Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Welcome back to our now seventh Revolution together, seven!, this time, the great revolutionary year of 1848, also known as “the turning point that did not turn”.

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Now let’s turn our attention to the Revolutions of 1848. On January the 29th, 1848, Alexi De Tocqueville, member of the French Chamber of Deputies Rose and delivered a speech to his colleagues concerning the stagnant drift that had taken hold of the July monarchy. He was afraid that the kingdom was dividing into two unequal parts between those who held property and those who did not. Those of the property owning class controlled the political life of the nation. But over the past decade, their reigned among them, “nothing but Langer, impotence, stagnation, and boredom.”

While in the non-property owning classes, “political life began to make itself manifest by means of feverish and irregular signs.” He said to his colleagues, “the time will come when the country will find itself once again divided between two great parties. The French Revolution, which abolished all privileges and destroyed all exclusive rights, has allowed one to remain that of landed property. Let not the landlords deceive themselves as to the strength of their position, nor think that the rights of property form an insurmountable barrier because they have not yet been surmounted for our times are unlike any others. Before long, the political struggle will be restricted to those who have and those who have not. Property will form the great field of battle.

Then he went on to say, “I am told there is no danger because there are no riots. I am told that, because there is no visible disorder on the surface of society, there is no revolution at hand. Gentlemen permit me to say that I believe you are deceived. True, there is no actual disorder, but it has entered deeply into men’s minds. See what is passing in the breasts of the working classes, who, I grant, are at present quiet, no doubt they are not disturbed by political passion properly so called to the same extent that they have been, but can you not see that their passions instead of political have become social? Do you not see that they are gradually forming in their breasts opinions and ideas which are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry or even form of governments, but society itself until it totters upon the foundations on which It rests today. Do you not listen to what they say to themselves each day? Do you not hear them repeating unceasingly, that, all that is above them, is incapable and unworthy of governing them. That, the present distribution of goods throughout the world is unjust. That property rests on a foundation which is not an equitable foundation. And do you not realize that when such opinions take root, when they spread in an almost universal manner, when they sink deeply into the masses, they’re bound to bring with them sooner or later, I know not when nor how, a most formidable revolution, this, gentleman is my profound conviction, I believe that, we are at this moment sleeping on a Volcano

De Tocqueville delivered this speech with a mind to warn his colleagues of a dangerous threat. That was looming on the horizon and though he did not realize how ready the Volcano was to explode, he did see clearly that the social and political challenges of the future would be of an altogether different character than those of the past. That there was something deeply powerful in the distinction between the political question and the social question. And when he delivered this speech, he was thinking of a group of intellectuals who were at that very moment, preparing to drop one of the most influential declarations in the history of the world.

Because on February the 26th, 1848, just a few weeks after de Tocqueville’s speech, Karl Marx and Frederick Engles published the Communist Manifesto, which opened so famously with “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exercise this specter, Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French, radicals and German police spies”.

The manifesto then went on to say, just as Tocqueville had said, “our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie possesses, however, this distinct feature: It has simplified class antagonisms, society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other, bourgeoisie and proletariat. The goal for the communists was for the proletariat to rise up and overthrow bourgeois supremacy as a part of the theory of historical force that Marx in particular was developing. That just as the French Revolution had abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property, the communist revolution would mark the abolition of bourgeois property, a system of private property built on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the manifesto read “the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.” And then of course, the manifesto ends with the stirring: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!“

De Tocqueville’s speech and the Communist Manifesto both arrived at the same time and offered the same analysis though with very different takes on whether this was all good or bad, and both arrived at the same moment as the Revolutions of 1848.

But here’s the thing, though I began this episode and this series with all of that because it so clearly defines the pivot from the liberal revolutions of the past to the socialist and communist revolutions of the future, neither De Tocqueville nor Marx and Engels were exactly right about the nature of the volcano of 1848. What they saw was still for the future, not necessarily for the present.

So to start working through the real nature of the volcano of 1848, I would like to begin today with a broad look at the state of Europe in the 1830s and 1840s. So first, we’ll take a big picture, look at the geographic regions, the kingdoms and empires where the revolutions will explode. Then we’ll talk about the economics and social classes building up the revolutionary pressure, and then finish with the discussion of the ideas, philosophies, and ideologies that are feeding the revolutionary fire.

Now, nothing we do today is gonna go into too much detail in any individual area because after today’s episode we’ll follow five episodes that each take a detailed look at our main areas of interest: France, Germany, the Habsburg Empire, and then two special components that will spin off from our discussion of the Habsburg Empire, Italy and Hungary. Then the next thing you know will be at Episode 7.7 to talk about the depression of 1846 – 1847, and then it will be time for the volcano to blow.

So the first thing you’ll notice is that the list of geographic areas of interest do not coincide with the five great powers that we’ve been talking about since all the way back in Episode 3.6. France, Prussia and Austria will get a ton of attention in this series while Britain and Russia will not, because they were both mostly outside the blast zone, though for completely opposite reasons. In Britain, the Great Reform Act of 1832 pretty much gave the bourgeois middle class what they wanted politically and left them with no reason to join forces with the lower classes and a revolutionary uprising. While in Russia, an intensely reactionary autocratic regime will be able to quickly stamp out what few sparks tried to catch fire. Russia will enter the fray of the story of 1848, but only as muscle to aid the conservative powers of central Europe beat back the forces of revolution.

So that leaves us with the three great powers that were in the blast zone: France, Prussia, and Austria, and most especially Austria’s imperial satellites. France was of course now living under the July monarchy, allegedly a liberal constitutional monarchy, but as we’ve already seen in the episode on the June Revolt of 1832, it became clear very quickly that Lafayette’s Republican kiss had been secured on false pretenses. As disillusionment with the July monarchy set in everywhere, the verdict of de Tocqueville, that the regime was defined by nothing but anger, impotence, stagnation and boredom was practically the universal verdict of everyone not in Louis Philippe’s inner circle. And frankly, even a few of them nodded in agreement. So we’ll talk about the July monarchy and our old friends Laffitte, Guizo, and Thiers in detail next week.

But though disappointing, France at least operated under a constitutional governments, which was more than could be said for Prussia and Austria. Prussia had emerged from the Napoleonic Wars devastated and in debt, and was only just now starting to pull themselves together. But though Prussia is the great power in the region, our focus in 1848 will also include the wider array of German principalities that surrounded the kingdom of Prussia. The map of Germany is not quite as baffling as it had been under the old Holy Roman empire, but it’s still pretty baffling. And the order of the day was German disunity, with the inhabitants of all these tiny states living under petty tyrannies, dominated from above by the Prussians and Austrians. We’ll talk all about the disunited Germans in Episode 7.3.

So then the last of the great powers was Austria. As we saw in Episode 6.8c, Austrian foreign minister Metternich had been able to revive the fortunes of the Austrian Habsburgs at the Congress of Vienna and make them a centerpiece of his new conservative order for Europe. But rather than trying to revive the Holy Roman empire, Metternich established in its place a multi-ethnic empire bound together in personal union by the Austrian Habsburg dynasty. So, no longer Holy Roman Emperor, but instead simply Emperor of Austria. Under the Austrian Emperor was a multi-ethnic empire that sprawled out from Vienna in all directions, and besides Austrian and Germans, there were Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Ukrainians, Poles, Croatian, Slovenes, Serbs, Hungarians, and Italians. Metternich believed deeply in the legitimacy and necessity of this multi-ethnic empire, and we will pick up his story where we left it off in Episode 6.8c in Episode 7.4.

But within the Austrian empire, there were two major components that we must talk about in greater detail, Italy and Hungary. Now, we talked about Italy in the episodes covering Metternich and the Carbonari, I mean I wasn’t just slapping those episodes together, you know, they did have a point. Northern Italy around Milan and Venice were formal constituent parts of the Austrian empire and understandably chaffed under imperial rule, while the rest of the Italian peninsula was divided between a few smaller kingdoms, Piedmont-Sardinia in the northwest, the Kingdom of the Two Sicily’s in the south, and the Papal states in the middle. And though not formally under Austrian rule, these smaller Italian kingdoms lived under the ominous shadow of Austrian domination. Denied unification at the Congress of Vienna, an underground network of Italians kept that particular dream alive. And we’ll talk all about them in Episode 7.5.

And then finally, we have to introduce a whole new group that we’ve never talked about, not even once on the Revolutions podcasts, the Hungarians. I’m not gonna get into them too much today as I’m going to give you a nice history of the Hungarians in Episode 7.6, but suffice it to say that of all the constituent parts of the Austrian empire, the Kingdom of Hungary, was, thanks to the way it had been absorbed into the Habsburg realms, the most uniquely autonomous.

Okay, so that pretty much defines the geographic scope of the Revolutions of 1848. From west to east, it’ll run from Paris to Budapest, north to south, from Berlin to Sicily.

Now we will not only be talking about these five big areas, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Hungary, but those areas will get us most of the most important action. And I’ll fill in the gaps and make extensions as needed as we go. There’s no episode limit to this series. We’re just gonna be done when we’re done.

Okay, so let’s move now to a survey of the economics and social classes that will be in play. This being a show about political Revolutions, we’ve been following the political history of the Atlantic world pretty steadily since oh…, about the end of the Seven Years War. But alongside these political revolutions, we all know that there was this other revolution, an economic revolution. The industrial revolution. And the history of the 19th century is in many ways the history of a civilization transforming from an agrarian society to an industrial society. New mechanical inventions, sources of power, modes of production, particularly in textiles, mining, metallurgy and railroads were combining two utterly remake the face of the world. But since we’re still in the 1830s and this series will be peaking at the end of the 1840s, how far along in this industrial transformation are we? The answer perhaps a bit surprisingly, is that in our five big areas of focus, not very far along at all.

Britain was way ahead of everyone on this front. And so while Manchester and Leeds might at this moment resemble what Marx and Engels were depicting in the Communist Manifesto when they said “modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers crowded into the factory are organized like soldiers.” Well That hasn’t It really hit the European continent yet? This kind of factory industrialization had advanced to Belgium, northern France, and parts of the Rhineland. But most of the rest of central, eastern and southern Europe remained predominantly rural and agricultural. Only 4% of the male population of Prussia, for example, worked in factories. In France. there were 400,000 men who could be classified as industrial workers, but That was just 1/10th of the four million total who were counted as workers, and this all in a country of over 30 Million people. 75% of France was still rural and agrarian. Basically on the continent in the 1830s and 1840s, the industrial revolution was still in its infancy and in many places had not made an appearance at all.

So with most of Europe still rural and agrarian, let’s talk about who was living out in those rural and agrarian areas, and the first thing we must say is that there were a lot of them and more every day. The industrial and political revolutions that kicked off in the middle of the 18th century were matched by a demographic explosion that started around 1750, and then after pausing momentarily, as everyone fed everyone else into the Napoleonic meat grinder started back up again after the Congress of Vienna. Between 1800-1850, the population in Europe rose about 35% after being stagnant for centuries. This put enormous pressure on existing land and resources all over Europe, especially because no major technological advancements in farm production had yet been introduced. So more people, more bellies, same amount of land, same amount of food, not a great combination.

If the industrial revolution had not yet hit most of these areas, neither had the political revolution. Most rural peasants in central, eastern and southern Europe still lived under the same sociopolitical regimes that trace their origins back to the misty Dark Ages. A small clique of noble families owned all the land and acted as the landlords and employers of millions of landless peasants who eked out a feeble existence, either as tenant farmers, sharecroppers, day laborers, or in some places serfs still legally bound to their owner and his property.

And those who weren’t serfs often found themselves no better than serfs. Most peasants in central and eastern Europe were still obligated to meet the kind of seigneurial dues that their French counterparts had managed to get out from under during the French Revolution. These are taxes due to their lords and requirements to provide so many days of free labor a year. But even those peasants who were free were still not very free. The Prussians, for example, had abolished serfdom back in 1807, but that just meant all those freed serfs were dumped out into a free economy, that left them tossed like leaky rowboats and stormy waters that were dominated by huge battleships.

Living and working at the edges of subsistence, most rural families took up home manufacturing as a way to make ends meet, usually spinning cloth or doing simple craft work like making utensils and bowls. But unfortunately, it was into this sphere of very necessary economic activity that even those regions supposedly untouched by the industrial revolution was very much touched by the industrial revolution. Because the goods that dominated the home manufacturing trade were the first ones to transition to mass industrial production. Textiles and simple crafts with cheap mass produced goods now entering the marketplace. Peasant home manufacturers could not compete and they were forced to work harder and longer for lower wages. And remember, the population is still increasing rapidly, so the less food and the lower wages were getting less and lower every day.

So with the quality of life declining in the rural areas, this also marks the beginning of a steady migration to the cities, as the 19th century was also the beginning of a transformation from rural to urban to match the transformation from agrarian to industrial. Migrating to a city, a newcomer would enter a fairly baffling and hostile world of terrible sanitation, packed slums, horrible food, and crappy jobs. Now where there were factories sprouting up, the newcomer might be able to find a job. And while the wages weren’t actually that bad compared to the alternative, the job in question was usually dirty, dangerous, and degrading. But of critical importance to us here for our series on the Revolutions of 1848, this growing class of urban proletariat will not, repeat, not be the ones out on the front lines manning the barricades. Partly this was simply due to the distinction between the rising industrial cities and the ancient political capitals. The factories grew where the coal was, not where the King was. So like in England, the industrial cities were Manchester and Leeds up in the north rather than London in the south, in France, it was more Lille than Paris.

Berlin and Vienna for the moment, remained mostly free of factory skylines. So when political trouble breaks out in the political capitals, there just won’t be that many industrial workers physically present. The revolutionary proletariats’ time will come. That time has not yet come. So the question of who will be manning the barricades brings us to another quote from the Communist Manifesto: “The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guild, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class. Division of labor between the different corporate guild vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop,” which again reads like something that has already happened rather than something that will happen in the future, or at any rate was happening right then in the present. Because that feudal system of industry was not dead yet. And more than anyone else, it would be the urban artisans who would be manning the barricades of 1848. Because they were in the political capitals and with their way of life under siege, they had grievances worth fighting for.

So the artisans encompassed a whole range of skilled trades, carpenters, masons, butchers, metal workers, weavers, tailors, bakers, jewelers, blacksmiths. As we discussed during the French Revolution, these trades were all closed by the guild system, a tightly controlled set of rules that created a strict hierarchy of apprentices and journeymen and masters that restricted competition and fixed wages and prices. Artisan work was done in small shops, and though never wealthy, masters, at least, enjoyed a measure of independence and dignity. Now, in terms of economic efficiency, the guild system was of course terrible, and most governments across Europe had either already abolished them, as had happened in France during the revolution, or they were bound to abolish them as, for example, would be the case in Prussia. Adding to the pressure on the old artisan guild was increasing competition, both from rural artisans migrating to the cities and the rise of cheap industrial goods in the market.

Though the artisans had no love for the socialists, they all did agree that, ruthless, mindless economic competition was eroding all that was good and decent in life. The demands of the artisans would be security, independence and equality, and they will be on the revolutionary barricades. But ironically, not because they were fighting for progress, but rather because they were trying to hold onto a way of life, that was slipping away.

So above the artisans in the socioeconomic hierarchy, we come to the crux of the whole thing, the bourgeoisie, the middle class, the owners of capital and the means of production. If you had to explain the Revolutions of 1848 in 15 words or less, you wouldn’t be wrong to say that it was an attempt by the economic middle class to become the political ruling class. But it is important to keep in mind, that as simple as Marx and de Tocqueville are when they say that society is dividing into two parts, lumping all the bourgeoisie into a single bucket is way too reductive, because we’re talking about a range from small time shopkeepers and tavern owners barely getting by to major financiers, merchants, and the budding captains of industry who were as rich as the richest aristocrats. But what most of them did have in common was no access to political life. Even in France, only the richest of the rich were able to vote. Even after the July Revolution, we’re still only talking about 250,000 voters in a nation, like I said, of more than 30 million.

Meanwhile, in Prussia, most of the German principalities and all the Habsburg realms, there was no access to political power at all. But That said, many in this rising bourgeoisie didn’t give a rip about politics. A lot of the business oriented middle class just wanted to run their businesses and make their fortunes. So anger over the lack of political access was really concentrated in one particular segment of the bourgeois middle classes, the professional trades. These are doctors, lawyers, journalists, and teachers, all of them educated, of some means, worldly, and denied outright a share of the political power. Even as the ideas that were gonna be talking about in a minute, liberalism, radicalism, socialism are floating around out there in the ether and engaging their ambitions and imaginations. In central and eastern Europe, the hackles of these guys was raised further because they all knew they were under political surveillance and had been going back to their days in the university. So it wasn’t just that they couldn’t vote, they couldn’t speak or think or gather freely, and they were getting awfully fed up.

Finally, at the top of the socioeconomic ladder, there was the old aristocracy. Despite, or perhaps because of the French Revolution, the nobility still dominated the economic and political landscape of central, eastern and southern Europe. They owned all the land. They dominated the upper rungs of the state bureaucracy in places like Prussia and the Habsburg Empire. Where there were parliaments in a few of the German principalities, the nobles dominated those too. They formed the government’s ministries, they lorded over local politics and administration. They were the senior officers of the army and navy. For all the talk of this rising bourgeoisie running the world, they were still just rising. There was an aristocratic ceiling they could not crack, at least not yet.

So to sum this up, in 1848, Europe was mostly rural and agricultural. Agricultural and landed wealth was still the most powerful kind of wealth. And the ruling class was nearly synonymous with the land owning class, which was nearly synonymous with the aristocratic class, augmented here and there by a few of the richest bourgeoisie who had invested their profits and land. When the Revolutions come, we will see the same union that we saw in 1830 up here again of lower class street fighters, particularly the artisans and middle class intellectuals, particularly from the professional trades combining their strength to break the repressive, conservative and aristocratic regimes they detested. That is what is coming.

So we’ll round this out today with a brief review of the ideologies that provided the intellectual framework for opposition to the conservative regimes that dominated Europe in the 1830s and 1840s. The first of which needs no introduction because we’ve been talking about it forever now. And that is liberalism. Liberal is a word that means different things to different people at different times and places, but for our purposes it means a belief in constitutional governments, participatory governments, individual civil rights, private property, and the rule of law. In the main, the political liberals and the economic middle classes are all but synonymous.

But middle class liberalism had limits, pretty strict limits. For one thing, most liberals were not democrats. So while your average liberal supported extending the franchise to cover men with education and property, that’s as far as they wanted to go. When a French liberal like Odilon Barrot brought up the old maxim “Vox populi, Vox Dei“, that is “the voice of the people, was the voice of God”, he did not mean it as a good thing. He meant it was something to fear, I mean, my God, what if we were ruled by the mob? The liberals were also, ironically enough, super anti-revolution. They look back at 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Men for inspiration, but the fear they had of the reign of terror made them shudder at the mere mention of the word revolution. So they preached evolution, not revolution. Because of this evolutionary bent, most of them were constitutional monarchists as opposed to outright republicans because you gotta do these things in stages and not rock the boat or somebody might break out Madame Guillotine.

Finally, the liberals were also almost exclusively focused on answering the political side of the equation that had been brought up by de Tocqueville, so rights constitutions and elections rather than the social part of the equation, the unequal distribution of wealth, the crippling dislocation caused by economic progress, the unjust and inhumane lives most people were living.

To the left of the liberals were radicals and democrats. These guys operated inside the liberal tradition, but were, well, more radically democratic. There’s a gray area where a moderate republican and a super committed liberal might overlap, but the principle distinction between them was that the radicals advocated for universal suffrage. One person, one vote, and almost all of them were republicans. They did not want to compromise with monarchy or, as Lafayette put it, to surround the monarchy with republican institutions. They wanted to overthrow the monarchy so that the people could lead themselves. And these radicals put a lot of faith in the people, the power of the people, the sovereignty of the people. They said “Vox populi, Vox dei” and meant it! But being mostly middle class educated intellectuals themselves, they didn’t actually trust much with the people beyond the abstraction of the thing. So there was an element to the radicals casting themselves as the directors of the old General Will. Now far more than liberals too, the radicals were also sympathetic to the social side of the equation, and they advocated reforms and state action to try to ameliorate disease, poverty, starvation, and misery. These things that were becoming so increasingly omnipresent.

Beyond the radicals was a whole new breed of cat that was just now entering the picture, the socialists. Now, since socialism was just getting going, the word really stood for a grab bag of programs and thinkers, many of whom only bore the slightest resemblance to each other beyond a general emphasis on the social rather than the political side of the equation. Trenchant critics of the way modern life was shaping up, the socialist advocated radical solutions. So socialism as it stood in the 1830s and 1840s included Saint-Simon’s technocratic plant society, Charles Fourier’s minutely described utopia, Louis Blanc’s, simple credo that men had a right to work, but then also guys like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the father of modern anarchism who thought men ruling other men was itself an absurd contradiction.

And then of course, coming down the pike was Marx and Engles and their brand of historically infused scientific socialism. In pursuit of their aims, socialists could be autocratic, monarchical, republican or anarchist, whatever method they thought did the most good. They also, surprisingly enough did not share any uniform stance on private property. Some would keep It, some would consolidate it, some would abolish it. And the most that could be said is that they all wanted property more equitably distributed. We are also at this point talking about a very small group of thinkers confined to tiny intellectual circles. The socialists at this point have made next to no inroads with the uneducated and illiterate lower classes on whose behalf they were theorizing, I mean the communist manifesto didn’t even come out until 1848.

But the socialist critiques were so scathing and their solutions so radical and revolutionary that everyone from the staunchest liberal to the most reactionary conservative made a right old boogeyman of the lot of ’em. So the biggest thing the early socialist shared in common was that everyone else was happy to have them all ruthlessly suppressed. To be a socialist in the 1830s and 1840s was on its own basically a criminal act.

So we will wrap up this preliminary survey with a look at one of the other great forces unleashed by the French Revolution and that is nationalism. Now we’ve talked a lot about how the French Revolution introduced the idea that it was the people and the nation that was the true basis of political sovereignty rather than old royal dynasties Bottom up from the people rather than top down from God, remember? But then in the run up to 1830, we saw how the anger at the cowardly retreat of the Bourbons from the greatness and power of La Nacion had fueled the Three Glorious Days. So in the French case, 19th century nationalism was a backward looking demand for return to that once glorious heritage. But elsewhere in Europe, nationalism was a forward-looking call for something new. Nationalism meant taking a fresh look at how people with a shared language, history, heritage, art, and music could and should join together politically and that each nation deserved a measure of collective self-determination.

Now, we’ll talk a lot about this as we discuss each of our revolutionary regions in turn, but in Germany, nationalism meant unification of all the fractured principalities. In Italy, it meant unification of the Italian peninsula plus booting out the Austrian. And throughout the Habsburg realms, it often meant equality and autonomy inside the empire if true independence was not yet possible.

The Revolutions of 1848 are often called the Springtime of the Peoples as the idea of a nation state as the truest and purest expression of political organization took firm root in the political imagination of Europeans.

Okay, so I, think that gets us off to a pretty good start and we’ll spend the next five weeks reinforcing most of what we just discussed in the particular circumstances of the big regions we’re going to explore. And again, that is France, Germany, the Habsburg Empire, Italy, and Hungary. And so next week we will head back to Paris to discuss just what everyone found so absurdly offensive about the July monarchy.

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