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Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 7.33 What the Heck Just Happened. So hello, I am back from my break now. But technically, this is the last episode of series 7, which is why this is episode 7.33 instead of episode 8.1. What I want to do today is mimic the retrospective I did on the French Revolution. Because if any revolution needs one last final pass to try to figure out what the heck just happened, it's the revolutions of 1848.
So we're going to go back through and trace the common sequence of events. Try to figure out why the revolutions ultimately failed and what their future legacy turned out to be. Because though 1848 is marked down as a set of failed revolutions, that doesn't mean it didn't have any impact at all. So this is a look back and a look forward. And it'll hopefully serve as a nice bridge to our next series on the Paris Commune, which will be a direct outgrowth of some of these post-1848 aftershocks.
As it related directly to the second French Empire and the second stab at German Unification, both of which we'll talk about in the episodes to come. But before we get started, I do need to mention that hey, hey, hey, 2018 Revolutions fundraiser is now open for business. In addition to this episode posting, there is a standalone announcement that covers all the details of the new fundraiser.
And you should go listen to it, but also if you want to, you can just go to revolutionspodcastfundraiser.com. It's now open. There are t-shirts, new episodes of the history of Rome and other assorted goodies. Now this is a very special fundraiser because I have a very special personal announcement. No, not more kids. We've got two kids. That's enough kids. But it gets to why the latest series will have eight episodes in it before I go right back on hiatus.
What I'm about to say is not a joke and it's all real. I have for some time known that Citizen Lafayette was going to be my next book. And I knew that to write that book, I would need access to the French National Archives in Paris. Oh, Mrs. Revolutions and I started talking through the cost and logistics of me taking extended trips to France. And then she quite rightly said, well, you're not taking extended trips to France and leaving me behind.
So that meant bringing the kids and then we just kept talking and realize both our jobs are portable. And the next thing you know, we're moving to Paris. So that's going to happen in July. We'll be there in time to celebrate the Steel Day. Now, I'm not sure how long we're going to live there yet, but it'll be a year at minimum while I dig deeply into the life and time. So the marquee de lafayette.
So this here fundraiser is in part about smoothing through the cost and logistics of moving a family of four half way across the world. It's going to be crazy. The kids are six and two and a half now, but we both agree that it would be a great experience for them. And now that we've got the opportunity, we don't want to pass it up. So in about three months, new episodes of Revolutions will be coming to you live from an extremely small apartment in Paris.
Okay, so please go take a look at the fundraiser, but now we have to figure out what the hack happened in 1848. We started this series with a quote from Alexei de Tocqueville when he warned his colleagues in January of 1848 of the brewing forces of social revolution that he saw out there. A warning which he ended by saying, this gentleman is my profound conviction. I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano.
Now what he was referring to was the responses to the social and economic upheavals of the 1840s, which remember were later dubbed the Hungry 40s. The potato famine that started in 1845 caused devastating hunger across North and Central Europe.
That was followed by a general crop failure in 1846, then a business recession, and then the collapse of a speculative investment bubble and things like railroads, all that led to a general financial crisis, which folded right back around on the starving and unemployed masses.
So the period between about 1845 and 1847 were crummy times for everyone, starving peasants, unemployed workers, under-employed professionals, bankrupt businessmen, and governments scrambling to try to keep their countries afloat. But that was only half the story of the origin of the revolutions of 1848. The other half were all the political complaints from the more educated and affluent segments of society. These guys wanted to participate in government.
Now in more liberal France, that meant expanding suffrage beyond the 250,000 men who qualified to vote, and the mere 50,000 who qualified to stand for office. Meanwhile, over and more conservative Central Europe, that same class of educated and affluent professionals just wanted any public voice at all. They wanted an end to censorship. They wanted constitutional government and civil rights.
So in the mid-1840s, the social question and the political question, combined to create potent revolutionary energy. And it did not help that Europe at that point was run by men like Francois Gizot and Metarnick, who believed all reform inevitably led to revolution, and so it must be resisted at all costs. Their resistance to reform created a massive backlog of frustration that triggered the very revolution they hoped to avoid. Okay, so what the heck happened next?
Well, in early 1848, there was that showdown over the banquets in France, right? Whether or not citizens could gather of their own free will and express political opposition to the existing government. This showdown devolved into riots and then barricades got thrown up, and the next thing you know, Gizot has resigned and King Louis Philippe has abdicated the throne. And this was a shocking turn of events, most especially shocking to the men who won the February Revolution.
They were not at all expecting to, and then they went off and formed a provisional Republican government. Events in France then provided a framework for events everywhere else in Central Europe. The pattern was the same. Opposition liberals of the bourgeois middle class joined with students, artisans, and workers to stage public demonstrations in cities across Europe. That's what happened in Vienna just a few weeks later, which led to the really big domino of 1848 to come crashing down.
And that was the resignation and exile of Metarnick. Metarnick was like a human linchpin, and as soon as he was removed, the volcano blew its top. Suddenly, barricades were going up in Berlin and Milan and Venice and Budapest. This was all accomplished. Six episodes worth of material in just ten crazy days between March 13th and March 23rd, 1848, the most truly insane and revolutionary part of the revolutions of 1848.
But the victory of these revolutionary coalitions in February and March turned out to be ephemeral, because there were two distinct groups inside this coalition. On the one side, you had the opposition liberals who were concerned with answering the political question. The motivating passion for these educated affluent leaders was tearing down the conservative restraints on their ability to participate in politics.
They wanted constitutional government, representative assemblies, and civil rights. Now for the lower classes, the students, and the workers, and the artisans, well, they really couldn't care less about any of that stuff. They were dealing with economic dislocation, unemployment, and hunger. Their motivating passions were food, wages, and housing. Since both sides saw the existing conservative regime as an enemy, they joined forces in February and March.
The lower classes manned the barricades, while the upper classes provided the political leadership. But once victory was achieved at the end of March, that coalition split in half. The liberal leader said, yes, we did it! While the lower class radicals and socialists said, yes, this is just the beginning. And then they looked at each other, and realized maybe they were not so similar after all.
As most of the liberals were at heart reformers, who felt driven into the streets by the willfully stubborn conservative regimes. Now that those regimes had been toppled, the liberals wanted to restore the social order at quickly as possible. So the post-February and March governments, whether the provisional government in Paris or the April laws, regime in Hungary, or the liberal ministries that were elevated in Berlin and Vienna, they were all defenders of the social order.
They were not locomotives of revolutionary change. Now after the events of the spring of 1848, all those roiling social forces out there were still roiling and making the new liberal government seasick. And those new liberal governments were kind of baffled. They were like, we won! We have democratic elections and freedom of the press, we did it! But somehow that wasn't enough.
And by the summer of 1848, we see a split in the forces of the political revolution and the forces of the social revolution. And once again, France would set the tone for the rest of Europe. In June of 1848, Paris was rocked by a second revolution. And in the face of this second social revolution, the liberal leaders did an about face. They now saw their former friends as enemies and their former enemies as friends.
And where Louis Philippe had balked at crushing his people under the bloody boot, the leaders of the new second French Republic did not. The June rebellion was a bitter bloody affair that broke any nascent social revolution. Now we would take a bit longer for that split between the social and political revolutions to pop up elsewhere in Europe. But by September of 1848, that split had blown up in Berlin, in Vienna, and Frankfurt.
And except for a very brief period in Vienna, nowhere did the more radical social forces ever get the upper hand. And the pattern that was set in Paris played out in all those other European capitals. Urban uprisings of students and workers were met by the civic guards who were sent out not to defend the people, but to attack them.
But here's the rub. After abandoning quite violently, their connection to the social forces that had put them in power in the first place, the liberal governments were left more or less defenseless against counter revolution. Because far from shaking hands with the liberals and saying, oh gee, thanks for not letting things get too far out of hand, the conservatives said, wow, you guys are really isolated and have next to no popular support.
We are going to launch a reactionary attack, which is what they did. Across Europe and the autumn of 1848, you start to see a withdrawal of the concessions that had been made in the spring, and when the liberals protested, the conservative leaders said, yeah, well what are you going to do about it? And it turns out the liberals could do nothing about it, because they had rendered themselves isolated and unpopular. This is what happened in Paris and Berlin, in Frankfurt, and in Vienna.
Now, somewhat removed from this common sequence of events were the two special cases of Italy and Hungary. The revolutionaries there wound up fighting wars of independence against the Austrians, but that didn't save them from fatal disunity. In Italy, the short-lived coalition fighting jointly for liberation and unification started to break down when Pope Pius VIII abandoned ship at the end of April.
Then, when the Austrians pushed back the armies of Piedmont, the liberal monarchists and the radical Democrats started to turn on each other. In this first war of Italian independence, the Italians were so busy fighting over what the future of Italy would look like, that they forgot to fight over what the present of Italy would look like. So it kept looking a lot like a peninsula of disunited principalities dominated by the Austrians.
In Hungary, meanwhile, there was mostly unity internally between the Magiard political factions. There really was something to the national unity that had been forged in their war against the Austrians, but they had already shot themselves in the foot by embracing Magiardization in the summer of 1848, which cost them the support of their own national minorities.
So while the ethnic Hungarians were mostly united, the most united really of any of the nationalities involved in the revolutions of 1848, the kingdom of Hungary that they ruled was a disunited mess. By the summer of 1849, it was victory for the forces of conservative absolutism on nearly all fronts. Only the Second French Republic still stood, but having elected Louis Napoleon Bonaparte president in December of 1848, the Second French Republic would not be standing for long.
So 1848 started with exuberant hope on the side of the reformers and the revolutionaries of Europe and dread fear on the side of the existing conservative regimes. It ended with disillusionment for the reformers and revolutionaries and relief for the existing conservative regimes, nearly all of whom went right back to existing. So why did it fail?
Well, for one, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the unbridgeable divide between the social and political revolutions allowed them both to be swept away by the waters of counter-revolution. In the aftermath of the failures of 1848, for decades to come, I mean, held right down to the present day, there were mutual recriminations among the radical socialists and the conservative liberals.
The liberals blamed the radicals for being too hostile to the new constitutional regimes while they were still in their infancy. Rather than celebrate civil rights and democratic government, the left-wing leaders launched broad sides at the new governments. If the radicals and socialists had just been patient, everyone would have eventually gotten everything they wanted. But the hostility from the left made a functioning, non-conservative, non-absolutist government all but impossible.
And so the liberals blamed the radicals. The radicals mean while blame the liberals. They said that the liberals were never going to pursue further social reform. That while sharing with the left an opposition to political absolutism, liberals shared with the right a firm commitment to the existing social order. And liberal principles that trumpeted free trade in capitalist industry were diametrically opposed to radical socialist ends.
So the socialists later said, don't pretend like if we had supported you fully in 1848 that you would then have turned around and adopted our program. That's bullcrap. And besides, why is it that our program is the one that needed to wait? We were the ones talking about issues at the very bottom of the hierarchy of needs like food and shelter and water.
You liberals were talking about whether or not somebody could publish an article in a newspaper that nobody was going to read anyway as if that was the central issue of our time. To this, the liberals would say, you know, you should get down off your high horse. You don't really speak for the people you claim to represent. You're just a click of coffee house intellectuals trying to graft yourselves onto a working class that you don't even understand.
I mean, you wouldn't know how to work a mechanical loom if I threatened to smother you with a collar or a ridden blanket. To which the socialists would say, it's not like you guys are any better. I mean, you talk about democratic government, but you only get votes from a narrow constituency of comfortable bourgeois scum. While they argued, the authoritarian conservatives happily munched popcorn and continued to rule Europe for another couple of generations.
But this lack of post-victory unity is not exactly out of line with other revolutions. That's a pattern that's popped up so often going all the way back to the English revolution that I've started calling it the entropy of victory. So to further explain what the heck just happened, we have to talk about one of the unfortunate side effects of the powerful embrace of democratic universal suffrage.
As it turns out, both the social radicals and the political liberals were right when they accused each other of only representing a small fraction of the population. No, I'm exaggerating a little bit here, but the liberals appealed to a small population of educated urban professionals. The radical socialists appealed to other radical socialists, mostly frequenting the same coffee houses they did.
Neither of them had much of a relationship with the actual working classes, and neither of them had much of a relationship with the people who formed the actual masses of Europe, the rural and agrarian populations. And when those rural voters were given the right to vote, they voted conservative, because most of them were conservative. Bismarck had this one nailed when he pushed the king of Prussia to go ahead and embrace democratic elections.
Conservative candidates are going to win in a landslide. Now, you may want to deny those rural voters' agency and say that they just did whatever their landlord or their local parish priest told them to do. But I don't think it's out of the question that they would not be in favor of voting for educated urban radicals who wanted to upend society. Rural voters are typically small-sea conservative that goes all the way back to ancient Rome.
You can see it in election results all over the place in 1848. And it's why socialists and communists would later put the education of the masses and the elevation of class consciousness as a key part of their political programs, even if they kept running into the problem of socialism arousing intense fear and disgust from these rural populations rather than hope and comfort.
So aside from the infighting and the general unpopularity of these ideologies in the context of mid-19th century Europe, there is one more big practical reason why the revolutions of 1848 failed. There was a failure of nerve, a failure to be utterly ruthless. Now, this I can chalk up to the fact that the specter of the French Revolution was still hanging over Europe.
The men who ran the revolutions of 1848 knew that history chapter and verse, and they wanted to avoid what they saw as the violent excesses of that biggest and most foreboding of revolutions. So the defense of their new regimes was tepid at best.
Now, yes, the response to the June days revolved and a few of the other attacks on students and workers in Frankfurt and Vienna and Berlin were bloody, but there was nothing like the systematic omnipresent police and spine networks that the French Revolution had used to root out enemies and expose traitors and subject them to harsh reprisals. And in the context of 1848, these guys were particularly adverse to those tactics because those were the tactics of Gizot and Metternick.
The liberals especially wanted to supplant their enemies, not become them. So in France, for example, the men of the provisional government stuck fiercely to freedom of the press and freedom of speech and open elections, even as they watched those free institutions manipulated by men who were quite openly opposed to the republic.
The Frankfurt Parliament, meanwhile, never made any move to seize the real levers of power, to demand control of the German armies, to forcefully root out reactionary threats. Instead, everywhere you looked, these guys abolished police state tactics and the death penalty. Now, you can of course make a moral case that this was all for the good, and it was so inextricably bound up with their own political ambitions that it's hard to see how they could have done things differently.
But if we're here analyzing why the revolution failed, getting squeamish about defending the revolution must be called out. Whatever his other faults, robes fear at least knew that you can't have a revolution without a revolution. Okay, so the revolutions failed. We get that. And later, the historian GM Travalian would say that the revolutions of 1848 were the turning point at which history did not turn.
But there is a reason that he's able to say that, and it's because much of what drove 1848 did later come back around. The failure of the revolutions of 1848 did not dump any of the forces that drove the revolutions of 1848 into the dustbin of history. And if you look at post-war war two Europe, it looks a lot like a collage of the issues and policies from 1848.
So in hindsight, the revolutions of 1848 look a lot like they are anticipating the direction of history, but then not turning down that path for another century. And that particular century between 1848 and 1948 were super not great for Europe, and many people have asked if the failure to turn at that turning point of 1848 didn't cost Europe a lot of blood and treasure. But 1848 did plant some permanent seeds, at least on the political front.
After 1848, the principles of constitutional government, equality before the law and civil rights had all taken root. This was proven by the forms of the post-1848 conservative regimes. Prussia now had a constitution and a representative assembly. Austria now had a constitution and a representative assembly. France had a constitution and a representative assembly. Remember up until mid-March 1848, Meternick's position was that constitutions were an abomination.
After March of 1848, they were considered a small price to pay to avoid a future 1848, as long as the regime wrote the constitution to ensure maximum control over the state. So the failure of the revolutions of 1848 did not result in no constitutions. And though liberals had been defeated and those constitutions were spectacularly absolutist, the principle had been established. A state needs a constitution.
There was also serious concessions on the point of equality before the law, which now cemented itself. And though in practice the rich ol' magnates of Europe still had much of the influence, the abolition of Serfdom, an elimination of most de jour noble privileges, set the stage for modern states that were built on the principle of equality. Now that's it. On the matter of the social question, I think it's safe to say that the revolutions of 1848 were not so much a failure as a non-event.
Aside from little things like the National Workshops in Paris, which were dropped as soon as humanly possible, there was no attempt by anyone who held power before, during or after the revolutions, to deal with a social upheavals wrought by changing forms of economics. And the social question would only loom larger, as the years after 1848 saw a renewed flourishing of industrial capitalism, and what often gets called the Second Industrial Revolution.
This Second Industrial Revolution is the one that winds up looking a lot like the picture painted in the Communist manifesto about sprawling factories of brick and steel, consuming and spitting out human beings like so much cordwood, a fuel of fire that produces mountains of cheap consumer goods, that only enrich a little click of plutocratic rubber barons.
The artisans who had manned the barricades and the hopes that their old guildways would be brought back, well they got some relief in a few places, most notably Prussia. But other than that, the push towards free trade and omnipresent industrial capitalism only picked up the pace. I don't think anything that happened in 1848 impeded or accelerated that process, other than freeing up some central European serfs to migrate into the cities. But that was going to happen anyway.
The post-1848 regimes also tended to make investment in industry at priority, but it's difficult to assign some causal relationship to the actual revolutions of 1848. So on the social front, it's just a big nothing, but not addressing it didn't mean it wasn't going to go anywhere. And then there's the little matter of nationalism. Nationalism is also not going anywhere. The spring time of the peoples was a huge component of the revolutions of 1848.
But where the revolutions themselves quickly went from spring to summer to fall, and then finally to the death of winter, the peoples continued to flourish. Once the giant had been awakened by the alarm clock in 1848, it could not be put back to bed. And 1848 in fact, helped prove that nationalism was a much stronger binding agent than any given political ideology.
And we see this in places like Italy and Hungary, where foreign threats to a nationality had a tendency to keep disparate groups within the nationality stuck together. This is obvious among the madjars of Hungary, and though Italy was driven by local rivalries and divisions between Republicans and monarchists, the Italian identity would be the one that won out in the end and lead to subsequent phases of resorgemento.
French nationalism would be one of the building blocks of the second French empire. German nationalism would be taken up by Bismarck and the Prussians. And the new Austrian empires attempt to erase national distinctions with sweeping declarations about the equality of all subjects, well, those sweeping declarations mostly came to nothing. The Austrians would lose northern Italy to the Italians.
They would be forced to recognize the equality of the madjar when they were forced to create the dual monarchy in 1866. And the Austrians would never solve their problems with the Slavic nationalists. Those problems would persist until, well, you know. But after the revolutions of 1848, we can begin to discern a change in the character of that nationalism. After 1848, there was a turn away from the inclusive phase of romantic nationalism.
Repoliticians and scholars and artists were discovering and celebrating common threads of culture and music and folklore and declaring new national families. They were turning now to the more exclusive phase, where it became just as important to identify who was not a member of the family who didn't belong. This would obviously come to turn the Jews across Europe into a favorite target for exclusion. But it also impacted national minorities everywhere in all countries.
The romantic idealism of forging a self-determining nation state opened up a dark undercurrent that required suppression, exploitation, and a loss of rights for the capital O others in their midst. Romantic idealistic liberal nationalism was now giving way to repressive authoritarian racist nationalism, which now to editorialize here was bad news for Europe.
So I want to wrap up this episode and this series by briefly touching on some final specific observations about our five major revolutionary areas so that we can have a touchstone to check back on when we hop forward 20 years for our next series. So for the Austrian Empire, the real big problem heading into 1848 was that their central imperial apparatus was a mess.
Having an absentee emperor was a disaster waiting to happen. And even setting aside the incapacities of Ferdinand, the rest of the imperial administration was brittle, inflexible, and micromanaged from the center by ministers who were often at cross purposes with each other. By the 1840s, Meternick had succumbed to his own paranoid inertia, and so the Habsburg court was defined by a vacillation disorder, lack of resolve, lack of unity.
When 1848 hit, this all combined to allow events to spiral out of control. But ironically, the uprisings in Vienna and beyond wound up strengthening the Habsburgs hold on their empire. Because the neo-absolutus cabal of Archduchess Sophie, Marshall Vindich Grotz and Prime Minister Schwarzenberg, was able to use the rebellions to put young Franz Joseph on the throne by the end of the year.
Then in March of 1848, they rolled out a new and forceful neo-absolutus constitution that co-opted the language of the revolution while establishing the forms of the old absolutist regime. There was a parliament, yes, but central executive controls reaffirmed. There was a quality before the law, yes, but mostly to ditch old national claims to special privileges, looking at you, Magyar.
But though they now had the will and the means to resist further revolution, that did not mean it was all sunshine and roses for the Habsburgs. By the late 1850s, they would find themselves facing a newly aggressive pressure to the north and the Kingdom of Piedmont, making another play for Lumberty, which they captured in 1860 with the backing of the French.
This international squeeze would culminate in 1866, where the Austrians were defeated in the quick Austro-Prussian War that left northern Germany free to be unified under Prussian rule. In fact, in 1866, in many ways, brought Austria right back to 1848, especially when it came to their relationship to Hungary.
After their defeat in 1849, the Hungarian slipped back into being mere subjects of the Habsburgs, and were now facing the elimination of all their ancient national privileges and a number of other repressive policies. But oddly enough, the minority nationalities that had helped the Austrians reconquer the Magyar, the Croatians and Romanians and Serbs, found themselves in the same boat.
And one Croatian complained to a Magyar friend that the Habsburgs had given the Croatians as a reward, the same things that they had given the Magyar as a punishment. Hungarian national resolve, though, was only briefly set back, and Hungarian leaders were clearly just biting their time until they had another chance to assert their equality. They were, after all, still the largest, richest and most populous constituent part of the Austrian Empire, and everybody knew it.
They were finally able to leverage this to their advantage after the Austrian military defeats in 1868, defeats that saw them outclass by the Prussians, and losing their lucrative province of Venetia to the Piedmontese. Striking while the iron was hot, the Hungarians threatened to cut the Austrians off and leave them withered, strangled, and alone, if the Habsburgs didn't make some serious concessions, and serious concessions were made.
This is the moment that the Austrian Empire becomes the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or, more accurately, the Dual Monarchy. Just as the Hungarians had always wanted, the Habsburgs sovereign would now rule over two equal parts, Austria and Hungary, with both having their own parliaments and ministries, even down to having their own passports.
Now this is a massive oversimplification of a complex process, but the point is that 20 years after their defeat in 1848, the Hungarians got what they had originally been fighting for, self-determination, and sharing with Austria only a sovereign.
Meanwhile, as I've just hinted, Italy did not give up on their journey to Ressorgimento. After 1848, it's true that Italy went back to being a bunch of Austrian-dominated principalities, but in the Kingdom of Piedmont, the new king, Victor Emanwell, promised to keep the Constitution his father had promulgated in 1848, and continued to at least spiritually be the keeper of the red, white, and green tricolor.
The brief hope among the radicals and republicans in Italy that the Roman Republic could act as a nucleus for an Italian republic, was now pretty much dead, and the next few phases of resorgimento would play out through the military efforts and political ambitions of the Kingdom of Piedmont. But the Piedmontese now admitted that they could not do it alone, and that it would take an alliance with Louis Napoleon and the armies of the Second French Empire to make resorgimento a reality.
So in stages over the next 30 years, Italy was fused together piece by piece. Piedmont took Lumberty in 1859, and the following year traded unchallenged annexation of Parma, Modena and Tuscany for the French annexation of Savoy and Nis. Then when the Austrians were getting pummeled by the Prussians in 1866, they took the opportunity to seize Venetia, and then the great republican revolutionary Garibaldi, reconciling himself to the Kingdom of Italy, led a famous expedition to capture Sicily.
And the forces of Italian resorgimento led by the Kingdom of Piedmont more or less enveloped all of Italy, leaving only the city of Rome itself as a stubborn holdout. Pope Pius IX did not want to give up, and he was still backed by French soldiers. But when those French soldiers were dragged into the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, wow, we'll actually talk about all of that two episodes from now. Like Italy, the process of German unification was not going to be stopped.
Though the failure of the German Liberals to accomplish unification through peaceful speeches and legislative resolutions meant that it was now going to be accomplished by the blood and iron of Bismarck and the Prussian armies. This wound up giving the resulting German Empire a militaristic and authoritarian character that it might not have had, at the Frankfurt Parliament succeeded. Now, I am not a Sonderwig guy, because I'm not a huge fan of mechanistic inevitabilities in history.
And for those of you who don't know, Sonderwig means the special path. And it's a theory in German historiography that argues that everything I'm talking about right now was going to inevitably result in Nazi imperialism, which I don't necessarily buy. But the fact that peaceful unification by liberals talking in a room failed, and Bismarck's blood and iron succeeded, well, that was something of a turning point that did turn.
Especially because a lot of the German Liberals split the continent altogether. Tens of thousands of families relocated to the United States in the wake of 1848, and those families drew more of their family members over the years that followed, which only tended to weaken democratic, liberal, and radical politics in Germany. Most of these radical emigres wound up in the American Midwest, where Bismarck's was called the 48th generation, the 48th.
And they very much strengthened democratic, liberal, and radical politics in the United States. It's why Milwaukee kept electing socialist mayors. It also helps explain why Missouri stayed in the Union, because a lot of these guys settled in St. Louis. They were all strong unionists, and most of the men, who were still a fighting age anyway, wound up fighting in the Union Army a decade later. Friedrich Hacker, Gustav Struth, they were both officers in the Union Army.
All of this was to the general benefit of the United States, but it did seed the home country to Bismarck and the Imperial Conservatives. So that brings us finally to France, who I am, not going to talk about. That's right, I am not going to talk about France, and I am not going to talk about them because our entire next episode, Episode 8.1, is creatively titled The Second French Empire.
And I will talk all about what happened in France after the election of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, and the course and character of the Second French Empire he presided over for the next 20 years. That will set us up for Episode 8.2, which will re-merge the story of France with the story of Germany for the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which is another one of those tremendously important wars that nobody ever seems to want to talk about.
So to wrap up this episode, and to officially wrap up the series on 1848, we can say that the revolutions of 1848 did help put the French Revolution in the rear-view mirror. As everybody in Europe now had a new massive revolutionary upheaval to refer back to in the years to come.
Liberals would look back on 1848 wistfully, and wonder what might have been, as they continued to pursue democratic constitutional government and strong individual civil rights, all of which had been achieved and lost, in just a matter of months. But also fearing social revolution, most of those liberals would turn away decisively from extracurricular activities, and instead focus on pragmatic reform efforts. 1848 was mostly, but not entirely, the death of revolutionary liberalism.
Socialists and radicals, though, picked up that revolutionary mantle, and they never looked back on 1848 with anything but hate in their hearts for the men of property who had betrayed them. And they concluded that the liberals would never be there for them, that inevitable betrayal was all they could ever hope for, that the social revolution was incompatible with their mere political revolution. Conservatives, meanwhile, concluded that rigid anti-reform was a very bad play.
The story of 1848 was a story of their predecessors not being flexible enough with what tools they used to rule. They were all terrified of another 1848, all the rulers of Europe were terrified of another 1848, and it became like a spooky story they told each other to remind themselves to be eternally vigilant, or else one day, the peoples of Europe might be free. So this concludes our series on the revolutions of 1848. Now please, go to revolutionspodcastfundrazer.com and buy lots of stuff.