Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Now we spent the first eight episodes of this series absorbed in big picture background stuff, and we explored the five main geographic areas of a revolutionary interest: France, Germany, the Austrian Empire, Italy, and Hungary.

Well, the time has finally come to put it all together. Today, we will actually launch The Revolutions of 1848. Now when anyone wants to tell the story of The Revolutions of 1848, they almost always begin in Paris, because the February Revolution in France is undeniably the great bonfire that sent Revolutionary sparks showering down across Europe and lighting everything on fire from the Seine to the Danube.

But it is not the case that the revolutionary insurrection in Paris was the first revolutionary insurrection of 1848. In fact, by the time the barricades were going up in Paris, the Italian peninsula was already a good seven or eight weeks into revolutionary upheaval. And so, by the irresistible force of chronological supremacy, it is in Italy, not France, that we will begin our story of The Revolutions of 1848.

As we’ve discussed, Italy had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity since the Congress of Vienna. Periodic insurrections had been cooked up by a variety of secret societies like the Carbonari and Young Italy, but their record was frankly dismal. The uprisings of the 1820s and 1830s had all been crushed under the Austrian boot. So it was pretty clear by the 1840s that the underground cult-like secret societies were never going to succeed on their own. They had to have the support of some broader institutional power operating out in the open. And as we saw last time, the late 1840s delivered not one but two such institutional powers.

In 1846, the reforming Pope Pius IX was elected, and shortly thereafter, rumors began to swirl that the ambitious King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia was open to leading the forces of Italian liberation and unification. The thought of a patriotic alliance between the Pope and the King sent revolutionary hearts aflutter.

But the funny thing is that despite the revolutionary hopes now being laid at their feet, neither Pius IX nor Charles Albert were revolutionaries in any sense of the term. Despite a brief flirtation with liberalism in his early 20s, Charles Albert had spent most of the last 25 years as a zealous reactionary conservative. Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary par excellence, certainly hated Charles Albert’s guts, and for good reason. During the 1830s, the king had arrested, exiled, tortured, and executed many of Mazzini’s closest friends. And Mazzini would never be able to truly reconcile himself to the idea of Charles Albert leading the revolutions to come. Even those who were actively trying to make Charles Albert the leader of Risorgimento, were not sure they could trust him. They all knew his record, and he still refused to commit to promulgating a constitution.

But if Charles Albert had no interest in social or even political revolution, the word was going around that, like all patriotic Italians, he was sick of taking his orders from Vienna. And the possibility of the King making the army of Piedmont the center of an anti-Austrian war machine, well, that overcame many doubts about his ultimate political leanings. I think it’s fair to say that no one really trusted Charles Albert, but most everyone had concluded that he was the living definition of indispensable. With his army, they might win. Without his army, they would surely lose, just like they always had.

Now, one like Charles Albert, who was being very coy and sphinx-like, Pope Pius IX seemed to have signaled that he was actually a liberal activist, dramatically opening his papacy by reforming the government of the papal states and releasing political prisoners, an act that made Metternich grouse incredulously that “God was not supposed to issue pardons.”

Those concrete actions joined with Pius’ reputation for generosity to the poor, sympathy for Italian nationalism, and leniency towards revolutionary conspirators. And it all seemed to indicate that Pius was the patriotic liberal Italian pope that patriotic Italian liberals had never even dared hope for.

But their hopes overshot reality by quite a wide mark. Remember, it was a deadlock that had led to Pius’ election. The two leading candidates at the Papal Conclave of 1846 had been a staunch conservative and a truly stalwart liberal. Pius had been the compromise between the two factions. So he was from the beginning hardly going to be disposed to be the crusading liberal that many in Italy now believed him to be.

Now, this is not to say that Pius was not okay with reform. He was okay with reform, but he favored very slow, very incremental reform. He once said, “Let me be a tortoise so long as I am not a crab“. The small reforms and gestures that accompany the opening of his papacy were for Pius just about as far as he was willing to go for the moment. Far more an end than a beginning. But many in Rome and many in Italy generally did not realize that. They thought it was just the beginning. So in Rome, banquets and parties thrown in his honor throughout 1847 praised Pius to the stars. But his words started to leak that maybe the new Pope wasn’t exactly on board with thorough going liberal reform. Their endless praise started to carry an implicit threat. Like, if you turn your back on us now, there’s going to be trouble.

So in the summer of 1847, the Roman middle and upper classes agitated hard for the creation of a Civic Guard. Basically, the Roman equivalent of the French National Guard. The petitioners said the civic guard would be a tool for maintaining domestic order. But it was hardly lost on anyone that such a force might be used to defend the city against, say, the Austrian army. Unwilling to risk a showdown, Pius bowed to the request. And in early July 1847, the Civic Guard in Rome was inaugurated. But it was already clear, at least in hindsight, that there was a disconnect between how far Pius wanted to go and how far the Italians now expected him to go.

But though revolutionary hopes were now being foisted onto a very non-revolutionary King and a very non-revolutionary Pope, both men shared one thing in common that made the hopes being foisted on them not mere flights of fancy. Both resented Austrian dominance of Italy. For Charles Albert, it was a matter of raw ambition. He had concluded that he could be more than merely the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, that he could potentially be the King of Italy. And the Austrians stood in his way. Pius, meanwhile, was annoyed that the papacy, and thus the entire Catholic Church, had been made a mere dependent client of the Austrian Empire. His conservative predecessors may have been content with Rome being a mere protectorate of Austria, but Pius wanted more freedom, autonomy, and dignity for the Church.

So just a few weeks after acquiescing to the creation of the Civic Guard, Pius gave a further signal that Rome might still yet lead the charge for liberation and unification. In late July 1847, a small uprising broke out in the city of Ferrara, a city inside the domains of the Papal States, just on the other side of the border from Austria’s kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. Unwilling to allow the unrest to spread, the commander of the imperial army in Lombardy ordered his troops across the border. They put down the insurrection and occupied the city. This violation of papal sovereignty angered Pope Pius, and he sent protests to Metternich, who was himself not thrilled at the intervention, as the commander in question had ordered the occupation of the city without even asking for permission.

The occupation of Ferrara, which would last until the end of 1847, became a small infected wound that kept the Pope and the Austrians as antagonists, and gave Italian nationalists hope that the Pope’s protests to Vienna would soon transform into more decisive calls to patriotic action.

Before we move on, however, we must fully introduce that Austrian commander who ordered the unilateral occupation, because he is actually a major player in the story of 1848, as he will be the great spoiler in the First War of Italian Independence. His name is Joseph Radetzky von Radetz, and he was, in the summer of 1847, a sprightly 80 years old. And that is not me misspeaking, like I did with that British Admiral who I said was 84 when he was really 48. Field Marshal Radetzky was really born all the way back in 1766, and really was 80 going on 81.

But far from presiding over the Milan garrison with a mix of lethargy and senility that one might reasonably expect from an 80 year old Austrian field marshal, Radetzky was still bright and nimble, keenly aware of the revolutionary forces gathering on the Italian peninsula and eager to defeat them.

Radetzky had been orphaned at an early age and basically raised in an Austrian military academy. He moved from the academy to the army in 1785 at the age of 19, just in time for an entire generation’s worth of war to break out between Austria and France. He fought his way through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, always showing courage, zeal, and above all, that greatest of all gifts, competence. A General, by the end of the wars, he was most useful as a chief of staff and master of logistics and planning without ever losing his tactical or strategic edge. After the peace, he remained in the army. It was, after all, the only life he knew. But by the late 1820s, he fell from grace thanks to some scandalous debts incurred by his wife. By the early 1830s, he was in his mid-60s and laboring at a minor provincial post with his wages basically being garnished into oblivion. But when trouble kept flaring up in Italy, the aging Emperor Francis tapped Radetzky to take over the military command in Lombardy, Venetia. Radetzky tried to beg off, saying that he was too old and too in debt. But the Emperor told him, You take care of your years, and I will take care of your debts. And that was that.

Now a full Field Marshal, Radetzky apprehended quickly that the Austrian finances were in terrible shape, and he would never have the number of men, nor the amount of equipment he wanted. So he concentrated his energy on training the men he did have relentlessly, so that whatever they lacked in numbers, they made up in discipline and dependability. He was also fanatical about the cleaning and maintenance of guns, equipment and other essential material. With no promise that anything they had would ever be replaced, what they did have could not be allowed to fall into disrepair. Radetzky’s other great asset was a genuine regard for the lower ranks, and also poor civilian peasants. He was himself an orphan who had risen from the bottom, and nothing made him blow his top faster or harder than essential provisions arriving late, or his men not being paid on time. This, as you can imagine, earned him some serious loyalty up and down the ranks. He also broke no abuse of the local peasantry, and he did not allow his men to steal from those who had nothing. So Radetzky’s name was well known and well liked among the lower class Italians.

But this was for sure not just benevolence, though. Aware that the Italian middle and upper classes were catching revolutionary fever, Radetzky wanted to make sure the Austrian army’s interactions with the lower classes left those lower classes with no cause to join the fight.

After more than ten years on the job, Radetzky sensed in the late 1840s that something was once again amiss. The elevation of Pope Pius IX was eliciting dangerous enthusiasm, and over in Piedmont, the once dependable Charles Albert was showing signs of independence. Indeed, with the Pope continuing to make liberal concessions and be celebrated for it, Charles Albert decided it would be best to follow the pontiff’s lead. As I mentioned last week, he had so far been super cagey about whether or not he was willing to accept a constitution. And the truth of the matter was, he was dead set against it and starting to admit it privately. To d’Azeglio, that guy who had gone out stumping for him in 1845 and 1846, the King said, “I want freedom for Italy and for that reason I will never grant a constitution.”

Now this, of course, would have raised red flags all over the place about what kind of weird ass definition of freedom the King was working from. But the king had two rationales. The first was pretty basic. He was, by disposition, not a liberal. He was an absolutist. He did not think a King should ultimately have to answer to anyone. But the other reason is that Charles Albert spied a tough road to liberation and unification, and believed that he would need a free hand capable of forceful executive action to see Italy through the crisis. This was no time to invite a bunch of squabbling amateurs into government. The times required discipline and duty, more than freedom and rights.

But the King also knew that his plans would not succeed if he lost the support of the energetic middle class liberals and radicals. So to head off calls for a constitution, in the fall of 1847, he unilaterally loosened press restrictions, reduced censorship, and reformed a number of his police laws. But it was all a free gift from a benevolent King, not the actualization of some inherent natural right, and certainly not a constitution.

So in the Kingdom of Piedmont, one man in particular used the loosened press laws of Charles Albert to found a newspaper in that same fall of 1847 that would serve to advocate all manner of social and economic reform, but not shy away from explicit political commentary in an attempt to push the King to adopt a constitution. This paper was founded and edited by Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour, who wanted a thoroughgoing reform of the kingdom so that it could serve as the righteous vehicle for the liberation and unification and transformation of the Italian peninsula.

Cavour had been born in Turin in 1810 at the height of the Napoleonic era, and he was born into one of those families that was doing quite well under French rule. He was a massively intelligent and incredibly headstrong kid, and in his 20s he joined the Piedmont army as an engineer. But military life did not take, and he resigned in 1831. He spent most of the 1830s and 1840s managing his family’s estates, which used up a mere fraction of his available intellect, which he then turned mostly to matters of economic, social, and political reform. He toured France, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, and came home bursting with ideas. He organized an agricultural society that was ostensibly meant to improve farm output. But since the land and its produce touched on every part of life, the society pursued topics as varied as fertilizer, banking, railroads, and tariffs. Other more dedicated political activists thought Cavour’s wide-ranging program distracted from the central goal of constitutional reform.

But for Cavour, social progress was more likely to be the predecessor of political progress than the other way around. Though he himself also scolded economic reformers who were simply in it to make a buck. He said, “those who see nothing in the progress of industry except material things have small minds.”

But though he was an energetic and passionate reformer, Cavour was not an aggressive revolutionary, and he butted heads with guys like Mazzini, the same way that Széchenyi butted heads with Kossuth in Hungary. Basically, wide-ranging but slow and economic progress, or a lightning strike at the evil political regimes.

With non-Austrian Italy getting excitable, over in Austrian Lombardy-Venetia, relations between the native Italians and the German administrators was only getting worse. Still living under tight censorship, the people of Lombardy-Venetia used piety as a cover for their own political ambitions. At various holy days and feast days, they would get together and make ostentatious declarations of support for Pope Pius IX, which no Austrian agent missed the point of. And the participation of the local clergy in all this was really aggravating for Metternich. And from his later exile in London, he rued the loyalties of the clergy. Now during the French Revolution, the clergy had served as a major conservative bulwark against the evil revolutionaries. But during the anti-Austrian campaigns in Italy, they always seemed to side with the revolutionaries. Hell, half of them were revolutionaries. It was indicative of a general divergence of national identity, with Italians congregating with Italians and Germans with Germans. And many German officers and functionaries serving in Lombardy-Venetia noted by the end of 1847 that their social lives had become frozen and uncomfortable. We’re talking right down to invitations being sent out for a routine dinner party or soiree, and none of the Italian couples showing up. The Germans felt isolated and nervous.

But still, as was the case with the old North American revolutionaries in 1775, there was a wide split among the Italians in Lombardy-Venetia between a hardcore group of radicals who now saw independence as the only way forward, and more conservative liberals who just wanted to improve their position within the imperial system. Younger students and struggling lower middle class professionals tended to demand independence. Liberal nobles, prosperous merchants, and established professionals simply wanted to pressure Vienna into making concessions, allow more Italians to participate in government, lose repression of speech and assembly, make some tax reforms. Basically, this group wanted a better and more dignified life in the empire, rather than a full break with the empire.

In December of 1847 and January of 1848, reformers of this type decided it was high time, though, to do the unthinkable, to actually criticize the government. But it was all framed as, look, we’re loyal subjects, but that means you are our government, and we need you to start living up to our expectations for what our government ought to be.

But that was the more staid liberal reformist line. More radical elements, all those members of young Italy and the Carbonari, had much grander ambitions, and they were now routinely smuggling in radical literature and arms and ammunition from both Piedmont-Sardinia and Switzerland, all of which Field Marshal Radetzky knew about but was increasingly unable to stop. Believing that things would soon be coming to a hit, he cancelled all leave requests from his officers in December of 1847 and requested Vienna send reinforcements. Now, he was beefed up a little bit and told that a loan from the Rothschild Bank had recently come through, so some money would be available, but none of the figures quoted were as big or would be coming as quickly as Radetzky would have liked. His situation was tenuous, but he publicly told his men that any insurrection would be dashed like fragile surf against hard rock, just like always.

Receiving no satisfactory response from Vienna about their petitions, the people of Milan decided to hit the Empire where it hurt, right in their already threadbare purse. Despite making up one sixth of the Empire’s population, the Italian subjects contributed fully one third of the Emperor’s revenue. So the plan was to starve Vienna of all those funds until Vienna recognized the Italians as the critical members of the Empire they were, and afforded them the dignity they felt they were being denied. Explicitly using the Boston Tea Party as their model, the word went round that they were going to dry up Vienna’s two most lucrative revenue streams, the tax on tobacco and the national lottery. So as they approached New Year’s 1848, the people of Milan made one of the great all-time inner circle members of the New Year’s Resolution Hall of Fame. They were all going to quit smoking.

On January the 1st, 1848, Milan woke up ready to give up their vices. No more smoking, no more playing the lottery. Deprived of critical tax revenue, Vienna would have to make concessions. But Field Marshal Radetzky did not plan to let it get that far. In the face of this mass challenge to the existing order, Radetzky decided to provoke a confrontation that would justify beating the Italians back into submission. Radetzky was someone who believed, as he put it, “that three days of bloodshed was worth 30 years of peace.” So, if you want to provoke a confrontation with a bunch of people who have just given up smoking, what do you do? Correct. You issue every soldier under your command six extra cigars and then send them out into Milan to puff away as openly and obnoxiously as possible. Do it right in front of the people trying to quit. Blow it in their faces. Tease them whenever possible. He also issued his men extra brandy rations to ensure that cooler heads would not prevail.

It did not take long for cooler heads not to prevail. On January 3rd, a fed up Italian knocked a cigar out of the mouth of one of these provocative Austrian smokers. In response, the Austrian and his comrades beat up the Italian and some of his friends. That triggered a response from other Italians, and soon a mob surrounded those soldiers, and they got beaten up. So now we’ve got ourselves a full-fledged riot, and the main garrison gets called in, guns and sabres drawn. Everything escalated exactly as Radetzky wanted it to, and soon six lay dead and another 50 plus were wounded before order was restored.

Now, Radetzky was satisfied with the bloody nose he had just given Milan in what is alternatively called the Smoking Riots or the Tobacco Riots. Hopefully, they had been reminded that the inevitable end to any cycle of escalation was the invincible might of the Austrian army. So I hope you’ve all learned your lesson.

But though he no doubt took some satisfaction in the day’s work, he was not happy about troubling intelligence reports that soon arrived from Piedmont that King Charles Albert was steadily, if quietly, enlarging the size of the Piedmont army. Radetzky was also informed that after the smoking riots, the merchants of Turin had presented a mass petition to the King begging Charles Albert to assist their beleaguered cousins in Milan, to be their savior. Given that the Austrian secret police and Radetzky knew that weapons and propaganda had been filtering over the border from Piedmont for quite some time, it was not a wild stab in the dark to guess that it was entirely probably that come the spring, Charles Albert might make a move.

But even a keen observer of events like Radetzky could not have foreseen how quickly things would unravel in Italy, nor how widespread the crisis already was. Nine days after the smoking riots in Milan, a completely separate and wholly unrelated insurrection broke out on the island of Sicily. Now, if you will recall, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies covered all of southern Italy and the island of Sicily. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Bourbon rulers of the kingdom had lost their mainland possessions to France, but held on to Sicily thanks to the British Navy. But while under British protection, the Bourbon rulers had been obliged to grant their Sicilian subjects a constitution, one based on the famous Spanish Constitution of 1812, complete with a functioning parliament and everything. Well, after the fall of Napoleon, the Bourbon rulers had gotten all their mainland possessions back, decamped Sicily for Naples, and annulled the constitution on their way out the door.

Well, 30 years have now passed, with Sicily being ruled from Naples without a constitution, and the Sicilians had finally had enough. The agricultural and economic crisis of the mid-1840s had led them into a miserable winter in 1847-1848, and the island of Sicily was ready to explode. So to celebrate the birthday of their King, King Ferdinand II, for those of you keeping score at home, the inhabitants of Palermo planned a great big surprise. On January 12, 1848, they poured out into the streets wearing the green, white, and red cockade. They barricaded the streets, and they cheered, “Long live Italy, the Sicilian Constitution, and Pius IX“.

These patriotic activists, though, were soon joined by somewhat dodgy allies. Members of local criminal gangs that represented something like a proto-mafia. These guys poured into Palermo armed to the teeth, and street clashes soon broke out with the government troops. The government troops used grapeshot to try to disperse the mobs, but there were too many insurgents and too few soldiers. The soldiers were forced to retreat, the police headquarters was sacked, and all records inside burned. Sporadic fighting went on for the next two weeks, but the insurgents successfully held Palermo, and in the meantime, the unrest was spreading across the island. Any government office was identified and sacked. Tax, debt, and police records all put to the torch. In Palermo, a provincial government was established, and this provincial government declared that the 1812 Constitution was reenacted, though for the moment, the throne of their constitutional monarchy was vacant, as they had yet to decide whether King Ferdinand would continue to be their King.

Back in Naples, a frantic word of the uprising was met with a frantic response. To quell the insurrection, the King dispatched an expedition of 5,000 men to Sicily, which had two results, both of them bad for the King. First, the expedition wasn’t nearly big enough when literally the entire island is now up in arms, so it was repulsed quite easily.

Second, it drained Naples of the backbone of its garrison that might have defended the King, and when word got out of the Palermo uprisings, the always restless inhabitants of both Naples and the surrounding countryside – remember, this is old Carbonari territory – suddenly sprang to life.

So within days, the poor residents of the city rose up, just as rumors swirled that a huge peasant army had mobilized and was marching on Naples. The respectable citizens of Naples, that is, the nobles and richer property owners, then went to the King and said, whoa King, you have to bend, or it’s all going to break. This seemed to be confirmed on January 27 as a demonstration of 25,000 people gathered in front of the royal palace. The King sent his cavalry to disperse this crowd, but instead the crowd convinced the cavalrymen to dismount and join them. The commander himself offered to personally carry their petition to the King.

With all of his people now seemingly up in arms, on January 29, King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies announced that he would bow to his people’s wishes and promulgate a constitution, even sketching out details. But it looked a lot like he was cribbing not from the Spanish Constitution of 1812, but the French Charter of Government of 1814. There was rejoicing in Naples, but when the Sicilians found out about it, they said, no, sir, that is not good enough. And with the government unable to take the island by force and with the Sicilians unwilling to surrender, the island was now a completely self-governing entity.

The sudden and shocking news of first, the insurrection in Palermo, then the independence of Sicily, and then the King of the Two Sicilies agreeing to grant his subjects a Constitution sent shockwaves across Italy. Now that the first domino had fallen, the rest of Italy wanted to know when are we going to get our Constitution?

In Rome, major demonstrations were held on February 3, with the newly created Civic Guard ditching the white and yellow of the Pope and instead donning the green, white, and red cockade. They rallied under the banner of liberty and a Constitution. This was all way too much for Pope Pius IX. Having already been dragged way beyond his comfort zone, he issued a proclamation trying to pump the brakes rather than put his foot on the gas, as many now hoped he would do. He said, “I do not favor constitutional government and I oppose any plan for war with Austria“. But he finished his proclamation with the formulation, Oh Lord, bless Italy. And since people always hear what they want to hear, the audience took this to mean that the Pope was still for Italy and that all the other stuff had just been smoke and mirrors for the Austrians.

The news of the constitution in Naples spread north and when it ran through the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, demonstrations in favor of a Constitution turned violent in a number of cities. And the Grand Duke, Leopold II, did not waste much time buckling. On February the 4th, he announced that he would promulgate a constitution that would take effect on February the 17th.

With the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany having now granted constitutions, and the Pope under heavy pressure to follow, King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia faced a major dilemma. He did not believe in constitutions. He did not want a constitution. He had done everything in his power to avoid granting a constitution. But now all those liberals in his own dominions were looking at him expectantly. Would he reveal himself to be the same absolutist conservative he had always been? Or was he really with them?

Charles Albert was finally forced to conclude that denying a constitution at this juncture would simply alienate too many critical allies. They were as indispensable to his project as he was to theirs. I mean, Young Italy had infiltrated his officer corps. His army might mutiny if he refused a constitution now. And I’m putting words in his mouth here, but he was pretty clearly also following Talleyrand’s old maxim, that when something is inevitable, it is best to embrace it early when you can still be applauded for moving, than waiting until you are scorned for being dragged against your will.

So on February the 13th, 1848, King Charles Albert announced that he would promulgate a constitution. Though he planned to keep it as conservative as possible, with as much latitude and initiative reserved for the King built in as he could muster. When the announcement landed, Turin burst into celebration. Though the King had cleverly also included a mandated reduction in the price of salt to curry favor with the lower classes, who might not care about such constitutional matters.

Over in Milan, Field Marshal Radetzky learned of all of this with a sense of grim resolve. The wave of constitutions did not bode well for Austria’s position on the peninsula. When word of Piedmont’s constitution landed in Milan, the city burst into celebration. And Radetzky had every reason to suspect that come the spring, war would be at hand.

And Radetzky was not wrong. War would be coming in the spring. But what he did not know, what no one could have known, was that all of this was merely a prologue to an almost incomprehensibly large revolutionary wave that was about to sweep Europe.

Because just a few weeks after the dominoes of Italian constitution started to fall, word came over from France that Paris had exploded, that the July Monarchy had fallen, that King Louis Philippe had abdicated the throne and was on his way to exile in England.

And so next week, we will leave our friends in Italy where they are and move up to France for the French Revolution of 1848.

Return to The Revolutions of 1848 >>