The Dynasties recover power

The projected Pan-Slav Congress convened, as arranged, in Prague in early June. The proceedings of this Congress were sub-divided into a section involving Poles and Ruthenes, one involving Czechs and Slovaks, and one involving Croats, Serbs and Slovenes. This Pan Slav Congress functioned as a more or less conscious counter-blast to the German National Assembly stressing support for the equality of nations and the continuation of several Slav peoples existence within the Austrian Empire - its outlook was in favour of Slavic Revival and of resistance to cultural Germanization.
Nevertheless the proceedings of the Congress itself were conducted through German as a language understood by all the delegates drawn, as they were, from a number of Slavic national traditions.

On 12th June there was some rioting in Prague that was followed several days later by the active deployment of the forces under the command of the local Austrian commander, General Windischgrätz, whose wife had been fatally wounded in the disturbances of the 12th, and a revival of Austrian administrative control after five days of conflict. In many cases moderate persons, seeing the behaviour of those involved in rioting in Prague as being excessive or alarmingly socialistic, tended away from support for unpredictable change and toward support for traditional authority.

Reaction was furthered by other, inherently tragic, developments that took place in France in late June. The French National Assembly elections of April 23rd had been based on universal suffrage and had produced a conservative outcome where the small number of deputies in favour of Republicanism and Socialism were heavily outnumbered. Those promises made in February that the government would arrange work schemes had resulted in the organisation of "National Workshops" which proved to be very expensive at a time when the new administration found it difficult to raise loans and considered it most imprudent to raise taxes sufficiently to actually fund the considerable expense in continuing the project. In many cases those in employment in Paris felt able to agitate for higher wages from their existing employers in the belief that they could fall back upon the public purse. Persons from outside Paris migrated to take advantage of the new provisions. In late May the authorities, with perhaps one hundred and twenty thousand persons enrolled in the work schemes, began to place restrictions on them. On 22nd June the assembly moved to close down the work schemes. People were in cases offered such deeply unattractive alternatives as joining the French army, participating in the draining of (notoriously unhealthy!!!) provincial swamplands, or emigration to colonial north Africa. On 23rd June barricades were set up in Paris by workers alienated by the closure of the National Workshops and the authorities ordered the army to intervene.
Thousands of fatalities occurred during subsequent street fighting, with thousands more being sent into exile or being given terms of imprisonment. After these "June Days" Socialism was subjected to repression and press freedoms were curtailed.

The Minister of War, General Cavignac, had played a prominent role in the "June Days" where socialism was suppressed and was invited by the assembly to continue with the exercise of sweeping powers until a new constitution was in place. Over the ensuing months however General Cavignac showed limited capacity for government and for the winning of political support. In the event people increasingly began to be attracted by the personality and policies of one Louis Napoleon, who had been raised as a nephew of the former Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who had long lived in exile but had been given approval to return to France in June 1848 and who had actually been elected to the Assembly. French public opinion, long supportive of extensions of French political, cultural, and military, influence had recently been moved by the works of Thiers and others celebrating the achievements of the Napoleonic era.

Louis Napoleon stood for election as President of the Republic - an office which, under the constitution of the republic, was to continue over a four year term. In this campaign Louis Napoleon espoused policies that offered strong support for order, for the rights of private property, and for the maintenance of the republic. His close family association with Napoleon Bonaparte also seemed to offer the promise of a more dynamic policy at home and abroad. At the election in December 1848 Louis Napoleon was returned with some five-and-a-half million votes out of the seven-and-a-half million cast. The now somewhat discredited General Cavignac being the closest runner up in the presidential campaign.

Although the assemblies of Lombardy, and of Venetia, had voted for annexation to the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont this was not put into effect as the Austrian commander Radetzky exceeded his official orders by leading his now reinforced armies based in the Quadrilateral against the Sardinian-Piedmontese led interest and won a decisive victory at Custozza on July 23rd.

In April 1848 Prussia, Brunswick, and Hanover, had sent forces into Holstein after being asked to intervene by those assembled at Frankfurt at a time of a succession crisis, following on from the repudiation of the incoming Danish Kings personal Sovereignty as Duke, by the Estates of Holstein and Schleswig. In early May Prussian forces penetrated into the Danish province of Jutland. The Tsar of all the Russia's had let it be known that he disapproved of these actions by Prussia, meanwhile, the British were pressing for the agreement of a peace. As a result of these international complications, and also of the seriously adverse effects of a Danish blockade on Prussian commerce, the Prussian Kingdom entered on 28th August into a so-called Malmo Armistice with Denmark without prior consultation with the German National Assembly. The Assembly initially condemned this armistice but, on the 16th September, narrowly endorsed it after a three-day debate. During these days there had been radically-led rioting in many west German towns. On 26th September Austrian, Prussian, and Hessian, forces were called upon to defend the Assembly's proceedings against those protesting this acceptance of an armistice so deeply unwelcome to German national sentiment. Two conservative deputies lost their lives in these turmoils.

The unicameral legislature that was to meet in Vienna to frame a Constitution convened there on 22 June. The wide franchise resulted in an unprecedentedly large number on peasant deputies, (92 out of 383), with more than half on the deputies being of Slavic origin.
A wide range of languages, German, Czech, Polish, Roumanian, Ruthenian and Italian, were heard in the debates. By September 7 the legislature had agreed to the removal of feudal burdens on peasant-held lands in return for provincially and peasant funded compensations. These reforms went a long way to satisfying peasant grieviances. A gradual easing of the level of unrest in these weeks of debate had been accompanied by a return of the Emperor from Innsbruck to the Schonbrunn, one of his principal palaces, on the outskirts of Vienna. The gradual easing of tensions and this return of the royal court allowed an upturn in trading confidence and an increase in employment which also allowed people to feel more content with their lives.

The Magyars tended to see themselves as the natural "people of state" and the Magyar tongue as the natural "language of state" in their hoped for restored and constitutional kingdom of Hungary. Although Kossuth, in sponsoring Hungarian constitutional autonomy in March 1848, had pronounced that "Our task is to found a happier future on the brotherhood of all the Austrian races" it happened that the Magyar dominated Hungarian Diet sought to effectively impose the Magyar tongue, as the language of state, on the several Slav nationalities that had been living under the political control of the Hungarian Diet. This being done at a time when the admittedly traditionally dominant Magyars comprised only some forty per cent of the population of the Kingdom of Hungary.

The Magyars were not the first people to endeavour to create a 'progressive' state for themselves.
Turbulent times can often give scope for the adoption of sweeping policies. If we look, in efforts to better understand The Human Condition, at revolutionary France in the years after 1789 we see that policies were adopted by the French Revolutionaries which featured such things as the abandonment of the long established "feudal" territories of France, (e. g. Maine, Anjou, Gascony), with their being replaced, after December 1789, by eighty-three new administrative Departements whose names were derived from geographical features.

Against a background of economic crisis the immense landholdings of the Catholic church in France were seized by the Revolutionaries in order to back the issue of a new currency - the Assignat. The promulgation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July 1790 divided the French clergy into those who agreed to swear an oath of loyalty to the new Constitution and those who refused after the Constitution had been condemned by the Pope in April 1791.
The "Christian" calendar was repudiated with a new one being adopted based on the current reality of the, "French Revolutionary New Dawn," giving humanity its new base year, (September 22, 1792 - the day the revolutionaries pronounced the French monarchy to be abolished - was redefined to be the first day of Year I of the Republic), along with new months and new weekdays. This new calendar made no concessions to the continued recognition of a christian "holy day" or saint's days.
On 10 November 1793 a great festival in honour of liberty was held in Notre-Dame cathedral. A morally disreputable actress from the Opera played the role of the goddess of Reason. Artifacts associated with of royalty and religion were burned in a bonfire around which people danced and drank to fraternity until dawn. After this festival, Notre-Dame became the Temple of Reason. The cult of Reason soon spread throughout provincial France, and the churches were secularized. The Convention created a group of officials, called "mission deputies," to enforce the dechristianization of the French republic.

The France of 1789, with an overall population of some twenty-eight million persons, was the most populous state in western Europe by a wide margin. Territorially France was a result of a centuries long consolidation of provinces that had been brought under French royal sovereignty through dynastic marriages, dynastic inheritances, dynastic wars and other conflicts.
Such processes had resulted in a high degree of regional linguistic diversity. The Revolutionary upheavals after 1789 occured in a French domestic situation where perhaps a million persons spoke Breton in their everyday lives, another million spoke German, an hundred thousand spoke Basque, there were another hundred thousand Catalan speakers, whilst Provence, in the south east, was the home of many historic dialects. Flemish and Italian were also spoken in certain border regions.
In 1789 it is suggested that some forty per cent of the population of France as a whole could not communicate through the French language. Whilst only a sixth of the newly relevant 'Departments', all of which were located around Paris, were more or less exclusively French speaking.

Ardent French Republicanism was largely an urban phenomenon. Its keenest supporters called each other "Citizen", demanded that "Careers be open to Talent" in a state supportive of "Liberty, Egality, and Fraternity."
The Kings of France had been prepared to exercise sovereignty over a feudally structured realm that featured a degree of localised linguistic diversity. The would-be architects of the Republic increasingly associated the concepts of "language" and "nation" and, as they conceptually struggled with issues of "unity" and "nationhood," it become evident that the "progressive" forms of "unity" and "nationhood" they had in mind were difficult to promote against this background of linguistic diversity and provincial regionalism. Some resistance being shown by non-French speaking provinces to the aspirations of the French Revoutionaries probably contributed to the generation of a mindset amongst the leading French Republican circles that saw such historically arising minority languages as being associated with the "feudalism" the French republicans were determined to displace.

A Republican Decree under Robespierre, the Decree of Thermidor 2 (July 20, 1794), provided that henceforth all contracts had to be written in French. By its terms any civil servant, public officer, or any government official who, in the performance of their duties, drew up, wrote or subscribed official reports, judgements, contracts or other generally unspecified documents in idioms or languages other than French could be condemned to six months imprisonment.
One of the moving spirits behind its adoption, the Abbe Gregoire, had presented a report entitled "Why and How the Patois Must be Destroyed and French Made Universal" to the National Convention on 16 Prairal Year II (4 June 1794). This report suggested that standard French was the mother tongue of only 15% of the population and maintained that ‘the patois (Occitan, Provençal and all non-standard forms of French), together with Breton and Basque, represent the barbarism of centuries past and need to be obliterated and replaced by standard French’. Gregoires report called for the single and invariable use of "the language of freedom" in a "Republic one and indivisible".
As early as 8 Pluviôse Year II (January 27, 1794). Bertrand Barère (a member of the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety) had stated: ‘Federalism and superstition speak Breton, emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German, counter-revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque. Let us break these instruments of injury and error. The language of a free people must be one and the same for all’.

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838), one of the political great men of the time, proposed that there should be a primary school in each municipality such that "The language of the Constitution and the laws will be taught there to all; and this crowd of corrupted dialects, the last remains of feudality, will be forced to disappear; the new order of things demands it".

A lite version of Latin had traditionally been the political language of the Hungarian Kingdom - this was broadly acceptable in cultural and historic terms to most of the ethnic groups domiciled in that kingdom as, by learning to speak Latin, the non-Magyar peoples living under the sovereignty of the Kings of Hungary did not unduly compromise their inherited local ethnicity or their preferred "wider european" cultural perspectives.
Magyar, on the other hand, had been brought west in association with a conquering Magyar mass migration several centuries previously and was regarded as being an extremely difficult language to learn. This difficulty arose in large measure from archaic differences in origin - Magyar having "Uralic" linguistic roots quite different to those of the "Indo-European" tongues of most of western Europe. Finnish and Estonian being the most prominent related branches of this "Uralic" Finno-Ugrian language family that have become established in western Europe and Scandinavia.

Kossuth, and Magyar nationalism, also tended to see Transylvania and Croatia, southern and eastern territories recently included in a declaration defining the "lands of the Crown of St. Stephen", although they were not actually within the historic Kingdom of Hungary, as being self-evidently subject to the governmental power to be exercised by the Hungarian Diet. In the case of Croatia the long history of association with Hungary was based on the person of the monarch rather than any other binding political or cultural arrangements.

The year was 1848 and perhaps Europe as a whole at that time had yet to experience widespread instances of historic communities making pressing claims for linguistic and cultural autonomy. One Croat representative to the Diet rose in protest and said that "You Magyars are an island in an ocean of Slavism. Take heed that its waves do not rise and overwhelm you."
This representative, Ljudevit Gaj, was perhaps the leading figure in the Illyrian movement. Like many romantic nationalists in these times, and later, across Europe and Scandinavia he was not native to the (in this case "Illyrian") nationality that was being championed. Gaj was the son of a German father and a Slovak mother and was born just north of the ancient Croat capital, Zagreb, in 1814 and developed an interest in Croatian history as he grew up. Whilst he was later being educated in German speaking universities he became influenced by a romanticisation of Pan-Slav cultural nationhood that held all Slavs to be brothers in the wider sense, but accepted the division of them into four main groups, one of which was the Southern Slav, or 'Illyrian', cornprising the Croats, Slovenes, Serbs and Bulgars.
The lands Gaj sought to identify with, "Illyria", or "Croatia with Dalmatia and Slovenia and possibly also Bulgaria and Serbia", had long been under the sway of external powers and foreign cultural influences to the extent that little remained of what was thought of as Croat identity. Gaj, through his involvement with his Croat language Illyrian News journal had gained a certain celebrity particularly in those parts where people could think of themselves as being "Croats" as a would-be champion of an awakening of a cultural patriotism that hoped to see a recovery of a "Croat-Illyrian" language, and a renaissance of "Croat-Illyrian" culture.
In his efforts to recover "Croatian" as a South Slavic literary language, Gaj had personally devised a Latin character based script through which to better express "Illyrian" literature, aspirations and nationalist sentiments.

In 1843 the Hungarian dominated Pressburg assembly had voted to make Magyar the official language of Hungary and Slavonia, and nominated Magyar as the future official language of Hungarian-Croatian relations. Such relations had hitherto been conducted through culturally and politically "neutral" Latin. Croats regarded this new law an infringement on their traditional autonomy and saturated the Imperial authority at Vienna with petitions for political separation, within the Austrian Empire, from Hungary. As part of this scenario Croat officials returned to Budapest many documents that had been sent them in Magyar.
The Magyar authorities, meanwhile, were alarmed by the upsurge of "Illyrianism" and had even tried to ban public utterance of the word "Illyria."

Jellachic, formerly a colonel of a Croatian regiment in the Habsburg service and more recently (March 1848) Governor or Ban of Croatia (and a close friend of Ljudevit Gaj!), soon thereafter expelled Magyar officials from Croatia, in May forbade correspondence with the Hungarian government, and in June moved to restore the Croatian Diet at Agram. Under Hungarian diplomatic lobbying most of these measures by Jellachic were successively officially condemned by the Emperor even to the point of suspending Jellachic from office. After being summoned to an interview with the Emperor at Innsbruck Jellachic gave fulsome assurances of loyalty to the Habsburg state system and published an address to the numerous Croat soldiers based under Radetzky's overall command in Lombardy to continue in the Habsburg service and "not to be diverted from their duty to the Emperor in the field by any report of danger to their rights and to the nationality nearer home." This manifesto won him the support of many important persons in the higher reaches of the Austrian military and court.

Radetzky's victory at Custozza contributed to a resurgence in the fortunes of the Habsburg system. Given this resurgence the Emperor felt able to return to Vienna. In early September Jellachic was restored to office by the Emperor as Ban of Croatia and soon thereafter led a force against the Hungarian interest. By this move Jellachic intended to support the restoration of the Habsburg Empire. The Hungarian Parliament was declared abolished by the Emperor on the 3rd of October, on the 6th arrangements for the sending of Austrian German regiments to the aid of Jellachic were followed by a revolt in Vienna aimed at impeding this deployment. Should Jellachic and the Austrian regiments suppress the Hungarian separatism this would tend to also diminish the possibility of securing the formation of an administration that would be less under the sway of the dynasty and more responsive to the wishes for constitutional freedom of the Empires's "Peoples of State" or "Master Nations."

The Emperor left Vienna for Olmutz where a manifesto was issued proclaiming that Imperial authority would be re-established by military action. This Viennese revolt was forcibly contained by soldiers under the command of General Windischgrätz who could act in association with Jellachic's forces that had by this time reached the outskirts of Vienna.
In the event the Windischgrätz forcibly captured Vienna repulsing the advances of an Hungarian relieving force.
Such nationalities as the Serbs, the Slovaks, and the Rumanians also tended to operate against the establishment of a definite Hungarian political power - not so much to restore the Habsburg system as to inhibit the unwelcome threat of Magyarisation.

In November there was rioting in Berlin and King Frederick William ordered the dispersal of the Prussian Assembly. Prussian and other states' forces intervened in several German states to restore princely rule.

In late October, the Frankfurt Parliament, in its efforts to define a future relationship between the Habsburg lands and the German Polity the Franfurt Parliament was hoping to represent in the future, voted to accept a Grossdeutsch solution to this "German National Question" where Germanic and Czech lands traditionally ruled by the Habsburgs would be represented in Frankfurt but the other lands of the Habsburgs would enjoy other arrangements in some form of personal union with the Austrian Emperor.

By the late autumn of 1848 was the Habsburg system was showing strong signs of recovery in many of its historic territories. That being the case on 27th November the Austrian minister Schwarzenberg insisted that the Austrian Empire must be preserved intact. Given this declaration the deputies at Frankfurt had little option other than to throw their weight behind a Kleindeutsch solution to the German National Question where none of the the Habsburg lands would be represented in Franfurt. In such an arrangement, that had already been sponsored by liberal nationalist deputies a preponderance of influence would inevitably fall to the powerful Prussian state.

Austria was the traditionally the "leading power" in the German confederation, but of its thirty-six million inhabitants less than six million were German. Prussia was traditionally the "second power" in the German confederation, and of its sixteen million population some fourteen million were German.

In early December Schwarzenberg arranged the abdication of the incapable Emperor Ferdinand, whose authority had been tarnished by his concessions, in favour of an eighteen year old nephew the Archduke Francis. At the time of his accession Francis added Joseph to his name as Emperor in the hope of associating his rule with that of an earlier Emperor whose reforms were kindly remembered by many. Alongside his German mother tongue Francis Joseph also spoke fluent Hungarian and had some facility in most of the dialects of his new subjects. The Hungarians were unwilling to consent to Francis Joseph being invested with the Crown of St. Stephen.

On 4th March Francis Joseph issued, by decree, a new centralising Imperial Constitution devised by his own ministers and moved to dissolve the Austrian Constituent Assembly. On 9th March Schwarzenberg threw his support behind a possible resolution to the question of the extent of the new German State by suggesting that the entire Austrian Empire should join with the Germanic Confederation in "an Empire of Seventy Millions". Schwarzenberg further suggested that the leadership of this Germanic Confederation with further, non-germanic, Habsburg ruled, territorial additions would alternate between Austria and Prussia.

On 14 April the Hungarian Reichstag declared for the complete independence of Hungary from the sovereignty of the Austrian Empire. At this time the Hungarians had considerable military resources to call upon in support of the declaration of independence. These resources included a substantial Polish contingent including some able Polish generals.
The struggle to subdue Hungary proving difficult the Austrian authority sought, in late April, the involvement of the Tsar and invited active Russian assistance "in the holy struggle against anarchy."
The Tsar of all the Russias was in principle supportive of divine-right dynastic governance and had also become somewhat concerned lest the Hungarian developments be copied in "his own" Polish Kingdom. He had already, and seriously, offered to assist in returning the Kingdom of Hungary to its earlier political position within the 'lands of the Habsburgs' and now sent some three hundred and sixty thousand of his soldiers to co-operate with Austrian forces in efforts to subdue Hungary.

By late June, with Hungarian nationalism being hard pressed by Austrian, Russian, and local nationality opposition Kossuth made some concessions to the nationalities within the Hungarian kingdom allowing them to use their own languages in schools and law courts. This attempt to win support from these nationalities proved to be, however, a case of too little and too late.

By mid August the Hungarian movement for independence was effectively overwhelmed. The Constitution issued by Francis Joseph on 4 March was now held, by the Austrian authorities, to be applicable to Hungary also.

As the Austrian authority recovered power it alienated "liberal-German" sentiment by issuing Imperially sponsored and limited constitutions and by dismissing Austrian political assemblies.

Those present as representatives in the Frankfurt Parliament had another option to consider than the Empire of Seventy Millions being suggested by Schwarzenburg in the form of Kleindeutschland. After further debate the Frankfurt Assembly responded to the ongoing constitutional stalemate by approving, on 28 March with some two-fifths of the representatives abstaining, a Kleindeutsch outcome and offering the throne as hereditary "Emperor of the Germans" to the King of Prussia.

A thirty-two man delegation subsequently journeyed to Berlin to seek the consent of the King of Prussia. In the event King Frederick William, in polite and diplomatic terms told the delegation that he felt honoured but could accept the crown only with the consent "of the crowned heads, the princes, and the free cities of Germany." He nevertheless gave some consideration to the offer, over several weeks, before finally declining to become "Emperor of the Germans".

King Frederick William was less polite about these developments in a letter to a relative in England in which he related that he felt deeply insulted by being offered "from the gutter" a crown, "disgraced by the stink of revolution, baked of dirt and mud."
It appears that King Frederick William alongside his own romantic notions about kingship, (he had described Constitutions as "pieces of paper that stand between God, who appoints kings and rulers, and the people"), also thought of the House of Habsburg as being the naturally leading dynasty in the Germanies and as such was unwilling to attempt to challenge its leading role by accepting the Imperial title. In practical terms the Habsburg dynasty would have found such an acceptance to be intolerable and would probably have sought to undo it through diplomatic and possibly also military endeavours.

During the early summer of 1849 such German states as Baden, Württemberg, the Bavarian Palatinate, the Prussian Rhineland and Saxony experienced turmoils that seemed to offer support to the Frankfurt Parliament but which also featured evident social revolutionary aspects. In early May Prussian forces intervened to suppress a serious radical rising in Dresden, the capital of the Kingdom of Saxony, without the encouragement or consent of the German National Assembly.
Following on from leftist rioting in the Prussian Rhineland Karl Marx' Rheinische Zeitung was ordered to cease publication.
Such social revolutionary turmoil was widely seen as a threat by many who were fairly content with the more modest reforms that was already deemed to have already been secured through the Frankfurt Assembly process.

Wider society increasing looked to the authorities to maintain order against such perceived extremism.
The foot soldiers involved, although often drawn from the same stratas of society that also produced radical insurrectionists, commonly saw themselves as acting in defence of the "March achievements" against dangerous radicalism. Prussia's leading role in these interventions in several historic states of the Germanies did not seem to bring with it unpopularity with the wider society of the German states affected or with the soldiers of other states who commonly aligned themselves with the Prussian drive against perceived extremism.

In the wake of Frederick William's decision not to accept the proferred Imperial crown Prussian delegates were ordered to withdraw from the German National Assembly, other states also withdrew their representatives.
In the circumstances what was left of the credibility of the Assembly largely evaporated - the Frankfurt Assembly was discontinued in May with a rump of mainly left-leaning delegates ineffectively reconvening at Stuttgart.
After the recovery of reaction in the Germanies the Constitutions of many German states were rendered less liberal or suspended altogether.

On 15th November 1848 Rossi, the Prime Minister of the States of the Church who seemed to be on the point of acting to repress reform, was attacked and fatally injured. Later that month Pope Pius left a turbulent Rome and relocated at Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples. The formation of a Constituent Assembly to be elected by universal suffrage was set in train shortly thereafter. On 5th February the Constituent Assembly held its first session and four days later issued a Declaration which repudiated the Temporal Power of the Church and proclaimed a Roman Republic:-

Article 1. The temporal government of the papacy is now at an end, in fact and in law.
Article 2. The Roman pontiff will have every guarantee needed for the independent exercise of his spiritual power.
Article 3. The form of government at Rome shall be that of a pure democracy, and it will take the glorious name of the Roman Republic.
Article 4. The Roman Republic will enter into such relations with the rest of Italy as our common nationality demands.

On February 18th Pope Pius, believing this Declaration of a Roman Republic to be an intolerable revolutionary overthrow of what was not only an historically valid polity but which was also, and more importantly, the divinely ordained seat of the Papacy, called upon France, Austria, Naples and Spain to restore the States of the Church to Papal Sovereignty.

In March at Novara the Austrians won an important victory over the forces led by Sardinia-Piedmont prompting King Charles Albert to abdicate. He was succeeded by a son, Victor Emmanuel who, in a personal interview with the Austrian commander Radetzky won his agreement to the continuance of the Sardinian Statuto constitutional arrangements as this continuance would be likely to better reconcile potentially turbulent Piedmontese radicals to the post-conflict situation.

Austrian intervention secured the restoration of the Grand Duke of Tuscany to his throne - it now seemed that Rome would similarly be returned to Papal authority before many weeks had passed.

The Sicilian Parliament had pronounced Ferdinand, the Boubon dysnast who ruled from Naples, to be deposed and had offered the throne to a younger brother of Victor Emmanuel. King Ferdinand responded by despatching a naval fleet which proceeded to bombard Messina over five days. Negotiations were entered into but agreement proved elusive. In the event Sicily was invested with King Ferdinand's soldiers such that the capital, Palermo, was captured on May 15.

The government of Louis Napoleon in France preferred that Austrian arms should not themselves achieve the restoration of the Papal power in Rome as this could lead to the re-establishment of an Austrian hegemony in the peninsula that could well be harmful to the perceived interests of France. Louis Napoleon also hoped to gain favour with powerful Roman Catholic interests in France through a French intervention intended to win Rome back to the sovereignty of the papacy.
Some ten thousand soldiers were duly sent from the French Republic with the minority republican element in the French assembly being assured of the good intentions of the assembly towards the Roman population and of a desire to avert possible Austrian domination.

The large army sent by France landed on the coast near Rome on 25 April 1849 and was directly responsible for the militarily contested overthrow of the Roman Republic in early July 1849 despite a stout resistance led by several patriotric Italians including Mazzini and Garibaldi. This French intervention, was styled for French domestic consumption as being a necessary to overthrow unpopular "foreigners who had come from all parts of Italy."
On August 25 an Austrian army overthrew the independence of Venice where resistance had been worn down by cholera and famine as well as by military siege and bombardment.

The Papal authority, as restored to Rome on July 14, soon showed itself, in defiance of the wishes of France, as being interested in the re-imposition of a priestly absolutism. Pope Pius IX did not personally return to Rome from Gaeta until the following year and when he did so he returned with a head of hair that had become rapidly and prematurely grey due to the stresses of the time. He thereafter followed notably conservative policies in theology and in politics over the following two decades.

The revolutions of 1848-9, this so-called "springtime of the peoples" which had once seemed to sweep all before it, had revealed that there was a powerful groundswell of dissatisfaction with traditional dynastic governance but where it was set aside this usually led to the emergence of situations where deep rivalries centered on the forwarding of sectionally "popular" socialistic and sectionally "popular" nationalist aspirations by some interested groups that were deeply unwelcome to other interested groups. The resulting divisions and turmoils alienated many people from the course of the revolutions and facilitated the return of local dynastic authority as a broadly acceptable champion of order over chaos.
Just as in the 1789-1815 era Russia again eventually intervened in support of the tradition of throne and altar governance.

Although the tide of revolution was turned back in 1849 the events of 1848-1849 left several direct legacies. There was profound reform of the lot of the peasantry over much of central Europe as approved by the Austrian Constituent Assembly on 7th September 1848 (and as retained by the restored Austrian administration).
This involved an elimination of the "robot" feudal services which the peasantry had previously to render to local magnates. This led to far-reaching transformations in society where agriculture became more commercial and less feudal and where many poorer peasants were unable to survive economically due to falling prices. A consequent increase in migration of (usually) Slav peasants to (often previously) Germanised urban areas sometimes tended to contribute further to the establishment of conditions for continued "local clashes of culture and language" between German and Slav over large tracts of the Austrian Empire.

There was also an imparting of impetus to nationalism in the Italian Peninsula and in "the Germanies." Enduring change towards more inclusive representation or constitutional government occurred in Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Switzerland.

Things had also changed in that Scwartzenberg's newly centralised Austrian Empire featured a lesser role for conservative and aristocratic influences over affairs as the administration was now both more centralised and focussed more locally on the nationalities. These changes allowing a greater role for middle class influence and involvement across the empire.

Many consequences were to follow from Louis Napoleon's elevation to the French Presidency. On October 31 1849, when he had been in Presidential office for almost a year, he sent a message to the Assembly which effectively undermined the constitution of the republic. This message sought to offer some justification as to why the former Brissot ministry had been dismissed.

"France, in the midst of confusion, seeks for the hand, the will of him whom it elected on the 10^th of December. The victory won on that day was the victory of a system, for the name of Napoleon is itself a programme. It signifies order, authority, religion, national prosperity within; national dignity without. It is this policy, inaugurated by my election, that I desire to carry to triumph with the support of the Assembly and of the people."

In late 1851 the Republican constitution was more completely overthrown:-

"The present situation cannot continue. Each day that passes increases the country's danger. The Assembly, supposed to be the staunchest supporter of order, has become a hot-bed of sedition. The patriotism of three hundred members was not enough to curb its fatal tendencies. Instead of legislation for the public good, it is forging weapons for civil war. It is making a bid for the power that I wield directly by virtue of the people's will. It fosters every wicked passion. It is jeopardising the stability of France. I have dissoved the National Assembly and I invite the whole people to adjudicate between me and it. "
Proclamation of Louis Napoleon of 2 December 1851

Under the previous constitutional arrangements Louis Napoleon would have had to leave office in 1852 with there also being a law against the re-election of previous holders of the presidential office. Louis Napoleon, who had run up very heavy personal debts, knew that his political adversaries were waiting for an opportunity to move against him. The Proclamation of 2 December was accompanied by the arrest of seventy-eight of such key political opponents.

The French Republic was subsequently replaced by a form of Empire under Louis Napoleon who was to hold power as Emperor Napoleon III. Napoleon I being Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon II being a title imputed to the son of the politically arranged marriage between Napoleon Bonaparte and an Austrian Archduchess. This son had been raised under Metternich's overall supervision as an Austrian Duke but had died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-one.
As his life ebbed away this young Duke left the great ceremonial sword of honour he had inherited from his father not to any of his surviving Bonaparte uncles but to his cousin Louis Napoleon.

The implication of this title being that "Napoleon III" sought to identify his empire with that of Napoleon Bonaparte and intended to pursue somewhat Bonapartist policies at home and abroad. Where the truly dynastic rulers of Europe respected the principle of dynastic sovereignty and were also usually supportive of church influence on society such was not the "Bonapartist outlook." In particular Napoleon III was somewhat prepared to take upon himself the promotion of states based on what was called the so-called "national principle."

His uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte after defeat and in exile, had claimed to have been a champion of this "principle" but an examination of Bonaparte's policies suggests that such support as he offered to it was perhaps guided by considerations related to his own imperial framework and the winning of allies amongst peoples whilst avoiding the alienation of mighty adversaries such as the Tsar of Russia.

Napoleon III saw the promotion of national statehood as being a necessary response to the existence of popular and national aspirations that might tend to overspill into turbulent challenges to the then existing system. He also hoped that France might gain diplomatically by being the sponsor of such states and thus winning friends and allies. The situation where Napoleon III, as the ruler of one of the most inherently powerful states of western Europe, was prepared to undermine historic traditions of dynastic rule in order to facilitate the emergence of states based moreso on ethnic nationhood was likely to bring with it a degree of constitutional and political turmoil in Europe.
Napoleon III was also to some degree dismissive of the validity of the "Vienna Settlement" of 1815, which had attempted to restore dynastic rule after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte.

(Something of the nature of the potential constitutional and political turmoil that might tend to result from Napoleon III's adoption of such policies can be seen in a scenario, early in 1863, where the Empress Eugenie the wife of Napoleon III, spent some three hours showing the Austrian ambassador a projected "more rational" map of Europe. This proposed map envisioned dramatic and unprecedented changes to the sovereignty of several states.
A Polish state was to be re-established - such re-establishment would be at the expense of Prussia, Austria and Russia but Russia was to make compensatory gains in Asia Minor and Prussia in a consolidated North Germany. The emergent Italian kingdom [that had been formed in 1861] would gain Venetia with the Austrian Empire being compensated with Silesia and some territories in the Balkans. Greece would gain Constantinople [Istanbul] whilst the Ottoman Empire's lands in Europe seemed to disappear into other existing european states. France herself was to gain the left bank of the Rhine at the expense of German princes who might hope for territorial compensation in South America.)

Given his political outlook it happened that Napoleon III decided to interact diplomatically, and militarily, with dynastic ministers such as Cavour (prime minister to the House of Savoy) and Bismarck (prime minister to the House of Hohenzollern), in ways which culminated in the establishment of states - a Kingdom of Italy in 1861 (Cavour) and a second German Empire in 1871 (Bismarck) - that were simultaneously both dynastic and moreso in accordance with the "national principle". Powerful sections of the local populations in both these situations tending to support the replacement of the former patchworks of traditional dynastic states of the Italian peninsula and the German lands as a necessary route towards the establishment of more powerful and more progressive states that were also associated with shared feelings of nationality.

Interestingly, in both of these cases Napoleon III got more than he bargained for in that the Italian Kingdom and the German Empire that eventually emerged were both more territorially extensive and more independent of French influence than he had anticipated.
Similarly Cavour and Bismarck also got more than they bargained for in that the establishment of the Italian Kingdom and the German Empire were in practice associated with a lessening of the full acceptance of the personal sovereignty of dynastic rulers and a greater acceptance of popular national sovereignty.

In 1879 Edward Augustus Freeman, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, wrote:- A hundred years ago man's political likes and dislikes seldom went beyond the range suggested by the place of his birth or immediate descent, Such birth or descent made him a member of this or that political community, a subject of this or that prince, a citizen - perhaps a subject - of this or that commonwealth. The political community of which he was a member had its traditional alliances and traditional enemies, and by those traditional alliances and traditional enemies the likes and dislikes of the members of that community were guided. But those traditional alliances and enemies were seldom determined by theories about language or race. The people of this or that place might be discontented under a foreign government; but, as a rule, they were discontented only if subjection to that foreign government brought with it personal supression or at least political degradation. Regard or disregard of some purely local priveledge or local feeling went for more than the fact of a government being native or foreign. What we now call the sentiment of nationality did not go for much; what we call the sentiment of race went for nothing at all. Only a few men here or there would have understood the feelings which have led to the two great events of our time, the political reunion of the German and Italian nations after their long political dissolution. Between circa 1850 and 1870 several territorially ambitious Dynasties tried to exploit or "ride the tiger" of populist nationalism. In the case of Count Camillo Cavour this facilitated a form of Italian unification. In the case of Count Otto von Bismarck this led to a form of German unification.
Count Cavour, Garibaldi and Italian unification	Otto von Bismarck and German unification
1848 revolution
The revolution of 1848 begins	The French revolution of 1848
The german revolution 1848 The Frankfurt Vorparlament
Italian developments 1846-8 italy revolution 1848	1849 - the Dynasties recover power

Emerson's "Transcendental" approach to History

Spirituality & the wider world

Some Social Theory and insights

The Unfolding of History

The Vienna Declaration

Framework Convention on National minorities

Return to start of
The revolution of 1848
Aftermath - dynasties recover power

The Dynasties recover power

Proclamation of Louis Napoleon of 2 December 1851

1848 revolution