In the middle of the 19th century, ideas unleashed by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution inspired revolutions across Europe. It does not take much imagination to connect the 1848 Revolutions of Italy, France, Germany, and the then-vast Austrian Empire with the present day. From do-gooding liberals to revolutionary socialists, the characters and ideologies that shaped this era are instantly recognizable to modern readers. So, too, is the grand ideological sweep of the period, from the initial burst of revolutionary enthusiasm to disillusionment and factionalism among the rebels to the inevitable counterrevolutionary backlash.
It may be difficult to see ourselves as Pharaohs or Caesars, but the enduring (and romantic) image of long-haired radicals storming the barricades is very familiar. The ideological battle lines of 1848 are also recognizable because we’re still having the same arguments. Revolutionary socialists called for the abolition of private property. Pioneering feminists called for the abolition of the family. Moderate liberals tried to chart a middle course between reactionaries and radicals. Conservatism transformed from a disposition into an emergent political ideology. And Revolutionary Spring, an excellent new history of the era from Cambridge professor Christopher Clark, charts how it happened.
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The debates that inspired the 1848 uprisings and played out during this turbulent period occurred against a backdrop of profound material deprivation and Europe’s transformation from an agrarian, semi-feudal society into an industrial one, a change without precedent in world history. Combined with the very newness of many political ideas and programs, the stage was set for ideological, political, and military history to converge.
Despite their pervasive cultural influence, socialism, radical feminism, and even bourgeois liberalism were elite affectations. Nationalism was the only of these ideas destined to capture the imagination of the 19th century masses. Nationalism began its ideological life cycle as the era’s “radical chic,” a way for intellectuals and aristocrats to flaunt their authenticity by wearing folk costumes and speaking the local patois. It would gradually transform into something broader and more enduring.
Early nationalism had a cosmopolitan, international character, with Greek, Italian, and Polish patriots attracting sympathy and support from intellectuals, journalists, and romantics across Europe. Its supporters were often fixated on intellectual concerns such as the revival of poetry in the local vernacular, though few peasants were ever roused to action by stirring recitations of patriotic verse. In fact, many were alienated by their would-be liberators, who were typically drawn from the propertied classes. The number of people involved in those early days was comically small. At a writers’ meeting in Prague, a Czech patriot admitted, “If the ceiling were to fall on us now, that would be the end of the national revival.” Clark archly observes that “the single most important vehicle for Romanian patriot opinion” in Transylvania, a province of 2 million, was a gazette with 250 subscribers.
Aristocrats often needed a little patriotic prodding. Clark recounts an amusing episode in which two Hungarian swells are kicked out of a dinner party for wearing tails instead of traditional patriotic dress. The invitations they ignored also asked guests to speak only in Hungarian, a necessary stipulation because the educated classes often conversed in other languages. Count Istvan Szechenyi, the man whose name still adorns Budapest’s oldest and most iconic bridge, kept his private diary in German.
This gives the reader some idea of just how outside the mainstream patriotic feeling was, even among conservatives and traditionalists. Today, nationalism is associated with the political Right, but it began as a radical challenge to the status quo, a Europe of imperial dynasties, French-speaking Russian aristocrats, and Hungarian landowners who grew up emulating the habits and dress of the British gentry.
Despite these modest origins, nationalism was the one "ism" that eventually developed mass appeal. It is fashionable, particularly on the Left, to deride national identities as recent inventions, the implication being they should be easily discarded. There is some truth to the idea that national consciousness is created; Clark describes how a few intellectuals tried to shoehorn several Slavic dialects into a short-lived “Illyrian” national movement along the Adriatic coast. Perhaps only happenstance separated this stillborn project and the more successful versions pursued by French, German, and Italian patriots.
Yet something allowed nationalism to endure and eventually eclipse its ideological rivals. Despite its fringe origins, nationalism was potentially more inclusive than other ideologies “because,” notes Clark, “it embraced every member of the linguistic or cultural community, including women.” Liberalism, an ideology created by and for bourgeois idealists, and Marxism, a movement explicitly organized around the idea of an elite revolutionary vanguard, could not compete with nationalism’s reach. While national stories are often embellished or even invented, the raw material is real. People in certain places do share folkways, habits, and a common language.
The era’s most significant legacy, however, is the curdling of romantic nationalism into something harsh and bitter. The revolutions of 1848 laid bare the limitations of liberal patriotism. Bourgeois constitutions and high-flown appeals to principle were supplanted by the lure of blood and soil. Idealists gradually realized that Europe could not easily be carved into coherent ethnic and linguistic blocs; someone would always be stuck on the wrong side of a border. Reactionaries were the quickest to grasp this lesson: the ancient Habsburg dynasty proved quite adept at playing off various ethnic minorities against Polish and Hungarian rebels.
The acid test of nationalism’s appeal would come later, after it had transformed from a fringe concern into a truly frightening political force. By the early 20th century, the embers stoked by the poets, romantics, and intellectuals of 1848 would roar into an all-consuming flame. In August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II thundered, “Henceforth I no longer know any parties. I know only Germans.” Liberals and socialists in the Reichstag were immediately overcome by war fever.
Perhaps this is why the 1848 Revolutions are less celebrated than other revolutionary episodes. Though patriotic uprisings in Germany, Italy, and Hungary failed and the French Second Republic soon gave way to autocracy, 1848 endures in Hungarian national folklore, the Danish and Swiss constitutions, and the eventual unification of Italy and Germany. These triumphs are tainted by the reader’s foreknowledge of tragedies to come.
Nationalism was not the only ideology to harden after the failures of 1848. Many disillusioned liberals turned to revolutionary socialism. Others became bureaucrats and administrators, precursors to the technocratic overclass that manages the modern administrative state. A few migrated to the Right, overseeing the machinery of repression that had condemned so many former comrades to death or imprisonment.
In one of his rare asides on modern politics, Clark suggests that the tumult of mid-19th century Europe mirrors our own uncertain era. The ideological parallels are obvious, but today something is missing that the 1848ers had in abundance. The mid-19th century was a frightening time because no one knew what lay on the other side of political upheaval and industrialization. But this uncertainty created an atmosphere of intellectual and cultural ferment that has rarely been seen since. Many admire the 1848 revolutionaries for their clarity and singleness of purpose. We should envy their era’s lively sense of possibility, while cherishing the benefits of hindsight.
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Will Collins is a lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.