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Q1 Ge bi (Fb)Causes of the German Revolutions 1848/9
Economic and social problems
Increasing population
Since the middle of the eighteenth century, Germany’s population had grown dramatically, doubling in the century up to 1848. The result was that some areas found it difficult to sustain their populations. Thus, people left the land and drifted to towns in search of work or went to other parts of the world, hoping to better themselves. Of the 250,000 who left Germany in the 1840s, most went to the USA.
Problems in the countryside
Those people who remained in the countryside found life hard. In eastern Prussia much of the land belonged to the Junkers and was worked by landless peasants. Even in the parts of Germany where the peasants had become tenant farmers (i.e. farmers who rented their land from the landowner) rents were high and it was difficult to make a living.
Problems in the towns
In most towns there were insufficient jobs and housing to cope with the influx of migrants from the countryside. Living and working conditions were often atrocious [grauenhaft]. Even in good times workers were poorly clothed and fed. From the mid-1840s, there was unemployment in many industries. […] When work was available, working conditions were grim. The machines, especially in the textile factories, were not designed with the workers in mind. Men, women and children worked for 13 or more hours a day, often in awkward position, crouched over the machines.
Inadequate sanitation encouraged diseases like typhoid and cholera. Many newcomers, unable to find work, depended on charity or turned to crime. Strikes and riots among the urban working class multiplied in the 1830s and 1840s. Towns had concentrations of discontented people who were far more likely to act together than their rural counterparts. It is worth noting that the 1848 revolutions in Germany were overwhelmingly urban.
Across Germany industry was growing in the early nineteenth century. Skilled workers felt threatened by the advance of mechanisation that forced down the costs of production and made hand-produced products relatively expensive.
The economic crisis: 1846-7
In 1846 and 1847 the corn harvests were disastrous and the situation was made worse by a serious outbreak of potato blight (i.e. a destructive disease of the potato caused by a parasitic fungus). Potatoes were the main item of diet for most German peasants, and failure of the crop meant starvation. There was distress and unrest, and food riots broke out. There had been poor harvests before, but the increased population made the situation worse.
In the industrial towns there was a sharp rise in food prices. Cereal prices increased by nearly 50 per cent in 1847. In Berlin, the ‘potato revolution’ occurred. Barricades were erected, shops looted and the Crown Prince’s palace stormed before soldiers restored order.
Across Germany, the rise in food prices led to a reduction in consumer spending on items other than foodstuff. Consequently, craft and industrial production suffered a steep fall in demand, to which employers responded by laying off workers. There was thus a rapid increase in unemployment, particularly in the textile industry. Even those in work found their wages cut. The standard of living of most workers fell alarmingly as higher food prices coincided with lower wages.
Growing unrest
In both town and country, there was growing unrest. Dissatisfied with the existing state of affairs, workers and peasants demanded a better life for themselves and their families. Most of the demands were concerned with practical matters – higher wages, better housing, a shorter working day – not politics and political theories.
(from: Access to History: The Unification of Germany 1815-1919, ed. Alan Farmer/Andrina Stiles, London (2007), pp. 25-26.)
Political problems
The economic crisis helped to shape the prestige and self-confidence of many existing regimes. Most lacked the financial and bureaucratic resources – and possibly also the will – to intervene effectively to alleviate [erleichtern; lindern] the social distress and reverse the economic collapse. The calibre of rulers was not high and many monarchs and their ministers attracted a great deal of personal unpopularity, particularly from the growing number of educated middle class – lawyers, doctors, journalists, teachers, and civil servants.
In 1848 power lay where it always had – with the nobility who owned the land, filled senior government jobs and officered the army. They guarded their privileges jealously against any infiltration by the middle classes. Middle-class Germans were critical of systems which largely excluded them from participation in the political progress, and in which they were restrained from free expression of their grievances by the censor and the secret police. Many of the dissatisfied middle classes wanted the establishment of some form of parliamentary system and the guarantee of basic civil rights.
Middle-class Germans also wanted to see the establishment of a united Germany, which they claimed would ensure national prosperity. By 1847 patriotism was running high.
Baden
The impetus [Anstoß; Impuls] for a German national revolution came from the small state of Baden in south-west Germany. In 1846 the Grand Duke of Baden had been forced to accept a liberal constitution. In consequence, the Baden representative assembly was elected on a wider franchise than in any other German state. Not surprisingly, the people of Baden were more politically conscious than most Germans.
Throughout the 1848s liberal politicians in Baden had supported a united Germany. Now they put their views forcefully to an assembly of liberals from all the south-west German states. This assembly, which met in October 1847, agreed on the urgent need for a German People’s Parliament.
While this meeting was going on, radical politicians (mainly from Baden) were holding their own meetings in south-west Germany. The radicals wanted fairer taxation, education for all, a people’s army, and most importantly, the establishment of a united GermanRepublic.
The situation in early 1848
In 1848 few Germans expected revolution. There was still widespread loyalty to the established dynasties. Moreover, the economic situation was beginning to improve slightly. Nevertheless, economic distress in major cities, which continued over the winter of 1847-8, helped to foment [anfachen; schüren] revolution. The urban and rural poor, however, did not have a clear set of aims and were often untouched by the radical, liberal and nationalist ideologies of the middle class.
(from: Access to History: The Unification of Germany 1815-1919, ed. Alan Farmer/Andrina Stiles, London (2007), pp. 27-28.)
Revolution in France and its effects
On 20 February 1848, the opponents of the French government made plans to hold a political banquet in Paris. The government banned the banquet and thereby brought the common people of Paris in the streets of the capital. They marched on the Chamber of Deputies, where their leaders presented a petition demanding Guizot’s (i.e. the head of government) resignation.
Popular dissatisfaction with the government, and with Guizot in particular, had been growing during 1847, but the opposition campaign had been led by middle-class politicians who were seeking to reform government rather than overthrow the monarchy of Louis Philippe. Now their cause became the cause of the common people of Paris, and on 22 February 1848 the police had to clear an unruly [renitent] crowd in the Place de la Madeleine.
The next day the King dismissed Guizot, but the concession had come too late, because on the same evening a great throng of people had made their way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, only to find their passage blocked by a troop of cavalry and infantry. A shot rang out, and in the panic that followed at least forty people were killed. The victims were piled on a cart lit with torches and within a few hours the city was blocked with barricades.
Louis Philippe abdicated the next day and a provisional government was set up which would probably have decided in favour of a regency [Regentschaft], but a series of invasions of the Chamber of Deputies by republican activists, students and eventually a crowd of workers on the afternoon of 24 February pushed the provisional government reluctantly towards the declaration of a republic. Paris was now in the hands of the workers and the ‘dangerous classes’. […]
The revolution in France was followed by outbreaks of violence and revolutionary activity elsewhere in Europe. In southern Germany the peasants of the Odenwald and Schwarzwald descended on their landlords’ castles and destroyed the charters that perpetuated [aufrecht erhalten] their feudal obligations. […] By March the revolutionary tide had spread eastwards to Berlin, the capital of Prussia, and to Vienna, Prague and Budapest. […]
The revolutions of 1848 had two important features. First, they were widespread […]. Second, they were initially successful. In Prussia King Frederick William IV temporarily went with the revolution, parading the streets swathed in the German national flag. But the most startling victory of the revolutionary year was the resignation of Metternich. […] Troubles in Vienna had grown from the moment that the news of the revolution in Paris arrived. On 13 March the Diet of Lower Austria, a traditional assembly that contained some liberal-minded nobles, was invaded by a crowd of workers and students. Metternich argued that swift action would quell [unterdrücken; bezwingen] the uprising. But it was too late. Metternich had lost the support of the court and was soon to lose the ability to take the decisive action that he claimed was necessary. So it was against a background of popular revolution in the streets that Metternich resigned and eventually made his way to England as an exile.
The great Habsburg Empire […] seemed on the point of disintegration. The Italians of Lombardy and Venetia were seeking to break free from the grip of Vienna; the Hungarians led by Kossuth were staking their claim for independence; and the first rumblings of Czech nationalism were making themselves heard in Prague.
This vigorous activity was not caused solely by the example of the French […]. The outbreak of the revolution in those places […] had general causes to be found in the years before 1848.
(from: Cambridge Seminar Studies in History: The 1848 Revolutions, ed. Peter Jones, Essex (1991), pp. 1-4.)