Chapter 11: The Revolutionary Internationale

On March 15, 1848, in the Hungarian city of Pozsony, a poet named Sándor Petőfi stood on the steps of the National Museum in Pest and read twelve demands to a crowd that had gathered with astonishing speed. Freedom of the press. A responsible Hungarian ministry. Annual parliament in Budapest. Civil and religious equality. A national guard. Shared taxation. Abolition of feudal burdens. Jury trials. A national bank. The army must swear allegiance to the constitution. Political prisoners must be freed. Union with Transylvania.

The crowd shouted its assent. Within weeks, the Hungarian Diet had passed the April Laws — abolishing serfdom and robot labor, transforming the feudal estates into a democratic representative body, establishing press freedom, and offering what one scholar called "the widest suffrage right in Europe at the time." Emperor Ferdinand signed them on April 11.

By that date, revolution had already swept Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, and Venice. Metternich — the architect of European reaction since 1815, the man who had built an international system designed specifically to prevent exactly this — had fled Vienna disguised in a laundry cart on March 13. Within eight weeks of the February revolution in Paris, the entire European order was shaking. Telegraph wires carried the news. Newspapers — over sixteen hundred newly created in Germany alone — amplified it. Émigré networks, cultivated through decades of exile, activated. The Communist Manifesto, published in London in late February, arrived just in time to be almost entirely irrelevant to events it appeared to have prophesied.

1848 was the year revolution went continental. It was also the year revolution failed on a continental scale. Within eighteen months, every revolutionary government in Europe except Switzerland's had been crushed or reversed. The story of 1848 is the story of why tearing down is faster than building up — and why the gap between revolutionary mobilization and revolutionary governance is not an accident but a structural feature of the form.

The speed was unprecedented.

February 22 to 24: revolution in Paris. Louis Philippe abdicates. The French Republic is proclaimed. March 13: Metternich falls in Vienna. March 15: revolution in Budapest. March 18-19: revolution in Berlin, barricade fighting in Milan — the "Five Days" that drove the Austrian garrison from the city. March 22: Venice declares independence as the Republic of San Marco. The entire wave, from Paris to the periphery, took approximately eight weeks — extraordinary speed for an era when overland travel still moved at the pace of a horse.

How did it spread so fast?

Clare Pettitt, in Serial Revolutions 1848, argues that the revolutions traveled as narrative. Each uprising was reported, serialized in newspapers, and consumed as an unfolding story in the next capital over. The revolution was, in part, a media event — the first time that real-time reporting of political upheaval in one country could catalyze action in another within days rather than months. Some two thousand miles of telegraph wire connected major European cities by 1848, patchy but sufficient to compress the timeline of contagion. Kurt Weyland, studying the diffusion mechanisms, documented the first instance of what he termed real-time revolutionary contagion.

But the telegraph alone cannot explain it. Political exiles — Poles, Italians, Germans, Hungarians — had formed transnational networks across European cities for decades. When revolutions erupted, many returned home, carrying organizational skills honed in exile. The Communist League, to which Marx and Engels belonged, was itself an émigré organization based in London, Brussels, and Paris. The infrastructure of revolution preceded the events.

The structural conditions had been accumulating across Europe simultaneously. Fiscal crisis. Agricultural failure — the potato blight that devastated Ireland had also struck the continent. Industrial displacement. A generation of educated young men who found every path to advancement blocked by aristocratic privilege. Goldstone's framework maps 1848 precisely: elite overproduction, fiscal strain, popular mobilization enabled by urbanization and print culture, and an international environment in which each revolution lowered the threshold for the next.

What did the revolutionaries actually want?

The specifics varied enormously. But across the continent, certain demands recurred with striking consistency — and the constitutions they produced reveal the depth of the revolutionary imagination at work.

The Frankfurt Parliament, the first freely elected German national assembly, spent a year drafting an Imperial Constitution. The Grundrechte — Fundamental Rights, adopted December 21, 1848 — were remarkable: equality before the law. Abolition of all class privileges and feudal burdens. Freedom of the press and expression. Freedom of assembly and association. Religious equality and minority rights. Free schooling. And a provision nearly unprecedented for the era: these rights were enforceable before an imperial court. A citizen could, in theory, sue the state for violating the constitution.

The parliament offered the crown of a united Germany to Frederick William IV of Prussia. He refused — famously declining to accept a crown "from the gutter," offered by an elected assembly rather than bestowed by God.

The Hungarian April Laws went further. They abolished serfdom and the entire feudal obligation system at a stroke. They established ministerial accountability to parliament, created the widest suffrage in contemporary Europe, and eliminated noble privileges. The transformation was so radical that it created, briefly, a constitutional democratic state out of a feudal kingdom.

In Rome, Giuseppe Mazzini's short-lived Republic produced the only Italian 1848 constitution written, debated, and approved by a constituent assembly elected by universal manhood suffrage. It abolished the death penalty — only the second state in world history to do so, after the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. It established religious freedom, separation of church and state, secular education, and land redistribution from the Church's vast holdings to peasants. The Republic fell on July 4, 1849, to a French military expedition sent by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to restore the Pope. The irony was complete: one republic destroyed another to reinstall a theocracy.

In Venice, Daniele Manin's Republic of San Marco lasted seventeen months, surviving siege from August 1848 until August 1849, when starvation, cholera, and Austrian bombardment forced surrender. Manin had catalogued the fiscal exploitation with a lawyer's precision: by 1845, Austria took forty-five million Austrian lire more from the Venetian region than it spent. Venice became the last revolutionary holdout in Europe — enduring longer, under worse conditions, than any other.

And then there was Paris.

The February revolution had established National Workshops — relief projects enrolling over a hundred thousand unemployed persons. These were not the productive social workshops envisioned by Louis Blanc; they were a deliberate parody designed by Blanc's opponents to discredit the principle. Blanc was given a commission "without any power or budget" and kept as far from implementation as possible.

On June 23, the workshops were ordered closed. Unemployed workers revolted. For four days — the June Days — class warfare erupted in the streets of Paris with a clarity that no subsequent theorist could ignore. General Cavaignac, entrusted with extraordinary powers, brought in troops from conservative rural areas. Approximately ten thousand were killed or wounded. Ten thousand more were deported, chiefly to Algeria.

The June Days were, in Eric Hobsbawm's judgment, "a landmark in modern history, the first large-scale outbreak with clear overtones of class warfare." They split the revolution irreparably. Liberals who had cheered the overthrow of Louis Philippe in February now sided with the army against workers whose demands — employment, economic justice, the right to eat — exceeded what the liberal program could accommodate. The revolutionaries of February became the counterrevolutionaries of June. The breach between political liberalism and economic justice, papered over in the revolution's first weeks, tore open and never closed.

Why did 1848 fail?

Five explanations compete in the scholarship, and the honest answer is that all five are partially right.

The liberal-radical split. The revolutions were torn between bourgeois liberals who wanted constitutional government and political reform, and radicals who wanted economic transformation and universal suffrage. Liberals "rejected privileges of birth" while "affirming the privilege of wealth." At Frankfurt, moderate liberals wanted to draft a constitution to present to the monarchs; radicals wanted the assembly to declare itself a sovereign legislature. The two factions paralyzed each other.

Military loyalty to the old regimes. The armies of Europe's monarchies remained fundamentally loyal. The restoration commenced even before the revolution was over, and it was accomplished by the armies that had never wavered. Cavaignac in Paris, June. Windischgrätz in Prague, June 17. The Austrian army in Vienna, October. The Prussian army in Berlin, December 1849. Saxony and Baden crushed in 1849. The monopoly on organized violence had not changed hands.

Nationalist fragmentation. Lewis Namier argued in 1944 that 1848 "inaugurated a new age, not of liberalism as many revolutionaries hoped, but of a nationalism that was to destroy liberal constitutionalism." Germany and Austria could not achieve unity because they were composed of multiple ethnic groups, and the aspiration to build a nation-state activated ethnic claims that fractured revolutionary solidarity. Nationalism was both the energy source and the solvent.

The peasant paradox. The abolition of serfdom in the Austrian Empire — 1848's single most consequential and irrevocable achievement, passed by the Reichstag on September 7, 1848, largely credited to twenty-five-year-old delegate Hans Kudlich — transformed the peasantry from a revolutionary force into a conservative one. Once freed from robot labor, peasants became grateful to the Emperor. Their demands had been narrow: land, security, autonomy. Once those were met, they had no further interest in urban radicalism. The revolution's greatest success demobilized its largest constituency.

Russian intervention and great-power dynamics. Tsar Nicholas I sent two hundred thousand troops, plus eighty thousand auxiliaries, into Hungary to crush the revolution at the Austrian Emperor's request. General Görgey surrendered at Világos on August 13, 1849. Britain watched passively, more concerned about Russian expansion into the Balkans than about Hungarian democracy. The counter-revolutionary internationale proved stronger than the revolutionary one.

But did 1848 actually fail?

Christopher Clark, in his 2023 study Revolutionary Spring, argues that the failure narrative misses the point entirely. "To talk of 'success' and 'failure' is to miss the point," he insists. The legacy of 1848 is immense.

The abolition of serfdom in the Austrian Empire was never reversed. Over ninety percent of the Empire's population were rural dwellers, and not one subsequent government — not the absolutist regime that followed, not the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, not the successor states after 1918 — attempted to reimpose feudal obligations. Some achievements create social bases so large that restoration becomes structurally impossible.

The Sardinian Statuto Albertino, granted in March 1848, was the only Italian constitution to survive the reaction. It became Italy's constitution in 1861 and remained in force, with modifications, until 1948 — a century of constitutional continuity seeded by a revolution that supposedly failed.

Prussia got a constitution. Flawed, imposed, hobbled by the notorious three-class voting system that weighted ballots by tax payments — but a constitution nonetheless. Prussia was no longer an absolutist state. The counter-revolution could revise 1848's achievements; it could not erase them.

Switzerland transformed from a loose confederation into a federal state, with freedom of press, religion, residence, and democratic governance. While every neighboring state reverted to conservative rule, Switzerland's constitution endured — revised in 1874, wholly replaced in 1999, but built on the same foundation.

By the 1860s, constitutional governments existed everywhere in Europe except the Russian Empire. German and Italian unification, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise — all stemmed from initiatives first taken in 1848. Constitutions were no longer granted from above but founded on the principle of popular sovereignty embodied in elected national assemblies.

The women of 1848 saw all of this — and saw, too, the revolution's refusal to include them.

In Paris, Eugénie Niboyet founded La Voix des femmes — the first female-led daily newspaper in France — and the Club des femmes in March 1848. Jeanne Deroin ran in the 1849 election specifically to denounce "universal male suffrage" as a contradiction in terms. French women demanded the right to participate in governance, workshops for the unemployed, education, freedom in marriage, and the vote.

In Vienna, Karoline von Perin-Gradenstein founded the first political association of women in Austria. She organized a demonstration and brought a petition with a thousand signatures demanding fair labor rights, equality, and education. Men turned their noses at the demonstration, making a mockery of the movement through humiliating cartoons.

In Germany, Louise Otto declared: "The participation of women in the interests of the state is not only a right, but an obligation." She founded a women's newspaper with this warning: "In the midst of the great upheavals in which we all find ourselves, women will discover that they are being forgotten if they forget to think of themselves."

Women fought on the barricades. Emma Herwegh, disguised as a teenage boy and armed with two daggers, fought in Baden. Lucie Lenz took part in storming the Zeughaus in Berlin. Margarethe Adams was one of 585 women arrested in Frankfurt for transporting stones and rifles to the barricades. Henriette Zobel stabbed a Prussian general with her umbrella. Pauline Wunderlich participated in the Dresden May Uprising and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In the restoration that followed, governments across continental Europe closed women's clubs, banned women from political associations, and forbade women from publishing in the political press. The women of 1848 had exposed the gap between the rhetoric of universal rights and the practice of male-only citizenship. The counter-revolution silenced them with a thoroughness that suggests how dangerous the exposure was.

Karl Marx, observing the wreckage from London exile, produced the most penetrating analysis of why 1848 collapsed — and, in doing so, wrote one of the sharpest pieces of political prose in any language.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, published in 1852, opens with the line that would become his most quoted: "all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice... the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Napoleon I was tragedy. His nephew Louis Napoleon — who leveraged the peasant vote to win the presidency, then staged a coup to become Emperor Napoleon III — was farce.

But the deeper argument was about the revolution itself. The revolutionaries of 1848, Marx observed, "anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes." The 1789 Revolution had needed Roman Republican imagery to accomplish its bourgeois transformation. But 1848 merely parodied 1789 without producing new content: "only the ghost of the old revolution circulated."

His prescription was radical: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past."

This is, avant la lettre, the argument we have been tracing. Revolution within the same value system can only produce parody, not transformation. The borrowed costumes prevent the revolution from seeing — and redesigning — the environment. But Marx may have been more right about France than about the entire wave. The Frankfurt Fundamental Rights, the Roman Republic's abolition of the death penalty, the Hungarian April Laws — these were genuinely novel achievements, not borrowed costumes. The constitutions of 1848 were not parodies. They were prototypes.

What 1848 deposited in the pattern library is this: revolutionary contagion can destroy regimes faster than anyone predicts. But building new governance requires organization, shared vision, and institutional design that the initial mobilization cannot provide. The gap between mobilization and governance — between the crowd in the square and the committee drafting a constitution — is not a failure of revolutionary will. It is a structural feature of revolution itself.

The revolutions of 1848 mobilized millions. They produced constitutions of extraordinary sophistication. They abolished serfdom across an empire. They seeded democratic practices that would take decades to mature. And they were defeated — by armies that never wavered, by liberals who feared workers more than kings, by nationalists who fractured solidarity along ethnic lines, by peasants whose demands were narrow enough to be satisfied and conservative enough to become the base for counter-revolution, and by a Russian Tsar willing to send two hundred thousand soldiers to ensure that the old order survived.

G.M. Trevelyan called 1848 "the turning point at which modern history failed to turn." A.J.P. Taylor said it was "the last of the preindustrial revolutions" and that after it "nothing remained but the idea of Force."

Clark's rebuttal deserves the last word: the revolutions should be judged not by whether they held power but by what they accomplished. By that measure, 1848 is not a failure. It is a rehearsal whose script the next century would perform — sometimes as tragedy, sometimes as progress, and sometimes, as Marx warned, as farce.