European Revolutions of 1820, 1830, and 1848
Overview
European Revolutions of 1820, 1830, and 1848
The French Revolution inspired a succession of revolutions and revolts, among other uprisings across Europe. Uprisings began soon after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, occurring most noticeably around 1820, 1830, and 1848. These uprisings revolved around aspects of liberalism and nationalism, and they went hand-in-hand with other forms of economic, religious, social, and technological democratization that were part of the Industrial Revolution. Underlying these uprisings was a struggle among the participating groups and individuals over which reforms and changes would be pursued, as well as under whose control they would happen. Conservatives who sought to limit the scope and degree of any changes were led by the monarchies of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, collectively known as the Holy Alliance. These three governments sought to turn back the clock to the way things had been before the French Revolution. They influenced the agenda implemented by the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Opposing these conservative forces were groups and individuals who sought more democratic changes in European economies, governments, and social structures, along with the Roman Catholic Church.
Learning Objectives
- Explain the consolidation of national states in Europe during the 19th century.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Congress of Vienna: a conference of ambassadors of European states chaired by Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich and held in Vienna from November 1814 to June 1815, though the delegates had arrived and were already negotiating by late September 1814 (The objective was to provide a long-term peace plan for Europe by settling critical issues arising from the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. The goal was not simply to restore old boundaries but to resize the main powers so they could balance each other and remain at peace.)
Frankfurt Assembly - the first freely elected parliament for all of Germany, elected on May 1, 1848 (The session was held from May 18, 1848, to May 31, 1849, in the Paulskirche at Frankfurt am Main. Its existence was both part of and the result of the “March Revolution” in the states of the German Confederation. After long and controversial debates, the assembly produced the so-called Frankfurt Constitution.)
Nationalism and liberalism drove the Revolutions of 1820, 1830, and 1848. These revolutions were part of trends in democratization that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, which also included mass production and the development of a culture of consumption. Nationalism was about forging new nation-states on the basis of common culture and ethnicity in Europe. In the Americas nationalism was explicitly about a shared political ideology based on republicanism, and implicitly about common ethnicity and culture, a characteristic that many in the dominant cultures of the various American nations do not realize or will not admit, event today. The revolutions from 1820 through 1848 solidified the European definition of nationalism. Liberalism was concerned with the removal of economic, political, religious, and social obstacles built into society and worked toward the ultimate goal of achieving equality of opportunity, as distinct from equality of outcome. The ideology of liberalism was initially defined by Enlightenment writers during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. During the revolutions from 1820 through 1848 members of the new middle classes, which had emerged with the economic changes of industrialization, came to make liberalism an ideological vehicle for their economic and political aspirations, implicitly restricting useage of this ideology by the industrial working classes.
Highlighting this succession of uprisings during the first half of the nineteenth century were the Revolutions of 1820, 1830, and 1848. Beginning in 1820 movements broke out in Portugal, Spain, and several Italian kingdoms; the objectives of these movements was to transform each into a constitutional monarchy. Although each of these movements failed in the short term, they established or strengthened precedents for liberalization and democratization. Troops of the restored French monarchy returned absolute authority, at least nominally, to the Spanish monarchy. However, the constitutional revolution in Portugal sparked a struggle that lasted into the 1840s.
In 1830 revolution broke out in France with the expulsion Charles X, who fancied himself an absolute monarch in the tradition of Louis XIV. When Charles tried to repress opposition to his absolutist rule from newly elected liberals in the French legislature, mob reaction forced him to abdicate. Louis Philippe replaced Charles X as king. In an acknowledgement of the democratic spirit which drove the opposition to Charles X’s rule, Louis Philippe took the title of King of the French, rather than King of France.
Nationalist uprisings also broke out in the Catholic portion of the Netherlands and Poland. The uprising in Poland failed in the short term, but national sovereignty would be restored to Poland at the end of the First World War. The uprising in the Netherlands, born of an antagonism between Catholics and Protestants in that country, led to the creation of the Kingdom of Belgium. A similar spirit of religious division between Protestants and Catholics contributed to the Irish nationalism that would lead to the creation of the Republic of Ireland in 1922. During the nineteenth century Irish nationalists experienced incremental progress in their struggle for national sovereignty from the British Parliament.
A major advancement in political democratization related to the 1830 uprisings occurred in the United Kingdom in 1832 with the First Reform Act—the first in a series of reform acts passed between 1832 and 1928. Collectively these acts led to the vote being extended to all adult citizens in the United Kingdom by 1928. The First Reform Act extended the vote to middle class male voters based on property value, rent/ taxes paid, and length of residence. In this respect the First Reform Act did not eliminate the traditional property requirements of the English political system, rather it modified these requirements to include members of the evolving middle classes in recognition of economic and social changes that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. In terms of new voters in parliamentary elections, this act only increased this number by about fifty percent. This increase is in and of itself unremarkable when one considers that before the 1832 act only about one in ten adult males in the United Kingdom could vote in parliamentary elections. In addition, this act explicitly prohibited women from voting. based on population. Population growth came with the development of manufacturing and the growth of cities in the Industrial Revolution, starting the process of correcting longstanding inequities in voting representation between rural and urban areas.This act was not only a response to democratic protests and movements in Britain, but also a conservative effort to stave off future uprisings by giving activists part of what they wanted. It ended up walking the line between the agendas of parliamentary conservatives and democratic reformers during the tumultuous early 1830s.
The Revolutions of 1848—known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, People’s Spring, Springtime of the Peoples, or the Year of Revolution—were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history. These diverse revolutionary movements were in opposition to the conservative agenda of the Congress of Vienna and marked a major challenge to its vision for a stable Europe.
The revolutions were essentially democratic in nature, with the aim of removing the old feudal structures and creating independent national states with democratic political structures and greater material security, even prosperity, for the working classes. The revolutionary wave began in France in February and immediately spread to most of Europe and parts of Latin America. Over 50 countries were affected, but with no coordination or cooperation between their respective revolutionaries. According to Evans and von Strandmann (2000), some of the major contributing factors were widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership, demands for more participation in government and democracy, demands for freedom of press, demands made by the working class, the upsurge of nationalism, and the regrouping of established governmental forces.
The uprisings were led by shaky ad hoc coalitions of reformers, the middle classes, and workers, which did not hold together for long. Tens of thousands of people were killed and many more forced into exile. Significant lasting reforms included the abolition of serfdom in Austria and Hungary, the end of absolute monarchy in Denmark, and the introduction of parliamentary democracy in the Netherlands. The revolutions were most important in France, the Netherlands, the states that would make up the German Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century, Italy, and the Austrian Empire.
In the Austrian empire, France, a number of the Italian states, and Prussia, 1848 revolutionaries were teased with hints of success. Ultimately, however, they were disappointed, in a number of cases, fatally, disappointed. Advocates for reform and German unification from across the German states created the Frankfurt Assembly in 1848. However, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who the Assembly elected as emperor of a new unified Germany, ended the Assembly’s efforts by refusing to accept this position. He undercut support for the Assembly by asserting that it had no authority to select him as emperor of a unified Germany. Promises of reform and liberal constitutions made by the Austrian emperor and rulers of various German and Italian states in 1848 and early 1849 were subsequently reversed between mid-1849 and the end of 1851. These reversals accompanied campaigns of persecution against the revolutionaries throughout European by the restored conservative leaders of these countries and states.
French revolutionaries enjoyed possibly the most auspicious success with their creation of the short-lived Second Republic in 1848. Even though Louis Napoleon subverted the Second Republic with a coup in December 1851 that led to the creation of the Second Empire (the First Empire being that of Napoleon Bonaparte, his uncle), he had to do so under the guise of an implicit popular mandate, which he had established with his election as president of the Second Republic in December 1848. Throughout his reign, Louis Napoleon was mindful of popular opinion, even accepting quasi-democratic reforms during the second half of his reign. Despite its brevity the Second Republic set precedents for republican governance in France that would be adopted and built upon in the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth French Republics.
Sprinkled among the 1820, 1830, and 1848 Revolutions were a number of national independence movements. A weakening Ottoman empire was the most vulnerable multiethnic and religiously diverse Eurasian empire to such movements, with limited autonomy being gained by Serbia in 1817 and Moldavia and Wallachia in 1829, and national independence by Greece in 1832. Italian states unified under the auspices of the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1861, and German states under Prussian direction in 1871.
Ultimately, the activists who carried out these movements during the first half of the nineteenth century failed because they couldn’t work together. They had different agendas in terms of visions, goals, and means. In the aftermath of the 1820 – 48 Revolutions, conservative national leaders in France, the Italian states, and the German states took control of the process of change and reform, establishing top-down control. However, the efforts of these revolutionaries built upon the efforts of the 1789 – 95 French revolutionaries, laying the foundation for successes in European democratization during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Attributions
Images courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Title Image - "Liberty Leading the People" by Eugene Delacroix. Attribution: Eugène Delacroix, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Provided by: Wikipedia. Location: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix_-_Le_28_Juillet._La_Libert%C3%A9_guidant_le_peuple.jpg. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
Boundless World History
"The Congress of Vienna"
Adapted from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/chapter/the-congress-of-vienna/
"France after 1815"
Adapted from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/chapter/france-after-1815/