Why did the liberal revolutions of 1848 fail?
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Why did the liberal revolutions of 1848 fail?
The first thing to realize about 1848 was the scope of the crisis. The fact that it failed means that people sometimes forget how big it was. Except for London and St. Petersburg, there was a revolution in every major European capital in 1848 or shortly thereafter. But in between those two, every major European capital suffered some form of revolutionary movement. Why did they fail? Well, in some sense this question is also related to what kind of linkages we can connect between the French Revolution in 1789 and the Russian Revolution in 1917.
The revolutions of 1848 were led by liberal nationalists who had the model of the French Revolution before them. This meant that they were in many ways cautious about their goals. At the same time, the revolution took place too early in the history of European industrialization, so there was not a big enough constituency in support of more radical ideas such as those of Karl Marx and other socialist theorists of the time. This was the revolution that fell between two stools, in a sense.
There is a lot to be said for this argument, but it's also important to remember that the revolutions of 1848 did not completely fail. What failed in Germany and in France and in Italy was the idea that these countries could be unified under liberal principles. What happened, however, was that conservative regimes in Europe - the Prussians and later the Piedmontese, who helped to unify Italy afterwards - realized that their political goals could be fulfilled by rallying a popular nationalism.
That liberal revolution failed in 1848 is indisputable. But a popular sort of nationalism, enlisted by conservative monarchies, emerged as one of the most powerful organizing forces in politics in the late 19th century.
How did the failure of the 1848 revolutions change the character of European nationalist movements in the second half of the nineteenth century?
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How did the failure of the 1848 revolutions change the character of European nationalist movements in the second half of the nineteenth century?
The first thing to remember is that nationalism, at its origins, was really a political force on the left. In the French Revolution, nationalism was associated with revolutionary liberals who wanted to overthrow the monarchy or at least establish some form of democratic government. This was tremendously inspiring to people in other parts of Europe. The Napoleonic Wars to Italy and the German-speaking lands of central Europe. People in these German-speaking lands believed that they might be able to harness this same kind of power. In the years leading up to 1848, nationalism as a force for unification in Germany and Italy was really a motivating force for liberals.
When the members of the Frankfurt Parliament gathered in 1848 to come up with a constitution that they could offer to the Prussian king, their goals were liberal goals. When Mancini and Garibaldi established the Roman Republic in Italy, their idea was to create some kind of unified Italy under liberal principles. However, they failed.
What happened as a result of this was that a kind of lesson was learned in the aftermath of 1848. This lesson was that nationalism could be mobilized by other political forces as well. German unification takes place under Prussian sponsorship and they use a populist nationalism that proved especially useful in times of national emergency - the war with Austria or the war with France in 1870 - to rally the population behind a notion of unity that was not connected to liberal ideas of representation or democratic principles but instead linked to the Prussian monarchy and a notion of an organic German culture of which they could partake if they joined this new country. The same thing happened in Italy. Italian unification doesn't happen under Mancini and Garibaldi. Garibaldi helps, but ultimately it's a king, Victor Emmanuel, who is the leader of a new unified Italy.
We can see, then, in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, that nationalism is no longer associated solely with liberal principles, but becomes available as a kind of motivating force for all sorts of political regimes, including some of the most conservative in Europe.