Hello and welcome to Revolutions.
Welcome to the last of our groundwork laying episodes, where we discuss the details of the political question hanging over Europe in the 1840s, a political question that would merge with the social question we talked about last week, and then suddenly explode in a furious eruption. Now, I will be taking next week off, and we’ll tell you at the end of today’s episode why I am taking next week off, but when we return in two weeks, we will open our hymnals to January of 1848 and begin the slow march through about 18 months of very convoluted revolutionary insanity.
The biggest question of the whole post-Napoleonic age was do you have a constitution? Now, we know that the French had been granted a Charter of Government in 1814, a benevolent grant from the restored King Louis XVIII, who gave his subjects a written compact that spelled out how the new government would work, while making it very clear that this all came down from God, not up from the people.
A few other places in central and northern Europe had constitutions, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Kingdom of Bavaria, and the Duchy of Baden being a few examples. But most everyone else re-embraced absolutism in the reactionary age of Metternich. A source of major recurrent tension then was about the struggle for those without a constitution to get one. And we saw this during the episodes on Spanish-American independence, when the Spanish Constitution of 1812 became the basis of the Cádiz Mutiny of 1820, a revolutionary uprising that then migrated over to Italy and became the rallying cry of Italian revolutionaries across the peninsula from Naples up to Turin. The Italian project only briefly got off the ground before being crushed by Austria, while the Spanish liberals lasted three years before being crushed by the French.
Now, the July Revolution in France then kicked the issue off again, as the French altered their charter to say, oh no, sovereignty does in fact come up from the people. The Belgians then broke away from the Netherlands and forged a constitutional government a year later, and in the midst of all that, the rulers of Saxony panicked and issued their own constitution.
But by the 1840s, most of the rest of Europe, watched like a hawk by Prussia and Russia and the Austrian Empire, remained fiercely absolutist. So the first big question is, do you have a constitution? And if not, do you want one?
Now, if a country already had a constitution, they were then driven by a further question. What’s in the constitution? How does it function? Who should be allowed to participate in government? What are the responsibilities and rights of the rulers? What are the rights and responsibilities of the subjects? And shouldn’t subjects maybe really be citizens?
This further question is one of the reasons why guys like Metternich were so opposed to any leader in Europe granting a constitution, no matter how conservative or by the grace of God, it was. Granting a constitution was always the beginning of trouble, not the end of it. So now we have a second big question. Do you have a constitution? If yes, do you want to reform it? Perhaps on liberal lines.
Now the third big question meanwhile, fused with both of those questions, and it involved nationalism. If popular sovereignty was in fact your jam, how do you define the people? What was the link between the nation and the state? How do you define what a nation is? Now it’s very easy to say, well, the Germans are Germans and the Hungarians are Hungarian. But all these areas had ethnic and religious minorities who might not fit in with the definition of what a German is or what a Hungarian is. What would their place be? How excited could you expect them to be for national unification and self-determination when that nationalism was in part built around, oh, by the way, you’re not one of us. So one looming problem out there is that it was not at all clear that nationalism and liberalism, so tightly linked at this moment, were ultimately even compatible with each other. Now, most in the majority groups would say, well, of course it is, but minority groups would beg to differ. But at the moment, this tension was not yet fully apparent.
So with these three big questions in mind, let’s take a look at some of the specifics. Now, I imagine a lot of this will inevitably get lost in the coming whirlwind, but I’ll at least be able to remind you of it to jog your memory from time to time. But we are now going to talk about some details in our five revolutionary zones. So we left France in Episode 7.2 with the rather hypocritical inauguration of the July Column on the 10th anniversary of the Revolution of 1830. By then, most anyone with a sense of idealism now felt betrayed, let down, and disillusioned by the new regime. Even the return of Napoleon’s body a few months later, engineered by the government as a patriotic bit of propaganda and celebrated with great fanfare in Paris, mostly served to remind everyone that the glory days had long since passed. Though it did hilariously trigger his nephew Louis Napoleon’s second disastrous coup attempt when he thought that the cheering for Napoleon meant that the people of France longed for Napoleon’s heir.
Landing in Boulogne with a few dozen supporters in August of 1840, Louis Napoleon was quickly rounded up by the authorities and tossed in prison, where he would sit for the rest of his life and never bother anyone ever again, and certainly never fulfilling what he believed was his destiny, to become emperor of France. What a nutball.
Now, if you remember from Episode 7.2, the political history of the July Monarchy in the 1830s was one of constantly shuffling ministries, and defined mostly by petty acrimony, with small ‘c’ conservative liberalism charting the course of the ship of state. The revised charter of government would be revised no further. Risks, both domestically and in foreign affairs, would be avoided at all costs, and liberty was now routinely obliged to bend a knee to order.
This course was then firmly locked in place in October of 1848 when Adolphe Thiers’ second stint as prime minister came to an abrupt end when he nearly triggered a pan-European war over the renegade Egyptian leader Mohammed Ali. Don’t ask.
Tossing aside Thiers, King Louis Philippe elevated Marshal Soult to be prime minister again, but by everyone’s internal agreement, the real power was now given to the new foreign minister, François Guizot. The conservative liberal power excellence, Guizot believed in a strong and orderly constitutional monarchy. Now on the inside looking out, rather than the outside looking in, Guizot turned his back on the idea that the King should reign but not rule and argued that the royal throne could not be merely an empty chair. Now actively defending the prerogatives of Louis Philippe in matters of state and his appointment of ministers, the King came to at least appreciate the work of Guizot, even if he didn’t like him much personally. I mean, nobody really liked Guizot personally. Guizot’s stubborn resistance to any further change or reform also endeared him to Louis Philippe, who was now almost 70 and getting awfully stubborn in his old age.
If the 1830s were marked by ministerial turnover, the 1840s were then marked by a remarkable continuity. Guizot would remain the de facto prime minister and then actually the prime minister all the way until February of 1848 until the Revolutions of 1848. And in that time, he managed to achieve the perfect governing balance. He had the confidence of the King and stable majorities in the House of Deputies. And especially in the early 1840s, he got to take credit for a booming economy as bountiful harvests combined with increasingly lucrative investments in railroads and factories and building projects.
But we know where that’s headed. The crop failures of 1845 and 1846 led to recession, unemployment, starvation, and misery. Hard hit in particular was Paris, where the working population was approaching something like 50% unemployment, or at the least catastrophic underemployment. 58% of metalworkers out of a job, 72% of furniture makers, 64% of men in the building trades, aka people who might know how to construct a barricade should the need arise. Now, whether it was his fault or not, Guizot and his policies were blamed. You can’t take credit for boom times and then try to fob off responsibility for bad times, though it is a trick every politician in the history of the world has tried to pull off.
Now, as we discussed last week, the conduct of the July Monarchy during the economic crisis of the mid 1840s was not nothing. For both humanitarian and political reasons, King Louis Philippe pressed his government to do more to alleviate the suffering of the people. So they drained the state treasury trying to blunt the effects of the crisis. They bought grain from abroad, 300,000 people in Paris alone received government bread coupons, but it was never going to be enough. And Guizot especially would not be able to shake the charge that he let his doctrinaire liberal economic philosophy ignore the social crisis. Now, once upon a time, some people had come to pester him about enlarging the electorate because they did not qualify for the vote, and his advice to them had allegedly been enrichissez-vous, or enrich yourself. And it was now a biting joke, though the whole thing is likely as misattributed as Marie Antoinette’s let them eat cake.
As the economic and social crisis went on in 1847, Guizot finally ran into real political trouble, most especially on that issue of how representative of the people of France the government really was, the point being it wasn’t very representative at all. The complaints were twofold. First, not enough people got the vote, and second, the electoral map made no sense. Now remember, at the dawn of 1848, the population of France was somewhere between 30 and 35 million, of whom somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 people qualified to vote in national elections. This was an intolerably small number, most especially to the middle middle classes and the lower middle classes, which is to say the demographic that qualified and was indeed obligated to serve in the National Guard. Most of these guys qualified to vote at the local level, and indeed, while the national electorate was only 300,000, the local electorate was more like 3 million. So there were 2.7 million people out there who could serve in the National Guard and could vote in the local elections, but were told flat out, you are not good enough to vote on matters of national importance.
The other big complaint was that France had a problem of rotten boroughs, where seats were apportioned based on long out-of-date census data, if such data had ever come into play in the first place. Specifically, the continuing urbanization of the population and industrialization up in the north meant that many of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies came from insignificant, depopulated areas with only a few actual voters. Voters who could easily be bought off by Guizot. Meanwhile, the entire city of Paris had only 12 deputies, and most of the other growing cities just one or two. From inside the halls of government, Guizot’s majorities looked like he had the confidence of the King and the people. But from the outside, it looked like he was sitting on the head of a pin, supported only by a handful of corrupt men representing rotten boroughs.
These complaints had always dogged the regime, but by the late 1840s, a thorough going reform movement began to heat up. But Guizot would not listen to them. For him, any further reform would open the door to another revolution, which was intolerable. So rather than follow the path of the British leadership, who accepted the Reform Bill of 1832 as necessary medicine, Guizot refused to even consider rationalizing the distribution of seats in the House of Deputies or increasing the electorate. Now the British probably did not get caught up in 1848 thanks in part to the Reform Bill, which cleaved the interests of the middle classes and the working classes. Guizot’s resistance, which was premised on avoiding revolution, probably brought one down on his head. Because history does oh so much have a sense of humor.
So when we return to France, it will be to join in the controversy of the banquets, political gatherings that skirted the rules against political gatherings by declaring themselves to be mere private parties, banquets. When the government challenged their right to hold these banquets, both sides engaged in a game of political chicken, that as Alexei de Tocqueville wrote, “the government by its defiance goaded the opposition into adopting this dangerous measure, thinking thus to drive it to destruction. The opposition let itself be caught in a spirit of bravado unless it should be suspected of retreating, and thus irritating each other, spurring one another on, they dragged each other towards the common abyss, which neither of them as yet perceived.”
So moving on now to Germany. We move from an area where constitutional government existed, and thus drew the battle lines along its reform, to an area where constitutions existed in the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Duchies of Saxony and Baden, but nowhere else. Now in those constitutional areas, one of the big questions of 1848 would indeed be about reforming their constitution and enlarging the size of the political community, but in most places in Germany, the governments remained intractably absolutist, as was the case in the largest state of Prussia, which is mostly what I want to talk about here today.
Now after Prussia had gotten stomped on by Napoleon, a King Friedrich Wilhelm III had inaugurated an era of reform, designed to modernize the administration and finances and education in the kingdom, most especially to see it through these dark times and, most importantly, to pay off the oppressive indemnities owed to France. During this period, the King repeatedly promised that his people would get a constitution. He made this promise in 1810, 1811, 1814, and then again in 1815. But with the reactionary turn of Europe after 1815, the King had very little incentive to follow through on his promise, even after he renewed it one last time in 1820. The promise of a constitution had also always come with the promise of a pan-Prussian national diet, like the one in Hungary, but the King stopped even bringing it up after 1820, and he ran a conservative absolutist regime in line with Metternich’s vision for Europe.
Now this was all very annoying, most especially to the people who lived in the west, which was generally more liberal and industrial and modern, while the east was more traditional and conservative and agrarian, and run by the land-owning aristocracy that also dominated the upper rungs of the Prussian military, bureaucracy, and state ministries, also much to the chagrin of the more quote-unquote modern westerners. And people from the Rhineland were especially peeved at all this, as their annexation into France had led them to imbibe a lot of revolutionary ideals, and they had to watch helplessly as various rights and laws they had come to take for granted were stripped away. The upper rungs of the state were the preserve of the aristocracy. There was no freedom of speech, freedom of the press or freedom of assembly.
So an old King, Friedrich Wilhelm III, died in 1840 after 43 years on the throne. His son, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, ascended to power, and any hope amongst the liberal Prussians that he would bring with him constitutional reform were quickly dashed. Friedrich Wilhelm IV was a conservative absolutist, who, in his own words, believed that he ruled by the grace of God alone. His sovereignty came from above, not below.
Now, Friedrich Wilhelm IV is an interesting cat. He was a romantic and a patron of the arts and German culture, but he centered his romanticism on the glory of feudal and medieval Germany. He was very much backward-looking rather than forward-looking, and to the extent that he supported pan-German unity, it was to be under the careful domination of a great power like Prussia. And to the extent that he loved his people, it was as a father protector. It would never be as a citizen King. But that said, he too always held out the promise of liberal constitutional reform. He just never followed through on it. And so liberal disenchantment with his regime set in.
Now the King did finally appear to give an inch in 1847 in the midst of the great economic crisis. Remember, his capital Berlin had been rocked by that potato revolution in April. The King called for the first national diet. And it was called for the same reason any autocrat calls for one of these things. It was to raise more money. He called this national diet thanks to a holdover law from his father’s time that said that new state loans had to be approved by a national diet, even though no such national diet had ever been called. They were called for much the same reason that Louis XVI was forced to finally call the Estates General. The international bankers, who the King wanted to borrow money from, said they wouldn’t lend the King any money unless he called the national diet. So this could be like Prussia’s quasi-1789 moment, as this diet, which was supposed to be quiescent, demanded instead a constitution, the constitution that had been promised since 1810, and which the King, with a provocative speech, said, hey, no scrap of paper is going to come between me and my people. So the diet refused to approve the funds without their own guarantees, most especially that this new united national diet would be granted a regular sitting so that they could competently weigh in on matters of state. The king refused and tried to change the subject by bringing up the idea of German unification, hey, everybody likes that, and he said he approved of it, as long as it was done in a federal way under Prussian leadership. But the King was shocked when everyone kept their focus on getting a constitution for Prussia. So the diet was dismissed before 1847 was up. The King wanted to hear no more about it from his troublesome subjects, all this demands for a constitution. But clearly, the issue was not going to go away.
Down in Austria, the imperial government was dealing with a whole host of problems. Many both inside and outside the creeky government believed the empire needed to reform to survive. The Austrian government in the 1840s was, to be blunt, wholly inadequate for the job they had to do. Now things had been bad enough under Francis I, who remember was both a micromanager and someone who took forever to make a decision, which is a terrible combination. But when he died in 1835, things got even worse. His son Ferdinand I succeeded him, and Ferdinand was disabled, so instead a regency council was convened to do the real governing. It was called the Secret State Conference, and it was made up of the new emperor’s uncle and brother, who were both pretty inert and unambitious, so real power was wielded by the two other members of the council. And that was foreign minister Metternich and finance minister, wish me luck, François-Anton von Collorat-Liebsteinsky. The problem was that Metternich and Collorat were fierce rivals, and their contradictory aims led to a lot of gridlock and inaction on any front. So instead it was just a lot of inertia. Fatal inertia.
Now Collorat is often described as a liberal, but it was more like he was not as conservative as Metternich, which isn’t really saying that much. Collorat did resist Metternich’s insistence on maintaining large armies and his beloved police apparatus, but that was mostly on budgetary grounds. As I said in Episode 7.3, in 1830 the Emperor was told point blank that Austria couldn’t afford a war. Well, that was Collorat who was telling him that.
Collorat though is generally more favorable to the national demands of the empire’s subjects and inclined to be sympathetic to their demands for more local autonomy, but again it was more on a pragmatic level than any kind of liberalism. If Collorat was a liberal, then Francois Guizot was a frothing radical. It’s all in the perspective of the thing.
So inside Austria proper, a growing reform movement built up among Viennese intellectuals and liberal nobles and the rising bourgeois middle classes who started to question and challenge how the imperial apparatus was run. And the aim did seem mostly to be, look, our empire is going to collapse into a heap if we let things go on like this. It’s either going to be state bankruptcy or mass national insurrection. Probably both.
So when books and pamphlets published anonymously in Germany and then smuggled back into Vienna, a lively, if still pretty small, debate started up about what was to be done. One early influential book that came out in 1842 called Austria and Its Future argued that the problem was the central bureaucracy. It would be one thing to have centralized absolutist rule under the Josephist enlightened ideal, but what Austria had at present was a bureaucracy that was as inept as it was arrogant, and as arrogant as they were irritating. The book advocated for power to be devolved to the local level, so that the local people could participate in and run their own local affairs. This was the only way to ensure responsible government. Responsible government is the only thing that would diffuse growing national hostility to Vienna. It also advocated for a strong imperial diet that would be composed of representatives from across the empire who would come to Vienna and be able to keep a close watch on the Emperor and the taxes he levied and expenditures he approved. All of these arguments were gobbled up most especially by liberal nobles, because it was the nobility who would naturally dominate all those locally empowered governments, and their eyes widened at the possibilities.
But other eyes narrowed at the suggestion of further empowering the nobility, and instead they argued the opposite, they said it was the entrenched landed nobility that was the problem, that they would never see any interest but their own, and would thus lead the empire to ruin. So the Emperor had to look to his people for support, not to his lords. But mostly what they meant by that was educated people, men of merit who could do the job that wasn’t getting done, because the job kept getting handed to incompetent aristocrats who couldn’t do it. And this line of argument was gobbled up most especially by, of course, the rising middle professional classes, because it was them who stood to gain the most from this kind of new system. It would give them a level of political equality with the nobility, and the nobility had been the ones keeping them locked out of power for so long, so now it was their eyes that widened at the possibilities.
But again, other eyes narrowed at the suggestion of the empowerment of the middle classes and said, right direction, but it does not go far enough. The strength of the empire lay in its total population, everyone, its workers, artisans and peasants, the people who made up the vast majority of the empire’s 40 odd million subjects. Government must be with the people and for the people. Writers advocated sweeping aside the old feudal estates and creating a truly national representative assembly that represented the people, especially the lower classes who were doing all the work and paying all the taxes. It couldn’t last. Things couldn’t go on like this, especially not in a multi-ethnic empire, where anger at Vienna was manifesting as the locomotive of national pride, and that was national pride that was felt by all classes. Until the government of the empire recognized and embraced all its people, it was never going to survive.
But one thing to keep in mind about all these Austrian reformers is that they were almost all reformers, not revolutionaries. Now, true, they had to confine their discussions to private clubs and pass around banned books by hand or word of mouth, but that wasn’t because they wanted to overthrow the government, that was because Metternich was kind of paranoid, and as long as he was around, any hint of reform meant the spectre of revolution.
So getting back to our big question, they weren’t even necessarily advocating for a constitution for Austria, they just wanted reform. But with Metternich around, there is no chance of that.
So sliding over to Hungary, one of the national component parts of the Austrian Empire, the effects of this inept or at least obnoxiously centralized and disrespectful rule from Vienna had already opened up the reform period that began in the 1830s, and indeed the activity of the Hungarians was one of the things that was driving the Austrian reformers to think about what they could do. And to talk about Hungarian politics during the reform period, I want to introduce now two really important figures, Count István Széchenyi and Lajos Kossuth.
István Széchenyi was born in 1791, the son of an ancient and influential Hungarian noble family. The family was important enough that young István was born in Vienna and then split his childhood between the imperial capital and the family estates in Hungary. When the Napoleonic War soon raging, he joined the army in 1808 at the age of 17 and then served with distinction until the end of the war, earning plaudits for his bravery. Though he stayed in the army until 1826, with the wars over, Széchenyi was able to travel extensively through western Europe, and what he saw both impressed and dismayed him. The economic, social, and political progress of the west was evident everywhere, and he could not escape the realization that his own Hungarian homeland was, in comparison, falling dangerously behind. So he wound down his travels in the early 1820s and then settled in Hungary and became a relentless advocate for reform and modernization in every aspect of life.
Széchenyi was a proponent of fostering and celebrating Hungarian culture, a trait he inherited from his father, who had founded the Hungarian National Museum back in his own day. So in 1825, Széchenyi famously donated a full year’s income to found the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His generosity inspired others to kick in and they raised a further amount equal to his own donation. He also wrote books imploring his fellow nobles to abandon their feudal privileges and most especially that one privilege that would always hold the kingdom back, the noble exemption from taxation. As long as the kingdom was forbidden from tapping the real wealth of the country, it would always be backward.
And Széchenyi had practical plans for what needed to be done. He focused a lot of his attention on infrastructure improvements, roads, canals, navigation of the Danube to improve lines of trade and communication which would be so important in a future that was already looming. His most famous campaign was for the building of the first permanent bridge linking the twin cities of Buda and Pest. Begun in 1840, the Great Chain Bridge was completed in 1849, and it became a symbol of modern Hungary. The bridge is in fact named for him.
The point of all this was to give Hungary the means to pursue bold new achievements and earn with it the respect of Europe. But Széchenyi was never a firebrand nationalist. Hungary was itself a multi-ethnic state, so advocating for fierce pro-Magyar policies would only antagonize and alienate the minority groups. Széchenyi wanted to reform Hungary, and reform its relationship with Vienna, but he always thought that this would unfold inside the empire. He was also emphatically not a revolutionary. He believed that everything took time, and that slowly and surely Hungary would improve its material, cultural, and spiritual condition. Anything more than that would simply invite disaster.
But as construction began on the bridge across the Danube in 1840, Széchenyi, justly admired and famous, was about to be eclipsed by a younger and more fiery advocate for Hungary, Lajos Kossuth. Kossuth had been born in 1802 into a Lutheran family from the common Hungarian nobility. His father was a lawyer and a small estate owner. The family was also of mixed ethnic stock. Kossuth had Magyar, German, and Slovak ancestors, and he spoke all three languages. He got his first taste of politics after joining his father’s law firm at the age of 19. He was put in charge of the estate of a magnate’s widow and became the designated voting representative on her behalf in the national diet. But he would soon be dismissed by the widow for various and sundry reasons, and it would not be until his time attached to another major magnate in the diets of 1825 and 1832 that he rose to prominence.
“During those diets, Kossuth’s job was to write up detailed reports of what went on in the sessions. Since Habsburg censorship forbade the publishing of reports like this, they would be circulated privately among the delegates, and Kossuth’s soon became much sought after for their force and eloquence, and he was already clearly an aggressively liberal reformer. He stressed the power of the Hungarian national identity and pushed back against the Habsburg absolutism that was treading on their rights, rights that traced all the way back to the Golden Bull of 1222 and beyond.
Kossuth made an attempt to publish his write-ups, but the censors shut him down and then gave him a stern talking to. The diet of 1832 stayed in session until 1836, and after it was dissolved, Kossuth went off to do the same kind of work in the local diets. He wrote and distributed accounts of their sessions, and any time he thought a member had not been eloquent enough in their defense of an ideal he happened to hold dear, like, for example, freedom of the press, Kossuth helpfully rewrote their speeches with his own talented pen.
Now finally, Kossuth pushed his luck too far, and he was arrested in 1837 in a general crackdown of opposition leaders, and he was charged with treason. He spent a year in prison, awaiting trial, and was then sentenced to another four, and it would be in relatively close confinement, his only solace being that he was allowed to read during his time in prison, and also take visits from his future wife, Teresa. His imprisonment, and that of other opposition leaders, became a major cause for other Hungarians to rally around, and when the next national diet was called in 1839, they refused to do anything until the prisoners were released.
Finally set free in 1840, Kossuth was now a national icon, but immediately he made further waves by marrying Teresa. With her being a Catholic and him a Protestant, this was quite shocking. Even in tolerant Hungary, mixed marriages were socially taboo and ran the couple afoul of both Catholics and Protestants.
While imprisoned, Kossuth learned a lot. He read the latest in political and economic thinking, but he does not appear to have learned his lesson. In 1841, he took a position in a liberal paper that had obtained a state license, and he got right back to work. Kossuth helped make the paper the most popular in Hungary. And it was during this period that his more intense and radical ideas, his demand for change now, not later, ran him in to the national hero, Count Széchenyi, and the two of them came to personify the two ends of Hungarian reform politics, with Széchenyi advocating slow gradual improvement, and Kossuth arguing reform now, tax the nobles, abolish feudal obligations, demand that Vienna respect us. Now, one other thing that they profoundly disagreed on, and which we will explore more in detail down the road, is the issue of Magyarization. Should the Magyar language and culture be the dominant language and culture of the Kingdom of Hungary? Széchenyi said no, he believed the ethnic minority should have their own space. Kossuth was a fiery yes, all for his own complicated reasons.
Széchenyi believed Kossuth’s fiercely pro-Magyar policies would alienate the minorities and bring the Austrians crashing down on their heads. Now their debate about the fate of the Kingdom of Hungary would finally come to a head during the crucible year of 1848, and Kossuth would finally enter the political arena in his own right in 1847, when he was elected as a delegate to the next national diet. When he won his seat, he promised, quote, “Now that I am a deputy, I will cease to be an agitator.”
Ha ha ha ha. Sure, man.
So we’ll wrap this up today with the situation in Italy, which by the late 1840s had become volatile, with lots of potential outcomes being laid out and plenty of opportunistic plays to be made. The situation in Italy was defined by three poles. The revolutionary Republican Giuseppe Mazzini, King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia, and the new Pope, Pius IX.
Giuseppe Mazzini was the great Italian nationalist and revolutionary agitator of his day. If anyone was the living, breathing embodiment of liberation and unification, it was him. Born in Genoa in 1805, Mazzini was drawn from a young age to radical politics, and the dream of national liberation. But that meant the liberation not just of the Italians, but of all the people of the earth. Liberation from whatever despot they happened to be laboring under. So it should come as no surprise that he joined the Carbonari at the age of just 22 and was forced to depart Italy for Marseille when he fell under suspicion. After his first arrest and release, he then founded his own group called Young Italy in 1831. To be eligible for admission into this most seditious of secret societies, you had to be under 40 and dedicate your life to the principle that Italy must be one, independent, and a free republic, because there were no Kings for Giuseppe Mazzini and Young Italy, which put them all on the radical edge of revolutionary politics.
After a failed revolt in 1834 that saw his fellow Genoese revolutionary Garibaldi depart eventually for South America, Mazzini was booted from France, too, and forced to bounce from place to place. Up in Switzerland, he helped found a larger Young Europe movement that was dedicated to the same ends as Young Italy, but covering every nationality on the continent. It was exactly the kind of international revolutionary organization that haunted Metternich’s dreams, and Mazzini was without question public enemy number one for the Austrian secret police. He was finally able to settle in England in 1837, where he became a popular member of a certain segment of society, and wound up at the center of a shocking scandal when the British government turned out to be reading his mail. This was shocking to the liberty, but more important, privacy-loving British.
But while Mazzini’s Young Italy organization was large and loyal, I mean, as many as 60,000 members at its height, Mazzini was not the only force in Italian politics. Nor was his answer to the political question, a unified constitutional republic, the only answer to the political question. And in fact, a more plausible answer to the question was as anti-republican and anti-constitutional as it got. That was everyone rallying behind King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia.
Now we introduced Charles Albert already, he’s the guy who got cold feet during that insurrection in 1821. Well, as I said, he inherited the crown of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1830, almost certainly with a promise to Metternich that he would never ever offer his subjects a constitution. And he didn’t. He stayed conservative and loyal to Austria all through the 1830s and most of the 1840s. But by the mid-1840s, he had spied himself an opportunity. The Austrians were clearly becoming weak and the Italians were clearly ready to be rid of them.
And as I said, nearly every patriotic Italian recognized that war with Austria would be part and parcel of liberation and unification, and Piedmont-Sardinia was the only kingdom with a military strong enough to do the job. Nobody knew that better than Charles Albert himself.
There were also plenty of Italians who thought the fanatically Republican Mazzini was kind of a pain in the ass. Among them was a Piedmont noble and occasional ne’er-do-well Massimo d’Azeglio, who believed the best option was a constitutional monarchy under King Charles Albert. It was not until he traveled the circuit of central Italy in 1845 and won some adherence to the idea that Charles Albert was a better option that d’Azeglio took the idea of a new candidate to the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, who in a secret early morning meeting said, Tell your friends to lay low for now, but when the time comes, I will be ready.
Inscrutable and with a history of side-switching, no one really knew the King’s true intentions. He was also extremely coy about whether or not he was going to deliver a constitution, which for most of the revolutionaries would be a necessary guarantee. Even d’Azeglio himself was not sure if he could really trust the King, but as he later said, “you can’t trust a thief to reform himself, but what if you are asking him to help you plan a robbery?”
The third great political pole to emerge in Italy came from the momentous papal conclave of 1846. The election of Pope Pius IX felt like it lurched the entire process of risorgimento forward and made liberation and unification a really real reality. The future Pope Pius was born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, and he was ordained as a priest in 1819 under the patronage of the aging Pope Pius VII. He’s the one who had served and suffered through the Napoleonic era. Mastai-Ferretti’s first important job (Revolutions tie-in alert) was that from 1823 to 1825 he went to the newly liberated Chile and Peru to arrange the status of the church in the newly independent South American countries. So he was showing up just as Bolivar was departing.
This also made him the first Pope to ever set foot in the Americas. Just thought I’d throw that out there. As an archbishop back in Italy in the late 1820s and early 1830s, he got a reputation as a generous friend of the poor and the downtrodden, and also as pretty lenient towards patriotic revolutionaries of the Carbonari variety. He always advocated clemency and amnesty. Was he secretly in favor of liberation and unification? So when Pope Gregory XVI died in 1846, after 15 years of being the furthest thing from a friend of revolutionaries, his conservative heir apparent and an openly liberal Cardinal went head to head in the subsequent papal election. But when the College of Cardinals couldn’t break the deadlock between the two candidates, Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti emerged as the compromise candidate, and he was elected on June 16, 1846, taking the name Pius IX.
For the next 20 months or so, he was easily the most popular man in Italy. He released a bunch of political prisoners and instituted reforms to improve the administration of the papal states, going so far as to call a new council of state that would be made up of competent administrators. Pius was now being identified as a man of great revolutionary promise by other revolutionaries in Italy. I mean, if any one person could unify all of Italy, all of disunited Italy, the Pope was that man. And now they have this brand spanking new liberal reformist Pope. I mean, my God, think of the possibilities. King Charles Albert certainly thought of the possibilities. And in conjunction with the Pope’s elevation and reforms, he liberalized some of the more restrictive laws in his own kingdom. All of which Metternich viewed with intense suspicion. If this upstart Pope joined his moral authority to the military power of Piedmont-Sardinia, the empire was going to have a real mess on its hands in Italy.
Okay, so that’s a pretty good roundup of European politics on the eve of 1848. The regimes that had been in power since the Congress of Vienna, or in France’s case since July of 1830, had spent decades just trying to make today like yesterday and tomorrow like today. If there was not yet a constitution, you weren’t going to get one. And if you had a constitution, it wasn’t going to be reformed. And though a regime might dabble in it from time to time, nobody really wanted to stick a fork in the light socket that was nationalism.
But this conservative system was sitting on top of bubbling magma. There was social and economic transformation and upheaval and a growing political consensus, at least among the educated classes, that absolutist tyranny was simply incompatible with the realities of modern life. So all the ingredients for revolution was there. But one thing is very clear. Nobody saw the revolutions of 1848 coming, even though they are now just months away. Nobody saw it coming. Even de Tocqueville, who predicted the eruption of the volcano just weeks in advance, sheepishly admitted later that he had been exaggerating for effect.
So it was with surprise, some horrified surprise, some jubilant surprise, that Europe suddenly and violently exploded in early 1848. And I elected to wrap things up this week in Italy, because little known fact, the first outbreak of revolution in Europe in 1848 was not in France, as it’s usually described, but in Italy.
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