The year 1848 was a tumultuous one. From Paris to Berlin, and Budapest to Rome, insurgents rushed to hastily built barricades, forcing kings and princes to beat an equally hasty—though only temporary— retreat. Perhaps the most highly symbolic moment came on March 13, 1848, when Klemens von Metternich, the primary architect of the Concert of Europe, was forced to resign as minister of state in the Austrian capital of Vienna while a revolutionary crowd outside celebrated his departure. Metternich’s balanced system of international relations, where stability was guaranteed by reinforcing the legitimacy of traditional dynastic rulers against movements for reform, was swept aside in a wave of enthusiasm for liberal political ideals and popular anger. Metternich himself was forced to flee to England, which less than one month earlier had also welcomed King Louis-Philippe of France, after another revolution in France.
Metternich’s downfall and the collapse of the French monarchy made clear that the 1848 revolutions were strongly linked to powerful forces for change unleashed earlier by the French Revolution. At the same time, however, this was also the year
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That Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, which announced as its goal an even more sweeping remaking of society than that imagined by the French revolutionaries of 1789. If 1848 was the last wave of the revolutionary movements that began in Europe and the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century, it was also the first chapter in a new revolutionary movement that would have enormous consequences in the twentieth century.
Revolutionary regime change, territorial expansion, economic development, and debates about who deserved citizenship: all of these were issues in 1848, and all were related to the spread of nationalism and nation building in Europe and the Americas. As we saw in the last chapter, the term nation had taken on a new meaning at the end of the eighteenth century and had come to mean “a sovereign people.” Nationalism was a related political ideal, based on the assumption that governments could be legitimate only if they reflected the character, history, and customs of the nation—that is, the common people. This idea undermined the assumptions of Europe’s dynastic rulers, as hereditary monarchs had emphasized the differences between themselves and the people they ruled. Kings and aristocrats often did not even speak the same language as their subjects. Nobody would have thought this odd before 1789, since peasants often spoke regional dialects that were different from the language spoken in cities. But once the notion of national sovereignty emanating from the people became widespread, such discrepancies between the language and culture of elites and of the common people loomed larger as political questions that needed to be solved. Intellectuals, revolutionaries, and governments all propagated the radical new idea that nations of like peoples and the states that ruled over them should be congruent with one another. This simple idea lay at the heart of all forms of nationalism, but there was often bitter debate about who best represented the nation and what the goals of a unified nationalist government should be.
Between 1789 and 1848, Europeans commonly associated nationalism with liberalism. Liberals saw constitutions, the rule of law, and elected assemblies as necessary expressions of the people’s will, and they sought to use popular enthusiasm for liberal forms of nationalism against the conservative monarchs of Europe. The upheavals of 1848 marked the high point of this period of liberal revolution, and their failure marked the end of that age. By the end of the nineteenth century, conservative governments also found ways to mobilize popular support by invoking nationalist themes. The only political movement to swim against the tide of nationalism was that of the socialists, who stressed the importance of class unity across national boundaries: Marx and his followers believed that German, French, and British workers had more in common with each other than with their middle-class employers. Even so, however, socialist movements in Europe developed in distinctly different nationalist political contexts, making traditions of French socialism different from German socialism, or from Italian socialism, for example.
The years following the 1848 revolutions witnessed a shift in the connections between liberalism, nationalism, and nation building. In the United States, territorial changes such as the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transformed the boundaries of nations; equally significant was the American Civil War, which resulted in wrenching political change. The unification of Germany and Italy in the years after 1848 also involved the conquest of territory, but the process could not have been completed without political reforms and new state structures that changed how governments worked and how they related to their citizens. The governments of France, Britain, Russia, and Austria undertook vast projects of administrative reform during this period: they overhauled their bureaucracies, expanded their electorates, and reorganized relations among ethnic groups. The Russian tsar abolished serfdom, and Abraham Lincoln, an American president, abolished slavery, decades after the French and British had prohibited slavery in their territories.
As the process of nation building continued, the balance of power in Europe shifted toward the states that were the earliest to industrialize and most successful in building strong, centralized states. Older imperial powers such as the Habsburg Empire in Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire found their influence waning, in spite of their long history of successful rule over vast territories with diverse populations. At the heart of this nineteenth-century period of nation building lay changing relations between states and those they governed, and these changes were hastened by reactions to the revolutionary upheavals of 1848.
Throughout Europe, the spring of 1848 brought a dizzying sequence of revolution and repression. The roots of revolution lay in economic crisis, social antagonisms, and political grievances. But these revolutions were also shaped decisively by nationalism, especially in southern, central, and eastern Europe. To be sure, reformers and revolutionaries had liberal goals: representative government, an end to privilege, economic development, and so on. They also sought some form of national unity. Indeed, reformers in Germany, Italy, Poland, and the Austrian Empire believed that their liberal goals might be realized only in a vigorous, “modern” nation-state. The fate of the 1848 revolutions in these regions demonstrated nationalism’s power to mobilize opponents of the regime and also its potential to splinter revolutionary alliances and to override other allegiances and values entirely.
A deteriorating economic climate in Europe was an important contributing factor to the outbreak of revolution in 1848, one that helps to explain why revolutions occurred in so many places nearly simultaneously. Poor harvests in the early 1840s were followed by two years in 1845-46 when the grain harvest failed completely. A potato blight brought starvation in Ireland and hunger in Germany (see Competing Viewpoints on pages 690-91). Food prices doubled in 1846-47, and bread riots broke out across Europe. Villagers attacked carts carrying grain, refusing to let merchants take it to other markets. At times, hungry people seized the grain and forced the merchants to sell it at what they thought was a “just” price. Compounding the problem was a cyclical industrial slowdown that spread across Europe, throwing thousands into unemployment. Starving peasants and unemployed laborers swamped public-relief organizations in many European cities. The years 1846 and 1847 were “probably the worst of the entire century in terms of want and human suffering,” and the decade has earned the name the “Hungry Forties.”
GERMAN CONFEDERATION, 1815. Compare this map with the one on page 714. ¦ What major areas were left out of the German Confederation? ¦ Why do you think they were left out? ¦ What obstacles made it difficult to establish a unified German nation during this period?
World History
