Download Ideologies and Upheavals, 1815–1850

A History of Western Society, 10th Edition
CHAPTER 22
Ideologies and Upheavals, 1815–1850
Notes
Instructional Objectives
After reading and studying this chapter, students should be able to:
1. Explain how the victorious allies fashioned a general peace
settlement, and how Metternich upheld a conservative European
order.
2. Discuss the basic tenets of liberalism, nationalism, and socialism
and identify groups most attracted by these ideologies.
3. Identify the major characteristics of the romantic movement,
including some of the great romantic artists.
4. Analyze how liberal, national, and socialist forces challenged
conservatism in Greece, Great Britain, and France after 1815.
5. Explain why revolutionaries triumphed briefly throughout most of
Europe in 1848, only to fail almost completely.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. The Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars
A. The European Balance of Power
1. In 1814 the Quadruple Alliance of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and
Great Britain finally defeated France and agreed to meet at the
Congress of Vienna to fashion a general peace settlement.
2. The first Peace of Paris gave to France the boundaries it
possessed in 1792, which were larger than those of 1789, and
restored the Bourbon dynasty.
3. The Quadruple Alliance combined leniency toward France with
strong defensive measures that included uniting the Low
Countries under an expanded Dutch monarchy and increasing
Prussian territory to act as a ―sentinel on the Rhine.‖
4. Klemens von Metternich and Robert Castlereagh, the foreign
ministers of Austria and Great Britain, respectively, as well as
their French counterpart, Charles Talleyrand, used a balance-ofpower ideology to discourage aggression by any combination of
states.
5. Napoleon undid this agreement briefly when he escaped from
Elba and reignited his wars of expansion, but he was defeated at
Waterloo in 1815.
6. The second Peace of Paris, concluded after Napoleon’s final
defeat, was also lenient with France, although this time France
was required to pay an indemnity and to support an army of
occupation for five years.
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7. The Quadruple Alliance then agreed to meet periodically to
discuss common interests and to guard the peace in Europe.
8. This European ―congress system‖ lasted long into the
nineteenth century and settled many international crises through
international conferences and balance-of-power diplomacy.
B. Repressing the Revolutionary Spirit
1. Within their own countries, the leaders of the victorious states
were much less flexible.
2. In a crusade against the ideas and politics of the dual revolution,
the conservative leaders of Austria, Prussia, and Russia formed
the Holy Alliance, which became a symbol of the repression of
liberal and revolutionary movements all over Europe.
3. In 1820 revolutionaries succeeded in forcing the monarchs of
Spain and the southern Italian kingdom of the Two Sicilies to
grant liberal constitutions against their wills.
4. Metternich and Alexander I proclaimed the principle of active
intervention to maintain all autocratic regimes.
5. Austrian forces then restored Ferdinand I to the throne of the
Two Sicilies in 1821, while French armies in 1823 likewise
restored the Spanish regime.
6. Metternich continued to battle against liberal political change,
and until 1848 his system proved quite effective in central
Europe, where his power was the greatest.
7. Metternich’s policies dominated the entire German
Confederation, which comprised thirty-eight independent
German states, including Prussia and Austria.
8. In 1819 Metternich had the German Confederation issue the
infamous Carlsbad Decrees, which required the thirty-eight
German states to root out subversive ideas and which
established a permanent committee to investigate and punish
liberal or radical organizations.
C. Metternich and Conservatism
1. Determined defender of the status quo, Prince Klemens von
Metternich (1773–1859) was an internationally oriented
aristocrat who made a brilliant diplomatic career as Austria’s
foreign minister from 1809 to 1848.
2. Metternich’s pessimistic view of human nature as prone to
error, excess, and self-serving behavior led him to conclude that
strong governments were necessary to protect society from the
baser elements of human behavior.
3. Metternich defended his class and its rights and privileges with
a clear conscience and at the same time blamed liberal middleclass revolutionaries for stirring up the lower classes.
4. Liberalism appeared doubly dangerous to Metternich because it
generally went with national aspirations and a belief that each
people, each national group, had a right to establish its own
independent government and seek to fulfill its own destiny.
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5. The multiethnic state Metternich served was both strong and
weak—strong because of its large population and vast territories
and weak because of its many and potentially dissatisfied
nationalities that included Italians, Romanians, and various
Slavic peoples, who were politically dominated by a German
and Magyar (Hungarian) minority.
6. Metternich had to oppose liberalism and nationalism, for
Austria was simply unable to accommodate these ideologies of
the dual revolution.
7. In his efforts to hold back liberalism and nationalism Metternich
was supported by the Russian Empire and, to a lesser extent, by
the Ottoman Empire.
8. After 1815 both of these multinational absolutist states worked
to preserve their respective traditional conservative orders.
II. The Spread of Radical Ideas
A. Liberalism and the Middle Class
1. In contrast to Metternich and conservatism, the new
philosophies of liberalism, nationalism, and socialism started
with an optimistic premise about human nature.
2. Liberalism—whose principal ideas were liberty and equality—
demanded representative government as opposed to autocratic
monarchy, and equality before the law as opposed to legally
separate classes.
3. Opponents of liberalism criticized its economic principles,
which called for unrestricted private enterprise and no
government interference in the economy, a philosophy known
as the doctrine of laissez faire.
4. In early nineteenth-century Britain this economic liberalism was
embraced most enthusiastically by business groups and thus
became a doctrine associated with business interests.
5. Labor unions were outlawed because they supposedly restricted
free competition and the individual’s ―right to work.‖
6. As liberalism became increasingly identified with the middle
class after 1815, some intellectuals and foes of conservatism felt
that liberalism did not go nearly far enough.
7. These radicals called for universal
voting rights, at least for males, and
for democracy, and they were more willing than most liberals to
endorse violent upheaval to achieve their
goals.
B. The Growing Appeal of Nationalism
1. Early advocates of nationalism were strongly influenced by
Johann Gottfried von Herder, an eighteenth-century philosopher
and historian who argued that each people had its own genius
and its own cultural unity.
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2. In fact, in the early nineteenth century such cultural unity was
more a dream than a reality, with an abundance of local dialects
that kept peasants from nearby villages from understanding
each other and historical memory that divided the inhabitants of
various European states as much as it unified them.
3. Despite these basic realities, sooner or later European
nationalists usually sought to turn the cultural unity that they
perceived into political reality.
4. It was the political goal of making the territory of each people
coincide with well-defined boundaries in an independent nationstate that made nationalism so explosive in central and eastern
Europe after 1815.
5. The rise of nationalism depended heavily on the development of
complex industrial and urban society, which required much
better communication between individuals and groups.
6. Promoting the use of a standardized national language through
mass education created at least a superficial cultural unity
within many countries.
7. Many scholars argue that nation-states emerged in the
nineteenth century as ―imagined communities‖ that sought to
bind millions of strangers together around the abstract concept
of an all-embracing national identity.
8. Between 1815 and 1850 most people who believed in
nationalism also believed in either liberalism or radical
democratic republicanism.
9. Liberals saw the people as the ultimate source of all government
but agreed with nationalists that the benefits of self-government
would be possible only if the people were united by common
traditions that transcended local interests and even class
differences.
10. Early nationalists usually believed that every nation, like every
citizen, had the right to exist in freedom and to develop its
character and spirit.
11. Yet early nationalism developed a strong sense of ―we‖ and
―they,‖ to which nationalists added two highly volatile
ingredients: a sense of national mission and a sense of national
superiority.
C. French Utopian Socialism
1. Early French socialist thinkers saw the political revolution in
France, the rise of laissez faire, and the emergence of modern
industry as fomenting selfish individualism and splitting the
community into isolated fragments.
2. They believed in economic planning and argued that the
government should rationally organize the economy and not
depend on destructive competition to do the job.
3. With an intense desire to help the poor, socialists preached
economic equality among people and believed that private
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property should be strictly regulated by the government.
4. Count Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) optimistically
proclaimed that the key to progress was proper social
organization in which leading scientists, engineers, and
industrialists would carefully plan the economy and guide it
forward by undertaking vast public works projects.
5. Charles Fourier (1772–1837) envisaged a socialist utopia of
self-sufficient communities and advocated the total
emancipation of women.
6. Louis Blanc (1811–1882) focused on practical improvements,
and in his Organization of Work (1839) he urged workers to
agitate for universal voting rights and to take control of the state
peacefully.
7. In What Is Property? (1840) Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–
1865) argued that property was profit that was stolen from the
worker, who was the source of all wealth.
8. The message of French utopian socialists interacted with the
experiences of French urban workers, who became violently
opposed to laissez-faire laws that denied workers the right to
organize in guilds and unions.
D. The Birth of Marxian Socialism
1. In 1848 Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–
1895) published The Communist Manifesto, which became the
bible of socialism.
2. The atheistic young Marx had studied philosophy at the
University of Berlin before turning to journalism and
economics, and he had read extensively in French socialist
thought before developing his own socialist ideas.
3. The interests of the middle class (the bourgeoisie) and those of
the industrial working class (the proletariat) were inevitably
opposed to each other, according to Marx.
4. Marx predicted that the ever-poorer proletariat, which was
constantly growing in size and in class-consciousness, would
conquer the bourgeoisie in a violent revolution.
5. Marx’s socialist ideas synthesized not only French utopian
schemes but also English classical economics and German
philosophy—the major intellectual currents of his day.
6. Marx’s theory of historical evolution was built on the philosophy
of the German Georg Hegel (1770–1831), who believed that each
age is characterized by a dominant set of ideas that produces
opposing ideas and eventually a new synthesis.
7. Marx used this dialectic to explain the decline of agrarian
feudalism and the rise of industrial capitalism while asserting
that it was now the bourgeoisie’s turn to give way to the
socialism of revolutionary workers.
8. Thus Marx pulled together powerful ideas and created one of
the great secular religions out of the intellectual ferment of the
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Notes
early nineteenth century.
III. The Romantic Movement
A. Romanticism’s Tenets
1. The artistic change known as the romantic movement was in
part a revolt against the emphasis on rationality, order, and
restraint that characterized the Enlightenment and the controlled
style of classicism.
2. Romanticism was characterized by a belief in emotional
exuberance, unrestrained imagination, and spontaneity in both
art and personal life.
3. Great individualists, the romantics believed the full
development of one’s unique human potential to be the supreme
purpose in life.
4. The romantics were enchanted by nature, and most saw modern
industry as an ugly, brutal attack on their beloved nature and on
the human personality.
5. In romanticism, the study of history was the key to a universe
that was now perceived to be organic and dynamic, not
mechanical and static as the Enlightenment thinkers had
believed.
6. Historians such as Jules Michelet, who focused on the
development of societies and human institutions, promoted the
growth of national aspirations.
B. Literature
1. Romanticism found its distinctive voice in a group of British
poets led by William Wordsworth (1770–1850).
2. In 1798 Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–
1834) published their Lyrical Ballads, which was written in the
language of ordinary speech and endowed simple subjects with
the loftiest majesty.
3. Classicism remained strong in France until Germaine de Staël
(1766–1817), in her study On Germany (1810), extolled the
spontaneity and enthusiasm of German writers and thinkers.
4. Between 1820 and 1850, the romantic impulse broke through in
the works of Lamartine, de Vigny, Dumas, George Sand, and
Victor Hugo (1802–1885).
5. Hugo’s powerful novels, including Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1831), exemplified the romantic fascination with fantastic
characters, exotic historical settings, and human emotions.
6. Renouncing his early conservatism, Hugo equated freedom in
literature with liberty in politics and society, a political evolution
that was exactly the opposite of Wordsworth’s.
7. Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin (1804–1876), generally known
by her pen name, George Sand, defied the narrow conventions
of her time both by wearing men’s clothing and by writing on
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shockingly modern social themes.
8. In central and eastern Europe, literary romanticism and early
nationalism often reinforced each other: The brothers Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm were particularly successful at rescuing
German fairy tales from oblivion.
9. In the Slavic lands, romantics advanced the process of
converting spoken peasant languages into modern written
languages.
10. Aleksander Pushkin (1799–1837), the most influential of all
Russian poets, used his lyric genius to mold the modern literary
language.
C. Art and Music
1. The great French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–
1863) was a master of dramatic, colorful scenes that stirred the
emotions.
2. Notable romantic English painters included Joseph M. W.
Turner (1775–1851), who often depicted nature’s power and
terror, and John Constable (1776–1837), whose paintings
depicted humans amid gentle Wordsworthian landscapes.
3. Abandoning well-defined structures, the great romantic
composers used a wide range of forms to create a thousand
musical landscapes and evoke a host of powerful emotions.
4. The crashing chords evoking the surge of the masses in
Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude and the bottomless despair of the
funeral march in Beethoven’s Third Symphony plumbed the
depths of human feeling.
5. Music became a sublime end in itself, expressing the endless
yearning of the soul, and made cultural heroes of composers and
musicians who evoked great emotional responses.
6. The most famous romantic composer, Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770–1827), used contrasting themes and tones to produce
dramatic conflict and inspiring resolutions.
7. Even though Beethoven began to lose his hearing at the peak of
his fame and eventually became completely deaf, he continued
to compose immortal music throughout his life.
IV.
Reforms and Revolutions Before 1848
A. National Liberation in Greece
1. Despite living under the domination of the Ottoman Turks since
the fifteenth century, the Greeks had survived as a people,
united by their language and the Greek Orthodox religion.
2. The rising nationalism of the nineteenth century led to the
formation of secret societies and then to revolt in 1821, led by
Alexander Ypsilanti, a Greek patriot and a general in the
Russian army.
3. At first, the Great Powers were opposed to all revolution and
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refused to back Ypsilanti.
4. Yet many Europeans responded enthusiastically to the Greek
national struggle, and as the Greeks battled on against the Turks
they hoped for the support of European governments.
5. In 1827 Great Britain, France, and Russia yielded to popular
demands at home and directed Turkey to accept an armistice.
6. When the Turks refused, the navies of these three powers
trapped the Turkish fleet at Navarino and destroyed it.
7. Great Britain, France, and Russia finally declared Greece
independent in 1830 and installed a German prince as king of
the new country in 1832.
B. Liberal Reform in Great Britain
1. Eighteenth-century British society had been both flexible and
remarkably stable.
2. The common people had more than the usual opportunities of
the preindustrial world, while basic civil rights for all were
balanced by a tradition of deference to one’s social superiors.
3. Conflicts between the ruling class and laborers were sparked in
1815 when the landed aristocracy selfishly forced changes in
the Corn Laws, with the result being that the importation of
foreign grain was prohibited unless the price at home rose to
improbable levels.
4. The revision of the Corn Laws during a time of widespread
unemployment and postwar economic distress triggered protests
and demonstrations by urban laborers.
5. The Tory government, completed controlled by the landed
aristocracy, responded by temporarily suspending the traditional
rights of peaceable assembly and habeas corpus.
6. Two years later, Parliament passed the infamous Six Acts,
which placed controls on a heavily taxed press and practically
eliminated all mass meetings.
7. In the 1820s, a less frightened Tory government moved in the
direction of better urban administration, greater economic
liberalism, civil equality for Catholics, and limited importation
of foreign grain.
8. These actions encouraged the middle classes to press on for
reform of Parliament so they could have a larger say in
government.
9. The Whig Party had by tradition been more responsive to
middle-class commercial and manufacturing interests and
sponsored the Reform Bill of 1832.
10. A surge of popular support propelled the bill into law and
moved politics in a democratic direction that allowed the House
of Commons to emerge as the all-important legislative body.
11. The new industrial areas of the country gained representation in
the Commons, ―rotten boroughs‖ were eliminated, and the
number of voters increased by 50 percent to about 12 percent of
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adult men; thus a major reform had been achieved peacefully.
12. The principal radical program for continued reform was
embodied in the ―People’s Charter‖ of 1838 and the Chartist
movement, which demanded universal male (but not female)
suffrage.
13. In addition to calling for universal male suffrage, many
working-class people joined with middle-class manufacturers in
the Anti–Corn Law League, founded in Manchester in 1839.
14. When Ireland’s potato crop failed in 1845 and famine prices for
food seemed likely in England, a handful of Tories joined with
the Whigs to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846 and allow free
imports of grain.
15. From that point on, the liberal doctrine of free trade became
almost sacred dogma in Great Britain.
16. The Tories passed the Ten Hours Act of 1847, which limited the
workday for women and young people in factories to ten hours,
and they continued to champion legislation regulating factory
conditions.
17. This healthy competition between a still-vigorous aristocracy
and a strong middle class to gain the support of the working
class was a crucial factor in Great Britain’s peaceful evolution.
C. Ireland and the Great Famine
1. The people of Ireland, most of whom were Irish Catholics, did not
benefit from the political competition in Britain but remained
under the oppression of a tiny minority of Church of England
Protestant landlords.
2. The condition of the Irish peasantry around 1800 was
abominable, described by novelist Sir Walter Scott as ―the
extreme verge of human misery.‖
3. Despite the terrible conditions, the population of Ireland
continued to grow, from 3 million in 1725 to 8 million by 1840,
a population explosion that was caused primarily by the
extensive cultivation of the potato.
4. The decision to marry and have large families made sense for
peasants: rural poverty was inescapable and better shared with a
spouse, while a dutiful son or a loving daughter was an old
person’s best hope of escaping destitution.
5. As population and potato dependency grew, conditions became
more precarious, and potato crop failures in 1845, 1846, 1848,
and 1851 resulted in the Great Famine, a period of widespread
starvation and mass fever epidemics.
6. The British government was slow to act, and when it did, its
relief efforts were tragically inadequate.
7. Moreover, the government continued to collect taxes, landlords
demanded their rents, and tenants who could not pay were
evicted.
8. The Great Famine shattered the pattern of Irish population
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growth: fully 1 million emigrants fled the famine between 1845
and 1851, and at least 1.5 million died or went unborn because
of the disaster.
9. The Great Famine also intensified anti-British feeling and
promoted Irish nationalism, eventually leading to campaigns for
Irish independence.
D. The Revolution of 1830 in France
1. Louis XVIII’s Constitutional Charter of 1814 was a basically
liberal constitution that fully protected the economic and social
gains of the middle class and the peasantry in the French
Revolution, permitted great intellectual and artistic freedom,
and created a parliament with upper and lower houses.
2. Louis XVIII’s charter was anything but democratic, however,
allowing only about 100,000 of the wealthiest males out of a
total population of 30 million to vote.
3. Nevertheless, the ―notable people‖ who did vote came from a
variety of backgrounds and included wealthy businessmen, war
profiteers, successful professionals, ex-revolutionaries, and
large landowners from the middle class and the old aristocracy.
4. Louis’s successor, Charles X (r. 1824–1830), wanted to reestablish the old order in France but was blocked by the
opposition of the deputies, so in 1830 he turned to military
adventure in an effort to rally French nationalism and gain
popular support.
5. In June 1830, in response to a long-standing dispute with
Muslim Algeria, a French force of 37,000 crossed the
Mediterranean and took the Algerian capital city of Algiers in
three short weeks.
6. In 1831 tribes in the interior revolted and waged a fearsome war
until 1847, when French armies finally subdued the country and
expropriated large tracts of Muslim land.
7. Emboldened by the good news from Algeria, Charles repudiated
the Constitutional Charter in July 1830, stripped much of the
middle class of its voting rights, and censored the press.
8. After ―three glorious days‖ of insurrection in the capital, the
government collapsed, and Charles fled.
9. Then the upper middle class, which had fomented the revolt,
seated Charles’s cousin, Louis Philippe, duke of Orléans, on the
vacant throne.
10. Louis Philippe (r. 1830–1848) accepted the Constitutional
Charter of 1814 and admitted that he was merely the ―king of
the French people.‖
11. The situation in France remained fundamentally unchanged,
however—there had been only a change in dynasty to protect
the status quo for the upper middle class—and social reformers
and the poor of Paris were bitterly disappointed.
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Notes
V. The Revolutions of 1848
A. A Democratic Republic in France
1. The political and social response to the economic crisis of the
1840s was unrest and protest, with ―prerevolutionary‖ outbreaks
all across Europe.
2. By the late 1840s, revolution in Europe was almost universally
expected, but it took revolution in Paris—once again—to turn
expectations into realities.
3. For eighteen years Louis Philippe’s ―bourgeois monarchy‖ had
been characterized by a glaring lack of social legislation and by
politics dominated by corruption and selfish special interests.
4. The government’s stubborn refusal to consider electoral reform
eventually touched off a popular revolt in Paris on February 22,
1848, when rebellious workers and students, armed with guns
and dug in behind barricades, demanded a new government.
5. When Louis Philippe refused to order a full-scale attack by the
regular army, the revolutionaries proclaimed a provisional
republic, headed by a ten-man executive committee, and
immediately drafted a constitution for France’s Second
Republic.
6. They wanted a truly democratic republic and so gave the right
to vote to every adult male while also freeing all slaves in
French colonies, abolishing the death penalty, and establishing a
ten-hour workday in Paris.
7. Profound differences within the revolutionary coalition in Paris
reached a head in 1848 in the face of worsening depression and
rising unemployment.
8. Moderate liberal republicans, having conceded to popular forces
on the issue of universal male suffrage, were willing to provide
only temporary relief and were opposed to any further radical
social measures.
9. On the other hand, radical republicans and artisans hated the
unrestrained competition of cutthroat capitalism and advocated
a combination of strong craft unions and worker-owned
businesses.
10. The resulting compromise set up national workshops, which
were soon to become little more than a vast program of pickand-shovel public works that satisfied no one.
11. As the economic crisis worsened, the number enrolled in the
workshops soared from 10,000 in March to 120,000 by June,
with another 80,000 trying unsuccessfully to join.
12. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), one of the newly elected
members of the Constituent Assembly, observed that the
socialist movement in Paris aroused the fierce hostility of
France’s peasants, who owned land, and of the middle and
upper classes.
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13. The clash of ideologies—of liberal capitalism and socialism—
became a clash of classes and arms after the elections.
14. Fearing that their socialist hopes were about to be dashed,
artisans and unskilled workers invaded the Constituent
Assembly on May 15 and tried to proclaim a new revolutionary
state.
15. As the workshops continued to fill and grow more radical, the
fearful but powerful propertied classes in the Assembly
dissolved the national workshops in Paris, giving the workers
the choice of joining the army or going to workshops in the
provinces.
16. The result was a spontaneous and violent uprising; barricades
sprang up again in the narrow streets of Paris, and a terrible
class war began.
17. After three terrible ―June Days‖ of street fighting and the death
or injury of more than ten thousand people, the republican army
under General Louis Cavaignac stood triumphant in a sea of
working-class blood and hatred.
18. In place of a generous democratic republic, the Constituent
Assembly completed a constitution featuring a strong executive.
19. Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, won the
election of December 1848, fulfilling the desire of the
propertied classes for order at any cost and producing a semiauthoritarian regime.
B. The Austrian Empire in 1848
1. The revolution in the Austrian Empire began in Hungary in
1848, where nationalistic Hungarians demanded national
autonomy, full civil liberties, and universal suffrage.
2. When the monarchy in Vienna hesitated, Viennese students and
workers took to the streets, while peasant disorders broke out in
parts of the empire.
3. The Habsburg emperor Ferdinand I (r. 1835–1848) capitulated
and promised reforms and a liberal constitution, while
Metternich fled in disguise toward London.
4. The coalition of revolutionaries was not stable, however, and
once the monarchy abolished serfdom, the newly free peasants
lost interest in the political and social questions agitating the
cities.
5. Meanwhile, the coalition of urban revolutionaries broke down
along class lines over the issue of socialist workshops and
universal voting rights for men.
6. In March the Hungarian revolutionary leaders pushed through
an extremely liberal, almost democratic, constitution, but they
also sought to transform Hungary’s multitude of peoples into a
unified and centralized Hungarian nation.
7. To the minority groups that formed half of the population—the
Croats, Serbs, and Romanians—unification was unacceptable,
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as each group felt entitled to political autonomy and cultural
independence.
8. Finally, the conservative aristocratic forces regained their nerve
under the rallying call of the archduchess Sophia, Ferdinand’s
sister-in-law, who insisted that Ferdinand abdicate in favor of
her son, Francis Joseph.
9. On June 17, the army bombarded Prague and savagely crushed
a working-class revolt.
10. At the end of October, the regular Austrian army attacked the
student and working-class radicals barricaded in Vienna and
retook the city at the cost of more than four thousand casualties.
11. After Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916) was crowned emperor of
Austria, Nicholas I of Russia (r. 1825–1855) sent 130,000
Russian troops into Hungary on June 6, 1849, and they subdued
the country after bitter fighting.
12. For a number of years, the Habsburgs ruled Hungary as a
conquered territory.
C. Prussia and the Frankfurt Assembly
1. When the artisans and factory workers in Berlin joined
temporarily with middle-class liberals in March 1848 in the
struggle against the Prussian monarchy, the autocratic yet
compassionate Frederick William IV (r. 1840–1861) vacillated
and finally caved in.
2. On March 21, he promised to grant Prussia a liberal constitution
and to
merge Prussia into a new national German state.
3. When the workers issued a series of democratic and vaguely
socialist demands that troubled their middle-class allies, a
conservative clique gathered around the king to urge counterrevolution.
4. In May, a National Assembly convened in Frankfurt to write a
German federal constitution, but the members of the Assembly
were distracted by Denmark’s claims on the provinces of
Schleswig and Holstein, which were inhabited primarily by
Germans.
5. The National Assembly called on the Prussian army to respond,
and Prussia subsequently began war with Denmark.
6. In March 1849, the National Assembly finally completed its
drafting of a liberal constitution and elected King Frederick
William of Prussia emperor of the new German national state.
7. Frederick William reasserted his royal authority, disbanded the
Prussian Constituent Assembly, and granted his subjects a
limited, essentially conservative constitution.
8. When Frederick William, who really wanted to be emperor but
only on his own authoritarian terms, tried to get the small
monarchs of Germany to elect him emperor, Austria balked.
9. Supported by Russia, Austria forced Prussia to renounce all its
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schemes of unification in late 1850, and the German
Confederation was re-established.
10. Attempts to unite the Germans—first in a liberal national state
and then in a conservative Prussian empire—had failed
completely.
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