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The year was 1848, and Europe was burning: The fires of revolution had flared up in country after country, each blaze erupting separately yet all feeding on the same fuel of social unrest and economic instability. It made little difference whether local governments reacted quickly and sternly, or slowly and gently. One way or another, the revolution always seemed to grow. With the pressures of the industrial revolution, food shortages, and increased populations, Europe was dry kindling in 1848, and all it needed was a spark.
How these revolutions were lit, stoked, and eventually extinguished is expertly explained by Mike Rapport in his new book, 1848: Year of Revolution. A lecturer in history at the University of Stirling and author of several well-received books on 19th-century Europe, Rapport draws on eyewitness accounts, political memoirs, and a wide range of secondary sources to produce a clear and persuasive narrative.
The more one reads about the topic, the more one realizes that what makes the year 1848 so memorable is its peculiar combination of faceless crowds and strong leaders. The same combination is what makes Rapport's 1848 so interesting to read. From Bonaparte to Bismarck, Marx to Metternich, powerful figures tried to control and ride the masses that were surging up against the old order. On January 29, 1848, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville warned the Chamber of Deputies: "I believe that right now we are sleeping on a volcano … . Can you not sense by a sort of instinctive intuition &helip; that the earth is trembling again in Europe?"
Tocqueville's premonitions were justified. Within months, revolutions would erupt in Paris, Milan, Venice, Naples, Palermo, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Krakow, and Berlin. Across Europe, peasants, serfs, artisans, and workers were struggling. One study in Germany found workers to be earning less than half the income required to live decently. In Berlin, "a city of 400,000 people by 1848, there were no less than 6,000 paupers &helip; 4,000 beggars, 10,000 prostitutes, 10,000 'vagabonds' (meaning people with no fixed income) and, it was thought, a further 10,000 engaged in criminal activity." As one Prussian minister wrote, "the old year ended in scarcity, the new one opens with starvation. Misery, spiritual and physical, traverses Europe in ghastly shapes—the one without God, the other without bread. Woe if they join hands!"
Rapport insists that this "social question" was the force behind the uprisings. While intellectuals would at times attempt to capitalize on social frustrations, using working-class anger to push for this or that ambitious agenda, the average rioter simply wanted bread on the table and saw violence as one of his few remaining options. As Rapport convincingly argues, the "collapse of the conservative order &helip; was a crisis of 'modernization' in the sense that the European economy and society were changing, but they had not yet been adequately transformed to absorb the intense pressures of population, and, above all, to address the desperation of artisans, craft workers and peasants."
The year's first violent confrontation erupted in Milan, in January—over a cigar, oddly enough. The area was under the control of Austria, and young Milanese nobles had grown increasingly resentful of their limited opportunities under their German-speaking rulers. With luxury taxes a major source of income for the Austrians, the Italians decided to organize a boycott of tobacco. And so, on New Year's Day 1848, the people of Milan gave up smoking. In retaliation, "the Austrian garrison, encouraged by their officers, took up smoking with gusto, ostentatiously waving their cigars in the faces of the citizens."
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