1848: Revolution and Reaction

The year 1848 was a tumultuous time for Europe as a whole. Governments across Europe were toppled as a wave of violence and protests racked almost every great European city. Our own time has seen its share of political upheaval from Syria to Ukraine to Venezuela to Myanmar and well beyond. Young readers will be challenged, but also gain innumerable insights by attempting the masterful history of the 1848 upheavals written by Michael Rappaport.

At the time of the revolutions of 1848, Europe had been locked in a system which was a holdover from the post-Napoleonic conference of Vienna in 1815. The great conservative prime minister of Austria, Klemens von Metternich, had established a relatively sound conservative status quo between the great European powers. While England and France had some level of representation in their respective governing bodies, (Parliament and the Estates General) Austria, Prussia, and Germany were still avid practitioners of authoritarianism. Their extremely conservative methods left two of the three countries listed above as major staging grounds for violent revolutionary uprisings.

The year 1848 began with quite a sense of foreboding on all sides, especially in France, where the Parisian public had initially decided that while King Louis Philippe was quite liberal, he had turned out to be no better that the Bourbon king Charles X, who had ruled before 1830. The 1830s, as a whole, had been a time in which the old order had been shaken to its core by small uprisings, and one particularly violent revolt in Poland had to be put down by a 120,000-man strong army headed by the Russian Tsar’s general, Ivan Paskevich.

When the Austrian Chancellor heard of the new revolution in France in 1848, he reportedly said, “My entire life’s work is destroyed…” as he collapsed in despair. It is quite clear early on in the book that France came the closest out of any state to actually having a somewhat stable, democratic government. However, the inaction of the progressive French government to help out beleaguered liberal principalities in Italy and in the German Confederation seems rather odd. Rappaport does a fine job of describing how the French were so debilitatingly paralyzed in making any sort of political decision and that situation directly led to Napoleon III’s ascension to power soon after the events which take place in this book. The issue with France was that Parisian society, along with other urban centers, were far removed from the arch-conservative ways of France’s large rural population. According to this author’s explanations, France was a victim of its social geography, while the British were almost completely spared from any social unrest, due to their favorable geographic detachment from the rest of the continent.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this book is the extensive and detailed discussion of the struggles of the Balkan nationalities to overthrow the yoke of Austrian domination and Habsburg absolutism. Although areas such as Hungary were almost by this time acting as states within states, the inspiration from the revolutions in France and in Italy would have encouraged these Balkan peoples to seek perhaps more rights than they were in a stable position to demand. In the spring of 1848, the inevitable power of equality seemed to finally sweep over Vienna, and soon enough Metternich was deposed and the Habsburg royal family had left the imperial capital for a city with more welcoming environs elsewhere in their vast empire.

Part of this fine book’s appeal is that, while sometimes the complex politics of Vienna and Paris especially could be a bit tedious, these explanations are mixed with a graphic description of the street fighting that occurred in all parts of the European continent, in some shape or form. The reader is afforded the fascinating opportunity to try to imagine fully what the barriers of the French radicals would have looked like, or pitchfork mobs tramping ominously through the torchlit streets of Vienna. This frenzied action contrasts with extremely confusing political mixups in areas such as Moldavia, Bulgaria, and Romania, which witnessed extremely complex political scenes during this time period.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of Michael Rappaport’s timely book is that change does not necessarily equate to progress, as almost all of the promising revolutions fizzled out the following Autumn. In our own time when chaos seems to be increasing almost everywhere in the world and when national borders and polities around the world are substantially challenged, high school students will do well to fortify themselves by delving into this crucial history with Rappaport’s welcome assistance.