Chapter Summary
There is little doubt that 1848 represented a revolutionary year for almost every nation on the European continent. The revolution in France served as the catalyst for these uprisings, although the real causes of the revolutions of 1848 lay in European developments that included unreconciled social antagonisms, economic crises, and a general impatience with the conservative order. The Revolutions of 1848 were not, however, monolithic. Developments in one country did not necessarily play out in others. While the middle classes played important roles in developments in Western Europe, the same cannot be said of Central and Eastern Europe, where the nobility and large landowners retained the traditional pantheon of privilege and authority.
The revolutions of 1848 also highlight one of the key developments in the formation of nineteenth-century ideologies. For it was during the years following the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) that nationalism-along with liberalism and nation building-came to exert a profound social, economic and political force. Nationalism came to be understood as an ideology that binds a people with a common history, geography, language, and cultural tradition together. And although there were a number of philosophers who were advancing this "nationalist idea," it was the year 1848 that brought nationalism to the forefront of popular argument for reform.
While historians and others could easily argue the success or failure of the French Revolution of 1789and indeed, they have been doing so for more than a century1848 represents a clear failure on the part of the revolutionaries, no matter which country is under investigation. However, in the wake of the revolutions of 1848, new nations came into beingspecifically Germany and Italyand thus changed the map of Europe forever. The balance of power, so carefully constructed at Vienna, set the stage for the appearance of what, by the end of the nineteenth century, would be called the Great Powers: Germany, Britain, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, France, and, a relative newcomer, the United States. And this balance of power, a clever balancing act if ever there was one, would manifest itself in the great imperialist drives at the end of the century and ultimately in the European cataclysm, the Great War of 1914-1918.