From the 1830s onward, the working class increasingly acted independently, forming new and revolutionary movements, and becoming the crucial factor in 1848, argues Dominic Alexander

Part 1: The English Revolution begins
Part 2: The English Revolution: the first civil war
Part 3: The English Revolution Completed
Part 4: The French Revolution: the road to revolution
Part 5: The French Revolution: Revolution and the Sans Culottes
Part 6: How the Great Revolutions happened, France: Rise and fall of a popular republic
Part 7: The age of revolutions: Aftershocks of the French Revolution 

During the early 1830s in particular, at least some Jacobin republicans began moving left towards the working class, beginning to understand that it was not the amorphous ‘people’ who were the source of revolution, but the working class. The old class language of the people against the aristocracy began through analogy to be adapted to the worker-capitalist class struggle. Thus a republican wrote that: ‘Every manufacturer lives in his factory like a plantation owner among his slaves.’¹ The same kind of shift in radical language was taking place in Britain too, identifying industrial capitalists as a new oppressive aristocracy. It took time for the old language to disappear, but such analogies expressed the modern class struggle quite adequately.

The republican group, the Society of the Friends of the People, founded shortly after the 1830 revolution, was convinced to reject economic liberalism by Blanqui, another radical who was a follower of Buonarroti (the veteran of Babeuf’s conspiracy). Left republican politics at this stage did not go beyond calling for taxation of the rich for the benefit of society, but recent events were widely understood in such circles as being explained by a class struggle between capitalists and the working class. Blanqui was imprisoned in 1832 for a year due to his role in the Friends of the People and became a convinced socialist in prison. 

Socialist ideas were being spread in France through the utopian schemes of Henri Saint Simon and Charles Fourier, but Blanqui adopted socialism as a goal of the revolution, rather than accepting the utopians’ abstract apolitical agendas. Blanqui’s view was that a revolution should install a dictatorship which would rule on behalf of the people, and prepare them for communism. After being released from prison, Blanqui created a succession of clandestine and conspiratorial revolutionary organisations, structured hierarchically in cell formations, to reduce the impact of police betrayals. These organisations were inevitably small and fairly isolated from the developing working-class struggles of the era.

During the period of the Orléanist regime, France’s own industrial revolution accelerated, but consequently, either a bad harvest or a trade recession could cause enough hunger and unemployment to push towns and cities into crisis. From 1835, however, Louis Phillipe’s government was politically secure for some time. Blanqui’s conspiratorial revolutionary organisations did not really trouble it. There was a crisis in 1839 when an economic downturn caused a spike in unemployment, and an inconclusive election left the government in limbo. Pressure from the rank and file of Blanqui’s organisation led to his calling an uprising on 12 May, but, in the event, only a few hundred were involved, and the insurrection was crushed. The expected popular uprising in support did not happen, and Blanqui, among others, was sentenced to life imprisonment.² He wouldn’t be released until another revolution resulted in a change of regime.

Britain’s near miss

Britain, of course, did not undergo a revolution in this period, but as France had its second in 1830, so the former also underwent a crucial political crisis that had many characteristics of a revolutionary situation. Britain’s long-lasting Tory governing supremacy had been able to weather the working-class unrest of the post-Napoleonic period, but this Tory coalition fell apart over a number of issues, in which Ireland loomed large. Marginally more forward-looking parts of the ruling political bloc used royal power in parliament to force through an act of Catholic Emancipation, alienating the ultra-Tory gentry, and allowing the reform-minded Whig party into government in 1830. The Whigs were barely less aristocratic or conservative than the preceding Tories but did want to reform the creaking electoral system and allow the urban and industrial middle class wider participation in the political system.

The reactionary Tory majority in the House of Lords, however, saw no reason to surrender aristocratic dominance over the political system and blocked the Whig’s mild Reform Bill. As so often, a split within the ruling class opened the way for pressure from below to drive events. Already in 1830, agricultural districts around London were convulsed by the machine-smashing Swing Riots, while in towns across England, Political Unions, led by the largest one in Birmingham, frequently united working-class and middle-class people into a movement for political reform.

The working class was also organising separately, however, particularly in Manchester and Leeds, with their own Unions demanding universal suffrage, rather than the limited reform on offer from the Whigs. The most important working-class newspaper of its time, The Poor Man’s Guardian, was founded at this point also. However, working-class radicals were divided over whether to support the Whig reform as a first step in the right direction, or to campaign unequivocally for universal suffrage, and even oppose the limited Whig bill. Working-class agitation was further divided in focus by other campaigns, particularly the Ten Hours Movement for a reduction in working hours, led by the veteran Reform leader, Henry Hunt, and the ‘Tory radical’, Richard Oastler.

Despite the divisions among activists, it was certainly working-class unrest which was instrumental in forcing the Tory aristocracy to back down. Widespread, uncontrolled rioting in Bristol, Deby and Nottingham, and mass demonstrations elsewhere in October 1831, after the Lords’ rejection of the Reform Bill, alarmed ruling circles. This wave of disturbances had come on top of the unprecedented rise in Merthyr Tydfil in May, where reform demonstrators had persuaded miners to come out on strike, leading to working-class control of the town and surrounding industrial areas for several days. Crowds demanded reform, higher wages, and lower food prices, sacked the debtors’ court, destroying its records, and saw off several military attempts to suppress the rising. Thousands of workers besieged the authorities and employers while marching under a red flag and crying ‘down with the King’, among other slogans.³

In June 1832, the House of Lords finally passed a version of the Reform Bill, after a last, tense stand-off in May, during which fears of an uncontrollable explosion of popular anger should the Lords reject it again led to the climbdown. The Reform Act extended the franchise to industrial areas and the middle class, and abolished the bulk of the rotten boroughs, but left the working class frozen out, even losing representation in some of the old boroughs with popular franchises. Women were formally excluded from the franchise for the first time. Britain, unlike France, had avoided revolution, not for want of popular unrest, but because crucial elements of the ruling class were able to concede ground. At the last moment, King William IV signalled his willingness to swamp the House of Lords with Whig peers, and the Lords backed down instead.

Fundamentally, the change involved in accepting the industrial middle class into the political ruling coalition was not a sufficient existential threat to the capitalist-orientated aristocracy. We could conclude that Britain avoided revolution in 1830 because it had already had one in the 1640s, which was confirmed in 1688. That is true, but the explanation needs to be mediated through the more immediate historical context. A crucial part of the equation is that the ruling class, after experiencing decades of ongoing popular unrest, and facing an increasingly self-organised and militant working class, saw that compromise with the middle class was the wiser option, rather than risk a more radical threat from below. It is recognition of this dynamic which justifies, as much as the great revolutions, Marx’s claim in the Communist Manifesto that: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’

Chartism

After 1832, there was a widespread feeling of betrayal among working-class radicals that when the middle class had gained suffrage, there were not then moves to extend it. The outcome of the Reform Act contributed very significantly to the shift in class consciousness among workers during the 1830s towards the understanding that capitalists were the exploiters of the working class, rather than there being a more amorphous conflict between the ‘people’ and the ‘aristocracy’, which marked earlier phases of radicalism.

One of the first post-1832 initiatives was the Owenite Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, a hugely ambitious attempt to unite the trade union movement in one organisation. It has the distinction of including the Tolpuddle Martyrs among its members, but it was short-lived, partly due to overwhelming counter-action by employers. It did, however, push William Lovett, artisan and Owenite, to form the London Working Men’s Association, which launched the People’s Charter for universal suffrage and a swathe of democratic reforms. Although the demands of the Charter were strictly political, they would have had a revolutionary impact. In Engels’ view, they would ‘overthrow the whole English Constitution, Queen and Lords included.’⁴ The charter was revolutionary in spirit, although neither Lovett nor the LWMA were in any way revolutionary in practice.

The centre of gravity of the resulting Chartist movement rapidly shifted away from relatively prosperous London artisans towards the industrial workers and hand-loom weavers of the north and midlands, where it became a militant mass movement. Its expression of proletarian class struggle was frequently explicit, as when, after parliament’s rejection of the first great petition in 1839, a Chartist declaration declared:

‘Strike! Colliers! Strike for the Charter! … without coal, this giant monster, the Steam Engine, cannot work. Your labour, my honest friends, supplies it with strength, for without Coal it is powerless. Stop getting Coal, for Coal supports the money-mongering Capitalists’.⁵

The defeat of the first petition, which had gained 1,280,000 signatures, was marked by attempts at insurrection, most famously at Newport in Monmouthshire, where thousands of Chartists marched on the town, aiming to free comrades held by police, but were fired upon by troops. As many as two dozen were killed, with scores more injured. The insurrectionary strategy of ‘Physical Force’ Chartism declined thereafter.

Originally, Chartism did have allies among the radical middle class, but as it grew in industrial areas, and its tone moved decisively towards class struggle, these drifted away. Chartism was, of course, defeated, but to a significant degree, it dominated the political scene of the 1840s. It can also claim the distinction of being the first mass, democratic political party in history, with the formation of the National Charter Association in 1840. This was a membership organisation, with a democratic structure, and a full-time staff paid by the dues of the membership. This happened decades before any other political groups, such as the Liberals or Tories, would form similar structures themselves. The NCA effectively had a party paper, as well, the Northern Star, whose readers supplied the paper with their reports and poems. 

Chartism’s greatest achievement, however, may be the General Strike of 1842,⁶ an attempt to force parliament to pass the second petition, whose 3.3 million signatures had been unceremoniously rebuffed by parliament. Since the defeat of the 1839 petition, Chartism had grown significant roots in the trade union movement. Although the so-called ‘Plug Riots’ were defeated, they represented ‘not only the first general strike in Britain, a political one at that, but the first on such a scale in any country. It was a time when British workers, as a class, put a decisive stamp on the situation by bringing the main industrial areas of the country to a standstill.’⁷

State persecution of the trade union militants of 1842 helped to sever the connections between trade unions and Chartism, and the political limitations of most of the ‘physical force’ Chartists meant that the movement drifted after 1842, and was unable to regain the lost momentum even with the last surge of activity during the third petition of 1848. Chartism was not without result, however, as it is unlikely that parliament would have passed a range of Acts on factory and mine reform, and public health, without the Chartist movement pushing working-class issues to the front of parliamentary attention. Indeed, the so-called Ten Hours Act of 1847 could be characterised as the bourgeoisie saying in reply to Chartism: you can’t have the vote, but we will ameliorate your working conditions somewhat.

Silesian weavers

Britain may have been the most economically advanced country in Europe at this point, and its proletariat the largest, but the working class was making its mark on politics elsewhere as well. In Germany, liberal movements after 1815 had largely been frustrated by the repressive monarchies and relative isolation from the masses of people. The reverberations of France’s revolution in 1830 produced widespread unrest, and some concessions to liberalism in the form of constitutions in some smaller German states, but a revolution in the small, central state of Hesse-Cassell was reversed by the intervention of Prussian troops. Radical and democratic ideas began to grow more strongly first in the 1830s, and then by leaps and bounds in the 1840s. The term ‘socialism’ gained wide currency, but could simply mean the demand for universal manhood suffrage.⁸ Equally, it could be associated with the advanced intellectual formulations of some of the Young Hegelians (from whom Marx sprang), or more radical tendencies such as the conspiratorial communism of Wilhelm Weitling.

The Silesian Weavers’ Revolt of 1844, however, was a startling indication that the balance of forces was changing. Handloom weavers faced impoverishment and destitution, partly due to competition with imported British textiles, and like their British equivalents, they weren’t prepared to be wiped out without resistance. Similarly, textile factory workers were protesting for better wages. Refusals by employers and merchants to raise wages led to the first disturbances, which included machine-smashing, and protests escalated until troops were sent to restore order. Remarkably, the troops were forced to retreat at first, and the weavers were only suppressed with additional forces. Marx was particularly impressed with the weavers, celebrating their ability to shake the Prussian state in a way that the middle-class liberals had been entirely unable to do:

‘This means that in a country where banquets with liberal toasts and liberal champagne froth provoke Royal Orders in Council (as we saw in the case of the Dusseldorf banquet), where the burning desire of the entire liberal bourgeoisie for freedom of the press and a constitution could be surpassed without the aid of a single soldier, in a country where passive obedience is the order of the day, can it be anything but an event and indeed a terrifying event when armed troops have to be called out against feeble weavers? And in the first encounter, the feeble weavers even gained a victory. They were only suppressed when reinforcements were brought up. Is the uprising of a mass of workers less dangerous because it can be defeated without the aid of a whole army? Our sharp-witted Prussian should compare the revolt of the Silesian weavers with the uprisings of English workers. The Silesians will then stand revealed as strong weavers.’⁹

Marx’s burgeoning grasp of the centrality of the working class to changing society was not uninfluenced by these events, and they certainly signalled that dangerous forces were brewing beneath the carapace of the semi-absolutist German states. Just as workers’ unrest surged in Britain and France during the ‘hungry forties’, as the 1840s became known at the time, so there was more tumult in Germany, notably the ‘potato revolution’ in Berlin in 1847, one of many food riots that happened in that year, particularly in Prussia.

The year of the revolution

The potato blight, which so devastated Ireland in the late 1840s, but which had a serious impact generally in Europe, certainly contributed to the wave of revolutions that broke out in 1848, but there was no automatic connection. Ireland, after all, saw no such reaction, and the worst of the crisis was over in Europe by the time the revolutions broke out. However, the real impact of the blight was as the last straw on top of a decade and more of hardship, with the recurring trade depressions of the 1840s, and outbreaks of epidemic disease, particularly cholera, which devastated rapidly growing urban centres across Europe. Governments seemed either unable to address such crises or indifferent to the suffering of their people. The legitimacy of existing governments fell to a low ebb across the continent, and, with rising levels of oppositional political activity, both liberal and radical, most societies had become primed for explosion.

The first outbreak was in Palermo, Sicily, in January, which overthrew the ruling Bourbon dynasty there, but it was, of course, events in France at the end of February which precipitated the revolutions elsewhere. King Louis Philippe’s government was increasingly unpopular even with middle-class opinion and was seen as mired in corruption. A relatively unimportant division between the Orléanist government and the parliamentary opposition led to the king forbidding expressions of liberal opposition in the form of political banquets, which had been the tactic of choice among wealthy oppositionists, but which had some popular variants and gained some wide support.

The government forbade these to take place any longer, and the liberal opposition called on the people of Paris to support their struggle. A popular demonstration provoked the King into summoning the National Guard to suppress it, but this middle-class militia turned on the government, shouting ‘Vive la Réforme’ and calling for the fall of the prime minister, Guizot.¹⁰ They also prevented other troops from being able to control the crowds. Guizot was dismissed, but some confusion followed, and then troops fired on protestors, killing fifty. The revolt then erupted across Paris, with barricades and red flags.¹¹ The king soon abdicated and fled, while the opposition rapidly began to construct France’s Second Republic, on 26 February.

News of the revolution spread rapidly, and the southwestern state of Baden was the first in the German realm to see a revolution on 1 March, followed by Bavaria two days later. Vienna, the Austrian capital, saw a revolution on 13 March, where the hated architect of the post-Napoleonic reaction, the Chancellor Prince Metternich, fell from power, and fled to England. Across Germany, the rulers of petty states fled their palaces in the face of demonstrations, and when troops fired upon protestors in Berlin, the capital of Prussia erupted in rage, and King Frederick William IV suddenly found himself the prisoner of a new liberal cabinet. With both Austria and Prussia paralysed by their own revolutions, there was a vacuum of power across Germany. Liberals had the opportunity to fill the gap and organised the Frankfurt Parliament, to which elected delegates were sent from across Germany, to establish a constitution for a united Germany.

France’s Second Republic

The course of events in Germany remained, however, deeply influenced by the shifts in forces within the revolution in France. There, the weight of the left in Paris ensured a republican provisional government that instituted universal male suffrage immediately. Despite including figures like the left-republican Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, and the socialist Louis Blanc, it was dominated by ‘moderate’ republicans, who were determined to establish a bourgeois state that would be safe for capitalist property. Blanc and Ledru-Rollin’s inclusion was mainly in the hope they would control the workers. This was a worrying issue, as the liberal deputy and political sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville later explained, ruing the ‘uniquely and exclusively popular character of the revolution’: ‘The people alone bore arms, guarded the public buildings, watched, gave orders, punished; it was an extraordinary and terrible thing to see in the sole hands of those who possessed nothing all this immense town, so full of riches.’¹²

The economic pressures which had done much to bring down the July monarchy, were, if anything, more acute after the revolution. There was no agitation for the past regime, but the new one still had to earn its welcome. Settling the workers of Paris was the first priority, so some measures, including a maximum ten-hour day in Paris, but eleven hours outside it, were passed. Also, in a bastardisation of Louis Blanc’s plan for state-funded co-operatives, the government established ‘National Workshops’ for the unemployed, which never amounted to more than ‘a system of registering the Paris unemployed for the payment of a wretched dole’.¹³ About 120,000 were in receipt of this, and some labour of dubious value was organised, but tens of thousands more unemployed people were excluded from the programme. Proposals for funding public works were rejected by the government, and it appeared that the national workshops were being deliberately sabotaged by those in charge of making them function.

The provisional government also insisted on continuing to pay all the state obligations on the national debt, funding it by imposing a new tax which fell mainly on the peasantry. The Second Republic lost the allegiance of this huge mass of people with that one measure, in stark contrast to the First Republic, whose survival was ensured by the peasantry’s enthusiastic willingness to defend it. There would be no such loyalty for the second.

The ‘moderate’ republicans were opposed to any kind of social policy or economic reforms. The result of this was a growing polarisation between working-class demands and the conservative instincts of the moderate republicans. Blanqui, released from prison by the revolution, arrived in Paris and began to try to unite the mushrooming democratic and radical political clubs around his Central Republican Club. Blanqui declared that the revolution as it existed would betray the workers and rallied the left around a demand to postpone elections for a Constituent Assembly so that republicanism would have more time to gain support in the provinces. The provisional government wished to rush forward, however, and rejected a list of demands put to it by a coalition of labour organisations. Meanwhile, the National Guard demonstrated against its own democratisation and drew out a counterdemonstration from Parisian workers the next day on 17 March. Another demonstration a week later highlighted a growing split between the far left and social reformers like Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, whose concern was to restrain revolutionary impulses.

Crisis of the republic

The still deteriorating economic conditions, the total inadequacy of the dole, and the farcical nature of the National Workshops were the occasion for another workers’ demonstration on 16 April, during which Ledru Rollin went so far as to call out the National Guard against the protestors. The Guard surrounded the marchers, shouting ‘Down with the Communists! Down with Louis Blanc, with Blanqui …’.¹⁴ Soon afterwards, fighting between workers and the National Guard broke out in Limoges and Rouen.

An anti-worker ‘party of order’ was almost fully formed. Elections to the Constituent Assembly cemented the growing swing to the right. Moderate republicans were the largest group, but half of them had only been republicans since February. There was a strong anti-revolutionary bloc of open monarchists on the right, and a smaller group of red republicans, with a scattering of socialists, on the left. Louis Blanc was excluded from the new government, although Ledru-Rollin was allowed to stay on.

The revolutionary left’s disastrous reaction to this situation was a demonstration on 15 May, ostensibly demanding war on Russia and Prussia over Polish independence, but the demonstrators were able to invade the National Assembly and declare a new provisional government. Inevitably, the National Guard recovered from its surprise and arrested all the key leaders. Ledru-Rollin sided definitively with the party of order, and lost his working-class following at this point. Blanqui, whose involvement in the adventure was reluctant, was caught after eleven days, and imprisoned once again.¹⁵

It was only a matter of time, after this, before the government would choose to act against the workers, and this it did on 22 June when it abolished the National Workshops, declaring that unmarried men in them should join the army, and others be deported to the provinces. Barricades went up in three areas of Paris, and fighting began, but the working class was almost leaderless after 15 May, and faced 150,000 troops organised by the minister of war, Cavaignac, against estimates of twenty to fifty thousand insurgents, at least one in ten of the city’s working-class population.¹⁶ Nonetheless, it took four days to crush the revolt, and contemporaries were in no doubt that this was a class war. The liberal de Tocqueville declared that: ‘I saw society split in two …No bonds, no sympathies existed between these two great classes, everywhere was the idea of an inevitable and approaching struggle.’¹⁷ Possibly 3000 insurgents were killed, 14,000 were imprisoned, and 4000 were deported to prison camps and colonies, such as Algeria.

The bloodbath of the June Days ripped the heart out of the republic, and in the election that was held in December for the presidency of the Republic, there was little enthusiasm for any existing political figures, from Cavaignac on the right to Ledru-Rollin on the left. Instead, an outsider candidate, who successfully posed as something for everyone, won. This was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the great man’s nephew. Small property owners of the countryside had voted for order and the safety of property from social demands. Bourgeois liberalism had no convincing answer. Soon enough, Louis Napoleon was able to engineer a coup, and install himself as a dictator over a restored ‘Empire’. He ruled the Second Empire as Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870.

The failure of 1848 in Germany

The counterrevolution in France from June changed the mood in much of the rest of Europe. In Germany in March 1848, revolutions had seemed set to sweep away the old order and bring about a united, even democratic Germany. However, the pre-parliament and the Frankfurt parliament, which succeeded it, rapidly became bogged down in interminable debates about the nature of the constitution such a unified state would adopt, from liberal to democratic-republican, excluding or including Austria, and federal or centralised. Liberal ministries in individual states in Würtemberg, Baden, Bavaria, Hanover, Saxony, Nassau or Prussia were tolerated by rulers in the hope that they could contain more radical forces. When the pre-parliament in Frankfurt strongly rejected the radicals’ agenda, the liberal ministry in Baden used this as an excuse to crack down on radical activity. This provoked radical democrats in the south of the state to mount an uprising in the hope of establishing a republic. It gained support mostly from artisans, but its progress through the countryside failed to snowball into a mass revolt, and it was put down.

The Frankfurt parliament approved the suppression of this rising by the troops of the German Confederation, the loose framework for cooperation among German states established after 1815, and in effect the guardian of the old regime. This decision accomplished two disasters for the German Revolution in one go. Firstly, this body which had claimed to be acting as the new sovereign authority in Germany conceded coercive power to the conservative forces of the old order almost right away, and secondly it alienated itself from the growing radical democratic movement, which could have harnessed mass support for a new Germany.

The potential for a mass democratic movement to radicalise the revolution in Germany was evident by the summer, with peasants, artisans and industrial workers all engaged in agitation, which involved everything from founding organisations to press their demands to burning estate records, smashing machinery and food riots. A Workers’ Brotherhood raised social demands for employment and a cooperative model for industry, while women, prominent at demonstrations and meetings, formed their own organisations and papers demanding political and social rights.¹⁸

Ultimately, the fate of the revolution rested on the course of events in the capitals of Prussia and Austria: Berlin and Vienna. The liberal bourgeoisie in Prussia had been aiming at a constitutional monarchy during the 1840s. The March Revolution in Berlin was somewhat unwelcome, as they feared the radical colouration of the February Revolution in France would infect Prussian workers and peasants as well: ‘Such was the dread evinced by the new ministers of the aroused masses, that in their eyes every means was good if it only tended to strengthen the shaken foundations of authority,’ wrote Engels in 1851.¹⁹ The King and his reactionary coterie soon realised that the liberal ministers who held him in Berlin, were politically as much royal prisoners, as the king was theirs.²⁰ The liberals’ reform measures were blocked or watered down, and, most disastrously, they accepted the re-imposition of the remaining elements of feudalism in Silesia, alienating potential peasant support, in the fear of violating ‘private property’ and encouraging the growth of the far left.

Reaction recovers

In the wake of the June Days in Paris, the aristocracy recovered confidence and began to organise its forces. By August, a League for the Protection of Landed Property had met in Berlin. Meanwhile, the liberals in the Frankfurt Parliament had showed no stronger grasp of the forces involved in the revolution than their counterparts in Berlin. Frankfurt rejected the Industrial Code proposed by an artisans’ congress. This would have regulated hours and wages. Frankfurt further refused to countenance the abolition of remaining feudal obligations burdening the peasantry.

Once again, Engels summed it up most clearly: ‘This assembly of old women was, from the first day of its existence, more frightened of the least popular movement than of all the reactionary plots of all the German Governments put together… Instead of asserting its own sovereignty, it studiously avoided the discussion of any such dangerous question. Instead of surrounding itself by a popular force, it passed to the order of the day over all the violent encroachments of the Governments …’, allowing them to crush all radical developments.²¹

In essence what had happened was that the bourgeoisie, finding that it was capable of business and enrichment under the conservative old regime, preferred the limitations that entailed rather than risk-taking power for itself, with a radical, democratic, increasingly socialist, working class threatening its back. For Germany, the bourgeois revolution had come too late. Modern industry had already created a rebellious industrial proletariat, at the same time that it impoverished the artisan class. This dangerous combination happened while radical democratic ideas born of the French Revolution had spread and developed, before the bourgeoisie could establish their own social and political hegemony, as they had in England from the seventeenth century, and France, less securely, since 1789. The bourgeoisie in Germany therefore did not dare to risk their own revolution, in case they ushered in a proletarian revolution on its heels.

The effective end of the German Revolution of 1848 accelerated after the summer, with a clear crisis in September, as developing popular unrest brought calls for a second revolution to secure the gains of March. A desperate radical revolt in Frankfurt in September was put down, and the Democratic Congress in Berlin in October fruitlessly appealed against the tide of reaction, rejecting Frankfurt’s supposed leadership. Meanwhile, the Austrian ruling class had recovered itself sufficiently to march troops into Vienna and suppress the revolution there, largely because peasant disorders had been settled. On 1 November, the Prussian general von Wrangel marched into Berlin, and put an end to the liberal government, restoring the King to full authority.

The Frankfurt Parliament limped on into 1849, finally agreeing on a constitution among themselves, and offering the crown of a Germany excluding Austria to Frederick William IV. Restored to his authority the previous autumn, he naturally refused a position offered by a revolutionary parliament. The parliament was then driven out of the city, and soon dispersed. Austria would be further distracted in May 1849 by a renewal of the Hungarian revolution, but Prussian armies were sufficient to suppress the last radical revolts in Germany from April through to July.

Age of bourgeois conservatism

By the end of 1849, the reaction appeared to be triumphant throughout most of Europe, Austria had defeated both the Hungarian and Italian revolutionaries. Napoleon III intervened to crush the Roman Republic on behalf of the Pope in July, bringing to an end the last revolutionary outpost in Italy. However, even in defeat, the bourgeois liberals achieved many of their aims: German princes abolished the remains of feudalism throughout Germany, and almost all of them also accepted constitutions. The only exception was backward Mecklenburg, which wouldn’t receive one until 1918. Even Prussia had a constitution with a parliament of two houses, taming the liberals into mostly supine opposition.

Reactionary and authoritarian leaders had understood by this point of the nineteenth century that economic development was essential to the continuing stability of their rule, so in economic terms, the bourgeoisie had won, even if in terms of politics and social status, it was still subordinate to the aristocracy in Germany. In France, the Second Empire was quite acceptably bourgeois in nature, proof that bourgeois class rule has never necessitated liberal parliamentary government. Industrial capitalism made great strides in France, Germany and elsewhere in the twenty years after 1848, but the workers’ movements which had so marked 1848, grew with it, and by the later 1860s, worker militancy was seriously destabilising the rule of Napoleon III in France.

Other forces set in motion in 1848 were also not so much defeated as absorbed by the conservative order. In Italy, unification came to be the cause of the relatively developed kingdom of Piedmont. German unification came to be the project of Prussia. Prussia had made itself the lynchpin of the German customs union, the Zollverein, from the 1830s, and post-1848 pursued a deliberate policy of extending it over the rest of Germany, while expressly excluding Austria.

¹ Greene, Communist Insurgent, p.29

² ibid. pp.53-5

³ For a full account, see Gwyn A. Williams, The Merthyr Rising (London: Croom Helm 1978)

⁴ Rob Sewell, Chartist Revolution (Wellred Books 2020), p.106; https://www.counterfire.org/article/chartist-revolution-book-review/

⁵ ibid. p.158

⁶ See Mick Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842 (London 1980)

⁷ Sewell, Chartist Revolution, p.220

⁸ Blackbourne, History of Germany, p.132

⁹ Karl Marx, ‘Critical Notes on the Article: “The King of Prussia and Social Reform By a Prussian”’, Vorwarts!, No.63, August 7 1844: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/08/07.htm. The Dusseldorf Banquet was a liberal gathering which provoked the King to forbid civil servants from attending such events.

¹⁰ Cobban, History of France, p.130

¹¹ Greene, Communist Insurgent, p.64

¹² ibid. p.64

¹³ Cobban, History of France, p.138

¹⁴ Greene, Communist Insurgent, p.75

¹⁵ ibid. pp.76-7

¹⁶ Cobban, History, p.144, Greene, Communist Insurgent, p.77

¹⁷ Cobban, History, p.143

¹⁸ Blackbourne, History, pp.145-6

¹⁹ Friedrich Engels, The German Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1967), p.163

²⁰ ibid. p.163

²¹ ibid. p.169