Artisans and unemployed workers destroyed industrialized machines when their social demands were neglected. Rural population growth had led to food shortages, land pressure, and migration, both within Europe and out from Europe, especially to North America.
In the years and , a potato blight caused a subsistence crisis in Northern Europe. The effects of the blight were most severely manifested in the Great Irish Famine , [11] but also caused famine-like conditions in the Scottish Highlands and throughout Continental Europe. Aristocratic wealth and corresponding power was synonymous with the ownership of farm lands and effective control over the peasants. Peasant grievances exploded during the revolutionary year of Despite forceful and often violent efforts of established and reactionary powers to keep them down, disruptive ideas gained popularity: democracy , liberalism , nationalism , and socialism.
In the language of the s, democracy meant universal male suffrage. Liberalism fundamentally meant consent of the governed and the restriction of church and state power, republican government , freedom of the press and the individual.
Nationalism believed in uniting people bound by some mix of common languages , culture , religion , shared history , and of course immediate geography ; there were also irredentist movements. At this time, what are now Germany and Italy were collections of small states. Socialism in the s was a term without a consensus definition, meaning different things to different people, but was typically used within a context of more power for workers in a system based on worker ownership of the means of production.
Although little noticed at the time, the first major outbreak came in Sicily, starting in January There had been several previous revolts against Bourbon rule; this one produced an independent state that lasted only 16 months before the Bourbons came back.
During those months the constitution was quite advanced for its time in liberal democratic terms, as was the proposal of an Italian confederation of states. The failed revolt was reversed a dozen years later as the Bourbon kingdom of the Two Sicilies collapsed in —61 with the Risorgimento. This revolution was driven by nationalist and republican ideals among the French general public, who believed that the people should rule themselves.
It ended the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe , and led to the creation of the French Second Republic. This government was headed by Louis-Napoleon, who, after only four years, returned France to a monarchy with the establishment of the Second French Empire in Led by well educated students and intellectuals, [14] they demanded German national unity , freedom of the press , and freedom of assembly.
The uprisings were not well coordinated but had in common a rejection of traditional, autocratic political structures in the thirty-nine independent states of the German Confederation.
The middle class and working class components of the Revolution split, and in the end the conservative aristocracy defeated it, forcing many liberals into exile. Denmark had been governed by a system of absolute monarchy since the seventeenth century. King Christian VIII , a moderate reformer but still an absolutist, died in January during a period of rising opposition from farmers and liberals.
The demands for constitutional monarchy, led by the National Liberals , ended with a popular march to Christiansborg on March The national-liberal movement wanted to abolish absolutism but retain a strongly centralized state. The king accepted a new constitution agreeing to share power with a bicameral parliament called the Rigsdag. Although army officers were dissatisfied, they accepted the new arrangement which, in contrast to the rest of Europe, was not overturned by reactionaries.
Schleswig , a region containing both Danes and Germans, was a part of the Danish monarchy but remained a duchy separate from the Kingdom of Denmark. The German population in Schleswig and Holstein revolted, inspired by the Protestant clergy.
The German states sent in an army but Danish victories in led to the Treaty of Berlin and the London Protocols They reaffirmed the sovereignty of the King of Denmark, while prohibiting union with Denmark.
The violation of the latter provision led to renewed warfare in and the Prussian victory in Proclamation of Serbian Vojvodina in Sremski Karlovci. From March through July , the Habsburg Austrian Empire was threatened by revolutionary movements, which often had a nationalist character.
The nationalist picture was further complicated by the simultaneous events in the German states, which moved toward greater German national unity. Hungarian hussars in battle during the Hungarian Revolution. The Hungarian revolution of started on the 15 March , when Hungarian patriots organized mass demonstrations in Pest and Buda today Budapest which forced the Imperial governor to accept their twelve points of demands.
This resulted in Klemens von Metternich , the Austrian prince and foreign minister, resigning. In turn, Emperor Ferdinand promised Hungary a constitution, an elected parliament, and the end of censorship. The new government, led by Lajos Kossuth , was initially successful against the Habsburg forces, but eventually, after one and a half years of fighting, the revolution was crushed when Russian Tsar Nicholas I marched into Hungary with over , troops.
Hungary was thus placed under brutal martial law, with the Austrian government restored. Switzerland, already an alliance of republics, also saw major internal struggle.
The creation of the Sonderbund led to a short Swiss civil war in November In , a new constitution ended the almost-complete independence of the cantons and transformed Switzerland into a federal state.
The center of the Ukrainian national movement was in Eastern Galicia. On April 19, , a group of representatives lead by the Greek Catholic clergy launched a petition to the Austrian Emperor. It expressed wishes that in those regions of Galicia where Ruthenian Ukrainian population represented majority the Ukrainian language should be taught at schools and used to announce official decrees for the peasantry; local officials were expected to understand it and Ruthenian clergy was to be equalized in their rights with the clergy of all other denominations.
The Council was headed by the Greek-Catholic Bishop Gregory Yakhimovich and consisted of 30 permanent members. People in Bucharest during the events, carrying the Romanian tricolor. A Romanian liberal and Romantic nationalist uprising began in June in the principality of Wallachia. Closely connected with the unsuccessful revolt in Moldavia , it sought to overturn the administration imposed by Imperial Russian authorities under the Regulamentul Organic regime, and, through many of its leaders, demanded the abolition of boyar privilege.
Led by a group of young intellectuals and officers in the Wallachian military forces, the movement succeeded in toppling the ruling Prince Gheorghe Bibescu , whom it replaced with a Provisional Government and a Regency , and in passing a series of major liberal reforms, first announced in the Proclamation of Islaz. Thus, any crisis in the economy would also be caused by a crisis in the finance and credit sectors. As the 19 th century Le Journale des Economistes ed.
In the s, the major investment was primarily in the railways and industry. The landlords chiefly invested in both these emerging sectors; and thus decreased the gross investment in agriculture; leading to an overall decline in the output of land. A huge chunk of land was freed from cultivation mainly by landlords and put into the industrial sector. This further lowered the land under cultivation, lowering the total output from land.
Also, guarantee on credit was virtually absent as land comprised of the major asset against loans; which was in itself in scarcity, as discussed above. Personal loans and borrowings further increased the pressure on the credit system. Thus, the whole mechanism of credit crashed under this enormous weight.
Also, this led to a depression in trade and commerce, leading to major discontent amongst the middle classes or the bourgeoisie. The clear demand of this class was thus for more and more policies of Liberalism, as Peter Jones notes. However, as Droz argues, the economic crisis was ebbing out by the beginning of Yet the Revolution happened just after that. Thus, economic factors were not the sole cause of the Revolutions in A lot of developments in the political realms and the development of newer political theories and ideologies also had an important presence in the years before the revolutions of broke out.
Historian Vivier argues that the economic reasons are not enough to explain the outbreak of the revolutions in He says that a mix of various crises—political and ideological and social— effected them. The political motivations of the revolutionaries were evident from their demands and their actions in the early phase of the revolution.
It must not be forgotten that the forces of Conservatism and Reaction consolidated the period after Monarchs ruled all countries in Europe and became the targets for the revolutionaries. The first instance of the Revolution was on 12 January in Naples, Italy. The revolution here was directed against the foreign rule of Ferdinand II of the Spanish-Bourbon dynasty. The main targets were the foreign monarchy and the territorial settlement at the Congress of Vienna Therefore, the Metternich System was at the head of malcontents.
Similarly, in France, on 12 February , barricades were set up in the streets of Paris against Louis Phillip of the Orleans dynasty and his Reactionary prime minister Guizot.
The Revolution was up against inadequate political rights of the petite bourgeoisie and the working class and the maladministration of the monarch. There were two dominant trends in the political patterns of the revolution.
One was seen in Austria, Italy and Germany, where the revolution was directed against foreign rule and the settlements of the Congress of Vienna. Meanwhile, France, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal saw revolutions against inadequate rights and inconsistent policies of the parliament. Thus the revolutions followed two major patterns and sets of grievances. As Peter Stearnes argues, some major political strands or ideologies emerged and influenced the Revolutions.
The first was that of the Liberals. They believed in the ideas of Liberalism as forwarded by many intellectuals in the 18 th century.
They had a more or less moderate goal, i. However, they were weary of leading the revolution as they viewed the Revolution in France as a major catastrophe. Besides, they wanted a limited representation and a small base of suffrage, based on ownership of property and education. The other faction was that of the Radicals. They were an offshoot of the liberals but looked at a more radical goal, that of total Republicanism. Peter Stearns elaborates that.
Most of them were democrats, and all wanted a wide suffrage… They were not socialists but they were concerned about economic injustice and talked of the need for social reform to protect the working classes.
Thus, it is clear that the Radical method of achieving the goal was only and only revolution. Thus, many a Radical leaders also played a key role during the Revolutions of Another group of moderates emerged in the Nationalists. They believed in the supremacy of the nation over the individual; however, they agreed with the Liberals that civil liberties must be ensured by the state upon its citizens.
However, as Mazzini, a thorough Nationalist, theorized, the liberation of the nation is a precursor to the endowment of liberty to the people. A minor group within Italy emerged, called the Neo-Guelfs. They supported the Papal authority and sought to restore the Roman Catholic Church in all its glory by establishing a Papal Federation. The Neo-Guelfs held some stand in the middle quarters of the century; but lost out in the ultimate political framework almost a decade after the Italian Unification under Cavour and Garibaldi.
Although there were many differences amongst these ideological groups, it is clear that they had some common features. They were all looking to gain self-determination, as opposed to the Metternich System and monarchical governments.
All of them upheld liberal civil rights for a wider section of the population; and thus worked to establish a parliament and a constituent assembly after the easy surrender of the monarchical forces in early Thus it can safely be argued that they were all nationalistic in nature.
It must here be noted that C. Bayly identifies this whole period as the period of nation formation in terms of modernity and global history; thus, the importance of the rise of nationalist ideas cannot be ignored here.
Another nascent force of politics was to be seen in Socialism and Communism. By , the socialists had cemented their place in the political sphere of Europe and were an undeniable presence. The influence of the socialist ideas was seen widely growing, especially amongst the students and teachers at the big universities in Europe. However, it is clear from the examples above that political aspirations and ideological strands were not a prime mover when it comes to the revolutions as there is little space for their being as widely affective as something like food crisis or rising poverty.
Thus, scholars have turned to other social factors to look for the major causes of the outbreak of the revolutions. Although it is true that the socio-economic antagonisms in all the countries of Europe were not uniform, it is also true that the everyday existence of the social classes was not very different from the days of the ancient regime. As may be evident, certain classes like the bourgeoisie, the working class, the petty bourgeoisie, the mercantile and professional bourgeoisies, the peasantry, landlords, aristocrats and monarchs were present in all countries of Europe at this point in time.
This has led many scholars to argue that it was in the social antagonisms that the major causes for the outbreak of the Revolutions lie. Widespread malnourishment, low wages, disease, lack of civil rights, access to healthcare and poor living conditions characterized the life of a worker. Peter Jones goes on to explain that the revolutionary consciousness emerged from the rising working class consciousness as an effect of the Industrial Revolution.
The industrial revolution, he says, was not important in ; it was in its nascent stages. The regions of industrialization were mostly in the peripheries of the towns; but it was the towns that proved to be a center for the revolutions, cutting off the workers from the barricades. Besides, the condition of workers was so miserable that they had little mobilization amongst them for a revolutionary cause, per se.
He points out that the key group of protestors in the Revolution was that of the artisans, not the workers. The artisans were aggrieved by the breakdown of the guild workshops and high competition from the factory produced goods. The greatest fear of the artisans was that of proletarianisation. Thus, they attacked both the capitalists and nobility as well as the proletariat 11 during the confrontations at the barricade, especially in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Milan.
Stearns also looks into the participation of the peasantry in the Revolutions and he argues that it was very little. There were many causes for discontent amongst the peasantry, unemployment 12 being one of them.
However, whence the revolution came, the landlords were divided into either revolutionary or feudal; the majority being that of the latter. And due to fears and insecurities of the city life and urban occupations, the peasantry flocked to their landlords.
Table of Contents. Add a header to begin generating the table of contents. Features of the Revolutions of The upsurge of uprisings across Europe Outcomes of the revolutions. Key Facts And Information. In and early , Europe witnessed its most widespread revolutionary wave, now often referred to as the Springtime of Nations or the Year of Revolution. The increasingly radical protests affected more than fifty countries with France, the states of the German Confederation, Italy, and the Austrian Empire having the most important revolutions.
Most of the Revolutions of generally failed and led to the conservatives regaining power. Nevertheless, they effectively catalysed significant reforms such as the abolition of feudalism in Austria and Germany, the end of absolute monarchy in Denmark, and the introduction of representative democracy in the Netherlands.
Features of the Revolutions of At the outbreak of the Revolutions of , the streets of several European cities including Paris, Palermo, Budapest and Berlin were filled with barricades out of paving stones, carriages, and furniture.
With numerous changes taking place in Europe over half a century after the French Revolution of , these uprisings were caused by a wide variety of factors. What were the shared aims of the revolutions?
Eradicate the old monarchical structures Create independent nation-states Main stimulus of the revolutions Dissatisfaction with the poor governance and the negligence of the European monarchs towards the people Emergence of new ideas such as nationalism, liberalism, and socialism in Europe Shared desire for reform of the middle and working classes Other factors that sparked the revolutions Severe economic crisis and food shortages - The crop failures and Irish potato famine led to food supply problems and high food prices.
Poor conditions of the working class - Workers in both urban and rural areas were undernourished, disease-ridden, and struggling. Widespread unemployment - Elimination of certain trades due to mechanisation led to the decrease in the overall number of jobs. Who were the revolutionaries? The liberals - They generally wanted a republican government, economic freedom, and civil liberties.
The nationalists - They wanted a national unity based on common language, culture, religion and shared history. The radical democrats - They wanted universal male suffrage which was not popular amongst liberals. The radical socialists - They wanted ownership of the means of production and redistribution of wealth. The upsurge of uprisings across Europe Following a severe famine across Europe in , economic depression was experienced in the continent. These difficult economic conditions coupled with the rise of new ideas and values ignited revolts in various European countries, primarily in urban areas.
In France, the suppression of the campagne des banquets by Paris officials on 22 February resulted in the February Revolution. The banquet campaign was mainly planned to actively push for the extension of suffrage, however, it was cancelled due to the government's fear of an organised protest by the middle and working classes.
This repression angered the skilled workers, factory labourers, and middle class liberals who poured into the streets and were later joined by the National Guard and the army garrison stationed in Paris. King Louis Philippe's attempt to bring swift reform was rejected by the general public. The constitutional monarchy ended and the Second Republic that hoped to address the economic and social concerns of the working class was created on 24 February.
However, the power struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class weakened the revolutionary aims. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, was elected president of the new government.
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