1848 (28 page)

The Danes and the Swedes also abolished slavery in their Caribbean islands (the Swedes still held Saint Barthélemy in 1848). Yet there was no serious talk of abandoning empire itself: the Dutch parliament certainly asserted some control over the Netherlands' overseas colonies, but the commerce itself remained a monopoly of the crown. Algeria remained a French colony (it was first invaded in 1830 in a desperate attempt by the last Bourbon king, Charles X, to curry popularity with an overseas adventure), and while the European colonists were given the right to vote, the indigenous population was not.

Another serious limitation to the ‘Springtime of Peoples' was that it did little to emancipate women. Nowhere in Europe did they receive the right to vote, primarily because there was a persistent prejudice against it not only among most men but among many women, who had internalised the prevailing views of gender difference. Mid-nineteenth-century European society generally held that women were naturally predisposed to the domestic sphere: they were the nurturer of their children, the virtuous wife and the ‘angel of the hearth'. They were thought to be best protected by being under male authority, be it their father or their husband. Politics were best left to men, who were deemed to be more rational than women and so were naturally attuned to public life, an arena into which women were not meant to stray. Typical of even the left-wing revolutionaries in this respect was the Mainz democrat Ludwig Bamberger, who spoke out against women's ‘perfumed slavery' but asked, ‘Who wants to eradicate differences which are present in nature?' Either sex, he argued, should get involved only ‘as is appropriate to its nature'.
¹³⁶
Even those rare voices that supported women's emancipation could not always be said to be full-blown supporters of gender equality: a Hessian democrat declared that depriving women of the vote was akin to denying them the pleasures of ‘cooking, sewing, knitting, darning, dancing and playing'.
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Yet women did participate in the politics of the revolution in different ways; and, in the process, they challenged the limits to emancipation in 1848. Women almost everywhere (and of almost all social backgrounds) took part - usually in various supporting roles - in the street-fighting in the revolutions of February-March. Working-class women would also participate in later insurrections: in June in Paris and Prague, and in the radical uprisings in the Rhineland in 1849. In Paris women helped to build the barricades, and they carried food, messages and ammunition to the fighters - often by hiding these items in hollowed-out bread or in the bottom of milk canisters. The iconography of French women bearing flags on the barricades is no myth: two
parisiennes
were cut down by the National Guard as they did just that on 23 June 1848. The women of the barricades in Prague left a deep impression on posterity, as symbols of the heroism and sacrifice of Slav women.

Women were also important observers of the events, offering influential commentary on the revolutions: to cite but a few examples, under the pseudonym of Daniel Stern, Marie d'Agoult wrote a history of the 1848 revolution in France that remains an important source; in Germany, Fanny Lewald penned a series of influential letters on the revolution; in Italy, the American journalist Margaret Fuller became, in effect, the United States' first war correspondent when she reported on the events in Rome for Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune
.
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In Paris the socialist Eugénie Niboyet established a feminist newspaper called the
Voice of Women
. The Czech writer Božena Němcová sympathised with the plight of the poor, deplored anti-Semitism, opposed German nationalism and urged women's emancipation through education: ‘We women have remained far behind the age, behind the banner of freedom and culture. Let us confess this, let us not be ashamed, for the fault is not with us, but with those who have completely neglected the education of people, and left the guidance of the female sex utterly to chance.'
¹³⁹
Such voices were those of the politically engaged writer, not the detached observer.

Women also formed, or joined, political clubs. In Paris the ‘Fraternal Association of Both Sexes' admitted men and women as equals, while the Club of the Emancipation of Women and the Union of Women pressed for women's rights - generally not to political enfranchisement, but to education, divorce, a control over their own property - and for a system of national workshops that provided work for unemployed women as well as for men. Meanwhile, radical clubs, such as the Montagnard Club and Adolphe Blanqui's Central Republican Society, also admitted women, although most socialist clubs allowed women to attend but not to speak. In 1849-51 women played a role in distributing radical propaganda across the French countryside - by allowing their homes to be used as meeting places for the radicals and by reading left-wing newspapers aloud to the illiterate. Thousands of German women collected money for the popular cause of a German navy, while women's clubs were established in cities such as Berlin, Mannheim and Mainz. In the Rhineland women were admitted to some democratic clubs from the summer of 1848, while mass meetings held in rural areas were well attended by them. In Mainz Kathinka Zitz-Halein created the Humania Association in May 1849 because Bamberger's Democratic Association did not allow women to speak. Its purpose was to support ‘needy patriots' with money, clothing, bandages and nursing during the radical insurrection that summer. Similar organisations appeared in Saxony, Nassau, Frankfurt and Heidelberg. The middle-class women of Prague founded the Club of Slavic Women to promote women's education; it organised two public meetings in August 1848 to protest against the Austrian military occupation of the city. The second of these sent a delegation to Vienna which secured the release of some political prisoners who had been held since the insurrection in June. While, to modern eyes, such activities seem scarcely to have scratched the surface of inequality, to conservatives they were viewed as especially dangerous. On 17 March 1849 the Austrian government handed down a law on associations, banning women's political activities of all kinds in the Habsburg Empire. It was even to be illegal for women to join political meetings as quiet observers.

Some women went so far as to try to stand in elections. In Paris in May 1849 Jeanne Déroin attempted to stand as a socialist candidate. The government declared her candidacy unconstitutional, warning that none of her votes would be counted. Her supporters among the left-wing republicans therefore backtracked, but it was an important symbolic moment in French politics. The great writer George Sand took a more Fabian approach to women's political enfranchisement: she argued in April 1848 that women would some day participate in politics, but society had to change first. Until that happened, women would be too dependent upon marriage and too subjugated by laws that reinforced male authority within the family to act truly independently in politics. She therefore distanced herself from her admirers who proposed her candidacy for the upcoming elections. The task of the Second Republic was not to give women the right to vote, she argued, but to improve women's status within the family first.
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This was a curious argument from someone who worked closely with Ledru-Rollin, the Republic's minister of the interior.

The events of 1848 appeared to provide an unprecedented opportunity for European liberals to realise their long-nurtured goals for national unity or independence. Moreover, the sudden collapse of the old governments offered some nationalities the chance to give political expression to their identities for the very first time. Yet the various nationalisms were riven by both internal divisions and conflicts with one another. The former problem was perhaps most glaring in Italy, where many patriots fought less for national unity than for the liberties of their own state: Venice, Lombardy, Tuscany, Sicily and so on. Loyalties could be even more localised than that: the inhabitants of the small towns and cities of the
terra firma
in Venetia regarded the preponderance of Venice itself with suspicion and even hostility. In Tuscany the port city of Livorno resented the capital, Florence, which provoked instability later. Civic pride -
campanilismo
(love of one's own
campanile
, or bell-tower) - still had a deep and widespread appeal; by comparison a sense of a wider, ‘Italian' identity seemed too abstract. Moreover, the existing rulers of the Italian states were reluctant to countenance any form of unification that undermined their own dynastic interests, and they held the trump cards: their armed forces, which allowed Charles Albert to dictate terms to the revolutionaries and which other rulers provided and withdrew according to their own interests. At times, Mazzini must have felt like tearing out his hair and beard. To cite another example, the Polish radicals, who in exile had formulated a vision of a unitary, democratic Polish state, came up against the more pragmatic but less ambitious provincialism of the patriotic movement on the ground in Poznania and Galicia. The Polish elites who provided the local leadership of the national movement had their own social interests to defend and felt that their cause would be best served by working first with their Prussian and Austrian rulers for reform, before trying to piece Poland together again. Even in Germany, where nationalism had spread more broadly among the population, the liberals had little or no experience of working within a national framework. Respect for the individual states was still deep-rooted throughout German society, and the revolutionaries carried with them a complex baggage of state and regional loyalties, religious denomination and economic interests, all of which coloured their opinions on the bigger national issues of 1848.
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The ‘Forty-Eighters' were also confronted with the fact that their own national aspirations conflicted with those of other ethnic groups, whether they were neighbouring peoples or minorities within the presumptive state. When they responded, the revolutionaries found it very hard to look at the ‘national question' from any perspective other than that of their own national interests. Even Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's intellectual partner, argued in 1852 that Bohemia ‘could only exist henceforth, as a portion of Germany', dismissing the very idea of Czech nationality as ‘dying according to every fact known in history for the last four hundred years'.
¹⁴²
Engels was driven by the sense that the Slavs of the Austrian Empire were essentially counter-revolutionaries, since, when their national interests conflicted with those of the Germans and Hungarians, they turned to the Habsburgs for support. He was sympathetic to the Poles, and in the same article he denounced the travesty inflicted on them by the Prussians in 1848, but the apostle of communism had little sympathy for ‘those numerous small relics of peoples which, after having figured for a longer or shorter period on the stage of history, were finally absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations'. Yet precisely those nationalities were giving political expression to their aspirations in 1848, sometimes for the first time. For Engels, some nationalities were doomed by history to be subject peoples, since they had neither the culture nor the strength to survive independently. This intellectual position - a version of the ‘threshold principle' of nationality, which argues that a particular ethnic group becomes a ‘nation' when it is large and powerful enough to sustain itself - allowed Engels to support German national interests against the Czechs and even to demand the restoration of Poland, but only if it was at the expense of the peoples further to the east - Lithuanians, Belarussians and Ukrainians - not the Germans.
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One of the tragedies of 1848 was therefore that it marked the moment when European liberalism explicitly surrendered itself to its darker, nationalist impulses. This was primarily because, when the conflicting strategic and territorial interests of competing national aspirations became clear, most liberals threw their weight behind the desires or needs of their own nationality. They rarely admitted the perspective of the other ethnic groups, since that would have meant implicitly recognising that there was some good reason behind these rival aspirations. So, instead, the liberals generally preferred to deny to other peoples the very rights and freedoms that they claimed for themselves. The conflicts that thus arose had long-term consequences for the development of nationalism in Europe. Experts frequently distinguish between ‘civic' and ‘ethnic' forms of national identity. The ‘civic' type defines the nation politically, as a matter of explicit or implicit choice by its individual citizens to live together as a nation: as the French scholar Ernest Renan famously declared in 1882, the nation is a tacit ‘daily plebiscite'.
¹⁴⁴
The nation here is simply a political community: one's nationality is defined by one's desire to share equal political and civil rights with other citizens and to live under the same laws that govern that particular state. This form of nationalism has the capacity, of course, to absorb as fully fledged citizens different ethnic groups, whose new nationality is meant to transcend, if not efface altogether, their original identity. ‘Ethnic' nationalism glories in the shared cultural roots and heritage of a people enjoying a common descent from a particular ancestry, real or mythical. One remained ‘organically' part of a particular nation, whatever one did and wherever one went. Ties of ‘blood' and ‘culture' are often invoked to justify or explain this immutable sense of belonging. In this definition foreigners who lived within the boundaries of the state but could not claim to share the same ethnicity or ‘race' as the indigenous people could never be full citizens. As authorities such as Anne-Marie Thiesse and Anthony D. Smith have suggested, all European national identities in practice have elements of both the civic and ethnic forms of nationalism, albeit in different combinations. As Smith puts it, the two forms represent ‘the profound dualism at the heart of every nationalism'.
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