by Mike Rapport
The revolutions of 1848 were also a ‘seed-plot’ in the sense that they comprised a truly European phenomenon, throwing up similarities in aims and ideals that bound together liberals and radicals of different nationalities, while also creating the circumstances that would soon drive them apart. This was Europe’s great year of revolutions, rivalled only by the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. Yet the question of whether or not 1848-9 really was a ‘European’ revolution - and if so, in what way? - has exercised historians. 21 It is an important problem, since underlying the historical question is (implicitly) the wider, more contemporary issue of whether Europe’s political and social development rests on a broadly shared historical experience or, conversely, whether the differences between the countries are so deep that ‘European’ history amounts to little more than the sum of its constituent parts. Certainly, some historians have argued that 1848 was so complex that the revolutions did not sit on any common European ground, but were simply ‘the sum of local events’.22 There is no doubt, of course, that there were important national differences in the experiences of 1848. Rudolph Stadelmann, for example, stresses that the aims of the liberal majority of the German revolutionaries indicate the ‘independence of German liberalism from the French example’, concentrating as they did on state-building under a constitutional monarchy rather than acting on a republican-socialist impulse for radical political innovation. 23 The implications can be read in two conflicting ways: that the German revolutionaries were more moderate and concerned for legality, stability and continuity with the past; or that the German concern for state-building and monarchy gave both nationalism and conservatism priority over liberal freedom. Also, of course, not all European countries underwent a revolution: Britain, Sweden- Norway, the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal, Russia and Ottoman Europe (with the exception of the Romanian principalities) were all scarcely troubled.
But if 1848 does not stand out as a genuinely ‘European’ phenomenon in the sense that every country had a revolution, it is equally true that no country was wholly unaffected by the upheavals, even if they did not directly experience an uprising. Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway all felt tremors, if not actual revolts. And in the broader framework of international politics, all the European powers were affected. Britain and Russia, at various stages, felt obliged to intervene in the revolutions. Both brought diplomatic pressure to bear over the Schleswig-Holstein crisis, and Russia intervened militarily against the revolutions in Romania and in Hungary. That 1848 did not degenerate into a major European conflict on the scale of the Napoleonic or First World wars was largely due to the fact that the five great European powers - Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia - all wanted to avoid such a war at all costs. All governments - even the French Second Republic - understood that a general European conflagration would simply radicalise an already dangerous political situation and could lead to the complete disintegration of the multinational empires of Central and Eastern Europe. The task of maintaining a lasting peace in the aftermath of such turmoil would be much harder than it already was. Moreover, except in France, foreign policy and the armed forces remained under the control of the very monarchies who had the greatest interest in keeping the existing European order intact. Consequently, the Prussian government refused to bend to liberal enthusiasm for a nationalist war against Russia and yielded to combined British and Russian protests over its invasion of Schleswig-Holstein. When Russia invaded Romania and Hungary, Britain and France remained neutral; and, of course, in the case of Hungary, the Russian attack came in response to Austrian pleas for help. The French intervention against Rome in 1849 was set against a backdrop of wider international concern for the Pope, so while French forces took the city itself, Spanish, Neapolitan and Austrian forces were all involved in the wider conflict. As these examples show, the European international system based on the hegemony of five great powers remained intact, and in the end this benefited the counter-revolution. 24 It is significant that once the great European states put other interests over the maintenance of the international status quo - and this would happen soon enough, in the Crimean War of 1854-6 - one of the fundamental aims of the ‘forty-eighters’ - Italian, German and Romanian unification - all took place within less than two decades.
The 1848 revolutions were also European in the sense that they were genuinely spontaneous across the continent. By comparison, the assault on the old European regime after the French revolution of 1789 might have had the assistance of some local Jacobins in various countries, but the central impulse undeniably came from France. The overhaul of the Napoleonic era would not have been possible without the military might unleashed by that nation. While it is true that in 1848 perhaps the single greatest shock to jolt Europe was, once again, a revolution in France, it was the fall of Metternich in March which really drove forward the revolutionary impulse. Where tensions had been stored up in northern Italy, Hungary, Transylvania, Bohemia and Prussia, it was not the events in Paris that unleashed the fresh revolutionary charge, but the insurrection in Vienna. The outbreak of the 1848 revolutions, in other words, was a genuinely European phenomenon, precisely because they did not all burst from a single fountainhead. The European revolution of 1848 was essentially polycentric, expressed in localised varieties of liberalism that were bound together by broad and important similarities in aims, by the patterns in which the revolutions themselves progressed, and in the problems that the newly formed liberal regimes faced.
The broad similarities in the revolutionary experience were all the more remarkable in a Europe where political, social and economic structures varied widely from one country to the next. The obvious explanation as to why so many very different countries should experience revolution in 1848 is that their peoples were all suffering in the dire agrarian and industrial crisis. That underlying cause gave the revolutions a strong pan-European dimension, even though different people experienced the hardship in different ways. However, without downplaying the centrality of these economic pressures, the revolutions also followed strikingly similar patterns across Europe. Their success was invariably due, first, to a crisis of confidence both in and within the existing governments in their ability to deal with the challenges of social distress and political opposition. Second, they owed their victory to political unity between liberals and radicals and to a momentary social unity among the middle class, workers, peasants (and sometimes even the nobility) against the old order. The problems began when this unity proved to be short lived and fractured, as liberals and radicals vied with each other for control of the direction of the new regime, as property-owners sought to protect their wealth from a second, more radical revolution, and as peasants, having gained what they could from the initial upheaval, fell back in line with the conservatives. As the all-too-brief revolutionary consensus fell apart (sometimes with bloody consequences), so politics became more polarised, cutting away the middle ground as moderates turned towards increasingly authoritarian solutions to counter the threat of a second, ‘social’ revolution. In this sense, therefore, the revolutions self-destructed by internecine fighting. By the end of the year the conservatives had recovered their nerve, marshalled their redoubtable advantages (control of the army, the loyalty of the peasantry) and regained the initiative.
The European liberals did not only undergo similar revolutionary experiences but shared comparable (in John Breuilly’s sense of ‘essentially similar’) aims.25 While there were certainly important local variants in aims and ideology, liberals across Europe were all bound by a common desire to see political reform, particularly in the shape of constitutions with a limited suffrage, and everywhere except in France under the benign hand of a constitutional monarch. Radicals, on the other hand, shared the common goal of universal, or near-universal, male suffrage, and in a great many cases under a republic. The liberals and radicals of one nationality were themselves acutely conscious that they shared similar goals with their European nei
ghbours: Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann cites the illuminating example of a German republican poster which called for a mass meeting in Berlin on 3 April 1848, in honour of the ‘great European revolution’, promised speeches in German, English and French, and hailed the republic in those three languages.26
The revolutionaries with the most ‘European’ outlook tended to be those whose national aspirations would benefit most from a political reshaping of the continent. Carlo Cattaneo, in an address to the Hungarian Diet shortly after the March revolutions, reminded the Magyars that for centuries Poland, Hungary and Venice had stood together as left, centre and right flanks against the Turks. Now the same nations (for ‘Venice’, read ‘the Italians’) should stand shoulder to shoulder against the new common enemy: Russia.27 It is perhaps no coincidence that Cattaneo should - rhetorically at least - have named as allies the three nationalities who would have had the most to gain from a reordering of the European states system. Above all, the Poles, whose homeland had been torn apart by the three great ‘eastern’ powers, had everything to gain from such an upheaval. This was reflected in the truly internationalist language adopted by the Polish Democratic Society when it appealed to the French for arms on 28 March 1848:
Frenchmen! Your revolution has not achieved its legitimate results! The day when your Republic was proclaimed, Europe believed itself to be free . . . it is not . . . For want of being sheltered by an independent Poland, the edifice of European freedom lacks a rooftop and remains exposed to the storms of the absolutist reaction. The fraternity of peoples is still an empty phrase . . . Frenchmen! Is that what you want? . . . Is it the egotistical ‘every man for himself’ style of monarchist nationalism? No, no, a thousand times no! Your Government itself proclaimed this, when, in tearing up the liberticide protocols of Vienna, it laid the will of peoples - and not that of the cabinets usurping their rights - as the basis for international relations in the future.28
The Polish democrats (not for the last time) were claiming for Poland the role of European buttress against the forces of repression and reaction.
Although such appeals were based on broadly European rhetoric, they were not pacifist, for everyone understood that the restoration of Poland, in particular, would require a war, and most likely a general European war at that. For ultimately, too, all European nationalists of 1848 wanted to realise, first and foremost, their own dreams of freedom, independence and greatness. Consequently, the cosmopolitan language was largely empty rhetoric. Since the national aspirations of the liberals of one country invariably overlapped with those of their neighbours, the talk of Europe and of international fraternity was all too much hot air. There was no overarching European liberal movement to secure the revolutionary gains of 1848; rather, the liberals acted within their own national frameworks and, ultimately, for their own national interests. The fact that so many of these interests worked against each other is one of the primary explanations for the failure of the revolution.29 As Axel Körner argues, ‘despite its idealism, Europe was not one of the revolution’s priorities’.30 Arguably, Europeans paid a terrible price for ignoring this bitter lesson of 1848: only after two murderous world wars and, more recently, several bitter ethnic conflicts are truly European political and economic structures being forged. It can only be hoped that these will act as a conduit for the peaceful resolution of future conflicting national interests. The extremes of European nationalisms and the conflicts that they have engendered in the century and a half since 1848 are, Reinhart Koselleck argues, reason enough not to forget the common experience of the mid-nineteenth-century revolutions.31
In some parts of Europe they have never been forgotten. Despite their intensely problematic legacy of failure, the revolutions of 1848 remained an inspiration for later generations. Socialists saw the bloody repression in the summer of that year as the martyrdom of the working classes, which confirmed that their interests - and democracy itself - would always be betrayed by the property-owning bourgeoisie. In East Germany the communist regime appropriated the legacy of 1848 ‘as an indisputable element in the revolutionary tradition of the German Democratic Republic’. It claimed that the ‘achievements of the socialist German state also have their roots in the battles and endeavours of the revolutionary masses of 1848’.32 Yet, for others, 1848 was a confirmation of democratic principles. After the creation of the Weimar Republic in 1918 the Social Democratic chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, worked hard to reconnect with the liberal heritage of 1848. At a ceremony at Saint Paul’s Church in Frankfurt in 1923, commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the opening of the first German parliament, he told his huge audience that 18 May 1848 had been the day when the German people slipped from the grasp of reactionary governments and took its destiny in its own hands. After the same church was bombed during the Second World War, it was rebuilt after the conflict in time for the revolution’s centenary, as a ‘credo of German democracy’.33 The memories of 1848 were also held dear in Hungary, where in 1941 left-wing demonstrators protested against the authoritarian regime’s entry into the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany by laying wreaths at the statues of Kossuth and Petőfi on the symbolic date of 15 March. While the post-war communist regime appropriated these revolutionary figures as its own heroes, they also became symbols of protest against totalitarianism. During the anti-communist uprising of 1956 the Hungarian insurgents sang Petőfi’s patriotic hymns. After seizing control of the state radio station, they called it Radio Kossuth.34
Finally, the revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe had profound echoes of 1848. The parallel is by no means exact, not least because many of the intellectuals and dissidents who led the resistance to communism were adamant that they wanted to break with Europe’s heritage of revolution, not reignite it. Above all, they wanted their revolution to be an ‘anti-revolution’, a rejection of what the novelist and sociologist György Konrád (explicitly linking 1789 with 1917) dubbed the ‘Jacobin-Leninist’ tradition, which was foisted on Eastern Europe after 1945. In 1984 the Czech playwright Václav Havel had declared himself in favour of ‘antipolitical politics’, 35 by which he meant that the opposition to communism was not about a violent seizure of power, but rather involved elevating the cultural opposition in civil society to greater importance than the repressive state. For Konrád, the revolutionary tradition would be rejected by occupying the polar opposite of centralised political authority: ‘decentralized spiritual authority’.36
Nevertheless, the revolutions of 1989 brought about the collapse of communism - and Havel himself, of course, did take power, as Czechoslovakia’s first post-communist president. It was one thing to speak of ‘antipolitics’ while a dissident, but the old regime was replaced by a new democratic order that required the engagement of those who had done so much to create it. Ultimately, therefore, the 1989 revolutions were not just the process by which the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe rejected the legacy of 1917. They were also (perhaps despite themselves) the means by which those peoples became reacquainted with traditions of the French revolution of 1789 - the principles of ‘liberty, democracy, civil society, nationhood’. 37 But these ideals were not merely imported from the West; they tapped into the history of Eastern and Central Europe itself. On the eve of the collapse of communism, Timothy Garton Ash remarked that ‘Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles are rediscovering their own history; and they are making it again’.38 The uprisings of 1989 may have rejected the communist revolutionary tradition, but in so doing they reconnected their peoples to the liberal revolutions of 1848.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In writing this book I have received a lot of help and support, so I have many people to thank. My former doctoral supervisor and friend Bill Doyle first brought me to the attention of Tim Whiting at Little, Brown, so ‘Salut et Fraternité!’ I am grateful to Tim for his enthusiasm in the early stages of this book, and to his successor, Steve Guise, who has been a patient, kind and generous editor. I should also like to thank Iain Hunt, Ker
ry Chapple, Philip Parr (a superb copy editor: all blunders and errors - of judgement and of fact - are of course my own) and Jenny Fry at Little, Brown for their great work in the editing process and the publicity. Among colleagues, I salute Jim Smyth, who has been a good friend and a fine head of department; and Bob McKean, whom we were sorry to lose to retirement, for his generosity and his irrepressible enthusiasm - he has always taken a great interest in my work, such as it is. Looking beyond the history department, I should thank the University of Stirling for granting me a semester’s sabbatical leave to allow me to start work on this project in the autumn of 2005. Kevin Adamson set me right on some important details, while Daniela Luigia Caglioti gave me a copy of her interesting article on foreign Protestants in southern Italy during 1848. My friend and colleague, the excellent Dave Andress, read a full copy of the typescript: if this book is ever thought to be any good, it will be largely thanks to his perceptive comments. The library staff at the University of Stirling have, as always, been cheerfully helpful. In particular, this book could not have been written without the assistance of the nice people at the Document Delivery Service. I should also add that the staff at Glasgow University Library are excellent and the collections there superb. Furthermore, I acknowledge the help of the National Library of Scotland, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Archives Nationales in Paris. Thanks also go to my mother and Mike for putting up with me during the research trips to Paris, while my father and Jane provided me with urgently needed computer technology at an important stage of this project. My mother-in-law, Elizabeth Comerford, and Brenda Swan, Maureen and Robert Burns, Michael Bell and Sophie Rickard, also helped ease the pressure at a crucial stage in the editing.