German revolutions of 1848–1849

gigatos | June 11, 2022

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Summary

The German Revolution of 1848

The related events were part of the liberal, bourgeois-democratic and national unity and independence uprisings against the restoration efforts of the ruling houses allied in the Holy Alliance in large parts of Central Europe (cf. European Revolutions 1848

In the German principalities, the revolution began in the Grand Duchy of Baden and spread to the other states of the federation within a few weeks. From Berlin to Vienna, it forced the appointment of liberal governments in the individual states (the so-called March Cabinets) and the holding of elections to a constituent National Assembly, which met on May 18, 1848, in the Paulskirche in the then free city of Frankfurt am Main. The National Assembly established a central government and saw itself as the parliament of a revolutionary, nascent German Empire.

After the successes achieved relatively quickly with the March riots, such as the abolition of press censorship and the liberation of the peasants, the revolutionary movement increasingly went on the defensive from mid-1848 onward. Even the peaks of the uprisings, which flared up anew especially in the fall of 1848 and during the imperial constitutional campaign in May 1849, and which regionally (for example in Saxony, the Bavarian Palatinate, the Prussian Rhine Province and especially in the Grand Duchy of Baden) assumed civil war-like proportions, could no longer stop the ultimate failure of the revolution with regard to its essential core demand. By July 1849, the first attempt to create a democratically constituted, unified German nation-state had been put down with military force by predominantly Prussian and Austrian troops.

As late as the spring of 1849, Prussian King Frederick William IV sought to establish a nation-state himself (Erfurt Union). Austria, on the other hand, sought to re-establish the Bundestag and was successful in doing so in the fall of 1850.

The persecution of supporters of a liberal, but above all of a republican-democratic or socialist outlook, which accompanied the suppression of the revolution and the subsequent reactionary era, prompted in the years after 1848

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Stakeholders

The revolutionaries in the German states sought political freedoms in the sense of democratic reforms and the national unification of the principalities of the German Confederation. Above all, they espoused the ideas of liberalism. However, in the further course of the revolution and afterwards, liberalism increasingly split into different directions, which set different priorities in essential areas and partly opposed each other (e.g. in their attitude to the status of the nation, the social question, economic development, civil rights, as well as the revolution itself).

Circles with radical democratic, social revolutionary, early socialist and even anarchist goals were also heavily involved in local revolutionary activities and uprisings. Their activities were mainly extraparliamentary; they were underrepresented in parliaments or not represented at all. They were therefore unable to assert themselves in the decisive bodies of the revolution.

Outside the German Confederation, countries and regions affiliated with the Habsburg Empire of Austria sought independence from its domination. These included Hungary, Galicia and the upper Italian principalities. In addition, revolutionaries in the province of Posen, which was predominantly inhabited by Poles, worked to break away from Prussian rule.

Of the five powerful European states, the European pentarchy, only England and Russia remained unaffected by the events, in the case of Russia apart from the involvement of Russian military personnel in the suppression of the Hungarian independence uprising against the Austrian Empire in 1849. In addition, Spain, the Netherlands and the young and in any case comparatively liberal Belgium remained largely uninvolved in the revolutionary events.

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Significance for Central Europe

In most states, the revolution was put down in 1849 at the latest. In France, the republic lasted until 1851

One lasting result of the bourgeois-democratic efforts in Central Europe since the 1830s was the transformation of Switzerland from a loose and politically very heterogeneous confederation into a liberal federal state. The new federal constitution of 1848, made possible by the Sonderbund War of 1847, determines its basic state and social structures to this day.

Although the March Revolution, with its fundamental aims of change, failed to achieve its nation-state objectives and led to a period of political reaction, in historical terms it was the wealthy bourgeoisie that asserted itself and finally became a politically and economically influential power factor alongside the aristocracy. From 1848 at the latest, the bourgeoisie, in the narrower sense the upper middle classes, became the economically dominant class in the societies of Central Europe. This rise had begun with the political and social struggles since the French Revolution of 1789 (see also bourgeois revolution).

The revolutions of 1848

In addition to previous developments rooted in the Enlightenment, the March Revolution provided some ideal impulses for the development of the European Union (EU) in the late 20th century. The Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, for example, advocated a Europe of the peoples even before the revolutionary turmoil around 1848. He opposed this utopia to the Europe of authoritarian principalities and thus anticipated a basic political and social idea of the EU. Mazzini”s corresponding ideas had already been taken up in 1834 by some idealistic republican-minded Germans, among them Carl Theodor Barth, in the secret society Junges Deutschland. Together with Mazzini”s Young Italy and the Young Poland, founded by Polish emigrants, they formed the supranational secret society Young Europe in Bern, Switzerland, also in 1834. Their ideals often characterized the mood of optimism at the beginning of the March Revolution, when in many places the revolutionary base spoke of an “international springtime of peoples.

Economic and social background

An immediate harbinger of the March Revolutions in Central Europe at the time was the crisis year of 1847, which was preceded by a severe crop failure in 1846. This was followed by famines in almost all German states and regions and, as a result of the rise in food prices, various hunger revolts, such as the so-called “potato revolution” in Berlin in April 1847. As a result, many poorer sections of the population affected by pauperism (pre-industrial mass poverty), such as workers, impoverished craftsmen, agricultural laborers, etc., increasingly joined the demands of democratic and liberal-minded circles due to their social hardship. One consequence of the crisis was the decrease in purchasing power for industrial products, especially textile goods, which led to the decline of the still strongly artisanal textile trade. In the German lands, many families still worked in the textile industry in minimally paid homework for a few rich entrepreneurs and landowners. The decline not only of the textile industry, but of the crafts in general, was also caused by the advancing industrial revolution in Europe, which – starting from England – had been gradually changing the social, economic and industrial conditions on the entire continent since the middle of the 18th century through technical inventions. In addition, the population increased to such an extent that the increasingly productive agricultural economy in the countryside and the industry in the cities were no longer able to absorb the mass of labor that had been created. The result was mass unemployment. The surplus labor force formed an “industrial reserve army.” More and more people sought work in the rapidly growing cities in manufactories and the newly emerging factories, where many products could be manufactured more cheaply through more rational mass production.

A new stratum of the population, the proletariat (the dependent working class), grew rapidly. Working and living conditions in and around industrial factories were generally catastrophic in the 19th century. Most workers lived in the ghettos and slums of the cities at or often below the subsistence level, threatened by unemployment and without social security. Years before the March Revolution, there had been repeated smaller, regionally limited uprisings against industrial barons. For example, the Weavers” Revolt of June 1844 in Silesia, a hunger revolt by weavers from Langenbielau and Peterswaldau, was the first significant uprising of the German proletariat on a national scale as a result of the social hardship caused by industrialization. However, the uprising was put down by Prussian military after only a few days.

The wealthier middle classes also found their economic development increasingly restricted. Due to the customs policies of the principalities, the possibilities for free trade were severely limited. Calls for a liberalization of the economy and trade had also become louder and louder in the German states in the first decades of the 19th century. On March 22, 1833, the German Customs Union was founded, simplifying trade in the German states. As a result, there was also a certain economic upswing overall at the end of the 1830s. However, the social hardship of the poorer sections of the population hardly changed.

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Political background

One of the main goals of the March Revolution was to overcome the policy of restoration that had characterized the period since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. It prevented a federal reform with the expansion of institutions that had already been envisaged when the Confederation was founded.

One of the most important advocates of political restoration was the reactionary Austrian diplomat and state chancellor Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich. The policy of restoration, adopted by most European states at the Congress of Vienna on June 9, 1815-just before Napoleon Bonaparte”s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815)-was intended to restore, domestically and intergovernmentally, the political power relations of the ancien régime in Europe as they had prevailed before the French Revolution of 1789. This meant the supremacy of the nobility and the restoration of its privileges. Furthermore, the Napoleonic reorganization of Europe, which had also established civil rights with the Code civil, was to be reversed.

Domestically, in the course of the Restoration, demands for liberal reforms or national unification were suppressed, censorship measures were tightened, and freedom of the press was severely restricted. The works of the literary Young Germany, a group of young revolutionary-minded writers, were censored or banned. Other socially critical or nationalist poets were also affected by censorship, so that some of them had to go into exile – mainly to France or Switzerland. Well-known examples are Heinrich Heine, Georg Herwegh, Georg Büchner (who spread the slogan “Peace to the huts, war to the palaces!” from the time of the French Revolution with the pamphlet Der Hessische Landbote) or Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (the poet of the Deutschlandlied).

At this time, the student fraternities in particular were the bearers of the demand for national unification and democratic civil rights. As early as October 1817, they had vehemently advocated the demand for German unity at a major demonstration near Wartburg Castle, known as the Wartburg Festival, on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig and the 300th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. This included a public book burning, when a minority of the demonstrators burned state symbols and dummies of works by “un-German” writers labeled as reactionary (see the book burning at the Wartburg Festival in 1817).

Corresponding activities inspired by the Wartburg Festival drew the attention of the state authorities to the Burschenschaften, which were then subjected to increasing repression. These repressions took legal form in 1819 as the Karlsbad Resolutions, which were a reaction to the murder of the poet August von Kotzebue by the radical democratic and fanatically nationalistic fraternity member Karl Ludwig Sand. Despite bans and persecution, members of the Burschenschaften often remained active underground. In some cases, seemingly apolitical front organizations were established and expanded, such as the gymnastics movement of “Turnvater Jahn,” where liberal and national ideas culturally influenced by Romanticism continued to be cultivated, but which also bore anti-emancipatory and anti-Enlightenment traits. Thus, there was also a widespread, predominantly religiously motivated anti-Judaism in these groups. This was reflected, among other things, in the Hep-Hep riots of 1819, which originated in Würzburg and led to violent excesses in many places and were directed against Jewish emancipation in general and against the economic equality of Jews in particular.

The July Revolution of 1830 in France, in which the reactionary royal house of the Bourbons under Charles X had been overthrown and the bourgeois-liberal forces had installed the “Citizen King” Louis Philippe of Orleans, also gave new impetus to liberal forces in Germany and other regions of Europe. Thus, as early as 1830, there had been regionally limited uprisings in various German principalities, such as Brunswick, Electoral Hesse, the Kingdom of Saxony and Hanover, some of which had led to constitutions in the respective states.

In 1830, there had also been uprisings in the Italian states and in the Polish provinces of Austria, Prussia and Russia (Congress Poland) with the aim of achieving nation-state autonomy. In the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Belgian Revolution led to the secession of the southern provinces and the establishment of an independent Belgian state as a parliamentary monarchy.

On the whole, however, the Metternich system initially remained intact, even if cracks were appearing everywhere. Thus, even after the Carlsbad resolutions, despite the “persecution of demagogues,” there had been further spectacular gatherings similar to the Wartburg Festival, such as the Hambach Festival in 1832, at which the banned republican black-red-gold flags were demonstratively displayed.

The Frankfurt Wachensturm on April 3, 1833, was already a first attempt by about 50 students to trigger an all-German revolution. The action had been directed against the seat of the German Bundestag, which was regarded by the democrats as an instrument of restoration politics. After storming the two Frankfurt police stations, the insurgents wanted to capture the envoys of the princes in the Bundestag and thus set the signal for an all-German uprising. However, the action, which had already been betrayed in advance, failed at the outset after an exchange of fire in which there were several deaths and injuries.

A major triggering factor for the March Revolutions was the success of the February Revolution of 1848 in France, from where the revolutionary spark quickly spread to the neighboring German states. The events in France, which succeeded in deposing the bourgeois king Louis Philippe, who had in the meantime increasingly abandoned liberalism, and finally proclaimed the Second Republic, set revolutionary upheavals in motion whose turmoil kept the continent in suspense for a year and a half.

The most important centers of the revolution after France were Baden, Prussia, Austria, Upper Italy, Hungary, Bavaria and Saxony. But other states and principalities also saw uprisings and popular assemblies at which revolutionary demands were articulated. Starting with the Mannheim People”s Assembly on February 27, 1848, at which the “March Demands” were first formulated, the core demands of the revolution in Germany were: “1. popular armament with free election of officers, 2. unconditional freedom of the press, 3. jury courts on the model of England, 4. immediate establishment of a German parliament.”

In the Kingdom of Denmark, revolutionary events led to a new constitution in 1849, which introduced constitutional monarchy and a bicameral parliament with universal suffrage.

In some states of the German Confederation, for example in the kingdoms of Württemberg and Hanover, or in Hesse-Darmstadt, the princes quickly relented. There, liberal “March Ministries” were soon established, some of which met the revolutionaries” demands, for example by establishing jury courts, abolishing press censorship and liberating the peasants. Often, however, these remained mere promises. In these countries, the revolution took a reasonably peaceful course because of the early concessions.

Already from May

A chronological course of the revolution in its entirety is difficult to grasp, since the events cannot always be clearly related to one another, decisions were made at different levels and in different places, sometimes almost simultaneously, sometimes at different times, and then revised again.

Transition to the March Revolution as of January 1848

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Baden

As early as February 27, 1848, there had been a people”s assembly in Mannheim at which fundamental demands of the revolution were anticipated. The Baden revolutionaries, especially their strongly represented radical democratic wing, demanded the most far-reaching changes.

Led by the advocates Friedrich Hecker and Gustav Struve, they demanded, among other things, the creation of actual popular sovereignty, the abolition of aristocratic privileges, popular armament and a progressive income tax. In this way, they were already making social revolutionary and socialist demands.

Struve and Hecker, as representatives of the left wing in the Frankfurt Pre-Parliament, which was to prepare the election to a constituent National Assembly, had called for a federal German republic with not only political but also social changes. However, a corresponding program published by Struve was rejected by the majority of the pre-parliament.

Hecker, Struve and their followers then tried to implement their ideas on their own, starting from southwestern Germany, in the so-called “Hecker Uprising”. In Constance, they allegedly proclaimed the republic on April 12, 1848, together with Bonn university professor Gottfried Kinkel and others; however, none of the three Constance newspapers mention this in their reports on the speech in question. The Hecker train set out with about 1200 men in the direction of the Rhine plain, where it intended to unite with a train led by the left-wing revolutionary poet Georg Herwegh and his wife Emma, who had been assigned as a scout, the “German Democratic Legion” coming from France, and march to Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden, in order to enforce the republic throughout Baden from there. However, both groups were defeated and routed in a short time by regular military forces: Hecker”s Freischar on April 20, 1848, in a battle near Kandern in the Black Forest, Herwegh”s Freischar a week later near Dossenbach.

Hecker was able to escape into exile, which ultimately led him to the USA via Switzerland. The Heidelberg poet Karl Gottfried Nadler took his defeat as the occasion for his mocking ballad Guckkastenlied vom großen Hecker.

Another uprising by Struve in September 1848 in Lörrach, where he and his followers had proclaimed the republic on September 21, also failed. Struve was captured and sentenced to imprisonment along with several other revolutionaries at a treason trial in Freiburg until he was freed again during the May riots of 1849. The further revolutionary development of Baden thereafter was essentially limited initially to the disputes in the Frankfurt National Assembly.

In May 1849, after the failure of the National Assembly in Frankfurt, there were further uprisings in Baden as well as other German states, the so-called May Uprisings as part of the Reich Constitution Campaign. The democrats wanted to force the recognition of their respective governments in an imperial constitution.

In the federal fortress of Rastatt, the Baden garrison mutinied on May 11. A few days later, Grand Duke Leopold of Baden fled to Koblenz. On June 1, 1849, a provisional government under the liberal politician Lorenz Brentano took power. Fighting ensued against federal troops and the Prussian army led by the “Carthaginian Prince” Wilhelm of Prussia, later German Emperor Wilhelm I. The Baden revolutionary army could not withstand the pressure of the superior strength of the Prussian troops.

The Baden revolutionaries were under the leadership of the Polish revolutionary general Ludwik Mieroslawski in June 1849. Mieroslawski was a tactically skilled and experienced soldier of the revolution. He had also already led the 1848 uprising of Posen Poles against Prussian domination and other preceding Polish uprisings in the course of the March Revolution (see subarticle Posen, Poland). However, Mieroslawski resigned as commander of the Baden revolutionary troops as early as July 1, 1849; he was resigned to the hesitant attitude of Brentano”s government, which relied on negotiations and delayed a general arming of the people demanded by the radicals. Furthermore, the morale of the troops had declined, so that Mieroslawski ultimately considered the military situation hopeless for a success of the Baden Republic.

Brentano”s indecisiveness had still led to his overthrow by Gustav Struve and his supporters at the end of June 1849. But this step could not stop the process of disintegration of the revolutionary forces. Without a unified military leadership, the remaining convinced freedmen had almost no chance. The downfall of the Baden revolution was basically sealed.

On the side of the Baden revolutionaries, the socialist Friedrich Engels was also actively involved in the struggles. Engels was in 1848

When the fortress of Rastatt fell on July 23, 1849, after a three-week siege, the Baden Revolution had finally failed. 23 revolutionaries were executed, while a few others, such as Gustav Struve, Carl Schurz and Lorenz Brentano, managed to escape into exile. In total, about 80,000 Badeners left their country after the revolution. That was about five percent of the population. Some of the prominent revolutionaries later continued their political commitment to democratic goals in the United States and made political careers there. Carl Schurz became U.S. Secretary of the Interior in 1877 and served in that office until 1881.

In contrast to the other revolts in the German Confederation, the Baden Revolution was characterized by the fact that the demand for a democratic republic was most consistently advocated. In contrast, the majority in the committees and revolutionary parliaments of the other principalities of the German Confederation favored a constitutional monarchy with hereditary emperorship.

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Prussia, Poznan, Poland

Under pressure from the revolutionary events in Berlin since March 6, 1848, Prussian King Frederick William IV initially relented and made concessions. He agreed to convene the Diet, introduce freedom of the press, remove customs barriers and reform the German Confederation. After the reading of the corresponding patent on March 18, two shots were fired from military rifles, driving away thousands of the citizens gathered in the Schlossplatz. This was followed by a barricade uprising in Berlin and street fighting by the revolutionaries against the regular Prussian troops, in which the insurgents prevailed for the time being. On March 19, the troops were withdrawn from Berlin by order of the king. Several hundred dead and over a thousand wounded on both sides were the result of this fighting.

The king felt compelled to pay his respects to the slain revolutionaries. He bowed before the laid-out “March Fallen” on March 19 before they were buried on March 22 in what is still called the “Cemetery of the March Fallen.” On March 21, he rode through Berlin wearing a armband in the colors of the revolution black-red-gold and promised in an appeal “To my people and to the German nation” that Prussia would rise in Germany. In the evening, the black-red-gold flag was placed on the scaffolding of the palace dome. In a proclamation the king announced:

The following day, Frederick William IV secretly wrote to his brother, Prince William:

On March 29, 1848, a liberal March Ministry was installed. The new government included two former, middle-class representatives of the First United Diet of 1847: the Rhenish bankers Ludolf Camphausen and David Hansemann. Of course, conservative aristocrats like Karl von Reyher were also part of the Camphausen-Hansemann cabinet. They blocked reform projects. The bureaucracy and the army remained virtually unchanged in terms of personnel and structure. Until the end of April 1848, the Prussian March Ministry enjoyed great confidence among the population. However, a revolutionary transformation of the state was never in the interest of Camphausen and Hansemann. In alliance with conservative forces and the monarchy, they intended only a “limited reformation” of Prussia. On June 20, 1848, the March Ministry was abolished again.

When events had calmed down somewhat at the end of May 1848, the king made a reactionary U-turn. With the Berlin Zeughaussturm, there was another revolutionary upsurge on June 14. The people armed themselves from the arsenal. On November 2, 1848, General Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg was appointed prime minister of Prussia. A week later, the royal troops returned to Berlin. The following counterrevolution in Prussia also involved the conservative MP Otto von Bismarck, who later became Prussian Prime Minister and eventually Chancellor of the German Empire, founded in 1871. The negotiations of the Prussian National Assembly, which had been taking place since May 22, on a constitution that had been repeatedly promised by Frederick William IV and his predecessor since 1815 but never realized, were ultimately unsuccessful. The draft constitution presented in July 1848, the “Charte Waldeck,” which provided for some liberal democratic reforms, was rejected by both the conservative deputies and the king.

On November 10 and 15, 1848, the king ordered the military to dissolve the deliberations of the Prussian National Assembly in Berlin. In Düsseldorf, revolutionary forces called for a tax boycott on November 14, 1848, which an armed vigilante group declared itself “permanent” to carry out and supervise. A short time later, it searched the local post office for tax money, which resulted in the government imposing a state of siege on the city and banning the vigilante group on November 22, 1848. On December 5, the king ordered the dissolution of the National Assembly, which he had moved to Brandenburg, and on the same day he himself imposed a constitution that fell far short of the demands of the March Revolution. The king”s position of power remained untouched. The king retained the right to veto all decisions of the Prussian parliament and the right to dissolve the parliament at any time. The Ministry of State – the Prussian government – was not accountable to Parliament, but only to the king. Nevertheless, the octroyed constitution initially still contained some liberal concessions taken over from the “Charte Waldeck,” although these were modified in the following months.

At the end of May 1849, the National Assembly was replaced by the Prussian House of Representatives, Second Chamber. A three-class electoral system was introduced to ensure the dominance of the propertied classes. This undemocratic electoral law remained in force in Prussia until 1918.

This reaction led to counter-movements, especially in Prussia”s western provinces. In formerly liberal or Catholic-dominated constituencies in the Rhineland and the province of Westphalia, democratic deputies were elected in many cases in the new elections to the Prussian House of Representatives. However, the king”s forces had gained the upper hand over the revolution by May 1849 at the latest with the failure of the Iserlohn Uprising in Westphalia and the Prüm Armory Storm in the Rhineland.

The Grand Duchy of Poznan, inhabited mainly by Poles, was a Prussian province in 1848. The former Polish-Lithuanian state had already become a political pawn of the major European powers by the end of the 18th century. After several violent partitions under Russia, Prussia and Austria, the state ceased to exist in 1795.

At the beginning of the 19th century, only from 1807 to 1815 there was a Polish vassal state under Napoleonic protection, the Duchy of Warsaw under Duke Frederick August I of Saxony, who was also King of Saxony. After the victory of the partitioning powers over Napoleon, the Duchy of Warsaw was divided between Russia and Prussia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, recognizing an obligation to safeguard the Polish nationality of its inhabitants.

In the following period, conspiracies were repeatedly formed in the Polish territories of Russia, Prussia and Austria with the aim of re-establishing an independent Poland. In the wake of the French July Revolution in 1830, this led to the November Uprising in the Russian part of the country, which, however, remained unsuccessful.

In 1846, a secretly planned Wielkopolska uprising in the Grand Duchy of Posen was uncovered and crushed in the bud. Its leader, the Polish revolutionary Ludwik Mierosławski, was captured, sentenced to death in December 1847 at the Polish Trial in Berlin, but then pardoned along with seven others to life imprisonment on March 11, 1848.

After the fighting in Berlin on March 18 and 19, 1848, 90 Polish revolutionaries, including Mierosławski and Karol Libelt, were released from prison in Moabit. In the initial stage of the March Revolution, which was perceived in Europe as a springtime of nations, a pro-Polish attitude still prevailed among the revolutionaries, which initially welcomed and favored the subsequent uprising in Poznan. Mierosławski, shortly after his liberation in April and May 1848, placed himself at the head of the uprising of Poznan Poles against Prussian rule, which was now perceived as German. The uprising was directed against the inclusion of predominantly Polish territories in the elections to the Frankfurt National Assembly and thus against the incorporation of part of Poland into a German nation-state. The further goal was a unification of the whole of Poland. In this respect, the revolution in Poznan also aimed at the liberation of the Kingdom of Poland, the so-called “Congress Poland”, which since 1831, after the loss of autonomy, had been a province under direct Russian rule.

In the course of the revolutionary process in Prussia, where conservative forces had increasingly begun to determine the situation again, the initial enthusiasm for Poland had also given way to a more nationalistic attitude in Prussia. Moreover, Prussian King Frederick William IV did not want to risk war with Russia because of the Poznan Uprising. On May 9, 1848, the uprising of the Poznan Poles was put down by a superior force of Prussian troops and Mierosławski was arrested again. At the intervention of revolutionary France, he was pardoned after a short time and expelled to France; until June 1849, when he was summoned by the Baden revolutionaries, who placed him at the head of their revolutionary army (see sub-article Baden).

After the revolution of 1848, the Poles in Prussia had realized that a violent uprising could not lead to success. As a method of maintaining national cohesion and resisting Prussian Germanization policies, organic work became increasingly important in the now constitutional Prussian state.

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Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Italy and First Italian War of Independence

In the Habsburg Empire and multiethnic state of Austria, the monarchy was threatened not only by violent uprisings in the heartland of Austria itself, but also by other revolutionary upheavals, for example in Bohemia, in Hungary and in northern Italy. The Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont provided military support to the revolutionaries. While the Hungarian, Bohemian and Italian uprisings sought, among other things, independence from Austrian domination, the revolution in the heartland of Austria, similar to the other states of the German Confederation, aimed at a liberal and democratic change in government policy and the end of the Restoration.

In Austria, too, it was 1847

Finally, on March 13, 1848, the revolution in Austria broke out in Vienna with the storming of the Ständehaus and attacks by social revolutionaries against stores and factories in the suburbs. The song Was kommt dort von der Höh, where the “Höh”” referred to the police and the barracks, became the song of the revolution. It is still sung today by various student fraternities to commemorate the participation of the Academic Legion. Before the storming of the Estates House, a speech written as early as March 3, 1848 by the Hungarian nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth expressed displeasure with the political system and the revolutionaries” demands for a constitutional transformation of the monarchy and constitutions for the Austrian lands. This speech was read out in the Estates Assembly by Adolf Fischhof. The attempt to deliver a petition to Emperor Ferdinand turned into a real demonstration, so that Archduke Albrecht gave the order to fire and the first deaths occurred.

On the evening of March 13, the state chancellor Prince Metternich, the hated 74-year-old symbolic figure of the Restoration, resigned and fled to England. This event was thematized, for example, by Hermann Rollett”s poem Metternich”s Linden Tree.

On March 14, Emperor Ferdinand I made his first concessions: He approved the establishment of a national guard and lifted censorship. The following day, he specified that he had “granted complete freedom of the press” and at the same time promised the enactment of a constitution (the so-called Constitutional Promise of March 15, 1848, see picture opposite).

On March 17, the first responsible government was formed; its Minister of the Interior, Franz von Pillersdorf, drafted the Pillersdorf Constitution, so named after him, which was promulgated on the emperor”s birthday on April 25, 1848. This constitution had an early constitutional character; above all, the bicameral system and the Reichstag electoral regulations published on May 9 caused outrage, which led to renewed unrest (“May Revolution”). As a result of the “Storm Petition” of May 15, the constitution was amended to the effect that the Reichstag was to consist of only one chamber and, moreover, was declared “constituent,” i.e., it had the task of drawing up a definitive constitution first; Pillersdorf”s constitution remained in force as a provisional one. On May 17, 1848, the overburdened emperor, weak in leadership, brought himself to safety from the intensifying unrest by fleeing to Innsbruck.

On June 16, Austrian troops under Alfred Prince zu Windischgrätz put down the Prague Whitsun Uprising.

On July 22, 1848, the constituent Austrian Diet with 383 delegates from Austria and the Slavic countries was opened by Archduke Johann. Among other things, the liberation of peasants from hereditary servitude was decided there at the beginning of September.

As a result of the events in Hungary since September 12, 1848, where under the leadership of Lajos Kossuth the Hungarian uprising turned into a warlike confrontation against the imperial troops, and as a result of the assassination of the Austrian Minister of War Theodor Count Baillet of Latour on October 6, the 3rd phase of the Austrian Revolution took place in Vienna, the so-called “October Revolution” in Vienna. In the course of it, Viennese citizens, students and workers managed to take control of the capital after the government troops had fled. But the revolutionaries could only hold on for a short time.

On October 23, Vienna was surrounded by counter-revolutionary troops from Croatia under Banus Joseph Jellačić and from Bohemian Prague under Field Marshal Alfred Prince zu Windischgrätz. Despite the fierce but futile resistance of the Viennese population, the city was retaken by the imperial troops after a week. About 2000 insurgents had fallen. Other leaders of the Vienna October Revolution were sentenced to death or long prison terms.

Among the victims executed by summary execution was the popular left-wing liberal republican member of the Frankfurt National Assembly Robert Blum, who was executed on November 9, 1848 despite his parliamentary immunity and thus became a martyr of the revolution. Literarily, this event was processed in the (popular) “Song of Robert Blum,” which, however, was sung mainly in the German states outside of Austria.

On December 2, 1848, there was a change of throne in Austria. The revolutionary events had highlighted Emperor Ferdinand I”s weakness in leadership. On the initiative of the Austrian prime minister, Field Marshal Lieutenant Felix Fürst zu Schwarzenberg, Ferdinand abdicated and left the throne to his 18-year-old nephew Franz, who took the imperial name Franz Joseph I. With this name, he consciously drew on his great-grandson. With this name he deliberately borrowed from his great-granduncle Joseph II (1741-1790), whose policies had stood for reform.

Thus the revolution in Austria was crushed. The constitution drawn up in March never came into force. However, the events in Hungary and Italy initially remained an obstacle for Franz Joseph I to assert his claim to power throughout the Habsburg Empire.

Culturally, the year 1848 was marked by the short-term lifting of censorship. As a result, a large number of works were published, journals sprang up and disappeared again, and the culture of writing underwent a fundamental change. Friedrich Gerhard”s “Die Presse frei!”, M. G. Saphir”s “Der tote Zensor”, the Censor”s Song or Ferdinand Sauter”s “Geheime Polizei” give an idea of the spirit of optimism. There was also sharp criticism of the existing system. Examples of this can be found in Johann Nestroy”s Freiheit in Krähwinkel, Der alte Mann mit der jungen Frau, Skizzen zu Höllenangst, Lady und Schneider or Die lieben Anverwandten (1848), in the political poems of Anastasius Grün and in the writings of Franz Grillparzer: “Dem Vaterlande” and “Gedanken zur Politik”.

In June 1848, the Prague Whitsun Uprising took place in Bohemia. The uprising was preceded by the Slav Congress, also held in Prague from June 2 to 12, which was attended by Poznan Poles and Slavic Austrians, as well as the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the only Russian. The participants of the congress demanded the transformation of the Danube monarchy into a federation of equal peoples. The demand for a Czech nation-state was expressly rejected; instead, only autonomy rights vis-à-vis the Austrian central government were sought. The Austrian Emperor Franz Ferdinand I strictly rejected these demands. As a result, Czech revolutionaries began the Whitsun Uprising against Austrian rule. The uprising was put down on June 16, 1848 by Austrian troops under Alfred Prince von Windischgrätz.

In Hungary, where on September 12, 1848, Lajos Kossuth, until then Minister of Finance and Chairman of the Defense Committee, replaced the liberal Prime Minister Lajos Batthyány, the Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I was denied recognition as King of Hungary as a result of the revolutionary events in Austria.

The imperial decree of the Octroyed March Constitution led to the Independence Uprising on March 7, 1849. To put down the uprising, an imperial army under Alfred Prince zu Windischgrätz marched into Hungary. However, on April 10, 1849, this army was forced to retreat before the revolutionary army, which had been reinforced with free men and Polish emigrants.

On April 14, 1849, the Hungarian Diet declared its independence from the House of Habsburg-Lorraine and proclaimed the Republic. Kossuth was then declared the Hungarian imperial administrator. As such, he had dictatorial powers.

However, the other European states did not recognize independence. Therefore, Russian troops provided assistance to the Austrian army and eventually together defeated the Hungarian revolution. On October 3, 1849, the last Hungarian units surrendered in the fortress of Komárom. In the days and weeks that followed, over a hundred leaders of the Hungarian uprising were executed in Arad. On October 6, 1849, the first anniversary of the Vienna October Uprising, followed the execution of former Prime Minister Batthyány in Pest.

Lajos Kossuth, the politically most important representative of the Hungarian freedom movement, was able to escape into exile in August 1849. Until his death in Turin in 1894, he advocated Hungary”s independence.

Italy in the 19th century, after the military termination of Napoleonic hegemony in Europe and also in the Italian principalities, consisted of various individual states. The upper Italian territories (Lombardy, Veneto, Tuscany and Modena) were under Austrian suzerainty. Since the 1820s at the latest, the Risorgimento (“Resurgence”) uprisings had been taking place, striving for a unified Italian state and thus also directed against Austrian rule in Upper Italy. Particularly active from the underground were the groups around the radical democratic national revolutionaries Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi in the 1830s, when they initiated several uprisings in various regions of Italy in the wake of the French July Revolution, but all of them failed.

These revolutionaries also played an important role in Italy during the March Revolution. Mazzini”s theses of a united free Italy in a Europe of peoples freed from the monarchical dynasties, which were disseminated in the banned newspaper Giovine Italia (“Young Italy”), not only had an influence on the revolutions in the Italian states, but were also significant for the radical democratic currents in many other regions of Europe.

The revolutionary events of 1848 found strong reverberations not only in northern Italy, but also in other provinces of Italy. As early as January 1848, the first uprisings of Italian freedom fighters against the domination of the Bourbons in the south and the Austrians in the north had occurred in Sicily, Milan, Brescia and Padua, and they intensified in Venice and Milan on March 17, 1848. In Milan, the revolutionaries declared the independence of Lombardy from Austria and its annexation to the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont. This situation eventually led to war between Sardinia-Piedmont and Austria (see First Italian War of Independence).

King Charles Albert of Sardinia-Piedmont, who had already enacted a representative constitution in his state on March 4, 1848, modeled on France and establishing a constitutional monarchy, wanted to take advantage of the revolutionary mood to unify Italy under his leadership. However, after Karl Albert”s initial successes, the king”s troops were defeated by the Austrians under Field Marshal Johann Wenzel Radetzky at the Battle of Custozza near Lake Garda on July 25, 1848. In the armistice of August 9, Lombardy had to be ceded to Austria. Only Venice remained unoccupied for the time being. Italian revolutionaries had declared the city independent on March 23, 1848 and proclaimed the Repubblica di San Marco under the leadership of Daniele Manin.

When insurgents finally putsched against Grand Duke Leopold II of Habsburg in Tuscany in February 1849, war broke out again. This was again decided in favor of the imperial Austrians under Radetzky in their victory on March 23, 1849, in the Battle of Novara against the 100,000-strong army of Sardinia. Thus the Italian unification movement was crushed for the time being and Austrian domination of northern Italy was essentially restored. King Charles Albert of Sardinia-Piedmont abdicated in favor of his son Victor Emmanuel II and went into exile in Portugal. The new king concluded a peace treaty with Austria in Milan on August 6.

As the last bastion of the upper Italian uprisings of 1848

In 1848, many non-Austrian regions of Italy also experienced

Pope Pius IX fled Rome in November 1848 in the face of worsening unrest and left the Papal States. He retreated to Gaeta on the Naples-Sicily coast. On February 9, 1849, Roman revolutionaries under Giuseppe Mazzini proclaimed a republic in the Papal States. On July 3, 1849, the Roman Revolution was crushed by French and Spanish troops, which led in part to protests in France itself, such as in Lyon. After the rebellion was crushed, power was taken over by an executive committee of cardinals. It was not until 1850 that the pope returned, reversed much of the reforms he had introduced in 1846, and established police-state conditions.

Bavaria

In Bavaria, there were increasingly democratic and liberal-motivated unrest and uprisings from March 4, 1848 onward. On March 6, Bavarian King Ludwig I gave in to some of the revolutionaries” demands and appointed a more liberal cabinet. However, the king was also in crisis elsewhere because of his unseemly relationship with the alleged Spanish dancer Lola Montez, to whom he partially subordinated the affairs of state. This affair also brought Ludwig criticism from the conservative Catholic camp. On March 11, 1848, Lola Montez was banished from Munich. New unrest ensued when it was rumored that the dancer had returned. As a result, the king finally abdicated in favor of his son, Maximilian II.

After the failure of the Paulskirche constitution, the Palatinate (Bavaria) experienced the Palatinate Uprising in May 1849 as part of the imperial constitutional campaign, as in some other regions of Germany. In the course of this uprising, the Rhine Palatinate was briefly seceded from Bavarian rule. However, the uprising was quickly put down by Prussian troops.

Also read, biographies – Ceawlin of Wessex

Grand Duchy of Hesse

In the Grand Duchy of Hesse, Grand Duke Ludwig II and his senior minister Karl du Thil quickly buckled under pressure from the street. Both were flushed out of office. The grand duke effectively abdicated in favor of his son, Hereditary Grand Duke Ludwig III, and died a few months later. Heinrich von Gagern became the new prime minister, but he soon vacated the post as he assumed his duties in the National Assembly. After only a few weeks, a de facto alliance was formed between liberals and the old forces, as peasants and democrats tried to encroach on property rights. The new electoral law of 1849 brought about two liberal-democratic state parliaments in quick succession, which blocked the state budget. In the fall of 1850, there was a “coup d”état from above” in that the government”s new strongman, Reinhard Carl Friedrich von Dalwigk, had the new Landtag elected according to a drastically changed mode, but one that greatly strengthened the propertied bourgeoisie, which therefore went along with it. Overall, the achievements of the revolution were only partially reversed.

Saxony

In the Kingdom of Saxony, the revolutionary events of March 1848 led to a change of ministers and some liberal reforms. After the Saxon king rejected the imperial constitution adopted a year later in Frankfurt on March 28, 1849, the Dresden May Uprising took place on May 3.

The central figure of this uprising of about 12,000 insurgents, among whom was the then court conductor Richard Wagner, was the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. The goal of the uprising was the enforcement of the imperial constitution (“Reichsverfassungskampagne”) and the achievement of democratic rights. However, the struggle of the radicals, organized in the March Associations, aimed less at the recognition of the constitution itself than at the enforcement and recognition of a Saxon republic in the Reich constitution.

The revolutionaries formed a provisional government after the king fled the city to the fortress of Königstein, the chambers were dissolved and the ministers resigned. Most of the Saxon troops were in Holstein. The Saxon government, which had fled, turned to Prussia for help. Prussian troops, together with the remaining regular military units of Saxony, put down the uprising on May 9, 1849, after bitter street fighting.

Also read, biographies – Wallis Simpson

Holstein, Schleswig; first German-Danish war

At the end of March 1848, there was an uprising against the Danish king in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. This was preceded by a debate about the future of the absolutist, multi-ethnic Danish state. Schleswig and Holstein were then ruled by the Danish king in personal union, Schleswig being a fiefdom of Denmark under state law, while Holstein was a fiefdom of the Roman-German Empire until 1806 or a member of the German Confederation after 1815. Linguistically and culturally, Holstein was (Low) German-speaking, while in Schleswig both German, Danish, and North Frisian were common, with Danish and Frisian in parts of Schleswig in a language shift in favor of German. Both German and Danish national liberals demanded basic rights and a free constitution, and thus stood in opposition to conservative forces that wanted to maintain the paternalistic, overall state. On the question of Schleswig”s national allegiance, however, the two liberal groups were at odds. After King Frederick VII had already presented a draft for a moderate-liberal constitution for the entire state in January 1848, the two national groups came to a head in March 1848. While Danish national liberals demanded the creation of a national state including Schleswig, German national liberals called for the merger of the two duchies within the German Confederation. Both groups were thus in opposition to a multi-ethnic comprehensive state. On March 22, the so-called March Government was formed in Copenhagen in the course of the March Revolution. Two days later, a German-oriented provisional government was established in Kiel. Both governments were characterized by the dualism of liberal and conservative forces, but were irreconcilably opposed to each other nationally. The provisional government was recognized by the Bundestag in Frankfurt am Main before the opening of the Frankfurt National Assembly, but a formal admission of Schleswig to the Confederation was avoided. Subsequently, the first German-Danish war began. Prussian troops advanced as far as Jutland on behalf of the Confederation under Field Marshal Friedrich von Wrangel.

This action led to diplomatic pressure on Prussia from Russia and England, which threatened to assist Denmark militarily. Prussia relented, and King William IV concluded an armistice with Denmark on August 26, 1848 (the Malmö Armistice). This provided for the withdrawal of federal troops from Schleswig and Holstein and the dissolution of the provisional government in Kiel.

This high-handed action by Prussia led to a crisis in the National Assembly, which was meeting in Frankfurt in the meantime. It became clear how limited the resources and influence of the National Assembly were. In the end, it was helplessly at the mercy of the powerful individual states of Prussia and Austria. Since the National Assembly had no means of power of its own to continue the war against Denmark without Prussia, it was forced to agree to the armistice agreement on September 16, 1848. The consequence of this consent was renewed unrest throughout Germany and especially in Frankfurt am Main (see September Unrest). As a result, Prussian and Austrian troops were ordered to Frankfurt, against which barricade fighting broke out on September 18. In these battles, the insurgents were no longer so much concerned with the Schleswig-Holstein question, but increasingly with defending the revolution itself.

After Friedrich Daniel Bassermann had demanded popular representation at the German Bundestag in the Baden Estates Assembly on February 12, 1848, this demand took on an extra-parliamentary life of its own; the Heidelberg Assembly on March 5 ended with the invitation to a pre-parliament as a constituent. After responding to public pressure by releasing freedom of the press on March 3, the Bundestag also attempted to regain sovereignty in the field of the constitution and parliamentary representation by admitting the need to revise the Articles of Confederation and appointing a committee of seventeen to draft a new constitutional basis for a unified Germany. The Pre-Parliament, in which the liberals held the upper hand against the radical left, decided in the first days of April to cooperate with the German Confederation and, in the spirit of legalizing the movement, to jointly approach the elections for a constituent National Assembly. The Committee of Fifty was set up to represent the revolutionary movement to the Bundestag, and the Bundestag called on the states of the German Confederation to hold elections to the National Assembly. The latter met for the first time on May 18, 1848, in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main and elected the moderate liberal Heinrich von Gagern as its president. The National Assembly established a provisional central power as the executive branch, which took over state power from the Bundestag. The central power was headed by the Austrian Archduke Johann as Reichsverweser (imperial administrator), and Prince Karl zu Leiningen acted as minister-president of the newly created “Reichsministerium.

The ideas of the factions ranged from the “radical democratic” minority position of the establishment of a parliamentary all-German democratic republic represented by the Ganzen, to a constitutional monarchy with hereditary emperorship represented by the Halben as a so-called Kleindeutsche Lösung (without Austria) or as a so-called Großdeutsche Lösung (with Austria), to the preservation of the status quo.

The paralyzing disunity of the deputies was compounded by the lack of an executive branch capable of acting to enforce parliamentary decisions, which often failed due to Austrian or Prussian go-it-alone efforts, among other things. This led to several crises, such as the Schleswig-Holstein issue concerning a war against Denmark (first Prussian-Danish war).

Despite all this, on March 28, 1849, the Paulskirche constitution was adopted by a majority of 42 votes, providing for a small-German solution under Prussian leadership. The King of Prussia was designated as emperor. When, on April 3, King Frederick William IV of Prussia rejected the imperial dignity offered to him by the imperial deputation (Frederick William described the imperial crown offered to him as “hoarfrost baked from dirt and lettuce”), the Frankfurt National Assembly had effectively failed. Of the medium-sized German states, 29 approved the constitution. Austria, Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony and Hanover rejected it. The Prussian and Austrian deputies left the National Assembly when they were illegally recalled by their governments.

In order to enforce the constitution in the individual states despite the strengthening of the counterrevolution, the so-called May uprisings took place in May 1849 in some revolutionary centers as part of the imperial constitutional campaign. These uprisings constituted a second, radicalized revolutionary thrust that assumed civil war-like proportions in some areas of the Confederation, such as Baden and Saxony. The Frankfurt National Assembly lost most of its members as a result of the recalls and further resignations, and moved to Stuttgart as a “rump parliament” without the Prussian and Austrian deputies on May 30, 1849. On June 18, 1849, this rump parliament was forcibly dissolved by Württemberg troops. With the suppression of the last revolutionary struggles on July 23 in Rastatt, the German Revolution of 1848 was over.

The suppression of the revolution and the victory of reaction had created a specifically German dualism between the ideas of nation (→ patriotism, nationalism) and democracy, which shaped Germany”s history in the long term and which can still be felt today. Unlike in France, the United States and other countries, for example, where “nation” and “democracy” are traditionally seen as a unity after successful revolutions and a commitment to the nation usually also includes a commitment to democracy, the nation-democracy relationship in Germany remains the subject of polarizing, controversial and often highly emotional debates to this day (→ German Sonderweg).

After the failure of the revolution, a reactionary counterrevolution prevailed. In the period known as the era of reaction in the decade following 1848, there was once again a certain restoration of the old conditions, which, however, did not quite take on the proportions of Metternich”s repression during the Vormärz.

The apparent failure of the nation-state goals of the 1848 Revolution

Another lasting success of the Revolutionary years was the abolition of the secret Inquisition justice of the Restoration and Pre-March periods. The demand for public criminal jurisdiction, for public juries, had been one of the fundamental March demands. Its implementation led to a lasting improvement in legal security.

In addition, a more or less pluralistic press landscape emerged during the revolution after press censorship was relaxed. New newspapers influenced political events from the left to the right. On the left, for example, this was the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, edited by Karl Marx, which was banned in 1849. The moderate center was represented by the Deutsche Zeitung, among others, and the right was represented by the Neue Preußische Zeitung (Kreuzzeitung), which Otto von Bismarck helped to found. Kladderadatsch, one of Germany”s first important satirical journals, was also launched on May 7, 1848.

The national idea of a small German unification (→ Union policy) was – after its provisional failure in the Olmützer Punktation in 1850 – finally enforced and implemented from above by the ruling conservative forces under Prussian leadership, especially under Otto von Bismarck as Prussian prime minister since 1862, after Prussia”s three “German unification wars” against Denmark, against Austria and against France. In 1871, after the victory over France, a German Empire was proclaimed with King Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor.

The increasing ideological exaltation and glorification of German nationalism and militarism over the course of the decades, which was accompanied by a simultaneous discrediting of democratic ideals by the politically dominant social classes, also fostered anti-Semitic resentment to an ever greater extent in the medium to long term and the increased emergence of right-wing extremist, or “völkisch”-nationalist groups and parties (→ Völkische Bewegung). These developments ultimately contributed to the wars and political catastrophes of the 20th century – World War I, the period of National Socialism, World War II and the Holocaust.

It was not until the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, a hundred years after the failure of the revolution, that the original democratic ideals of the revolution could be brought back to the fore. Both the Weimar Constitution and the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany incorporated essential elements of the Paulskirche Constitution, which had failed in 1849, for example in the form of fundamental rights. The German Democratic Republic also invoked the impulses emanating from 1848, albeit with a different orientation.

Also read, biographies – Mikis Theodorakis

Development of the revolutionary interest groups

New emancipation movements, especially the workers” movement and the women”s movement, could not decisively determine the revolution in its results. They were not represented in parliament and had to rely on the bourgeois-liberal democratic left to represent their interests in parliament. However, the revolution promoted their organization in the long term. Structures and institutions were created that outlasted the repression and suppression of the reactionary period:

For example, on September 3, 1848, the General German Workers” Brotherhood was founded in Berlin on the initiative of Stephan Born, a typesetter. It is considered the first supra-regional organization of German workers and initiated the development of trade unions. On May 12, 1849, the journalist and early women”s rights activist Louise Otto, known as Louise Otto-Peters after her later marriage, launched the new politically motivated women”s newspaper, in which she called, among other things, for women workers to join together along the lines of the associations of male journeymen.

The liberal forces gathered in 1861 in the first political party in the modern sense, the German Progress Party. However, as a result of the Prussian constitutional conflict between 1866 and 1868, this split into different directions, as had already been indicated by the formation of factions in the Frankfurt National Assembly: National Liberals (→National Liberal Party), Freisinnige (→ German Freisinnige Party) to the left-wing liberal or social liberal currents (→ German People”s Party and Saxon People”s Party). In the fragmentation of German liberalism and the further development of the parties that emerged from it, the polarity between the different ideas of “nation” and “democracy” becomes particularly clear.

The radical “libertarian,” state-negating current of anarchism developed even more strongly in a fundamental socialist direction. In the 1870s, the International Workingmen”s Association, the “First International,” saw open conflict between the anarchist advocates of socialism around Mikhail Bakunin and its Marxist advocates around Karl Marx. The conflict led to a rupture between anarchism and communism and ultimately to the dissolution of the International by 1876.

Many radical democrats, if not imprisoned or executed, had fled into exile during and after the Revolution. After 1848

Many other radical democrats who had remained in Germany or returned after the amnesty of 1862 joined the emerging labor movement, which grew rapidly from the 1860s onward, and the Marxist-oriented Social Democracy of the 19th century, from whose various parties the SPD developed between 1863 and 1890 (→ Communism, Socialism, Communist Party).

After 1849, the differences between the monarchist corps and the liberal fraternities among the students remained for the time being. However, the fraternities, which had originally helped pave the way for the March Revolution, lost political influence. After the unification of the empire in 1870

Almost all socio-political currents relevant to Germany and Europe in the 20th century – from the radical left to bourgeois democrats to the nationalist right – can refer to political ideas, personalities and developments that took place in the revolutionary years 1848

Also read, biographies – Guy de Maupassant

Literary Résumé of Georg Herwegh 1873

A rather bitter and provisional summary of the March Revolution comes from the socialist-revolutionary poet Georg Herwegh, who was himself involved in the revolutionary events in Baden in 1848. In 1873, two years before his death, he wrote the poem “Eighteenth of March” on the 25th anniversary of the start of the revolution in Prussia under the impression of the still young German Empire:

Problems and alternatives

According to Hans-Ulrich Wehler, six factors weakened the German Revolution:

Thomas Nipperdey first directs the attention to the liberals, because they were later reproached the most. After all, the liberals had the majority behind them, contrary to the self-imposed claims of a radical minority. The liberals stood against the left as well as against the counter-revolution and were revolutionaries against their will. They wanted to revolutionize what existed, but to bring the revolution into legality. One could not expect the liberals of the 19th century to share the equality-minded norms of later times. Perhaps their fear of a social revolution and a reign of terror like in France in 1792 was

According to Nipperdey, the objectives of the various camps should be discussed according to their own political orientation; “a scientific decision is not possible. If one asks about the reality and the chances of the concepts, then the gradual but decisive course of the liberals may have been a sensible strategy as long as the old powers were weak. The left, especially the republican left, relied more on the popular masses. The liberals, however, were justifiably skeptical about a people in which many were still monarchical and nationalistic. The counter-revolution could have mobilized masses against a republican revolution, with civil war as a consequence, perhaps even Russian intervention. Some on the left even welcomed such a catastrophic policy of the great European war against reactionary Russia: “they wanted to risk the deluge, because afterwards they themselves would come.

Outside of such radicalism, Nipperdey still thinks of a right-wing liberal alternative, according to which the German Confederation would have been fundamentally reformed, but that would not have gone far enough even for most right-wing liberals. The right-wing liberals around Heinrich von Gagern, on the other hand, could have cooperated more with the moderate left around Robert Blum, for a sharper, not gentler, course. But the moderate left felt strong cohesion with the radical one, and there was great antagonism on concrete issues. And with the sharper pace, the maelstrom that led to counter-revolution might have occurred even sooner. An alternative time sequence, like the real one, would possibly have been defeated anyway by the problem of Greater Germany.

Also read, biographies – Maria Luisa of Parma

Question of failure

Mike Rapport sees the failed revolution as a missed opportunity and the beginning of a German Sonderweg. Not from below, but from above, with Prussian military power, an authoritarian empire was later founded by Bismarck, which sowed the seeds for the Third Reich. The German liberals, he said, had likewise dreamed of power, of German power, and had placed national unity above political freedom. “That was perhaps the deeper tragedy of 1848: even the liberals were too willing to sacrifice freedom for power.” Helga Grebing examines the Sonderweg thesis very critically, adopting Michael Stürmer”s formulation for the 1848 Revolution that instead of “failed,” it could more accurately be described as “unfinished.” Moreover, one must ask whether historians understand the bourgeois revolution “too much as a one-time revolutionary act” from which they expect too much.

Nipperdey points to the numerous problems the revolutionaries faced:

Measured against its goals, according to Hans-Ulrich Wehler, the revolution had failed. Political participation in state power was again eliminated by the victorious conservatives, and the establishment of a liberal-constitutional nation-state did not succeed either. But there was also progress to be recorded:

Wehler rejects what he sees as the “crassly” one-sided formula of the failure of the revolution, since there were indirectly impressive successes and a transformation of politics and society. The standards it set remained an ideal “that remained binding for many people despite all the setbacks after 1849 – and therefore could not be circumvented as a basic political fact in the long run.”

Hahn and Berding see the revolution as the end and climax of an upheaval that had already become stronger at the beginning of the century. The search was on for a new order of the German world of states that was compatible with the European system of states, as well as for a new legitimation of rule and political participation of society, in each case against the background of a new, liberal market society. As elsewhere in Europe, there were phases of acceleration, but also of standstill or regression.

Even more decisive action – even a European war of liberation – would have made the revolutionaries of 1848

Karl Griewank took up the question of whether the events of 1848 had been

The 1848

The revolution in a broader sense and other contexts:

Selection of personalities active for the revolution (last names in alphabetical order)

Also read, biographies – Pierre Reverdy

Sources and older representations

Sources (e-texts and digital copies)