7.

Revolutions of 1848

Abstract
The present chapter explores the historiographical problems surrounding
the role and relative strength of national sentiment in the revolutions of
1848. Here again the national problem is considered in relation to other
contemporary sources of political and social discontent. In each of the
cases under review, from Germany to Habsburg Europe to Italy, historians
portray a sharp and even abrupt rise in the strength and assertiveness of,
in the words of James Sheehan, ‘liberal political action’ in the years im-
mediately preceding the 1848 revolutions, with a corresponding elevation
in the perceived stature of national sentiment and demands.

Keywords: 1848 revolutions, Risorgimento, German unification, Habsburg

Empire, The Social Question

Les révolutions se font malgré les révolutionnaires.1

In a well-known paper delivered at a conference commemorating the

one-hundred-year anniversary of the 1848 revolutions, Ernest Labrousse
argued that if the tempests of the period beginning in 1789 had ‘distant
origins,’ each was immediately preceded by the sudden onset of ‘economic
tensions.’2 This was furthermore the ‘only force powerful enough’ for
revolutions of the type 1789, 1830 and 1848, which he clarified as spontane-
ous, mass uprisings stemming from social grievances of an ‘endogenous’
nature.3 All were thus the product to a considerable degree of ‘hazard’ or
chance, and ‘appeared to their contemporaries comme des révolutions-
surprises.’4 Labrousse’s paper elicited a lively response from his listeners,

1 Labrousse, ‘1848-1830-1789,’ p. 1.
2 Ibid., p. 4.
3 Ibid., p. 3.
4 Ibid., p. 1.

Kostantaras, D., Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848. Amsterdam: Amsterdam

University Press, 2020
doi 10.5117/9789462985186_ch07

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 174  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

some of whom pointed out that the hardships cited by the author were
present elsewhere, and yet, did not have the same ‘explosive’ consequences.
Labrousse’s ruminations on the role and primacy of chance seemed in
this case to be at odds with the conspicuous frequency of revolution in
France, leading another to ask whether these results might be traced more
precisely to ‘psychological’ factors (e.g., that the French people had come
to regard revolution as a ‘phénomène normal’).5 Although Labrousse did
not address this question directly in his essay, he believed that France’s
susceptibility to revolution in 1789, 1830 and 1848 accrued instead from
the fact that certain economic and social imbalances persisted over the
period and were even augmented by the emergence of new insecurities
linked to the spread of industrialization.6
These provocative reflections on the fundamental challenges that ‘for-
tune’ posed to the conduct of history as a scientific enterprise appeared to
deflect attention from Labrousse’s less speculative observations concerning
the events at hand.7 He went on, for example, to explain that the revolu-
tions in question would not have amounted to much if they were merely
‘jacqueries d’affames’ born of temporary economic distress.8 The momentous
nature of what transpired should be attributed instead to the fact that
‘the political crisis coincided with an economic one.’9 There was also a
‘national’ dimension to the unrest. From 1789 forward, Labrousse wrote,
each revolution became indeed the occasion for mass recitals of national
feeling, the byproduct in part of a political culture in which most claims
or calls to action were grounded on their (imputed) congruence with the
will of the nation or the ideals expressed in the great events of its past. In
the words of Labrousse: ‘Finally, there is the national fact, fait passionnel
par excellence. What a thrill, in 1830, at the sight of the tricolor flags. What
hatreds against Guizot and against the regime of July, accomplices by action
or abstention of the treaties of 1815.’10 Similar professions of national agency
and independence came to the fore in 1848, as captured, for example, in

5 Fawtier, Actes du congrés historique, p. 22.

6 Labrousse, ‘1848-1830-1789,’ pp. 4-8.
7 Note, for example, Labrousse’s response to the remarks of M. Van Kalken. Fawtier, Actes du
congrés historique, pp. 26-27.
8 Labrousse, ‘1848-1830-1789,’ p. 11
9 According to Labrousse: ‘In 1848, an industrial proletariat was born: a united proletariat,
in which was born, to a higher degree than before, a class consciousness.’ Ibid., pp. 17, 19. For
Pierre Leveque, the crisis in France might thus be characterized as le printemps des ouvriers.
Leveque ‘Ébranlement et restauration de l’ordre social,’ p. 84.
10 Labrousse went on to add, ‘But the “frisson tricolore” is also a frisson social: that of the
progressive bourgeoisie.’ Labrousse, ‘1848-1830-1789,’ p. 15.

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 Revolutions of 1848 175

Lamartine’s Manifeste à l’Europe. ‘France is a Republic,’ declared the latter

in this famous tract, further adding that ‘the French Republic does not
need to be recognized in order to exist. It is a matter of natural right; it is a
matter of national right. It is the will of a great people which only demands
its title from itself.’11
Although some parts of Labrousse’s thesis have fared better than others
over the years, the view one gains from his work of the ‘composite’ nature
of the revolutions in question remains a staple of scholarly approaches to
the subject, as noted in the previous chapter.12 The revolutions of 1848 bear
witness in this sense to the several problems or sources of dissonance chal-
lenging the repose of Europe and the international order at the time of the
crisis. In the words of Hobsbawm, ‘the world was out of balance. The forces
of economic, technical and social change released in the past half-century
were unprecedented […] their institutional consequences, on the other hand,
were yet modest.’13 The previous chapter closed by asking which of these
changes and the corresponding or perceived deficiencies in the institutional
or geopolitical sphere – the constitutional, social, or national – was the most
severe or capable of initiating a new round of continental unrest. On one
hand, it might be doubted whether any general conclusions are possible on
this point given the different conditions prevailing in the many parts of
Europe affected by the crisis. For others, the question, which is premised
on the assumption that certain problems possessed greater mass appeal or
mobilizing potential than others, might also seem flawed in the sense that
the concept of composite revolution implies that the upheavals sprung from
an interdependence of grievances and their cumulative force.14 Additionally,
certain grievances and aims were entangled in such a way as to pose severe
challenges to any scholar who would wish to delineate the relative power of
each. This entangling of ends is particularly evident in the case of the close
association, well-marked by historians, between ‘liberalism,’ a movement
that encompassed a range of opinions on the appropriate scale and pace

11 Lamartine, Manifeste à l’Europe, pp. 3-4.

12 For a history of the reception of Labrousse’s thesis, see Démier, ‘“Comment naissent les
révolutions.”‘
13 Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 303.
14 As Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann writes, ‘Political reformers had as much need for social
protests to further their cause as those backing social protests depended upon the reformers
to articulate their demands.’ Von Strandmann, ‘The German Revolutions of 1848-1850,’ p. 103.
Similarly for Sheehan, ‘Although the details varied greatly, everywhere a similar pattern emerged:
reports from France produced widespread expressions of discontent, usually led by Vormärz
opposition but quickly joined by more radical groups and reinforced by collective action among
urban working people and peasants.’ Sheehan, German History, p. 661.

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 176  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

of reform, and nationalism.15 If liberalism, as is commonly argued, grew in

popularity and strength during the period was this a reflection therefore
of the constitutional or national substance of its aims?
These problems aside, in each of the cases reviewed here, from Germany
to Habsburg Europe to Italy, historians portray a sharp and even abrupt
rise in the strength and assertiveness of, in the words of Sheehan, ‘liberal
political action’ in the years immediately preceding the 1848 revolutions,
with a corresponding elevation in the perceived stature of national sentiment
and demands.16 Contemporary Italian historians speak, for example, of a
‘transformation of the social base of Italian nationalism from a minority
political sect into a mass movement’ which ‘took place between 1846 and
1848.’17 Similar depictions are found in the works of Czech, Hungarian and
German historians. This remarkable change in the political landscape, if
prone to diverse explanations, helps to account for the swift manner in
which the liberal opposition in these same regions was able to organize a
response to the crisis. There was clearly too a strong transnational element to
this development in the sense that the increase in activism occurred across
a range of political and cultural frontiers in near simultaneous fashion.
R.J.W. Evans, for example, writes that the liberal political forces in Hungary,
which, ‘by the mid-1840s’ had attained a powerful position in the kingdom’s
diet, ‘drew particularly on the German example.’18 Historians also appear
to have less difficulty in accounting for the failure of the revolutions, with
most tending to cite the problem of reconciling the substantial divisions
within the ranks of the opposition forces. In the words of Heinz-Gerhard
Haupt, 1848 may thus be regarded ‘as a historical moment in which the
“complexity” of the problems raised made it difficult for any political action
to be taken.’19

15 Otto Urban writes, for example, that ‘it would be more proper to talk of “liberalisms”’ in the
sense that one cannot point to a ‘complete system of ideas with a well-defined and determinate
content.’ Urban, ‘Czech Liberalism, 1848-1918,’ p. 273. Where necessary, distinctions are made
below (as elsewhere in the volume) between ‘liberals’ and ‘democrats.’ For a review of how these
and related terms (e.g., ‘republicans’) were used during the period, see Philp and Posada-Carbó,
‘Liberalism and Democracy.’
16 To recall again the words of Von Strandmann, the actions of dissidents in 1830 ‘had not been
coordinated and national demands were not strong.’ Von Strandmann, ‘The German Revolutions
of 1848-1850,’ p. 104.
17 Körner and Riall, ‘Introduction,’ p. 399.
18 Evans, ‘1848-1849 in the Habsburg Monarchy,’ p. 184.
19 Haupt, ‘1848 en Allemagne,’ p. 466. Haupt attributes this consensus to a cooling of the
conflict between German historians of varying ideological dispositions. See also Mattheisen,
‘History as Current Events.’

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 Revolutions of 1848 177

The clashes of opinion alluded to above, which were visible in the pre-
1848 divisions among moderates and ‘democrats,’ were greatly heightened
by the ensuing disorder. ‘While many different elements combined to make
the revolution possible,’ Blackbourn writes, for example, of the situation
in Germany, ‘its outbreak released forces of still greater diversity. The
collapse of authority produced an intoxicated sense of new possibilities
that spurred some Germans to further actions but f illed others with
fear.’20 In the case of Habsburg Europe, the ensuing power vacuum and
struggle, combined with the surge in calls for collective action on the
part of one group or another, gave rise to a series of mobilizations and
counter-mobilizations (euphemisms such as the ‘springtime of the peoples’
notwithstanding) that occasionally took lethal turns.21 If, for example, ‘the
threat of German unification,’ writes Bernard Michel, ‘radicalized Czech
nationalism,’ the actions of Magyar nationalists had a similar effect on
the sentiments of Croats, Romanians, Slovaks, and Serbs. 22 These events
serve to mark 1848, he continues, expressing a view shared by several
others cited here, as ‘an essential break’ in the history and relations of
‘the nations of the empire.’23

Rise and Fall of the Frankfurt National Assembly

As indicated above, the historiography surrounding the revolutions of 1848

contains many references to a sharp increase in the strength of the ‘protest
party’ in the second half of the 1840s. Sheehan describes, for example, a
sudden ‘impulse to political involvement,’ manifested, most conspicuously, in
the rise (if difficult to quantify) of ‘liberal political action.’24 Given the stress
placed on the need for unification in the platforms of most liberal parties
(whether moderate or radical), this was to have in turn great implications for
the public stature of the national question.25 And to be sure, ‘nationalism’ is

20 Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century, pp. 143-144.

21 For a genealogy of the history and use of the term, see Caron, ‘“Printemps des peoples.”‘
22 Michel, ‘La Revolution de 1848,’ p. 481.
23 Ibid., p. 477. Similar points in Reill, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation.
24 Sheehan writes in this connection that ‘every indicator of public interest in political life
showed a sharp increase: newspaper circulation, book publishing, the formation of political
organizations, parliamentary debates, and popular demonstrations.’ Sheehan, German Liberalism,
pp. 12, 290.
25 Links between politically active Germans across state lines were meanwhile promoted
by developments such as rising newspaper production and expanding ‘transport networks.’
Siemann, The German Revolution of 1848-49, p. 142.

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 178  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

often said to have risen precipitously in the Bund during this period.26 The
rapid establishment of the Frankfurt National Assembly, which was virtually
in place by the end of March 1848, followed in fact, according to Brian Vick,
from the ability of its founders to ‘draw on the institutional network of the
“organized nationalist movement” that had become increasingly dense and
popular in the course of the 1840s.’27
In the case of the factors that may help to explain the ‘vitality’ of German
liberalism in these years, Sheehan lays stress on ‘a growing sense of crisis’
stemming from ‘economic discontent’ and a corresponding fear of ‘social
unrest.’28 The ‘economic dislocations’ alluded to by Sheehan would seem
to have been most severely felt by those outside of the Mittelstand ranks of
German society, from which the liberal movements were largely composed,
although it is possible that a condition of underemployment in these sec-
tors served to politicize some number of this cohort as well.29 Sheehan
refers more directly to the possibility that such involvement was stirred
by the belief that major reform was needed to avert an impending social
upheaval.30 These anxieties were felt as well by German conservatives who
also increasingly turned to nationalistic appeals as a means to quell the
gathering threat. As Doron Avraham points out: ‘The combination of social
crisis, which from the 1820s on became the ‘Social Question’ (die Soziale
Frage), and political unrest from the 1830s onwards created a background

26 ‘The undoubted centrality of the national question in 1848 was as much effect as cause of
the revolution,’ David Blackbourn observes; however, ‘it was nevertheless a measure of how
much German nationalist sentiment had grown in the 1840s that moderates and radicals alike
thought immediately of establishing a national assembly.’ Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth
Century, p. 164. In the words of Hagen Schulze, ‘it was the idea of nation as a prevailing standard
of legitimacy which served to bind together the other, in part contradictory, factions making
up the party of protest.’ Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism, p. 68.
27 Vick, Defining Germany, p. 79.
28 Sheehan, German Liberalism, p. 12. Living conditions in cities such as Berlin, whose population
increased by 30 percent between 1840 and 1847, were further imperiled throughout the ‘hungry
forties’ by a series of agricultural failures and economic downturns. See, for example, Von
Strandmann, ‘The German Revolutions of 1848-1850,’ p. 106.
29 Sheehan refers here to ‘the judicial and administrative bureaucracy,’ physicians, pastors,
teachers, and other ‘members of the educated elite.’ Sheehan, German Liberalism, p. 19.
30 Ibid., pp. 30-34. Among the groups hardest hit by this distress were the urban craftsmen
and artisans: Economic liberalization had substantially increased their numbers but led as well
to a condition of chronic underemployment increasingly made worse by the introduction of
mechanized production. Seriously endangered in this case by the ‘threat of social demotion,’
urban craftsmen were among the most restive social elements in Europe during the period, a
fact grimly attested to by their overrepresentation on the lists of those killed in the street battles
of 1848. See, for example, Siemann, The German Revolution of 1848-49, pp. 27-28; Hobsbawm, The
Age of Revolution, p. 157.

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 Revolutions of 1848 179

in which conservatives started contemplating the meaning and importance

of collective identity and nationalism.’31
The sources responsible for the growing strength of liberal activism aside,
any movement in this direction served to further raise the level of public
discourse on the need for national unification – a principle which was, again,
a fixture of most liberal programs. This correlation has been well marked,
however, the ‘nature of the association’ as Stuart Woolf suggests, has been
subject to diverse readings.32 In attempting himself to explain the sources
of such a linkage, Hobsbawm noted that part of the difficulty arose from the
fact that there was a ‘surprising degree of intellectual vagueness’ surrounding
the importance of the nation in ‘nineteenth-century liberal discourse.’33
Hobsbawm nevertheless believed that this was due to the assumption ‘that
it did not require to be spelled out, since it was already obvious.’34 He goes
on to argue that the connection accrues in part from a conception of the
‘nation as progress,’ and its corresponding appeal, like liberalism, to those
who regarded themselves the bearers of such values or forces of change.35
It might be objected that this cannot be said to represent a ‘natural’ affinity,
as Hobsbawm refers, from the start, to a particular rendering of the nation
consistent with liberal tastes (it is perhaps akin to saying that liberals were
attracted to a liberal conception of the nation). Hobsbawm touches more
directly on these subjective elements of contemporary political culture
when he later writes that ‘it [e.g., the ‘modern nation’] was linked to the
remainder of the great liberal slogans by long association rather than by
logical necessity: as liberty and equality are to fraternity.’36 Conversely,
‘because the nation itself was historically novel, it was opposed by conserva-
tives and traditionalists, and therefore attracted their opponents.’37 Woolf

31 Avraham, ‘The Social and Religious Meaning of Nationalism,’ p. 527. Avraham refers to
f igures such as Friedrich Julius Stahl, Adam Müller, and Ernest Ludwig von Gerlach who
proposed systems of unification in which the princes would operate under the leadership of a
strengthened central monarchy. The same would appear to hold for Italian conservatives (e.g.,
the ‘Anti-Risorgimento’), who might espouse the merits of independence without an insistence
on unification, or alternatively, a loose, federal approach to the same. See, for example, Lyttelton,
‘The National Question,’ p. 86.
32 Woolf, Nationalism in Europe, p. 12.
33 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 24.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., pp. 38-39. Note: Scholars tend to trace the first political usage of the term ‘liberal’ to the
1820s. See, for example, Sheehan, German Liberalism, p. 11; Philp and Posada-Carbó, ‘Liberalism
and Democracy,’ p. 180.
36 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 40
37 Ibid.

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 180  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

alludes similarly to the logic of a political contest in which each side took
up ideological stances based in part upon the oppositions of the other.38
As indicated below, however, conservatives too could fashion a rendering
of the nation compatible with their interests.
This problem notwithstanding, both Hobsbawm and Woolf refer to
a (liberal) concept of the nation, hewing to French Revolutionary-era
precedents, in which popular sovereignty and other ideals later associ-
ated with liberal movements, were equated with the awakening and
emancipation of the ‘nation.’ It could be argued from this perspective
that liberalism is implicitly a form of nationalism in the sense that it
represents the acquisition on the part of the people at large – the Third
Estate or ‘nation,’ for Sieyès – of political powers formerly reserved for
other parties.39 However, the nation could only exercise its sovereignty
effectively, according to the same tradition, if all its members shared a
common consciousness, will or character; an idea that is reprised, in a
manner flattering to French national pride, in Lamartine’s Manifesto
of 1848. 40 Liberalism necessarily proceeded in tandem therefore with,
in contemporary parlance, a nation-building endeavor. These ideas are
alluded to by Brian Vick when attempting himself to account for the stress
on nationalism in German liberal ideology at the time of the Frankfurt
Assembly. Vick observes in this connection a ‘mutually reinforcing and
interlocking quality’ of the nationalism and liberalism espoused by the
figures in question. Specifically, these deemed the cultivation of national
consciousness and the ‘fusion’ of ‘individual or group opinions into a
general, or national, will’ as essential to the functioning of ‘self-governing
institutions.’41 One may nevertheless ask how deeply these ideas permeated
the rank and f ile of German liberals. Secondly, the correlations made
here, which deal mainly with classical notions of popular sovereignty,

38 ‘Liberalism and nationalism were necessarily associated,’ he writes, ‘because the anti-liberal
states were also anti-national.’ Woolf, Nationalism in Europe, p. 12.
39 See Chapter 4.
40 The various forms of government then in operation, wrote Lamartine in the Manifeste,
reflected ‘the diversity of character, geographical location and intellectual, moral and material
development among peoples.’ Nations were thus ‘like individuals of different ages’ and ‘the
principles that govern them have successive phases.’ The forms – monarchiques, aristocratiques,
constitutionnels, républicains – corresponded to the ‘different degrees of maturity of the genie of
peoples.’ ‘They demand more freedom as they feel able to bear more,’ he continued, ‘they demand
more equality and democracy as they are inspired by more justice and love for the people. It
is a matter of timing. A people loses itself by anticipating the hour of this maturity, just as it
dishonors itself by letting it escape without grasping it.’ Lamartine, Manifeste à l’Europe, pp. 6-7.
41 Vick, Defining Germany, p. 41.

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 Revolutions of 1848 181

don’t account alone for the stress on unification. According, for example,
to what has been said above, the people of Saxony, Baden, or any other
state of the Bund could be construed as ‘nations,’ complete with their own
peculiarities and national consciousness, and their liberal aspirations
accordingly satisfied through a more equitable distribution of political
power. However, this was obviously not the position of German liberal
nationalists. The insistence on unity suggests that they were especially
attracted from the start to a more encompassing understanding of the
nation, dwelling on matters of culture or history, not wholly accounted
for in the theoretical observations made above. 42
Still other works which address the linkage between liberalism and
national unification in Germany offer more prosaic explanations. John
Breuilly, for example, suggests that the insistence upon national unification
in German liberalism was a matter of self-preservation: Simply put, the
triumph of such reforms in any state of the Bund would most likely be
short-lived if its neighbors remained in the enemy camp – a premise which
appears to be applicable as well to the Italian context. As Breuilly explains,
‘opponents of state governments found that behind those governments stood
the Bund. That made national reform a necessary condition of state reform.
Gradually political opponents of individual states took up connections with
one another.’43 This notion of self-preservation had also an international
dimension, at least as expressed in German rhetoric upon the subject: As
Vick shows, the speeches and writings of the Frankfurt delegates were
highly charged with warnings about the ambitions of external powers
and the threats they posed to the people of Germany, especially in their
divided condition (a point also expressed in Italian discourse). 44 There are
finally economic motives to consider. Specifically, the members of liberal
movements, who tended to represent the commercial interests of society and
waxed often, according to Sheehan, on ‘the blessings of economic growth
and development,’ were more likely to appreciate the benefits of the closer
economic union which was bound to follow from the political one.45 These

42 Note that Vick refers to the diverse forms and expressions of German national consciousness
elsewhere in the work.
43 Breuilly, The Formation of the First German Nation-State, p. 32. Liberal politics were thus
implicitly national in orientation, another historian has observed ‘since the creation of a liberal
political order at [the] national level was seen as a precondition of the desired domestic changes.’
Green, Fatherlands, p. 13.
44 Vick, Defining Germany, pp. 74-78.
45 Sheehan, German Liberalism, p. 28. Similar points made in Hobsbawm, Nations and National-
ism, 20-33.

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 182  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

benefits were already visible in the early returns from the Zollverein, or so
at least it was claimed by figures such as List. 46
It might be said that the material and tactical explanations given above
for the liberal attachment to the goal of national unification fail to account
for the emotional quality of the discourse on the subject; an issue noted
often in Anthony Smith’s critiques of ‘structural’ approaches. 47 The qualities
alluded to by Smith came especially to the fore again in works dealing with
the specter of an impending recurrence of continental warfare.48 The Rhine
Crisis of 1840 is often cited as the catalyst for a widespread surge in sentiment
and rhetoric of this kind. 49 In a recent article on the subject, James Brophy
cites, for example, the works of an impressive array of modern German
historians – Wehler, Schulze, Echtenkamp, Alter, Simms, Winkler – all
of whom have ‘canonized the view that the crisis was a decisive moment
when liberals abandoned the hope of reforming the political framework of
the Confederation, moving toward a program of national unity.’50 Brophy
is inclined to agree with this position although he is keen to point out the
plurality of responses to the crisis. On one hand, he writes, ‘evidence abounds
to record the anti-Jacobinic, anti-Bonapartist, anti-western strains of German
political thought, which encouraged not only war but also the belief that
France was a force hostile to Germany’s political development.’ On the other
hand, he continues, ‘an equally impressive range of print matter can be ad-
duced to show a restrained, measured assessment of the political crisis.’51 Also

46 ‘From day to day it is necessary that the governments and peoples of Germany be more
convinced,’ he wrote in 1841, ‘that national unity is the rock on which the edifice of their welfare,
their honor, their power, their present security and existence, and their future greatness must be
founded.’ Likening the reluctance of some small states to join the venture to an ‘apostasy’ and
a ‘national scandal,’ he was confident that in reconsidering the matter ‘intelligently’ all would
find that ‘the material advantages of joining the Union are much greater for those states, than
the sacrifice which it requires.’ List, ‘The National System of Economy,’ pp. 132-133.
47 This problem pursued throughout works such as Smith, Nationalism and Modernism.
48 According to Iggers, a ‘xenophobia’ with ‘anti-French, anti-Slav, and anti-Semitic components
[…] had occupied a crucial place in the ideology of pre-1848 nationalism.’ He adds that ‘In 1848
liberals and particularly democrats […] were more outspoken opponents of Slav stirrings for
autonomy than were conservatives, and were willing to risk a general European war.’ Iggers,
‘Nationalism and Historiography,’ p. 17.
49 See, for example, Leerssen, ‘The Never-Ending Stream,’ pp. 224-261. Similar spirits were
aroused in 1848 over relations with Denmark. See, for example, Hewitson, Nationalism in
Germany, pp. 50-52.
50 Brophy, ‘The Rhine Crisis of 1840,’ p. 3. For Schulze, the Rhine crisis was ‘the breaking
point’ which established nationalism as ‘a mass phenomenon.’ Schulze, The Course of German
Nationalism, pp. 64, 66.
51 Brophy, ‘The Rhine Crisis of 1840,’ p. 20.

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 Revolutions of 1848 183

significant are Brophy’s conclusions regarding the crisis’ role in encouraging

a reduction of censorship restrictions throughout the Bund; a measure that
was conducive to the further dissemination of liberal doctrines.52
In sum, attempts to explain the remarkable developments in the German-
speaking world over the course of 1848 point to a sharp intensification of
political activity in the immediately preceding years and one which accrued
especially to the benefit of liberal and nationalist programs. The Assembly
served as an official medium for the continuation of a dialogue on issues of
this kind, while dealing of course too with the nation’s economic maladies.53
Defining the borders of the German nation was consequently a matter of
first importance but also one of great contention. These vehement debates,
in which ‘Tacitean references to ancient tribal habitations mingled with
voluntarist Rousseauian echoes of the general will,’ offer a remarkable view
of the diversity in both ethnic and civic conceptions of national identity
on the part of those attending as well as the division of opinion over the
merits of federal and unitary state designs.54 As Levinger writes, a central
problem ‘for the revolutionaries of 1848, as for subsequent generations of
German political leaders, was the proper distribution of sovereign authority
between the nation and the territorial states.’55 If in fact, he adds, ‘the leading
revolutionaries concurred that Germany should be unified, many believed
that significant authority should remain vested within the individual territo-
rial states.’56 Compromise was perhaps further hindered by what Sheehan
describes as a political culture in which each faction tended to depict the

52 According to the author: ‘Because state officials saw utility in the nationalist hue and cry,
censors permitted nationalist musings, thus opening a door.’ Ibid.
53 Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century, p. 149.
54 Vick, Defining Germany, p. 142. Although the question of sovereignty was never definitively
settled, most members of the assembly were probably in favor of retaining the Lander (states);
the future Bund would perhaps bear a closer resemblance in this case to the federal Germany
much spoken of by patriots such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) during the Napoleonic
Wars than the federation of German states which later emerged at the Congress of Vienna. As
indicated in the words of Schleiermacher in 1813: ‘My greatest wish after liberation is for one true
German Empire, powerfully representing the entire German folk and territory to the outside
world, while internally allowing the various Lander and their princes a great deal of freedom to
develop and rule according to their own particular needs.’ Cited in Sheehan, German History,
p. 379. Even in 1848, another has observed, ‘the memory of the old Reich’ continued to foster
‘federative rather than unitary’ visions of a future Germany. Green, Fatherlands, p. 322.
55 Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism, p. 225.
56 ‘Indeed,’ he continues, ‘many Germans would continue to use the word “nation” to describe
Germany’s constituent states, such as Bavaria and Wurttemberg, through the decade of the 1860s.
Even Prussia had its own “national assembly” in 1848-1849. In Prussia, however, this usage of
the word “nation” seems to have been an anomaly of the 1848 Revolution. The term “Prussian

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contests at hand as a ‘struggle between good and evil.’57 Given these many
‘controversies’ writes Levinger regarding the constitution, boundaries and
social composition of the nation, ‘the revolutionary movement failed to
crystallize around a single central project’ and ‘ultimately proved no match
for the conservative forces, which were determined to reassert monarchical
authority in the German states.’ Indeed, ‘the failure of the 1848 Revolution,’
he concludes, ‘stemmed in part from the intensely contested character of
the concept “nation.”’58

National Mobilization and Counter-Mobilization in Habsburg

Europe

The sharp rise depicted above in the strength of liberal movements and
internal political contention in Germany over the course of the 1840s is
typical too of accounts of contemporaraneous events in Habsburg Europe. As
Otto Urban writes, for example, of the situation in Bohemia, the emergence
of a ‘new, liberal generation’ of Czech patriots and ‘ideologists’ precipitated an
intense power ‘struggle’ in which the latter sought a ‘comprehensive revision’
of the ‘original premises of the national program.’59 These developments
entailed, Urban continues, a politicization of the Czech national movement,
with ‘purely national (linguistic and literary) demands’ being joined to
‘new, liberal postulates, including claims for radical changes in the basic
social, political and governmental structures.’60 In Hungary, too, the 1840s
are commonly described as a time of intense internal debate, with the
political balance of power increasingly favoring the liberals.61 As again in
Germany, the strength and initiative of liberal movements in both these
parts of Habsburg Europe was reflected in their ability to quickly form an
organized response to the subsequent crisis and advance their agendas for
reform. Moreover, the connection observed in Germany between liberalism
and nationalism holds as well in the Czech and Hungarian cases, although

nation” had appeared quite rarely in public discourse since the Napoleonic era, and it virtually
disappeared after 1850.’ Ibid.
57 Sheehan, German Liberalism, p. 18.
58 Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism, p. 225.
59 Urban, ‘Czech Liberalism, 1848-1918,’ p. 280.
60 Ibid., pp. 280-281.
61 In the words of Eötvös in a text from the time, Hungary found itself in the 1840s ‘at a
crossroads.’ Cited in Vermes, Hungarian Culture and Politics, p. 304. See also Dénes, ‘Political
Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives.’

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 Revolutions of 1848 185

few could have predicted what followed.62 To be sure, the early stages of the
crisis featured episodes of intracommunal cooperation, notably in Bohemia.
However, these were succeeded by an escalation of tensions, increasingly
inflammatory rhetoric (replete with dystopian visions of national annihila-
tion), and ultimately, in the case of the Hungarian Kingdom, full-blown
ethnic conflict. This violence reached such a scale again that the period has
often been characterized as representing a ‘turning point’ in the history of
the ‘nations of the empire.’63
Attempts to reconstruct how this came about usually take account of
the fact that some conflicts of interest were previously present among the
groups in question, although one hastens to add that this did not imply an
unavoidable slide toward open warfare. Nor did the leaders of the national
movements within the region always espouse radical or overtly threatening
aims, as indicated again in the Czech case, where many advocated strongly
against full sovereignty and the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. This
position was famously presented in the course of Palacký’s rejection of an
invitation to join the deliberations in Frankfurt; the implication being that
Bohemia, which had been part of the Holy Roman Empire as well as the Bund,
belonged in a future united Germany. But ‘when I direct my gaze beyond
the frontiers of Bohemia,’ countered Palacký in his well-known ‘letter’ of
11 April 1848, ‘natural and historical considerations constrain me to turn
not to Frankfurt but to Vienna, to seek there the centre which is fitted and
predestined to ensure and defend the peace, the liberty, and the rights of
my nation.’64 The initiatives in Frankfurt promised only to elevate ‘German
national consciousness,’ he continued, and ‘expand the power and strength of
the German Empire.’65 The dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire would
strengthen in turn, the hand of Russia, warned Havlíček, an acquisitive
power driven by the ambition to ‘control all Slav lands.’66 Any hope for
the cultivation of a Czech national life, and surely all of the small nations
composing the Habsburg Empire grasped this point, depended therefore
upon the preservation of the empire – provided of course that it recognized
the error of its ways and adopted a more enlightened nationality policy.67

62 According, for example, to Urban, ‘all forms of Czech liberalism were “nationalistic” to some
degree.’ ‘Czech Liberalism, 1848-1918,’ p. 274
63 Michel, ‘La Révolution de 1848,’ p. 481.
64 Palacký, ‘Letter to Frankfurt,’ p. 327.
65 Ibid., p. 324.
66 Havlíček, ‘The Slav and the Czech,’ p. 253.
67 For only a system built upon ‘the principles of equality,’ advised Palacký, could produce the
unity necessary for the empire’s survival. Palacký, ‘Letter to Frankfurt,’ p. 327.

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 186  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

As historians have nevertheless pointed out, the prospects for compromise

not only between the empire and its constituent nations, but among the latter
themselves, were sometimes undermined by overlapping territorial claims
and notions of ‘historic rights.’68 ‘The example set by the Magyars,’ as Peter
Brock has written, ‘stimulated the Slovaks and other peoples of the kingdom
to emulate their cultural achievements and even to resist them when they
attempted to deny to others what they demanded for themselves.’69 The
Ukrainian movement elicited hostility in turn from Polish nationalists
who saw it as a threat to their dream of a fully restored Commonwealth.70
The Czechs had meanwhile to contend with the appearance of similarly
‘upstart’ Moravian and Slovak nationalisms. Of these, the latter proved
more controversial and this despite the fact that its first representatives,
Ján Kollár and Josef Šafařík, advocated a form of Pan-Slavism that took
some account of Czech sensibilities.71 The ‘unitary’ position on the language
question advocated by the latter was subsequently rejected by younger
Slovaks such as Ľudovít Štúr who published several ‘apologies’ of their own
intended to demonstrate the substantial differences between the ‘national’
idioms of both peoples.72
Although the writings of Štúr produced angry denunciations in Prague,
historians suggest that the attention of Czech scholars and polemicists
tended to fix more upon what was perceived to be the historical confronta-
tion between German and Slav; a perspective on full display in Palacký’s

68 For an earlier scholar, ‘the question of nationalities was raised and appeared in all its
complexity. […] Each nation seeking to resolve the issue to the best of its interests, it was inevitable
that rivalries would arise: pursuing its national unity, it could not fail to come into conflict with
another nationality living in the same territory.’ Markovitch, ‘La Révolution Serbe de 1848,’ p. 194.
69 Brock, The Slovak National Awakening, p. 39.
70 As Janowski writes, ‘Soon, however, it became apparent that the conflict between the
despotic authority and the liberal opposition was blended with the conflict between rivaling
nations. Weaker nationalities considered the threat from Vienna less dangerous than the threat
from the stronger neighbors. So, the Czechs were afraid of the Germans, the Ukrainians of the
Poles, and the weaker nations of the Hungarian crown of the Hungarians. In effect all of them
gave support to the Viennese court in the hope that the reformed Austria will assure them the
best conditions for development. In this way, in 1848 the Poles in the Austrian Partition had
to face the modern nationality question for the first time in their history. Besides the Polish
national movement there appeared a quickly maturing and even more self-conscious Ukrainian
movement. Polish thought was totally unprepared for such a development, repeating dogmas
of the return to the boundaries of 1772.’ Janowski, Polish Liberal Thought before 1918, p. 98.
71 For Kollár and Šafařik, former students at the University of Jena where they had come into
contact with both the Burschenschaftler and the works of Herder, Czechs and Slovaks formed
a single nationality. See, for example, Orton, The Prague Slav Congress of 1848, p. 9.
72 Ibid. For additional historiographical context, see Maxwell, ‘Effacing Panslavism.’

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 Revolutions of 1848 187

multivolume History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia (1848-1867).73

‘Continuous contact and conflict between the Slav, Roman and German
characters,’ wrote Palacký, ‘was the basic feature of all Bohemian-Moravian
history.’74 But given the fact that the Roman character did not touch the
Czechs directly it might simply be said that Czech history is ‘based mainly
on conflict with Germandom, in other words, on the Czechs acceptance or
rejection of German manners and regimen.’75 Although Palacký used much
stronger language in this Czech version of his history than the earlier work
of the same title published in German, such ideas, circulating widely in the
later years of the Vormärz, offer some context for the rhetoric that burst out
amid the stresses of 1848, with German and Slavic writers each accusing
the other of fantastic plots to absorb and assimilate their peoples.76 As
scholars such as Hugh Agnew nevertheless contend, many people, Czech
and German alike, retained a ‘flexible’ sense of ‘Bohemian’ identity well into
the nineteenth century.77 Some even sought to give it a surer foundation, as
glimpsed in the writings of the Charles University professor Bernard Bolzano
(1781-1848) whose appeal for a renewed commitment to bilingualism and the
cultivation of a ‘Bohemian’ identity recalls the hopeful remarks of Belgian
patriots discussed in previous chapters.78
The social cleavage between German and Slav abhorred by Bolzano was
nevertheless reinforced, writes Urban, recalling points made again in the
Belgian case, by a pattern of industrialization in Bohemia in which the
‘means of production’ largely found their way into the hands of German
speakers.79 These and other socio-economic developments have also been
cited by scholars such as Hroch as conducive to fostering a ‘coincidence

73 See, for example, Štaif, ‘The Image of the Other.’ According to Urban, ‘from the late eighteenth
century, Czech modernization was a matter of building up the Czech nation, saving it from the
influence of Germanization.’ Urban, ‘Czech Liberalism, 1848-1918,’ p. 274.
74 Palacký, ‘A History of the Czech Nation,’ p. 55.
75 Ibid.
76 Orton, The Prague Slav Congress of 1848, pp. 42-43.
77 Agnew, ‘Czechs, Germans, Bohemians?’
78 Text refers to works such as Bolzano, ‘Concerning the Relations between the Two Peoples
of Bohemia,’ pp. 239-245. For additional context, see Hroch, ‘From Ethnic Group toward the
Modern Nation.’
79 As one scholar has explained, ‘Initially, industrialization occurred in German-speaking
regions with their older tradition of crafts, and due to this and other reasons a stereotype
grew up around the middle of the nineteenth century: the German as craftsman, industrialist,
entrepreneur, workman; the Czech as peasant, farmer or workman.’ Progressing in this fashion,
industrialization privileged (or reinforced the privileges) of one group over another and placed
Czech workmen in the position of having to learn German in order to improve their status.
Urban, ‘Czech Society, 1848-1918,’ pp. 199-202. Gellner alludes to the case in Gellner, Nations and

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 188  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

of national demands and social (political, cultural) interests’ which may

have abetted the growth of the Czech movement. 80 Sharp increases, for
example, in the size of the rural population of Bohemia, combined with
peasant emancipation and a rise of commercial activity in the towns, led to a
steady exodus of people from the countryside. These largely Czech-speaking
newcomers to town life accordingly found themselves in circumstances
which were propitious for the elevation of collective sentiment: Unlike the
German peasant, argues Hroch, the Czech ‘entered a society whose official
language he was unable to understand. The difference in possibility of social
advancement – and also in the search for a new identity – became apparent.’81
These sources of friction notwithstanding, the demands included in the
11 March 1848 Prague Citizens Petition, which called for the unification and
federal autonomy of the ancient ‘crown lands’ of Bohemia, Moravia and
Silesia, the elevation of Czech to equal status with German as the language
of public affairs, and a set of reforms concerning the extension of political
rights and civic freedoms, was initially drafted with the support of liberal
German Bohemians.82 Unfortunately, the final version of the petition and
its provisional acceptance by the hard-pressed Habsburg authorities was
greeted with less enthusiasm by a Bohemian German community stirred
up by the progress of events in Frankfurt. In the rapidly intensifying contest
over loyalties it became clear, writes Agnew, that the majority of the latter
had been converted to the großdeutsch or Greater Germany program.83 The
pronouncements of Havlicek demanding succession of Bohemia from the
German Confederation and finally Palacký’s widely circulated response to
the Frankfurt Assembly (cited above), further widened the breach.84 Both
lent their support in turn to the forming of the Prague Slav Congress, seeing
this as a means for rallying Slavic opinion in defense of maintaining the
physical integrity of the Habsburg Empire.
For Jeremy King, the inhabitants of Bohemia thus found themselves
suddenly faced with ‘a fundamental question […] did they want to belong to
a German state, to a Habsburg one, or to a Czech or Bohemian one within
the monarchy?’85 The advocates of each side proceeded to publicize their

Nationalism, pp. 108-109n. See also the observations of Hroch, ‘National Romanticism,’ p. 14,
and idem, ‘From Ethnic Group toward the Modern Nation,’ p. 106.
80 Hroch, ‘From Ethnic Group toward the Modern Nation,’ p. 95.
81 Ibid., p. 99. See also Klíma, ‘The Czechs,’.
82 Havránek, ‘Bohemian Spring 1848,’ p. 125.
83 Agnew, The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, p. 118.
84 Havránek, ‘Bohemian Spring 1848,’ p. 125.
85 King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, p. 30.

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 Revolutions of 1848 189

positions with competing slogans demanding ‘Czechia for the Czechs! And
‘Bohemia for the [German] Bohemians!’86 These frictions, however severe,
between Czech and German speakers of Bohemia did not escalate into
armed conflict. Unfortunately, this was not true in the case of Hungary,
where intra-communal relations took a violent turn.
In the case of pre-1848 Hungarian affairs, here again, historians point to
a heightening of nationalist discourse, as well as the ill feelings inspired in
minority groups by the Magyarization campaigns, expressed in the form of
language ordinances, issuing from the kingdom’s Diet.87 This latter institu-
tion, which had been recalled to service by Habsburg authorities in 1825,
became the site of considerable debate and acrimony over the question of
how best not only to improve the nation but preserve it from extinction.88 For
all the violent clashes of opinion which came to the fore, these proceedings
helped nevertheless to shape the Diet into an institution which had by 1848,
in the view of Kořalka, ‘far outdistanced all other corporate representative
bodies in the Habsburg Monarchy in terms of political experience, definition
of aims and determination.’89
Contention within the Diet entered a critical phase in the 1840s following
the rise of a new generation of liberal statesmen, led above all by Kossuth,
and a corresponding attempt to accelerate the pace of reform.90 In addition
to fierce debate on issues such as peasant emancipation, freedom of the
press, and measures to increase commerce, opinions also diverged over a
renewed push to make Magyar ‘the vehicle of Hungary’s cultural life’ – a
project that aroused opposition from other groups within the kingdom.91 The
language laws of the 1830s which made knowledge of Hungarian mandatory
for all engaged in public affairs were particularly divisive.92 Demands for a
federalization of the Habsburg Empire further elevated these tensions by rais-
ing the prospect (should they succeed) of even greater exposure to Magyar
control – as the federal program envisioned by Hungarian leaders for the

86 Ibid., p. 24.
87 The recall of the Hungarian Diet in 1825 is typically identified as the starting point of the
so-called ‘reform era’ in the kingdom’s history. Barany, ‘The Age of Royal Absolutism,’ p. 188.
88 Vermes, Hungarian Culture and Politics, p. 319.
89 Kořalka, ‘Revolutions in the Habsburg Monarchy,’ p. 149.
90 See especially the description of the 1843-1844 diet in Vermes, Hungarian Culture and Politics,
pp. 308-313.
91 Barany, ‘The Age of Royal Absolutism,’ p. 190.
92 ‘We are yet a Hungarian people [genus Hungaricum] and a single people,’ objected, for
example, the Croatian poet Juraj Rehoni in 1832, ‘so long as the communal Latin tongue remains.’
Cited in Evans, ‘Language and State Building,’ p. 9. For additional background, see Péter, Hungary’s
Long Nineteenth Century, pp. 187-189.

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 190  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

empire did not extend to the lands enclosed within the Hungarian Kingdom
itself. Attempts by some prominent figures such as István Széchenyi to exert
a restraining influence on these trends were nevertheless defeated by more
forceful and charismatic proponents of change.93 The mobilizations of other
language groups within the kingdom meanwhile grew apace.
To meet this challenge, Hungarian reformers reprised a democratized
version of the old culturally neutral concept of the ‘political nation.’ National
feeling would be grounded, according to this view, in common political,
social and legal rights, the access to which was now to be enjoyed by all the
inhabitants of the kingdom (not merely the nobility). Hungarian liberals,
much like those discussed earlier in Poland, hoped therefore to thwart
demands for greater autonomy among the minority groups through a
program of expanded individual freedoms, or, in so many words, ‘to offer
constitutionalism in return for assimilation.’94 But this enlarged ‘politi-
cal nation’ still required a common language to function, or so at least it
was claimed by Magyar legislators, who made their preferences for the
choice of such an idiom clear. The prospective benefits of membership
in the ‘Hungarian political nation’ proved therefore inadequate in halt-
ing the politicization of groups such as the Slovaks whose efforts toward
cultural rehabilitation and enrichment evolved into appeals for a separate
crown land – a constitutional measure now deemed necessary to prevent
‘denationalization.’95
As witnessed previously in the cases of Germany and Bohemia, Hun-
garian liberals responded swiftly to the disorders of 1848 and sought at
once to mobilize popular support for their cause.96 Legislation was duly
passed abolishing the robot, extending suffrage – the old ‘noble nation’ was
finally put to rest – and establishing freedom of the press. These reforms
were institutionalized in the ‘April laws’ which additionally proclaimed
Hungary’s new autonomous status within the empire and its reunifica-
tion with Transylvania. Jubilation surrounding these achievements was
soon tempered, however, by reports of growing restiveness among the
kingdom’s national minorities, the insecurities of which were heightened
now by the prospect of life in Hungary without the mediating influence of
Vienna. These anxieties surfaced in the earlier cited Prague Slav Congress

93 See, for example, Vermes, Hungarian Culture and Politics, pp. 303-308.
94 Trencsényi, editorial introduction to Lajos Mocsary ‘Nationality,’ in Trencsényi and Kopeček,
Discourses of Collective Identity, II, p. 356.
95 Brock, The Slovak National Awakening, p. 52.
96 See Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary.

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 Revolutions of 1848 191

of June 1848 but took a darker turn with the actual outbreak of fighting
between Serbs and Magyars in the Banat, the former drawing volunteers
from the semi-independent Serbian state across the Habsburg border.97
The conflict quickly escalated into a fierce and wasteful struggle of a year’s
duration, since characterized by some historians as the ‘region’s first ethnic
and race war.’98 Warfare also broke out between Magyars and Romanians
in eastern Hungary and Transylvania.
An additional challenge to Magyar hegemony came finally from Croatia,
which possessed an army of its own led by the newly installed Ban, Josip
Jellačić. Although defeated in his first clashes with Hungarian forces in
September of 1848, Jellačić later helped to put down the second Viennese
revolution of that year, a victory which appeared to mark a turning point in
the fortunes of the beleaguered empire. The fall of Prague shortly followed.
By January 1849, with order restored in the capital and a new emperor at
its head, the monarchy was poised to reckon with Hungary. An offer of
military assistance from the Tsar in May settled the issue. And yet at this
late hour the now fully independent state of Hungary, its leaders having
refused to recognize the succession of Franz Joseph to the Habsburg crown,
made a sweeping gesture of peace to the peoples over whom it still claimed
suzerainty, guaranteeing ‘a national life’ to all in exchange for political
unity.99 It was nevertheless a show of beneficence, indifferently received,
on the part of a government which, in less than a month’s time, would
cease to exist.

1848 and the ‘New Risorgimento Historiography’

In a recent review article, Mauricio Isabella observed that ‘the centre of

gravity’ of Risorgimento scholarship, ‘has shifted away from the French
period and the earlier decades of the Restoration towards 1848-9 and the
biennium of 1859.’100 Although Isabella detects no opposition on the part of
the scholars in question to the view that ‘the French Revolution was central
to the origins of the Risorgimento,’ the representatives of this new school,
and Isabella refers specifically to figures such as Banti, Ginsborg, Isvenghi
and Cecchinato, see 1848 as exemplifying and in rather abrupt fashion

97 For additional background, see Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, I, pp. 239-250.
98 Deák, ‘The Historiography of Hungary,’ p. 1046. See also Ćirković, The Serbs, p. 203.
99 Text refers to the Nationalities Act of 28 July 1849.
100 Isabella, ‘Rethinking Italy’s Nation-Building,’ p. 256.

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 192  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

‘the birth of a new popular political culture.’101 This view breaks also with
postwar traditions of historiography, linked especially with the thought of
Gramsci, in displaying a greater appreciation for the mass involvement of
the public in events like 1848, which these later scholars attribute in turn
to a sharp increase in the strength and spread of national sentiment.102
In The Risorgimento Revisited, Lucy Riall and Silvana Patriarca write
similarly of 1848-1849 as having acquired the significance of a ‘turning
point in Italian history,’ while referring also to the increasing importance
of ‘nationalism’ as a ‘causal variable’ over ‘the primacy of class struggle
and the fight for political hegemony.’103 This change is credited in part to
historiographical trends corresponding to the intervening linguistic turn
as illustrated especially again in the work of Banti, who has striven to show

101 Ibid. Note also again remarks of Körner and Riall, ‘Introduction,’ p. 399. This view may be
distinguished from ones found in prewar histories, often ‘hagiographical’ and teleological in
nature, which give the impression of a gradually unfolding process, beginning in the eighteenth
century, and characterized by a steady, incremental growth in popular mobilization. ‘Everyone
knows,’ wrote the historian Gioacchino Volpe in 1932, ‘that to understand the ‘Risorgimento’ it
is not enough to go back to 1815 or even to 1796. […] The ‘Risorgimento,’ as the renewal of Italian
life, as the formation of a new bourgeoisie, as a growing consciousness of national problems […]
has to be traced back to well before the Revolution.’ Cited in Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 233.
Gramsci refers to Volpe’s L’Italia in cammino: l’ultimo cinquantennio (1927).
102 Isabella refers, for example, to the work of Anna Maria Isastia, who has argued that the
military conflicts of 1848 and 1849 involved ‘over a hundred thousand individuals organized in
more than 350 groups of volunteers.’ Isabella, ‘Rethinking Italy’s Nation-Building,’ p. 253. This
shift can even be seen in the works of important present-day scholars, who, in their studies from
the 1990s tended ‘to look primarily at the interaction between social classes and institutions in
the Restoration regimes, at the expense of revolutions, ideology and politics, thus neglecting
nationalism and even the Risorgimento itself as putative causes accounting the creation of
the Italian state.’ Ibid., p. 250. Riall, for example, once wrote of Risorgimento as an outcome of
the failure of Italian states (other than Piedmont) ‘to negotiate Italy’s ‘difficult modernization’
successfully.’ Riall, The Italian Risorgimento. Unification occurred, John Davis wrote similarly in
a more recent piece, ‘because six Italian states collapsed,’ crushed under a weight of accumulated
discontent stemming from ‘a series of crises’ beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing
into the nineteenth. Davis, ‘Rethinking the Risorgimento?,’ p. 45.
103 Patriarca and Riall, The Risorgimento Revisited, pp. 2, 12. See also Körner and Riall, ‘Introduc-
tion,’ p. 397. This to be distinguished from Gramsci, whose interpretation of the ‘nationalism’
of the Moderates ran as follows: ‘The Moderates, then, were an expression of the “trepidation”
of the aristocracy and affluent people, who feared “excesses,” and of the diplomatic corps. In
what way could this be an expression of anything “national”? As for the fear of “excesses”: was
it not fear of the classes that would mobilize to assert their progressive demands? And the
“fearful”: were they not the reactionary protectors of an antinational status quo…? […] Grand
Duchy or a unified Italy: what does it matter as long as things stay the same?’ Gramsci, Prison
Notebooks, p. 245. Note that Gramsci’s interpretation continues to find a place in Risorgimento
historiography, as witnessed in the work of Franco Della Peruta. See, for example, again, Isabella,
‘Rethinking Italy’s Nation-Building,’ p. 249.

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 Revolutions of 1848 193

how the national aspirations conveyed in writings of various patriot-literati

could obtain a mass following.104 Far from advancing their claims through
appeals to abstract concepts or principles, the texts cited by Banti dwell
upon matters of faith, kinship, heroism and honor; connecting the ideals
and aims in question (consciously or not) to ‘deep images’ which had the
capacity to arouse emotional responses and motivate action. Banti thus
conducts an analysis of Risorgimento discourse that responds, many feel
effectively, to the kinds of cautions expressed by Lyttelton when writing
earlier of how too great a reliance on ‘disembodied ideas’ may inhibit an
understanding of the ‘social forces’ which actually made the Risorgimento.105
In summary, although the turn in scholarship cited above continues
to provoke debate, it seems uncontroversial at present to rank national
sentiment high among the factors responsible for the massive unrest across
the Italian peninsula over the years 1848-1849. This raises in turn by-now
familiar questions regarding how to best account for the sharp rise in such
sentiments considering again the nature of the disturbances in 1830, which
if significant, failed to acquire – and by a large margin – such dimensions.
What had happened in the intervening years to dramatically alter the
fortunes of the national movement in Italy? In addition to the claims of
authors such as Banti and Ginsborg regarding developments on the cultural
front and their effects, speculation on this question turns also to trends in
the political sphere.106 Here again, scholars tend to link the rise of nationalism
in Italy during this period to an increase in the strength of liberalism,
variously defined. For Roberto Romani it was in fact more precisely the
emergence and popularity of a particular branch of Italian liberalism, namely
‘moderatism,’ that warrants attention.107 This moderate ‘movement’ had

104 For Körner and Riall, Banti ‘laid down the major challenge to previous ways of thinking’ in
his landmark book, published in 2000, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santita` e onore alle
origini dell’Italia unita [Risorgimento nation: Kinship, sanctity and honor at the origins of a united
Italy]. Körner and Riall, ‘Introduction,’ p. 399. Note again that some historians, such as David Laven,
continue to express reservations toward this school of thought. See, for example, Laven, ‘Why Patriots
Wrote and What Reactionaries Read,’ pp. 419-426. ‘When popular insurrections broke out in 1848,’
he countered earlier, ‘those on the barricades were not prompted by reading Foscolo or looking at
the canvases of Hayez. […] Revolution came about because of the failure of the Restoration regimes
to address practical problems faced by ordinary Italians.’ Laven, ‘Italy,’ p. 257.
105 Lyttelton, ‘The Middle Classes in Liberal Italy,’ p. 218.
106 See, for example, Ginsborg, ‘European Romanticism and the Italian Risorgimento.’
107 ‘Moderates,’ write Philp and Posada-Carbó, ‘saw themselves as a “party,” as distinct from
a faction, and sought a dialogue with their governments. They were committed to order and
the decentralization of state institutions, and aspired to a constitutionally protected dialogue
between the governing classes and the sovereign. They emphasized the importance of a
public sphere for political deliberation and as the basis for mixed government. They wanted

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 194  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

its ‘inception,’ writes Romani, in 1843 with Gioberti’s previously cited Del
primate morale, a work which inspired a host of comparable publications
promoting the ‘neo-Guelph’ position, the great advantage of which, from
a popularization standpoint, lay in its complimentary attitude toward the
Church.108 In short order, ‘a moderate network encompassing the whole
peninsula was quickly set up,’ the power of which was expressed not only
in intellectual and journalistic endeavors but in the realm of practice, as
witnessed by the reforms undertaken in the Papal States and Piedmont on
the eve of the revolutions.
Despite the differences in doctrine separating the various branches
of Italian liberalism, the connection cited elsewhere appears again to
hold: where liberalism grew in strength, so too did nationalism. That said,
familiar questions come to the fore regarding which end of the linkage
merits precedence – were people drawn, for example, to such movements
on the basis of their constitutional or national ideals? – or were indeed the
two joined in such a way as to render such queries irrelevant (or insoluble)?
In addition to the ideological and cultural factors noted above, practical
explanations for such a linkage are also prominent and analogous to the
German situation. As in the case of the relationships in Germany between
the individual federal units and the Bund, the success of liberalism in one
state of the Italian peninsula was arguably contingent upon its triumph
elsewhere; as any isolated attempt at regime change would otherwise be
exposed to a reactionary onslaught – with of course the support of Austria
– from its neighbors. These factors could accordingly serve to profoundly
entangle national independence, unification and anti-Austrian sentiment
in the mind of Italian liberals. Another practical source of calls for unifica-
tion, relevant also to German liberalism, may be found in the material
sphere and namely in the form of its projected economic advantages. The
question of a peninsula-wide railway network was a particularly popular
subject; however, this could not be completed without the cooperation of
Austria, which declined to link its Italian territories by rail with those of
Piedmont – a policy, writes Lyttelton, which ‘helped to fuse economic and
nationalist grievances.’109

independence from foreign intervention and advocated a politics rooted in their own history
and culture.’ Philp and Posada-Carbó, ‘Liberalism and Democracy,’ p. 193. For contemporary
developments in democratic ideology, see Fruci, ‘Democracy in Italy.’
108 According to Romani, ‘moderatism worked for it resonated with deep-rooted opinions and
feelings associated with Catholicism.’ Romani, Sensibilities of the Risorgimento, p. 97.
109 Lyttelton writes, for example, of a major effort in the 1840s on the part of journalists and
intellectuals to ‘popularize’ a ‘programme for economic unification.’ Ibid., p. 88.

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If in sum, scholars have recently tended to depict a sharp increase in

popular support for national independence and unification throughout
the peninsula in the second half of the 1840s, why did the revolution in
Italy fail to make any progress in achieving such aims? Reasons given for
this outcome include factors cited elsewhere, such as the existence of a
plurality of interests and agendas among the opposition forces, as well as
the actions and deficiencies of certain key figures, chief among them King
Charles Albert of Piedmont. Some scholars also refer to the failure of the
nationalist parties to draw the rural populace into the fold.110 Accounts
of the revolutions in 1848-1849 give compelling evidence, for example, of
mass uprisings involving the urban strata of Italian life.111 However, the
participation of the rural peasantry in such events and their attitude more
generally toward issues of ‘national’ import remains difficult to assess.112
That said, many scholars no doubt share Ilaria Porciani’s view that the
rural populace ‘had no interest in the cause of independence, let alone
unification […] most of all, it was the urban dwellers (including lower-class
people) who participated in 1848.’113 She further argues that sources such as

110 Although he spoke often of the goal to create a genuine mass movement, Mazzini himself
looked first to the ‘the youth of the educated classes,’ as a recruiting ground for Young Italy. His
reasons for doing so appeared to rest not on material interests but the belief that his movement
was built upon conceptions of duty and mission that required a modicum of leisure time,
education, and independence of mind to grasp. Mazzini, Joseph Mazzini, p. 107. It was similarly
the urban middle classes, representing more generally a retinue of merchants, professionals and
bureaucrats (the latter of whom had been enlarged in number by the reforms of the Napoleonic
era), who are thought to have been the primary consumers of the canone risorgimentale and
the greatest advocates for reform and Italian unif ication. Many of these found their career
prospects inhibited by the Restoration, a situation which was further complicated in Venice and
Lombardy by the tendency to fill government positions with appointees from Vienna. Lyttelton,
‘The Middle Classes in Liberal Italy,’ pp. 219-221.
111 See, for example, the remarks of Carlo Cattaneo in L’Insurrection de Milan en 1848. For
additional background on Cattaneo’s thought and actions, see Thom, ‘Unity and Confederation
in the Italian Risorgimento.’ As Adrian Lyttelton recently wrote, ‘in 1848 the mobilization of
the masses was far more general than in 1859-1860, and even if it was prevalently an urban
phenomenon, there were moments when the rural population was also involved.’ Lyttelton,
‘Comment.’
112 As John Davis and Paul Ginsborg write in another work, the popular spirits and enthusiasms
aroused by the great events of the day might just as rapidly be extinguished or diverted, e.g.,
‘We do not want the Republic,’ declared the villagers from one province of the Neapolitan
Kingdom over the course of the Napoleonic struggle, ‘if we must pay the same taxes as before.’
Cited in Davis and Ginsborg, Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento, p. 21. A figure
such as Garibaldi was thus of immense value because of his ability to inspire mass interest.
Riall, Garibaldi, pp. 226-247.
113 Porciani, ‘On the Uses and Abuses of Nationalism from Below,’ p. 81.

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Cattaneo’s L’Insurrection de Milan en 1848 which allude to the involvement

of the peasantry were intended to counter the very different accounts of
the event produced by Austrian authorities.114 Still other scholars note in
this connection a marked disinterest toward ‘the people’ in Risorgimento
discourse, or at least a tendency to show much less reverence toward the
same than found in those nationalist traditions with a prominent volkish
dimension.115 A similar situation it may be argued arose in Greece, where
the peasant masses also appeared to interfere with the reveries of a social
elite, fixated on a golden past.116 Italy and Greece stand out starkly in this
case from contemporary Slavic and German nationalisms which expended
so much ink and energy upon the glorification of folk culture, a phenomenon
that appears to suggest the conditioning role of external perceptions and
attitudes.117
If not included in the nationalist discourse the peasants were neverthe-
less a social force of immense potential, their lives having been adversely
affected by the nexus of high population growth and the commercialization
of agriculture.118 Some historians may take these factors to suggest again
that the peasantry represented a missed opportunity for Italian national-
ism, a social force that could otherwise have proven decisive. Mazzini, for
one, who referred often to the examples of the Spanish and Greek wars
of independence, appreciated this fact; however, he also seemed puzzled
over the way forward.119 The task of building a truly mass movement had,

114 Ibid.
115 For Stuart Woolf, ‘wholly absent from Risorgimento national discourse is exaltation of the
peasantry as the ‘carriers’ of the original purity and language of the nation.’ Woolf, ‘Nation,
Nations and Power in Italy,’ p. 302.
116 These questions explored in works such as Augustinos, ‘Philhellenic Promises.’
117 Greek and Italian intelligentsia tended to covet in so many words those things (and the
honors attached to them) which they perceived to rank high in the minds of enlightened European
opinion – even if such claims of heredity only served to highlight the distance separating
themselves from their glorious ancestors. For additional context, see Kostantaras, ‘Idealisations
of Self and Nation’; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans; and Leontis, ‘Ambivalent Greece,’ among
many other sources.
118 As elsewhere, land reforms enacted in Italy during the Napoleonic era proved extremely
injurious to the peasantry, generating conditions, in the words of John Davis, of ‘grinding poverty,
tensions and conflicts that were a constant backdrop to the political struggles of the nineteenth
century.’ Davis, ‘Italy 1796-1870,’ p. 179.
119 See, for example, the opening statutes of Young Italy, which include Mazzini’s reflections
on waging a people’s war: ‘Insurrection – by means of guerrilla bands – is the true method of
warfare for all nations desirous of emancipating themselves from a foreign yoke. […] It forms the
military education of the people, and consecrates every foot of the native soil by the memory
of some warlike deed.’ Mazzini, Joseph Mazzini, p. 71.

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 Revolutions of 1848 197

in his defense, the qualities of a zero-sum game in which appeals to one

class imperiled the ability to attract another; a dilemma felt by nationalists
in Poland and elsewhere. If too radically pitched, a program of attaining
national unification ‘from below’ would ‘terrify’ the middle classes and
drive them to reaction.120 Other scholars have claimed that prospects for
gaining the support of the peasantry were dimmed by the alienation of the
church, an institution which played a critical role in the Spanish and Greek
revolutions.121 However, this view has been qualified of late by scholars such
as Isabella, Riall, Romani, and Borutta.122 It should finally be noted that if
the rural populace in Italy participated less avidly in the movements and
events described above, this was by no means exceptional, as Blackbourn
notes of contemporaneous events in Germany.123
If therefore some explanations for the failure of the revolutions in Italy
allude to the absence of the peasantry, this factor is overshadowed in most
accounts by a stress on the plurality of interests among the opposition forces
and the severe obstacle these divisions posed to concerted action. Although
no attempt has been made to narrate events in detail, the picture one obtains
from works of this kind is of a period of protracted uncertainty, the forces of
various factions waxing and waning in strength, punctuated by occasional,
albeit short-lived, gestures of compromise and collaboration.124 There is

120 As one scholar has explained, ‘there were severe problems about putting Mazzini’s conception
of a ‘people’s war’ into effect. […] A guerilla war could not succeed without the support of the
peasants. Mazzini saw this […] but he had no convincing practical programme for bringing it
about. The Italian republicans were never successful in overcoming the cultural gap between town
and country.’ Lyttelton, ‘The National Question,’ p. 84. Philosophically, therefore, and perhaps
tactically, Mazzini eschewed radical ideologies such as those advanced by Filippo Buonarroti.
There would be no attack in his Italy on private property; poverty and inequality would be
eliminated instead through educational initiatives and worker-owned business ‘associations’
intended to promote wealth accumulation on a wider scale. No one would be threatened in the
process. See, for example, Mazzini, The Duties of Man.
121 ‘Undoubtedly the great disappointment of 1848, which was to make the task of winning the
support of the peasants for the new nation state immensely more difficult, if not impossible, was
the irreparable breach between the national movement and the Church.’ Lyttelton, ‘Comment.’
122 As Manuel Borutta, for example, writes ‘there was a powerful, liberal Catholic movement in
the Italian Church’ and ‘many members of the clergy supported the project of national unification.’
Borutta, ‘Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy,’ p. 192. Similar points are
made in Isabella, ‘Religion, Revolution, and Popular Mobilization,’ pp. 241-246. See also Cerruti,
‘Dante’s Bones,’ and Riall, ‘Martyr Cults.’
123 According to Blackbourn, ‘the large-scale defection of the peasantry […] their demands
for the abolition of feudal privileges met […] granted German princes the great boon of rural
quiescence.’ Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century, pp. 170-171.
124 English readers can find a concise recapitulation of events in works such as Coppa, The
Origins of the Italian Wars of Independence.

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 198  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

finally the figure of Charles Albert, who launched two ill-fated wars against
Austria in the course of the crisis and subsequently abdicated the throne. In
addition to his faulty military leadership, Charles failed, nor even seriously
attempted, claim his critics, to exploit prospects for alliance with other Ital-
ian sovereigns, anti-Austrian partisans, or foreign powers. These deficiencies,
according to his detractors, can be traced to still more fundamental issues
of motive. For Cattaneo, who took every opportunity in his account of the
revolution in Lombardy to excoriate the character of the (soon to be) fallen
sovereign, Piedmont’s entrance into the fray amounted to no more than a
pre-emptive strike against republicanism, or alternately, a bid for territorial
aggrandizement waged in the guise of a crusade for Italian emancipation.125
The king’s famous rallying cry that ‘Italy will do it alone’ disclosed no great
surfeit, accordingly, of patriotic spirit, but rather, his anti-French animus and
desire to ensure that Piedmont would be the sole beneficiary of Austria’s
expulsion from the peninsula.126 As indicated in a recent work by Catherine
Brice, some scholars have nevertheless taken a more sympathetic attitude
toward Charles Albert of late, and if acknowledging his penchant for acting
in accordance with the dictates of realpolitik, believe that he did show some
measure of support for constitutional reform.127

Conclusions

One of the major lessons from the historiography of 1848 reviewed above
concerns the remarkable extent to which the 1840s appear as a time of
sharply rising political mobilization throughout Europe, a turn which
reflected especially the increase in strength and assertiveness of liberal
parties. The reasons for this remarkable change in the power and prospects
of liberalism – a relaxation of censorship rules or a heightening fear of
social problems and their consequences – are matters of debate. There were
furthermore reciprocal qualities to this development in the sense that the
growth of such activity in one part of Europe gave encouragement to similar
movements elsewhere. This sudden increase in ‘liberal political action’ with
its corresponding effect on the elevation of nationalist discourse helps on
one hand to account for the remarkably swift manner in which the liberal

125 Text refers to Cattaneo, L’Insurrection de Milan en 1848. See also Pécout, Naissance de l’Italie
contemporaine, pp. 113-114; Coppa, The Origins of the Italian Wars of Independence, pp. 41-58.
126 Pécout, Naissance de l’Italie contemporaine, p. 113.
127 Brice, ‘Monarchie, Etat et nation,’ pp. 87-88.

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 Revolutions of 1848 199

opposition in places such as Germany, Hungary, and Bohemia was able

to organize a response to the disorders and press forward in its aims. The
subsequent crises in Berlin and Austria, which, as David Blackbourn points
out, were, in sharp contrast to 1830, ‘rocked by events,’ had the effect of
encouraging still more widespread and ambitious challenges to the status
quo.128 Further impetus was provided by the hope, albeit short-lived, of aid
and support from abroad.129
The failure of the revolutions is generally attributed again to the plurality
of aims and interests prevailing among the forces of change. That said, one
encounters often the claim that 1848-1849 represents a ‘rupture’ and ‘turning
point’ for the prospects of the national idea in those parts of Europe affected
by the crisis. According to Lyttelton, ‘we cannot simply look on 1848 as a
failure or simply as a prelude to 1859-1860. On the contrary, it was then
that it became clear that Italy was not just a “geographical expression” and
that political independence and even unification were probable in the long
term.’130 Such sweeping arguments, which may raise teleological concerns
for some, imply that despite the failures of the revolutions to achieve any
concrete results, the crisis had served to politicize large numbers of people
and thus passed in contemporary parlance a social ‘tipping point,’ the vagar-
ies surrounding such a claim notwithstanding, in popular indoctrination.
In some parts of Europe, notably Italy and Hungary, the insecurities and
violence stemming from the revolutions may also be conceived as having
reified matters of nation and national identity in ways that were far beyond
the capacity of ideas and intellectuals; a phenomenon addressed recently

128 Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century, 164. For Cattaneo, ‘the insurrection of Lombardy
and the Veneto was truly popular and general; it broke out the same day in Milan and Venice,
from the effect of the same news, arriving from Paris and Vienna.’ Cattaneo, L’Insurrection de
Milan en 1848, p. 180.
129 These hopes aroused in the Italian case by remarks made in Lamartine’s Manifeste, the
latter’s disavowal of any hostile intentions notwithstanding. Although claiming, for example,
that ‘the proclamation of the French Republic is not an act of aggression against any form of
government in the world,’ Lamartine did go on to say ‘that if the time of the reconstruction of
various oppressed nationalities in Europe, or elsewhere, appears to us to have been sounded in the
decrees of Providence,’ if the Swiss are menaced in their bid to democratize (a reference to the 1847
Sonderbund War won by Swiss liberals), and finally, ‘if the independent states of Italy are invaded;
if limits or obstacles are imposed to their internal transformations; or if they were challenged by
armed forces the right to join forces with one another to consolidate an Italian homeland, the French
Republic would believe itself to have the right to arm itself to protect these legitimate movements
of growth and nationality of peoples.’ Lamartine, Manifeste à l’Europe, p. 13. Cattaneo seems to
have put (at least initially) some faith in such overtures, as did Manin. See, for example, Ginsborg,
Daniele Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848-49, p. 87; Brovelli, ‘1848 à Venise,’ pp. 142-143.
130 Lyttelton, ‘Comment.’

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 200  Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

by John Breuilly in review of Risorgimento historiography.131 These same

dynamics were alluded to previously in the case of the Greek and Belgian
Revolutions.
Other scholars suggest that the prospects for national unification in
Germany and Italy in the aftermath of 1848 were facilitated by a substantial
change in liberal outlook. Stuart Woolf, for example, writes that 1848 ‘led
to painful self-questioning by both Italian and German liberals whether
national independence might not be a necessary prerequisite for liberal
reforms and the furtherance of progress.’132 The consequences in both cases
were the ‘subordination of liberal reformism to political unity’ as witnessed,
for example, in the foundation and political disposition of important or-
ganizations such as the National Society.133 If a perennial source of debate,
support for this view may be found in the works of important scholars
such as Sheehan, who, if acknowledging a range of liberal sentiments in
the aftermath of the revolutions (from ‘relief’ to ‘despair’), notes a trend in
thought beginning in ‘the early fifties when men like Rochau had begun to
emphasize the centrality of state power in the achievement of unification.’
These developments were further encouraged by fears of the onset of an
increasingly hostile international environment.134 Pecout too writes of a
tendency among historians of Italy to portray a sense of ‘political resignation’
among Italian liberals which, combined with a few reforms from Albert’s
successor, sufficed to secure ‘the triumph by default of the project unitairé
piémontais.’135

131 As Breuilly has observed, ‘Emotional depth in group identity does not require historical
depth.’ Breuilly, ‘Risorgimento Nationalism,’ p. 440.
132 Woolf, Nationalism in Europe, p. 13.
133 Ibid.
134 Sheehan refers here to the influential publicist August Ludwig von Rochau. He also writes
that such tendencies in thought were ‘reaffirmed by the process of national unification in Italy,
a process which German liberals watched carefully.’ Sheehan, German Liberalism, p. 113
135 He himself believes that these interpretations do not place adequate emphasis on the
‘meaning of 1848 in the process of the politicization of Italian civil society.’ Pécout, Naissance
de l’Italie contemporaine, p. 122. Mark Philip and Eduardo Posada-Carbó write in similar vein
that ‘after the containment of the revolutions of 1848, erstwhile democrats passed into internal
or external exile, and moderate and elitist strands of liberalism regained their dominant place,
although they did so with a heightened suspicion of popular power, a sharper sense of the risks
from their left, and an increased sense of the fragility of the progress they sought to defend.’
‘Positioning themselves,’ the authors continue, ‘as the only viable alternative to absolutism
and foreign domination, they [Piedmontese liberals] offered a nationalist agenda in place of
a democratic one. […] “Ideas of nationality and independence” took centre stage, displacing
concerns with popular government and entrenching conservative moderatism at the heart of
the state-formation process.’ Philp and Posada-Carbó, ‘Liberalism and Democracy,’ pp. 181, 201.

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 Revolutions of 1848 201

Of equal importance in this connection, or so at least it has been argued

by some, were the effects of the revolutions on conservative thought and
rhetoric. As Walter Schmidt has, for example, written, ‘in contrast to the pre-
revolutionary era it [the aristocratic and monarchical element] was no longer
able to maintain a strictly anti-national stance. Discerning representatives
of the reactionary powers, particularly of Prussia, abandoned their inflexible
role as protectors of German particularism and themselves adopted national
demands.’136 These thoughts certainly cohere with what Hobsbawm argued
in the previously cited Invention of Tradition and other works regarding the
attempt of the ‘dominant classes’ to appropriate the national idea in ways
that were congenial to their interests.137 For similarly minded scholars the
traumas of these years had a catalyzing effect on conservative opinion
and one which contributed greatly in turn to the further nationalization
of contemporary political discourse – a development which perhaps boded
well for the prospects of the national idea in Europe, if not liberalism.138

136 Schmidt, ‘The Nation in German History,’ p. 160. See also Erdody, ‘Unity or Liberty?’
137 Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions,’ p. 267.
138 Perry Anderson, in a review of works by Berman, Mayer and Lukács, writes in somewhat
similar vein of a post-1848 consciousness marked by ‘the imaginative proximity of social revolu-
tion.’ Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution,’ p. 104. As Levinger adds, liberals also ‘became
terrified of the danger of an unchecked revolution.’ Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism, p. 222.

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