Reactions and Revolutions

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Describe how and why diverse groups challenged the existing order between 1815 and 1914 (Skill 6.D; LO G).
• Account for KC-3.4.I.C: how revolutionaries attempted to dismantle the post-1815 status quo across the first half of the nineteenth century.
• Account for KC-3.4.I.D: how the 1848 revolutions, set off by economic hardship and political discontent, broke down the Concert of Europe.
• Account for KC-3.4.II.D: how Russian autocratic leaders pushed through reform and modernization (the emancipation of the serfs and related reforms) that gave rise to revolutionary movements and eventually the 1905 Russian Revolution.
• Corroborate, qualify, or modify an argument about the causes and consequences of the 1848 revolutions using diverse evidence (Skill 6.D).

Topic 6.6 traces the principal challengers to the post-1815 European political order across the long nineteenth century. The challenges came in two principal waves: the early-nineteenth-century revolts (Decembrist 1825, Greek 1821-1829, July 1830, Belgian 1830, Polish 1830-1831) which the Concert system could partially contain; and the 1848 wave, which broke the Concert system entirely. A separate Russian story runs in parallel: Tsar Alexander II's reform program from above (1855-1881) and the revolutionary movements that responded to it.

Early-nineteenth-century revolts. KC-3.4.I.C: in the first half of the nineteenth century, revolutionaries attempted to dismantle the existing order. Six principal episodes shape the period.

The 1820 revolts in Spain, Naples, and Piedmont were carbonari-led liberal-constitutional movements. In Spain, Major Rafael del Riego led an army revolt in January 1820 that forced Ferdinand VII to restore the 1812 Constitution of Cadiz. In Naples, the carbonari forced Ferdinand I to grant a constitution in July 1820. In Piedmont, an officer revolt in March 1821 forced Victor Emmanuel I to abdicate in favor of his more constitutionalist brother Charles Felix. The Concert powers responded under the Troppau Protocol: Austrian forces suppressed Naples in March 1821 and Piedmont in April 1821; French forces suppressed Spain in 1823.

The Greek War of Independence (1821-1829) was different in character: a nationalist revolt against Ottoman (rather than Concert) authority. The European liberals supported the Greek cause (philhellenism became a recognizable European sentiment, with the British poet Lord Byron its most famous representative; Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824). British, French, and Russian fleets defeated the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at Navarino in October 1827. The 1830 London Protocol recognized Greek independence, and the Concert powers themselves were the principal architects of the new state — an unusual outcome that broke the Concert's general policy of suppression.

The Decembrist revolt of December 1825 was a constitutionalist officer movement in Russia. Following the death of Tsar Alexander I and confusion about the succession, several hundred officers of the Imperial Guard, organized in two principal secret societies (the Northern Society in St. Petersburg and the Southern Society in Ukraine), attempted to block Nicholas I's accession in favor of his older brother Constantine, whom the conspirators regarded as more sympathetic to constitutional reform. The revolt was suppressed within a day; five of the leaders were executed and over a hundred sentenced to Siberian exile. The Decembrist revolt was the first major modern Russian revolutionary attempt; its failure shaped Russian autocratic policy under Nicholas I (1825-1855), who treated systematic suppression of revolutionary infrastructure as the central task of his reign.

The 1830 wave produced three principal events. The July Revolution in Paris (27-29 July 1830) replaced the Bourbon Charles X (whose July Ordinances had suspended press freedom and dissolved the Chamber of Deputies) with the more liberal Louis-Philippe of the Orleans branch. The 1830 Belgian Revolution produced an independent Belgium recognized by the Concert powers in 1831 (formal recognition came with the 1839 Treaty of London) and breaking the United Kingdom of the Netherlands the Vienna settlement had created. The Polish November Uprising (29 November 1830 to October 1831) attempted to restore Polish independence from Russian rule; the Russian army crushed the revolt and Poland was reduced to a Russian province under direct rule. The 1830 wave demonstrated that the Concert could no longer reverse every revolutionary outcome — the July Monarchy and Belgium remained, the Polish revolt was suppressed but at high political cost.

The 1848 revolutions. KC-3.4.I.D: the revolutions of 1848, triggered by economic hardship and discontent with the political status quo, challenged conservative politicians and governments and led to the breakdown of the Concert of Europe.

The economic background was the agrarian and industrial crisis of 1845-1847: the Irish Famine and the broader European "Hungry Forties" (Topic 6.2); the early industrial business-cycle downturn of 1846-1847 producing widespread urban unemployment; and the food-price spike that pushed working-class living standards down sharply. The political background was the cumulative pressure of liberal-constitutional and nationalist movements that had been suppressed but not defeated through the Concert period.

The wave began in Sicily in January 1848 (a revolt that produced a short-lived independent state) and accelerated dramatically with the February Revolution in Paris (22-24 February 1848). The Parisian crowds and National Guard forced Louis-Philippe to abdicate and a provisional government to declare the Second French Republic, with universal male suffrage. Within four weeks, revolutions broke out in Vienna (13 March, forcing Metternich's resignation and exile), Berlin (15 March, forcing Frederick William IV to grant a constitution), Hungary (15 March, with Lajos Kossuth leading a movement for Hungarian autonomy and eventual independence), Milan (18 March, the "Five Days of Milan" expelling Austrian forces), Venice (March, restoring the Venetian Republic), and Frankfurt (May, with the Frankfurt Parliament convening to draft a German national constitution).

The revolutionary coalitions split between the moderate liberals (constitutional monarchy, parliamentary government, civil liberties) and the more radical democrats and socialists (republican government, universal suffrage, social reform). In Paris, the June Days uprising (23-26 June 1848) saw the Paris working population rise against the new conservative government's closure of the National Workshops; the army under General Cavaignac suppressed the revolt with substantial casualties. The June Days marked the principal political break: the bourgeois liberals turned against the radical democrats and the social-reform program, and the revolution lost its broadest base of support. The December 1848 election produced a presidency for Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon I; he carried out a coup in December 1851 and proclaimed the Second Empire in December 1852.

The other 1848 revolutions met similar fates by mid-1849. The Habsburg recovery began with Field Marshal Windischgratz's recapture of Prague in June 1848 and Vienna in October 1848; Hungarian resistance continued under Kossuth until Russian intervention (the principal post-1815 example of Russia acting as the "policeman of Europe") crushed the Hungarian forces at Vilagos in August 1849. The Frankfurt Parliament drafted a German constitution and offered the imperial crown to Frederick William IV of Prussia, who refused it (April 1849); the Parliament dissolved without producing a unified German state. The Italian states' revolutions were suppressed by Austrian forces by August 1849. The Roman Republic, declared in February 1849 after Pope Pius IX fled, was overthrown by French forces in July 1849 and the Pope restored.

The 1848 revolutions failed to achieve their immediate political aims, but they had three lasting consequences. First, they ended the Concert of Europe as a system of conservative international coordination. After 1848 the great powers no longer cooperated systematically against revolutionary movements; the Crimean War (1853-1856) and the wars of Italian and German unification (Topics 7.2 and 7.3) reflect the absence of Concert coordination. Second, they ended legal serfdom in central and eastern Europe (Habsburg lands by September 1848, Prussia by 1850), one of the few durable social-policy outcomes of the revolutionary year. Third, they established universal male suffrage as a political horizon: France retained universal male suffrage despite the 1851 coup, and the demand became standard across continental European liberal and socialist movements.

Russian autocratic reform. KC-3.4.II.D: in Russia, autocratic leaders pushed through a program of reform and modernization, including the emancipation of the serfs, which gave rise to revolutionary movements and eventually the 1905 Russian Revolution.

Tsar Alexander II (reigned 1855-1881) inherited the throne at the end of the Crimean War (1853-1856), which had exposed Russian military backwardness and administrative inefficiency. The reform program responded to that exposure. The 1861 Emancipation Manifesto formally ended Russian serfdom, freeing roughly 23 million privately-owned peasants from binding obligations to noble landlords. The terms of the emancipation were not generous: peasants were freed but required to pay long-term redemption obligations (lasting until 1907) for the land allotments they received, which were typically smaller than the land they had farmed under serfdom. The peasant commune (the obshchina or mir) retained collective responsibility for redemption payments and tax collection, restricting individual peasant mobility.

Subsequent reforms expanded the program. The 1864 zemstvo reform created elected local-government councils at the district and provincial level, with limited authority over local roads, schools, public health, and welfare. The 1864 judicial reform introduced trial by jury, public proceedings, and an independent bar (a substantial improvement over the secret bureaucratic procedures it replaced). The 1864 educational reform expanded primary and secondary schooling. The 1874 universal military conscription law replaced the older twenty-five-year terms of service for serfs with a six-year peacetime term applicable to all male citizens, modeled on the post-1864 Prussian system.

The reforms produced unintended political consequences. The newly literate students and educated professionals constituted a new middle stratum of Russian society (the intelligentsia) that proved increasingly critical of autocracy. Revolutionary movements emerged in the 1860s and 1870s: the populist "going-to-the-people" movement of 1873-1874 (university students attempting to organize the peasants); the People's Will (Narodnaya Volya) revolutionary group that assassinated Alexander II in March 1881; and after 1900 the Social Revolutionary Party and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (which split in 1903 into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks). The 1905 Russian Revolution, triggered by the disasters of the Russo-Japanese War, forced Tsar Nicholas II to grant a representative assembly (the Duma) and a constitution — an outcome that resembled the 1848 settlements in central Europe a half-century earlier and that the Romanov regime would not survive past 1917.

Three sources framing the revolutionary challenge: a Decembrist program, a French observer of 1848, and the 1861 Russian Emancipation Manifesto.

1. (Causation, Skill 6.D) Account for the principal challenges to the post-1815 European political order before 1848. Identify three specific revolts and explain what each demanded.
2. (Causation) Account for KC-3.4.I.D: how did economic hardship and political discontent combine to produce the 1848 wave? Identify the principal cities where revolutions broke out in February-March 1848.
3. (Causation) Account for the failure of the 1848 revolutions in central Europe. Why did the Habsburg recovery succeed where the revolutions of February-March had not?
4. (Causation) Account for KC-3.4.II.D: how did Tsar Alexander II's reform program respond to the post-Crimean War exposure of Russian autocratic weakness? Identify three specific reforms beyond the 1861 Emancipation Manifesto.
5. (Causation) Compare the 1848 revolutions in France with the parallel revolutions in central Europe. Why did France end with Bonapartist authoritarianism while the central European revolutions produced complete restoration of pre-revolutionary regimes?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.