The Revolutions of 1848: Europe's Spring and the Reaction

How hunger and reform demands toppled governments from Paris to Vienna in 1848, why the old powers won back control by 1849, and what lasting changes survived.

Avevide · Last reviewed October 24, 2026 · 9 min read

In the space of a few weeks in early 1848, governments across Europe that had looked permanent began to fall. A king of France abdicated and fled to Britain. Austria's state chancellor, Prince Metternich, was driven from Vienna. Barricades went up in Berlin and Vienna, risings broke out in Milan and Venice, and a freely elected German parliament gathered in a Frankfurt church to write a constitution for a nation that did not yet exist.

Eighteen months later, almost all of it had been reversed by armies loyal to the old dynasties. That rise and fall is why 1848 is sometimes treated as a revolution that failed. The record is more interesting than that verdict suggests. This deep dive follows the risings and the reaction country by country, drawing on the German Historical Museum's online history, the French National Assembly's history of the suffrage, and the UK Parliament's account of the Chartists, and it asks what actually changed.

Hunger before politics

The revolutions did not come from nowhere. The German Historical Museum describes 1846 and 1847 as crisis years in which long-term impoverishment was made far worse by acute famine. Bad harvests alone were not the whole cause; the museum notes that tight supplies combined with exports of food to regions able to pay more drove prices up, while laborers and simple craftsmen could not find work. Families went hungry, and the desperate baked bread from spoiled grain or ate weeds and fodder.

Protest followed hunger. Unrest began in Bohemia in the spring of 1847 and spread across Germany by May. In Berlin, during what became known as the "potato revolution" of April 21 and 22, 1847, crowds plundered 30 bakeries. Governments responded with police and troops, and with relief measures that rarely reached far enough. The museum concludes that famine, the riots it caused, and the political tension between old and new elites made an explosive mix that burst open in 1848.

France had similar pressures. The French National Assembly's history lists shortages, epidemics, economic and financial crisis, and unemployment as having weakened the July Monarchy of King Louis-Philippe by 1848.

Paris, February 1848: the spark

In France the political demand was the vote. Only men wealthy enough to meet a property threshold could vote, and even many members of the National Guard fell below it. A "banquet campaign" for electoral reform spread; the government first tolerated the banquets, then banned them. On February 22, 1848, Parisians protested the ban. The next day the king dismissed his deeply unpopular minister, François Guizot, but that evening shooting broke out on the Boulevard des Capucines.

On February 24 Louis-Philippe abdicated in favor of his nine-year-old grandson. Republicans, anticipating a regency, invaded the Palais Bourbon and proclaimed a republic, and a provisional government formed that included Alphonse de Lamartine, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, and François Arago.

The provisional government moved fast. A decree of March 5, 1848, announced that suffrage for electing a constituent assembly would be universal and direct, open to all Frenchmen aged twenty-one who had lived in their commune for six months. The National Assembly's history is careful to add that "Français" then meant French men only, so universal suffrage was universal male suffrage. In its first weeks, according to the same source, the Second Republic also abolished slavery and created national workshops to fight unemployment. When voters went to the polls on April 23, abstention was below 20 percent despite long journeys to cantonal polling places. The results favored conservatives and provincial notables, and the assembly formally proclaimed the republic when it first met on May 4.

The German states: March demands and a national parliament

News from Paris crossed the Rhine almost at once. On February 27, a public meeting in Mannheim, in Baden, raised what came to be called the March Demands. The museum lists them as freedom of assembly, speech, and the press, a people's militia, independent courts, political equality for all citizens, an army sworn to the constitution, and a national parliament. Within days they were being heard in nearly every German state, and many rulers granted liberal concessions and appointed reform-minded ministries.

Berlin was different. On March 18, 1848, barricade fighting shook the Prussian capital and cost more than 250 lives. Shaken by the bloodshed, King Frederick William IV appointed a liberal ministry and proclaimed that Prussia would henceforth merge into Germany, which seemed to promise national unity and constitutional government.

On May 18, 1848, the first freely elected German national assembly met in Frankfurt's Paulskirche, with about 600 deputies from every state of the German Confederation. Parties in the modern sense did not yet exist, so deputies grouped into factions. In December they passed a catalog of basic rights with support across those factions: equality before the law, freedom of the press, opinion, assembly, and religion, and protection of person and property against arbitrary state power.

The assembly's weakness was power. When Britain and Russia pressed Prussia into an armistice with Denmark at Malmö, the Frankfurt parliament first voted against it, then, lacking any force of its own, accepted it, and riots in Frankfurt in September left two conservative deputies murdered. The constitution, adopted in March 1849, created a "small German" state that left out Austria, with a hereditary emperor at its head. On March 28 the deputies elected Frederick William IV emperor. He refused the crown, saying in effect that it carried the taint of revolution, and Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Hanover, Saxony, and other states rejected the constitution. Radical risings in Saxony, the Palatinate, and Baden were put down by Prussian troops, and the surrender of the fortress of Rastatt on July 23, 1849, ended the revolution in Germany.

The Habsburg lands: Vienna, Prague, Hungary

The Austrian Empire faced revolution on several fronts at once. In Vienna, after bloody barricade fighting on March 13 to 15, 1848, insurgents forced the fall of the chancellor, Metternich, who fled to Britain. On March 16 the Hungarian leader Lajos Kossuth demanded an independent government for the Kingdom of Hungary. In Venice a rising against Austrian rule began on March 17, unrest broke out in Milan the next day, and on March 24 the king of Sardinia-Piedmont declared war on Austria at the head of the Italian national movement.

The movements did not share a single goal. In April the Czech historian František Palacký refused Czech participation in the Frankfurt parliament, and in June a Slav Congress in Prague called for the monarchy to become a federation of equal peoples. A Whitsun uprising in Prague that month was crushed by Austrian troops after fighting that cost 400 lives.

Then the empire struck back. Austrian forces defeated the Piedmontese in July and retook Milan in August. Loyal troops under Prince Windischgrätz recaptured Vienna on October 31, and on November 9 Robert Blum, a Frankfurt deputy sent to Vienna, was shot by summary court-martial despite his parliamentary immunity. In December Emperor Ferdinand abdicated in favor of his nephew Franz Joseph. In March 1849 the Austrian constituent assembly was dissolved and a constitution imposed from above; apart from one advisory council, it was never put into effect and was revoked in 1851.

Hungary held out longest. When Vienna tried to impose its constitution there too, an independence uprising broke out, and on April 14, 1849, the Hungarian diet under Kossuth declared independence. In May Tsar Nicholas I promised Franz Joseph military help. Under pressure from an Austro-Russian army, Kossuth gave up power on August 11 and fled to the Ottoman Empire, and the Hungarian army surrendered near Arad on August 13. On October 6, 1849, thirteen Hungarian generals and officers were executed.

Rome, Britain, and the edges

In Rome, Pope Pius IX fled an uprising in November 1848, and revolutionaries proclaimed a republic in February 1849, led by a triumvirate including Giuseppe Mazzini. French troops captured the city on July 3, 1849, ending it. Austria defeated Piedmont again at Novara in March 1849, and Venice capitulated on August 22.

Britain avoided revolution, but not agitation. The Chartists, whom the UK Parliament describes as the first mass movement driven by the working classes, had demanded since 1838 votes for all men, the secret ballot, annual elections, equal constituencies, paid MPs, and no property qualification for members. In April 1848 they organized a mass meeting on Kennington Common and presented a third and final petition. The authorities, fearing disorder, kept troops on standby. The petition was rejected, but the expected unrest did not happen.

France again: from republic to coup

The French republic turned on its own left within months. In late June 1848 the war minister, General Cavaignac, bloodily suppressed a workers' uprising in Paris. In December Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, became president. The National Assembly's history describes how the early ambitions faded: the constitution left out a right to work, a law of 1850 cut back universal suffrage, and education was placed under the church's supervision. On December 2, 1851, posters announced that the assembly was dissolved and universal suffrage restored, and troops occupied the chamber. Resistance was crushed, with 380 civilian victims, and 76 republican representatives, including Victor Hugo, were exiled.

Did 1848 fail?

The German Historical Museum's judgment is that the national, liberal, and social aims of 1848 failed with the violent suppression of 1849, and that the victory of the restoration powers ushered in reactionary years in which modern ideas advanced only slowly. On the immediate goals, that is hard to dispute. No united German nation emerged from Frankfurt, Hungary and the Italian states were reconquered, and the French republic ended with its president dissolving the assembly by force.

Yet the same sources record changes that outlived the defeat:

In Prussia, the king dissolved the national assembly in December 1848 but imposed a constitution that, the museum notes, met liberals halfway on many points.
Switzerland held its first Federal Council elections in November 1848 and named Bern its federal city.
Denmark's King Frederick VII signed a constitution on June 5, 1849, making the country a constitutional monarchy; the museum says it remains essentially in force.
In France, universal male suffrage, once introduced in 1848, became something even Louis-Napoléon claimed to restore rather than abolish.
In Britain, the UK Parliament notes that by 1918 five of the Chartists' six demands had been achieved.

Women were largely shut out of 1848's politics. The French decree's "universal" suffrage excluded them, but the period also produced new voices, such as Louise Otto-Peters, whose Frauen-Zeitung, a national women's newspaper, first appeared on April 21, 1849. Whether 1848 "failed" depends on the yardstick: as a seizure of power, mostly yes; as a rehearsal of demands that later generations would win, the picture is far more mixed.

Key takeaways

The crisis years of 1846 and 1847, with famine and food riots, helped prepare the ground for revolution.
The French monarchy fell on February 24, 1848, and a decree of March 5 introduced universal male suffrage for the constituent assembly.
Revolutions followed in the German states, the Habsburg lands, and Italy; the Frankfurt parliament met on May 18, 1848, and wrote a constitution the Prussian king refused.
By late 1849 the old powers had reconquered Vienna, Hungary, Rome, and Venice, and the last German revolutionaries surrendered at Rastatt.
The immediate goals largely failed, but constitutions, suffrage, and reform demands from 1848 outlasted the reaction in several countries.

Sources

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