1848

by Mike Rapport

  In late March he banned the publication of news relating to the European revolutions, ordered all Russian subjects abroad to return home (this proved a counter-productive measure, since on their return home these eighty-thousand-odd excited or frightened people simply babbled the stories of the revolutions that they had just witnessed), banned all Russians from leaving the empire and forbade entry to all foreigners (except for merchants and those with the Tsar’s express permission). Having tried to seal Russia off with a cordon sanitaire, Nicholas also tried to choke all expressions of internal dissent, however mild. On 2 April (in the then Russian calendar, which ran twelve days behind the Gregorian version used elsewhere in Europe) he created a committee that would supervise the state’s censors, who were now deemed to be too lax. Some of the first to feel the sting of the tsarist lash, therefore, were not revolutionaries at all, but loyal servants of the regime. Among the reasons for the establishment of the ‘Committee of 2 April’ was that the minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, was felt to be too ‘liberal’ - yet he was the author of the regime’s ideology of ‘official nationality’, whereby a loyal subject was defined as Orthodox, obedient to the Tsar’s autocracy, and fervently Russian. Uvarov may well have been among the least benighted of Nicholas’s ministers, but he was scarcely a wild-eyed radical.143 Intellectuals had always needed to be circumspect in the way they expressed their ideas, but the likes of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov and others had always been indulged somewhat. Now, though, the atmosphere was positively stifling. Perhaps most damaging of all in the long run was that Nicholas, who appears to have been earnest in trying to find ways of tackling the problems of serfdom and had passed a series of edicts at least to improve the lives of peasants, now retreated from all reform.

  The repressive screws turned even tighter in 1849, when the authorities struck ruthlessly at a circle of Saint Petersburg intellectuals who had been meeting under the leadership of Mikhail Petrashevskii. During the 1840s this group, which included the budding writer Fedor Dostoevskii, had met to discuss the state of Russian society, new ideas and the future, including socialist solutions to the problems of poverty, serfdom and oppression. They had even managed to get some of their ideas in print in 1845 by publishing a Dictionary of Foreign Words, which gave the authors scope to discuss the concepts as well as to define their meaning. This was, however, no revolutionary organisation. There were some hot-heads, led by Nikolai Speshnev, who on news of the February revolution in Paris wanted to press immediately for a coup d’état and the assassination of the Tsar. Most of the Petrashevtsy (as the group became known) were enthusiastic about the revolution, but recalled the fate of the Decembrists, the liberal army officers who failed to topple the Tsar in a military coup in 1825. This more cautious majority, including Petrashevskii himself, took a Fabian approach, wanting to prepare the ground by a long campaign of propaganda among the peasantry, winning hearts and converting minds, so that when, in the distant future, the revolution finally came, it could be sure of mass support. In the acrimonious split, Speshnev and the extremists started preparing for an immediate peasant revolution.

  Yet the essential moderation of the majority availed the Petrashevtsy nothing. They had been under close surveillance since February 1848, and only the slow collection of evidence delayed the almost inevitable government crackdown. In 1849 an undercover agent of the Third Section, the Tsar’s secret police, revealed Speshnev’s plans to his bosses and in the night of 23 April the authorities swooped, arresting some 252 people, all of whom were interrogated. Fifty-one were exiled and twenty-one sentenced to death.144 ‘A handful of nonentities, the majority of them young and immoral, has tried to ride rough-shod over the sacred rights of religion, law and property,’ read the damning indictment.145 The death penalties were commuted, but only at the very moment when the sentences were about to be carried out, on 16 November. A traumatised Dostoevskii was one of the victims of this mock-execution. His sentence was reduced to four years’ exile in Siberia. Among the collateral damage in the crushing of the Petrashevtsy was Uvarov, who was forced to resign as minister of education after Nicholas, a week after the arrests, severely curtailed student admissions to the universities, which he regarded (with some reason) as seedbeds of dissent.

  There was, therefore, no revolution in Russia, but in the long run the tsarist regime arguably paid a high price: it was a ‘Pyrrhic victory’. 146 Prior to 1848 the regime and the intelligentsia (writers, poets, historians and the like, mostly of noble background, who substituted for civil society in Russia) had lived in an often stuffy atmosphere, but there was at least some give and take in the relationship. After the thoroughgoing repression, the ‘parting of ways’147 between the state and the intellectuals became virtually an unbridgeable chasm. The failure to press home the reform of serfdom (Nicholas had already made it clear that he did not feel able to abolish it outright) ensured that Russia would lag behind the rest of Europe, where the institution was finally abolished (in those places where it still existed) in 1848. Moreover, by keeping the non-Russian peoples of his empire under his heel, Nicholas simply stoked up the resentment of the Poles, the Ukrainians and other subject nationalities. The Tsar simply left these potentially poisonous issues to his successors. The shortcomings of the tsarist state and of Russian society were exposed in the disastrous Crimean War of 1854-6, and it was left to Tsar Alexander II to pick up the pieces. He made admirable strides, abolishing serfdom in 1861 and introducing other reforms, but Nicholas’s hardline position against dissent had ensured a hardening of positions on both sides, between the state and the hard kernel of opposition. The uncompromising nature of the repression convinced the radical intelligentsia, once and for all, that there could be no constructive accommodation with the regime and that meaningful progress would be attainable only by violent means.148 The harshness of Nicholas’s reaction to 1848 ensured that, when the critics of the regime resurfaced from the 1860s onwards, this time they would give genuinely revolutionary expression to their frustration.

  Although these countries on Europe’s periphery did not experience the great upheavals that swept across the continent’s geographical centre, they do show that they did not remain entirely untouched or even emerge unchanged by the shockwaves of the revolutions. Even with these exceptions, too, what happened in the few weeks between late January and the end of March was breathtaking in its rapidity and geographical scope. Underlying the broad range of the revolutions was the economic crisis of the later 1840s: although the European economy was strikingly diverse from one region to the next, and although the social structure and political institutions of each country varied, the intense economic pressure placed on almost every section of society across the continent ensured that there was a widespread sense of distress and frustration with the inability of the existing governments to do much to meet the crisis. Yet this does not explain why the responses should have been spontaneously revolutionary in so many places, in such a short space of time, nor why the revolutions should have achieved such startling success.

  The first reason is that the insurrections of 1848 were preceded by a widespread - indeed, near universal - demand for political reform across Europe, even in those countries like Britain, Sweden and Norway, Spain and the Netherlands that managed to navigate this tumultuous year without serious revolutionary disturbances. The political ferment of 1846-7, which included the Galician uprising, the Sonderbund War in Switzerland, the liberal resurgence in Germany, mounting tensions in Italy and the banquet campaign in France, was symptomatic of a growing and widespread frustration within civil society with the limitations of the conservative order. These outbursts of violence and protests had already seemed like portents of something more serious.

  That a truly dramatic upheaval of tectonic proportions appeared to be stirring came with the eruption in Paris. The French capital sent shockwaves across Europe because France’s now well-established revolutionary tradition made it the single most important source of inspiration or fear (
depending upon one’s point of view). The great French revolution of 1789 had been studied carefully by reactionaries, reformers and revolutionaries alike for lessons and warnings. In the initial revolutionary sweep of Europe in the first three months of 1848, the historic French example led governments to make gloomy prognoses as to their prospects of facing down the rising tide of opposition. Moreover, the memory of revolutionary France bursting its banks and flooding into neighbouring countries, as it did in the 1790s, encouraged some governments to make concessions at home the better to meet the anticipated challenge from the French.

  So it was that the February revolution in Paris - rather than the opening shots heard in Palermo and Naples in January - set the European heather alight. The demands, ideals and even some of the institutions immediately established by the European revolutionaries of 1848 drew in some measure from the models of 1789: the Committee of Public Safety and the National Guard established in the Budapest revolution of March are cases in point. Moderate liberals were also conditioned by memories of the 1789 revolution, admiring the freedoms achieved then but anxious not to repeat the events of 1792-4, which showed that terror and social conflict were potentially the consequences of revolution - and perhaps even of democracy.149

  Yet in 1848 the Parisian events were not the only impulse. It is significant that, in Germany, the February revolution in France sparked revolutionary movements in the smaller ‘middle states’, but it did not immediately provoke political change in Berlin, the capital of one of the two hegemonic powers in the confederation. Instead, it was the news that Metternich had fallen in the other great German metropolis, Vienna, which intensified the political pressures in the Prussian capital before exploding into the insurrection of 18 March. The March revolution in Vienna - not the February revolution in Paris - also brought about the unravelling of the conservative order in the Habsburg Empire. It is true that the citizens of Budapest, Prague, Milan and Venice stirred in excitement with the news from France, but it took the ousting of Metternich and the imperial promise of a constitution to spur the liberals to make the decisive revolutionary push.

  Moreover, while events in Paris and Vienna were undoubtedly triggers, opposition had been simmering everywhere, albeit with various degrees of intensity, before the revolutions of February and March 1848. Social and economic distress, combined with the gathering momentum of constitutional demands in almost every European state from the mid-1840s - and the weakness and lack of confidence evident in government responses in 1848 itself - gave the revolutions their explosive power and ensured their initial victory. The speed with which the wave of revolutions swept across Europe was due to the wonders of modern technology. In 1789 it took weeks for news - carried, at its fastest, on horseback or under sail - for the fall of the Bastille to be relayed across Central and Eastern Europe. In 1848, thanks to steamships and a nascent telegraph system, reports were being heard within days or even minutes.

  The liberal opposition was also momentarily able to seize the advantage over the conservative order because of the temporary weakness of the old regime. Its shortcomings - particularly its reluctance to countenance anything other than the most sedate of reforms and the most limited of social intervention - were exposed harshly by the economic despair. Moreover, the sharp decline in tax revenue that was a consequence of high unemployment, the agrarian disaster and the manufacturing slump made governments seriously doubt their ability to deploy the armed might at their disposal for very long. Yet governments appeared to have suffered from a crisis of confidence that went beyond a mere question of finance and force. Rather, the wider atmosphere and expectations of the later 1840s seem to have made ministers and even some military commanders doubt their own ability to weather the crisis. The failure of the old regime was therefore one of leadership as well as of structural problems such as the economic crisis and the schism that had opened up between government and civil society. Confronted with determined protests backed by the actual or implicit threat of insurrection, the authorities lost their nerve and either gave way without a fight or offered only muddled, contradictory responses to the challenge of the opposition. Referring to Frederick William’s dithering while the street-fighting raged in Berlin, General Leopold von Gerlach commented ‘we were at that time all so inexperienced in this kind of warfare that we did not consider how every postponement only made matters worse’.150 Watching the Prussian army pull out of Berlin after the March revolution, the French ambassador, Adolphe de Circourt, remarked that the troops were ‘gloomy, irritated, but obedient . . . never before had good troops been so undeservedly abandoned and even disavowed by their leaders’.151 Even the most determined and disciplined of troops were often left to go into battle unsure about the overall purpose or strategy for which they were fighting. This was certainly the case in Paris, where Louis-Philippe (for quite admirable reasons) commanded that no blood should be shed and that negotiations must take place prior to any assault on the barricades. Such orders merely left his commanders uncertain as to their next step once talks had failed: were they ultimately to clear the streets with force or to wait in a stand-off until the government decided what to do next? The Orléanist Charles de Rémusat, who was with Louis-Philippe when he abdicated on 24 February, noted that the King’s confidence had evaporated in a matter of hours: ‘it is our attitude’, he reflected later, ‘the powerlessness of our will, that humiliates me when I think it over’.152 In Milan the Count von Hübner had no doubt about Radetzky’s inspirational abilities. Rather he blamed the paucity of the logistical and moral support that the latter received from Vienna for his failure to hold on to the city. Metternich, Hübner wrote prior to the Five Glorious Days,

  speaks of intervention, but I do not see how military preparations are being made. I believe, on the contrary, that Marshal Radetzky has been refused the help which he has said is necessary for poorly conceived reasons of economy . . . The prince is isolated, paralysed - in a word, powerless. He is only granted half-measures, timid attempts which can only finish with miscalculations if not catastrophe.153

  It was not, however, only the weakness of the old order that ensured the success of the uprisings. The revolutionaries themselves also showed a unity of purpose, across social and political divisions, which enabled them to prevail. In Milan Cattaneo, who normally saw the middle class as the mainspring of the national movement (unfairly, in fact, since much of the political and cultural leadership of the liberal opposition prior to 1848 came from the nobility), emphasised the social unity of the Five Glorious Days. He described the moment when incredulous peasants burst into Milan to meet ‘such elegant women who had built barricades and loaded weapons with their own hands’.154 As a republican, it was in Cattaneo’s interests to stress the social unity of the Milanese revolution, with the cause of liberty transcending divisions of wealth, poverty and gender. However, his view is corroborated by that from the other side of the barricades. Hübner, who was marched as a prisoner through the streets of Milan, noted armed peasants guarding barricades, young women helping to build fortifications, a large number of priests wearing ‘broad-rimmed hats decorated with tricolour cockades and carrying swords or sabres in their hands’, noblemen and bourgeois ‘who seemed a little awkward with their rifles, which they often shifted from one shoulder to the other, a little astonished at the part which they had been made to play’.155 The Church played an important role in Italy, in particular. As a figurehead, Pius IX managed to transcend social and political divisions and offer a striking unifying focus to the Italian insurrections, but the local clergy played an important, galvanising role as well. As violence erupted in Milan on 18 March, the archbishop ‘excited an indescribable enthusiasm’ when he appeared wearing the Italian tricolour and, Carlo Osio claimed, those who accompanied the clergyman were among the first to give the orders to raise the barricades.156 In Hungary nobles provided almost all the leadership of the revolution, backed by the urban population of Budapest and by the threat of a peasant insurrectio
n.

  The peasantry gave the revolutions - temporarily, as it turned out - mass support and ensured that the old order could not depend on the countryside: in France, western Germany, Lombardy, Venetia and the south of Italy, rural unrest lent the revolution a particularly wide social basis and contributed to the evaporation of confidence among the conservatives. In the urban insurrections, the workers and artisans provided the strong backbone to the risings. A sympathetic, though anonymous, account of the March revolution in Berlin claims of the nine-hundred-strong Borsig workers that ‘it was above all due to their heroic courage and endurance behind the barricades on the night of 18 March that a battle was fought which allowed the cause of the people to appear with an importance which could no longer be denied’.157 Women engaged in the initial, peaceful demonstrations everywhere; and, when the fighting erupted, they helped to build and repair barricades, loaded weapons, kept the insurgents fed, tended the wounded or gave encouragement by cheering on the revolutionaries waving flags and shouting slogans, often at the very scene of the battle.