Europe's springtime of peoples burned brightest then fractured
The revolutions of 1848—springtime of the peoples—swept Europe from January 1848 into October 1849, still the continent's most widespread revolutionary wave. Aims varied yet generally fought absolute monarchy and feudal residues while chasing constitutional nation-states.
The first blaze came in Sicily in January, and the uprising in France that February carried the wave across the continent. More than fifty countries were touched, yet their revolutionaries barely coordinated. Coalitions of workers and middle-class reformers led the charge but soon split apart; many revolts were crushed, tens of thousands died and more fled into exile. Some gains stuck all the same: serfdom ended in Austria and Hungary, Denmark's absolute monarchy fell, and the Netherlands gained representative government.
Deep causes ran through the countryside. Historian Jonathan Sperber identifies fights over land as the commonest social conflict beforehand. Where feudalism had been swept away, enclosure stripped peasants of customary rights such as gathering wood in communal forests, and they answered with lawsuits and theft. One Sicilian case filed in 1829 was settled only in 1896, and wood-theft convictions in the Bavarian Palatinate rose roughly fivefold, reaching 185,000 in 1846–47 against 37,500 back in 1821–22. Where feudalism survived, revolt was chronic; in 1846 a peasant rising in Austrian Galicia even snuffed out the Polish nobility's Kraków Uprising.
Cities were strained too. Population growth and migration from the land flooded labour markets, pushing real wages down as living costs rose, and when harvests failed in 1845–1847, workers who could afford little beyond bread and potatoes were devastated. As guilds weakened, masters hired cheap labour while blocking journeymen from ever becoming masters themselves, and merchants who farmed out textile work underpaid artisans, sparking weavers' revolts in Silesia in 1844 and twice before that in Lyon, in 1831 and 1834.
Over all of this lay the political hangover of the French Revolution: conservative regimes built to prevent a repeat, and the spread of liberal, radical and nationalist ideas that challenged them. Industrialisation and urban growth tightened every pressure at once.
Source: Revolutions of 1848
