Revolutions of 1848

The year 1848 cannot be understood without 1815. The People’s Spring was in fact a direct consequence of the Congress of Vienna and the restriction—by the Quadruple Alliance and the Holy Alliance—of the national and liberal aspirations that emerged during the Revolution and the Empire.

Nor can 1848 be understood without 1830, and the first challenges to 1815, for instance the proclamation of national sovereignty by the new Citizen King Louis-Philippe in France, the independence of Greece and Belgium, or Poland’s rebellion against its Russian occupier and the rebellion of part of Italy against its princes.

Finally, 1848 cannot be understood without demographic expansion or the economic and social crisis that erupted a few months earlier in most of Europe, which was all the more serious because its was simultaneously agricultural, industrial, and commercial. Within half a century, the European population grew by 25–45% depending on the country, totaling nearly 80 million. It became younger, and swelled the ranks of cities like never before. This young and more urban population faced an unprecedented crisis, with its procession of unemployment, food scarcity, and poverty. The intellectuals, bourgeois, and members of the minor nobility who were a driving force (Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, Mickiewicz, Kossuth, Bălcescu, etc.) were joined by the mass of anonymous protagonists. The latter included students—and in his own way the character Frédéric as depicted by Flaubert in L’Éducation sentimentale—who served as the archetype of this “génération quarante-huitarde” (generation of forty-eight) drunk on hope and thirsting for liberty, equality, and fraternity, as well as artisans, laborers, and the unemployed of major cities. The People’s Spring began in direct contact with power, in the European capitals where these protagonists lived.

The year 1848 was more powerful than 1830 because its was a connected and transnational revolution. Political exiles were legion at the time, with the circulation of revolutionaries whose exemplary ideas spread like a contagion, in addition to a more powerful and widely diffused press, and wider networks than those that had existed eighteen years earlier.^[12]