Revolutions of 1848

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The Revolutions
of 1848
Prelude
Revolution in France
Revolution in Habsburg areas
Revolution in Germany
Revolution in Italy
Revolution in Poland
Aftermath

The European Revolutions of 1848, in some countries known as the Spring of Nations or the Year of Revolution, were a series of revolutions triggered by the Revolution of 1848 in France, which erupted in February 1848 in Paris and soon spread to the rest of Europe. These European Revolutions were the violent consequences of a variety of changes that had been taking place in Europe in the first half of the 19th century. In politics, both bourgeois reformers and radical politicians were seeking change in their nations' governments. In society, technological change was creating new ways of life for the working classes, a popular press extended political awareness, and new values and ideas such as nationalism and socialism began to spring up. The tinder that lit the fire was a series of economic downturns and crop failures that left the peasants and the poor working classes starving.

The result was a wave of revolution sweeping across Europe and raising hopes of liberal reform as far away as Brazil, where the rhetoric surrounding the Praieira revolt took many cues from European events, as did its thorough repression. Only the United Kingdom and Russia were missing: Russia had not yet a real bourgeois or proletarian class to initiate a revolution (and, more to the point, it lacked the communication between various groups of people to form such classes or to form committees to organize revolts). In the United Kingdom, the middle classes had been pacified by general enfranchisement in the Reform Act of 1832, with the consequent agitations, violence, and petitions of the Chartist movement that came to a head with the petition to Parliament of 1848. The repeal of the protectionist agricultural tariffs called the "Corn Laws" in 1846 had defused some proletarian fervor. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, revolution was far from the minds of those in Ireland, struggling and dying through the Potato Famine. The United States remained profoundly isolated, increasingly involved in its own expansion and social ills; there, after a summer of European revolutions, the Free Soil Party in the November presidential election sufficed only to divide Democrats and bring the apolitical slave-holding career soldier General Zachary Taylor into office.

Although the revolutions were put down quickly, in their span there was horrific violence on all sides. Tens of thousands were tortured and killed.

Although the immediate effects of the revolutions were short-term, there were lasting legacies.

Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in his Recollections that "society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, and those who had anything united in common terror."

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See also

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External links and references

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848"
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