Revolutions and reaction

Warm-up: getting the order right

In lesson 1 two questions went astray: what the Corn Laws were, and which came first among Suez, the German Empire and the Berlin Conference. Dates are the skeleton of a narrative, so here is a quick sort before the story starts. Tap the events in the order they happened, earliest first.

1815: the lid goes on

After Napoleon, the victors met at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) to put Europe back together. Their host and organiser was the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich.

Metternich ruled a ramshackle empire of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Croats and more. Two ideas let loose by the French Revolution could each tear it apart: liberalism (constitutions, elected parliaments, a free press) and nationalism (each people should have its own state). So the system he built had one aim: keep both down. Kings were restored, the great powers met regularly to settle disputes (the “Concert of Europe”), and in the German states the 1819 Carlsbad Decrees censored the press and policed the universities.

For a generation it mostly worked. no war drew in all the great powers at once until 1914, a peace no one in 1815 would have dared predict. But the pressure underneath kept building.

1830: a rehearsal

In July 1830 King Charles X of France tried to muzzle the press and shrink the electorate. Paris built barricades, and after three days of street fighting (the “Three Glorious Days”) Charles fled to England.

But the people who had fought on the barricades did not get a republic. The liberal deputies and bankers who stepped in chose a new, safer king: Louis-Philippe, a cousin from the Orléans branch of the family, who styled himself “King of the French” and wore a businessman’s frock coat. His regime, the July Monarchy, gave the vote to only the richest men, under 1% of the population. It was a regime of property and money, and the Paris Rothschild, James, became one of its main lenders.

The spark spread. Belgium broke away from the Netherlands and became an independent kingdom. The Poles rose against Russian rule and were crushed in 1831. Italian revolts were put down by Austrian troops. The pattern was set: a shock in Paris, uprisings elsewhere, and the strong armies of the east restoring order.

Britain bends instead of breaking

Britain had riots in 1830–31 too, and its parliament was absurdly unrepresentative: booming Manchester had no MP of its own, while “rotten boroughs” with a handful of voters sent two each. The Whig government pushed through the Great Reform Act of 1832. It redrew seats toward the new industrial towns and widened the vote to the middle class, still only about one adult man in five.

That was the British pattern for the century: reform early, just enough, so that revolution never got going. The working-class Chartist movement demanded votes for all men in the late 1830s and 1840s, but its great London rally of April 1848 passed off peacefully. The repeal of the Corn Laws two years earlier, which made bread cheaper, had taken some of the heat out.

1848: hunger, then credit, then barricades

Start with money and food. From 1845 potato blight ruined harvests across Europe; in Ireland about a million people died and another million emigrated. Grain harvests failed in 1846 too, so food prices soared just as people had less to spend. Then came a financial crash in 1847, after a railway-building boom in Britain and on the Continent went bust. Factories laid off workers in the towns that had most of the radicals.

In February 1848 Louis-Philippe’s government banned a political banquet in Paris (banquets were how the opposition got around the ban on political meetings). The barricades went up, and in three days the king was gone. This time France became a republic, the Second Republic, and gave the vote to all adult men.

The news travelled by railway and telegraph faster than any revolution before. Slide through the months and watch it spread.

By the end of March, Metternich, the architect of 1815, had resigned and fled Vienna for (of all places) London. Even Salomon Rothschild left Vienna. Kings in Berlin, Munich and Turin granted constitutions. Hungary got its own government under Lajos Kossuth. In May an elected all-German parliament met in Frankfurt to write a constitution for a united Germany.

Why it failed

Spring turned to reaction within months. Three reasons recur.

The winners split. Liberals wanted constitutions and property rights; radicals and workers wanted jobs and social change. In Paris the republic set up “National Workshops” to employ the jobless. When it closed them in June, workers rose again, and the army crushed them in the “June Days”, killing thousands. Frightened middle-class liberals now preferred order to further revolution.

The nations split. Germans in Frankfurt and Hungarians in Budapest wanted their own nation states, but the Czechs, Croats and Romanians living among them wanted theirs too. Vienna played them off against each other: Croatian troops marched against Hungary.

The armies stayed loyal. Kings had lost their capitals, not their soldiers. Austrian troops retook Milan in August and bombarded Vienna into submission in October. Prussia’s king brought his troops back into Berlin in November. When the Frankfurt Parliament offered him the crown of a united Germany in 1849, he refused a “crown from the gutter” handed up by an elected assembly. Russia sent an army to finish off Hungary in August 1849.

What the winners learned

Not everything was undone. Serfdom was abolished across the Austrian lands in 1848 and stayed abolished. France kept the vote for all men. And the next generation of conservatives drew a lesson from 1848: the vote and national feeling did not have to be the enemy. They could be harnessed.

Louis-Napoleon seized full power in a coup in December 1851 and made himself Emperor Napoleon III a year later, both times confirmed by a vote of all adult men. He then bought popularity with growth: railways, the rebuilding of Paris under Baron Haussmann, and new investment banks like the Péreire brothers’ Crédit Mobilier (1852). Gold rushes in California (1848) and Australia (1851) poured new money into the world economy and fuelled the 1850s boom.

In Prussia, Otto von Bismarck would unify Germany not through a parliament in Frankfurt but through three short wars, the last ending in that proclamation at Versailles in 1871. Then he gave the new empire’s parliament a vote for all men, betting that peasants would vote conservative. Italy too was unified from above, by the kingdom of Piedmont and its prime minister Cavour, with Garibaldi’s volunteers.

So the revolution from below failed, and a revolution from above succeeded. Those regimes ran on booms, borrowing and national pride, which leads straight to the boom in Vienna and Berlin that crashed in 1873.

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