Asher Sisneros

France

With the dawn of Louis Philippe’s reign, France would go on to experience economic prosperity unseen since the days before the French Revolution. However, the citizens were still fervently waiting for governmental reform, and the revolutionary spirit still gripped the nation tightly. 

While Louis Philippe’s moderate rule may have appeased Americans, the revolution-struck French refused to accept it. All parties were dissatisfied with him. The legitimists and ultra-royalists wanted a return to the “senior” Bourbon bloodline, not Louis Philippe; the Bonapartists hated Louis Philippe’s noninterventionist foreign policy and wanted Napoleon Bonapart’s successors to expand French imperialism across Europe; and the classical liberals thought Louis Philippe was too moderate and wanted greater civil liberties. Matters only worsened because Louis Philippe identified himself with the middle-class entrepreneurs who were vilified in France as the bourgeoisie. Because of this, Louis had no sympathy for the angered artisans who went into the streets and smashed labor-saving machines that were private property. 

One policy that particularly infuriated the French was his suppression of political gatherings. All political rallies and meetings were forbidden from having more than twenty people. To maneuver around this law, the people held banquets. They engaged in political discourse during these banquets, but on paper, it was legal. Eventually, Louis Philippe and his ministry caught on to this loophole and shut down a prominent banquet, which incited revolution. 

Mobs took to the streets and soon attacked the French capital at Palais Bourbon. The National Guard was sent to put down the rebellion, but it joined the revolutionaries instead. Like his cousin did eighteen years earlier, King Louis Philippe abdicated the throne and fled to Great Britain, ending the July Monarchy and giving rise to the Second Republic. 

Ultimately, though, the French Revolution of 1848 proved to be fruitless. And because of infighting, the Second Republic crumbled within a decade. Frankly, its demise is unsurprising. The classical liberals and the socialists united in their revolt against Louis Philippe, but they deeply resented each other, and the more popular classical liberals were never going to let France descend into socialism. To appease the socialists, they placed Louis Blanc in charge of a committee, but his position was only a high title with little to no significance. Most of his proposals were rejected except for the establishment of national workshops that gave the unemployed jobs. However, during the parliamentary elections, classical liberals once again took sweeping victories just as they had done in 1830, and the socialists were driven from influence. The socialists revolted in what is known as the June Days, but unlike Charles X and Louis Philippe, those controlling the Second Republic did not hesitate to squash the revolt and shut down the national workshops. Gaining enough support, Louis Napoleon won the presidency in 1848. By 1851, he and his colleagues launched a coup d’etat to dissolve the National Assembly, arrest sixteen representatives, and establish an empire. A quasi-referendum was held to permit Louis to amend the constitution, where mayors threatened voters at gunpoint. Within only eight years, the Second Republic had fallen, and France was once again a dictatorship. 

The Rest of Europe

Seeing France’s example in 1848, other European nations also broke out into civil war and anarchical revolt. In Austria, revolutions for provincial self-rule spread and successfully forced Emperor Ferdinand and Foreign Minister Metternich to resign, but the revolutions themselves were crushed. In non-Austrian Germany, an offer was made to the Prussian King to rule them as a constitutional monarch, but he refused to be constrained by a constitution and passed the offer. In Italy, Piedmont Sardinia led a revolution to push Austria out of the Italian States, but it also failed. Even in Rome, revolutions broke out against Pope Pius IX. Guiseppe Mazzini and Guiseppe Garibaldi led the revolt and declared Rome a Republic, forcing Pope Pius to flee. But even their revolution, which saw temporary success, fizzled out when Emperor Louis Napoleon sent troops to help Pius.

In the end, all of the revolutions of 1848 were more or less failures. Liberalism, socialism, and nationalism—the goals of respective revolutionary movements—were halted in their tracks.