1848 (18 page)

 

It was not, however, only the weakness of the old order that ensured the success of the uprisings. The revolutionaries themselves also showed a unity of purpose, across social and political divisions, which enabled them to prevail. In Milan Cattaneo, who normally saw the middle class as the mainspring of the national movement (unfairly, in fact, since much of the political and cultural leadership of the liberal opposition prior to 1848 came from the nobility), emphasised the social unity of the Five Glorious Days. He described the moment when incredulous peasants burst into Milan to meet ‘such elegant women who had built barricades and loaded weapons with their own hands'.
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As a republican, it was in Cattaneo's interests to stress the social unity of the Milanese revolution, with the cause of liberty transcending divisions of wealth, poverty and gender. However, his view is corroborated by that from the other side of the barricades. Hübner, who was marched as a prisoner through the streets of Milan, noted armed peasants guarding barricades, young women helping to build fortifications, a large number of priests wearing ‘broad-rimmed hats decorated with tricolour cockades and carrying swords or sabres in their hands', noblemen and bourgeois ‘who seemed a little awkward with their rifles, which they often shifted from one shoulder to the other, a little astonished at the part which they had been made to play'.
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The Church played an important role in Italy, in particular. As a figurehead, Pius IX managed to transcend social and political divisions and offer a striking unifying focus to the Italian insurrections, but the local clergy played an important, galvanising role as well. As violence erupted in Milan on 18 March, the archbishop ‘excited an indescribable enthusiasm' when he appeared wearing the Italian tricolour and, Carlo Osio claimed, those who accompanied the clergyman were among the first to give the orders to raise the barricades.
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In Hungary nobles provided almost all the leadership of the revolution, backed by the urban population of Budapest and by the threat of a peasant insurrection.

The peasantry gave the revolutions - temporarily, as it turned out - mass support and ensured that the old order could not depend on the countryside: in France, western Germany, Lombardy, Venetia and the south of Italy, rural unrest lent the revolution a particularly wide social basis and contributed to the evaporation of confidence among the conservatives. In the urban insurrections, the workers and artisans provided the strong backbone to the risings. A sympathetic, though anonymous, account of the March revolution in Berlin claims of the nine-hundred-strong Borsig workers that ‘it was above all due to their heroic courage and endurance behind the barricades on the night of 18 March that a battle was fought which allowed the cause of the people to appear with an importance which could no longer be denied'.
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Women engaged in the initial, peaceful demonstrations everywhere; and, when the fighting erupted, they helped to build and repair barricades, loaded weapons, kept the insurgents fed, tended the wounded or gave encouragement by cheering on the revolutionaries waving flags and shouting slogans, often at the very scene of the battle.

The defection to the revolution of the usually quiescent property-owners - middle class or otherwise - was often decisive. On 24 February Tocqueville came across a battalion of National Guards from his own, well-heeled neighbourhood who were abandoning the July Monarchy: ‘the fault lies with the government, so the danger is theirs; we do not want to get ourselves killed for people who have managed affairs so badly'.
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The July Monarchy fell because its bedrock - property-owners, entrepreneurs and small business-owners whose conservatism was tinged with a mild liberalism - had, at a moment of acute crisis, deserted it. These same people would then spend the next two years trying to reassert stability and order, which they saw as their safeguard, against the more radical elements that had been unleashed in February 1848. Yet, no matter how half-hearted the defection of the bulk of the middle class may have been, in many places it proved to be essential to the success of the revolutions because they provided the rank and file of the various citizens' militias, which either pre-existed (as in Paris, Prague and Vienna) or were created (as in Budapest, Venice and Berlin). Since these citizens' militias recruited primarily from among property-owners and burghers who had stakes in law and order, their lack of confidence in the old regime severely weakened its ability to keep control of the streets except by the terrible and (as it turned out) counter-productive use of regular troops. Liberal nobles, clerics, bourgeois, artisans, workers, students, peasants, women, men and even children all played, in different ways from one insurrection to the next, parts in supporting the revolutions.

This social unity, however, could not last. The revolutions of 1848 were to some extent built on what Georges Duveau has called a ‘lyrical illusion'.
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This ‘illusion' rested, first, on the idea that the people had indeed triumphed over the old regime and even defeated its armed forces. There was some truth in this, but in most European states affected by the revolutions the structures of the old order were battered and severely damaged but not entirely levelled - except in France, the only country where the revolution destroyed the monarchy. Everywhere else, the monarchy remained - and with it ministers and advisers who were determined to resist further change or to undo the revolution altogether. They also kept control, vitally, of the armed forces, a factor that would prove to be decisive before the year was out. Second, the ‘lyrical illusion' was also founded on the idea that the revolutions marked a new beginning, one in which the unity of all classes and people could nurture the delicate growth of a new freedom and a new, liberal order. That this hope was problematic, to say the least, became obvious almost immediately, for the nascent liberal regimes were beset, to varying degrees and in different ways, by two fundamental problems that would ultimately tear them apart. The first was the ‘national question' - the problem of political unity and the place of ethnic minorities within the new liberal order. The second was the ‘social question' - how to deal with the desperate poverty that afflicted so much of the population, both as part of the wider structural changes in the economy and in the acute distress of the 1840s. These two questions provide the themes for the next two chapters.

‘
A
new era begins,' mused Fanny Lewald in her diary on 28 February. ‘What will it bring the French? New battles? Murder and the guillotine? A short epoch of peace and then new tyranny? I cannot believe that . . . War between civilized peoples is the last vestige of brute animal behaviour and must vanish from the earth. I believe in mankind, in the future, in the survival of the Republic.'
¹
German liberals would dub 1848 the
Völkerfrühling
- the ‘Springtime of Peoples' - a name pregnant with the liberating hopes of the early weeks of the revolutions, when national aspirations suddenly seemed possible. On 5 March the Heidelberg Assembly proclaimed that Germany must not intervene in the affairs of other states and that ‘Germany must not be caused to diminish or rob from other nations the freedom and independence which they themselves ask as their right.'
²

Yet there was a dark side to the liberal nationalism of 1848. The revolutions provided European liberals with the unprecedented opportunity to realise ideals of national independence or unity, but their fulfilment often conflicted with those of neighbouring peoples, or there were national minorities within the presumptive boundaries of the emerging liberal states. Most patriots of 1848, in claiming national rights and freedoms for their own people, were in the process willing to trample on the liberties of others. All too soon the hard iron of national self-interest invariably won out over the more fragrant universal principles of 1848. Consequently, in many places where the ‘national question' arose, Europeans would experience the brutalities of ethnic conflict, setting the revolutionaries against each other and providing the conservatives with the opening into which they could pour the hot lead of counter-revolution.

Initially, it was to France that European eyes anxiously looked. While European liberals were inspired by the February revolution, they were also uncomfortably aware that the First French Republic had been aggressively expansionist. The intensity of European anxieties was such that Piedmont initially deployed its forces not against Austria, but along the French frontier. The Belgian and Dutch governments put aside their mutual dislike to discuss measures for common defence against France. Prussian troops in the Rhineland were put on high alert, and other German states, great and small, followed suit.
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The frontier state of Baden was tormented by panic - the ‘French alarm' - in which peasants took the distant beating of German military drums to be the sound of a marauding French army.
⁴

French radicals certainly expected the provisional government to pursue an energetic foreign policy, to erase the humiliation of the defeat of 1815. For the republican left, this meant reconnecting with the revolutionary heritage of the 1790s, sending patriotic armies bursting forth, liberating Italy and Poland and spreading the gospel of democracy.
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The new socialist prefect of police, Marc Caussidière, wrote that the February revolution was like ‘a sacred promise of emancipation for all the peoples of Europe', which explained why the Hôtel de Ville was being inundated with addresses from radicals from ‘all parts of the globe'.
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These foreign political refugees kept French revolutionary proselytism on the boil. In better times, cities like Paris and Lyon were hives of economic activity, attracting foreign workers (there were some 184,000 in the capital in 1848),
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many of whom now languished in unemployment. Their poverty made them fertile ground for the revolutionary seeds sown by their more politically minded compatriots. The largest of these expatriate groups were the Germans, of whom there were 55,000; the Poles, although numbering just 4,000, were probably the most energetic. In Paris the German expatriate poet Georg Herwegh organised a paramilitary force of some eight hundred German exiles and workers to spearhead a republican revolution in Germany. ‘In three magnificent days', he told his French hosts, ‘you have broken with the past and raised the banner for all the people of the earth.'
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Over the course of the spring, making patriotic appeals for an aggressive foreign policy was a way for French radicals to recapture the political initiative that they had lost to the moderates on the creation of the provisional government. On 26 March, up to seven hundred Polish democrats led a march of Parisian radical club members - some twenty thousand strong - on the Hôtel de Ville, ignoring Lamartine's urgent pleas the night before to cancel the demonstration. In the event, the protest, which demanded arms and weapons from the French government, finished peacefully after the foreign minister assured the Poles of France's sympathies, but offered nothing beyond financial aid to help them return home.
⁹

Lamartine was in an invidious situation, since it was his task to reassure France's neighbours of the new Republic's pacific intentions. The tricky balancing act that he had to perform was illustrated on 25 February, when he persuaded radical demonstrators to abandon their demand that the red flag be adopted as the banner of the Second Republic, but in order to do so he had to appeal to their nationalist impulses: ‘The red flag . . . has been dragged in blood around the Champ de Mars
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. . . The tricolour flag has gone around the world carrying freedom in its folds.'
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Yet the British ambassador, Lord Constantine Normanby, saw Lamartine's symbolic victory in a positive light and felt able to report to London that most French people appeared to support the new government and ‘trust to the efforts to moderate the popular feeling and reestablish order and confidence'.
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Lamartine's colleagues also helped the next day when, seeking to break all associations with the Terror of the First Republic, they abolished the death penalty for political offences. More importantly, Lamartine's ‘Manifesto to Europe' (a declaration issued on 4 March) deftly balanced his sincere desire to ensure peace with the urgent domestic political need to absorb the radical pressure. The soothing words claimed that monarchies and republics could live together. While he denied the justice of the peace treaties of 1815, he declared that France accepted them as ‘facts to be modified by general agreement'. Nevertheless, there was some iron beneath the velvet glove. In an attempt to satisfy nationalist pressure, Lamartine declared that, if attacked, France would be a formidable enemy: ‘her martial genius, her impatience of action, and her force . . . would render her invincible at home, dreaded, perhaps, beyond her frontiers'. France would also not hesitate to protect her neighbours - specifically Switzerland and Italy - in their own attempts to democratise or to unite, if they were attacked by conservative powers. The Republic, however, hoped to lead by example, not by force: