3: The Revolutions of 1848 and Their Aftermath Flashcards
Lamartine
Alphonse Lamartine was a French author, poet, and statesman who was instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic. Lamartine, who was a former monarchist, came to embrace democratic ideals and opposed militaristic nationalism. When elected in 1833 to the National Assembly, he quickly founded his own “Social Party” with some influence from Saint-Simonian ideas and established himself as a prominent critic of the July Monarchy, becoming more and more of a republican in the monarchy’s last years. Lamartine was instrumental in the founding of the Second Republic of France, having met with Republican Deputies and journalists in the Hôtel de Ville to agree on the makeup of its provisional government. Lamartine himself was chosen to declare the Republic in traditional form in the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville and ensured the continuation of the Tricouleur as the flag of the nation. He tried to be elected president but was defeated by Louis Napoléon Bonaparte in 1848.
Lola Montez
Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, Countess of Landsfeld, known by the stage name Lola Montez. She was an Irish dancer and actress who became famous as a Spanish dancer, courtesan, and mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who made her Gräfin von Landsfeld. She soon began to use her influence on the King and this, coupled with her arrogant manner and outbursts of temper, made her extremely 5 was re-opened, Ludwig abdicated in favour of his son, King Maximilian II, and Montez fled Bavaria.
Friedrich List
List was a German American economist who developed the “National System” of political economy. He argued for the German Customs Union from a Nationalist standpoint and advocated imposing tariffs on imported goods while supporting free trade of domestic goods and stated the cost of a tariff should be seen as an investment in a nation’s future productivity. List’s hostility to free trade was first decisively shaped by the ideas of his friend Adolphe Thiers and other liberal protectionists in France. He opposed the cosmopolitan principle in the contemporary economical system and the absolute doctrine of free trade, and instead developed the infant industry argument, to which he had been exposed by Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Raymond. He gave prominence to the national idea and insisted on the special requirements of each nation according to its circumstances and especially to the degree of its development. He famously doubted the sincerity of calls to free trade from developed nations.
Zollverein
The German Customs Union, was a coalition of German states formed to manage tariffs and economic policies within their territories. Its foundations had been in development from 1818 with the creation of a variety of custom unions among the German states and through the Zollverein treaties, it formally started on 1 January 1834. Prussia, which had already established an internal customs union, was the primary driver behind the creation of the customs union. It included most of the German states. Austria was excluded because of its highly protected industry and because Metternich was against the idea. The foundation of the Zollverein was the first instance in history in which independent states consummated a full economic union without the simultaneous creation of a political federation or union. The original customs union was not ended with the Austro-Prussian War, but a substantial reorganization emerged in 1867. The new Zollverein was stronger, in that no individual state had a veto.
Mazzini
Giuseppe Mazzini was an Italian activist for the unification of Italy and spearhead of the Italian revolutionary movement. He practiced as a “poor man’s lawyer,” wrote articles for progressive reviews, and his love of freedom led him to join the Carbonari, a secret society pledged to overthrow absolute rule in Italy. In 1830 he was betrayed to the police, arrested, and interned at Savona, where for three months he reviewed his political beliefs and conceived the outlines of a new patriotic movement to replace the decaying Carbonari. He founded his patriotic movement for young men and called it Giovine Italia (Young Italy). It was designed as a national association for liberating the separate Italian states from foreign rule and fusing them into a free and independent unitary republic. While unsuccessful, it can be argued that all his plots were valuable, since they held out a permanent threat of violent revolution if Italy were not freed and united.
Radetzky
Johann Radetzky was a Bohemian nobleman and Austrian field marshal. He served as chief of the general staff in the Habsburg Monarchy during the later period of the Napoleonic Wars and afterwards began military reforms. A disciplined and fair man, he was so beloved by his troops that he was known as Vater (‘Father’) Radetzky. In 1813 he was Schwarzenberg’s chief of staff and had considerable influence on the councils of the Allied sovereigns and generals. He is best known for the victories at the Battles of Custoza (24–25 July 1848) and Novara (23 March 1849) during the First Italian War of Independence.
Palmerston
Palmerston was an English statesman whose career included many years as British foreign secretary and prime minister. He dominated British foreign policy during the period 1830-1865, when Britain stood at the height of its imperial power. He began his parliamentary career as a Tory, defected to the Whigs in 1830, and became the first prime minister from the newly formed Liberal Party in 1859. Palmerston masterfully controlled public opinion by stimulating British nationalism. Although Queen Victoria and most of the political leadership distrusted him, he sustained the favour of the press and the populace. Historians rank him as one of the greatest foreign secretaries, due to his handling of great crises, his commitment to the balance of power (which provided Britain with decisive agency in many conflicts) and his commitment to British interests. His policies in relation to India, China, Italy, Belgium and Spain had extensive long-lasting beneficial consequences for Britain.
Frankfurt Parliament
The Frankfurt National Assembly was the first freely elected parliament for all of Germany and German-speaking Austria-Hungary, elected on 1 May 1848. Its existence was both part of and the result of the “March Revolution” within the states of the German Confederation. After long and controversial debates, the assembly produced the so-called Frankfurt Constitution which proclaimed a German Empire based on the principles of parliamentary democracy. This constitution fulfilled the main demands of the liberal and nationalist movements and provided a foundation of basic rights, both of which stood in opposition to Metternich’s system of Restoration. The parliament also proposed a constitutional monarchy headed by a hereditary emperor (Kaiser). Frederick William IV refused to accept the office of emperor when it was offered to him.
Schwarzenberg
Kossuth
He was a political reformer who inspired and led Hungary’s struggle for independence from Austria (Brief period of power 1848-1849). In 1847 the county of Pest elected him to represent it in the next Diet, in which he assumed leadership of the “national opposition,” which had agreed on an extensive program of political and social reform. He demanded the removal of Viennese absolutism to safeguard the liberties of Hungary. He made himself the life of the more extreme nationalist movement in Hungary. It was Kossuth who persuaded the Diet to tie the dispatch of Hungarian troops to Italy to political conditions unacceptable to Vienna, at the same time calling for a big national force to defend Hungary against the danger from the Croats and Serbs. After the invasion of the Croat army and the prime minister had resigned, Kossuth became the effective leader of Hungary. The Diet elected Kossuth himself governor of Hungary but after the arrival of the Russian armies he had to resign this post.
Carlo Alberto
Charles Albert was the King of Sardinia from 1831 until 1849. As king, after an initial conservative period during which he supported various European legitimist movements, he adopted the idea of a federal Italy, led by the Pope and freed from the House of Habsburg in 1848. In the same year he granted the Albertine Statute, the first Italian constitution, which remained in force until 1947. Charles Albert led his forces against the Imperial Austrian army in the First Italian War of Independence (1848–1849) but was abandoned by Pope Pius IX and Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies and was defeated in 1849 at the Battle of Novara, after which he abdicated in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel II. The attempt to free northern Italy from Austria represents the first attempt of the House of Savoy to alter the equilibrium established after the Congress of Vienna. These efforts were continued successfully by his son Victor Emmanuel II, who became the first king of a unified Italy in 1861.
Blanqui
He was a French socialist and political activist, notable for his revolutionary theory which holds which holds that socialist revolution should be carried out by a relatively small group of highly organised and secretive conspirators. Having seized power, the revolutionaries would then use the power of the state to introduce socialism. He was disappointed by the Revolution of July 1830, which established the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. He organized first the Société des Familles and then the Société des Saisons. The latter society’s disastrous attempt at insurrection on May 12, 1839, was the classic prototype of the Blanquist surprise attack. B lanqui was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for having participated, on May 15, in a popular demonstration of which he had, in fact, disapproved. Released in 1859, he again organized secret societies and was rearrested in 1861, remaining in prison until he escaped to Belgium in 1865.
Chartism
Chartism was a movement for political reform in Britain that existed from 1838 to 1857. It took its name from the People’s Charter of 1838 and was a national protest movement. he strategy employed was to use the scale of support which these petitions and the accompanying mass meetings demonstrated to put pressure on politicians to concede manhood suffrage. Chartism thus relied on constitutional methods to secure its aims, though some became involved in insurrectionary activities, notably in South Wales and in Yorkshire.
The People’s Charter called for six reforms to make the political system more democratic:
- Vote for every man aged over 21
- Secret ballot
- No property qualification for MPs
- Payment of MPs, enabling tradesmen and working men to leave/interript their livelihood to represent the interests of the people
- Equal constituencies
- Annual Parliamentary elections
Irish Famine
The Great Famine was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852. One million people died and more than one million people left Ireland, causing the country’s populatiion to fall by 20-25%.
The proximate cause of the famine was a potato blight which infected potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, causing an additional 100,000 deaths outside Ireland and influencing much of the unrest in the widespread European Revolutions of 1848. From 1846, the impact of the blight was exacerbated by the British Whig government’s obstinate faith in laissez-faire economic policy, free from intervention by government. Longer-term causes include the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence.
The famine and its effects permanently changed the island’s demographic, political, and cultural landscape, producing an estimated 2 million refugees and spurring a century-long population decline. The strained relations between many Irish and their ruling British government worsened further because of the famine, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions and boosting nationalism and republicanism both in Ireland and among Irish emigrants around the world.
