On 2 January 1848 an Austrian captain was walking down the street in Milan puffing at a cigar when, suddenly, it was knocked from his teeth. This meant war. In a burst of patriotism, the citizens of Milan had decided in November 1847 to stop smoking in order to deprive the Austrian treasury of the revenue from the excise duty on cigars. Anyone who broke the boycott was bullied into complying, but until now no representative of the Austrian authorities had been involved. They retaliated by issuing large quantities of cigars to their troops and sending them out to swagger about the streets in groups of three and puff defiantly at the natives. They were hissed and jeered, and then assaulted. Street urchins, fishwives and petty criminals joined in, and it was not long before casualties began piling up, with at least two dead and hundreds wounded; the soldiers withdrew to the safety of their barracks.
On 12 January, revolution broke out in Palermo. This had been sparked off by associates of Mazzini, but rapidly attracted the riff-raff of the city and the brigands of the surrounding countryside. The troubles spread to Naples, and soon the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was in turmoil. King Ferdinand pleaded for Austrian help, but this was not forthcoming. ‘Europe is engulfed by a conspiracy of the party of subversion against the legally existing order, of which Austria is recognised as the only true defender, and as a result, the agitators have chosen her as the target for their attacks,’ replied Metternich, who was still recovering from the shock of the cigar plot. Ferdinand was going to have to resign himself to granting a constitution. In order to forestall any eruptions in Piedmont, the King of Sardinia granted one as well. The Grand Duke of Tuscany would do so next, followed by the pope.1
The next attack on Austria was no less sneaky than the tobacco offensive. It was delivered by an internationally renowned dancer, a darling of the London and Paris stages, the Neapolitan-born Fanny Cerrito. She was currently performing the ballet La Vivandière at the La Fenice theatre in Venice. On 6 February she flew on to the stage to deliver her pièce de résistance, a ‘Siciliana’ in which she could show off her famously nimble footwork, wearing a dress trimmed with the Italian nationalists’ colours of red, white and green, and rattling a similarly adorned tambourine. The audience went wild. The police intervened, arresting a number of people and closing down the theatre until further notice.
Perhaps thinking of the events in Palermo and Naples, of Etna and Vesuvius, Alexis de Tocqueville warned his colleagues in the French Chamber of Deputies on 24 January that they were sitting on a volcano. Three days later he conjured another metaphor. ‘Can you not feel … how shall I put it? a revolutionary draught?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘This wind, I do not know where it was born or whence it comes, nor, believe me, whom it will sweep away …’ There was certainly something in the air, and had been for some time.2
There was ill-feeling all over Europe, but particularly in Germany and Italy, against the progressive encroachment of the state into private life, against increasing regulation and taxation, and against the officials and police who enforced it. The Industrial Revolution had altered the economic, social and political landscape in most of Europe, creating inequalities on a scale hitherto unknown, and a huge underclass at the mercy of every dip in the economic cycle, threatened with starvation with every poor harvest. As a result of the economic crisis that began in the mid-1840s, waves of helpless people flooded into the larger cities, causing housing shortages which turned the centres of many of them into squalid anthills. At least a quarter of the population of Paris was indigent, living in filthy slums cheek-by-jowl with the hôtels particuliers of the rich. It was not just the poor who felt there was something wrong with this.3
There was, among young people and intellectuals, a sense of disillusion with a system which could produce such a state of affairs, and perhaps more important, of spiritual and cultural boredom. At the beginning of the 1840s, the heir to the French throne, Louis-Philippe’s eldest son the duc d’Orléans, said in conversation with the painter Ary Scheffer that ‘the present epoch is prosperous and peaceful, but it is too flat not to soon become stagnant and corrupt’. In 1847 the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine called for ‘a revolution of contempt’ against what he saw as a soulless and pharisaical political and social order. In February of that year, the socialist Louis Blanc and the historian Jules Michelet both published the first volumes of their respective histories of the French Revolution, which they depicted as poetic, patriotic and ultimately glorious. In March, Lamartine’s own contribution to the subject, Histoire des Girondins, added yet more poetic lustre. People who had been used to view the episode with horror and loathing began to see it in a different light, as something heroic and magnificent. The current epoch shone by the absence of such qualities.4
Tocqueville’s talk of volcanoes and revolutionary draughts may have been fanciful, but there was a sense of crisis. While some went as far as suggesting the king should abdicate in favour of his grandson the comte de Paris, most were agreed that he should at least sack his unpopular prime minister, François Guizot. The retired British officer Captain Rees Howell Gronow, who had settled in Paris, noted expressions of ‘sullen defiance’ as he strolled along the boulevards, and expected ‘squalls’. On 18 February 1848 the queen, Marie-Amélie, noted that there was no more gold to be had anywhere in Paris, that people had stopped transacting business, and that many had left for the country. She was even thinking of sending her diamonds to Brussels for safekeeping.5
So far, the only noticeable thing that had wafted over from the events in Palermo and Naples had been a fashion for the ‘Calabrian look’, an outfit including a conical plumed hat, thigh-high boots and a cloak, which was how most theatre producers dressed the Italian bandits who turned up frequently in operas and plays of the time. Students all over northern Europe began to affect the style, often growing fierce moustaches to go with it. But the vagaries of history were about to make Tocqueville’s warnings prophetic.
Beginning in July 1847, to obviate the ban on public meetings liberals had taken to holding political banquets in Paris to draw attention to the plight of the poor and to voice their grievances. These had proved ineffectual and were discontinued, but in the new year the 12th Legion of the National Guard, recruited from the poorest areas of the city, decided to hold one of its own. The government raised objections and on 21 February denied permission, so the event was cancelled. The following day a group of students staged a demonstration against this decision, marching through the slums on their way to protest in front of the seat of the Chambers at the Palais Bourbon. By the time they reached it, they were leading a huge and menacing crowd. The National Guard and troops were called out to disperse it and restore order, which they did, overpowering and dismantling a few barricades which had been erected. They then retired for the night.
The authorities had learned to live with this kind of disturbance over the past two decades, and the king was unruffled. He assured the painter Horace Vernet, who had called to discuss a portrait commission, that there was nothing to worry about, and that the ‘straw blaze’ would quickly burn itself out. The principal liberal agitators and the most active dissidents, such as Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, had been notable by their absence from the scene, since they too believed the people of Paris were in no mood for insurrection.6
By the next morning, 23 February, more barricades had gone up and the National Guard was called out once more, but this time only units from the more well-to-do quartiers turned out. This unsettled Louis-Philippe, and he caved in to the general demand for the sacking of Guizot. This was well received, and the crisis was defused as public opinion rallied to the king. Those students and workers bent on further action were isolated and leaderless, so nobody thought of moving the troops in to clear the remaining barricades and mop up. The mood on the boulevards was jubilant as Captain Gronow sauntered off to dine at his club that afternoon. The general sense of relief was also noted by the police functionary La Hodde, and by the journalist Maxime du Camp, who had spent the day wandering around the city with his friends Louis Bouilhet and Gustave Flaubert. They detected an inchoate enthusiasm, with shouts of ‘À bas Guizot!’ alternating with ‘Vive le Roi!’, ‘Vive la République!’, ‘Vive la Garde Nationale!’ and ‘Vive la Troupe!’ as rumour and rhetoric brushed the groups assembled on the streets. They and the overwhelming majority of eyewitnesses were convinced that the whole affair was over, and none of them expected any more trouble: former head of the Sûreté Paul Louis Canler judged that the émeute had blown itself out like a passing storm. But Captain Gronow’s dinner was rudely interrupted.7
He and his fellow diners were disturbed by a commotion in the street outside. When they went to the window they beheld a lugubrious procession filing past, drawing a wagon piled with corpses and calling for revenge; he could hardly believe the change of mood that had taken place within the space of an hour or two.
While the government had made no further use of the troops called out earlier, it had not withdrawn them, and various units were left encamped in streets and squares all over the city. On his way to dinner Gronow had passed a company of the 14th Regiment of the Line, stationed at the corner of the boulevard des Capucines. The bored soldiers stood around improvised braziers trying to keep warm, while passing civilians alternately cheered and taunted them. At one point an altercation developed, drawing in a number of passers-by. A random shot fired by one of the civilians provoked the soldiers, who opened fire before retreating to the shelter of the courtyard of the ministry of foreign affairs. At this point the incident turned into tragicomedy, as the bandsman bearing the big drum got stuck in the porte-cochère of the ministry, and those behind him had to make a stand outside. This minor incident left at least three dozen dead and over seventy wounded (figures differ). The dead were loaded on to a wagon, and drawn around the city by a snowballing crowd demanding revenge and calling the people to arms.8
By the morning of 24 February the city was in a state of chaos, with armed mobs attacking military outposts. But the situation was by no means desperate. Marshal Gérard had long before drawn up a plan to deal with popular insurrection, and it was considered foolproof. It was not, however, Gérard who was in command in Paris, but the talentless General Tiburce Sebastiani. The National Guard was under General Jacqueminot, a good soldier but not the man to rally his forces in a crisis. The prefect of police was Gabriel Delessert, described by one French statesman as ‘a very good man, but more fitted to preside over some philanthropic association than to directing the police of Paris’. Much the same could have been said of Louis-Philippe himself. While most of Paris waited for a vigorous reaction on the part of the government and a brisk restoration of order, the king dithered.9
Seventy-four years old and feeling his age, he had recently lost his dearest sister and closest adviser, Madame Adelaïde. He had been profoundly shocked by the unreliability of the National Guard, the citizenry-in-arms which he had considered to be the mainstay of his throne. He did not like the idea of using troops or shooting civilians. It was not until the early afternoon that he decided to hand over command to Marshal Bugeaud, with the brief of restoring order.
The younger son of an impoverished marquis from rural Périgord, Thomas Robert Bugeaud had won his corporal’s stripes at Austerlitz and distinguished himself as a colonel during the Hundred Days, when he defeated a sixfold-greater Austrian force ten days after Waterloo. He was certainly up to the job in hand: in Algeria, he had capped some spectacular victories with ruthless pacification, and he had no time for what he called ‘political prudery’. During the capture of Saragossa in the Peninsular war he had learned to deploy men hugging the walls on either side of the street, too close for the snipers on their own side but well placed to pick off those on the other, to take barricades and to enter houses by blowing holes in the walls with small infantry field-pieces.10
But, according to Bugeaud, the king’s order reached him too late, by a few hours. He believed that ‘every quarter of an hour which you abandon to the riot increases its physical and moral force’. The troops had been standing around in what he termed ‘a shameful position with regard to the insurrection’ for sixty hours, without adequate food, fodder or munitions. ‘All I could do was to raise my eyes to heaven and profoundly bemoan the fall of this monarchy which had given France seventeen years of peace, freedom and progress in every field.’11
Louis-Philippe’s eldest son, the duc d’Orléans, had been killed in a coaching accident four years earlier, leaving an infant son, the comte de Paris, in whose favour he abdicated. The king changed out of the uniform he habitually wore and put on a frock-coat, removed his toupee and covered his head with a black hat. Arm in arm with the queen and followed by a small retinue, he left the Tuileries by a side door and walked to the place de la Concorde, where the party climbed into two broughams and a cabriolet. The carriages rolled out of Paris in the direction of Saint Cloud, where they changed horses, and then made for the coast, via Versailles and Dreux. At Le Havre they took ship for England and landed at Newhaven. Throughout the flight, the disconsolate king kept muttering to himself, ‘Worse than Charles X!’, and the phrase came up again and again even after the royal party had settled into exile at Claremont House near Esher in Surrey, originally built for Clive of India and by 1848 the property of Louis-Philippe’s son-in-law Leopold, King of the Belgians.12
A couple of years earlier, Louis-Philippe had chided the liberal statesman Hyacinthe Odilon Barrot, saying, ‘You are too young, Monsieur Odilon Barrot … you never saw the Revolution!’ To which the young man replied, ‘For my part, Sire, I am beginning to fear that you are too old, and that you have contemplated it too much, this Revolution!’ Barrot remembered this exchange now. ‘Was it the phantom of the Terror and its scaffolds which clouded the natural wisdom of that otherwise sharp and open mind, was it that phantom which, at the crucial moment, robbed him of the courage which had not failed under the Prussian guns at Valmy, during the cruel trials of a long exile, or, later, the repeated attempts of the assassins: the king’s moment of weakness on the morning of 24 February and above all his precipitate flight cannot be explained otherwise.’13
Shortly after the exit of the king, the mob had stormed into the Tuileries, which was sacked, along with the other Orléans family properties of the Palais-Royal and Neuilly. The duchesse d’Orléans had driven over to the Chamber with the comte de Paris in a last-ditch attempt to have his right to rule endorsed, to no avail. The poet Alphonse de Lamartine had gathered together all the oppositionists he could rally, and from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, where less than eighteen years before Lafayette had presented Louis-Philippe to the people, he declared the Republic.
‘In this extraordinary manner, and almost I may say by chance, the Orleans dynasty ceased to reign over the French people,’ commented Captain Gronow. He was not the only one to be astonished at the randomness of the developments, and people all over Paris, including some of those making up the rapidly-cobbled-together provisional government, were asking themselves what had actually happened and how it had happened. Nobody had planned any of the events of the past few days. The opposition leaders had not played a part. The majority of the workers who manned the barricades had wanted a living wage, not a republic. ‘Paris had played at a bit of rioting and ended up with a revolution,’ commented Maxime Du Camp; ‘it had called for reform and proclaimed the Republic.’ Tocqueville too, while he felt that the revolution had been in some sense inevitable, admitted that it had happened entirely by chance.14
The atmosphere seems to have been even more good-natured than in the July Days of 1830. ‘All the dangers which surrounded us have disappeared,’ noted Count Apponyi in his journal on 28 February. ‘There is no safer town on earth at the moment than Paris,’ wrote this arch-conservative who had trembled at every riot of the past decade. ‘One could hardly be more polite than the people in the street: never, at any time, have I seen the lower classes more obliging towards everyone.’ The only immediate demands the people made of the provisional government were the rights to work and to form trade unions, and for a ten-hour working day. There was very little in the way of aggression towards the rich, attacks on châteaux or calls for blood.15
News of the events in Paris began to reach Vienna on 29 February, provoking wild rumours, a violent rise in the price of food and a crash of government bonds. ‘Well, my dear,’ Metternich said to the Russian ambassador, ‘all is lost!’ He wrote to the tsar to coordinate their response. On hearing the news from Paris, Nicholas had flown into a panic. ‘Act firmly and promptly, or, I am telling it to you, I am repeating it, all is lost,’ he wrote to Frederick William of Prussia. The Prussian king did not need his brother-in-law to tell him things were looking bad. ‘Satan is on the loose again,’ he exclaimed. His first reaction had been to write to Queen Victoria, Nicholas and Metternich, suggesting they create a league of solidarity, his second to call for a congress of German states. But he was overtaken by events.16
Prompted by the news from Paris, every malcontent and body in Germany with an axe to grind began voicing demands. On 3 March a mass demonstration in Cologne had to be dispersed by troops. In Baden, violent demonstrations obliged the king to grant concessions, and two days after that in Stuttgart a petition was presented to the King of Württemberg demanding he convene a German assembly, abolish censorship, introduce trial by jury, grant freedom of assembly and religious worship, and reform the fiscal system. Similar demands were made in Hesse-Darmstadt and Nassau, and on 6 March the King of Saxony was obliged to call the Estates. In Bavaria, political discontent was reinforced by outrage at the king’s recent scandalous affair with the dancer Lola Montez, and he was forced to abdicate in favour of his son. One after the other, governments caved in without the semblance of a fight.
In Berlin, crowds came out into the streets on 6 March calling for constitutional change, and more meetings and demonstrations took place over the next two days. The exceptionally fine spring weather and the carnival atmosphere swelled the crowds, which the city gendarmerie of 150 men was inadequate to control. The authorities felt obliged to fall back on the army, which was arrogant, brutal and greatly disliked, and on 13 March troops ordered to disperse demonstrators killed a number of civilians. There was uproar, and Frederick William could only placate it by promising to introduce reforms.
When news of this reached St Petersburg, the empress broke down. ‘My poor brother, my poor William!’ she wailed. ‘Never mind your poltroon of a brother, when everything is crumbling in Europe, when everything is on fire, when Russia too could be turned upside down,’ snapped an exasperated Nicholas, who felt no pity, having repeatedly warned Frederick William where his ‘liberal’ tendencies would lead. He then turned on his children’s tutor, who had been in the process of reading Goethe’s Faust to the empress, and berated him for propagating such ‘godless’ literature. While he was horrified by the revolutionary surge, the tsar could not repress a sense of satisfaction, even Schadenfreude, at the fact that Frederick William had fallen prey to demons he had himself nourished, and above all that the usurper Louis-Philippe had met his comeuppance. ‘Louis-Philippe has only received his just deserts,’ he wrote. ‘He has gone out by same door by which he came in.’ In contrast to 1830, Nicholas did not recall his ambassador in Paris.17
Metternich had also appealed to the British cabinet for moral if not military support in containing the spreading crisis, but this only earned him a pious snub from Palmerston. ‘Your politics of oppression, which tolerates no resistance, is a fatal one and leads as surely to an explosion as a hermetically sealed cauldron which has no safety-valve,’ the foreign secretary lectured the Austrian ambassador in London. The words were lost on the Austrian chancellor.18
Events taking place elsewhere had emboldened Metternich’s critics at home, and while the Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth made fiery speeches to the Magyar Diet at Pressburg (Bratislava) and Czech patriots held rallies in Prague, various individuals, groups and associations began to voice demands, many in the form of loyal addresses to the throne: booksellers asked for the abolition of censorship, lawyers changes to the legal system, professionals a revision of regulations, manufacturers fiscal reform, others the creation of proper ministries, the establishment of local assemblies, the limitation of the powers of the police, and so on. Metternich ignored them. He believed in standing firm in the storm, and he trusted his police to scotch all plots and conspiracies.
A rowdy demonstration in Vienna on 11 March was dispersed by police without recourse to the use of force, which seemed to bear out his confidence. But a demonstration by students two days later outside the building in which the Land Estates were meeting proved more difficult to handle. Attempts at communication broke down in misunderstanding, rumours spread by troublemakers raised the temperature, and in the early afternoon troops were called in to disperse the crowd. (This may have been done deliberately at the behest of Metternich’s arch-enemy Count Kolowrat in order to precipitate a crisis which would unhorse the chancellor.)
Shots were fired, blood was spilled and barricades were erected as more and more people came out onto the streets voicing a litany of demands, all of them requiring Metternich’s resignation. ‘At last the malady has come to the surface,’ he commented as he watched from the windows of his chancellery a Polish student haranguing the angry crowd outside, evident proof of the international conspiracy. By contrast, he was now utterly isolated, and faced the great hydra alone. Worse, all those who should have stood shoulder to shoulder behind him were putting pressure on him to resign. Without support from any quarter, at nine o’clock that evening Metternich bowed out. He left Vienna with his family and two faithful associates, travelling under an assumed name with nothing in his pocket beside the thousand ducats Salomon Rothschild had lent him. Worst of all, he was obliged to take refuge from the storm engulfing the whole of Europe in that den of liberal iniquity, London.19
This time Nicholas did not feel any Schadenfreude. ‘On Sunday, at 8 o’clock in the evening, we received by the Warsaw telegraph the first news of the worst political misfortune which could befall us in this terrible epoch for governments and peoples,’ Nesselrode wrote to Meyendorff on 21 March. ‘Words fail me to describe such a great catastrophe, human prediction cannot encompass the consequences which might flow from it.’ The immediate consequences were not hard to predict.20
On 15 March, a crowd led by two poets had crossed over from Pest and stormed Buda Castle, releasing a solitary political prisoner from this pseudo-Bastille; Hungary was well on the way to declaring independence from Austria. The following day, as news of Metternich’s resignation reached the city, Berlin began to stir. On 18 March a mass of people gathered in front of the royal palace to celebrate the king’s abolition of censorship and promise to introduce a constitution, and the king came out onto a balcony to accept their thanks. He was cheered, but the size of the crowd frightened him. He ordered the area to be cleared, and his troops set about the task with predictable clumsiness. There was confusion in the crowd, which was too big to disperse easily, fights broke out, shots were fired, and by nightfall the city was in a state of insurrection.
That same day the Milanese revolted against Austrian rule, attacking the 12,000-strong Austrian garrison and expelling it from the city after five days of fierce fighting, which went down in history as the illustrious Cinque Giornate. Venice declared independence from Austria on 22 March. The rulers of Parma and Modena were forced to leave by revolts in their states and, in order to keep his throne, at the end of March Charles Albert was obliged to take Sardinia to war against Austria in support of the risings in Lombardy and Venetia. Tuscany and the Two Sicilies gave token support, as did the pope.
By then, events had moved on in Germany. On the morning following the violence in his capital, Frederick William issued a proclamation to his ‘dear Berliners’. He assured all and sundry that the peaceful and joyful demonstration of the previous day had been taken over by anarchists, Freemasons, Jesuits, Jews, Poles, French convicts, democrats and Italians who had come to Berlin for the purpose and had been in hiding for a week, biding their time. He ordered the troops to withdraw, to the disgust of the Prince of Prussia, who called his brother a coward and threw his sword at his feet before going off to London in a state of dudgeon. Another who thought the king weak and ineffectual was Lady Burghersh, wife of the British ambassador in Berlin, who was in ‘no doubt the whole affair was got up by paid emissaries, chiefly from France and Poland, assisted by the Jews of this country’. After a long conversation on the subject with Queen Victoria a couple of months later, she related that the queen ‘was convinced the German people must have been long worked up by the French and Poles to have become so bad’.21
The defenceless Frederick William was obliged to nominate a liberal ministry. A newly formed Citizens’ Guard, made up principally of students wearing a Teutonic version of the Calabrian look, took up sentry duty at the palace, and the king had to come out onto the balcony and doff his hat to the corpses of those killed by his troops, which were paraded around the city. Also paraded around the city were Mierosławski and the other Polish would-be insurgents of 1846, who had been freed by the mob and hailed as heroes. The king was obliged to promise autonomy to his Polish provinces, whither the liberated heroes set off to prepare a country-wide insurrection. Frederick William was being hailed as the leader of the German nation, and had to ride around Berlin behind the hated and hitherto banned German tricolour.
The black, red and gold colours had been officially adopted by the Bundestag at Frankfurt, which had already passed a number of laws permitting the individual states to repeal repressive legislation such as the Karlsbad Decrees. It also voted to summon a new all-German parliament. On 31 March, 574 delegates to the preliminary Vorparlament met in Frankfurt. The Baden delegates Friedrich Hecker and Gustav von Struve demanded the immediate proclamation of the German Republic. On 4 April the Vorparlament decreed that the partitions of Poland had been illegal and the duty of the German people was to restore the country’s independence. A few weeks later the new Austrian government would declare that ‘Free Austria will bring freedom to Poland, and with the support of Europe, will not hesitate to fight Russia in order to realise so high an ideal.’ Obliged to give in to exorbitant demands, the Austrian imperial court abandoned Vienna and retreated to Innsbruck. The monarchy was effectively at war on two fronts in defence of its dominions in Italy and Hungary, and a third front was threatening to open in its Polish one. Metternich’s beloved settlement of 1815 was being blown to bits.22
From Switzerland, Friedrich Hecker led a legion of volunteers into Baden, aiming to link up with one of émigrés enlisted in Paris by the poet Georg Herwegh in order to provide armed support for the nascent German republic. The length and breadth of Europe, poets, sectarians and demagogues ranted from balconies to crowds assembled in streets and squares below, waving an assortment of tricolour flags. Every week brought news of barricades going up, gaols being broken open, and concessions being granted by panicked rulers. Student ‘legions’ marched about in support of their own and other people’s causes, dressed in fantastic editions of the Calabrian look. Émigrés of every nationality joined in, shouting slogans of solidarity. The excitement even appeared to have crossed the Channel, and on 10 April London braced itself for the worst as the Chartists marshalled their forces.
There had been a lull in activity by the various working men’s associations, partly as a consequence of the harsh clampdown on the events of 1842. A number of towns had created bodies similar to the Metropolitan Police in 1835, and following the disturbances of 1838–42 some counties established their own constabularies. The fall-off in agitation was partially explained also by the improvement in living conditions during the 1840s: food prices fell, and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 removed both one of the factors which had made them rise and one of the targets of the agitation. Some historians have identified a concomitant cultural explanation. The meetings and conventions of the first pro-reform societies, founded in the 1780s, had given rise to an associational culture which had gradually evolved into something which by the 1840s absorbed more and more of the energy of those involved. With their charters and constitutions, their often formalistic procedures, their agendas, motions, resolutions and minutes, the various unions and associations gave humble people a Pickwickian sense of their own dignity and worth. The attendant ceremonial of marching behind banners and hymn-singing, with addresses which were little short of sermons, added ritual which complemented or even replaced church attendance. There was an overlap between pro-reform and unionist activism and that of a growing number of other activities which also helped to divert energy, such as Sunday schools, oratorio societies, choirs, bands and sporting clubs, and a growing number of causes, such as pacifism and animal welfare. The propertied classes and civic authorities encouraged such trends among the working classes, with employers laying on dinners and outings, and with the provision of public amenities such as Preston’s Moor Park, opened in 1844, with its bandstand, lake and public conveniences.
Conditions began to decline again in 1847, and this revived the Chartist cause in early 1848. While there were some food riots in Glasgow and Manchester, the protests were conducted in orderly manner, and revolved around presenting a petition to Parliament, supposedly signed by six million people. A mass meeting was held on Kennington Common in south London on 10 April to deliver it. Mindful of events taking place across the Channel, the government refused permission for the 150,000 or so Chartists to approach Westminster, and closed the bridges over the Thames. A vast number of special constables were enrolled, and a sizeable military force was assembled under the command of the Duke of Wellington. There was no violence, and the petition was delivered in three hansom cabs. Place’s and Lovett’s charter repeated in almost every detail what a Reform Committee in Westminster, of which Charles James Fox had been a member, had drafted fifty-eight years before, and once again it was ignored.23
On 18 May the new German National Assembly met at Frankfurt. Heinrich von Gagern, just old enough to have fought at Waterloo, a dedicated Burschenschafter and a moderate liberal, was elected president. The Assembly’s composition bore out every one of Metternich’s prejudices, including as it did more than a hundred university professors and two hundred lawyers, not to mention dozens of journalists and literati of one kind or another. There was a holiday atmosphere, and the members leapfrogged each other in making declarations of support for various causes and solidarity with other nations. The clamour for the liberation of Poland was accompanied by violent diatribes against ‘barbaric’ Russia and the need to push it back into Asia.
Nicholas responded with a manifesto. ‘Following the sacred example of our Orthodox forefathers, after invoking the help of God the Almighty, we are ready to meet our enemies, wherever they may appear, and, without sparing ourselves, we shall, in indissoluble union with our Holy Russia, defend the honour of the Russian name and inviolability of the borders,’ it ran. With its battle-cry ‘for faith, Tsar, and fatherland’, Russia would show the world. ‘God is with us! Understand this, O nations, and submit, for God is with us!’24
He ordered all Russians travelling abroad to return home – which proved a headache for the Third Section, as some 90,000 flooded into the country, spreading news of events taking place abroad, and revolutionary ideas with it. Motivated by the need to recount sensational events, letters also poured in from abroad, some 400,000 to St Petersburg alone, all of which needed to be checked. Nicholas could see the danger. ‘Gentlemen! I have no police, I do not like them,’ he proclaimed in an address to the gentry. ‘You are my police. Each one of you is my steward and must, for the sake of peace in the state, bring on his own to my knowledge every evil doing and transgression he has noticed.’ ‘God alone can save us from the general ruin,’ he confided on 30 March, but he did not trust in God alone. He ordered Field Marshal Paskevich to bring all the fortresses along Russia’s western frontier into a state of readiness and to mass his troops in Poland in order to repel invasion. Martial law was declared in border areas.25
He need not have troubled. In France, the revolution never evolved. Lamartine’s provisional government was a random gathering of socialists and philanthropists rather than Jacobins bent on overturning the social order. The elections held in April returned three times as many Orléanists and legitimists as Jacobins, and more moderate liberals than those three categories put together. Disappointed by the results, those on the extreme left resorted to agitation in the streets, and on 15 May held a mass demonstration, ostensibly to force the government to support Polish national aspirations. They swamped the guards outside the Chamber and swarmed in, took over and appointed a new government, then marched on the Hôtel de Ville, but were dispersed by the National Guard. This kind of behaviour dissipated any goodwill the middle classes might have felt towards the workers, and paved the way for a swing to the right. When the workers attempted an insurrection in June, they were savagely crushed by the National Guard, assisted by newly-formed Gardes Mobiles, unemployed workers drafted in for the occasion (Karl Marx would refer to them as a ‘despicable lumpenproletariat’, ‘the dregs of society’). Beyond the capital, armed peasants scoured the countryside in gangs looking for ‘revolutionaries’ to kill. ‘The Republic is fortunate, it has the power to order troops to shoot at the people,’ Louis-Philippe commented when he heard of the bloody repression of the insurrection. There had been nothing to stop him from doing the same, except his own compassion, and such feelings were out of date. Events in Paris were, with minor variations, replicated elsewhere.26
Once the original excitement of wringing a few concessions from helpless rulers had died away, profound cleavages appeared between the various elements which had contributed to the revolts. The more moderate felt they had achieved their purpose and wanted to whistle the workers back to their slums, so that they themselves could settle down to reap the benefits. At the other end of the scale, the inarticulate masses who had believed revolution would bring them manna from heaven were shocked to discover that they were condemned to remain as hungry, miserable and downtrodden as before, and they reacted with fury. This in turn alarmed moderates naturally sympathetic to the downtrodden but not prepared to countenance violent social upheaval; they closed ranks with the authorities and enthusiastically participated in the counter-revolution. In rural areas, local interests or religious affiliation often kept the poorest classes firmly behind the existing order, and sometimes savagely hostile to the revolutionaries. Armies, when properly led, did their duty and did not fraternise with revolutionaries. The officers had their own world-view, caring more for their regiments, their families, their horses and dogs than for politics of any kind, and while they nurtured a deep dislike of policemen and officials, particularly those applying fiscal regulations, they had no fondness for writers or demagogues, and little understanding of political theory.
By the end of April, Struve was in gaol, and Hecker and Herwegh had fled to the safety of Switzerland, their legions having been scattered by loyal troops. The Austrian army bombarded an incipient rising in Kraków into submission. In July Field Marshal Radetzky defeated the Sardinian forces at Custozza and Charles Albert sued for peace, leaving the Milanese and Venetian rebels to their fate. In August the emperor was back in Vienna, and in the course of the next three months the counter-revolution triumphed in Austria and Prussia, emboldening the other rulers in Germany to repeal the reforms they had conceded and claw back prerogatives they had abdicated.
In November, the pope, who had been overtaken by the momentum of the reforms he had put in train, left Rome, where a republic came into being in February 1849. It drew to itself nationalists from all over Italy, and revolutionaries and Romantics from all over Europe, with the flamboyant Giuseppe Garibaldi at the forefront. Venice was still holding out heroically against an Austrian siege, and the Hungarians under Kossuth were valiantly defending their independence against Austrian and Russian armies. But by the summer of 1849 it was all over. The Roman Republic was extinguished by, of all things, an army despatched by the French Republic, acting jointly with Austrian troops. On his return to Paris once the trouble was over, the composer Hector Berlioz noticed that even the Spirit of Liberty atop the column on the place de la Bastille had a bullet-hole in it.27
When the dust settled it became clear that the events of 1848 had changed nothing much. The only monarchy which had fallen, that of Louis-Philippe, had been the most liberal in Europe. It was replaced, in 1852, by a far more reactionary Napoleonic empire. The only difference between this one and that destroyed at Waterloo was, as Herzen, now an émigré, quipped, that a grande police had replaced the Grande Armée.28
‘It is shameful,’ Princess Metternich wrote to Countess Nesselrode from Brighton in September 1848, describing the abject state to which the sovereigns of Germany had been reduced, ‘when one knows how few the perfidious agitators are, merely a few nasty Jews and some miserable professors!’ It had taken but a small leap of the imagination to get from the bankers to the Jews, who were henceforth part of the grand conspiracy. Preposterous as the princess’s statement may have been, the fact was that although 1848 is generally called the Year of Revolution, it is arguable whether any of the multiple disorders actually added up to anything one could call a revolution.29
Between January 1848 and the middle of 1849, a series of randomly opportunistic riots with wildly differing motivations had coincided with equally opportunistic attempts by the King of Sardinia to enlarge his realm and the Hungarian nobility to wrench their land from Austrian rule. The hopes of the Mazzinians who had started it all in Palermo in January were incomprehensible to the men they stirred up, who did not know what the word ‘Italia’ meant. The demands of the Parisians who fought on the barricades were for the right to work and to organise unions, for a ten-hour day, the abolition of debtors’ prisons, extension of the suffrage, and so on. But in Alsace the ‘revolutionaries’ had attacked Jewish homes and synagogues; at Bourg it was a monastery; at Besançon the mairie; elsewhere customs houses; in the country, people helped themselves to wood from state forests while Luddites tore up railway lines and destroyed bridges, power looms and textile mills.30
In Germany, the only nationwide urge was the wish for a unitary state, and overwhelmingly for a German empire rather than a republic. Most of the demands made – for constitutions, the lifting of censorship, trial by jury, and so on – were fully concordant with the provisions of the Vienna settlement of 1815. Otherwise, motivation varied by area, and was often entirely localised or restricted to specific interests, and in rural areas included looting, stealing firewood and score-settling. Much of this was the expression of anger at regulation, taxation and officialdom. In Crefeld, it was silk workers who wanted to create a guild. In Vienna, the sloganeering students had nothing in common with the workers they had helped whip up, and both were despised by the moderate liberals. In Berlin, most historians are agreed, it was the exceptionally fine weather which brought out the crowds, and there would have been no revolution if it had been pouring with rain. Many of the revolts were characterised by a carnival atmosphere and a degree of levity, and their original success was due entirely to the incapacity and weakness of the rulers, whose thoughts turned to 1789 every time they were faced with a riot.31
With his ponderous urge to classify, Karl Marx delivered his own verdict on the causes. ‘The eruption of the general discontent was finally accelerated and the sentiment for revolt ripened by two economic world events,’ he wrote in his Class Struggles in France. ‘The potato blight and the bad harvests of 1845 and 1846 increased the general ferment among the people.’ It had been a ‘struggle of the people for the first necessities of life!’ This was nonsense, and does not explain why the barricades in Dresden were manned by Marx’s capitalist friend Friedrich Engels, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the composer Richard Wagner, none of whom would have agreed on a single policy, and all of whom certainly did not lack for the first necessities of life. In Lombardy-Venetia, while the nationalists waved their tricolour, in rural areas much of the disorder was no more than the expression of discontent over state interference in property rights, land-use and taxation. In Poland and Hungary the motivation was exclusively nationalist, and directed by moderately liberal nobility who had no intention of upsetting the social order. In Germany, the interference of radicals, and particularly of outsiders, often distorted the original motivation or overtook it completely, turning what had been an explosion of anger over economic conditions or some local issue into an attempt to bring about upheaval that might favour their own cause, be it world anarchy in the case of Bakunin, or the liberation of Poland in that of the many unattached Polish émigrés with nowhere to go and nothing to do except join in the action.32
One thing is self-evident: it had not been what the rulers and their ministers all over Europe had been anticipating with horror since the 1790s. ‘The revolution of 1848 had everywhere the character of hastiness and precipitate action,’ noted Herzen, who had witnessed the events in Paris and in many parts of Germany, adding that there ‘it had a farcical character’. He was struck by the number of ‘actors’ apparently leading the disturbances, poseurs with no conviction or attachment to any particular cause. Far from leading events, both Marx and Engels were caught unawares. With their Communist Manifesto they attempted to impose a programme, but they spent the year chasing the various outbursts, desperately trying to get to the scene of the action, and mostly arriving when it was all over. Nowhere was there any sign of anyone, let alone any body, directing anything. There was no transnational cooperation. There was no attempt to overthrow the social order. There had never been any great conspiracy or any comité directeur – but the forces of repression had been given a golden opportunity to consolidate, and the police were there to stay.33