The anatomy of a revolution

The origins of the 1848 revolutions are best understood in terms of the coming together of longer- and shorter-term socioeconomic and political causes. A basic precondition for the revolution was the gradual decline in popular standards of living over the previous twenty to twenty-five years. To a great extent, this state of affairs reflected the decline of an agrarian-artisan economy, and its replacement by a more efficient one, characterized by a more productive agriculture, an improved market network, and a growing industrial sector. In central and eastern Europe, these structural changes were accompanied by a gradual movement from a society of orders to a civil society of property owners, involving changes in those property relations, particularly serfdom and the guild system, that hindered the development of a market economy and society. While historians might understand these developments as part of a favorable transition, leading to increased economic growth and higher standards of living, contemporaries had no way of knowing that their troubles were transitional, that after mid-century things would gradually improve. All that could be perceived was the decline, creating a permanent and widespread discontent.

The harvest failures of 1845–46, followed by the recession of 1847, topped off and intensified these long-term changes. Starvation was avoided in continental Europe, although for the poorer, mountainous areas it was a near thing, and for those of modest means, already suffering from the gradual declines in their real income, the years of high food prices meant taking on a heavy burden of debt.

Patterns of confrontation, May–November 1848

The second half of 1848 was a period of the resurgence of the party of order and of the decline of the party of movement in Europe. In a series of dramatic confrontations the revolutionary forces were overwhelmed, sometimes by an alliance of conservatives and liberals, sometimes by a resurgence of elements of the pre-1848 regimes. Following these confrontations, governments were reshuffled and public policy took a strong turn to the right. If the revolutionary movement had suffered a severe setback by the end of 1848, counter-revolution had not yet completely triumphed. Constitutional monarchists retained some influence on government policy; basic civil liberties and the constitutional form of government, those major accomplishments of the spring of 1848, remained, precariously, in place. While increasingly harassed by the police, radical and democratic forces were still able to reorganize themselves and seek out new supporters, preparing a new round of political struggles in the first half of 1849.

First steps in southern Italy

The 1848 revolutions began in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; the reaction against them also took its first major step there. As always in Italy during the mid-century revolution, the war against the Austrians in the north set the background for political action. Radicals in the capital city of Naples and more militant members of the kingdom's parliament meeting there demanded that its armed forces be sent north to join the nationalist war, and that the constitution granted by the king at the outbreak of the revolution be modified to increase parliamentary control over foreign affairs.

The new contours of public life

In the months following the barricade fighting of February–March 1848, a new space opened up for political activity in Europe. The\ liberal governments coming to power formally granted the classic civil liberties: freedom of speech, of the press, and of association and assembly. Even more significant as a guarantee of these freedoms in practice was the general weakening of state authority as a consequence of the revolutionary events, and the massive and widespread social conflict following them, which had the effect of making repressive actions, no matter what their legal basis or lack of it, substantially more difficult to carry out. In this chapter, we will explore some of these new possibilities for public life, go on to consider the different forms of association and organization that emerged and the people who took part in them, and conclude with a discussion of the long-term trends of political development over the course of the revolution.

The parliament as political focus

By the summer of 1848, Europe was crammed with parliaments. In the east and south of the continent, the very existence of such branches of government was a novelty. Everywhere, though, the parliaments of the year of revolution claimed significantly greater powers than their pre-1848 predecessors. In particular, many of the legislative bodies elected in 1848 were constituent assemblies, chosen for the purpose of laying down the basic rules of future political life.

The framework of political life

The typical characteristic of political life throughout Europe at the beginning of the 1840s was a negative one: the lack of republicanism and democracy. In an audacious outburst of experiment, late eighteenth-century revolutionaries had suggested that large, complex states could be ruled without a king and the years around 1800 had seen republican government at its greatest extent since classical antiquity. While a half-century later, this experiment continued in the Americas, in Europe it seemed to have been given up. The only republican governments were those covering small areas: the Swiss cantons, county-sized political entities bound together in a loose confederation, and the German city-states of Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, themselves only semi-autonomous parts of the larger German Confederation. Elsewhere, there were monarchs, who both reigned and ruled.

They ruled without counting on the consent of the governed. Even in those monarchies that possessed legislative bodies and a constitution or charter of privileges to empower them, the men who sat in them were scarcely the people's representatives. The franchise was restricted or exercised very inequitably. Nowhere was universal manhood suffrage a reality, to say nothing of women having the vote. The stringency of these limitations might be seen from conditions in France, where those possessing enough property to be eligible to vote in elections to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the bicameral legislature, made up just 5 percent of all the adult males in the country.