In the first place, then, the Revolution of 1848 was the act
of bourgeois liberals. All over the continent, from 1815 to 1848,
they sought to defend the privileges they had acquired under the
French Revolution and the Empire against a reactionary nobility
bent on recovering its former position. These advantages did,
of course, vary in importance from country to country. In France
equality before the law was no longer an issue; the struggle now
centered on property qualifications. Although large-scale industry
did not yet exist, progress in production and exchange had been
great enough to create a national market. Books and ideas traveled
along with the merchandise and united the bourgeois and the artisans
from one end of the country to the other.
In Prussia the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg were still to be
completed. The abolition of serfdom and the agrarian reform were
illusory in view of the continued existence of seigniorial jurisdiction.
The administrative system, in practice, stopped the representatives
of the central authority at the gates of the feudal domains. In
Germany the bourgeoisie had long been dominant in the cultural
sphere. The economy was traditionally under the direction of the
government. But, once individual initiative was set free, the
bourgeoisie asserted itself. Even the Prussian government, which
kept the bourgeois from power and would hear nothing of a parliament,
had to rely on them in order to carry out plans for the customs
union. The barriers which divided Germany fell one after another.
Social evolution-more rapid in one place, slower in another-followed
a similar pattern in all the states.
The surge in population which had begun at the end of the eighteenth
century continued everywhere. France's population increased from
27,000,000 in 1801 to 35,000,000 in 1846; Germany's, from 24,800,000
in 1816 to 34,400,000 in 1848. Cities proliferated; the 634,000
Parisians of 1816 became l,360,000 by 1846. In Saxony and Silesia,
where industry was concentrated, almost all of the cities at least
doubled in population. Chemnitz grew from 10,000 to 50,000 people
between 1816 and 1845.
These populations, which were gradually reached by education,
formed willing armies in the bourgeois cause. Such support from
artisans and workers was only to be expected, since the reign
of the bourgeoisie undoubtedly constituted, for everyone, an advance
over the absolutism of divine-right monarchy. The bourgeoisie's
goal was to establish constitutional governments, which would
be more or less concerned with the fate of the masses of peasants
and workers, who did not yet realize their own strength.
National feeling, which the wars of the French Revolution and
the Empire had aroused, was also everywhere on the increase. The
bourgeoisie was, by nature, less cosmopolitan than the nobility.
It knew nothing of the blood ties which united the great aristocratic
families; it substituted frontiers for the indefinite border zones
which had existed between states in the days of feudal dependencies.
Even its culture became more national in proportion as modern
languages gained over Latin. The hold of religion over public
and family life diminished.
In Italy and Germany national fervor found expression in the ideal
of national unification. But the champions of unification were
nonetheless liberals; they wanted a constitutional regime, if
not a parliamentary one, one on the model of the south German
States, France, and England. For all bourgeois, habeas corpus
and the rights of man were a political gospel to which they felt
more attached than to any religious gospel. Moreover, liberal
Catholicism proved to them that the two were not incompatible.
Between 1815 and 1848, then, population growth, commercial or
industrial progress, urbanization, and national feeling developed
along parallel lines in every European country. And everywhere
this development reinforced liberal ideas. There is nothing puzzling
in all this, since it seems clear that the formation of popular
masses leads to democratization. What does seem strange is that
the same demographic movement and the same accelerated economic
progress did not continue to produce the same effects in the second
half of the century. While the advance of democracy did continue
in France and england, Germany became autocratic: 1848 was undoubtedly
the closest the German people came to political liberalism in
the nineteenth century. Thereafter they moved away from liberalism
and took an opposite course to that of the western democracies.
We must, therefore, look for the international problem not
in the revolutionary quake of 1848, but in its immediate consequences.
In France the Revolution of 1848 did not constitute a crisis
in the special sense which we attach to this term: it did not
upset a tradition, bury an ideal, or replace one way of thinking
and feeling with another. The June Days crushed the Paris workers.
The coup d'etat of December 2 sent the republican bourgeois into
exile. The police-state and military regime which Napoleon III
established in 1852 was more authoritarian than were the regimes
preceding the revolution.
All this is indisputably true. But from 1857 on there were five
bourgeois republicans in the legislature. The pre-1848 republican
leaders, Thiers and Berryer, returned shortly thereafter. And
in 1864 Ollivier was able, with the Emperor's consent, to form
a third party, composed of bourgeois liberals who oriented the
Empire towards parliamentary government. The workers, who were
favored by a government which sought an ally in their leader,
Tolain, aligned themselves with the opposition. The leaders of
the republican party that they supported were lawyers, doctors,
and bourgeois. Until the end of the century the bourgeois continued
to guide social and political development.
Always inspired by his illustrious model, Napoleon III did his
utmost to establish a new aristocracy. But the bourgeois of the
Second Empire were much less eager for titles than was H. Poirier.
(A wealthy Parisian shopkeeper who marries his daughter to a poor
nobleman in hopes of gaining social and political prestige; in
Le Genere deM. Poirier, by Emile Augier and Jules Sandeau). We
can measure the progress of liberalism by comparing the role played
by the nobility during the First Empire with the unobtrusiveness
of the primarily military nobility of the Second: it was no longer
good form to be connected with the social classes of the past.
The greatest achievement of the Revolution of 1848 was to have
emancipated the slaves and to have replaced mercantilist colonialism
with a policy of assimilation. This policy, mistaken though it
may have been, was certainly generous. The Emperor did not allow
representatives of the colonies to sit in the legislature and
he did return to the statutory system, whereby the chamber was
excluded from colonial legislation. But he had no thought of reinstituting
the colonial pact. In Algeria he showed a real interest in the
native population. While more immediate concerns kept him from
developing a consistent colonial policy, at least he did not interfere
with people who had one.
One cannot think about the Revolution of 1848, and especially
about its international character, without recalling the political
activities of Faidherbe in Guadeloupe and Senegal. The care he
took to educate the natives and to make them accept the French
community made his work durable. Faidherbe's Senegal was an achievement
of the Revolution of 1848, and the ideal of the revolution was
perpetuated there under the Empire, as it was in the Antilles
and in Reunion. The Revolution of 1848, far from destroying a
tradition, reinvigorated the ideals of 1789 in France.
In Germany it was a different story. The unindemnified abolition
of hunting rights and seigniorial jurisdiction did endure in Prussia.
But these were the only lasting achievements of the revolution.
The outstanding fact was rather the break with that liberal tradition
which had asserted itself under Frederick II and Joseph II and
had subsequently spread throughout the empire. The armies of reaction
overcame the liberated in Germany more quickly than in France.
Above all, they overcame them more completely. The bourgeois liberals,
hunted down or simply too attached to their ideals to endure a
regime of censorship and political police, emigrated en masse.
On the eve of the revolution bad harvests led to a resurgence
of emigration, which had long been driving peasants and artisans
to seek their fortune in America. In 1846 95,000 left; in 1847,
110,000. The revolution which aroused so many hopes, reduced the
number of emigrants: it fluctuated between 80,000 and 90,000 from
1848 to 1850. Then, in 1851 there were 113,000 emigrants; in 1852,
162,000; in 1853, 163,000; and in 1854, 300,000.
There was no economic reason for this rapid increase in emigration,
which also involved the bourgeoisie. A large number of liberal
leaders left the states in which the old regimes had been restored-Pastor
Dulon of Bremen, Hadermann of Frankfurt, Karl Schurz. Teachers,
lawyers, doctors, poets musicians, and even officers left. The
German historian Veit Valentin estimates the number of those who
emigrated between 1849 and 1854 at 1,100,000, perhaps 2.5 per
cent of the population. They took their fortunes with them, worth
at least 300,000,000 Thaler (900,000,000 gold marks). These were
not poor men, but an elite whose absence was bound to make itself
felt.
Not all of the liberals left, however; and their ideals of course
continued to exist. Men continued to dream of unification, of
a constitution, of socialism. But the meaning of these words changed,
though the liberals themselves were not always aware of it.
To all appearances, in fact, the development of Germany after
1848 continued along the old lines. But unification by Bismarck,
who created an autocratic empire, had nothing in common with the
plans of 1848. It was an old-regime operation, a Prussian military
conquest, not a communal venture like the federation of France
in 1789.
The advance of democracy similarly appeared to be continuing,
since social progress was being achieved perhaps more effectively
than in the west. But French and English socialism, long expounded
by bourgeois liberals, continued to be pervaded by the ideas of
1789 and 1848. They remained humanistic until at least the time
of Jaures. In Germany the workers, for lack of a bourgeois elite,
were organized more sharply along class lines and set their material
demands above their humanitarian ideals. Marxism has always preferred
economic equality to liberty. It is not profoundly democratic
in the classical, bourgeois sense of the term.
In every case the same reality underlies the appearances. Just
as Bismarck achieved a unity different from the one dreamed of
by his adversaries, so he ended the Zollverein and subscribed
to free trade, only to jettison it in 1878, as soon as he felt
strong enough to satisfy the interests of his agrarian supporters.
In the same way he promulgated, between 1883 and 1889, the accident,
sickness, and old-age insurance laws which ameliorated the workers'
material condition. This made it possible to keep renewing, for
twelve years (1878-1890), the laws excluding the Social Democratic
party from political activity.
The bourgeoisie who had not emigrated contented themselves with
appearances. They did not understand the rare leaders who endeavored
to enlighten them, the Jew Lasker or the Catholic Mallinckrodt.
Moreover, they gradually became convinced of their own ineffectualness:
was it not evident that their enemy Bismarck had succeeded where
they had failed? Had not Bismarck, whom they had so long reviled,
achieved unity, satisfied national fervor, and made socialism
a reality?
The liberal elite was seized by a sort of timidity. Bismarck must
be right; politics was a profession, a technique. It was the business
of the government, of the king and his ministers and generals,
not of the professor, the doctor, or the weaver. Everyone should
stay within the bounds of his own profession. Parties became coalitions
of interests among which the government arbitrated. Their leaders
did not prepare themselves for exercising power; and those who
wanted to participate in public affairs climbed the ladder of
the bureaucratic hierarchy or made their way into the class of
nobles and officers which was closer to the seat of power.
A sharp split thus came into being between the opposition of
1848 and the new post-1870 bourgeoisie. This development was complete
by about 1880: the German bourgeoisie was no longer liberal; its
ways of thinking and feeling were the very antithesis of those
that prevailed before the revolution.
And another split came about which was more enduring, more profound,
and more fraught with consequences: a split between central Europe
and the western nations. In the latter democratic development,
after a momentary interruption, resumed under the leadership of
the liberal bourgeois elites. In the former it came to a halt:
a new, authoritarian tradition was created, dominated by the army,
the nobility, and the bureaucracy, which culminated in the capitalist,
Prussianized Germany of 1880. The two blocs which troubled liberals--whose
formation they wished to prevent, whose boundaries they saw passing
from the Vistula to the Oder or from the Oder to the Elbe - these
two blocs were formed in 1850, when the moral unity of the continent
was shattered by the international revolution of 1848; and their
boundary lies along the Rhine.