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The European Spring

VISIONS OF THE MACHINE AGE

On her visits to England during the 1830s the writer and revolutionary Flora Tristan (1803–44) was shocked by the condition of the factory workers she encountered:

Since I have known the English proletariat, I no longer think that slavery is the greatest human misfortune: the slave is sure of his bread all his life, and of care when he is sick; whereas there exists no bond between the worker and the English master. If the latter has no work to give out, the worker dies of hunger; if he is sick, he succumbs, on the straw of his pallet . . . If he grows old, or is crippled as the result of an accident, he is fired, and he turns to begging furtively for fear of being arrested.

For women, unemployment meant a fate even more diabolical, Flora noted, as she observed the prostitutes crowding the pavements along Waterloo Road. ‘In London,’ she wrote, ‘all classes are badly corrupted.’ To try and find out something of the system of government that presided over these horrors, she shocked a Tory Member of Parliament by asking him to lend her his clothes so she could sit in the public gallery (women were not admitted). Eventually she gained admission dressed as a young Turk; though this fooled nobody, the custodians let her in anyway. She listened to a speech by the Duke of Wellington (‘cold, tame, drawling’) but found no enlightenment. The machinery of the new factories impressed her, but she found the damage they inflicted on human beings appalling.

Born on 7 April 1803 to a French mother and a Peruvian father who had met in Spain, where her mother had gone ‘to escape from the horrors of the revolution’, Flora Tristan led an eventful life between the old world and the new. Her father, a landowner and friend of Simón Bolívar who claimed to be a descendant of Montezuma, served in the Spanish Army but died in 1807, leaving his widow and small child in serious financial difficulties. Her mother had married him in a church ceremony, which was not recognized in France, where only civil ceremonies had legal validity, so Flora was technically illegitimate. Living in a poor part of Paris, she became a wage-labourer, colouring engravings for an artisan, André Chazal (1796–1860), who owned a workshop in Montmartre. He fell in love with her and in 1821 they married. She was seventeen, he twenty-four. The marriage was not a success. She found him boorish, uneducated and irresponsible, prone to gambling and always in debt. He thought she ‘gave herself airs’. In 1825, pregnant with their third child, she left the marital home, claiming her mother had forced her into a marriage that had been nothing but ‘endless torture’.

Divorce was illegal in France; as a wife, Flora was a legal minor, with no rights and no property. In 1828, Chazal agreed to a legal separation of their property. Three years later, he began to look for her with the aim of getting back his children – two boys and a girl, Aline, – over whom he had by law the sole right of guardianship. While Flora went to Peru to try and recover her family property, Chazal tracked down Aline at a boarding school and kidnapped her. He began publishing defamatory pamphlets about Flora. ‘She possesses none of the virtues which bring esteem to the daughter, the wife, the kinswoman or the woman of quality,’ he complained: ‘For her, family ties, the duties of society, and the principles of religion, are useless impedimenta, from which she frees herself with an audacity which is fortunately quite rare.’ Ominously, he designed a gravestone for Flora, bought a pair of pistols, and started shooting practice. He became a regular in a wine bar opposite her apartment in Paris. On 10 September 1838 he spotted her walking along the street, approached her from behind, and shot her at point-blank range. The bullet entered the left side of her body, but failed to kill her. Doctors treated her, and she recovered, though the bullet was never removed. Chazal was arrested, found guilty of attempted murder, and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour.

For Flora Tristan, the situation of a wife trapped in an unhappy marriage, like that of an operative in an English factory, was no better than that of a slave. In November 1837, in Peregrinations of a Pariah, she pilloried her husband, and told every woman trapped in an unhappy marriage: ‘Feel the weight of the chain which makes you his slave and see if . . . you can break it!’ She began to petition the Chamber of Deputies for the legalization of divorce. ‘Up to now,’ she wrote in 1843, ‘woman has counted for nothing in human society . . . The priest, the lawmaker, and the philosopher, have treated her as a true pariah. Woman (half of humanity) has been excluded from the Church, from the law, from society.’ Searching for ideas with which to justify her increasingly radical stance, Flora began to read the works of the Utopian socialists, mainly French writers such as Charles Fourier (1772–1837), who since the Revolution of 1789 had been attempting to sketch the contours of the ideal society. She was not impressed with what she found. ‘Many people,’ she wrote in 1836, ‘among whom I count myself, find the science of M. Fourier very obscure.’ Utopianism also ‘paralysed all action’ in the workers, she thought. She was frequently assisted by the compagnonnages on her travels through France, and came to be regarded by them as their ‘mother’, but her dismay at their internal divisions and quarrels was another spur to her to create a unified workers’ movement. ‘Divided,’ she told them, ‘you are weak, and you fall, crushed underfoot by all sorts of misery! Union creates power. You have numbers in your favour, and numbers mean a great deal.’

Her critics resented the very fact that she was challenging masculine supremacy through her melodramatic pronouncements and her assertive independence. Even more shocking was her advocacy of the communal upbringing of children and her acceptance of Fourier’s belief that permanent sexual relationships were contrary to human nature. Moreover, her appalling experience at the hands of her husband led her to reject relationships with men, and she took refuge in intimate friendships with other women, where power relations, she thought, would not be involved. Women, she declared, should have the vote, along with all adult men, as well as the right to work and education. The emancipation of women was closely bound up with the emancipation of the workers; both, in the end, would triumph together. She urged workers to declare the rights of woman, just as their fathers had declared the rights of man in 1791. Equal wages for equal work would follow if inequalities in power between men and women were done away with. This would only be a recognition of the fact that ‘in all the trades where skill and dexterity are required, the women do almost twice as much work as the men’. Flora did not live to see her ideas put into practice. She caught typhoid on a visit to Bordeaux in 1844 and she died on 14 November, aged just forty-one. Her memory was kept alive by the workers and resurfaced in 1848. Her daughter Aline married Clovis Gauguin, a republican journalist, in 1846, but he died en route to Peru three years later. Their son Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), who stayed with Aline in Peru for seven years, supported by her family, later became an artist whose own global peregrinations perhaps owed something to his upbringing in two continents.

For the most part, Flora Tristan was right to criticize the Utopians’ lack of realism. But this did not mean that they failed to think about how to translate their ideas into reality. Central to many of them was the belief that by establishing perfect human communities, they would show the way to the future, a way so rational and so harmonious that people everywhere would quickly choose to go down it. Charles Fourier, for instance, proposed in his tract The New Industrial and Social World, published in 1829, the foundation of what he called phalansteries, or phalanxes, where around 1,600 people, men, women and children, would live a communal life based on shared social facilities. An architect, statistician and man of independent means, Fourier set up a community of this kind just outside Paris in 1832, though its inhabitants quickly quarrelled among themselves and departed increasingly from the ideas of its founder. His disciples eventually established communities in the United States. Perhaps inevitably, most of them only lasted a handful of years, or were transformed into more conventional settlements based on principles far removed from those of their founder.

Similar ideas were propounded by the lawyer and journalist Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), a man of humble origins who had taken part in the 1830 Revolution and served as an oppositional deputy in the early 1830s. More determinedly egalitarian than Fourier, he envisaged in his famous Voyage to Icaria (1840) a community where everyone worked equally and received the same rewards, everyone would have the vote, and all property would be held in common. This was ‘communism’, a word he invented. The downside of his Utopian prescription was that everyone would have to obey the community’s laws, and there would only be one newspaper, whose function was to express the common opinion of the community’s members. The desire for liberty, he warned, was ‘an error, a vice, a grave evil’ born of ‘violent hatred’. In 1848, despairing at ever being able to put his plans into operation in Europe, he sailed with a multinational group of followers, mostly artisans, to the United States, where they founded a number of Icarian communes. Most of them were short-lived. Their rules, which included a ban on smoking, were too strict for many of their members; even Cabet himself was expelled from one of them shortly before his death in 1856. It seemed that merely establishing Utopian communities was not enough by itself to convince humankind of their utility. Something more was needed.

One means of making an impact was developed by another group of Utopian socialists, the Saint-Simonians, founded by Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), who had had a career more adventurous than most: he had served under Washington at Yorktown in 1781, narrowly escaped the guillotine during the Revolution of 1789, and been incarcerated as a lunatic with the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) at the asylum in Charenton. He continued to live a troubled life thereafter, even attempting suicide in 1823 by shooting himself. His central concern was with developing a rational form of religion in which people would obtain eternal life ‘by working with all their might to ameliorate the condition of their fellows’. He attracted a number of followers, including not only carbonari but many highly trained, educated and talented people, particularly those associated with the coming world of industry, such as engineers, technologists, bankers and the like. Saint-Simon’s secretary was Auguste Comte (1798–1857), later the founder of sociology, author of Industry (1816–18) and Of the Industrial System (1821–2). Comte too was a troubled man; he was admitted to a lunatic asylum briefly and tried to commit suicide in 1827 by jumping off a bridge into the river Seine. He was no more successful in doing away with himself than his master had been, and survived for another thirty years, following Saint-Simon in devising a new ‘religion of humanity’ and coining the word ‘altruism’. His six-volume Course of Positive Philosophy, published between 1830 and 1842, was to have a major impact not only in France but in other countries too through the sociological doctrine of ‘positivism’.

Saint-Simon’s movement survived his death in 1825. He was succeeded as its leader by the bank cashier Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864), who had led a group of Napoleonic enthusiasts in armed resistance to the Allies as they invaded Paris in 1814 and subsequently joined the carbonari. Enfantin declared the improvement of ‘the poorest and most numerous class’ to be the will of God. But the lead in this task would be taken by scientists, engineers and industrialists. One Saint-Simonian, the former carbonaro and printer Pierre Leroux (1797–1871), introduced the term ‘socialism’ into French political vocabulary in 1834 (he also invented the word ‘solidarity’). Enfantin subsequently became a director of the Paris and Lyons Railway. Many of Saint-Simon’s disciples played a significant role in French industrial, economic and academic life in the 1850s and 1860s. His ideas also informed the writings of Louis Blanc (1811–82), tutor to the son of an ironmaster. In 1839, Blanc published an immensely popular book, The Organization of Labour, which proposed factories based on profit-sharing among the workers, financed initially by loans. Blanc rejected the hierarchical aspects of Saint-Simon’s philosophy and replaced his slogan ‘To each according to his works’ with a new one: ‘To each according to his needs’.

Among the Utopians it was above all Fourier who propounded the identity of women’s emancipation and general human emancipation, a belief shared by Flora Tristan: ‘The extension of privileges to women,’ he wrote, ‘is the general principle of all social progress.’ He too compared women to slaves: marriage for them was ‘conjugal slavery’. In the phalanstery, women would have fully equal rights and would be free to marry and divorce as they wished. Just as Cabet invented the word ‘communism’, so Fourier invented the word ‘feminism’. The Saint-Simonians were equally preoccupied with women’s place in society. Enfantin proclaimed ‘the emancipation of women’ as a central goal of a new Church that he would lead. He included in this concept, however, the ‘rehabilitation of the flesh’, and his advocacy of the sexual emancipation of women brought a conviction for offending public morality in 1832. Far more conventional was Cabet, who, perhaps surprisingly, thought that the main constituent unit of communist society would not be the individual but the heterosexual married couple and their children, so that shared childrearing did not come into his vision. Every woman should be educated, but the aim of her education should be to make her ‘a good girl, a good sister, a good wife, a good mother, a good housekeeper, a good citizen’.

Utopian socialism was not confined to French thinkers. The Welshman Robert Owen (1771–1858), born in humble circumstances, rose to become a factory manager and assumed control of the New Lanark cotton mill in Glasgow after marrying the owner’s daughter and organizing a consortium to buy him out. Owen found the workers dissolute and degraded, so he set up schools for the children and opened the first ever co-operative store, selling goods cheaply to the workers and sharing out the profits with them. New Lanark became famous as a model factory community, and led Owen to declare in 1827 that it could become the basis for the establishment of co-operatives across the industrial world. His mission was to overcome industry’s ‘individualization’ of the human being and replace this atomized society with what he called a ‘socialist’ one – the first time the term had been used in English. He invested heavily in communitarian experiments in the United States, most notably ‘New Harmony’, which flourished briefly between 1824 and 1829. His ideas had a considerable influence among the new industrial workers in Britain. But he eventually withdrew into another obsession of the Utopians, the foundation of a new Church. Owen became the self-styled ‘Social Father of the Society of Rational Religionists’, before converting to Spiritualism and enjoying conversations with the shades of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson until he too passed over to the other side, in 1858.

Owen, Fourier, Cabet and other Utopian thinkers spread their ideas to workers like the German tailor Wilhelm Weitling (1808–71), who in works such as Humanity: As it is and as it should be (1838) and The Gospel of Poor Sinners (1845) traced back communism to the doctrines of early Christianity and proposed to force it onto society by a millenarian uprising of 40,000 convicted criminals. However, few of the Utopians had roots in the artisanal world, let alone the world of the new industrial working class. When they did, like the French artisan Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), who grew up as the son of an impoverished cooper and himself trained as a compositor, their ideas were very different from those of theorists such as Enfantin. Thrown out of work in 1830, Proudhon embarked on a career as a writer, putting forward in a long series of books and pamphlets what he called ‘a people’s philosophy’. In his book What is Property?, published in 1840, he famously answered the question posed in the title by declaring: ‘Property is theft’. By this phrase, he did not intend to dismiss all private property; rather, he wanted society to own all property but to lease it all out to prevent profiteering and unfair distribution. Nevertheless, his declaration resonated across the century as a slogan for socialists, communists and anarchists alike. Proudhon was vehemently opposed to female equality. If women obtained equal political rights, he declared, men would find them ‘odious and ugly’, and it would bring about ‘the end of the institution of marriage, the death of love and the ruin of the human race’. ‘Between harlot or housewife,’ he concluded, ‘there is no halfway point.’

In this, as in other respects, Proudhon’s ideas differed from those of most Utopian socialists. What they had in common with them, however, was a determination to deal with the new political world made by the French Revolution of 1789, and the new economic and social world in the throes of being created across Europe by the advance of industrialism. This determination was shared by some variants of Hegelianism, another, more academic tradition of radical thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831), who grew up in south-west Germany under the influence of the Enlightenment, was an admirer of the French Revolution, and of Napoleon, whom he witnessed entering Jena after winning the battle of 1806. Following a variety of teaching positions, Hegel was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy in Berlin in 1818, where he remained until his death from cholera in 1831. An atheist, he replaced the concept of God with the idea of the ‘World-Spirit’ of rationality, which he believed was working out its purposes through history in a process he called ‘dialectical’, in which one historical condition would be replaced by its antithesis, and then the two would combine to create a final synthesis. As he became more conservative, Hegel began to regard the state of Prussia after 1815 as a ‘synthesis’ requiring no further alteration. Not surprisingly, he was soon known as ‘the Prussian state philosopher’. But his core idea of ineluctable historical progress held a considerable appeal for radicals in many parts of Europe. In Poland the art historian Józef Kremer (1806–75) propagated Hegel’s ideas in his Letters from Cracow, the first volume of which was published in 1843. The French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867) made a pilgrimage to see Hegel in 1817. ‘Hegel, tell me the truth,’ he demanded: ‘I shall pass on to my country as much as it can understand.’ The great man, having worked his way through Cousin’s Philosophical Fragments, was not impressed: ‘M. Cousin,’ he wrote scornfully, ‘has taken a few fish from me, but he has well and truly drowned them in his sauce.’

In the emerging world of the intelligentsia in Russia during the 1830s and 1840s, as Alexander Herzen, author of Who is to Blame? (1845–6), one of the first Russian social novels, later remembered, Hegel’s writings were discussed deep into the night. ‘Every insignificant pamphlet . . . in which there was a mere mention of Hegel was ordered and read until it was tattered, smudged, and fell apart in a few days.’ Hegel’s dialectic sharpened vague perceptions of the differences between East and West and forced Russian intellectuals to take sides. The literary critic Ivan Kireyevsky (1806–56), whose religious father was so vehemently hostile to the atheism of Voltaire that he bought multiple copies of the Frenchman’s books solely in order to burn them in huge piles in his garden, attended Hegel’s lectures in Berlin and concluded that Russia was destined to belong to the East, founding its society on collectivism rather than individualism, and building its moral character on the doctrines of the Orthodox Church. However, Hegel’s philosophy of history convinced others that Russia was on a preordained trajectory towards a liberated future by acquiring the freedoms common in the West. The young literary critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48) began labelling everything he thought backward in the culture and politics of his native land ‘Chinese’. Herzen drew similar consequences from a reading of Hegel, but stopped short of advocating violent revolution in order to achieve them.

That step was taken by the most radical of the Russian Hegelians, Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), who imbibed the works of the German philosopher while studying in Moscow. Bakunin was a man of violent, volcanic temperament, described by his friend Belinsky as ‘a deep, primitive, leonine nature’, also notable, however, for ‘his demands, his childishness, his braggadocio, his unscrupulousness, his disingenuousness’. In 1842, by now in Paris, Bakunin published a lengthy article urging ‘the realization of freedom’ and attacking ‘the rotted and withered remains of conventionality’. The article breathed a spirit of Hegelianism so abstract that for long stretches it was almost incomprehensible. But it ended with a chilling prophecy of the violent, anarchist extremism of which Bakunin was the founding father: ‘The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.’ These sentiments expressed the influence of a group of German philosophers known as the Young Hegelians, whose atheism led to their expulsion by the pious King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV (1795–1861), soon after he came to the throne in 1840. Bakunin met them in Paris, publishing his article in one of their short-lived magazines, edited by Arnold Ruge (1802–80). It was also in Paris that Bakunin met another Hegelian, Karl Marx (1818–83), who was to be his rival in the small and intense world of revolutionary activists and thinkers for most of the rest of his life. The two men disliked each other on first sight. Marx, as Bakunin later recalled, ‘called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right. I called him morose, vain and treacherous; and I too was right.’

In the longer run, it was Marx who was to prove the more influential. Born on the western fringes of Germany, in the small, declining provincial town of Trier, in the Rhineland, Karl Marx gravitated towards the Young Hegelians at the University of Berlin, one of whom, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), was the source of Marx’s famous statement ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world: the point is to change it.’ Marx became a freelance writer, penning articles for a recently founded radical paper based in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung. The paper was soon closed by the authorities in April 1843, and three months later Marx moved to Paris. His reading of the English political economists made him pessimistic about the economic prospects of the working class. His reading of the French socialists led him to see in the abolition of private property and the establishment of communal and collective forms of labour the way to overcome the alienation of the workers’ labour through the appropriation of its products by the employers. Socializing with radicals in Paris also brought Marx for the first time into contact with Friedrich Engels (1820–95), who became his lifelong collaborator. Marx wrote a number of polemics in the 1840s that reflected the fractious mood of the émigré circles among whom he now moved. It was socialists like Proudhon who were making the running, a situation which Marx’s vehement critique of the Frenchman’s ideas, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), had no real chance of changing. Still, all of these ideas, building on the legacy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution, were to play a part in the revolutionary events that brought the decade to a close.

NATIONALISM AND LIBERALISM

More immediately, however, in the 1830s and 1840s, it was the ideas of nationalism that had the greatest and most disruptive impact. It is common to define nationalism as the demand for a state respondent to the sovereign will of a particular people, but many nationalists in the first half of the nineteenth century stopped well short of embracing this radical principle. Some sought to free their own nation from a foreign yoke. Most persistent here were the Poles, who sought independence from tsarist Russia, the Habsburg Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, which had carved up the dysfunctional Polish state between them in the eighteenth century. But most other nationalists of this type only wanted greater autonomy within a larger political structure, or simply the official recognition of their language and culture. In the Habsburg Monarchy, distinctive national groups like the Czechs and Hungarians fell into this category; none actively campaigned for the dissolution of the monarchy itself. In Finland the Fennoman movement, led by Johan Vilhelm Snelmann (1806–81), a teacher and philosopher who advocated the use of Finnish rather than Swedish in the schools (although he himself only spoke the latter), did not raise any demand for independence from Russia. A second type of nationalism sought to bring together a single nation split into a number of different independent states – notably German and Italian – and here, the demand from the beginning was for complete sovereignty. Of course, these categories were not entirely separate from one another. Uniting Italy meant throwing off the Austrian yoke in the north of the peninsula; uniting Germany meant coming to an arrangement with Denmark and in particular the Habsburg Monarchy, both of which covered a part of the German Confederation but had most of their territory and inhabitants outside it. Still, it is important not to read back later demands for independence into the nascent nationalism of the 1830s and 1840s. Before mid-century, indeed, nationalism for many was as much a means to an end as an end in itself, a means to bring about liberal political and constitutional reform in the face of the conservative order enforced by the Holy Alliance and the police regime of the German Confederation under Prince Metternich.

It would also be unwise to read back into the 1830s and 1840s too much of the later aggressiveness and egoism of European nationalism. Giuseppe Mazzini, the best-known European nationalist of his age, believed in a United States of Europe, composed of free and independent peoples in a voluntary association with each other. The disunity of the 1831 urban insurrections in northern Italy and their easy suppression by the Austrians convinced him that the carbonari, to which he belonged, had to be replaced by a truly national organization, dedicated above all to organizing the expulsion of the Austrians from the peninsula. Living secretly in Marseille, he founded an association called Young Italy, possibly in imitation of the literary movement Young Germany founded shortly before. Despite its conspiratorial trappings, Young Italy had a clear programme – Italian unification on a democratic and republican basis. It also compiled membership lists, charged subscriptions, and employed a courier service to keep members in various towns and cities in touch with one another. Soon the members of Young Italy numbered thousands, inspired by Mazzini’s tireless campaigning, his incessant pamphleteering, and the fact that he was apparently the ‘most beautiful being, male or female’ that people who encountered him said they had ever seen. Metternich declared membership punishable by death. Carlo Alberto, the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, had twelve army officers who were involved in a plot to stage a military uprising under Mazzini’s influence early in 1833 publicly executed. Mazzini himself was condemned to death in absentia and the sentence read out in front of his family home in Genoa. Metternich succeeded in getting him expelled from France, but Mazzini continued to run Young Italy from Switzerland. He now focused his numerous plots on Piedmont: one of them, like so many betrayed to the Piedmontese authorities, involved a young naval officer, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had joined Young Italy after meeting a member on a trading expedition to the Black Sea. Also condemned to death in absentia, Garibaldi fled to South America, where he took part in the ‘War of the Ragamuffins’ in Brazil before fighting in the Uruguayan Civil War.

Working through correspondence, conducted after 1837 from London, Mazzini created individual national movements under the aegis of Young Italy: Young Austria, Young Bohemia, Young Ukraine, Young Tyrol and even Young Argentina came briefly into being. Young Poland played a significant role in the 1830 uprising. The most enduring and important organization of this kind was Young Ireland, a term mockingly attached by the English press to a movement founded in 1840 by Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847); it had nothing to do with Mazzini, who did not think that Ireland should be independent; it eschewed violence and insurrection, and it dedicated itself not to the creation of a new nation but to the repeal of the Act of Union with England passed in 1800. But through the organizations he actually did found, Mazzini had changed the terms and tactics of nationalism. Nationalists had learned to co-ordinate their efforts within each particular country, and a strong dose of realism had entered their discourse, causing all but the Poles to recognize that insurrections were unlikely to succeed by themselves, and that the formation of secret societies was not leading anywhere: nationalists needed a programme and a formal organization, equipped with a propaganda apparatus and aimed at securing democratic support.

Under the leadership of Metternich, the Habsburg Empire continued indeed to be the major obstacle that lay in the path of nationalist movements – in Italy, Bohemia, Germany, Hungary and – along with Russia and Prussia – in Poland. Austria had led the European states in the overthrow of Napoleon; for thirty years, from 1815 to 1845, Austrian dominance in Europe was unquestionable. Following Napoleon I’s abolition of traditional legislatures such as feudal Estates, few outlets remained for popular discontent. The Emperor Franz I refused to introduce any new constitutional arrangements to his domains in northern Italy. ‘My Empire,’ he remarked, ‘resembles a ramshackle house. If one wishes to demolish a bit of it one does not know how much will collapse.’ In central Italy, Gregory XVI, who was elected pope in 1831, ruled the Papal States through a militia of ‘centurions’ who suppressed all criticism of the corruption and inefficiency of his administration. So chaotic was the state of affairs in his dominions that the papal government did not even manage to prepare a state budget for the last ten years of his pontificate. In Piedmont-Sardinia throughout the 1830s and the first half or more of the 1840s, the fear of conspiracy and revolution kept Carlo Alberto of Piedmont on the Austrians’ side in northern Italy. Yet he was pessimistic in the longer run. ‘The great crisis,’ he wrote in 1834, ‘can only be more or less delayed, but it will undoubtedly arrive.’

Avoiding it was one of the aims of the moderate liberal reformers who arrived on the political scene in the 1840s. As with similar figures elsewhere in Europe, they looked above all to Britain as an example. The Milanese reformer Carlo Cattaneo (1801–69), an ex-carbonaro who had turned to more moderate ways, thought that ‘peoples should act as a permanent mirror to each other, because the interests of civilization are mutually dependent and common’. In Piedmont, the most influential of the moderates in the long run was Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (1810–61), a Protestant who had travelled widely in Britain and France and supported economic progress, railway-building and the separation of Church and State. As liberal sentiment spread among the educated classes, above all in northern Italy, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston warned the Austrian ambassador in London that it was time to make concessions: ‘We think ourselves conservative in preaching and advising everywhere concessions, reforms, and improvements, where public opinion demands them; you on the contrary refuse them.’ But change in Italy seemed to be heralded by the election of Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti (1792–1878) as Pope Pius IX on 16 June 1846. The new Supreme Pontiff amnestied political prisoners, relaxed the censorship rules, and appointed commissions to improve the Papal States’ administration, laws and educational provision. His summoning of a consultative assembly sent shock waves through the Italian states. Others followed suit. In Tuscany censorship was partially abolished in May 1847, a legislature was convened following demonstrations in a number of cities, and in September 1847 the Grand Duke Leopold II (1797–1870) appointed a moderate liberal government. In Piedmont, Carlo Alberto granted elected communal councils and limitations on censorship in October 1847. In the Habsburg Monarchy, Metternich’s refusal to relax the censorship rules in 1845 had no effect since nationalist and liberal literature poured in from outside, including French, English and German newspapers. The crisis seemed to be coming. ‘We are now,’ warned the former civil servant Viktor Baron von Andrian-Werburg (1813–58), author of an influential, pessimistic book on the future of the multinational monarchy, ‘where France was in 1788.’

This seemed to be particularly the case in the Hungarian provinces of the Habsburg Empire. The leading reformer István Széchenyi’s Anglophilia made him a gradualist, desiring ‘to change the condition of the fatherland with as little fanfare as possible’. He believed in bringing different social classes together in harmony, a purpose he thought could be fostered by horse-racing, for which he had conceived a passion following a visit to Newmarket – he founded the Hungarian Derby to this end in 1826. Following the Polish uprising and a devastating cholera epidemic in 1831, the Hungarian Diet met in 1832 with a programme of reform, but the emperor vetoed even the modest measures that got through. In 1837 the lawyer and journalist Lajos Kossuth (1802–94), who published Hungary’s first parliamentary reports, was arrested for sedition. This sparked a serious crisis, as Kossuth’s supporters in the Diet forced Metternich to climb down and release him and other imprisoned liberals in May 1840. The same Diet removed legal barriers to the establishment of factories, approved the building of the country’s first railway line, and relaxed restrictions on the occupation and residence of Hungary’s Jews. Further reforms gave Protestants civil and legal equality with Catholics and legitimated mixed-religion marriages. But this did not satisfy the liberals. Kossuth was joined by the leading moderate Ferenc Deák (1803–76), and together they produced a statement of their aims. In the new Diet of 1847, to which Kossuth was elected by a triumphant majority, Metternich felt obliged to make concessions, including the abolition of customs barriers on the Austrian border with Hungary. But it was too late: these measures altogether failed to appease the growing nationalist opposition, and divisions between the Hungarian liberals and the Monarchy’s leadership in Vienna continued to deepen until they became irreconcilable. Within only a few months they had broken out into open conflict.

In Switzerland, reforms passed by moderate liberals whose strength was in the towns and cities of the Protestant cantons ran into fierce objections from the largely Catholic, more rural parts of the Confederation. When the liberals passed a centralist constitution and began closing Catholic monasteries, the conservative cantons reacted by forming a ‘special league’ in 1843, the Sonderbund, in violation of the Federal Treaty of 1815. Both sides began to mobilize, and in November 1847 hostilities commenced. Federal troops captured the Sonderbund stronghold of Fribourg and installed a liberal government, which promptly expelled the Jesuits, as liberal and reforming governments everywhere were wont to do. In the Battle of Gislikon, the last pitched battle ever to involve the Swiss Army, thirty-seven soldiers were killed and one hundred wounded. For the first time in military history, horse-drawn ambulances arrived on a battlefield and took away the wounded. Further skirmishes led to the surrender of the Sonderbund on 29 November 1847. A new, more liberal constitution was passed a few weeks later.

The Swiss Civil War was a foretaste of conflicts to come in other parts of Europe. The revolutions of the early 1830s had only been partially negated by the repressive measures undertaken by Metternich in most parts of the German Confederation, and a good number of the states now had elected legislative assemblies that provided a forum for liberal politicians. Conservative rulers did not appreciate this change in the political climate. In 1837, when Queen Victoria acceded to the British throne, the Salic Law prevented her from doing the same in Hanover, and her uncle, Ernest August, Duke of Cumberland (1771–1851), already notorious for the extreme conservative views he was in the habit of expressing in the British House of Lords, ascended the Hanoverian throne and immediately abrogated the constitution of 1833, demanding an oath of loyalty from all the state’s employees. Seven professors at Göttingen University, including the brothers Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), compilers of the famous folk tales, refused to swear the oath and were dismissed from their posts. Their action achieved nothing in the short run – the constitution stayed abrogated – but aroused liberal sympathies all over Germany. In 1840 the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV as King of Prussia prompted liberal hopes of reform. Oppositional clubs and societies sprang up everywhere, and liberals got themselves elected to previously dormant city councils, which began petitioning the king to summon a constituent assembly. In an attempt to defuse the situation, Friedrich Wilhelm summoned the provincial Estates to a United Diet in 1847, prompted not least by the need to raise more taxes in the middle of the economic crisis of the late 1840s. When he spurned calls for a constitution, the majority rejected his request for tax reform. The king dissolved the Diet, but its potential role as a focus for constitutional reform had become clear.

In Bavaria, King Ludwig I (1786–1868) was becoming increasingly unpopular in view of the repressive, pro-clerical policies of his minister Karl von Abel (1788–1859) – nearly a thousand political trials were held during Ludwig’s reign, which began in 1825. What really undermined the king’s authority, however, was the arrival in Munich of the Spanish dancer Lola Montez (1821–61). Famous for her erotic ‘Spider Dance’, at the climax of which she lifted her costume to reveal that she was not wearing any undergarments, Lola was a veteran of previous affairs with the virtuoso pianist and composer Franz Liszt (1811–86) and (possibly) the novelist Alexandre Dumas. Despite her exotic-looking, dark beauty, Lola was not actually Spanish at all. Her real name was Eliza Gilbert and she was Irish, the daughter of the county sheriff of Cork. She made an instant impression on King Ludwig: when he met her, overwhelmed by her shapely form, he felt emboldened to ask whether her bosom was real, upon which she is said to have ripped off her bodice to prove that indeed it was. Soon she had become the king’s mistress. He showered her with gifts, gave her a generous annuity, and ennobled her as Countess of Landsfeld. When Abel objected (‘all those who plot rebellion rejoice,’ he warned the king), she had him dismissed. The pillorying of Ludwig in popular pamphlets and broadsheets reminded many of the scurrilous attacks on the French King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette that had done so much to discredit the French monarchy in 1789. A similar loss of legitimacy, though without the additional element of farce, undermined other monarchs in Germany too. The refusal of Wilhelm I of Württemberg (1801–64) to grant reforms led to the formation of an energetic liberal opposition, while the stubborn conservatism of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, Ludwig II (1777–1848), led to the victory of an organized liberal movement under the lawyer and former Burschenschaft member Heinrich von Gagern (1799–1880) in the elections to the state Diet in 1847.

The model polity that inspired such men was the liberal state in Britain, according to the German encyclopedist Carl Welcker (1790–1869) ‘the most glorious creation of God and nature and simultaneously humanity’s most admirable work of art’. What impressed European liberals was the ability of the British political system to avoid revolution through timely concessions to liberal demands. In power from 1832 to 1841, the Whigs passed legislation reforming the Poor Law (1834), reshaping the criminal law, and creating a new, uniform system of municipal government based on elected councils (the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835). Over a hundred Royal Commissions were set up between 1832 and 1849, with experts being examined, information compiled, and their reports, published as ‘Blue Books’, selling thousands of copies across the land and providing a detailed factual basis for public debate. When the Whigs were finally ousted in the General Election of 1841, a new kind of Tory came to power as Prime Minister – the efficient, hard-working Sir Robert Peel, who as Home Secretary under both Lord Liverpool (1770–1828) and the Duke of Wellington had simplified the criminal law and famously, in 1829, established London’s blue-uniformed Metropolitan Police Force, popularly dubbed ‘Bobbies’ or ‘Peelers’. Reticent, undemonstrative, upright and rationalist in character and approach, Peel was nonetheless animated by a powerful Evangelical conscience – one which, for example, had caused him to oppose equal rights for Catholics in the 1820s. Peel’s administration set up a uniform currency with notes issued by the Bank of England. The Companies Act of 1844 required companies to be registered and to publish their balance sheets, a necessary measure in an age of manic railway speculation. Peel also put the national finances in order by introducing an income tax, grudgingly accepted by the political class.

If both Whigs and Tories were, in European terms, moderate liberals, then there were also the equivalents in Britain of the radicals and democrats who had emerged on the Continent. Many forms of working-class self-help organizations emerged in the new industrial districts of the country in the 1830s and 1840s, notably friendly societies such as the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers’ Society, founded in 1844, which set up co-operative stores where members could buy goods cheaply. But the most overtly political of these groups was the Chartist movement, so called because it centred on a document called the Working Men’s Charter, drawn up in May 1838 by a group of radical Members of Parliament. Unlike the Jacobins or the Cato Street conspirators or the Utopian Socialists, the Chartists believed in the parliamentary system, but they wanted the House of Commons to be elected on a democratic vote with a secret ballot and equal electoral districts. They found a powerful orator in the Irishman Feargus O’Connor (1794–1855), a sometime MP and advocate of the repeal of the Act of Irish Union. Over six feet tall, with a ready wit, O’Connor appealed to ‘unshaven chins, blistered hands, and fustian jackets’ rather than the respectable classes. At a series of huge meetings, he addressed tens of thousands of Chartists in his booming voice, winning them over with his powerful rhetoric.

The climax of the Chartists’ agitation came with the London convention in February 1839 at which quarrels between moderates and radicals (some of whom wore Phrygian bonnets) revealed a serious split within the movement. When a petition adorned with 1,283,000 signatures, urging the House of Commons to adopt the Charter, was rejected in July 1839, the radical wing became more extreme in its rhetoric, and a number of its leaders were arrested for seditious libel and sent to prison. In Newport, Monmouthshire, the Chartist John Frost (1784–1877) organized a protest demonstration that turned into an uprising when several thousand miners, equipped with bludgeons and firearms, marched on the local jail to free fellow Chartists who had been arrested. Troops were summoned and fired on the crowd, killing more than twenty. Altogether 500 Chartists were in jail by 1840. After a second petition, with more than 3,250,000 signatures, was rejected by the House of Commons in 1842, Chartism died down, and O’Connor turned his energies to land reform. The mantle of the country’s leading pressure group fell on the Anti-Corn-Law League, which enjoyed strong middle-class backing for the ending of import tariffs on corn, and mounted a sophisticated and well-organized campaign that ended in success in 1846. The aristocratic Whigs voted with Peel, recognizing the need for a concession despite their identification with the landowning interest, but a strong minority of Tory MPs, led by the opportunistic young novelist-politician Benjamin Disraeli and counting among its number many gentry farmers, voted to support the Corn Laws and split the party, with the result that the Whigs were returned to office. Chartism was undercut by an improvement in the economy and by Peel’s demonstration through his reforms of the integrity of the political Establishment. Moderate liberals, incorporated both in the English Whigs and in Peel’s reformist Tories, had clearly seen off the democrats and radicals for the time being.

The dilemmas of moderate liberalism were nowhere better illustrated than in France, where its representatives had come to power in the 1830 Revolution. Overcoming the chronic political instability of the 1830s, François Guizot, a Protestant historian whose father had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror, managed to establish a stable ministry in 1840, which lasted until 1848. He became more conservative over time. ‘Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of a want of heart,’ he remarked: ‘to be one at 30 is proof of a want of head.’ An Anglophile who translated Shakespeare and published a collection of English historical documents in thirty-one volumes, Guizot was the arch-apostle of English-style constitutional monarchy. His commitment to the established order was unquestionable. His ambition, one critic said, was ‘to be incorporated into the Metternich clique of every country’. His response to those who complained at not having a vote because they did not have the 1,000 francs a year needed as a qualification, laid bare the materialism at the heart of the July Monarchy: ‘Enrich yourselves!’ The restrictive franchise remained unaltered until the regime’s end. In Britain, by contrast, the electorate was already proportionately larger even before the reform of 1832 (3.2 per cent of the British population as against 0.5 per cent of the French), and the fear of revolution, sparked in London by events in Paris two years before, had brought about a substantial widening of the electorate that for many years defused the campaign for democracy.

Guizot’s main achievement was in the sphere of education, where he laid down the principle that every commune, or group of communes, had to have a teacher-training college and a primary school, with a secondary school in each town containing over 6,000 inhabitants. Yet he encountered criticism for his restrictions on press freedom, imposed in 1835, which resulted in over 2,000 arrests and led to a show trial of 164 seditious journalists. Demands for social reform, he said, were ‘chimerical and disastrous’. The Factory Act of 1841, which forbade the employment of children under the age of eight in factories with machinery, remained the only law of its kind until 1874 and was far from effective. On the other hand, laws were passed to facilitate railway-building, which gathered pace in the 1840s. No wonder that Balzac described the July Monarchy as an ‘insurance contract drawn up between the rich against the poor’. Guizot’s government was beset by scandal, especially in 1847, when it emerged that the Minister of Public Works, Jean-Baptiste Teste (1780–1852), had accepted 100,000 francs from an ex-Minister, General Amédée Despans-Cubières (1786–1853), as a bribe for allowing him to renew a salt-mining concession. Corruption of this kind increasingly called the July Monarchy into question as the decade neared its end.

THE SPECTRE OF 1789

The first sign of a renewal of revolutionary violence was in Poland. The crushing of Polish autonomy by Russia in the early 1830s had driven many Polish nationalists abroad, where the national-democratic ideologies and secret societies of the post-Napoleonic era focused their energies and gave them a purpose. Typical was the Paris-born poet Ludwik Mierosławski (1814–78), whose godfather was one of Napoleon I’s marshals. Mierosławski had fought in the 1830 uprising, and belonged not only to Young Poland but also to the carbonari. After lengthy preparations, his plans for a simultaneous insurrection in Prussia, Cracow and Galicia finally reached maturity in 1846. But the Prussian police got wind of the conspiracy and arrested the ringleaders in their part of the partitioned land. The Austrian governor of Galicia felt too weak to oppose the armed noble rebels of the province and enlisted a local peasant leader, Jakub Szela (1787–1866), who rashly promised an end to serfdom for all who joined his forces. Matters got out of hand as a classic jacquerie of major proportions developed. Armed bands of peasants burned 500 manor houses, butchering their inhabitants and offering the severed heads of the aristocratic landlords to the Austrian authorities, who rewarded them with bags of salt. Altogether nearly 2,000 noble estate owners were massacred. Eventually the Austrian Army arrived to restore order. Szela was rewarded with a medal and a plot of land, and while serfdom, predictably, was not abolished, the revolt had sounded its death knell. An Austro-Russian Treaty signed on 16 November 1846 abolished the status of Cracow, the centre of the revolt, as a free city and merged it into Galicia.

The Galician uprising might have failed, but it sent shock waves across the Continent. Moderate liberals everywhere were spurred into action, fearing that without serious constitutional reform social revolution would overwhelm them. Democrats and socialists saw their chance. Authoritarian governments were shaken out of their complacency and started to make concessions. Underpinning all this were the catastrophic crop failure and potato blight that plunged the European economy into depression from 1846 onwards. Starving and desperate people flocked to the towns in huge numbers. Artisans were thrown into destitution, their income slashed just as food prices were soaring. Compounding this disastrous situation was a massive increase in the number of university students, from 9,000 in Germany during the 1820s to around 16,000 in the 1840s; they too found themselves on the breadline and, just as bad, without a prospect of a job after graduating. The crisis of the late 1840s was also a crisis of the industrial age. The centres of the events of 1848 were all in areas affected by British industrial competition, which was undercutting continental manufactures. The collapse of demand for manufactured goods caused the Borsig railway and engineering works in Berlin to lay off a third of its workforce at the beginning of March 1848, while a wave of bankruptcies swept over the textile industry in Bohemia. Capital cities in Europe were the fulcrum of revolution in 1848, but they were also major centres of industry. Here the formation of a new working class was as advanced as anywhere, and the street demonstrations that drove on the revolution were influenced by the ideas of the Utopian socialists of one variety or another.

Monarchs and princes and their leading ministers expected revolution – some of them had prophesied it for many years – and the expectation all too easily became self-fulfilling. The year 1848 marked the temporary displacement on the European Continent of English gradualism by French insurrectionism. Many people expected 1789 to happen all over again. In conformity with this script, it was in France that the revolution began. Middle-class opponents of Guizot and Louis-Philippe began holding a series of huge banquets, seventy in all during the year 1847, mostly in Paris but also in twenty-eight départements in the provinces, at which speeches were made demanding the reduction of the tax threshold for the right to vote. At one such banquet a large but peaceful crowd sang the Marseillaise outside, while 1,200 electors sat down to a candlelit dinner of cold veal, turkey and suckling pig inside a series of vast tents at twelve tables, each with a hundred places set for the participants, in what a contemporary newspaper described as a ‘truly magical spectacle’. A seventy-piece orchestra played ‘patriotic airs’. Toasts were raised ‘To national sovereignty!’, ‘To democratic and parliamentary reform!’, ‘To the deputies of the Opposition!’ and ‘To the improvement of the lot of the labouring classes!’. ‘What taste!’ exclaimed the writer Gustave Flaubert (1821–80): ‘What cuisine! What wines and what conversation!’ One speaker after another mounted a tribune to deliver speeches denouncing the government. A supporter of the movement made a pointed distinction between the cold veal (veau froid) eaten at the banquet and the golden calf (veau d’or) worshipped by the elite supporters of Guizot’s regime. A satirical broadside imagined conservatives holding their own version of the banquets with beefsteak – a reference to Guizot’s Anglophilia – and brie, an allusion to his own constituency in Normandy. They were clearly not going to consume ‘reformist veal’ or ‘Jacobin asparagus’.

As the campaign gathered pace, its threat to the stability of the July Monarchy became obvious. The political writer and historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59), already well known for his two-volume study of Democracy in America (1835), asked the Chamber of Deputies on 27 January 1848 ‘Do you not smell . . . a whiff of revolution in the air?’ The influence of Cabet and the socialists, he thought, had been increasing rapidly. Ignoring this warning, Guizot’s government decided to outlaw the banqueting campaign. The organizers riposted by calling for a huge procession to precede the next banquet, openly defying the ban on public demonstrations. As the demonstration went ahead, the troops defending the Foreign Ministry, under heavy pressure from the crowd, panicked and opened fire, killing more than eighty of the demonstrators. Within a few hours more than 1,500 barricades had gone up all over Paris. Adolphe Thiers was appointed Prime Minister; but soldiers of the National Guard greeted the king’s attempt to rally them with cries of ‘Long live reform! Down with the ministers!’ The paralysis of the regime was complete. Louis-Philippe went back to his chambers in the Tuileries Palace, slumped into an armchair, with his head in his hands, as Thiers, sunk in gloom, exclaimed repeatedly: ‘The sea is rising! The sea is rising!’ Louis-Philippe gave in. ‘I abdicate,’ he mumbled from his armchair, repeating the words more loudly a few minutes later. Accompanied by loyal troops, the king and his family and a few retainers decamped to the coast, where they were taken in hand by the British consul in Le Havre, George Featherstonhaugh. His whiskers shaved off, his face disguised in spectacles, his body muffled in a thick scarf and a heavy jacket, Louis-Philippe, following the consul’s plan, boarded a ferry, where Featherstonhough greeted him in English in an elaborate pantomime of deception that bordered on the farcical (‘Well, uncle! How are you?’ ‘Quite well, I thank you, George.’) On 3 March 1848 the boat landed at Newhaven, and ‘Mr. Smith’, soon to be followed by other members of his family, began his life in exile. The July Monarchy was over; France’s 1848 Revolution had begun.

While 1789 was in everybody’s minds during these events, the revolution of 1848 differed from its predecessor in many respects. Most obvious was its European dimension. In the 1790s the French revolutionaries had spread their ideas across large swathes of the Continent by force of arms. In 1848 they did not need to do this; revolutions broke out in many different countries almost simultaneously. A large part of the reason for this lay in the vastly improved state that communications had reached by the middle of the nineteenth century. Although still in its infancy, Europe’s railway network, assisted by better roads and faster, steam-powered ships, was sufficiently well developed to make the distribution of news far more rapid than it had been in the 1790s. Improved rates of literacy went along with a huge increase in the number of urban-industrial workers to provide a ready market for revolutionary ideas. Industrialization and the spread of capitalist institutions, compounding the Continent-wide economic crisis of the late 1840s, meant that distress and discontent impacted on the whole of Europe, not just on relatively isolated areas. Thus the French revolution of 1848 was paralleled by similar upheavals elsewhere.

In Italy trouble started on New Year’s Day in 1848, when the inhabitants of Milan, under Austrian rule, followed the principle of the Boston Tea Party by giving up smoking in order to stop the Austrians obtaining revenue from a tax on tobacco. On 3 January a participant in the boycott knocked a cigar out of the mouth of an Austrian soldier. Scuffles ensued and turned into a full-scale riot. In Sicily the official celebrations of the birthday of the king, Ferdinando Carlo (1810–59), on 12 January 1848 were met by crowds building barricades and flying the Italian tricolour amid cries of ‘Long Live Italy, the Sicilian Constitution and Pius IX!’ Peasants armed with rustic weapons streamed in and braved the grapeshot fired from the garrison at the fortress of Castellamare to drive the troops out of the city. All over Sicily, peasants stormed government offices and burned tax records and land registers. Liberals and democrats joined forces to establish a provisional government and call for elections. Ferdinando Carlo shipped 5,000 troops across to the island, stripping the mainland of its defences. The impoverished slum-dwellers of Naples rose in revolt, inspired by the example of the Sicilians. Terrified of what might happen if no concessions were granted, the liberals organized a demonstration of some 25,000 people in front of the royal palace. The royal troops were persuaded to stand down, and Ferdinando Carlo reluctantly issued a constitution that led to the formation of a moderate liberal government. As the unrest spread northwards, Pope Pius IX, faced with crowds shouting ‘Death to the cardinals!’, promised a part-lay government for the Papal States. Leopold II of Tuscany granted a constitution on 12 February 1848 and Carlo Alberto of Piedmont on 4 March 1848.

Although these events in Italy were already in progress, it was the fall of the July Monarchy that really marked the start of the 1848 revolutions. As the news spread across the Continent, ‘it fell’, in the words of William H. Stiles (1808–65), the American chargé d’affaires in Vienna, ‘like a bomb amid the states and kingdoms of the Continent; and, like reluctant debtors threatened with legal terrors, the various monarchs hastened to pay their subjects the constitutions which they owed them.’ In Mannheim huge crowds led by the radical lawyer Gustav Struve (1805–70) demonstrated in favour of the acceptance by Grand Duke Leopold I (1790–1852) of Baden of a petition he had drawn up, demanding freedom of the press, trial by jury, a militia with elected officers, constitutions for all the German states, and, crucially, elections to be held for an all-German parliament. As the petition was reprinted and circulated across the land, its items becoming known as the ‘March Demands’, constitutions were granted in Baden, Württemberg and Hesse-Nassau; Grand Duke Ludwig II (1777–1848) of Hesse-Darmstadt handed over his office to his son Ludwig III (1806–77) in protest, but a constitution was issued there too. King Ludwig I of Bavaria, already in deep trouble because of his affair with Lola Montez, was forced to grant the March Demands when irate crowds stormed the royal armoury on 4 February 1848, but the situation only calmed down when he agreed to abdicate in favour of his son Maximilian II (1811–64). On 6 March, King Friedrich Augustus II (1797–1854) of Saxony was obliged to enact constitutional reforms and dismiss his conservative chief minister. By 5 March delegates from the newly liberalized states were meeting in Heidelberg to organize a ‘pre-parliament’ that would stage elections for a German constituent assembly.

Events were now moving with dizzying speed. Remarkably, the revolutionary wave now spread across to the Habsburg Empire, which had remained relatively unaffected by the French Revolution of 1789. When the news of the Parisian revolution reached the Hungarian Diet in Pressburg, Kossuth immediately demanded self-rule for Hungary under a reformed Habsburg Monarchy. Copies of the speech circulated in Vienna and students petitioned the government for liberal reforms including the participation of the German areas of the monarchy in a new united German state. Four thousand marched with a petition to the centre of the city and tore up the Estates’ own, very mild petition for changes amid cries of ‘No half measures!’ and ‘Constitution!’ Large numbers of workers armed with their work tools marched in from the suburbs, pulling up lamp posts with which to smash the city gates, which had been prudently closed by the authorities. On the main square, the Ballhausplatz, troops were met with a hail of stones and opened fire. Barricades went up and as the workers finally broke through, alarmed members of the bourgeoisie demanded Metternich’s resignation. On 13 March 1848 the Chancellor finally gave in, announcing his resignation in a lengthy speech of self-justification. He left the city the next day with his third wife in a horse-drawn fiacre and made his way in stages to Brighton, on the south coast of England, consoling himself with the thought that at least his reputation had not been sullied by having been forced to cross the English Channel on the same ship as Lola Montez. Meanwhile, in Vienna, the abolition of censorship and the convening of a constitutional assembly were announced by Emperor Ferdinand I (1793–1875) on 15 March.

The ousting of Metternich, perhaps more than any other event, signalled the profound breadth and depth of the upheaval. He had succeeded, more or less, in keeping the lid on protest and revolution for more than thirty years. Now the lid had been blown off in an explosion of popular rage. There was no going back. Governments everywhere buckled then gave way under the strain. The first to react was Archduke Stefan (1817–67), Palatine (i.e. governor) of Hungary, who had been born in Buda and was generally pro-Hungarian. On hearing the news of Metternich’s downfall he summoned an emergency meeting of the Upper House of the Estates. It agreed to demand a new, liberal constitution. Kossuth, Széchenyi and the liberal reformer Count Lajos Batthyáni (1807–49) travelled by steamboat upstream to Vienna in a delegation of 150 to present their demands. Stefan extracted an Imperial Rescript from Emperor Ferdinand on 17 March 1848, agreeing to an autonomous Hungarian government with Batthyáni as Prime Minister. Kossuth pushed events forward by organizing a twelve-point petition demanding parliamentary sovereignty, trial by jury, the end of serfdom, and the evacuation of all non-Hungarian troops. Swollen by a stream of fresh recruits, a 20,000-strong crowd marched on the Palatine’s castle at Buda, where the troops guarding the Vice-Regal Council melted away and the Council accepted the twelve points in full. In April these were ratified in a lightly amended form by the Diet, making Hungary an autonomous constitutional monarchy, with a widened franchise and parliamentary sovereignty, but still with the Habsburg Emperor as monarch.

The Habsburg Empire was now in serious trouble. As in other parts of Europe, a combination of middle-class discontent, popular desperation, liberal ideologies and revolutionary anger provoked an almost irresistible wave of uprisings that rocked an already nervous and pessimistic civil and military establishment to its foundations. In the Austrian-ruled provinces of northern Italy, the news of Metternich’s fall and the end of royal absolutism in Piedmont spurred the liberals into action. As disorder broke out across Milan, with barricades going up all over the city, paving stones torn up and the vice-governor kidnapped, the commander of the Austrian forces in Italy, Marshal Joseph Radetzky von Radetz (1766–1858), a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, deployed his troops at key points and stationed snipers on the cathedral spires. Fighting broke out; insurgents clambered onto the rooftops and began firing at Austrian – mostly Croatian and Hungarian – troops below. As his strongholds fell, Radetzky was forced to withdraw, laying siege to Milan from outside. In Piedmont, Cattaneo’s improvised republican administration was pushed aside by the moderates, who persuaded Carlo Alberto to march on the city (he was keen to incorporate it into a new Kingdom of Northern Italy under his rule, and afraid that republicans would overthrow him if he failed to act). While Lombard artisans and farmers rounded up the smaller Austrian garrisons across the land, the Milanese broke Radetzky’s siege in a bloody, five-day battle, and the Austrians withdrew after a last, vengeful bombardment. The victory was symbolized a few days later by the arrival in Milan of none other than Giuseppe Mazzini, ready to take up in person the cause of Italian unity.

The upheavals spread to other parts of Austrian-ruled northern Italy with lightning speed. In Venice, Daniele Manin (1804–57), a liberal nationalist imprisoned by the Austrians for treason the previous year, was released by jubilant crowds as the news of Metternich’s fall reached the city, and immediately organized a citizens’ militia to counter the violence of the occupying Austrian forces, who had opened fire on the crowds on 18 March 1848. On 22 March, at his prompting, workers in the naval dockyards, angered by the Austrian commander’s refusal to give them a pay increase, rose in revolt, beat him to death, and took over the entire area. Manin declared a republic, and the Austrian (mostly Croatian) troops, withdrew rather than damage the city’s beautiful buildings. Habsburg flags were torn down everywhere and thrown into the canals. These events put enormous pressure on Pope Pius IX to join the war against Austria. The Pope sent an armed force to the northern border of the Papal States, where it was joined by 10,000 young Roman men, inflamed by nationalist passion. Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany was forced to contribute 8,000 troops, and King Ferdinando Carlo of Naples reluctantly sent a naval force to break the Austrian blockade of Venice, while a Neapolitan detachment of 14,000 men marched slowly northwards to join the other armies. In late May, 560,000 Milanese voted for incorporation into Piedmont, with fewer than 700 votes against, a result soon replicated in Parma and Modena. On 4 July, brushing aside Manin and the intransigent republicans, the Venetian Constituent Assembly agreed to ‘fusion’ with Piedmont as well. Italian unification suddenly began to look like more than a nationalist dream.

However, the revolutionaries did not have everything their own way. As northern Italy erupted, the violence spilled over into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where a liberal government forced on King Ferdinando Carlo had formed a citizens’ militia that proved wholly unequal to the task of restoring order. Elections held on 15 May 1848 on a low turnout returned a largely moderate liberal parliament from which Ferdinando Carlo demanded an oath to support the existing constitution. Enraged republicans threw up barricades in Naples, which were assaulted by 12,000 royal troops. In fierce hand-to-hand fighting, 200 soldiers were killed and a larger number of insurgents died as Ferdinando Carlo defeated the rebels. The troops shot many of their prisoners, and extorted money from others, while the urban poor took advantage of the situation to rampage through the city, looting and pillaging amid cries of ‘Long live the King!’ and ‘Death to the Nation!’ Ordered to return to Naples, the Sicilian naval force sent to relieve the Venetians obeyed, along with the bulk of the troops. A minority under General Guglielmo Pepe (1783–1855), a former carbonaro who had fought on Napoleon’s side after the emperor’s escape from Elba, remained, and found their way eventually to Venice to join the forces fighting the Austrians. Yet the republicans had met with a decisive defeat. Worse was to come. Radetzky was told by the government in Vienna ‘to end the costly war in Italy’, but he refused to negotiate. He was encouraged behind the scenes by hardliners in Vienna, led by Count Theodor Franz Baillet von Latour (1780–1848), Minister of War, a soldier descended from a Walloon family in the former Austrian Netherlands. Radetzky advanced his 33,000 troops against Carlo Alberto’s 22,000 at Custoza, a small hill town near Verona. On 24 and 25 July 1848 the Austrian troops drove the Piedmontese down the hill in fierce hand-to-hand fighting. It was the end of Carlo Alberto’s attempt to unite northern Italy. He was forced to sign an armistice. ‘The city of Milan is ours,’ Radetzky crowed: ‘no enemy remains on Lombard soil.’ Mazzini took a different view. ‘The royal war is over,’ he declared in a proclamation issued in August 1848: ‘The war of the people begins.’

Much still depended on what happened in Vienna. Here, events had been moving fast since the fall of Metternich on 13 March 1848. Four days later a constitutional ministry was formed, the imperial police force was restructured, and police spies were dismissed. Food taxes were lowered, a political amnesty was declared, and job-creation schemes were established. But the granting of a constitution by Ferdinand on 25 April outraged the radical democrats, because it still reserved decisive powers to the emperor. By 4 May mass demonstrations, joined by many workers, had forced the head of the new government to resign. When a restricted franchise was announced on 11 May, the radicals’ anger knew no bounds. Impatiently pushing forward the demand for the election by universal male suffrage of a democratic constitutional assembly, the students formed an Academic Legion that soon numbered 5,000 men, while the moderate liberals’ militia, the National Guard, counted 7,000 in its ranks. On the night of 14–15 May 1848, led by the students, a massive crowd marched on the royal residence to demand the revision of the constitution and the immediate holding of democratic elections. Ferdinand and his entourage panicked and gave in. The Cabinet resigned in protest. Two days later the emperor and his family left Vienna at night for Innsbruck. The parallel with Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette’s ill-fated flight to Varennes was lost on no one.

Safely away from the capital, Ferdinand issued a proclamation condemning the actions of an ‘anarchical faction’ and calling for resistance; or rather, it was issued for him, since, though not unintelligent, he was incapable of ruling. He had a severe speech impediment, and suffered up to twenty epileptic fits a day (he had five when he tried to consummate his marriage, and not surprisingly, had no children). One of his few known coherent remarks was a reply to his cook, who had told him that he could not have apricot dumplings because apricots were out of season: ‘I’m the Emperor,’ Ferdinand was said to have replied, ‘and I want dumplings!’ On 24 May 1848 his advisers closed the university in Vienna, then, the next day, they ordered the disarming and disbanding of the Academic Legion. But the National Guard went over to the side of the students, while hundreds of workers descended on the city centre. Tearing up paving stones and carrying furniture out of the houses, the students put up 160 barricades at key points, some of them rising up to the second floor of the houses on either side of the street and topped by red and black flags. The government forces were too weak to assert themselves, and were withdrawn, while Ferdinand and his entourage acceded on 12 August to the students’ demands for his return. Driving from the quayside at Nussdorf to the centre of the city in an open carriage, he was greeted with hisses mingled with barely audible shouts of welcome from the crowds lining the streets. The emperor ‘stared at his knees’, as an observer reported, while ‘the Empress had evidently been weeping’. The serried ranks of the National Guard let them pass without a salute, and the band of the Academic Legion played Arndt’s What is the German’s Fatherland as they passed, instead of the Austrian national anthem. The democrats in Vienna had, for the moment at least, gained the upper hand.

What happened in Vienna was closely bound up with what happened in the rest of the German Confederation, where one state after another had been forced to grant a constitution with full parliamentary rights. The pressure on the largest of the member states, Prussia, was growing daily. On 16 March 1848, when news of Metternich’s fall reached Berlin, panic broke out in the ruling clique. While Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s adjutant-general, Leopold von Gerlach (1790–1861), and the king’s brother and heir, Prince Wilhelm (1797–1888), urged the use of force, the king decided to make concessions, announcing the abolition of censorship and the summoning of the United Diet, in abeyance since the previous year. It would consider strengthening the German Confederation with a national law code, a flag and a navy. But this was not enough. As the demonstrators shouted for the troops to be withdrawn, shots were fired, and soon barricades were going up all over the city and men began to sound the tocsin on the bells of the city churches. On 18 March the Prussian troops mounted a full-frontal attack on the barricades with infantry and artillery, and soon, as an eyewitness reported, the streets were running with blood. By the end of the day 800 demonstrators, the vast majority of them impoverished artisans and unskilled workers, members of the new working class, were dead.

Rather than spelling the end of the revolution, however, the March events only drove it on. The king had not sanctioned the use of firearms, and was appalled by the bloodshed. On 19 March, as crowds bearing the bodies of many of those killed the previous day broke into the Palace yard, demanding to see the king, Friedrich Wilhelm appeared, ‘white and trembling’, and removed his hat amid mocking shouts from the crowd. The scene inevitably reminded people of the crowds that had stormed the royal palace in France in 1789 and forced Louis XVI to bow to their will. ‘Now only the guillotine is left,’ the queen is said to have remarked. But the king’s gesture restored calm. Two days later Friedrich Wilhelm gained further popularity by riding through the streets wearing the German national colours of black, red and gold, and accompanied by numerous officers bedecked in the same insignia. On 22 March he was forced to attend the elaborate funeral of the victims of four days before, again removing his helmet in a gesture of reverence to the dead and submission to the masses. Friedrich Wilhelm gained huge popularity by these gestures; privately, however, he experienced them as a deep humiliation. Towards the end of the month he ordered his troops to withdraw from Berlin, against further protests from the hardliners in his entourage. The city was now in the hands of the revolutionaries.

At this point, however, serious divisions began to open up between the moderate liberals and the hard-line democrats. In the Prussian Diet, elected by indirect though ultimately universal adult male suffrage, the conservatives mustered 120 delegates out of 395, enough to block the policies of the moderate liberal, Gottfried Camphausen (1803–90), a banker appointed head of the Council of State on 29 March 1848. On 14 June violence broke out in Berlin when democratic demonstrators, including many workers carrying red flags, looted the royal armoury. Helpless in the face of continued disorder, Camphausen resigned on 20 June. The diehards were thoroughly alarmed by the Diet’s presentation on 26 July of a draft constitution removing virtually all power from the king and the army and abolishing all aristocratic titles. On 9 August the deputies demanded that all soldiers should swear an oath of loyalty not to the king but to the constitution. As Camphausen was followed by a succession of weak ministers, the outraged monarch began making plans with Gerlach and the conservatives to take back the initiative. Similar cleavages soon became apparent in the national pre-parliament that met at Mannheim on 31 March 1848, in this case between moderate liberal deputies such as Heinrich von Gagern, who envisioned a united Germany as a federation of monarchies, and radical democrats such as Gustav Struve and Friedrich Hecker (1811–81), both from Baden, who demanded a single unitary German republic and the abolition of the existing German states along with their sovereigns. Outvoted in the pre-parliament, the two democratic leaders proclaimed a republic on 12 April 1848, and began raising an army. They were joined by a band of German emigrants from Paris under the leadership of the radical poet Georg Herwegh (1817–75), but they were no match for the 30,000 disciplined and well-armed troops mustered in Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria by the German Confederation, who defeated them at Kandern on 20 April and in a few subsequent minor skirmishes.

Meanwhile, the slow and cumbersome process of creating a national German state continued. The pre-parliament had ordered elections to a National Assembly that met in Frankfurt on 18 May 1848. Each state was left to organize the process the way it wanted, but almost all of them used a system of indirect elections based on a property qualification. This was fairly low, so that some three-quarters of all adult males had the right to vote at one stage or another. The 812 deputies included few out-and-out conservatives, since most of them had boycotted the elections on principle; around half of them were moderate liberals, constitutional monarchists; the rest were mostly democrats, of whom some were more radical than others. Three-quarters of the deputies had a university education, but actual professors numbered only 15 per cent. Fewer than 10 per cent were businessmen, and there was a sprinkling of professionals such as doctors, journalists and the like. In true revolutionary fashion the deputies debated at great length a declaration of rights, finally passed on 27 December, which included freedom of religion, speech, trade, assembly and education, as well as the abolition of capital punishment. It also appointed a Provisional Central Power on 24 June, under Archduke Johann of Austria (1782–1859) as head of state, which began to establish ministries and a national bureaucracy. The road to German unification seemed to be open.

These events made clear the cataclysmic impact of the events of 1848. Europe’s thrones had been shaken to their foundations. Figures like Metternich and Louis-Philippe, who had long dominated the political world had been ousted. Monarchs had been pressured into abdicating, abjuring a large part of their powers, or surrendering their claim to rule by Divine Right and undergoing the humiliating experience of bowing before enraged crowds of their citizens. Representative assemblies had come into being across Europe, and where they had existed already, gained significant new powers. The principle of national self-determination had been successfully asserted in one country after another. Vast and far-reaching social and economic reforms had been put in train in a dramatic expression of the principle of equality before the law. The 1848 Revolutions have often been dismissed in retrospect as half-hearted failures, but that is not how they seemed at the time. Nothing in Europe would ever be the same again after the events of January to July 1848. True, there had been setbacks. But in the summer of ‘the crazy year’, as it was later called in Germany, or, more optimistically, ‘the springtime of peoples’, there still seemed everything to play for.

Map 5. The 1848 Revolutions

THE REVOLUTION FALLS APART

Already by this point, however, it is clear in retrospect that the 1848 Revolutions were beginning to implode under the weight of their own contradictions. The real state of power in Germany was dramatically revealed by events on the German-Danish border, where the Duchy of Schleswig, with a Danish-speaking majority, had been joined to the German Duchy of Holstein, within the German Confederation, since the Middle Ages, under the personal rule of the Danish king. By a lucky chance for Danish liberals, the absolutist King Christian VIII (1786–1848) died in January. His successor Frederik VII (1808–63) was in no position to reject moderate liberal demands for a constitution. Huge demonstrations in Copenhagen forced Frederik to abandon the last remnants of absolutism and appoint a liberal Ministry, abolish the vestiges of serfdom, and declare the union of Schleswig with Denmark on 5 June 1848 with all parts of the Kingdom voting for a national parliament on a broad franchise. All men in Schleswig were to be liable for service in the Danish Army. German landowners in the Duchy declared independence in protest, and German nationalists, above all students, flocked to their support. The Diet of the German Confederation called in the Prussian Army, which marched into Denmark. Diplomatic pressure from Britain, Russia and Sweden forced the Prussians to sign an armistice at Malmö on 26 August 1848, followed by the withdrawal of German troops and the establishment of a joint Danish-Prussian administration in Schleswig.

These events caused a storm of indignation among the nationalists gathered in Frankfurt. Radical democrats told a meeting of 12,000 supporters in front of the Paulskirche, where the parliament was meeting, that the war against Denmark had to continue. The situation now began to turn ugly. On 18 September Archduke Johann’s new first minister, Anton von Schmerling (1805–93), summoned 2,000 troops from Hesse-Darmstadt, Austria and Prussia stationed nearby, and they opened fire on the crowds, driving them away. Sixty people were killed, including the conservative deputy Felix Lichnowsky (1814–48), who was beaten to death by the crowd, his body tied to a tree with a placard hung round his neck proclaiming him to be an ‘outlaw’. An attempt by Struve to revive the radical democratic cause by marching across the Swiss border into the town of Lörrach, where he proclaimed a German republic on 21 September 1848, was crushed by Badenese troops at Staufen. As Struve was taken away to prison, Frankfurt was placed under martial law, the national parliament now depending on Prussian and Hessian arms for its existence. It was all very well for the Frankfurt Parliament to issue laws and proclamations, but the brutal truth was that without armed force to back them, they counted for little or nothing in the end.

The revolution went through a similar trajectory in France, where, following the departure of Louis-Philippe, the poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), who had served in the Foreign Ministry in the 1820s, was chosen by the triumphant liberals to proclaim a Republic on 26 February 1848. He was appointed President, and led a coalition government that included Louis Blanc, the socialist, and a man only ever known as Albert the Worker (1815–95). On 2 March the government declared that all adult males would have the right to vote for the Constituent Assembly due to be elected on 23 April. Meanwhile, Louis Blanc pushed through a measure setting up National Workshops, which were employing 100,000 destitute workers by the end of May in activities such as building roads and planting trees, at a cost of 70,000 livres a day in wages paid by the state. Blanc and Albert set up a labour commission at the Luxembourg Palace to consider demands for wage increases, a reduction of the working day, the abolition of subcontracting and putting-out, restrictions on machinery, and similar, typically artisanal demands. Here was a striking mixture of the new socialist thinking, exemplified by Blanc, with traditional artisan politics reminiscent of the economic controls introduced during the French Revolution of 1789.

On 23 April 1848, alarmed by the turmoil in Paris, and alienated by the new land taxes levied to pay for the National Workshops, the largely rural electorate returned a Constituent Assembly dominated by moderates and conservatives. On 15 May hundreds of demonstrators, including many employees of the National Workshops, invaded the National Assembly to protest. After clearing the Chamber, the Executive Commission closed down the Luxemburg Commission, condemning it as socialist, and then on 20 June abolished the National Workshops. Outraged by this precipitate action, crowds of workers, now deprived of an income, began to gather and march through the streets, where shouts of ‘Napoleon for ever!’ could be heard among the demands for work. Thoroughly alarmed, the Executive Commission asked the Minister of War, Louis-Eugène Cavaignac (1802–57), a professional soldier who had fought in the Greek War of Independence and had moderate Republican views, to take action. While he prepared, the crowds built barricades amid cries of ‘Liberty or Death!’ and choruses of the Marseillaise. Cavaignac rightly mistrusted the National Guard, the vast majority of whom failed to respond to his order to mobilize, and some of whom defected to the insurgents. On 23 June, deploying his 25,000 troops in three columns against some 50,000 insurgents, Cavaignac brought his artillery to bear on the barricades one by one, blasting them to pieces amid heavy carnage. The following day, as the city continued to echo to the sound of cannonades, the Assembly passed a vote of no confidence in the Executive Commission and appointed Cavaignac dictator. Even the most determined Republicans like Alexandre Ledru-Rollin (1807–74), whose violent rhetoric had helped turn the 1847 banqueting campaign against the July Monarchy, backed the general. The Parisian clubs were thrown into confusion. None of them supported the uprising; neither did Louis Blanc, nor Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who had been elected to the Assembly by Parisian workers. Prisoners were summarily shot on both sides. Altogether some 1,500 of the insurgents were killed, at least 2,500 wounded, and 11,727 arrested, mostly to be released over the coming months, with 468 transported to Algeria. Louis Blanc, his standing with the workers destroyed by his opposition to the rebellion, left for London. Paris remained under martial law until October 1848.

What happened in Paris in June had a major impact on events elsewhere in Europe, emboldening moderate liberals and diehard conservatives alike and bringing them closer together in a shared fear of the masses. Everyone remembered how the popular uprisings of 1789–93 had plunged France into the abyss of the Reign of Terror. Nervous liberals were becoming increasingly worried that such events might occur again. But class contradictions were not the only rock on which the Revolution was to founder. Already in the 1840s rival nationalisms were beginning to rub up against one another. This was above all the case in east-central Europe, where the revolutions in Berlin and Vienna gave a powerful stimulus to movements for national unity and autonomy. These movements in turn were to have a major effect on the further development of the revolutions in Germany and Austria, opening up massive contradictions between liberalism and nationalism and giving conservatives and reactionaries the opportunity to recover the initiative. These contradictions were at their most obvious in Hungary, where Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, German-speaking Saxons and Romanians, all present in significant numbers in the lands of the Crown of St Stephen, could not speak or read Magyar. Hungarian nationalists began to advocate the complete Magyarization of these minorities. As one of them put it: ‘Our country, from the point of view of language, is a true Babel. If we cannot change the course of things, and the country cannot be united through Magyarization, sooner or later the German or Slav elements will assimilate our nation, and even our name will be forgotten.’ Rival nationalisms like that of the Croats began to emerge as counterweights to those who sought to impose Magyar as the dominant language, a development that was to store up serious trouble for the future. In the Hungarian Diet of 1843–4, as the law replaced Latin, finally, with Magyar as the official language of government and administration, and enforced its teaching in all secondary schools, the Croatian deputies still insisted on addressing the legislature in Latin, the only form of protest they could engage in and still be understood.

These tensions played a decisive role in the events of 1848–9 within the Habsburg Monarchy. When they were told by Magyar nationalists in revolutionary Budapest that they should ‘consider it an honour to be allowed to become Magyar’ within a liberal Hungary, young Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania organized a National Petition, presented to a crowd of 40,000 on the ‘Field of Liberty’ outside Blaj on 15–17 May 1848. They turned to Vienna for help against the Magyars. The Austrian military commander in the province, General Anton von Puchner (1779–1852), another veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, called on all loyal Transylvanians to rise up against the government in Budapest. Peasants launched a traditional jacquerie, killing Maygar and German landlords and officials. On their side, the Transylvanian Magyars raised a force of 30,000, including border regiments in the army, and began to retaliate, shooting Romanian peasants in mass executions and razing 230 villages to the ground. Puchner’s troops established control gradually, but were beaten back by a strong Hungarian military force when they tried to push on towards Budapest. Altogether the number of deaths was estimated at 40,000.

The revolutionary upheavals of 1848 spread even further east, to Moldavia and Wallachia, the two predominantly Romanian-speaking principalities adjoining Transylvania on the eastern side. The principalities were nominally under joint Ottoman and Russian control, ratified in the Organic Statute of 1831, which had imposed the rule of the princes, or hospodars, from outside. Liberal students and Romanian nationalists, influenced by the radical ideas many of them had imbibed in Paris, formed a secret society called ‘The Brotherhood’ in 1843 to prepare for revolution. On 9 April 1848, following a mass meeting at the Petersburg Hotel in Iaşi, liberal demonstrators issued a list of thirty-five demands for liberalization to the currently reigning prince of Moldavia, Mihail Sturdza (1795–1884). He brought in the army, arrested 300 protesters, had them ‘beaten like dogs’ and deported them across the Turkish border. To back him up, the Russians moved troops into the province. The revolution succeeded in Wallachia, however, where on 13 June large demonstrations toppled the hospodar Gheorghe Bibescu (1804–73) and issued the Proclamation of Islaz. It announced a series of classic liberal principles including the abolition of civil ranks, the ending of capital punishment, and the formation of a provisional government. Acting under Russian pressure, the Ottoman government sent in a military force to the Wallachian capital of Bucharest on 25 September, occupying the city after a brief exchange of fire; two days later, not trusting the Ottomans to finish the job, the Russians moved in as well. Ninety-one revolutionaries were arrested and sent into exile, and many more fled to Paris or across the border into Bulgaria. Britain and France had refused to intervene, the conservative landowners in Moldavia and Wallachia had recoiled in alarm at the liberals’ proposals for the ending of serfdom, and the ultimate objective of the revolutionaries – the unification of the two provinces to form an independent Romania – seemed as far off as ever.

Similar clashes quickly developed in the Habsburg Empire. Slovak nationalists’ demand for the use of Slovak as an educational and official language was rebuffed by the Magyars, and the nationalists’ anger spilled over into a series of violent conflicts starting in September 1848 that ended in the Slovak leaders going over to the Habsburg side. The Austrians roused Ruthenian (that is, Ukrainian) peasants in eastern Galicia against their Polish nationalist landlords by freeing them from serfdom, allowing them a representative Ruthenian Council and permitting the publication of the first-ever periodical in the province written in Ukrainian. Polish nationalists staged an uprising in the Prussian province of Posen in late April and early May 1848, led by Ludwik Mierosławski again, like its predecessor two years before. After a series of minor skirmishes with a large Prussian force sent at the request of the province’s German inhabitants, the Polish insurgents abandoned the struggle, whose only result was the abolition of the Grand Duchy of Posen and its reduction to the status of an ordinary Prussian province. At Frankfurt the moderate liberal Wilhelm Jordan (1819–94) asked pointedly whether the Germans in Posen should live in ‘a nation of lesser cultural content than themselves’.

Other national minorities were not slow to stake their own claims. Nationalist Serbs living in the southern area of the Kingdom of Hungary, encouraged by the neighbouring Principality of Serbia, proclaimed the autonomy of their province, the Vojvodina, in March 1848. Magyar troops crushed the rebellion, massacring some 300 Serbs in the town of Bečej, then marched slowly through the province during the late autumn and winter months, torching Serb villages as they went, and hanging many of their inhabitants, while the Serbs responded with ambushes and surprise attacks. Meanwhile, in Croatia, debates on of national unity with the Serbs led to the calling of a Croatian national congress in Zagreb on 25 March, which proclaimed the abolition of serfdom and called for Croatian autonomy. Conservative Croatian landlords were unhappy about the abolition of serfdom, which the Magyar liberals were advocating. A talented Croatian officer, Count Josip Jelačić (1801–59), an individual with strong monarchist and conservative views, seemed to the hardliners in Vienna to be the man to bring the weight of the Serbs and Croats to bear against the Hungarians. Appointed Ban, or governor, of Croatia, and given command of the Military Frontier, the series of defences against the now faded threat once posed by the Ottomans, Jelačić tried to unite the Serbs and Croats (publicly praying, for example, in both Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholic churches). If, he warned the Croatian parliament, ‘the Hungarians continue to prove themselves to act not as brothers . . . but as oppressors, let them know . . . that we are ready with sword in hand!’ On 4 September he led 50,000 troops across the river Drava into the core territory of the Magyars in support of the Serbs.

What happened in the Habsburg Monarchy also had serious repercussions for German unity. For one thing, the Austrian authorities were in the end not prepared to see the German-speaking part of their empire lopped off and attached to a unified Germany ruled from Frankfurt. For another, problems were also caused by the assumption of German nationalists that because Bohemia was part of the German Confederation and had many inhabitants who spoke German, it would become part of a united Germany. When the German Pre-Parliament at Mannheim invited the eminent Czech historian František Palacký (1798–1876) to join its members and help prepare all-German elections, he responded on 11 April 1848 by declaring that he had no interest in German affairs. ‘I am a Czech of Slavonic blood,’ he declared defiantly. Outraged, the German deputies threatened to use force to bring Bohemia into a united Germany. Meanwhile, Czech and German nationalists began to form separate Czech and German militias in Prague, and the middle classes, many of whose members were bilingual, began to take sides. At this point, the leading hardliner in Vienna, Count Latour, decided to intervene. Like a number of the leading Austrian generals, he had fought in the struggle against Napoleon, and regarded all liberals and revolutionaries as enemies of the state. The man Latour chose to seize control of events in Prague was Field Marshal Alfred Prince zu Windischgrätz, a veteran of the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in 1813 and an arch-conservative who had opposed all the concessions made by the emperor and his advisers. Windischgrätz placed his 10,000 troops in strategic positions around Prague, sparking a protest march on 12 June 1848 led by Czech militia, students, bourgeois National Guards and some 2,500 workers. When they encountered members of the German militias, fighting broke out, and soon barricades went up all over the city, 400 of them in all. German and Czech militias shot wildly at each other, and when a stray bullet killed Windischgrätz’s wife, the Field Marshal withdrew his troops and bombarded the city from the surrounding hills until the insurgents surrendered on 17 June. A committee of the Frankfurt Parliament gave full support to Windischgrätz. Yet the Field Marshal’s conquest of Prague was in fact the first stage of the counter-revolution that in due course would sweep all these revolutionary institutions away.

Windischgrätz had already established communications with Marshal Radetzky and the Habsburg court even before Ferdinand I’s return to Vienna. Jelačić’s army, repulsed by the Hungarians, was now encamped not far from the Austrian capital. After Radetzky’s victory at Custoza in July 1848, Latour and the hardliners at court envisaged a pincer movement of the loyal armies, converging on Vienna and Budapest. They were able to exploit not only the national divisions among the revolutionaries but also the gulf that had opened up between moderate constitutional liberals on the one hand and radical republican democrats on the other. When the government announced a sharp cut in wages, the men employed on earthworks at the Prater made a clay and straw effigy of the Minister of Public Works and set it on a donkey with a kreutzer coin in his mouth and a placard labelling it ‘The Kreutzer Minister’. On 23 August they began a mock funeral procession into the city centre. It quickly clashed with loyal units of the National Guard. Eighteen workers were killed and more than 150 seriously wounded as the demonstration was dispersed. The government followed this victory by immediately abolishing the public-works scheme, though it did make an effort to find alternative employment in the private sector for those thrown out of a job.

This was class war. Terrified middle-class Viennese liberals now began to turn to the monarchy and the army for protection. Taking advantage of the situation, the government arrested leading student journalists and suppressed republican newspapers. It now moved against Budapest, where Jelačić’s invasion in early September had brought Kossuth to power as Batthyáni dithered and Széchenyi, his attempts at a peaceful solution to the crisis brought to nothing, had a nervous breakdown, tried to commit suicide, and was put in an asylum. Caught in an impossible conflict of interests, the Archduke Stefan resigned as Palatine, and the Court sent Field Marshal Franz von Lamberg (1791–1848), yet another veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, to Budapest to replace him. However, on his arrival, on 28 September 1848, Lamberg was beaten to death by an irate crowd as his coach crossed the Danube; his mutilated body was carried in triumph, impaled on scythes, through the streets. This turned Court opinion decisively against Budapest. On 3 October the government in Vienna felt bold enough to issue a decree abolishing the Hungarian Parliament and placing the country under martial law, with Jelačić as imperial commissioner and commander-in-chief. As Latour sent a battalion of troops to Vienna’s railway station to make their way to join forces with him, angry crowds of workers, joined by democrats still sympathetic to the Hungarian cause, tore up the railway lines and blocked their way. Reinforcements arrived and opened fire on the crowd, but the officer in command was killed and the imperial troops were forced to withdraw. There were exchanges of fire on St Stephen’s Square, but the government forces were unable to master the situation.

Seeking to avoid further violence, Latour ordered the gates of the Ministry of War opened and his troops not to fire on the crowd. The hostile demonstrators outside burst into the building, seized him, knocked his hat off, then beat him to death, stabbing and trampling the body as it lay on the floor. Latour’s clothes were removed, and his naked corpse was hanged from a lamp post and used for target practice. The imperial arsenal was bombarded and looted, though only after its defenders had killed many of the besiegers with grapeshot. On 7 October 1848 the terrified emperor and his family fled the city for the Moravian town of Olmütz, leaving Vienna in a state of chaos as the Parliament (whose Czech deputies had decamped to Prague), the clubs, the student committee, the city council and the bureaucracy issued and countermanded orders on a daily basis: for the rest of October, as one observer commented, the Viennese were ‘ruled with placards’.

The end in Vienna came quickly. On 16 October 1848, after Windischgrätz arrived in Olmütz, a new proclamation from Emperor Ferdinand condemned the ‘reign of terror’ in Vienna, in a deliberate reference to the events of 1793–4 in Paris, and gave Windischgrätz, who helped draft the document, full powers to restore order. An imperial army numbering 70,000 surrounded the city and cut off its food supplies. On 28 October it began a sustained bombardment, and started clearing the barricades, while Windischgrätz’s Croatian troops went from house to house, looting and torturing the inhabitants. Meanwhile, 28,000 loyal soldiers, led by Jelačić, also entered the city and quickly cleared thirty barricades in hand-to-hand combat, led by Montenegrin troops clenching their scimitars between their teeth as they climbed over the obstructions. In a few hours of bloody fighting, the city was retaken. Windischgrätz declared martial law, abolished the Academic Legion and the National Guard, banned public meetings, and imposed a strict censorship of the press. More than 2,000 radicals and democrats were arrested; nine were executed, including Wenzel Messenhauser (1813–48), a former officer who had commanded the National Guard throughout the conflict. Another victim was Robert Blum (1807–48), a worker from Cologne who had been employed as a gardener, a goldsmith and an operative in a lamp factory. Blum’s talent for oratory had won him a seat in the Frankfurt Parliament, which had sent him to Vienna to support the revolution; he was arrested for treason and executed on 9 November (the first but far from the last time that this date marked a major turning point in German history).

The resurgence of Habsburg power demonstrated not only the Austrian government’s determination to keep its domains intact in the face of the revolutionary and nationalist tide, but also its utter ruthlessness in going about the business of re-establishing its authority. In Vienna a new government was appointed under Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg (1800–52), Windischgrätz’s brother-in-law and a military adviser to Radetzky. As a first step in ensuring the Monarchy’s future, his government persuaded the hapless Ferdinand to abdicate his throne on 2 December 1848 in favour of his eighteen-year-old nephew, Franz Joseph. ‘The affair,’ Ferdinand wrote in his diary, ‘ended with the new Emperor kneeling before his old Emperor and Lord, that is to say, me, and asking for a blessing, which I gave him, laying both hands on his head and making the sign of the Holy Cross . . . After that I and my dear wife packed our bags.’ He lived out the rest of his life, which lasted until 1875, in the Hradčany Castle in Prague. With order restored in Vienna, the new government turned its attention to Budapest, where in the face of the Habsburg declaration of war on 3 October 1848 and the rampages of Jelačić’s Croatian troops and their Serbian and Romanian allies, who murdered, looted and burned their way across the land, radicals and moderates had united to form a National Defence Committee under Kossuth’s leadership.

Windischgrätz now led 52,000 men slowly down the Danube, defeating a small and poorly equipped Hungarian force and entering Budapest on 15 January 1849. Batthyáni, attempting to mediate, was arrested and imprisoned by the Habsburg general, tried for treason, and after many months in prison, shot by firing squad on 6 October 1849. But the Habsburg armies did not have everything their own way. The Hungarian National Defence Committee removed itself to Debrecen, to the east of the capital. Conscription boosted the strength of the Hungarian Army to 170,000 by June 1849, Hungarian munitions factories turned out large quantities of arms and ammunition, and Kossuth managed to purchase and smuggle in further military materiel from abroad. Insurgents from non-Magyar minorities were arrested and tried; 122 were sentenced to death. Inevitably, the situation played into the hands of the radicals, and as the newly replenished Hungarian Army, now in the hands of competent commanders, began to push the Habsburg forces back, Kossuth declared complete independence on 14 April 1849 and was elected President by acclamation. On 23 April 1849 the Hungarians retook Budapest. The Austrians had left a garrison in Buda Castle, however, towering high above the Danube. Some 40,000 Hungarian troops, armed with heavy artillery, spent two weeks besieging it before storming the heights on the night of 20–21 May 1849, giving no quarter and putting more than a thousand Austrian soldiers to the sword in the course of a few hours. After this humiliating reverse, Windischgrätz was relieved of his command.

The fate of the Habsburg Monarchy hung in the balance. In this desperate situation, Franz Joseph and the government in Vienna took the radical step of going to meet Tsar Nicholas I of Russia in Warsaw on 21 May 1849 to ask for support in ‘the holy struggle of the social order against anarchy’. This was a brief resurrection of the largely moribund principles of the Holy Alliance. The tsar was flattered by the young Franz Joseph’s gesture of falling to his knees and kissing his hand in supplication. More pragmatically, he feared the effect of Hungarian independence on his Polish subjects, a number of whom were serving in the Hungarian Army, some of them in senior positions. The new Austrian commander, the hot-tempered Julius von Haynau (1786–1853), another veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, threw 83,000 men and 330 guns into the fray in the west, while Jelačić’s 44,000 troops, equipped with 190 artillery pieces, advanced from the south. Fully occupied with resisting these invasions, the Hungarians were unable to prevent an enormous force of 200,000 Russians, equipped with 600 pieces of artillery, pushing forward into Transylvania in support of the 48,000 Habsburg and Romanian fighters there. By 13 July 1849, Haynau had retaken Budapest, while the Hungarian government and Diet fled to Szeged in the south. Hungarian appeals for international protection fell on deaf ears. Desperate for allies, the government in Budapest issued a belated guarantee on 28 July that minority languages and cultures would be protected.

It was too late. Haynau’s force soon reached Temesvár, the principal town in the Banat. Here, on 9 August 1849, it crushed a Hungarian army led by the Polish soldier Józef Bem (1794–1850), who had served in Napoleon’s Grand Army and taken part in the 1830 uprising in Poland and in the Portuguese Civil War. Ever on the lookout for liberal causes, he went to Vienna in 1848 and next to Transylvania. Unlike his commander-in-chief, the gifted military tactician Artúr Görgei (1818–1916), Bem had a record in battle of almost unrelieved failure. He spoke no Hungarian, and at Temesvár he fell off his horse and was unable to command his forces at the crucial moment. Escaping once more, he made his way across the border to the Ottoman Empire, converted to Islam, and died under the name of Murat Pasha as governor of Aleppo. This was the last battle of the war. Kossuth resigned and, shaving off his whiskers, went to Constantinople, from where, after a period of house arrest, he took a ship to England, arriving in 1851 to the applause of tumultuous crowds. His English, learned from reading Shakespeare with the aid of a dictionary, was described as ‘wonderfully archaic and theatrical’. After visiting America, where he addressed a joint session of Congress, he returned to Europe, ending his days in Turin; his voice, captured on an Edison phonograph in 1890, is the first recording made in the Hungarian language.

On 13 August 1849, Görgei surrendered to the Russians. Disregarding the tsar’s pleas for clemency, Haynau had 4,600 Hungarians arrested, 1,500 imprisoned for periods between ten and twenty years, served by many of them in irons, and 500 sentenced to death. While many of the death sentences were commuted to long terms of imprisonment, 120 were carried out, mostly by hanging. Kossuth and other leading escapees were tried in absentia and their names nailed to the gallows in a kind of mock-execution. Görgei himself, as the signatory of the surrender, was spared. In the end, the Hungarians had been defeated partly by the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Russian Army, which inflicted on them the final, decisive defeat, partly by the depredations of the Romanians, Croats and Serbs, which forced them to divide their forces, and most of all by the superior discipline, organization and equipment of Haynau’s troops, which were able to draw on financial and industrial resources not available to the Hungarians.

RADICALS AND REACTIONARIES

The recovery of nerve by the Habsburg Monarchy and the reconquest of Vienna and Prague in the summer and autumn of 1848 had profoundly negative effects on the prospects of German unification. On 20 December the Frankfurt Parliament, after many months of discussion, finally promulgated the Basic Rights of the German People, guaranteeing all the liberal freedoms, secularizing marriage, abolishing aristocratic titles and privileges, introducing trial by jury in open court, and abolishing the death penalty. Yet these would prove impossible to enforce. Since Austria and Bohemia had definitively rejected inclusion in a unitary German nation state, the Parliament was left with no choice but to go for a smaller Germany, with the King of Prussia as hereditary sovereign, able to delay legislation but not reject it. Sufficient numbers of democrats were persuaded to support the idea with the inclusion of the vote for all men over the age of twenty-five in the Constitution, which narrowly passed on 27 March 1849. Twenty-eight German states adopted the Constitution, including Prussia, where the newly elected, largely liberal Parliament endorsed it on 21 April. Immediately, however, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who referred to the imperial crown as a ‘dog-collar with which people want to chain me to the 1848 Revolution’, dissolved the Parliament, shortly afterwards declaring that he would never accept an office given him by election rather than Divine Right. This severely undermined the political position of the moderate constitutionalists and played into the hands of the radical democrats and republicans, who now seized the initiative. However, it was striking that they were able to do so only in relatively peripheral regions of Germany, in Saxony and the Rhineland, where the last stand of the radical democrats now took place.

The King of Prussia’s decision to reject the constitution of a united Germany emboldened other monarchs to do the same. But they were not all equally well equipped to back it with force. On 30 April 1849, sending the liberal deputies in Dresden back home, King Friedrich Augustus II of Saxony appointed a hard-line government that sanctioned the use of force to restore order. By 3 May demonstrators had put up 108 barricades across the city, the civil guard had begun to desert the government, and the king and his ministers fled to the impregnable fortress of Königstein, just outside Dresden, from where they called upon the Prussians to restore order. The dismissed democratic deputies now formed a new Saxon government, and revolutionaries flocked to its defence from outside the city. Among those who mounted the barricades was the Court music director Richard Wagner (1813–83), who had come under the influence of the ideas of Proudhon and Feuerbach and saw revolution as a way of creating the ideal conditions in which to achieve his mission as a universal artistic genius. Enthused by the uprising, he declared optimistically: ‘The old world is in ruins from which a new world will arise; for the sublime goddess REVOLUTION comes rushing and roaring on the wings of the storm.’ More radical still was the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. He had arrived in Dresden in March 1849 after first having taken part in the revolution in Paris, then being expelled from Berlin, and finally telling the delegates at the Pan-Slav Congress in Prague in June that they should ‘overthrow from top to bottom this effete social world which has become impotent and sterile’. Bakunin had no sympathy with the aims of the Saxon liberals; he was in Dresden simply because he liked a good revolution.

While Wagner busied himself making hand grenades and looking out for the Prussian army from the top of the Frauenkirche, Bakunin helped build the barricades. It was all to no avail. The Prussian government acted with lightning rapidity, sending its troops to the Saxon capital by train. Some 5,000 Prussian and Saxon soldiers marched in on 9 May 1849, demolished the barricades, and overcame the resistance of the 3,000 poorly organized revolutionaries defending them; 250 of the insurgents were killed in the action, 400 were wounded, and 869 others were arrested. No fewer than 6,000 were prosecuted for offences going back to March 1848, and 727 received prison sentences, many of them lengthy. Ninety-seven per cent of them were native Saxons; outsiders, blamed for the revolt by the authorities, were in fact an extreme rarity. Nearly 2,000 insurgents fled to Switzerland, among them Wagner. He reported that Bakunin ‘had to submit his huge beard and bushy hair to the tender mercies of the razor and shears . . . A small group of friends watched the operation, which had to be executed with a dull razor, causing no little pain, under which none but the victim himself remained passive. We bade farewell to Bakunin,’ he added, ‘with the firm conviction that we should never see him again alive.’ Despite his disguise, Bakunin was arrested, and had the distinction of being sentenced to death twice, first by the Saxons for his part in the uprising, then by the Austrians for his inflammatory rhetoric at the Pan-Slav Congress in Prague. As a Russian citizen, however, he was extradited to St Petersburg, where he was sentenced to a lengthy period of imprisonment in the Peter and Paul fortress, followed by exile in Siberia.

The uprising in Saxony was part of a wave of protest and rebellion against the Prussian decision to reject German unity. In most other parts of Germany it was more easily dispersed. At Frankfurt, the titular head of state, Archduke Johann, refused to condemn the Prussians’ action in Dresden, and Heinrich von Gagern resigned as a minister, leading sixty deputies out of the Parliament on 20 May 1849. The Austrian and Prussian delegates were recalled by their respective governments, and those of the other two states that had rejected the Constitution, Saxony and Hanover, followed suit. The remaining 104 deputies left for Stuttgart to escape the Prussian troops in Frankfurt, but under pressure from Berlin, Württemberg troops broke up the meeting on 17 June, trashing the Stuttgart assembly chamber and tearing up the black, red and gold colours with which it was adorned. In the Rhineland, meetings organized by the democratic clubs and associations demanded the acceptance of the Constitution by the Prussian and Bavarian governments. On the Lower Rhine, barricades went up in Düsseldorf, Elberfeld and Solingen in early May 1849, with machine-breaking a notable part of the insurrection. As crowds released prisoners from the local jails, citizens and militia commanders formed Committees of Public Safety. Prussian troops began bombarding the barricades in Düsseldorf, and, realizing the hopelessness of their situation, the poorly organized insurgents in Elberfeld and Solingen dismantled theirs and went home, while other insurgent forces in the area, including many peasants, also disbanded.

The revolutionaries and democrats were not so easily cowed further upriver. On the Upper Rhine, democratic clubs met in a ferment of excitement on 2 May 1849, establishing a ‘Provisional Government’ in the Bavarian Palatinate after King Maximilian II had rejected the Frankfurt Constitution. Two columns of armed workers and citizens, mobilized by the democrats in Rhine-Hessen, marched to their aid. Soldiers sent to restore order mutinied and joined the rebels. Red republican flags and ribbons were everywhere. Further upstream, the armed forces of Baden mutinied in support of the democrats and forced the Grand Duke to flee to France on 13 May. Declaring Baden to be a republic, the democrat leaders joined forces with the insurgents in Hessen and the Palatinate to try and rescue what was left of the Frankfurt Parliament. The troops were commanded by the veteran Polish revolutionary nationalist Ludwik Mierosławski, aided by Gustav Struve, whom the rebels had released from his imprisonment. Struve raised an impromptu force of students and returned exiles, including Friedrich Engels; they were poorly equipped and ill-disciplined (Engels reported that one regiment broke into a wine cellar and got completely drunk). A force of 30,000 Prussian, Hessian and Württemberg troops invaded the Palatinate on 12 June, brushing aside resistance with their artillery, and reached Baden a week later, defeating Mierosławski’s forces at the Battle of Waghäusel. The last town to resist was Rastatt, where 6,000 democrats surrendered on 23 July 1849. The prisoners were decimated and the 600 bodies of those executed thrown into common graves. Engels escaped to Switzerland along with many others. Mierosławski made his way to Paris. In the following months, no fewer than 80,000 people left Baden for America.

A dialectic of radicalization on the left and military reaction on the right had emerged in many parts of Europe by the later stages of the revolution. In contrast to 1830, popular uprisings all over Europe had been powerful, persistent, and violent enough to shake the foundations of authority to their core. Many democratic revolutionaries were former carbonari, but by the late 1840s they had abandoned their old conspiratorial habits and put themselves at the head of the insurgent masses, just as the Jacobins had done in the French Revolution. But by the later stages of the 1848–9 revolution this was increasingly an act of desperation. And the more the democrats turned to the masses for backing, the more the moderate liberals were driven to invoke the military support of established authority. There was desperation too on the other side: as they recovered their nerve, monarchs and conservatives realized that in some cases they could not turn the tide without outside help. Just as the Russians had intervened with military force to rescue the Habsburgs in Hungary, so too the French, for very different reasons, would intervene to stabilize the situation in Rome. Dramatic events were to occur in both France and Italy before this happened.

These divisions were especially stark in the Papal States. Pope Pius IX had appointed as Minister of Justice the moderate liberal Count Pellegrino Rossi (1787–1848), a former supporter of the Napoleonic regime in Italy in 1815 who had lived in exile in France, taking French citizenship and being sent to Rome by Guizot as French ambassador. Rossi soon became in effect the head of the government and had leading radicals, exiles from Naples, arrested. On 15 November 1848 he was surrounded by demobilized soldiers on the steps of the Parliament and stabbed to death. A crowd gathered outside his widow’s house, chanting ‘Blessed be the hand that stabbed Rossi.’ Thousands of people assembled in front of the papal residence at the Quirinal Palace demanding a republic. Some started firing weapons. The Pope’s secretary was shot by a bullet entering through his office window, and a cannon was pointed at the palace gate. Thoroughly terrified, Pius IX fled to Naples in a carriage, disguised as a parish priest. He withdrew his troops from northern Italy, alarmed by the nationalists’ declaration of the war as a holy crusade: the Austrians, after all, were good Catholics as well.

In Tuscany, moderate liberals tried to hold the ring against a popular insurrection in Livorno, where democrats assumed power following a popular occupation of the arsenal on 23 August 1848. A huge demonstration in Florence forced the Tuscan authorities to agree to elect thirty-seven delegates to the Constituent Assembly on the basis of one man, one vote. Grand Duke Leopold fled, calling upon Marshal Radetzky to help him restore order. Rioters tore down the Grand Duke’s insignia from buildings and Tuscany was proclaimed an independent republic. In Piedmont, democrats pressured Carlo Alberto into repudiating the truce declared with the Austrians after his defeat at Custoza in July 1848 and mobilizing his forces against the Austrians. In a battle lasting all day on 22 March 1849 and until the following dawn, Carlo Alberto’s army of 85,000 poorly trained and badly equipped men was routed by 72,000 well-disciplined soldiers under Radetzky at Novara, north-east of Milan. For Carlo Alberto this was the last straw. After trying, and failing, to die in battle (‘even death has cast me off,’ he complained), he abdicated in favour of his son, Vittorio Emanuele II (1820–78), and left for Portugal, where he died an embittered man a few months later. Radetzky forced a large indemnity on Piedmont, and amnestied all except a hundred of the Tuscan and Lombard revolutionaries. Democrats in Genoa tried to rescue the situation but were overcome by Radetzky’s army, which bombarded their city into submission. For his part, Vittorio Emanuele warded off further domestic pressure by adhering publicly to Piedmont’s liberal constitution and declaring his allegiance to Italian unity (‘I will hold the tricolor high and firm’). This was to pay handsome dividends a decade later.

In the south of the peninsula, continuing social unrest in Naples and Sicily played into the hands of King Ferdinando Carlo. Even after crushing the democratic revolt in Naples in May 1848, he was still faced with a rebellion in Sicily. In classic style, the moderates there created a National Guard to try and restore order, but it was poorly trained and no match for the 10,000 regular troops dispatched by the king in August 1848 across the Straits of Messina. They retook Messina in a six-day bombardment that destroyed two-thirds of the city and earned Ferdinando Carlo the nickname ‘King Bomba’. In Sicily the revolutionary government had chosen the ubiquitous Ludwik Mierosławski to command its small force of 7,000 men, but it was no match for Ferdinando Carlo’s trained troops. Moreover, Mierosławski could not speak Italian and so was unable to give proper commands to his troops. As a Neapolitan fleet sailed towards Palermo, barricades went up, adorned with red flags, but the rebels were divided, and there was little serious resistance: as the young lawyer Francesco Crispi (1818–1901), a radical member of the Sicilian Parliament, complained, ‘the moderates were more afraid of the people’s victory than that of the Bourbon troops’. On 11 May 1849 the king completed his seizure of Palermo, dissolved the Parliament, and re-established his ramshackle autocracy on the island. In Naples he dissolved the Parliament and arrested the deputies.

As far as the remaining revolutionaries across Italy were concerned, this left no immediate option except a republic. As the Tuscan republican movement fell apart in disarray, a force of 15,000 Austrian troops marched in on 26 April 1849 and restored Grand Duke Leopold to the throne. Only Rome now remained. The Pope’s flight led to the proclamation of the Roman Republic, in which Mazzini, elected an honorary citizen by a unanimous vote of the democratic Assembly, played the leading role. Mazzini proved to be an unexpectedly competent administrator, winning general approval for his modest way of life, his probity and his effectiveness. He closed down the Inquisition and made over its premises for the accommodation of the poor, scrapped the censorship and abolished the death penalty, introduced public courts run by lay judges, set up a progressive taxation system and introduced religious toleration. His commissioner in Ancona, a town on the Adriatic coast of the Papal States, Felice Orsini (1819–58), a former carbonaro, restored order in the midst of a crime wave. The American writer Margaret Fuller (1810–50), visiting Rome at this time, called Mazzini ‘a man of genius, an elevated thinker’ and compared him to Julius Caesar.

However, the Pope’s appeal to the international community, now led again by the resurgent monarchies of Europe, did not fall on deaf ears. Surprisingly, perhaps, it was the French who responded. Following the defeat of the Parisian workers and radicals in the ‘June Days’ of 1848, the moderate liberals were desperately looking for a figure who would maintain order while preserving the political achievements of the revolution. They found one in the inveterate plotter Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, whose last escapade had been a botched landing in Boulogne, where he had been arrested on the beach with his armed followers. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he had escaped in 1846 dressed as a builder during restoration work on the fortress where he was incarcerated, and was living in exile in London. In 1844 he had won support from the workers by publishing a book, written in prison, advocating the elimination of poverty by the creation of state-subsidised savings schemes and labour colonies. He also won over the moderates: ‘I desire order,’ he proclaimed. Unprepossessing, dismissed by many as a ‘cretin’, to use the term applied to him by Thiers, and a stranger to France (he spoke French with a German accent as a result of his education in exile in Germany), Louis-Napoleon seemed to be so marginal a figure that the Assembly, on Lamartine’s prompting, had no qualms about passing a Constitution that provided for a popularly elected President even though it was clear he would be a candidate. Yet, skilfully exploiting the Napoleonic legend for his own benefit, Louis-Napoleon, in the elections held on 10–11 December 1848, won by a landslide against the unpopular general who had put down the June insurrection, Cavaignac, and a motley collection of fringe candidates, including Lamartine himself.

The new Prince-President, as he styled himself, of the Second Republic was aware of the need to win over conservatives and monarchists in France to his support, as well as to turn popular hostility to Austria to his own advantage. A French expedition to Rome to restore the Pope to his throne would win Catholic support in France and satisfy liberals and leftists by pre-empting the Austrian threat to do the same. In March 1849 the Assembly approved the sending of an expedition, and on 24 April, 6,000 French troops led by Charles Oudinot (1791–1863), who had fought with the first Napoleon from 1809 to 1814, landed on the Italian coast and moved towards Rome. Mazzini had been joined in Rome by Garibaldi, who had come back from exile in South America the previous August and taken part with his band of 500 volunteers in the fighting in northern Italy. Mazzini put him in charge of military affairs in Rome. Eight thousand troops of the Roman Republic surprised the French on 30 April and drove them back with heavy losses in a fierce bayonet charge, led by Garibaldi himself brandishing a sabre. Further republican victories followed against a Neapolitan army approaching from the south. Louis-Napoleon knew that the humiliation of Oudinot’s initial defeat had to be avenged if he was to continue to associate himself plausibly with the military legend of his uncle. Oudinot moved heavy artillery up to the heights around the Eternal City and began a systematic bombardment.

On 3–4 June 1849 an assault on Italian positions allowed the French to move further forward, and by 22 June they had captured the outer walls of the city. With their ceaseless cannonades causing huge destruction and loss of life, the French entered the city on the night of 29–30 June, beating back Garibaldi’s volunteers, who had now begun to wear the red shirts that later made them famous. Recognizing defeat, Garibaldi told Mazzini the game was up. The veteran revolutionary left for renewed exile in Switzerland, while Garibaldi led his volunteers out of Rome on an epic march across the mountains towards Venice, during which his wife Anita died and most of his followers were captured by the Austrians. They were not treated leniently. The Austrians stripped the skin off the forehead of the renegade priest Ugo Bassi (1800–49), where he had been anointed during his consecration, before putting him in front of a firing squad: ‘I am guilty of no crime save that of being an Italian like yourself,’ he told a papal official before his death. Garibaldi himself managed to make his way to the coast and sail to the Americas, where he eked out a living in a variety of countries over the next few years. In Rome, Pius IX, having by now thoroughly cast off his earlier reputation as a liberal reformer, disregarded Louis-Napoleon’s advice to respect the liberties of his subjects, re-established the Inquisition, forced the Jews back into the old ghetto, and refused to amnesty the majority of the Republic’s officials.

In northern Italy, Radetzky’s victory over Piedmont at the Battle of Custoza a year earlier had left only Venice still in the hands of the revolutionaries. The enforced withdrawal of Piedmont from the struggle played into the hands of the republicans, where Daniele Manin restored order, held elections, and became effective dictator by popular acclaim in March 1849. Some 12,000 troops and volunteers from across Italy joined 10,000 Venetian soldiers in manning more than fifty fortified emplacements that defended the island city from attack by the Austrians massing on the mainland. Manin’s 21,000 Venetian troops were commanded by the Neapolitan General Guglielmo Pepe, whose support enabled Manin to suppress the radical Mazzinian Italian Club in the city and deport most of its leading figures. As the siege went on, however, the Venetians began to run out of food and munitions. Rationing was introduced. Manin tried to get outside support, but only Kossuth and the Hungarians responded, and their forces were in the end unable to penetrate to the Dalmatian coast. Typhus, malaria and cholera began to take their toll on the citizens, 4,000 of whom died in the spring and summer of 1849. Over three weeks in May a massive bombardment of 60,000 shells rained down on Fort Marghera, on the causeway to the mainland, until the defenders were forced to abandon it. Moving their heavy artillery slowly into position, the Austrians fired a thousand cannonballs into the city on 29 July 1849. Recognizing the inevitable, Venice surrendered to Radetzky on 22 August, on relatively generous terms that allowed Manin and the other leaders to embark on a steamer to take them into exile. About 8,000 Austrian troops had died in the conflict, from enemy action or disease, and almost as many Venetians. As in other parts of the Habsburg domains, the ruthless determination and military superiority of the Austrian and allied forces had preserved the integrity of the empire. Few would have thought at the time that these events in fact spelled the beginning of a long crisis that within twenty years was to destroy the Habsburgs’ position not only in Germany but in Italy as well.

By September 1849 the revolutions everywhere were over. Only in France was there a coda. After his election as President of the Second Republic in December 1848, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte dissolved the National Assembly and secured a conservative majority in the elections of May 1849, building on the right-wing inclinations of the countryside. Packing his administration with former Orléanists, he rode the storm of democratic protest, led by the indefatigable Ledru-Rollin, that broke over him when his troops crushed the Roman Republic at the end of June 1849. On 11 June a crowd of 25,000 people singing the Marseillaise and including both Karl Marx and Alexander Herzen marched on the Assembly but was dispersed by cavalry. Only in Lyon, where artillery was used to destroy barricades put up by silk weavers, was there serious violence, involving fifty deaths and 1,200 arrests. Louis-Napoleon responded by introducing curbs on the press and on clubs, and introduced a law requiring three years’ domicile as a qualification for voting, thus disenfranchising many electors in the often migratory urban working class. Two-thirds of Parisian electors lost their right to vote, and nearly three million across the country as a whole. Ledru-Rollin fled to England, while Republican deputies were arrested and imprisoned in France.

Travelling round the country from 8 August to 12 November 1850 rallying support for himself, Louis-Napoleon declared that ‘the name of Napoleon is in itself a programme. At home it means order, authority, religion and the welfare of the people; and abroad it means national self-respect.’ A petition with 1.5 million signatures demanding the revision of the Constitution to extend his term of office as President failed to win the required two-thirds majority in the Assembly, so Louis-Napoleon began preparing a coup d’état, buoyed by shouts of Vive l’Empereur! that had greeted him on his travels. On the night of 1–2 December 1851 he had opposition leaders including Thiers arrested, and the Assembly dissolved. Uprisings all over south-eastern and central France followed, and were effectively put down by the army; they justified Louis-Napoleon’s pose as the guarantor of order. His propaganda condemned Republicans for instigating the violence and his police arrested 27,000 protesters, 3,000 of whom were imprisoned, 9,530 exiled to Algeria, and 239 sent to the penal colony of Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Louis-Napoleon issued a proclamation condemning the Assembly for factionalism and corruption while at the same time appealing to democrats by restoring universal male suffrage. On 20 December 1851 a plebiscite resulted in 7.5 million votes approving his actions and only 640,000 against. Some 1.5 million electors had not voted, however, and the opposition was undoubtedly hamstrung by the imposition of martial law in most of the French departments. Another plebiscite in November 1852 approved his inauguration as Napoleon III, Emperor of the French (the numbering reflected the fiction that Napoleon I’s son had reigned after his father’s death until his own untimely demise in 1832). Victor Hugo referred to him sarcastically as ‘Napoleon the Little’ and was forced to flee to Brussels for his pains, going eventually to the Channel Islands, where he completed his great novel Les Misérables (1862). The new emperor had chosen for his self-crowning the anniversary of his uncle’s victory at Austerlitz and his own coup the year before. Comparing the events of 1851 with Napoleon I’s coup against the First Republic in 1799, Karl Marx commented caustically that history was repeating itself, ‘the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’. This was neither the first nor the last time that Napoleon III’s critics underestimated his singular abilities.

THE LIMITS OF CHANGE

Almost everywhere, the bourgeois liberals who led the revolution took their inspiration from British parliamentarianism, which underpinned Britain’s world hegemony and industrial growth, while radicals and democrats were inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789–93. Moderate liberals sought the destruction of inherited authoritarian constitutions and the end of traditional, legally inscribed social hierarchies, while more radical spirits wanted a democratic republic. At the beginning, whatever their constitutional beliefs, revolutionaries everywhere thought of themselves as enrolled in the same causes. Some, like Bakunin or Mierosławski, even moved from country to country, taking part in several revolutionary events in the course of a few months. In many parts of Europe, too, veterans of the Napoleonic Wars re-emerged, to fight for or against the revolution according to their personal history and ideological past. The 1848 Revolutions broke out in the middle of a deep and widespread period of economic malaise that drove the impoverished masses to desperation and created a massive crisis of confidence in government in one state after another. The crisis hit Europe at a time when monarchs, from the weary Louis-Philippe in France to the nervous Friedrich Wilhelm IV in Prussia, from the epileptic Ferdinand I in Austria to the irresponsible Ludwig I in Bavaria, were peculiarly unfit to deal with it. Governments everywhere were paralysed by the memories of 1789. Revolution seemed inevitable and so they bowed to its historical force.

After decades in which they had made concessions to reform too slowly and too reluctantly, failing to address the key issues of economic distress and political participation, established governments were overwhelmed by the twin forces of moderate liberalism and democratic republicanism. Mass demonstrations, mounted by hundreds of thousands of disaffected workers and the urban poor, drove on the revolution in the major cities, just as they had in Paris in 1789–93. Everywhere, the moderate liberals established citizens’ militias to carry out the twin tasks of replacing the trained armed forces of absolutist monarchs and to restore and maintain order on the streets. Inspired by the constitutional monarchist political model of the United Kingdom, the most politically powerful and economically advanced nation in the world, they sought to harness the forces of revolution for the politics of reform. Many of the reforms they tried to implement – trial by jury in open court, the abolition of the death penalty, parliamentary sovereignty, popular representation, free trade, the removal of import tariffs – were generally acceptable to the population at large; others were not. The liberals’ ambivalent attitude towards state intervention to provide jobs for the unemployed and cheap food for the masses did not go unnoticed and helped fuel the anger of demonstrators. The creation everywhere of a National Guard or citizens’ militia proved a double-edged sword, with the men enrolled in its service wavering in their allegiances between the forces of order and the fighters on the streets.

Strikingly, the demonstrators did not on the whole call for a return to the days of guild regulations and restrictions. Their demands for state intervention in society looked forward to a new democratic world rather than back to the old society of ordered social hierarchies and legally demarcated economic functions. Most of the statistics we possess on the composition of the crowds strongly suggest a powerful element of the new working class in them. The great majority of the 727 people condemned for their part in the revolution in Saxony, for example, belonged to the nascent working class: 19 per cent were master artisans, 26 per cent journeymen, 12 per cent ‘artisans’ and 12 per cent ‘workers’; almost all of these in practice would have been factory workers. Saxony was the most industrially advanced part of Germany at this time, and the revolution there was more radical than most; the commitment of these workers to republican and democratic revolution was testimony to the depth of the economic crisis that had overtaken them. The rioters of the June Days in Paris were a similar random mixture of impoverished artisans and factory workers, most of them unemployed. All over Europe the disenfranchised built barricades to assert their claim to authority over urban space, establishing their power not just over the streets but also over the state, represented by the buildings ranged along them. In one city after another, barricades proved perhaps the most successful means of asserting popular sovereignty in a world where moderate liberals, restricting the franchise to a minority of the propertied wherever they could, denied it.

In the end, hastily assembled and poorly trained citizen militias proved no match for the disciplined and well-equipped forces of the professional armies, whose loyalty to the established state remained overwhelmingly intact. The monarchs recovered their nerve, having lost confidence in the liberals to maintain order. They were pushed to reassert their authority by a determined minority of diehard army officers and bureaucrats who regarded compromise as weakness and undermined it behind the backs of newly appointed liberal governments. There was little the revolutionaries could do to stop them regaining power. The revolutions of 1848 have sometimes been dismissed by historians as half-hearted, timid affairs, but the violence of the crowds, the lynching of hated royal officers, ministers and bureaucrats, and the storming of palaces and offices all over Europe, showed little evidence of reluctance to use force. Yet the ruthlessness and lack of inhibition shown by the armed forces of the old order far outweighed the violence of the crowds, in the face of which moderate liberals in most parts of Europe, with the notable exception of Hungary, gravitated towards the traditional forces of order. Democrats’ attempts to ride the tiger of popular insurrection only pushed moderate liberals further in the direction of counter-revolution. Memories of the Reign of Terror exercised by Robespierre in 1793–4 were simply too strong.

The revolutionaries were also undermined by the failure of the peasantry in most parts of Europe to lend their support to them. In many countries, most notably France, serfdom had long since been abolished or, as in Prussia and Austria, watered down by attrition until only its last vestiges remained. The peasants did not harbour the overwhelming sense of grievance that powered them during the great French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917. Most of the Prussian troops who crushed the revolution of 1849 in the Rhineland came from rural backgrounds. In Italy, Garibaldi found no support from the peasantry in his attempt to wage a guerrilla war against the Austrians after the defeat at Custoza: ‘I saw,’ he later wrote, ‘how little the national cause inspired the local inhabitants of the countryside.’ It was Tuscan peasants who crushed the republican movement in Florence, called in by moderate liberals seeking to restore Grand Duke Leopold in April 1849. In France the peasantry, accorded the vote by the Second Republic’s introduction of universal adult male suffrage, backed the forces of order and voted for Louis-Napoleon. In Poland the peasants massacred the nationalist landowners in 1846 and refused to support them two years later. In Habsburg central Europe the Monarchy’s emancipation orders left peasants with nothing further to fight for. By 1848, moreover, landownership was no longer identified exclusively with aristocracy as it had been in the eighteenth century. Many estates had been bought up by newly wealthy bourgeois, blurring the contours of social hierarchy. Moderate liberals, including landowners, were keen to privatize the countryside, abolishing common grazing rights and introducing a free market to override customary practice. This did not endear them to the peasantry either. Peasant revolts broke out in 1848 in the areas where grievances still remained to be remedied, but they failed by and large to connect with the revolutionaries of the liberal middle class.

Most serious of all were the divisions that so quickly opened up in the revolutionary camp: not merely between liberals and democrats, or constitutional monarchists and republicans, but above all between rival nationalisms. The principle of national self-determination ran up against the confusion of national boundaries in many parts of Europe. An historic entity such as the lands of the Crown of St Stephen clashed with the existence of linguistic groups like the Serbs or the Romanians that both lived within it and crossed its borders. Germans and Magyars considered themselves superior to smaller and, as they thought, less advanced nations like the Czechs or the Croats. The Habsburgs in particular were able to exploit these cleavages to their own advantage. The core of the European resistance to nationalism, democracy and parliamentarianism was indeed located in Vienna; and the Habsburg Monarchy came out of the conflicts of 1848–9 with its integrity intact and its position as Europe’s hegemonic power restored. Yet the revolutions contained the seeds of the empire’s decay. For it had become clear to many German nationalists in particular that a German nation state would have to be constructed outside the empire, without Austria or Bohemia. This would require strong action to expel these Habsburg lands from the German Confederation, and that in turn would require the leadership of Prussia. In a similar way, Italian unification had been frustrated largely by the intransigence of the Habsburgs; the peninsula’s wealthiest and most advanced state, Piedmont, remained the obvious leader of the unification process, but it had proved incapable of expelling the Austrians from northern Italy, and foreign aid, most obviously from France, would be required if the process were to succeed. For the moment, however, both German and Italian unification were off the European agenda.

The spirit of 1848 affected some parts of Europe in different ways and with a different chronology from the main course of events. In Spain, periodically racked by the Carlist Wars, moderate liberal hegemony had become imperilled by the authoritarian habits of General Ramón Narváez (1800–68), who presided over a constitutional reform in 1845 that limited the vote to the propertied classes, centralized the administration, reformed state finances and embarked on colonial wars in north Africa. Terrified that the 1848 Revolutions might spread to Spain, he muzzled the press, made frequent use of police spies, and ruled by decree. When asked on his deathbed whether he wished to forgive his enemies, he replied: ‘I have no enemies: I have shot them all.’ In February 1854, however, as economic depression hit the country, street protests began in Zaragoza and spread to other parts of Spain. More than 500 barricades were erected in Madrid, and Barcelona was similarly in uproar. In the south, General Leopoldo O’Donnell (1809–67), a descendant of Irish Catholic immigrants, ‘pronounced’ against the government, declaring ‘that we wish to lift from the populations the centralization that is devouring them.’ The political power of the military, significantly greater than in most other parts of Europe, ensured his success, sweeping him to power together with another progressive liberal general, Baldomero Espartero (1793–1879), victor in the First Carlist War. However, Queen Isabella’s continual vacillation between progressives and moderates gradually turned the military leadership against her. The collapse of the railway boom that had sustained O’Donnell’s leadership prompted another military revolution, backed by popular uprisings. In 1869 the victorious democrats pushed through a new Constitution – the sixth to be passed in Spain in the course of the nineteenth century – providing for universal male suffrage and all the classic liberal freedoms. They stopped short of introducing a Republic, but as one of the leading democrats remarked, ‘to find a democratic king in Europe is as hard as to find an atheist in Heaven!’ The search, perhaps unexpectedly, was to lead within a few months to the outbreak of a major European war.

Elsewhere in southern Europe, Greece had already experienced its liberal revolution in 1843, when a conspiracy of leading civilian politicians and army veterans of the War of Independence in the 1820s staged a bloodless coup against the ‘Bavarocracy’ of German officials brought in by King Otto when he had been imposed on the country by the Great Powers in 1832. Storming out of their barracks, the soldiers gathered below Otto’s palace window, shouting ‘Long live the Constitution!’ Reluctantly, the king yielded, appointing one of the leading conspirators, Andreas Metaxas (1790–1860), Prime Minister in what was now a constitutional monarchy with a restored legislative assembly elected by universal male suffrage. Otto never fully accepted the Constitution, and his continued intrigues against it, combined with his failure to produce an heir, eventually led to another conspiracy that overthrew him in 1863. Told to accept this fait accompli by Britain and France, who had called the shots in Greece throughout his reign, Otto went back to Munich, where he would regularly appear in the Bavarian Court in traditional Greek dress until his death in 1867.

Greek independence was guaranteed by the Great Powers, but remaining European parts of the Ottoman Empire were beginning to experience disturbances, notably Albania. Here the Ottoman reform programme known as the Tanzimat, begun in 1839, imposed new taxes and centralized the administration, disempowering local feudal magnates and introducing Anatolian administrators who had no connection with the country and did not even speak the language. Huge resentment was caused by the Ottoman administrators’ attempts to disarm the population, almost all of whom were used to carrying guns, and to recruit young men into the Ottoman Army. The arrest of refractory Albanian leaders led to an uprising in 1843 that drove Ottoman officials from most of the major towns. After three weeks of fierce fighting, the town of Kalkandelen fell to the rebels and became the headquarters of the Albanian Great Council, which demanded the rescinding of the reforms. The sultan sent an armed force to bring the Albanians to heel, commanded by Omer Pasha (1806–71), an ethnic Serb, originally called Mihajlo Latas, who had served in the Austrian Army on the Military Frontier but fled to Bosnia when he and his father were charged with embezzlement. He was described by his enemies as a ‘careerist, with the zeal of the mercenary’. Omer Pasha brought together a force of 30,000 men, shelled Kalkandelen for several weeks, arrested the rebel leaders, and ended the uprising. This was anything but a liberal revolution, and it does not even seem to have provoked the development of a nationalist ideology among the Albanians, who possessed neither a functioning state nor an education system, and could not even agree on a common alphabet. Most disputes in Albania continued to be settled not by the law but by blood feuds.

This was a rather different situation to that of Bosnia, despite the similar origins of revolt in the resentment of Muslim landowners at the introduction of the Tanzimat and the imposition of military conscription. Here a Bosnian Muslim national identity had begun to emerge after the uprising of 1831, powerfully boosted by the resistance movement led by the Vizier of Herzegovina, Ali Rizvanbegović (1783–1851), who now declared that if the reforms were imposed, ‘Bosnia would cease to be Bosnian in thirty years.’ ‘Mostar,’ he announced to the Bosniaks, ‘is your Istanbul.’ Here too the Ottomans sent Omer Pasha to crush the rebellion. He entered Sarajevo in May 1850 at the head of an army of 8,000 men, including many Islamicized Poles and Hungarians who had fled to Istanbul in 1849, accompanied by 2,000 Albanian irregulars and armed with thirty-four modern cannon. Fierce but uncoordinated resistance from the local Bosnian magnates followed, over two years of brutal civil war, in which Omer Pasha reduced one rebel stronghold after another. So fierce was the fighting that Omer Pasha advised a friend to avoid eating fish from the river Sava, ‘for they have been feeding on Bosniak flesh which I drove into the river’. As his troops plundered and pillaged their way across the country, imposing huge fines on rebel towns, Omer Pasha turned his headquarters at Travnik into ‘one enormous prison’. ‘Not a single office of state is now held by a Bosniak’, it was reported. Rizvanbegović, who was in his late sixties, was forced to walk in chains for over ninety miles before being shot dead. Heavy taxes and billeting of troops reduced Bosnia to a state of destitution. ‘Sarajevo,’ one commentator noted after Omer Pasha’s victory, ‘is dead.’

Some countries remained relatively little affected by the events and ideas of 1848. In Sweden there were riots on the streets of Stockholm in 1848, but the crisis was partly defused by the fact that King Oscar I (1799–1859), who had acceded to the throne in 1844, was himself known to have liberal inclinations; his proposals for introducing a parliamentary system were rebuffed by the traditional Estates, however, and it was not until the early 1860s that the measure was successfully introduced, by Oscar’s son Karl XV (1826–72), transforming Sweden into a constitutional monarchy. In Norway, which fell under the Swedish Crown, a largely peasant society enjoyed considerable autonomy following the constitutional changes of 1814 and their confirmation after the ‘Battle of the Square’ in 1829, and avoided the upheavals of 1848. The opposite situation obtained in Russia, where Nicholas I tightened the censorship and called up extra troops on hearing of the outbreak of revolution in Paris in 1848; in any case, however, the development of civil society in Russia had not reached a stage where a mass insurrection or a bourgeois liberal revolt was possible. In the realm of ideas, matters were different, and a number of Russian radicals – most notoriously, of course, Bakunin – took inspiration from the revolution as well as some of the ideas that circulated on its fringes.

In Britain the economic crisis of the late 1840s prompted a revival of the Chartist movement, which staged a series of massive demonstrations in Glasgow and London, with railings being torn up and shop windows smashed. Rioters in Manchester attacked a workhouse, and a national Chartist Convention staged a demonstration in South London in April 1848 attended by an estimated 150,000 people. Alarmed by the possibility that the marchers might try to emulate their counterparts in Paris, the government recruited 100,000 special constables (including Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, just before his return to France) to prevent the demonstrators moving across the river. But the demonstration ended peacefully, and the movement was publicly ridiculed when it was revealed that many of the two million names on the petition it presented to Parliament were fakes, including ‘Queen Victoria’ and ‘Mr. Punch’. Nevertheless, the government passed new legislation banning public meetings and strengthening the law on treason, and a group of ultra-radicals around the mixed-race tailor William Cuffay (1788–1870), a descendant of slaves, were arrested after a police spy revealed their plans to stage an insurrection. Cuffay was transported to Tasmania, taking with him a volume of Byron’s poetry presented to him by London Chartists ‘as a token of their sincere regard and affection for his genuine patriotism and moral worth’.

The British governments of the period, anxious not to impose extra tax burdens on the population at a time of economic hardship and potentially rising discontent, cut back sharply on expenditure on the large armed forces kept in the colonies, and stopped subsidising colonial planters and sugar growers at the expense of domestic consumers by an extension of free trade to the colonies. This in turn caused widespread unrest in the colonies, with Jamaican planters refusing to pay taxes and the governor of Canada pelted with eggs, while rebellious Anglo Loyalists burned down the parliament building in Montreal. The British colonial power’s imposition of fresh taxes in Ceylon, again to avoid extra burdens at home, sparked a massive rebellion, in which 20,000 armed Buddhists tried to impose the indigenous Kandian monarchy and were crushed by colonial troops; their leader was shot in full robes and his body left hanging from a tree for four days. In Malta and the Ionian islands, both ruled by Britain, governors prudently introduced liberal constitutional reforms to prevent the revolution spreading from the mainland. Further afield, Boer farmers in Natal, encouraged by their ‘observance of the state of affairs in Europe’, as the governor of Cape Town, Sir Harry Smith (1787–1860), noted, rose in rebellion in 1848 against the introduction of English settlers into the area; when he defeated them, Smith observed complacently that Britain was more capable of uniting its various territories than Germany was.

Moderate liberals across Europe continued after 1848, indeed, to point to Britain’s gradualist reforms as the way to defuse social tension. For mid-Victorian Britons, the idea of progress legitimized the nation’s global hegemony and informed the politics of improvement. Lord Palmerston, a leading figure in the Whig governments of the late 1840s and 1850s, and Prime Minister (with a short break in the middle) from 1855 to 1865, encouraged liberal movements on the European Continent in the belief that the British model of society and politics was the way to be followed by all. ‘We have shown the example,’ he declared,

of a nation, in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness the lot which Providence has assigned to it; while at the same time every individual of each class is constantly striving to raise himself in the social scale – not by injustice and wrong, not by violence and illegality, but by preserving good conduct, and by the steady and energetic execution of the moral and intellectual faculties with which his creator has endowed him.

The class warfare waged by the Chartists in the 1840s was indeed replaced in the 1850s by the steady pressure exercised by the new model trade unions such as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, founded in 1851, which avoided strikes and focused on encouraging thrift among their members with a view to building up insurance funds to be dispensed in time of hardship. The ‘Junta’ of new, moderate union leaders based in London insisted that ‘the riots of the rough population have but very little bearing on the claims of such societies as the Amalgamated Engineers or the Amalgamated Carpenters’. The fundamental principle of the age was individual advancement, and its Bible was Self-Help: with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859) by the Scottish journalist, railway administrator and ex-Chartist Samuel Smiles (1812–1904). ‘Every human being,’ declared Smiles, ‘has a great mission to perform, noble faculties to cultivate, a vast destiny to accomplish. He should have the means of education, and of exerting freely all the powers of his godlike nature.’ The book sold 20,000 copies in its first year of publication, and 250,000 by the time of its author’s death.

The social harmony and liberal individualism of the 1850s and 1860s in Britain were reflected in the relative stability of the political system, in which the Whigs were largely dominant following the split in the Tory Party over the Corn Laws in 1846, though internal divisions and frequent dependence on the radicals weakened their effectiveness. Parliamentary sovereignty, celebrated in the treatise The English Constitution (1867) by the businessman and journalist Walter Bagehot (1826–77), was unchallenged, and so the improvement of the parliamentary system proceeded at a steady pace, cementing the dominance of the House of Commons in public life. Corrupt practices during elections were reduced by the outlawing of bribery in elections in 1854 (though it was not until 1883 that it was eliminated altogether), while the secret ballot was introduced in 1872 and the uneven distribution of seats according to population rectified in 1867. Party allegiances were shifting and unclear, but minority Tory administrations never lasted very long. After the death of Sir Robert Peel in 1850, his followers slowly gravitated towards the Whigs, but it was really Palmerston’s popularity in the country that counted for most. The relative weakness of British governments in these decades reflected a wider scepticism about the role of government in a society based on freedom of enterprise, a scepticism underlined by the rigorous financial policies of the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1852 to 1855 and again from 1859 to 1866, William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98), who had come over to the Whigs with the Peelites. Over this long period, he abolished hundreds of tariffs and excise duties and reduced income tax to four pence in the pound. Money, he believed, should not be handed over to the state to waste, but should be allowed to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’. Further reforms included the liberation of the press through the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers (1855) and the ending of paper duty (1861), measures that hugely increased the circulation of the dailies, and in 1857 the imposition of duties on inherited estates. All of this made Gladstone a popular figure among the working classes and their representatives and paved the way for his electoral successes after he became leader of the Liberal Party (as the Whigs were rechristened in 1859) two years after the death of Palmerston in 1865.

By this time, the central political rivalry of the period had emerged, between Gladstone and the Tory leader Benjamin Disraeli, a novelist of Jewish origin whose rise to fame owed an enormous amount to his oratorical abilities and to the fact that he had taken the lead in the opposition to Sir Robert Peel within his own party. As Tory governments were led from the House of Lords by the sickly Earl of Derby, Disraeli came to be the party’s effective leader in the House of Commons. As such, he steered through a second Parliamentary Reform Bill in 1867, which increased the electorate by 88 per cent, from just over one to just under two million adult men, and abolished many remaining abuses. Vast but peaceful crowds demonstrated in favour of the Bill, whose provisions were widened beyond its original scope in a series of amendments designed to appease the demands of a working class that politicians in both parties now regarded as ‘respectable’. In securing the approval of the Bill, Disraeli aimed to enfranchise a sizeable sector of men who were not well off but earned enough to give them a stake in the country and, as he hoped, vote Conservative. Similar considerations motivated the new French President, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, in retaining the universal male suffrage introduced in 1848. They were to inform other conservative regimes later in the century too, which realized belatedly that they could no longer maintain their supremacy in the modern world by using methods that belonged to the eighteenth century.

THE CRIMEAN WAR

The regimes that came to power in the wake of the failure of the 1848 Revolutions looked to new methods to cement their hard-regained authority. All of them recognized that economic distress had been at the root of the revolutions of 1848, so each focused with a new vigour on economic development. In Portugal, indeed, the regime of the Duke of Saldanha, a veteran of the Miguelist wars who came to power in 1851 in a coup (one of no fewer than seven that he led over the course of his life), described his government as one of ‘regeneration’, introduced a new constitution with direct elections, abolished the death penalty, and devoted government funds to improving the infrastructure by building a road, rail and telegraph network across the country. In Spain a new Ministry of Commerce, Education and Public Works was founded in the same year. In Piedmont the government of Cavour did the same. Restored princely regimes in the German states borrowed heavily to build railways, bridges, canals and schools. Everywhere on the Continent the state took over the central direction of railway-building, the major source of the economic boom of the 1850s. Governments set up statistical bureaux to assess the state of society and the economy, not only as an adjunct to police repression but also as a basis for economic, social and administrative reform. ‘The people,’ purred Saldanha in 1854, ‘are renouncing politics in order to busy themselves with their own affairs.’ Urban improvement was undertaken everywhere. Press censorship shifted from the futile pre-revolutionary attempt to stop critical articles being published to surveillance of those who wrote them, coupled with the increasing willingness of governments to use the press for their own propaganda.

Whatever was restored in 1850, it was not the Europe of the Vienna Settlement. Symbolized by the departure of Metternich (in 1848), the new Europe was very different from the Europe of the Restoration. After a lengthy period in which the Great Powers had worked together to maintain the status quo, 1850 inaugurated two decades of rapid change and violent upheaval on the international scene, led by a new generation of intelligent and flexible conservative politicians who emerged in the post-revolutionary situation. Men like Cavour, Bismarck, Napoleon III or Disraeli recognized that the preservation of order and stability required radical measures to co-opt the masses into support for the state. They also realized that nationalism was becoming increasingly powerful, indeed unstoppable, and in their different ways they were determined to exploit it for their own purposes. All of them were more than willing to use foreign policy to help achieve these ends. This introduced a powerful new element of instability into European politics. The man who did more than anyone else to inaugurate it was Emperor Napoleon III of France.

Napoleon III has some claim to be the first modern dictator. He realized that his legitimacy depended on popular support, not on some old-established religious or secular principle or tradition. Thus his coup and later the Senate resolution declaring him emperor were both put to a national vote. Other votes followed on other issues. This was, in other words, a plebiscitary dictatorship. Behind the scenes, the emperor managed and manipulated elections and referendums by a mixture of bribery and intimidation in order to get the right result, whether a yes vote for his policies, or an obliging, pro-government majority in the legislature. Meanwhile, he too invested heavily in economic development to keep the people happy. He encouraged the creation of new banks, which helped finance a huge boom in railway construction during the 1850s – by the end of the decade, the total length of railway lines in France was three times what it had been at the beginning. This stimulated the iron, steel and engineering industries, and the emperor was also careful to ensure full employment by embarking on a major programme of public works, much of it privately financed. Still, not everything was new. The similarities between Bonapartism and Orléanism were expressed in the emperor’s appointment of former stalwarts of the July Monarchy to positions of importance in government. Some of them were members of his own family, on whom he relied closely. They included his Interior Minister, the Duc de Morny (1811–65), son of Napoleon I’s stepdaughter (the estranged wife of one of Napoleon’s brothers), and his Foreign Minister, Count Alexandre Walewski (1810–68), an illegitimate son of the first Emperor Napoleon. The role of the legislature was seriously diminished, with only 260 elected members as against 750 under the Second Republic, and the ability to initiate bills was taken away from it. It only met for three months every year.

There was no organized Bonapartist Party as such: the third Napoleon ruled above all through the bureaucracy. The real power was held by the Council of State, presided over by the emperor, and an upper Senate that was packed with government appointees. Napoleon III made sure that the departmental prefects, mayors and other officials in the provinces did as they were told by the Council of State, undercutting the influence of local oligarchies and massively increasing the power of central government. The regime was bolstered by a huge increase in the police force – tenfold in Paris, with the reforms of 1854. The number of police commissioners was doubled, and the rural gendarmerie, 14,000 strong under Louis-Philippe, was strengthened until it had 25,000 officers all told. The police hounded opponents of the regime and imprisoned those who dared publish attacks on it, sometimes after trials in which the critics could gain valuable publicity, sometimes without any kind of trial at all. Above all, the army, which had demonstrated its importance as a force for order with the failure of the National Guard during the revolutionary months of 1848, became a central bulwark of the regime, its prestige, pay and conditions raised, its new importance symbolized by the flamboyant uniforms of the new Imperial Guard. De Tocqueville’s choleric dismissal of the regime as a ‘bureaucratic and military despotism’ was not far off the mark. But more was needed than prosperity and order, the suppression of opposition and the manufacture of the appearance of consent. Real popularity was required too. Napoleon III felt he had an important myth to live up to – the myth of his uncle, the great Napoleon I. He had made liberal use of the Napoleonic legend in gaining support: he loudly proclaimed that the restoration of French glory and prestige was a central part of his mission. Now he sought to live up to this propaganda on the international stage. This suddenly made France an unpredictable and destabilizing factor in European politics. For the last time, indeed, the French were attempting to regain the position of European hegemony they had enjoyed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were other reasons too why Napoleon III was determined to cut a dashing figure in Europe. Military conspiracies had not entirely disappeared from the political arena. ‘Serious plots are afoot in the army,’ he wrote privately towards the end of 1852: ‘I am keeping my eye on all this, and I reckon that by one means or another, I can prevent any outbreak: perhaps by means of a war.’

In addition, Napoleon also relied heavily for the generation and maintenance of internal political support on the French Catholic Church, which perhaps more than any other institution had seen itself threatened by the revolutionary outbreak of 1848. An opportunity soon presented itself. For much of the nineteenth century there had been a simmering conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Russia desired to expand its influence in the Balkans, most of which was still ruled by the Ottomans, and to gain an ice-free port in the Mediterranean. The increasingly rickety Ottoman Empire, dubbed by Tsar Nicholas I ‘the sick man of Europe’, still controlled much of the region, as well as the Middle East. Nicholas was well aware, of course, of the dangers of pushing too far or too fast; the last thing he wanted was the Ottoman Empire to disappear altogether; paradoxically, perhaps, in view of his actions, he saw it as a bulwark of stability in the region and was willing on occasion to prop it up. His solution to the dilemma was to try to assert Russian influence over the empire. Correspondingly, he tried to stop other powers from doing the same thing. The competition for influence soon became serious. In 1852, Napoleon III sought to win Catholic support by backing the claim of Catholic monks to a small area of the floor in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, then a half-forgotten backwater in the Middle Eastern territories of the Ottoman Empire. Orthodox monks had enlarged their share of the Church over the previous few years when nobody had been paying much attention. Nicholas backed them; and the issue quickly became a proxy for the rival ambitions of the two powers in the Middle East, where Napoleon III was keen to clear the way for the construction of a canal across the isthmus of Suez, still nominally under Ottoman control.

Map 6. The Crimean War, 1854–6

The Ottoman Sultan, faced with these rival claims, dithered; and in the summer of 1853, losing patience with him, the tsar invaded the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, nominally under Ottoman suzerainty. The Russian navy destroyed the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Sinope in November 1853. The British were now seriously concerned about the growth of Russian naval power in the Mediterranean and the potential threat to the route to India, and indeed in the long run India itself. They were also alarmed about what they regarded as an upset of the balance of power in Europe through the Russian intervention in Austria-Hungary in 1848–9. So the British joined the French in sending a naval expedition to the Black Sea. Nicholas was not intimidated, and on 30 March 1854, Britain and France joined the Ottomans by declaring war on Russia. Fearing a land invasion, and mistrusting the Austrians, Nicholas withdrew his troops from the Danubian principalities in order to deploy them in defensive positions elsewhere. The Austrians duly moved in jointly to the principalities with the Ottoman forces, enraging the tsar by what he saw as their ingratitude after he had saved the Habsburg Empire from disintegration a few years before by invading Hungary and then, in 1850, helping them scotch Prussian plans for a union of German states in the treaty known as the Punctation of Olmütz.

Meanwhile there were military actions between the British and French allies on the one hand, and the Russians on the other, in the Baltic and on the Pacific coast at Kamchatka, while the Russians advanced across Ottoman territory in the Caucasus. None of these encounters was particularly important, still less decisive, but they did tie up large numbers of Russian troops – 200,000 in the Baltic alone, for example – and so prevented Tsar Nicholas from concentrating his forces at the main point of attack. Napoleon for his part was aware of the fatal consequences of staging a full-scale land invasion of Russia, in view of his uncle’s disastrous experience in 1812. So together with the British, he decided on an invasion of the Crimea, where troops could easily be supplied by sea instead of having to cover vast distances over land. A joint expeditionary force set up its headquarters at Varna, on the Bulgarian coast, and then landed in the Crimea, where 35,000 Allied troops defeated a Russian force of 57,000 at the Battle of the Alma in September 1854, thus threatening the Crimean city of Sevastopol. The Russians strengthened the city’s fortifications and in October launched a counter-attack at Balaklava, leading to the famous Charge of the Light Brigade, when British cavalry, misled by a mistransmitted and misunderstood order, charged the wrong way, into a furious Russian cannonade. As the French general present observing the event noted, ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre’ (‘It’s magnificent, but it’s not war’).

By this time the Russians had called up more than 100,000 reserves, but at the confused Battle of Inkerman in November 1854 they failed to use them against an inferior Allied force, which was thus able to beat back the Russian attack. After this, the war settled down into a prolonged siege of Sevastopol. The incompetence of the British leadership quickly became notorious. The commanding general, Lord Raglan (1788–1855), who had spent years fighting against Napoleon and lost an arm at the Battle of Waterloo, kept on referring to the enemy as ‘the French’, much to the annoyance of the French officers sitting on their horses at his side. The mostly aristocratic officers paid more attention to discipline than to fighting. An extreme though far from untypical example was that of Lord Cardigan (1797–1868), who led the fatal Charge of the Light Brigade. A wealthy man, he had purchased the command of the 11th Hussars in 1835 for the vast sum of £40,000 – the purchase of commissions was how posts were filled in the British Army – and soon transformed the regiment into the famous ‘cherry-pickers’, turned out smartly in tight-fitting maroon-coloured uniforms. Cardigan was married to the sister of his commanding officer Lord Lucan, but the marriage had ended in 1844 in a divorce that turned the men’s friendship into mortal enmity. Later, appropriately enough for a cavalry officer, he married the cigarette-smoking Lady Adeline de Horsey (1824–1915), who married a Portuguese nobleman after Cardigan’s death and subsequently wrote a scandalous set of memoirs. ‘Two bigger fools could not be pulled out of the British army,’ noted a captain in his diary. Neither Cardigan nor Lucan had experience of command in battle. Their incompetence and mutual hatred played a fatal role in the misunderstandings that led to the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade.

Conditions among the troops soon deteriorated sharply, and lack of proper hygiene and sanitation in their camps led to disease and death. The British military hospital at Scutari, on the Bosphorus opposite Istanbul, was soon overcrowded with the sick, the wounded and the dying all crammed together in filthy conditions. The London Times began a campaign to improve the situation, spurred on by its local correspondent Thomas Chenery (1826–84), who wrote: ‘The worn-out pensioners who were brought out as an ambulance corps are totally useless, and not only are surgeons not to be had, but there are no dressers or nurses to carry out the surgeons’ directions.’ Matters became worse when cholera broke out, brought over with the troops from France. As in all other wars of the time, and long before, more soldiers died from disease than from enemy fire, a point noted by the English nurse Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), whose achievements in improving medical care and treatment made her famous. Altogether on all sides, a high proportion of the men who died in the war died of disease: 16,000 out of 21,000 British fatalities, 60,000 out of 95,000 French, and 72,000 out of 143,000 Russian.

As these figures suggest, if the Anglo-French conduct of the war was incompetent, the Russian conduct of the war was even more so. Cholera and other diseases were rife in Sevastopol and the Russian encampments, and here too there was eventually a real effort, led by the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (1807–73), a German princess who escaped from her unhappy marriage through good works, to establish a modern nursing service and improve hygiene and nursing care. Russian military command was no better than the French or British. Afraid that an invasion might be staged to the north-west of the Crimea by the Austrians, who signed an alliance with the British and the French in December 1854, the elderly and indecisive Russian commander-in-chief, General Ivan Fyodorovich Paskevich (1782–1856), who had led the Russian armies in Poland in 1831, persistently prevented the sending of further reinforcements to the Crimea. He was thus unable to relieve Sevastopol, where the Allies had launched a poorly co-ordinated attack on the Malakov redoubt in June 1855. A sizeable technological gap had opened up between the Russian forces and those of the Allies. The Russian Black Sea fleet, for example, had easily defeated the Ottoman navy, but its ships were mostly made of softwood from Russia’s vast coniferous forests and were unseaworthy, they were poorly armed, very few of them were steam-driven, and their crews were badly trained. As soon as the French and British navies arrived on the scene, the Russians were clearly outsailed and outgunned. Russian troops still had flintlock muskets with a range of 200 yards, compared to that of 1,000 yards covered by Allied rifles. The Russian cavalrymen were mostly mounted on parade-ground horses that found it difficult to withstand the rigours of campaigning and were woefully slow at the charge. The Russian swords were blunt and easily broken, and were no match for the industrially produced Sheffield steel of their British counterparts, which could slice through enemy greatcoats with ease, whereas the Russian sabres simply bounced off them.

Russian troops were drafted for twenty-five years from the serf population, so that many of them were in their forties, and there was no proper reserve army; 400,000 of the new recruits drafted during the war had received no training because there were no officers available to train them. Similarly, many of the officers were middle-aged or elderly, over-cautious and uninspired. General Eduard Ivanovich Totleben (1818–84), the engineer who organized the construction of Sevastopol’s formidable defences, was the great exception to this rule. Since there were no railways south of Moscow, it took up to three months for troops from central and northern Russia to reach the Crimea. And when they arrived, they encountered a calamitous shortage of supplies, partly because of the difficulties in getting them there, partly because the absence of industrial plant in Russia meant manufacture was so slow that by the end of 1855 there were only 90,000 guns and just over 250 field artillery pieces in the stockpile of weapons. By contrast, the British and French were constantly replenishing their equipment by sea. Above all, perhaps, the Russian state was unable to finance the war effort, so that at the beginning of 1856 the State Council issued a warning to the new tsar, Alexander II, that state bankruptcy was likely unless he called a halt to the conflict.

Helped by the death of Tsar Nicholas I on 2 March 1855 and the appointment of Palmerston as British Prime Minister on 6 February, negotiations to end the war had already begun. After a relief attempt on Sevastopol had been beaten back in August 1855, the Russians now negotiated in earnest, and the Treaty of Paris was signed in April 1856. It neutralized the Black Sea, preventing Russia from stationing warships there, and gave independence to the Danubian principalities. These soon united to form Romania along with the former Ottoman territory of southern Bessarabia, which was removed from Russia, to which it had belonged since 1812. The peace settlement was therefore seriously damaging to Russia’s influence in the region but also affected the Ottoman Empire adversely. The Crimean War proved to be the most destructive European war Since Napoleon’s day, with around half a million killed in action or dying from wounds or disease. Yet it was very limited in geographical scope. It involved a very small proportion of the forces available to the belligerent powers, and it was fought for strictly limited aims. No state, neither tsarist Russia nor the Ottoman Empire, was threatened with destruction. The war was old-fashioned in another sense too. It was not only the generals, or some of them, who were leftovers from the Battle of Waterloo. The battles were still fought between gaudily uniformed masses of troops, firing rifle volleys, attacking the enemy on foot, or engaging in cavalry charges that were little different from those of half a century before.

If the results of the Crimean War were very limited in terms of direct outcomes, then the broader effects of the Russian defeat on international politics in Europe were more profound. Russia was beaten back to the margins from the central position it had taken in European politics in 1815. France re-entered European politics, its power and prestige greatly enhanced. The Ottoman Empire survived more or less intact, with the loss only of the Danubian principalities. Nevertheless, the sultan had to confirm in an official firman the rights of the Christians in his realms, and especially in Jerusalem. It slowly became clear that the empire’s institutions required serious reorganization. As the tough-talking and long-serving British ambassador, Stratford Canning, told the sultan: ‘Your present administrative system . . . is leading you only to destruction.’ Sultan Abdülaziz (1830–76) and his successor Abdülhamid II (1842–1918), who came to the throne in 1876 following Abdülaziz’s assassination and the rapid deposition of his mentally unstable successor Murad V (1840–1904), realized the need for reform, but were unable to meet it. Before long, the Ottoman Empire was the sick man of Europe again, defaulting on its debts and presenting easy pickings for Russian aggression when it resumed two decades later.

The inadequacies of the respective performances of the various armies led to far-reaching reforms in military organization and supply both in Russia and the United Kingdom. In Britain the absence of a system of conscription meant the army was relatively small and had few reserves. Public disquiet at the conduct of the war was fuelled by critical reports from the correspondent of The Times in the Crimea, William Howard Russell (1820–1907). A debate began about the best way to finance, organize and supply the armed forces, and a Royal Commission was established. But it was not until the late 1860s and early 1870s that reforms came into effect, increasing expenditure on the army and abolishing the system through which wealthy and mostly aristocratic young men had been able to purchase commissions instead of training for them and acquiring them by merit. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II, who was a grandson of Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia and thus, like many if not most European monarchs of the nineteenth century, part-German, reacted to the defeat by embarking on a series of fundamental reforms. The most significant of these was the emancipation of the serfs, carried out after lengthy preparations in 1861. Creating an army whose soldiers had a positive stake in Russia’s military success was one of the motivations for the emancipation, which was followed by a reorganization of government in the provinces. The abolition of serfdom had significant implications for rural Russian administration.

Ending the landlords’ police powers meant introducing a centralized system of policing, while on the other hand a sense of loyalty to the regime was to be encouraged by establishing locally elected assemblies, introduced in 1864. The assemblies, or zemstva, existed at district and provincial levels and were elected separately by nobles, townsmen and peasants (the last-named indirectly). At the provincial level, nobles predominated, a factor that dissuaded liberal reformers from pressing for a national assembly; the idea was opposed by conservatives in the tsar’s entourage anyway. Thus the autocracy continued. Alexander made efforts to reform the judicial system, introducing western European-style courts and public trials in 1865, with irremovable judges and jury trials for criminal offences. The police retained powers of ‘administrative arrest’ and exile to Siberia without trial for political offenders, but the reform was still a significant one: in due course, the courts became major centres for the free expression of opinion. In 1862 preventive censorship was replaced by prosecutions after publication. Universities were given greater autonomy, with the professors free to teach what they wanted, and the school system was restructured and extended. Serious attempts were made to purge corrupt bureaucrats and improve the standard of administration. The decentralization of many functions of government to the zemstva undoubtedly helped this process.

Alexander II appointed the liberal Dmitry Alexeyevich Milyutin (1816–1912) as Minister of War in 1861 with the task of reforming the army. Between 1861 and 1881 Milyutin streamlined the administration, reducing the volume of correspondence by 45 per cent, divided the empire into fifteen military districts, integrated the various branches of the army, reorganized and professionalized the military schools and training centres, and increased the available reserve from 210,000 in 1862 to 553,000 by 1870. After tremendous struggles with conservatives at Court who wanted nobles to remain exempt from military service, Milyutin finally succeeded in persuading the tsar to introduce universal conscription in 1874, with a six-year period of service followed by nine in the reserve. Milyutin was also concerned by the low level of literacy among recruits – a mere 7 per cent in the 1860s – and set up educational schemes within the army that resulted in a swift increase in the literacy rate among soldiers, half of whom were able to read by 1870 and a quarter of whom could write as well. Thus Russia entered the second half of the 1870s far better prepared for war than it had been two decades before.

The blow dealt to Russia’s position in Europe by defeat in 1856 was only temporary, though it lasted for a crucial period of almost two decades. The consequences for Austria, paradoxically, were far more serious, even though the Habsburg Empire had not fought in the Crimea. The Habsburgs had alienated Russia by supporting the Allied side, destroying the partnership that had been at the core of the Holy Alliance after 1815. But Austria’s contribution to the Allied war effort had been brief, hesitant and half-hearted, so that the Habsburgs became relatively friendless, with fatal consequences for their position in Europe. Of all the combatant powers, France came out the best. Most of the major victories in the war were largely due to the French, and Napoleon III emerged from the conflict with his power and status enhanced. The French triumph was sealed by the symbolic decision to hold the peace conference in Paris. The emperor was allowed to continue his quest for glory above all by the effective end of the Concert of Europe in the Crimean War and the final demise of the idea of monarchical solidarity. Looking for another foreign success, the emperor’s eyes lighted next upon Italy.

SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF THE NATIONAL CAUSE

France felt no particular obligation to Austria as a result of the war; a far more significant alliance was formed between France and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, now in the hands of moderate liberal reformers led by Cavour. Towards the end of the Crimean conflict, Cavour had supplied a small contingent of 15,000 troops to the Allied war effort, and begun to cultivate the friendship of Napoleon III; he even obligingly supplied him with a mistress in the shape of Virginia Castiglione (1837–99), the wife of the Piedmontese ambassador in Paris. Cavour knew that the best way to preserve the institutions of the Piedmontese state from the threat posed by democratic-nationalist revolutionaries led by Giuseppe Mazzini was to go with the tide of nationalism but ensure it took a moderate course. The representative institutions of Piedmont, a constitutional monarchy based in classic moderate liberal style on a legislature with substantial powers elected by a limited property franchise, would not survive the re-emergence of democratic nationalism. Cavour therefore prepared to pre-empt the revolutionaries by putting Piedmont at the head of the movement for Italian unity so cruelly aborted in 1848–9.

The first step had to be the expulsion of Austria from northern Italy. In the wake of the successful counter-revolution, the government of Emperor Franz Joseph’s domains was in the hands of Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, a scion of one of the richest landowning families in Europe. His affair with the Englishwoman Jane Digby (1807–81) while in London in the 1820s had earned him the sobriquet ‘Prince of Cadland’ in London’s clubland. By the 1850s, Schwarzenberg had left the world of the Regency dandy behind and developed into an astute politician, ‘the greatest minister I ever had at my side’, as Franz Joseph called him. For Nicholas I of Russia he was ‘Palmerston in a white uniform’; even Metternich sang his praises, calling him ‘a pupil of my diplomatic school’. Schwarzenberg began the process of imposing a regime of almost perfect reaction with the New Year’s Eve Patent of 1851, issued by Franz Jose and cancelling virtually all previous concessions and constitutions. Justice was integrated into government, abolishing the independence of the courts. The Patent restricted the legislature to a single-chamber Reichsrat with all the deputies appointed by the emperor. German-speaking Austrian bureaucrats imposed a uniform administration on the entire empire, obliterating national autonomy not merely in Italy and Hungary but also in Transylvania, Bukovina, Croatia and the Banat (the inconveniently independent Jelačić was sacked in 1853). Censorship was re-introduced, and the police were made directly responsible to the emperor.

To the emperor’s dismay, Schwarzenberg died from a sudden stroke on 5 April 1852. The disconcerted Franz Joseph assumed power himself, unable to nominate a successor. He also became Minister of War, and conducted his own foreign policy. Young and inexperienced (he was only twenty-one), he was hardly the right person for these jobs. Not surprisingly, his mother and his former tutor were the key influences on his policies. The reactionary political course continued unabated as a result, with a Concordat signed by the Austrian government and Pope Pius IX in 1855 giving wide powers over education and censorship to the Church and guaranteeing ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction over marriage. Meanwhile, however, Franz Joseph’s ministers encouraged railway-building, concluded an agreement reducing tariff barriers between Austria and Prussia, and, perhaps most importantly of all, emancipated the serfs in Hungary and Croatia, Galicia and Bukovina, Transylvania and all the rest of the Hereditary and Bohemian lands within the empire, concluding agreements in 1853 that implemented the bold but empty declarations of emancipation issued by the revolutionaries five years before. In 1854, Franz Joseph sealed the establishment of the neo-absolutist system by finally lifting martial law in Hungary, by marrying the seventeen-year-old Princess Elizabeth of Bavaria, whose beauty and vivacity had bowled him over on their first encounter, and by issuing an amnesty. But his attempt to establish an a-national rather than a multinational state met with sullen resentment almost everywhere. And the imposition of a uniform administration across the empire proved very expensive indeed. In addition, armed neutrality in the Crimean War caused government indebtedness to rocket. To try and deal with this situation, railway lines were privatized and taxes raised, but in 1857 a general European financial crisis hit the banks in Vienna particularly hard and required further economies. Under severe financial pressure, the government was forced to make savage cutbacks in expenditure on the army.

By the late 1850s, nationalism was beginning slowly and cautiously to revive. It was clear to Cavour that for all its problems, neo-absolutist Austria was still too strong for Piedmont to defeat on its own. He needed a powerful ally. France under the Second Empire was the obvious candidate. As a young man, Napoleon III had fought with the carbonari against the Austrians in the uprisings of 1831. He had long supported the idea of Italian unity. Intervention offered the prospect of further military glory and political advantage. And, decisively, the revolutionary Italian republican Felice Orsini, who had been briefly in charge of Ancona during the Roman Republic, became convinced that Napoleon III constituted in his very person the chief obstacle to Italian unity. After imprisonment at Mantua, which he had escaped in classic manner by sawing through the bars of his cell and descending a hundred feet from the window by means of bedsheets twisted into a rope, Orsini designed a bomb, had six casts made in Birmingham and tested in Sheffield, then transported them to Brussels and thence to Paris. Here on 14 January 1858, he and his accomplices threw three of the bombs at Napoleon III as he passed in his carriage on his way to the opera to hear Rossini’s William Tell. The bombs hit the carriage and the cavalcade, killing eight people and wounding 142, but the emperor was unhurt and in a characteristically flamboyant gesture proceeded to the opera as if nothing had happened. The incident convinced Napoleon that revolutionary Italian nationalism had to be neutralized by achieving national unity without revolution. A letter purportedly written by Orsini to Napoleon from prison indeed urged him to support the cause of Italian unification; it was rumoured that parts of it were actually written by the emperor himself. Orsini was guillotined on 13 March 1858; one of his accomplices was also executed and two were sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment. One of these two, Carlo Di Rudio (1832–1910), eventually escaped from the penal colony on Devil’s Island, emigrated to America, and joined the Seventh Cavalry under General George Custer (1839–76), managing somehow also to survive its massacre by Native American braves at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

Spurred into action by the assassination attempt, Napoleon III met Cavour secretly at the French spa town of Plombières in 1858, where they agreed on a war against Austria that would restructure Italy into a new confederation, reduce the power of the Pope, extend the Kingdom of Piedmont eastwards and rename it the Kingdom of Northern Italy. As a reward, France would receive Nice and Savoy. Napoleon III would contribute 200,000 soldiers, Cavour 100,000. At a New Year’s Day reception in 1859 the emperor loudly told the Austrian ambassador: ‘I regret that our relations with your Government are not so good as in the past.’ In the highly constrained diplomatic language of the day this amounted virtually to an insult. It caused a sensation. Cavour added fuel to the fire by getting King Vittorio Emanuele of Piedmont to open Parliament with the words: ‘We are not insensitive to the cry of pain which rises up to us from so many parts of Italy.’ The Russians were kept happy with the promise of a revision of the treaty of 1856 that had ended the Crimean War; and in any case they were not disposed to help the Austrians after the Habsburgs’ failure to come to their aid in 1854.

When the Austrians began drafting Italians into the imperial army, Piedmont mobilized. Nationalist associations sprang up all over Italy in a fervour of excitement. After Vittorio Emanuele refused to stand down his troops, Franz Joseph foolishly declared war, making Austria appear the aggressor and entirely losing the sympathy of Britain and Prussia. Hostilities were duly opened, and a largely French force outflanked a superior Austrian army at Magenta, forcing it to retreat, and then defeating it in June 1859 at the decisive Battle of Solferino, which involved a total of nearly 300,000 troops, the largest number to engage in a battle since the days of the first Napoleon. Casualties, however, were relatively light, with around 3,000 killed on either side. This was the last battle in world history in which the opposing forces were commanded by their respective sovereigns: Napoleon III proved a better general than the inexperienced Franz Joseph, who afterwards refrained from any more direct involvement in armed conflict. The Austrians retreated further to the east and effectively lost their grip on northern Italy. So far, things had gone according to plan for both Napoleon III and Cavour. At this stage, however, the situation began to escape their control. Cavour had sought to weaken the Austrians, and undermine the Papal States, by encouraging nationalist uprisings in central and north-eastern Italy. These forced the Austrian-backed rulers of Bologna, Tuscany, Modena and Parma to flee, leaving the Piedmontese to take over. Napoleon III began to fear that Cavour was becoming too successful and that the Prussians and other German states might intervene on Austria’s behalf. So he concluded a peace at Villafranca in July 1859, without consulting his Piedmontese allies. Much to the disgust of the Piedmontese, this left Austria in possession of the substantial territory of Venetia, in the north-east. Nevertheless, Cavour had no option but to consent, and subsequently ceded Nice and Savoy to the French as agreed.

But this was by no means the end. In Sicily, King Fernando Carlo had earned European disapproval by his harsh policies of repression, incarcerating some 2,000 dissidents in his mouldering jails. Gladstone’s condemnation of his rule (‘the negation of God erected to a system of government’) helped isolate his regime internationally, and the British and French governments both withdrew their ambassadors in 1856 after the king refused to follow their advice to reform. The defeat of Austria isolated him still further. At a crucial moment, on 22 May 1859, Fernando Carlo died, probably from the long-term effects of an assassination attempt three years before, when a soldier had stabbed him with a bayonet. His successor was Francesco II (1836–94), who had married the younger sister of the Empress of Austria in February 1859. The Sicilian government had made itself deeply unpopular by raising taxes and driving up the price of bread, and instead of making concessions to secure his position, Francesco rejected the demand for reform. This unwise act was to prove his undoing.

The war in the north had caused immense excitement among the revolutionary nationalists, whose leading active figure, Giuseppe Garibaldi, had lived as a sea captain following the defeat of the Roman Republic. After travelling to China, South America and Britain, he had returned to Genoa in 1854 and lived quietly on the island of Caprera, north of Sardinia. When the conflict began, he raised an army of volunteers who dressed themselves in red shirts, imitated in various colours by fascist movements all over Europe after the First World War. Dubbed ‘the Thousand’, they were mostly from northern Italy but also included thirty-three foreigners, among them four Hungarians. The rebels quickly mounted an expedition against Sicily, where Garibaldi landed in early May 1860 and declared himself dictator. Joined by local rebels and using the mobile tactics he had learned in guerrilla warfare in South America, Garibaldi defeated the royal army and took Palermo in three days of street fighting, made more desperate by a naval bombardment from the royal ships in the bay. After his victory in Palermo, Garibaldi crossed to Naples, which the king had been persuaded to abandon in order to regroup his forces. With every success, Garibaldi won new followers, including 600 men from Britain who joined his forces in Naples. There, he was welcomed by ecstatic crowds, with ‘waving hats and handkerchiefs, hands raised in salute, and a deafening frenzy of shouts and cries’. In a two-day battle at Volturno that began at the end of September 1860, Garibaldi’s army of 20,000 defeated a Neapolitan force of more than twice its strength.

Map 7. The Unification of Italy, 1815–70

His actions had made Garibaldi a European hero. Bolstered by the many speeches he delivered during his triumphant progress through Sicily and Naples, and by stories, not always exaggerated, of his bravery in battle, he became an international icon of liberal nationalism. His carefully tailored letters, and many written by his soldiers, were published in translation in many languages; there were newspaper stories, magazine articles, novels and countless illustrations of his deeds. The London Times called him ‘the Washington of Italy’. Biographies began to appear in America, France, Germany and many other countries; Alexandre Dumas produced a French version of his memoirs; Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale among many others sent him donations; money in large quantities arrived from North and South America to finance his cause; and later, when he visited England, he was mobbed by enthusiastic crowds, celebrated in specially written songs and verses, commemorated in porcelain figures, and elevated into a fashion icon. His cult knew no bounds; it paralleled but exceeded by far the celebrations held for the exiled Kossuth, and marked a first high point in the hero-worship that was to become such a marked feature of European politics and culture in the later nineteenth century.

Yet Garibaldi had to recognize the political realities of the situation, and after defeating the Neapolitan army he agreed to hold plebiscites in Naples and Sicily on their annexation by Piedmont. After an almost unanimous vote of approval in both cases, Garibaldi resigned his command and returned to Caprera. In March 1861, Vittorio Emanuele declared himself King of Italy. The end result was the effective extension of Piedmontese institutions to the rest of Italy. No sooner had this been achieved than Cavour died, probably of malaria, at the age of fifty-one. His achievement was to have preserved social stability by harnessing nationalist enthusiasm to the cause of the established social and political order. But he had done this at a price. Napoleon III was incensed. Italian unification had not been what he had agreed at Plombières. He had conjured up a new and potentially threatening Kingdom of Italy on his doorstep. His standing with the Catholic Church had been seriously damaged, potentially losing him significant support at home, and he quickly sent troops to protect the Pope in Rome, mollifying him as far as he could by providing him with a private train for his personal use, though the distances he could travel in it were now very limited indeed. The French troops were to remain in Rome, keeping it out of the unified Kingdom of Italy, until they were needed for other purposes in 1870, when the Italians promptly moved into the city themselves. The Pope and his successors were left walled up in the Vatican until the papacy finally conceded the legitimacy of the Italian state with the signing of the Lateran Treaty in 1929.

The defeat of Austria prompted Franz Joseph to accelerate his retreat from the policy of neo-absolutism. He was forced to agree to an elected element in the Reichsrat by the desperate situation of the imperial finances after the war. The leading minister, Anton von Schmerling, succeeded in introducing a constitution in the western half of the Monarchy in 1862, but when faced with the opposition of resurgent Hungarian and Croatian nationalists to a unitary political system covering the whole empire, he mortally offended them by declaring that Hungary could wait for its own political institutions. In 1865, getting nowhere, he was dismissed. Revived the same year, the Hungarian Diet was not likely to satisfy the renewed demands of the exiled Kossuth and the radical nationalists. Increasingly, the Austrian Empire seemed to be in a cul-de-sac. Meanwhile, the Austrian government failed to learn the lesson of its military defeat and reform its increasingly outdated army.

The consequences of the Italian war, for all its limited scope and duration, were decisive and Europe-wide. All over the Continent, Italian unification gave a tremendous boost to the idea of the nation state, which had been so badly defeated only a decade before. New nationalist associations and pressure groups began to form in one country after another. It was not only in Hungary that the example of Italy inspired a rebirth of the nationalist movement: a similar development took place in Poland too. In the ‘Congress’ part of Poland, Tsar Alexander II’s reform programme, begun in the wake of the Crimean War, included defusing the simmering discontent of the nationalist nobility by restoring the right of assembly, granting an amnesty to the former participants in the 1831 uprising still in exile in Siberia, and involving Polish landowners in discussions about the terms of servile emancipation. A Polish Agricultural Society was founded in 1858; with 4,000 members, it quickly became the vehicle for nationalist aspirations, as did a City Delegation formed in Warsaw in 1861. Secret societies re-emerged, discussion groups started to meet, and there was a demonstration in the streets on the thirtieth anniversary of the 1831 uprising. To stem the flood, the tsar appointed a conservative aristocrat, Count Alexander Wielopolski (1803–77), as head of the civil administration. ‘You can’t do much with the Poles,’ he was reported as saying, ‘but with luck you might do something for them.’ In pursuit of this somewhat paternalistic aim, Wielopolski dissolved the Agricultural Society and the City Delegation. Mass protest demonstrations followed: on 8 April 1861, when Cossack troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing a hundred, Wielopolski rushed in front of the troops and commanded them to stop, at considerable risk to his own life. This did not stop the crisis escalating, however, and mass arrests and deportations only made matters worse.

The conscription of 30,000 young Poles into military service was the spark that lit the flame of revolt. In guerrilla actions across Congress Poland, groups of armed rebels acting on a plan devised by the clandestine successor organization to the City Delegation in Warsaw spirited potential recruits away into the forest, so that only 1,400 were actually conscripted into the Russian Army. The organization had over 200,000 adherents. Its organizers were middle-class citizens, bank clerks, postal officials, merchants and the like, and they set up a shadow government, with five permanent Ministries, a system of couriers, an intelligence network and a security apparatus. Yet the movement remained entirely secret, and its membership utterly obscure, so that all kinds of people were suspected of belonging to it. As Field Marshal Fyodor Berg (1793–1874), a Baltic German who had been Governor General of Finland, and was appointed military governor to replace Wielopolski, ironically commented to the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich (1827–92), the new viceroy: ‘I have reached the conclusion that I do not belong to it myself, and nor does your Imperial Highness.’ In more than 1,200 small-scale military engagements fought across Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine, groups of nationalist guerrillas attacked Russian garrisons and troop units. Both sides promised the abolition of serfdom. The Polish nationalists learned from experience, and the landed nobility were much less prominent in the movement than in 1846. Significant groups of peasants were co-opted into the uprising, taking part in military actions such as the Battle of Małogoszcz on 24 February 1863, where 3,000 of them wielding scythes bravely attempted to defeat a well-armed unit of the Russian Army.

Yet the nationalists were bitterly divided between ‘Whites’ and ‘Reds’, liberals and revolutionaries. In October 1863, in desperation, both groups ceded power to Romuald Traugutt (1826–64), a Polish nobleman and Russian officer who led a small guerrilla unit and then travelled to Paris to try, in vain, to enlist the French in support of his cause. Traugutt was appointed dictator, reshaped the administration of the nationalist movement, introduced army ranks and hierarchies to the guerrilla bands, levied a tax on Polish exiles, and purged the movement of ‘private firebrands’ by threatening to denounce them to the police. All the leading figures in the nationalist movement now had pseudonyms; fewer than twenty people were aware of Traugutt’s real identity, and only six had permission to visit him. But on 8 April 1864 one of the revolutionaries broke under interrogation and revealed everything he knew. (Traugutt, he said, could be recognized by his ‘medium height, large head, swarthy complexion, dark hair, large black sideburns and small beard, ordinary white spectacles’.) On 10 April 1864, at one in the morning, a squad of armed police burst into his Warsaw lodging and took Traugutt away to the Pawiak Prison. A mass trial followed. Traugutt and five of his companions were publicly hanged in Warsaw on 5 August on a specially built multi-person gallows. The insurrection was over.

As the guerrilla bands melted away following the smashing of the central co-ordinating body, Field Marshal Berg rescinded Wielopolski’s reforms, closed down all the Congress Kingdom’s autonomous institutions, subordinated the administration directly to St Petersburg, and inaugurated a ruthless programme of Russification. A Russian university replaced its Polish equivalent, and most towns lost their municipal rights. Thousands of Poles were arrested and sent to Siberia. Even the name Poland was wiped off the map; it became the Vistula Land. In Lithuania a military occupation razed recalcitrant villages to the ground, confiscated estates, and tortured and killed suspected rebels. Polish intellectual life was crushed; an entire generation of nationalists was taken out of circulation. Across the rest of Europe, these draconian measures caused shock and outrage and confirmed liberal opinion, not least in Britain, in its hatred and suspicion of the Russian colossus. Indeed, from the outset, the Polish uprising attracted sympathy from across Europe.

Volunteers rushed to its aid, including François Rochebrune (1830–70), a French teacher and ex-soldier living in Warsaw who had taken part in a military expedition to China in 1857. As a sideline Rochebrune also ran a fencing school, and he enlisted some of his students in a unit he called the ‘Zouaves of Death’, clad in baggy trousers and fez caps. At the Battle of Grochowiska in March 1863, seeing Polish insurgents flee in panic, he grabbed them and pushed them back into the line at gunpoint, shouting repeatedly: ‘Psiakrew! Która godzina?’ – ‘Damn it! What time is it?’ – which was the only Polish he knew. Enthusiasm for the Polish cause in France led to Rochebrune being awarded the Legion of Honour when he eventually returned to his native land. Most volunteers, however, never managed to reach the scene of the conflict. The steamship Ward Jackson, sailing with 200 foreign volunteers from Gravesend, came to grief on a sandbank in the Baltic on the way. Writers and left-wing figures as varied as Garibaldi and Marx polemicized against the Russians. But the bitter truth was that no major power had any interest in helping the Poles. Britain, France and Austria sent two joint diplomatic notes requesting the tsar to make concessions, but they got nowhere. The Prussians even suggested joint action with the Russians against the rebels, though eventually thought better of it. Intervention was in any case logistically difficult. Unlike the Italians, the Poles were on their own, and they paid the price.

STEERING A COURSE ON THE STREAM OF TIME

By the second half of the 1860s, Napoleon III was beginning to face increasing opposition to his dictatorship from the growing economic and financial power of the middle classes. He was forced into granting a series of reforms that inaugurated the final phase of his rule, the so-called Liberal Empire. His foreign adventures, outside Europe as well as within, had proved extremely costly, and further expense was incurred by military reforms approved in the Army Law of 1868. His public works required massive loans for which the retrospective approval of the legislature was required. Elections in 1869 led to an increase of 1.5 million in the opposition vote, which stood at 3.5 million compared to 4.4 million for the government. Forced to dismiss his chief ministers and appoint a liberal Prime Minister, Émile Ollivier (1825–1913), a former moderate Republican who had won a reputation as a charismatic public speaker, the emperor had to grant a new constitution in April 1870, ratifying the liberalization that had taken place over the previous few years of the ‘liberal Empire’. It was approved by a vote of more than 80 per cent in a plebiscite, but this electoral triumph could not conceal the fact that the central pillars of the dictatorship had finally begun to crumble.

Yet the emperor had not abandoned his ceaseless quest for popularity and sought it once again in military glory. Soon a new opportunity to win the support of French patriots was to emerge in the shape of the looming threat to the east, a united Germany. Here the ferment of nationalist activity inspired by the unification of Italy found its expression in the Nationalverein, the National Association, established in 1859. It rapidly won adherents among middle-class liberals. Two years later the revivified liberals founded the Progressive Party, whose aims included the election rather than appointment of governments and administrative bodies; the guarantee of civil and religious freedoms; and, crucially, the effective replacement of the tradition-bound Prussian Army, with its reactionary officer corps and its independence from legislative supervision as an institution answerable to the king alone, by a people’s militia, along the lines of the National Guard so popular with the moderate liberals in 1848. The militia would be placed under the budgetary and supervisory control of the elected legislature. Liberal nationalists knew that a major reason for their defeat in 1848 had been the failure of the national parliament assembled at Frankfurt to establish control over the armies of Prussia, Austria and the other states, and they were determined not to make the same mistake again.

The experience of 1848 had taught them in addition that the idea of a unified Germany coinciding with the boundaries of the German Confederation was not a viable one. The Confederation had been resurrected by the so-called Punctation of Olmütz on 29 November 1850, and Austrian hegemony had been reasserted. The travails of the Frankfurt Parliament had made it clear that the Czechs in Bohemia would not be absorbed into a state dominated by German-speakers. And just as important, the Habsburgs, as the reassertion of their authority in 1849 had shown, were not going to allow the parts of their empire that fell within the borders of the German Confederation simply to be lopped off and assigned to a new German nation state. If Germany was going to be unified, it would have to be without Austria and Bohemia, without the Habsburgs, and without the German Confederation. This meant it would have to be led by Prussia. The problem was that Prussia was not a liberal state. In almost a decade of power the leading minister, Otto von Manteuffel (1805–82), had modernized the public administration and deregulated the economy, but he had also promoted the police as a positive, formative influence in society, and protected the central place of the professional army in the state.

Manteuffel was dismissed in 1858 when the reactionary Prince Wilhelm (1797–1888) became regent, following the incapacitation of Friedrich Wilhelm IV by a major stroke (he died in 1861, at which point Wilhelm acceded to the throne). Surprisingly, Wilhelm appointed a relatively liberal cabinet, and proclaimed a ‘New Era’ in Prussian politics in an attempt to defuse the growing agitation from the liberal nationalists in the legislature. He met with little success. Enthused by the success of Italian unification, the Prussian Progressives began a major offensive to try to gain control over the army and put their militia plan into effect. By 1862, a year after their formation, when the limited franchise secured the middle-class Progressives a controlling position in the legislature, they had got nowhere. To make matters worse, the military introduced a new system of universal conscription and increased the length of service from two to three years, thus enormously boosting the size and influence of the army under its existing administration. So the Progressives exercised one of the few real powers of the legislature, the right to approve the state budget, and voted it down. Without parliamentary approval it would be illegal to collect taxes or spend money on keeping the government and administration going. And they were not prepared to grant it until they won the argument over the replacement of the army by a militia.

In this stalemate Wilhelm I turned to the toughest and most conservative politician he knew: Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck’s family background was in the Prussian landed and service aristocracy. Neurotic, hypochondriac, frequently ill, Bismarck was nevertheless a man of enormous energy and gargantuan appetites. In 1880 a visitor to his estate noted that after a lunch consisting of ‘roast beef or beef steak with potatoes, cold roast venison, fieldfare, fried pudding etc.’ he consumed a dinner of ‘six heavy courses plus dessert’, then another meal called ‘tea’ eaten just before midnight. He drank wine with every meal including breakfast, and took beer with his afternoon ride – it was hardly surprising that he fell off his horse, according to his own account, more than fifty times. After a misspent youth, during which he fought many duels, Bismarck settled down to a pious married life. From early on he was frank about his ambition, which, he wrote in 1838, ‘strives more to command than to obey’. A poor speaker with a squeaky voice, he was never a particularly charismatic figure, and he was unable to move crowds in the way that someone like Gladstone could. But he was a ruthless and calculating politician who had no scruples about using force to gain his ends.

Throughout his life Bismarck was a passionate advocate of Prussian independence and Prussian power. Impressed by his ultra-conservatism in 1847–8, Friedrich Wilhelm IV had appointed him in 1851 as Prussia’s representative to the general meetings of the German Confederation to defend Prussian interests. It was during his eight years in this post that Bismarck came to accept that, as he said, ‘politics is the art of the possible’. Later in life he reflected on the nature of statesmanship: ‘People,’ he mused, ‘can’t create or divert the stream of time, they can only travel on it and steer with more or less experience and skill, in order to avoid shipwreck.’ The stream of time in the 1860s, following the enormous boost given to the movement for German unification by events in Italy, was, he recognized, flowing swiftly and unstoppably in the direction of a united Germany. Bismarck was determined that it would not lead the Prussian ship of state onto the rocks of liberalism. Prussia had to be kept intact, with its key institutions, a strong, professional, independent army, an authoritarian monarchy, and a dominant landed and service aristocracy.

On 23 September 1862 the king appointed him Prussian Minister-President and Foreign Minister. A week later Bismarck confronted the budgetary committee head-on. He did not mince his words: ‘Prussia,’ he declared, ‘must concentrate and maintain its power for the favourable moment which has already slipped by several times. Prussia’s boundaries according to the Vienna treaties are not favourable to a healthy state life. The great questions of the time will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions – that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood.’ Nothing can have been more calculated to strike terror into the Prussian liberals. But what exactly did Bismarck’s dramatic and chilling phrases mean? In the first place, it was clear from the map that Prussia was indeed something of a ramshackle creation. While the core areas of the old Prussian state, East and West Prussia, lay outside the German Confederation, the newest part of the Kingdom, Rhineland-Westphalia, added by the Congress of Vienna, was separated from the rest of Prussia by the Kingdom of Hanover. These western areas were by the middle of the century proving to be a huge advantage to Prussia: traditionally a centre of manufacture and commerce, they were now undergoing rapid industrialization on a large scale. But they had to be governed separately, they had a different set of laws and administrative arrangements, and communication with the rest of the Kingdom was understandably difficult. The Kingdom of Hanover had been ruled by the kings of Britain until 1837, but fortuitously the accession of Queen Victoria, who as a woman was debarred from becoming a German monarch by the Salic Law, effectively severed Hanover’s ties with the world’s leading commercial and naval power. Bismarck thus saw the opportunity to join up the different bits of Prussia into a single state.

The key, Bismarck realized, lay in engineering the destruction of the German Confederation. The route to this lay through the notorious Schleswig-Holstein question, which was so complicated that Palmerston once declared: ‘Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business – the Prince Consort, who is dead – a German professor, who has gone mad – and I, who have forgotten all about it.’ The question, which had already come to the fore in 1848, boiled up again in 1863, when King Frederik VII of Denmark died without an heir. Since the rules allowed succession through the female line in Denmark but not, because of the Salic Law, in the German Confederation, to which the duchies belonged, the new king, Christian IX, who did indeed inherit through the female line, could not become Duke of Schleswig and Holstein, which would have to come under a relative who inherited through the male line. Behind this rather arcane dispute there was a clash between German and Danish nationalisms, with one side backing a candidate who was Danish, the other a candidate who was German. In addition, the Danes passed a new constitution that undermined the traditional power of the German-speaking landed aristocracy in Schleswig, the northern of the two Duchies and the one bordering on Denmark proper. Bismarck demanded it be withdrawn, and the Danes refused. The dispute escalated until Bismarck persuaded Austria, in the name of the German Confederation, to join in forcing the Danes to give up their claim to the Duchies.

On 1 February 1864, 38,000 Prussian troops (eventually reinforced by 20,000 more) and 23,000 Austrian troops marched through Holstein and crossed the border into Schleswig. In the midst of a snowstorm the Danish Army was forced to retreat from its defensive positions on the border to the key fortress of Dybbøl, which was besieged and eventually stormed by 10,000 Prussian troops on 18 April with heavy losses on both sides. As negotiations in London ran into the sands, the German forces pressed on, expelling the last Danish troops from both Duchies by the end of June. When the Prussians advanced deep into Denmark itself, the Danes caved in. On 30 October they were forced to abandon both Duchies, which were now ruled respectively by Austria and Prussia; Denmark lost about a quarter of its population, including 200,000 Danish-speakers, in the process. Given the enthusiasm among German nationalists in 1848 for the German cause in the Duchies, there was no question that the Prussian liberals supported these actions.

Bismarck’s next step, however, was more controversial. The war against Denmark had introduced yet another geopolitical anomaly into north Germany in the form of Austria’s administration of the southern Duchy of Holstein, agreed with Prussia in the Gastein Convention of 1865. It was in Prussia’s interest to incorporate it into its own territory along with Schleswig, and Bismarck saw in the continuing disputes between the two states over the administration of the Duchies the opportunity for launching a war against Austria that would finally lead to the expulsion of the Habsburgs from Germany. When Austria appealed to the German Confederation to mediate in the dispute, Bismarck declared the Gastein Convention void and invaded Holstein. Austria persuaded the German Confederation to mobilize against the Prussians, winning the support of south German states such as Bavaria, which feared the consequences for their independence of Prussian domination. Bismarck responded by declaring that the Confederation no longer existed. He had prepared the ground by securing an alliance with the Italians, who still needed to expel Austria from Venetia, which was still under the control of the Habsburgs, and the benevolent neutrality of the French, arranged in a meeting with Napoleon III at Biarritz. Russia had remained alienated from the Austrians over their behaviour during the Crimean War, and saw in a strong Prussia a bulwark against an independent Poland. Britain did not regard the conflict as relevant to its interests. So the way was clear.

Most observers predicted a victory for the Austrian-led Confederation. The Prussian commander was Helmuth von Moltke (1800–91), an intellectual soldier who had published a novel and translated Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into German (or at least, most of it). Moltke had a cosmopolitan background: his wife was English, and during the 1830s he had served with the Ottoman Army in Egypt. A student of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, he was fascinated by the use of railways in battle (and indeed was director of a railway company). He believed in swift and decisive aggression as the best way to win a war, and broke up the massed Prussian infantry columns into smaller, more mobile and tactically responsive units, leaving much of the initiative in their deployment to their individual commanders, to the derision of many military commentators. By contrast, Austrian military doctrine regarded an emphasis on attack as a mistaken principle that had led the first Napoleon to disaster, and put its faith in a defensive strategy based on military strongpoints and fortresses. The leading Austrian military man, General Ludwig von Benedek (1804–81), who owed his rise to the courage he had shown in the war with Italy in 1859, boasted that he never read books on military strategy and observed that ‘the only talents required in a chief of staff are a strong stomach and good digestion’. He persuaded Franz Joseph to put strategic planning in the hands of his best friend General Alfred von Henikstein (1810–82), whom he valued not as a strategist but as a ‘paterfamilias, gigolo, gourmand, gambler and stag-hunter’. The bulwark of imperial power in 1848 and again through the neo-absolutist 1850s, the Austrian Army was lavishly rewarded with funds, but spent them on luxuries, uniforms, and extra, largely useless administrative posts rather than on modernizing its armaments and equipment. Many of the ordinary soldiers were poorly educated, badly prepared, weedy and stunted, unlike their Prussian counterparts.

Benedek decided to mass his forces around the fortress at Königgrätz (or Sadowa), to block any Prussian southward invasion from Silesia. Moltke quickly moved the three Prussian armies through Bohemia’s mountain passes towards the positions of the Austrians, who failed to respond and stayed put. After a series of minor encounters the two main forces met at Sadowa on 3 July 1866. Wilhelm I was nominally in command, but in practice it was Moltke who called the shots. Not everything went smoothly for him. Problems with telegraph communication and the last-minute improvisation of railway transport meant that only two of the three Prussian armies had arrived by the time the battle began. Thus some 240,000 Austrian and Saxon troops faced a Prussian force of only 135,000. The odds were decidedly in Benedek’s favour as hostilities commenced.

The Austrians might have been even stronger had they not had to deploy 75,000 troops to deal with an attack by a Piedmontese army a week earlier, when the Kingdom of Italy had decided to take advantage of the outbreak of war to invade Venetia. The Italians were poorly prepared: the leading general, Alfonso La Marmora (1804–78), admitted that of the 200,000 men who were mustered, ‘only half might actually be considered “soldiers”, Austrian spies reported that ‘chaos reigns along the entire front . . . Italian troops have nowhere to sleep and are famished’. There was no strategic planning system and there had been six different Ministers of War since unification five years before. The king summoned Garibaldi to raise an army of volunteers, but these ‘revolutionary canaille’, as Vittorio Emanuele described them in private, were ‘handled like pigherds’ by regular officers. Discontent was rife, and ‘a royal major was knifed by his own men’, as the Austrian spy gleefully reported. When the two armies met in June 1866 at the Second Battle of Custoza, superior Austrian firepower prevailed, and the Italians fled in confusion. The roads were ‘jammed with Italian troops, wagon trains and disbanded stragglers’, as one officer reported. Yet the Austrian commander, the Archduke Albrecht (1817–95), dismayed by his heavy losses, refused to pursue the defeated enemy. His outraged officers expressed ‘astonishment’. Albrecht had abandoned any chance of making his victory a decisive one.

At Sadowa, meanwhile, the fate of the conflict seemed in the balance. The Prussian centre was pinned down by superior Austrian artillery fire. ‘Moltke,’ King Wilhelm moaned, ‘we are losing this battle.’ But to the chagrin of some of his officers, Benedek refused to counter-attack. Indecisive and confused, he had no idea which direction to choose for an advance, and dithered despite his massive numerical advantage. Amidst heavy rain, the Prussian Third Army, with 100,000 men under the Crown Prince, struggled along a twenty-five-mile front to reach the battlefield, its guns and equipment bogged down in the mud. At 2.30 in the afternoon, however, it finally arrived, charging into the Austrian right flank. While Benedek had failed to act, Moltke had devised a classic envelopment strategy, and poured men and guns into a hole in the Austrian centre, beginning to roll up the flanks from both sides. Described by one officer later as ‘apathetic, fatalistic’, Benedek joined the retreat, which from 3 o’clock onwards, as the Prussians poured fire into the Austrian ranks, became a rout. Thousands of men fled in what a later court of inquiry described as ‘wild panic’, pursued by Prussian hussars slashing at them with their sabres. Hundreds of Austrian soldiers drowned trying to cross the river Elbe. The Prussians lost 9,000 men in the fighting, killed, wounded, captured or missing, whereas the Habsburg army’s losses totalled over 40,000, more than half of them taken prisoner. The Austrians and their allies had no more forces to counter the Prussian attack. Moltke occupied Prague and advanced on Vienna. In a short time his requisitioning columns reduced Lower Austria north of the Danube to ‘a vast desert’. His morale broken, Franz Joseph sued for peace. On 26 July 1866 an armistice signed at Prague brought the war to an end.

Map 8. The Unification of Germany, 1860–73

King Wilhelm and the generals wanted to push on and take the Austrian capital before imposing harsh terms on the defeated Habsburgs. But Bismarck, who had been present on the battlefield, knew that this would only lead to fresh resistance from the Austrians, and leave them bitter and resentful, ready to join in any future alliance against Prussia. From Bismarck’s point of view the main, and clearly articulated, aims of the war had been achieved. Austria had been expelled from Germany. Demonstrating his ruthless disrespect for tradition and legitimacy, Bismarck ousted the King of Hanover and turned his kingdom into a Prussian province, thus bridging the gap between the two halves of the Prussian state. For good measure Bismarck also grabbed other German territories, notably the previously self-governing city of Frankfurt, Germany’s financial centre, which like Hanover had backed the wrong side in the war. Bismarck might have seized the opportunity to reduce the power of the Prussian Parliament. But he knew that a modern government needed the support of the liberal middle classes in the long run. So he recognized the legitimacy of the Prussian legislature by introducing an Indemnity Bill, which invited the deputies to approve retrospectively the breach of the law he had committed in collecting taxes without parliamentary approval since 1862. As Bismarck intended, this divided the liberals, with a minority refusing to agree; but the measure was passed, among other things successfully sidelining the hard-line Prussian conservatives who had pushed for the introduction of a more authoritarian constitution. Even more shockingly for conservatives, Bismarck now created a new union of twenty-two German states, naming it the North German Confederation. This was halfway to being a German nation state, with a parliament, the Reichstag, which, astonishingly, was elected by universal male suffrage, in contrast to the property qualifications that governed voting rights in Prussia itself. Here Bismarck was taking a leaf from Napoleon III’s book, bypassing the liberal middle classes to appeal to what he assumed were the loyal and conservative masses in the countryside.

Bismarck made sure that the Reichstag’s powers were limited; it had the right to approve legislation but not to introduce it, and it could neither appoint nor dismiss governments and ministers, which remained the prerogative of the President of the Confederation, who was none other than King Wilhelm I of Prussia himself. Prussia’s dominance was sealed in the executive organ of the North German Confederation, the Bundesrat or Federal Council, where it could always effectively outvote the representatives of the other member states. The President also commanded the joint army of the Confederation, and could summon and dissolve the Reichstag. Below the President was the Federal Chancellor, who was also to be by custom, though not by law, the Minister-President of Prussia, or in other words Bismarck himself. The effect of these arrangements was to ensure the continued survival of Prussia and Prussian institutions, above all the army, into the new era of the emerging German nation state. At the same time Prussian rule meant liberalization in many respects in backward, ramshackle states like Hanover, winning over many liberals to the new arrangements.

The events of 1866 had major repercussions in the rest of Europe. After their defeat by Prussia, the Austrians realized they could not continue to fight the Italians, despite the victory of Custoza, and capitulated, leaving the peace settlement to cede the rest of northern Italy to the Italian state – an outcome which led to the jibe of a Russian diplomat at a peace conference later in the century, that since the Italians were demanding more territory, he supposed they must have lost another battle. The Habsburg monarchy was thrown into a deep crisis. The deposed Emperor Ferdinand is said to have remarked: ‘I don’t know why they appointed Franz Joseph; I could have been just as good at losing battles.’ There was immediate trouble from the Hungarians. The Diet elected in 1865 had a majority of moderate liberal nationalists, led by Ferenc Deák. Assisted by Count Gyula Andrássy, recently returned from exile under an amnesty, Deák seized the opportunity provided by the monarchy’s expulsion from the now-defunct German Confederation and the consequent change in the balance of forces within the Habsburg domains. Concerned that moves towards complete independence would encourage their other nationalities, notably the Slavs, to follow suit, the Hungarians began to negotiate with Franz Joseph for the restructuring of the empire as a Dual Monarchy, divided into an Austrian and a Hungarian half, each with its own government, legislature, laws and administration.

The deal reserved control over the armed forces and foreign policy and their finances to the central authority in Vienna, and put it in the hands of common ministers, though each half of the Monarchy had to be consulted on major actions such as the conclusion of international treaties. The respective Austrian and Hungarian legislatures were to negotiate via ‘delegations’, with the final power resting in the Monarch. Franz Joseph was crowned King of Hungary on 8 June 1867 and signed the law, known as the Ausgleich or Compromise, on 28 July. The Czech nationalists led by František Palacký objected and boycotted the Austrian legislature, under whose purview they fell, for eight years. The Croatians were appeased by the concession of the use of Serbo-Croat as an official language and generous provisions for the retention of tax revenues. Other nationalities – Slovaks, Serbs, Romanians, Italians, Saxons – were covered by a Nationalities Law passed in 1865 with significant concessions on the use of their languages in schools. The monarchy, now in control of a central administration named kaiserlich und königlich, ‘Imperial and Royal’, for the two halves of the Dual Monarchy, retained most of its key powers. The fact that these arrangements lasted for another half a century demonstrates that they were a reasonably effective solution to the problems that had been dogging the Habsburgs since 1848.

In Germany the Prussian victory marginalized the separatist politicians of the south German states, led by Bavaria, where the National Liberals were now generating an almost unstoppable enthusiasm for a final act of unification through the extension of the North German Confederation to the south. But France stood in the way. Following the Prussian victory, Napoleon III began to search for ways of limiting the threat to France that he saw in the emergence of a new strong power on the right bank of the Rhine. But he was unable to find any allies to back him up; the Italians were irritated by the continuing French military defence of the Pope’s remaining territories in and around Rome, Britain stood aloof, and Russia still valued the Prussians’ role in Poland. Nevertheless, war fever began to grip the French political elite. As early as February 1869 the Minister of War told the Council of Ministers in Paris that ‘war with Prussia is inevitable and imminent. We are armed as never before.’ Thus the French emperor felt unable to remain inactive when on 2 July 1870 a member of a cadet branch of the Prussian royal family, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1835–1905), was offered the throne of Spain, which had become vacant through the enforced abdication of Queen Isabella. France considered Spain part of its own sphere of influence, and thought that Bismarck and Wilhelm were behind the candidacy. The result, French public opinion feared, would be a Prussian threat from the south as well as the east.

Bismarck won international sympathy by claiming at the time, and later, that Prince Leopold’s candidature had come as a complete surprise to him. It was not until after the Second World War that documents from the Sigmaringen archive came to light showing that Leopold’s father had consulted Wilhelm I as soon as the first tentative approach was made from Spain, and that Bismarck had advised the king to encourage the candidacy. This was not because Bismarck wanted a war; it was for him just another lever of diplomatic pressure. Indeed, when the French ambassador Count Vincent Benedetti (1817–1900) met Wilhelm at his spa retreat in Bad Ems, the king agreed to withdraw his support for Leopold, who retired to his estate and never did become a monarch, although his brother and his son both became rulers of Romania. The matter seemed to be settled. However, the Prussian king was waylaid by the French ambassador during a walk and confronted with fresh demands. Wilhelm ‘sternly’ rejected Benedetti’s ‘importunate’ demand that Prussia should support a candidature like Leopold’s neither in the present nor at any time in the future, and he sent his aide-de-camp to tell Benedetti that he was not willing to receive him again. Wilhelm’s staff sent a telegram to Bismarck reporting the outcome. Bismarck’s published brief summary of the telegram left out the polite phrases with which Wilhelm had gilded his conversation with Benedetti. But the key lay in the mistranslation of the French term aide-de-camp as ‘adjutant of the day’, which made it seem as if a very lowly non-commissioned officer, not a close personal assistant, had been sent to give Benedetti the brush-off. This apparent insult was enough for Napoleon III, already seeking another foreign success to bolster his fading popularity, to issue a declaration of war.

What were the reasons for Bismarck’s aggressive and underhand behaviour? First, the ousting of the pro-Prussian Ministry in Bavaria in February 1870 and its replacement by a government of the ‘Patriot Party’, Catholic, anti-Prussian, and pro-French, threatened to derail the progress of unification. Bismarck feared this development could well be repeated in other south German states. Secondly, military reforms in France, though incomplete, meant that in the near future French military strength would be even more formidable than it already was. Thirdly, the French, currently on their own, might also gain allies in the near future; indeed, Napoleon III gambled on the Austrians and the Danes choosing this moment to take their revenge. Fourthly, it seemed to Bismarck that at this point Napoleon III could easily be made to appear the aggressor and thus international intervention be avoided. Both sides proceeded to mobilize their forces. Most people expected the French to win as they had expected the Austrians to win in 1866. While Moltke allowed his officers wide latitude in taking tactical decisions, however, the rigid French chain of command bound Napoleon’s officers into slow-moving, largely defensive manoeuvres. The chain of command through the Prussian General Staff – the only General Staff in Europe at the time – was far more decisive and effective. By the time of the first encounters, the French had brought 250,000 men to the front, many of them inadequately armed and supplied, whereas the Prussians and their allies deployed 320,000 battle-ready troops on the border. French intelligence was poor, and the seizure of the town of Wissembourg by 80,000 Prussian and Bavarian troops on 4 August 1870 came as a complete surprise to the French general who had inspected the town the day before. Poorly trained French recruits fired aimlessly and without co-ordination and were no match for the disciplined Prussians. At Froeschwiller and Spicheren the French armies, dug into defensive positions, were outmanoeuvred by the Germans. These initial victories opened the way for the Prussians to advance across France; they came as an enormous shock to public opinion across Europe, dissuading the Austrians, Danes and Italians from intervening, causing the overthrow of the French government, and leading to increasingly vehement criticism of the emperor by Republican journalists and politicians. Ill with gout and kidney problems, his face ‘stamped with suffering’ according to one account, Napoleon III finally passed over command to Marshal Achille Bazaine (1811–88), a rough soldier who had risen through the ranks and fought in Mexico and the Crimea.

But Bazaine dithered, absorbed in quarrels with his fellow commanders, with the emperor, and with the Empress Eugénie, who was in charge of affairs back in Paris. Without orders from Moltke, 30,000 Prussian troops dashed forward to encounter 150,000 French troops ensconced in defensive positions at Mars-la-Tour in north-eastern France. In the gathering gloom Prussian hussars charged, deceiving the French infantry with shouts of ‘Vive la France! Vive l’Empereur!’ before skewering them on their lances. Bazaine had failed to exploit his superior numbers by ordering an advance. Under heavy fire from Prussian artillery, and worried by his massive expenditure of ammunition and supplies, Bazaine retreated towards Metz, leading to the first major set-piece battle of the war, at Gravelotte on 18 August 1870, where 200,000 German troops with 730 guns faced 160,000 French troops with 520 cannon. Bazaine again stayed put, allowing his line to be outflanked. As his subordinates raged at him to move his troops to face the enemy, Bazaine remained inactive, until he was forced to pull his men back. The war now moved rapidly to a climax. As Bazaine retreated with 140,000 troops into the fortress at Metz, Moltke deployed an army of 150,000 to surround it, beating back the one French attempt at a sortie. A new French army put together by Napoleon III and Marshal Patrice de MacMahon (1808–93), whose Irish ancestors had emigrated to France after the defeat of King James II (1633–1701) in 1688, moved forward to relieve Metz. But this force was blocked at Beaumont and then surrounded by the German armies, now at a strength of 200,000, near the fortress of Sedan. ‘We are in the chamber-pot,’ commented the French general Auguste-Alexandre Ducrot (1817–82), who assumed command when MacMahon was wounded ‘and about to be shat upon’. Under a relentless artillery bombardment, the French army disintegrated and began to flee in panic and disorder, leaving 17,000 dead and wounded on the battlefield (the Germans lost 9,000).

Seeing the game was up, Napoleon III sent a message of surrender to Wilhelm, Moltke and Bismarck. Offered a flask of brandy, Bismarck toasted everyone in English, ‘Here’s to the unification of Germany’, and drank the entire flask. In an attempt to gain mild terms, Napoleon III rode out in person from Sedan, and was met by Bismarck, who sat him down on a bench by an inn. The conversation was held in the German the emperor had learned as a child. Bismarck informed Napoleon that the entire French army would be taken into captivity, and the siege of Metz would continue. ‘Then everything is lost,’ the emperor mumbled. ‘Yes, quite right,’ replied Bismarck brutally: ‘everything really is lost.’ Some 100,000 French troops were made to lay down their arms and were taken to prison camps. As the news reached Paris, on 3 September 1870, riots broke out. About 60,000 people gathered on the Place de la Concorde, shouting ‘Death to the Bonapartes! Long live the nation!’ On 4 September the Assembly proclaimed the deposition of the dynasty and the creation of the Third Republic. Napoleon III was taken to Kassel, from where he was eventually allowed to go into exile in England.

But the war was not yet over. ‘There is much bloody work ahead of us,’ King Wilhelm told his officers. Holed up in the fortress of Metz, Bazaine and his troops began to starve; by 30 September 1870 they had slaughtered half their horses for food. Two huge foraging columns of 40,000 men each were repulsed by Prussian artillery fire and shot to pieces with the chassepots the Germans had captured at Sedan. Bazaine surrendered his 133,000 troops and 600 guns to the Germans on 29 October 1870. As the soldiers trudged into captivity, the Prussians were taken aback by their desperate need for food: ‘all the French did from 29–31 October,’ commented one of them, ‘was eat and talk about food’. In France a provisional Republican Government of National Defence was formed under Léon Gambetta (1838–82), a long-term opponent of the empire. Dedicated to continuing the fight, Gambetta, escaping from Paris by hot-air balloon, raised 250,000 more troops, as the German armies completed their encirclement. In a series of bloody encounters, the French armies recaptured Orléans in early November, but an attack by 60,000 French troops on Beaune-la-Rolande was beaten back in heavy fighting, and a sortie from Paris planned to coincide with the attack never happened because the balloon carrying the message from Beaune was blown off course, eventually landing in Norway. Demoralized, and plagued by desertions, the remaining French armies disintegrated. All that was left were the 400,000 troops garrisoning Paris.

Surrounded on all sides by the German armies, Paris soon ran out of food, and the increasingly desperate inhabitants were subsisting on bread and not much else by the end of the year. An attempted breakout with 100,000 troops was repulsed with losses of 12,000 men in a three-day battle at Villiers and Champigny at the end of November 1870. Two more large-scale sorties fared no better. The Prussians began bombarding the city, but the losses the shells caused were far outweighed by deaths from starvation in the besieged city, which were running at 3,000 a week by January 1871. On 10–11 January a surviving French army dug in at Le Mans was destroyed by a surprise attack, losing 25,000 dead and wounded and 50,000 deserters. Another French army of 110,000 men fell to pieces in the south; men and horses were dying of sickness or malnutrition, and even the arrival of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who quickly assembled 25,000 volunteer troops to fight for the new French Republic, was unable to redress the balance. Meanwhile the conflict had become increasingly bitter, as the Germans looted everything in sight, focusing especially on wine cellars. (‘All the way down from Sedan,’ reported an American observer of the German advance, ‘there were two almost continuous lines of broken bottles along the roadsides.’)

When armed French civilians and deserters, quickly dubbed francs-tireurs, or ‘free sharpshooters’, ambushed their foraging parties and patrols, the Germans responded with heavy reprisals, summarily executing any armed civilians they encountered. Garibaldi and his men did not help by threatening to cut the ears off fourteen Prussian prisoners if the Germans continued with their reprisals. Bismarck ordered villages that resisted demands for supplies to be burned to the ground and all the male inhabitants hanged. There should be no ‘laziness in killing,’ he said. Their inhabitants suspected of aiding the francs-tireurs, the villages of Varice, Ourcelle and Ablis, near Orléans, were burned to the ground, while Prussian troops attacking francs-tireurs near Fontenoy-sur-Moselle set the buildings alight, bayoneted the inhabitants and threw them, still living, onto the flames. The situation was finally resolved when long-postponed elections were held in France, with the co-operation of the Germans, on 8 February 1871. They brought victory to anti-war conservative monarchists. The new Assembly appointed the seventy-three-year-old Adolphe Thiers as President. In bad-tempered peace negotiations, Thiers was browbeaten by Bismarck and Moltke until he agreed to sign a treaty on 26 February 1871, ceding Alsace-Lorraine to the new united Germany, reluctantly approving the payment of an indemnity of 5 billion francs, and sanctioning a German victory parade through the streets of Paris.

Altogether in the war, the French lost 140,000 killed and roughly the same number wounded, the Germans 45,000 killed and twice as many wounded. The peace terms imposed by Bismarck aroused lasting resentments that were to find their eventual outlet in 1914. To add insult to injury, Bismarck organized the proclamation of the German Empire, extended to include the now helpless south German states as well, in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, on 18 January 1871. The political significance of the war was immediately recognized by Disraeli, who declared on 9 February 1871:

This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of last century . . . Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. There is not a diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away . . . The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most, and feels the effects of this great change most, is England.

ECHOES OF REVOLUTION

In little over two decades, from 1848 to 1871, Europe had been transformed. Both Italy and Germany, despite the dashing of the nationalists’ hopes in 1848–9, had been united, though on the basis of a conservatively designed constitutional monarchy rather than a democratic republic. In Germany’s case the liberals had to make do with a parliamentary system in which the powers of the monarchy and the army were far greater than they had wished them to be. Universal male suffrage was also very far from what the moderate liberals wanted; they were more comfortable with the situation in Italy, where a limited property franchise still applied. Gambling on the loyalty and conservatism of the rural masses, bold and imaginative statesmen like Napoleon III, Bismarck and Disraeli had sought to outflank the liberals and deliver mass support to their new conservative ideology. Reaction, rampant almost everywhere in 1850, had failed by the end of the decade, even in Russia, despite its attempts to adapt to the new circumstances of the post-revolutionary era. The Vienna Settlement had been torn up, Metternich’s immobile conservatism brushed aside, and a new political order born. It was to last, though with perceptible shifts and changes, almost all the way up to 1914. After a short burst of rapid boundary changes and the formation of new geopolitical entities, the major states of Europe – Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottoman Empire – and many of the minor ones, from the Balkans to Scandinavia, remained within more or less stable borders for over four decades after 1870.

The dramatic changes of the 1850s and 1860s were set in motion by the 1848 Revolutions, even if they were not exactly what any of the revolutionaries had envisaged. The year 1848 put a whole range of political forces on the European agenda, from constitutional monarchy to democratic republicanism. From 1848 onwards, nationalism was a major driving force in European politics. The old world of the secret societies and Jacobin-style revolutionary clubs gave way almost everywhere, though not in Russia, Poland, or the Balkans, to the new world of organized political parties, the political press (used by government as well as by opposition), single-issue pressure groups, and increasingly as time went on, mass communications. Revolutionary activism bifurcated into organized Marxist movements on the one hand, and increasingly violent anarchist plots on the other. The old politics of Metternich’s stubborn resistance to the forces of change was superseded by a new, more flexible politics espoused by conservative statesmen who saw that these forces had to be embraced and turned to their own advantage if the society they wished to preserve could be saved. Even the most reactionary regimes of the 1850s recognized the need for economic deregulation, educational improvement and judicial reform, all of which can be counted major results of the 1848 Revolutions. The relations of governments with the public everywhere, even in Russia, were no longer shrouded in secrecy and mystery or dependent on assumed habits of deference, but were based far more on an openly propagandistic appeal to the loyalty of the masses. In many respects it makes sense to see the whole period from 1848 to 1871 as a single period of revolutionary change, rather than focusing individually on each of the short-term upheavals that followed one another with such breathtaking speed during these years.

Seen in a global context, the most notable achievement of the 1848 Revolutions was the abolition of slavery in a number of Europe’s overseas colonies. Here, as in many other respects, the running was made by the British, who had already abolished slavery in their colonies in the 1830s and used the power of the Royal Navy to suppress the trade in slaves from Africa to the New World. The Second Republic in France brought the committed anti-slavery campaigner Victor Schœlcher (1804–93) into government, and on 27 April 1848 it issued a decree freeing the slaves in the remaining French colonies in the West Indies – Guadeloupe, where 87,000 people became free men and women and French citizens, and 74,000 in Martinique. His action, however, was pre-empted by a slave revolt on the island of Martinique on 20 May, following protests at the arrest of a recalcitrant slave, two weeks before the news of the decree arrived on the island. The island’s authorities, anxious to quell the revolt, formally emancipated the slaves on 22 May. When the decree was announced in Guadeloupe in early June, the slaves fled the plantations, as they had done in Martinique, and by the end of the year Indian indentured labourers were being imported to get the sugar plantations going again. A slave rebellion that broke out on the island of St Croix in the Danish Virgin Islands in 1848 was also the trigger for the emancipation decree issued by Governor-General Peter von Scholten (1784–1854) on 3 July 1848; the slaves on the Swedish Caribbean island of St Barthélemy had already been freed the previous year.

The ideas of 1848 and the broader ideology of anti-slavery were all the more persuasive because pressures had long been growing for the abolition of the slave trade. The Evangelical Revival in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain brought to slave-owning areas radical missionaries who soon began to champion slaves’ rights. Thus in Demerara, part of British Guiana, acquired by Britain from the Netherlands in 1815, the arrival of one John Smith (1790–1824), sent by the London Missionary Society two years later, soon sparked discontent as he began to fight plantation owners for the slaves’ right to attend chapel services. Smith encouraged the slaves to educate and improve themselves and made a number of them deacons of his ministry. Yet conditions were so harsh that 10,000 slaves rose in rebellion in 1823. An even larger uprising, involving 60,000 slaves, took place in Barbados in 1831. A great slave revolt in Bahia province, Brazil, in 1835, like the West Indian uprisings, was in part inspired by the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), with the rebels carrying pictures of the Haitian leaders, and led by Muslim preachers who were able to mobilize slaves transported from Islamic states in west Africa. This was a more violent rebellion, and it was put down with considerable force by the Brazilian Army. These revolts caused growing alarm among European colonists, plantation owners and governments. The Brazilian slave trade was formally ended shortly after the great revolt. The British Parliament abolished slavery in British-controlled areas of the world two years earlier, in 1833, in a law that came fully into effect in 1838. In the 1850s and 1860s, including in North and South America, slavery was formally abolished almost everywhere, and international treaties were negotiated for the suppression of the slave trade. On the Caribbean island of St Martin, in the Antilles, divided between the French and Dutch, the French emancipation decree sparked a slave rebellion in the Dutch half, but slavery in the rest of the islands, including Curaçao, was not ended until 1863; in the Dutch colony of Suriname, on the north-eastern coast of South America, the slaves were forced to continue working, for meagre pay, for another decade, and in all these areas the ensuing labour shortage was made good by the import of indentured labour from the Dutch East Indies. The Spanish colony of Cuba did not outlaw the slave trade until 1867 and slavery itself in 1886, while it took the French another decade to abolish slavery in Madagascar.

The immediate or eventual emancipation of the slaves in the European overseas colonies where it remained could be seen as one of the wider consequences of the 1848 Revolutions, expressing liberal and democratic ideals of human equality and equal rights that had other corollaries in the parallel moves to end serfdom in the parts of Europe where it still remained. But these principles emphatically did not extend to at least half the population of the Continent, namely the female sex. The vast majority of revolutionaries of all political persuasions were of one mind in considering politics a matter for men; women’s place was in the home. Women might participate in revolutionary uprisings, help build barricades, defiantly fly revolutionary flags, as they did in Paris, in the face of oncoming troops, or prepare and carry supplies to the fighters: none of this was thought by men to entitle them to a say in politics. Nevertheless, in raising the question of the rights of man, the Revolutions of 1848 also by implication raised the question of the rights of woman, and some women at least spoke out in favour of female emancipation. The Czech writer Božena Němcová (1820–62) urged improvements in women’s education (‘We women have remained far behind the age, behind the banner of freedom and culture’), while the German social novelist Louise Otto-Peters (1819–95) founded the Frauen-Zeitung (Women’s Newspaper) to publicize the demand for votes for women and urge the formation of women’s societies.

As revolutionary clubs, meetings and demonstrations multiplied, women increasingly took part, and where they were not permitted to join, they sometimes formed their own, most notably the Club for the Emancipation of Women, established in Paris by Eugénie Niboyet (1796–1883), a former Saint-Simonian and veteran journalist whose salon had been frequented by Flora Tristan. Backed by her ‘socialist and feminist’ journal La Voix des Femmes (The Voice of Women), the Club raised the demand for the legalization of divorce and the right of married women to control their own property. Most notably, it also urged the extension of the franchise to women, proposing the celebrated writer George Sand (the pseudonym of Amantine Dupand, 1804–76) for the Constituent Assembly in 1848 (Sand declined). The former seamstress and teacher Jeanne Deroin (1805–94), a Saint-Simonian who brought up Flora Tristan’s children and edited a number of short-lived feminist newspapers, stood for election to the Legislative Assembly in 1849, but her candidacy was disallowed by the government. In Prague a Club of Slavic Women was founded to encourage women’s education, while patriotic women’s associations emerged in many parts of Germany. Few of these initiatives, which at their most radical, in France, reflected the feminism of the Utopian socialists, received the support of male radicals, democrats and republicans. They were denounced by the incorrigibly misogynistic Proudhon, and as the revolution disintegrated, the newly resurgent monarchical authorities banned women’s participation in political meetings (notably in Austria and Prussia and indeed almost all the German states) and closed any remaining feminist newspapers. Deroin was arrested in 1850 and not released from prison until the following year. Nevertheless, a number of the feminists who had spoken out in 1848–9 re-emerged with the resurgence of liberalism a decade or so later to form feminist associations and publications that would ultimately have a much greater effect and a more lasting influence.

Feminism was in the end marginal to the ideas and events of the 1848 Revolutions. So too, in the larger scheme of things, was socialism. At the beginning of the revolutionary year the socialists were in disarray, many of them in exile, without any mass following. If socialist principles such as state workshops were popular, they paled before the mass attraction of democratic ideas such as universal male suffrage. Socialists’ attempts to turn the revolutionary course of events to their advantage had little success. In exile in London, Karl Marx had already engineered the transformation of the League of the Just, a small group of exiled German artisans, into the League of Communists, shifting its focus from revolutionary conspiracy to open propaganda. As the revolutionary atmosphere intensified, Marx published its statement of aims in February 1848, drawing on previous drafts by Engels. This was the Communist Manifesto. Many of its pithy phrases have become famous: ‘the idiocy of rural life’; ‘the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class’; ‘the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains’; ‘workers of the world, unite!’ Capitalism, argued the Manifesto, was expanding relentlessly, creating an ever-growing, ever more exploited working class that would eventually come together under socialist leadership and overthrow it: the bourgeoisie ‘produces above all its own gravedigger. Its decline and the victory of the proletariat are both equally inevitable.’

For all the force of its rhetoric, however, the Manifesto met with only a limited response. Returning to Cologne in 1848, Marx joined forces with the democrats to polemicize against the moderate liberals and above all against Prussia. Expelled from the city, he travelled around the insurgent centres in 1849 with Engels, but they were disappointed with their ‘petty-bourgeois’ hesitancy. Marx revived the New Rhenish News with the subtitle Review of Political Economy. In 1850 it carried his brilliant essay, Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850. This recounted the defeat of the revolutionary forces but predicted a fresh outbreak in which the proletariat would come to power. The periodical was not a success, however. The Communist League became mired in ideological quarrels and personal animosities, and its members in Cologne were arrested and subjected to a mass show trial. Naively forgetting their assertion in the Manifesto that the law was just an instrument of class interests, Marx and Engels expected their exposure of forged evidence to produce an acquittal, but the jury found several of the defendants guilty. Driven to despair, Marx brought about the dissolution of the Communist League. In his pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), he was forced to conclude that capitalism had yet to develop to the point where a revolution would become inevitable.

None of this stopped Marx from engaging with the newly founded General German Workers’ Association. This had been created by the charismatic Hegelian Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64), who had established the Association in meetings held as he travelled the length and breadth of the land in the months preceding his death in a duel at the hands of a rival in love on 31 August 1864. Marx also attracted considerable attention in London when his backing for the Polish nationalist revolt against Russian rule in 1863 led to a public meeting at which the organizers founded a new International Working Men’s Association. The Association was not a tightly knit group as the League of Communists had been, but a loose confederation of already existing trade unions, mutual benefit societies and educational associations, and it soon won adherents in France as well as Austria, Belgium, Italy and Spain. Marx exerted his influence on the Workers’ International largely from behind the scenes, advocating reformist aims such as a shorter working day and labour actions such as persuading workers of one nationality not to break strikes in another country, in order to expand the movement and create a favourable basis for revolution when the moment came.

The Workers’ International now played a key role in the dramatic coda to the Franco-Prussian War that took place in Paris in 1871. On 18 March 1871, following repeated popular disturbances and struggles over the control of weapons, the government of the Third Republic, its bureaucrats and its troops decamped from the city along with much of the Parisian bourgeoisie. The Central Committee of the National Guard organized an election to create an independent municipal authority, the Commune, which they dominated along with the Proudhonians. The Workers’ International won only four seats. However, most of the Commune’s representatives had acquired their experience in the International’s sections, in the democratic clubs, or in the National Guard, and there was a high proportion of workers among them, alongside petty-bourgeois and artisans. The Commune spent most of its time organizing food and other supplies, but it also set up work schemes, laid down a minimum wage, decreed the separation of Church and State, abolished fines in factories, outlawed night work for bakers, and set up some schools on Fourierist lines. It seems reasonable enough to call such policies socialist. As the writer Edmond de Goncourt (1822–96) remarked, ‘what is happening is very simply the conquest of France by the workers’. Yet the ferment of radical ideas in the clubs had little practical effect, and led to massive disagreements within the Commune: ‘The best day of my life,’ one member was heard to say to another, ‘will be the one on which I arrest you.’ The Commune established a Committee of Public Safety and imposed a censorship. For many, this was 1792 all over again, though in reality the politics of the Commune were very different from those of the sans-culottes of the late eighteenth century.

The obvious dominance of the Jacobins did not prevent the government of the Republic, led from Versailles by Thiers, from claiming they were in reality communists acting under the orders of Karl Marx, who was accused of being the ‘head of a vast conspiracy’ operating through the Workers’ International. Elated at his new notoriety, Marx fired off his classic polemic The Civil War in France (1871), condemning Thiers, ‘that monstrous gnome’, and hailing the Commune as a new form of state created by working men, ‘the glorious harbinger of a new society’. The pamphlet was lauded by socialists across Europe and featured in newspapers and magazines everywhere. Yet the Commune did not last long. Communes proclaimed in other French towns were quickly suppressed. Thiers ordered the regular army into Paris to re-establish the authority of his government. The release from German captivity of French prisoners of war swelled the Versailles forces from an initial 55,000 to 120,000 by the end of May. The bombardment began on 2 April 1871. There was no co-ordinated defence, and no attempt to prevent the troops from entering the city; each quarter of the city set up its own barricades.

The breakthrough of Thiers’ forces at the Porte de Saint-Cloud on 21 May 1871 inaugurated the semaine sanglante, in which his troops rushed into the houses abutting the barricades and shot the people manning the defences until they were either all dead or had abandoned the obstruction. Hostages were killed on both sides, including the Archbishop of Paris, taken by the Communards in an attempted exchange for Auguste Blanqui, who had been seized on Thiers’ orders on 18 March 1871 but was subsequently elected President of the Commune in absentia. A recent investigation based on contemporary documents, including hospital and burial records, puts the number of dead at between 5,700 and 7,400, perhaps 1,400 of them executed in cold blood on capture. After Thiers re-established control over the city, 38,578 supporters of the Commune were arrested, imprisoned and brought to trial over the next two years; 10,137 were convicted, nearly half of whom were deported to the tropical penal colony of New Caledonia. This was the last gasp of the Parisian insurrectionary tradition, the final paroxysm of more than eighty years of Jacobinism. It polarized French politics and society. But it also changed the nature of socialism.

The suppression of the Commune opened up fresh divisions and recriminations in the Workers’ International, above all between the followers of Marx and those of Bakunin, who had escaped from his Siberian exile while on parole and reached London via Japan and the United States. After staying with Alexander Herzen, Bakunin moved to Italy, where he found disciples among the younger generation of political radicals in Naples. Moving next to Switzerland, he began again to spin revolutionary conspiracies, proclaiming his faith in the revolutionary potential of the dispossessed rural masses. In September 1867 he appeared with Garibaldi on the podium at a meeting of a new, largely liberal League for Peace and Freedom (also attended by Victor Hugo and John Stuart Mill), but after failing to persuade it to take a revolutionary course, he resigned and joined the Workers’ International. Here, however, he formed his own sub-group, incurring the wrath of Marx, who rejected the idea of insurrectionary secret societies in favour of organized, open political parties. As the polemics flew, Marx outmanoeuvred Bakunin’s supporters on the General Council of the International at the 1872 Hague Congress, which he attended in person. Armed with a clear majority, Marx dropped a bombshell: the seat of the Council would move to New York. The delegates duly obeyed. Behind this startling move was Marx’s belief that the new era of political reaction and police repression following the suppression of the Paris Commune would make the International’s work impossible, his fear that his own failing health might open the way to the Bakuninists once more, and his desire to clear the deck so he could make progress with his own economic writings at his customary seat in the British Museum reading room.

From now on, there was to be a clear distinction on the far left between the socialists, mostly followers of Marx, who eschewed the bullet for the ballot box, trusting in the inexorable growth of the proletariat to deliver, in the end, a democratic majority for a peaceful revolution, and the anarchists, mostly followers of Bakunin, who relied on violence, assassination and insurrection to destroy the state and open the way for the naturally egalitarian instincts of the rural masses to express themselves. Both these doctrines won millions of adherents in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. To see why this was so, we now have to turn to examining the ways in which European societies and economies developed over the years between 1850 and 1914.