1848: 'A virtual European Union of rebellion'

From The Prague (Berlin, Paris, Milan) Spring :

Two thousand eight was not a change year. Eighteen forty-eight was a change year. A series of liberal revolutions exploded from one end of Europe to the other, toppling governments from France to Hungary to many of the small German and Italian states. The revolts are not well known in the United States, but they rank in the annals of upheaval alongside the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789 and the end of European Communism in 1989 (relatively gentle though that was).

In “1848: Year of Revolution,” a lively, panoramic new history, Mike Rapport describes the uprisings of that year while making clear their modern resonance. The revolutionaries, he argues, were overmatched by near-impossible challenges that sound remarkably familiar today. They had to wrestle with the demons of nationalism, which threatened to drag liberal revolutions down into the muck of ethnic conflict. They had to forge new constitutional orders that could temper violent radicalism. And they had to confront the grinding poverty and social misery of the freshly empowered masses, who had unattainable expectations for economic growth and social equality. The book's descriptions of impoverished serfs and alienated city dwellers could equally well be about peasants in the Chinese countryside and migrant workers in Beijing and Chongqing today.

Rapport, a lecturer in history at the University of Stirling in Scotland, begins by explaining that European order had been frozen since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, with conservative rule imposed by the great imperial courts. Chief among the absolutists was Klemens von Metternich, Austria's icy chancellor, haunted by memories of the cataclysmic wars after the French Revolution. “In times of crisis,” the loftily paranoid Metternich wrote, monarchs had to show themselves as “fathers invested with all the authority which belongs to heads of families.” The flesh-and-blood emperors were rather less impressive: Czar Nicholas I was a pioneer in creating Russia's brutal secret police, while Austria's “mentally disabled” Emperor Ferdinand was called “Ferdy the Loony” by his subjects.

During a deep economic crisis in the 1840s, the desperate misery of peasants, artisans and the urban poor generated popular rage at the Metternichian system. In the past, nervous governments had censored their press, clamped down on labor unions and froze the middle class and professionals out of politics. When liberals rose up in places like Naples and Piedmont, they were crushed by Austrian forces. Polish nationalists got stomped under Austrian, Prussian and Russian boots; in 1830, a Polish revolt ended with Russia hauling 80,000 Poles off to Siberia in chains.

What were wild demands in 1848 are democratic dogma today: free speech, parliaments, religious liberty, jury ­trials. But despite such noble goals, the revolutionaries were easily enraptured with violence. The great Italian democrat Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Metternich called the most dangerous man in Europe, believed that “ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs.”

The insurrections were astonishingly widespread, with different local grievances detonating in sequence across the continent — a virtual European Union of rebellion. They were ignited by a riot in Austrian-ruled Milan, which was followed by a revolution in Sicily. Next, protest marchers in Paris clashed with the munici­pal guard, prompting riots across the city. The French government had no stomach for the military onslaught necessary to crush the revolt, and King Louis-Philippe helplessly fled to Britain with his queen, assisted by a British vice-consul who provided the royal couple with the alias “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

Then German liberals and workers, thrilled by the news from Paris, took to the streets. In Hungary, Lajos Kossuth, a noble turned vehement radical against Austrian domination, thundered for self-government free from “the pestilential air” of Metternich's absolutism. In Vienna itself, troops opened fire on rebellious crowds; the shaken Austrian government allowed a constitution and forced Metternich to resign. Even in reactionary Prussia, where soldiers unleashed artillery against the mutinous citizenry in Berlin's streets, the king had to grant a constitution. The only great powers spared bloody chaos were Britain, where constitutional government and middle-class support were already established, and Russia, where the czar choked off any hint of revolt, radicalizing subsequent generations of revolutionaries.

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