1848 (62 page)

When, in 1848, the German democrat Ludwig Bamberger first heard the news of the June days in Paris, he immediately focused on one of the great problems that throbbed relentlessly through the entire industrial age: how to reconcile social justice with individual liberty? This was a great moral and political issue, which would produce many different ‘answers', from communism to liberal capitalism. ‘The social question', Bamberger saw, ‘had thrown its sword into the turmoil of the political struggle, never again to disappear from the battle and to make more difficult if not impossible for all time the victory of . . . political freedom.'
¹⁸
In 1848 the social question ulcerated the liberal regimes because there was no revolutionary consensus. There was, first, no agreement over the form that the new political order would take: republic or monarchy, democratic or liberal, unitary or federal. Second, liberals and radicals did not see eye to eye over the extent to which the revolutions should overhaul social relations - how far the state should intervene to alleviate poverty, to mediate in labour disputes, and to regulate economic activity. In other words, to what extent should the new regime go beyond political reform and head into social revolution? These two sources of dissension were related, because the failure to resolve the first meant that there was no legal framework in which all sides had confidence and within which the second issue could be peacefully resolved through the political process. The failure of the 1848 revolutions to address the social question was therefore inextricably linked to the political failure of the revolutionaries to forge constitutions that could integrate those at the sharp end of the economic crisis.

This was one of the great tragedies of 1848: that the social and political unity that had secured the victory of the opposition in the initial revolutionary outbursts proved to be so fragile. Some historians have been damning of the radicals, in particular, for irreversibly damaging the liberal order while it was still in its vulnerable, early life. Frank Eyck, for example, says that in the long term, the radicals may have been right, ‘but in the short term they for a time destroyed constitutionalism and the tender beginnings of representative government by using force when they could not gain their ends by persuasion. It was they who made the task of moderate liberal governments impossible.'
¹⁹
One may have sympathy for this view, as the present writer certainly does. However, while it is true that the radicals were rarely the true representatives of the impoverished masses for whom they claimed to speak, they did voice some of the widespread frustration over the social question and, in some cases, offered constructive (if sometimes unrealistic) solutions to the problems of poverty. In the long term it is true that capitalism dramatically improved the overall standards of living in Europe. With the benefit of hindsight, therefore, Eyck's chastisement of radical impatience with the limitations of the emerging liberal order in 1848 seems entirely justified. With more forbearance in 1848, it could be argued, the liberal order would have survived, and within a generation or more Europeans would have enjoyed both constitutional government and the wealth created by maturing industrial economies. Yet in 1848 it was far from clear to contemporaries that capitalism would bring the benefits of sustained economic growth and prosperity. Herzen expressed the problem rhetorically while in Paris in 1848: ‘How will you persuade a workman to endure hunger and want while the social order changes by insensible degrees?'
²⁰

Namier's term, a ‘seed-plot of history', can be applied to this aspect of 1848 because the revolutions of that year witnessed the fatal consequences of the perennial tension between, on the one hand, the liberal emphasis on political freedom and civil liberty and, on the other, the socialist stress on social justice, or the friction between the individual and society. Since 1848 this tension has provoked a wide range of responses, ranging from liberal capitalism to totalitarianism and all points between. Most modern democracies cope with the social question because it is debated within a constitutional framework on which all parties are (more or less) agreed and which protects democratic freedoms. In 1848, no such political consensus existed in most European countries. The ‘social question' could therefore not be resolved within a peaceful, legal framework. So the revolutions faced the great challenge that confronts all modern states: how to integrate the masses into the state and to resolve the social question without provoking instability? Some states, such as the French Third Republic and Britain, managed to forge a political consensus by appealing to traditions (in the French case, to the democratic inheritance of 1789), which enabled them to offer some social reform through liberal, parliamentary systems. Others imposed reform from above through more authoritarian regimes, as in Bismarck's Germany during the 1880s. A third solution was revolutionary, where integration of the masses failed, or was not even seriously attempted, and where alienation led to a violent challenge to the old order, as in Russia, where the result was a totalitarian answer to the social question, in which the needs of society and, above all, the state took precedence over the liberty of the individual.

The revolutions of 1848 were also a ‘seed-plot' in the sense that they comprised a truly European phenomenon, throwing up similarities in aims and ideals that bound together liberals and radicals of different nationalities, while also creating the circumstances that would soon drive them apart. This was Europe's great year of revolutions, rivalled only by the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. Yet the question of whether or not 1848-9 really was a ‘European' revolution - and if so, in what way? - has exercised historians.
²¹
It is an important problem, since underlying the historical question is (implicitly) the wider, more contemporary issue of whether Europe's political and social development rests on a broadly shared historical experience or, conversely, whether the differences between the countries are so deep that ‘European' history amounts to little more than the sum of its constituent parts. Certainly, some historians have argued that 1848 was so complex that the revolutions did not sit on any common European ground, but were simply ‘the sum of local events'.
²²
There is no doubt, of course, that there were important national differences in the experiences of 1848. Rudolph Stadelmann, for example, stresses that the aims of the liberal majority of the German revolutionaries indicate the ‘independence of German liberalism from the French example', concentrating as they did on state-building under a constitutional monarchy rather than acting on a republican-socialist impulse for radical political innovation.
²³
The implications can be read in two conflicting ways: that the German revolutionaries were more moderate and concerned for legality, stability and continuity with the past; or that the German concern for state-building and monarchy gave both nationalism and conservatism priority over liberal freedom. Also, of course, not all European countries underwent a revolution: Britain, Sweden- Norway, the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal, Russia and Ottoman Europe (with the exception of the Romanian principalities) were all scarcely troubled.

But if 1848 does not stand out as a genuinely ‘European' phenomenon in the sense that every country had a revolution, it is equally true that no country was wholly unaffected by the upheavals, even if they did not directly experience an uprising. Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway all felt tremors, if not actual revolts. And in the broader framework of international politics, all the European powers were affected. Britain and Russia, at various stages, felt obliged to intervene in the revolutions. Both brought diplomatic pressure to bear over the Schleswig-Holstein crisis, and Russia intervened militarily against the revolutions in Romania and in Hungary. That 1848 did not degenerate into a major European conflict on the scale of the Napoleonic or First World wars was largely due to the fact that the five great European powers - Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia - all wanted to avoid such a war at all costs. All governments - even the French Second Republic - understood that a general European conflagration would simply radicalise an already dangerous political situation and could lead to the complete disintegration of the multinational empires of Central and Eastern Europe. The task of maintaining a lasting peace in the aftermath of such turmoil would be much harder than it already was. Moreover, except in France, foreign policy and the armed forces remained under the control of the very monarchies who had the greatest interest in keeping the existing European order intact. Consequently, the Prussian government refused to bend to liberal enthusiasm for a nationalist war against Russia and yielded to combined British and Russian protests over its invasion of Schleswig-Holstein. When Russia invaded Romania and Hungary, Britain and France remained neutral; and, of course, in the case of Hungary, the Russian attack came in response to Austrian pleas for help. The French intervention against Rome in 1849 was set against a backdrop of wider international concern for the Pope, so while French forces took the city itself, Spanish, Neapolitan and Austrian forces were all involved in the wider conflict. As these examples show, the European international system based on the hegemony of five great powers remained intact, and in the end this benefited the counter-revolution.
²⁴
It is significant that once the great European states put other interests over the maintenance of the international status quo - and this would happen soon enough, in the Crimean War of 1854-6 - one of the fundamental aims of the ‘forty-eighters' - Italian, German and Romanian unification - all took place within less than two decades.

The 1848 revolutions were also European in the sense that they were genuinely spontaneous across the continent. By comparison, the assault on the old European regime after the French revolution of 1789 might have had the assistance of some local Jacobins in various countries, but the central impulse undeniably came from France. The overhaul of the Napoleonic era would not have been possible without the military might unleashed by that nation. While it is true that in 1848 perhaps the single greatest shock to jolt Europe was, once again, a revolution in France, it was the fall of Metternich in March which really drove forward the revolutionary impulse. Where tensions had been stored up in northern Italy, Hungary, Transylvania, Bohemia and Prussia, it was not the events in Paris that unleashed the fresh revolutionary charge, but the insurrection in Vienna. The outbreak of the 1848 revolutions, in other words, was a genuinely European phenomenon, precisely because they did not all burst from a single fountainhead. The European revolution of 1848 was essentially polycentric, expressed in localised varieties of liberalism that were bound together by broad and important similarities in aims, by the patterns in which the revolutions themselves progressed, and in the problems that the newly formed liberal regimes faced.

The broad similarities in the revolutionary experience were all the more remarkable in a Europe where political, social and economic structures varied widely from one country to the next. The obvious explanation as to why so many very different countries should experience revolution in 1848 is that their peoples were all suffering in the dire agrarian and industrial crisis. That underlying cause gave the revolutions a strong pan-European dimension, even though different people experienced the hardship in different ways. However, without downplaying the centrality of these economic pressures, the revolutions also followed strikingly similar patterns across Europe. Their success was invariably due, first, to a crisis of confidence both in and within the existing governments in their ability to deal with the challenges of social distress and political opposition. Second, they owed their victory to political unity between liberals and radicals and to a momentary social unity among the middle class, workers, peasants (and sometimes even the nobility) against the old order. The problems began when this unity proved to be short lived and fractured, as liberals and radicals vied with each other for control of the direction of the new regime, as property-owners sought to protect their wealth from a second, more radical revolution, and as peasants, having gained what they could from the initial upheaval, fell back in line with the conservatives. As the all-too-brief revolutionary consensus fell apart (sometimes with bloody consequences), so politics became more polarised, cutting away the middle ground as moderates turned towards increasingly authoritarian solutions to counter the threat of a second, ‘social' revolution. In this sense, therefore, the revolutions self-destructed by internecine fighting. By the end of the year the conservatives had recovered their nerve, marshalled their redoubtable advantages (control of the army, the loyalty of the peasantry) and regained the initiative.

The European liberals did not only undergo similar revolutionary experiences but shared comparable (in John Breuilly's sense of ‘essentially similar') aims.
²⁵
While there were certainly important local variants in aims and ideology, liberals across Europe were all bound by a common desire to see political reform, particularly in the shape of constitutions with a limited suffrage, and everywhere except in France under the benign hand of a constitutional monarch. Radicals, on the other hand, shared the common goal of universal, or near-universal, male suffrage, and in a great many cases under a republic. The liberals and radicals of one nationality were themselves acutely conscious that they shared similar goals with their European neighbours: Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann cites the illuminating example of a German republican poster which called for a mass meeting in Berlin on 3 April 1848, in honour of the ‘great European revolution', promised speeches in German, English and French, and hailed the republic in those three languages.
²⁶