Revolutions of 1848

The Revolutions of 1848, sometimes called the Springtime of the Peoples, were a wave of uprisings that spread across much of Europe between early 1848 and the autumn of 1849. Liberals, radicals, workers and nationalists rose against the conservative order set up at the Congress of Vienna, toppling a French king and shaking the Habsburg and Prussian monarchies. Almost all the revolutions were defeated within two years, but they left lasting changes, including the end of serfdom in the Austrian lands.

After 1815 governments across central Europe used censorship and police to suppress demands for constitutions and national unity. Pressure built from several directions: a middle class seeking political rights, growing towns with poor working populations, and national movements among Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and others. A severe economic crisis in the mid-1840s, caused by potato blight, failed grain harvests and a commercial slump, pushed food prices up and threw many people out of work.

The first major rising came in Palermo, in Sicily, in January 1848, but it was events in Paris that set the continent alight. In late February, after a ban on political banquets, crowds took to the streets and King Louis-Philippe abdicated. A provisional government proclaimed the Second Republic and introduced universal male suffrage. Within weeks there were uprisings in many German states, in Vienna and in Berlin. In Vienna on 13 March, Klemens von Metternich, the symbol of the old order, resigned and fled. In Berlin, after street fighting, King Frederick William IV promised a constitution.

In the Habsburg lands, Hungary won wide autonomy through the April Laws, passed under the leadership of Lajos Kossuth and others. In northern Italy, Milan and Venice rose against Austrian rule and the Kingdom of Sardinia went to war with Austria. Elected delegates from across the German states gathered in the Frankfurt Parliament in May 1848 to draft a constitution for a united Germany. The same year Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto.

The revolutionary coalitions soon divided. In Paris, the closure of the national workshops for the unemployed led to the June Days uprising, crushed by the army with thousands of deaths. In December, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon, was elected president; in 1851 he seized dictatorial power. Austrian forces under Radetzky defeated Sardinia at Custoza in July 1848 and again at Novara in March 1849. Imperial troops retook Prague and Vienna, and the young Franz Joseph became emperor in December 1848. In Prussia the king dissolved the assembly and imposed his own constitution. When the Frankfurt Parliament offered him the crown of a united Germany in 1849, he refused, and the parliament dissolved.

The longest resistance came in Hungary, which declared independence from the Habsburgs in April 1849. Austria called on Russia for help, and the Hungarian army surrendered at Világos in August 1849. In Rome, a republic proclaimed in early 1849 and defended by Giuseppe Garibaldi fell to French troops in July, and Venice surrendered in August.

Few of the revolutionaries' goals were achieved at once, and many leaders were executed, imprisoned or driven into exile, with large numbers emigrating to the United States. Yet the revolutions ended feudal obligations on peasants in Austria and Hungary, brought constitutional government to Denmark and Sardinia, and introduced representative democracy in the Netherlands. The national questions they raised were later resolved from above, through the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which made Hungary an equal partner within the Habsburg monarchy.

We have no map for 1848 itself; our 1815 map shows the Europe the revolutionaries challenged, and the 1878 map shows the unified Italy and Germany that emerged in the following decades.