraged supporters of the party of movement in many countries to
hold large public meetings, on the model of the Parisian banquet campaign. Participants
demonstrated, clashed with soldiers, and built barricades: in Munich, 4 March; in Vienna, 13
March; Budapest, two days later; Venice and Kraków, two days after that; and, on the 18th,
in Milan and Berlin. News of each uprising encouraged the next, and their outcomes were
the same: withdrawal of increasingly unreliable troops; dismissal of the old, conservative
government ministers and naming of liberal replacements; the creation of national
committees or the proclamation of national unity; and either the granting of a constitution
or the agreement to call a constituent assembly to write one.

In most of the midsized German and Italian states, as well as in the Netherlands and
Denmark, large-scale demonstrations, or just the threat of them, sufficed for governments
to make similar concessions without risking a trial of strength on the barricades. After
repelling an invasion staged from northern France by Belgian radicals at the end of March,
the Belgian government proceeded to expand the franchise and introduce other reforms.
Young Romanians, studying in Paris, returned to their homes in the Principalities of Moldavia
and Walachia, after participating in the barricade fighting of February 1848, and launched
similar banquet campaigns and demonstrations in April and May 1848. Suppressed by the
prince in Moldavia but leading in June to a revolutionary government in Walachia, they
concluded, at the southeastern end of the Continent in Bucharest, the initial wave of
revolution.

The major exceptions to this initial wave were the British and Russian Empires. A mass
demonstration by the radical opposition in the United Kingdom, the Chartists, in London on
10 April, inspired by events on the Continent, was met with an overwhelming show of force
as over 100,000 police, soldiers, and volunteer "special constables" ensured that the
demonstration would not take a revolutionary turn. There were no visible manifestations of
political opposition in the absolutist tsarist empire, just a small revolutionary secret society,
the "Petrashevtsy," whose members were arrested and sent to Siberia. Both Great Powers
lacked the preconditions for revolution present in the rest of Europe, albeit for different
reasons. The United Kingdom (except for Ireland, whose inhabitants were too busy in 1848
starving to death or fleeing the island to think of revolution) had, by the 1840s, made the
transition to a more productive economy, based on factory industry and efficient agriculture,
with rising standards of living. In Russia, there was little in the way of a civil society—almost
no voluntary associations, not much of a press, indeed very few people who were literate—
in which opposition to the government could form.

POSSIBILITIES AND PROBLEMS

The victories of the insurgents and the coming to power of new liberal regimes unleashed an
enormous potential for democratic activity and political participation. This very potential
also led to conflicts and increasingly violent clashes that would weaken and ultimately
destroy the revolution.

There were two characteristic and largely spontaneous responses to the new regimes'
coming to power. One was a wave of festivity, with parades, nocturnal illuminations,
plantings of trees of liberty, and church services of thanksgiving, in euphoric celebration of
the end of decades of oppression—later dubbed the "springtime of the peoples." Another
was the violent actions of the lower classes to resolve their long-held social and economic
grievances. In regions of serfdom and seignorialism, from southwestern Germany to the
Banat in southern Hungary, peasants attacked castles of their lords and destroyed charters
of feudal privileges. Peasants assaulted their creditors (in some places, this developed into
attacks on the Jewish population, identified with moneylenders); they reappropriated
divided common lands and seized wood from the forests. Artisans and outworkers attacked
the merchant capitalists who had exploited them; there were several spectacular instances
of machine breaking, involving the destruction of factories, railroads, or steamships. The
lower classes, both rural and urban, destroyed tax-collection offices and customs stations,
and assaulted the officials who staffed them. The perpetrators saw these actions as part of
the celebrations of freedom, waving tricolor flags and chanting revolutionary slogans as they
performed them.

From the late spring of 1848 through the spring of 1849, these spontaneous actions gave
way to more systematic and planned ones. The numbers and circulation of newspapers
expanded five- to tenfold throughout revolutionary Europe, and readership reached parts of
the rural, lower-class, and female populations. Equally impressive was the creation and
growth of political clubs. First formed in large cities, and lacking specific political profiles,
they spread from there to smaller towns and the countryside, and divided along lines of
political orientation, while combining in provincial and national federations. Most common
in the German states, where their membership may have been as much as 10 percent of the
adult male population, the clubs were also prevalent in France, Italy, and, to a lesser extent,
or supplemented by nationalist societies, in much of the Austrian Empire. Clubs held regular
meetings and sponsored political debates, organized rallies with hundreds or thousands of
participants, sent petitions and addresses to parliaments, and, in times of crisis, mobilized
members for revolutionary or counterrevolutionary actions.

Workers' associations, consumer and producer cooperatives—national federations of these

existed in France and Germany—and, to a lesser extent, trade unions were founded
throughout western and central Europe. Elementary and secondary schoolteachers
mobilized to improve their position, often with an anticlerical hostility to church control of
public education. Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox clergy and laymen organized in turn, to
preserve or improve the position of their respective churches vis-à-vis the government, or to
attempt (usually unsuccessfully) to change their churches' hierarchy and governance.

In 1848–1849, women emerged vigorously into public life. Most women's activity was
devoted to assisting men, sewing flags for national guards, and forming associations—there
were two in Prague alone—to promote the use of "national" languages and national
costumes, or to support political prisoners and their families. There were also women's
newspapers, and women formed their own clubs to debate political issues and, primarily in
Paris (to some extent in other large cities, including Berlin and Vienna), to promote women's
rights, including public employment for unemployed women, and woman suffrage.

This same explosion of public political participation created two kinds of potentially violent
conflicts that would undermine the revolution. One involved the practice of democracy
itself. Elections held in April and May 1848 to constituent assemblies or parliaments, under a
broad franchise, with relatively little preparation or organization, were dominated by locally
influential men, including the clergy (who were very active), the nobility, and other
substantial property-owners; moderate and conservative outcomes were the result. A clash
between such moderate parliaments and the radicalized masses of capital cities, with their
newly formed political clubs, would duly occur.

The second and perhaps most important source of conflict came from the attempt to create
unified nation-states. The 1848 revolution in Italy was dominated by warfare aimed at
driving the foreign, Austrian rulers out of their two northern Italian provinces as a step
toward a united Italy. The effort to create a German nation-state was in part peaceful, via
the election of the Frankfurt National Assembly, charged with writing a constitution for a
united Germany. Violent conflicts arose, however, over the question of the national status of
territories previously under dynastic rule. Was the Prussian province of Posen (in Polish,
Poznań) part of a Polish nation-state, as the revolutionary national committee formed there
in March 1848 asserted, or would it be part of a German nation-state, as the province's
German-speaking minority insisted, backed by the Prussian army? Were the duchies of
Schleswig and Holstein—mostly German-speaking but with a Danish-speaking minority, and
before 1848 provinces of the Danish crown—part of a German nation-state, as German
nationalist insurgents asserted, with the support of the Prussian army, or was Schleswig part
of a Danish nation-state, as the new liberal government in Copenhagen saw it?

The most complex and violent clashes between nationalists occurred in the multinational
Austrian Empire. Should the empire—and, if so, which part of it—join a German nation-
state? German nationalists thought the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia were part of
Germany; Czech nationalists did not. The Polish National Committee in Kraków, like its
counterpart in Posen, saw the Austrian province of Galicia as part of a Polish nation-state,
while the Supreme Ruthenian Council in Lviv (in German, Lemberg) laid a contrasting
national claim to the province. The nationalities conflict was strongest in the Hungarian
provinces, which the newly constituted Hungarian National Assembly wanted to unite into a
Hungarian nation-state, basically independent of the empire, while Croatian, Serb, Slovak,
and Romanian nationalists wanted their own nation-states, or at least autonomous national
areas, independent of Hungary.
CYNICISM

Throughout 1848 these notions were clearly in the minority. As republicanism in France gave
way to socialism and dictatorship the tide of public opinion began to turn decisively. The
reactionary resurgence of 1849–1852 lent credibility to early critics of the revolution. The
June Days in Paris fed American disillusionment. In Mardi (1849) Melville articulated his
conviction that France's mob violence and conservative reaction were attributable to a
misplaced faith in popular government. An anonymous scroll admonishes the people of
Vivenza (the United States), "Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence
from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be of the number" (p. 529). Donald
Mitchell's reports for the New York Courier and Enquirer stressed the cruelty and socialist
ideology of the rioters. His portrayal proved to be more influential than reports such as
those submitted by Charles A. Dana (1819–1897), whose sympathies for the rioters clashed
with deep cultural prejudices against French violence and socialism. Others who had given
the revolution their support reconsidered. Mob violence horrified Emerson, who was more
sympathetic to the idea of mankind than he was to flesh-and-blood men (particularly in
groups). He soon took to denouncing "Red Revolution" in his public lectures.

Americans also reevaluated their support for republicanism outside France when the
conservative resurgence waxed. When the Frankfurt Assembly failed to unite Germany
under a constitutional monarchy, Americans blamed the German people for their unfitness
for American-style democracy. Even the Hungarian Revolution, by far the most popular of
the 1848 uprisings in American public opinion, lost its luster in time. Large, supportive
crowds greeted Kossuth in the initial months of his American tour. However, not only did he
fail to garner any kind of concrete support for the Hungarian cause, but the excitement
turned to apathy. On 12 July 1852 the penniless freedom fighter and his wife crept aboard a
Cunard liner under assumed names and sailed for England (Morrison, p. 131).

By that time, the lessons of the failed Revolutions of 1848 seemed clear. Although they
continued to celebrate their own war of independence Americans began to doubt the
propriety of revolutionary change. Abolitionism, fire-eating proslavery expansionism,
women's rights, and other "reforms" all seemed to threaten the stability of the union
and social order itself. Revolutions seemed more likely to end in reaction than progress,
more prone to produce violent disruption than liberalization. Americans put the Revolutions
of 1848 into the broader context of domestic "revolutions" that placed the republican
experiment itself at risk. No wonder they found them wanting.

Although over the long term the Revolutions of 1848 strengthened the credibility of
conservatives in the United States, there were countervailing trends. Some observers kept
faith in the righteousness of the revolutions and in the future of republicanism in the Old
World. Margaret Fuller's experience reporting on the revolution in Rome and its subsequent
defeat at the hands of the French not only produced the most passionate writing of her
career but also deepened her commitment to radical causes. Tragically, she drowned with
her husband and infant child when their boat sank within sight of Fire Island, New York, in
1850. Theodore Dwight (1796–1866), a New York editor, carried on Fuller's advocacy of
Italian republicanism in The Roman Republic of 1849 (1851), which challenged American
cynicism toward Italian liberalism. Italians were both devoted liberals and genuine
Protestants, Dwight maintained. Jesuitical intrigues and cultural prejudices conspired to
keep Americans ignorant of these facts. Although Dwight's portrayal was condescending in
its own way—he rehabilitated Italians by turning them into Americans—his faith in the
ultimate redemption of the peninsula was a refreshing counterpoint to the quasi-racist
disparagement assumed by most observers after the French and Austrians emerged
victorious.

Some German republicans and radicals escaping failed revolutions in Central Europe did
reach American shores. They exercised a liberalizing influence on American politics and
culture for much of the nineteenth century. Though only a small fraction of German
migrants during the late 1840s and 1850s were truly forty-eighters—those who left to
escape prison for their revolutionary activities—enough radicals did enter the United States
to provide leadership in German communities. They were a heterogeneous group,
containing a few genuine Marxists and many more moderate republicans. Many, for obvious
reasons, declined to engage in activism in their new home. Others were particularly active in
journalism and politics, where they used their influence to urge their adopted country to use
its moral authority to advance liberal causes abroad. These activists gravitated to

the new Republican Party in the late 1850s. Carl Schurz, Friedrich Hecker, Franz Sigel, and
others attained influential positions. Some earned high rank in the Union Army. Although
their influence was deep and lastissng, it was not powerful enough to counteract the general
impact of the European Revolutions of 1848, which enhanced the credibility of advocates for
American exceptionalism, deepened mistrust of Europe, and undermined the forces of
radical reform and engagement with the world beyond America's borders.