The attempt to secure the succession to the Spanish throne for his descendants by pressing on the marriage of the duke of Montpensier with the infanta Luisa, before that of the young queen Isabella had been proved to be fruitful The “Spanish Marriages.” in children, was on the part of Louis Philippe more than a breach of faith with Great Britain (how deeply it was resented may be learnt from Queen Victoria’s letters); it was a breach of faith with the revolution that had made him king. Since 1840, indeed, the whole tendency of the king’s policy had been to revert to the traditional standpoint of the Bourbons; internally, “resistance” to the growing claims of the democracy; externally, dynastic ambition. But in endeavouring to win the goodwill of the reactionary powers he only succeeded in losing that of the classes of his own people on which The “February Revolution,” 1848. his authority was based. In 1847 he joined with the three autocratic powers in supporting the clerical and reactionary Sonderbund in Switzerland, in defiance of the protests of Great Britain and the attitude of the majority of Frenchmen. When, in February 1848, the revolution broke out in Paris, the bourgeois monarchy, utterly discredited, fell without a struggle (see [France] and [Louis Philippe]).
The revolution in Paris was not the cause of the political upheaval which in the year 1848 convulsed Europe from Ireland to the banks of the Danube; it had indeed been preceded by the triumph of Liberalism in Switzerland, Revolution of 1848 outside France. by successful revolutions in Naples and Palermo, and by the grant of a constitution in Piedmont; but flaming up as it were in the revolutionary centre of Europe, it acted as the beacon signal for the simultaneous outbreak of movements which, though long prepared, might but for this have been detached and spasmodic. It was this simultaneity which gave to the revolutions of 1848 their European character and their formidable force. They were the outcome of various, dissimilar and sometimes contradictory impulses—political, social, racial. In France the issue resolved itself into a struggle between the new working-class ideal of Socialism and the bourgeois ideal of the great Revolution; in England the Chartist movement presented, in a less degree, the same character; in Germany, in the Austrian empire, in Italy, on the other hand, the dominant motives were constitutional and nationalist, and of these two the latter became in the end the determining factor. The events of the different revolutions are described elsewhere (see [France]; [Austria]; [Germany]; [Hungary]; [Italy]). From the point of view of Europe such unity as they possessed was due to their being, so far as Central Europe was concerned, directed against the system of “stability” associated with the name Metternich. In hatred of this system German, Czech, Magyar, and Italian were united; Kossuth’s great speech of the 3rd of March echoed far beyond the frontiers of Hungary; the fall of Metternich (March 13) was a victory, not only for the populace of Vienna, but for all the peoples and races which had worn the Austrian fetters. It was the signal for revolutions in Hungary (the passing of the “March Laws”), in Bohemia, in Prussia (March 15), in Milan; on the 23rd of March, Charles Albert of Sardinia, placing himself at the head of the Italian national movement, declared war against Austria. Against a movement so widespread and apparently inspired by a common purpose the governments were powerless. The collapse of the Austrian administration, of which the inherent rottenness was now revealed, involved that of those reactionary powers which had leaned upon it. One by one they accepted what seemed to be the inevitable; even Pope Pius IX. sent troops to fight under the banner of St Peter for the Italian cause; while in Berlin Frederick William IV., wrapped in the gold and black colours of imperial Germany, posed as the leader of “the glorious German revolution.” When, on the 18th of May, the parliament of United Germany was opened at Frankfort, it seemed as though pan-German dreams were on the threshold of realization; while in Italy, early in the same month, Lombardy, Modena, Parma and Piacenza declared by plebiscites for incorporation in the north Italian kingdom, Venice following suit on the 4th of June. A profound modification of the European states system seemed inevitable.
That, in the event, the revolutions of 1848 left the territorial settlement of Vienna intact, was due in the main to the marvellous resisting power of the Habsburg monarchy, the strength of which lay in the traditional loyalty of the Causes of the failure of the revolutionary movements. army and the traditional policy of balancing race against race within the empire. The triumph of democracy in Germany was made possible only by the temporary collapse of the Habsburg power, a collapse due to the universality and apparent unanimity of the onslaught upon it. But it was soon clear that the unanimity was more apparent than real. The victory of the democratic forces had been too easy, too seemingly overwhelming; the establishment of the constitutional principle in the main centres of autocracy seemed to make common action against the powers of reaction of secondary importance, and free play was allowed to the racial and national antagonisms that had been present from the first. The battle of German, as well as of Italian, liberty was being fought out on the plains of Lombardy; yet the German democrats, whether in Vienna or Frankfort, hailed the victories of the veteran Radetzky as triumphs of Germanism. In Bohemia the revolution was wrecked on the rivalry of German and Czech; and when the Hungarians drew the sword against Austria, the imperial government was reinforced by the hatred of the southern Slavs for their Magyar task-masters.
Thus, from the chaos of warring races, the old order began slowly to reappear. So early as the 15th of June 1848 Prince Windischgrätz had restored order in Prague and received the thanks of the Frankfort parliament; on Victory of the conservative forces. the 25th of July Radetzky’s victory at Custozza set free the imperialist army in Italy; on the 4th of September Jellachich, ban of Croatia, invaded Hungary in the name of the united empire; on the 1st of November Windischgrätz entered democratic Vienna. The alliance of the army and the Slav races had won the victory over German democracy. The combating of Hungarian nationalism proved a longer and a harder task; but the Austrian victory of Kapolna (February 26-27, 1849) encouraged Schwarzenberg to dissolve the rump of the Reichsrath at Kremsier and proclaim a new constitution for the whole empire, including Hungary. The Magyar victories that followed issued in the proclamation, on the 14th of April, of the independence of Hungary. But though the Austrian arms had not been strong enough to crush the Hungarian revolt, they had proved at least the vitality of the conservative principle. The emperor Nicholas I. of Russia had watched in disgusted silence the weak spirit of concession with which the revolutions had been everywhere met; so long as the sovereigns seemed to forget their divine mission he had held rigorously aloof, and had only broken silence to congratulate Windischgrätz on his capture of Vienna and Schwarzenberg on his reassertion of vigorous principles. Now, however, that Divine Right was in arms against the forces of disorder, he was prepared to listen to the prayer of the emperor Francis Joseph for assistance against the Hungarian rebels. The engagements of 1833 were remembered; and in the brotherly spirit of the Holy Alliance, Hungary was subdued by Russian armies and handed over, without quid pro quo, to her legitimate king.
Görgei’s capitulation of Világos (August 14, 1849) cleared the ground for the complete restoration of the system destroyed by the March revolutions of the year before. The refusal of Frederick William IV. of Prussia to accept the Prussia and Austria. Convention of Olmütz, 1850. imperial crown (April 21,1849) had already advertised the failure of the constitutional and unionist movement in Germany; and Prussia, her military prestige restored, stood once more face to face with Austria in rivalry for the hegemony of Germany. In the diplomatic contest that followed Prussia was worsted, her claims to an independent supremacy in the north were defeated, and the convention of Olmütz (November 29, 1850) restored the status quo of the Confederation as established in 1815.
Within three years of the great upheaval of 1848 the forces of revolution seemed everywhere to have been subdued, the states system of Europe to have been re-established on the basis of the treaties of Vienna. In reality, however, Napoleon III. and Europe. this restoration was only on the surface; the cracks in the structure of the European system had—to use Bismarck’s phrase applied to another occasion—only been “papered over”; and soon ominous rents revealed the fact that the forces that had threatened it with sudden ruin were still at work. One fateful breach in the treaties had, indeed, been accepted as beyond repair; when the dust of the revolutionary turmoil was at length laid a Bonaparte was once more firmly seated on the throne of France. The emperor Nicholas, watching from the calm of Russia, had realized all that the recognition of this fact would involve; he had proposed to set in motion the somewhat rusty machinery of the Grand Alliance, but the other autocratic powers were in no case to support a legitimist crusade, and when Napoleon in 1852 assumed the title of emperor, all Europe recognized his right to do so, even Nicholas being fain to content himself with refusing to treat the parvenu monarch as his “brother,” and to admit his style of “third” Napoleon, which seemed to imply a dynastic claim. Napoleon, indeed, was accepted by the powers, as he was welcomed by the French people, as the “saviour of society” from the newly revealed perils of the social revolution. For new and ominous forces had made their appearance since the revolution of 1830 had established the middle classes in power. The industrial development had proceeded in the west of Europe Rise of socialism. with astonishing rapidity, with its resulting concentration of vast populations in factories and factory cities; and this “proletariat,” excluded from any voice in the government, and exposed in accordance with the prevailing economic theories of doctrinaire Liberalism to the horrors of unrestricted competition, had begun to organize itself in a movement, of which the catchword was “the right to work” and the banner the red flag of the socialist commune. The reign of Charles X. had been the reductio ad absurdum of the principle of legitimacy; that of Louis Philippe had discredited for ever government based solely on the bourgeoisie; the socialistic experiments of 1848 in Paris had collapsed amid the anarchy and bloodshed of the June days. At this opportune moment “The Napoleonic Idea.” Louis Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed to the French people the “Napoleonic Idea” as conceived by himself. The great Napoleon had been the incarnation of the Revolution, had “sprung armed from the Revolution, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter”; he had ruled because to him the people, by whom the Revolution had been made, had delegated the duty of representing, protecting and guiding it. Of this idea Louis Napoleon conceived himself to be the heir; and when by a double plebiscite the French nation had established him in supreme power, first as president for life (1851), then as emperor (1852), he was able to claim that he represented the people in a far more immediate sense than could be asserted of the chance majority of any representative assembly.
It was clear that, sooner or later, Napoleon III. would prove a disturbing force in Europe. His title to rule was that he represented France; it followed therefore that he must be hostile to “the treaties,” by which the traditional Economic revolution in Europe. aspirations of France, e.g. for her “natural boundaries” of Rhine, Alps and Pyrenees, were restrained. He reigned as “emperor of the French”; it followed that he represented that principle of nationality which the treaties ignored. He could not afford—as Metternich had said of Ferdinand of Naples—“to treat his throne as an arm-chair”; and any activity he might display would be almost certainly at the expense of the established order. At the outset, indeed, it was his policy to pose as its custodian. To conciliate the French clericals he supported the pope against the Italian Liberals; but otherwise he proclaimed aloud his devotion to the arts of peace. A period of rapid material expansion succeeded the unrest of the revolutionary years; engineers and men of science were quickly producing a change in all the material conditions of life, greater than could have been effected by any political revolution; especially the face of Europe was gradually being covered with a network of railways, which it was hoped would draw the European nations not only materially but morally closer together. The first universal exhibition, opened under the auspices of the prince consort at London in 1851, was intended to advertise and consecrate the dawn of a new era of international peace and goodwill. The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, once hailed as the “bright Koh-i-nur of the West,” remains the dismal monument of a hope so soon to be belied by the hard logic of events. For no period since 1815 has been so occupied with wars and the rumours of war as the twenty years that followed the opening of this great temple of peace.
One question, that of the ultimate destination of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which threatened the tranquillity of the West, was temporarily settled by the conference of London in 1852 (see [Schleswig-Holstein Question]). The Crimean War. But about the same time anxious watchers noticed on the political horizon in the East a cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, that threatened a serious storm. At first this was no more than a quarrel between Greek and Latin monks about the custody of certain holy places and things in Palestine. It soon, however, became clear that behind these insignificant combatants loomed the figures of the emperors of Russia and France. The motives that induced Napoleon to take up the cause of the rights of the Latin church in this matter were partly political, partly personal. He resented the tsar’s attitude towards himself; he wished to gain the firm support of the clergy for his throne; he desired to win prestige for himself and his dynasty by reasserting the traditional influence of France in the Ottoman empire. The events that led up to the Crimean War, and those of the war itself, are told elsewhere (see [Crimean War]). Great Britain had been drawn into the war by her traditional policy of preserving the Ottoman empire as a barrier against the advance of Russia to the Mediterranean and the consequent danger to the British empire in India. It is now generally conceded that, so far as these objects were concerned, the war was a tragic mistake. The hopes that were built on the capacity of Turkey to reform itself were disappointed; the restrictions imposed upon Russia were repudiated at the first opportunity, during the Franco-German War in 1870; and the results of the Russo-Turkish War of 1876 have shown that a far more effective barrier against Russia than the weakened Ottoman Congress of Paris, 1856. empire has been furnished by the young and vigorous national states of the Balkan Peninsula. None the less, the treaty of Paris (1856), by which the war was closed, marks an important epoch in the diplomatic history of Europe; and it is impossible to say that the blood spilled in the Crimea was wholly wasted. At the time the main success of the allied powers seemed to be in the thrusting back of Russia from the Danube by the cession of Bessarabia, the extinction of Russian sea-power in the Black Sea, the formal repudiation of the tsar’s claim to a special right of interference in Turkey. But the true significance of the work of the congress of Paris lies in the impetus given by it to the development of an effective international law. The concert of Europe was consecrated anew by the solemn admission of the Ottoman empire to an equality of status with the European powers and the declaration of the collective obligations of Europe towards it. The congress, moreover, acted in some sort as the legislative body of Europe; it established the principle of the free navigation of the Danube and of the right of all nations to carry their commerce into the Black Sea; by a declaration, signed by all the powers present, it abolished the practice of granting letters of marque to privateers in war time. The question was even discussed of establishing some sanction by which the rules of international law agreed upon should be enforced upon recalcitrant states; and, though nothing was settled, a vœu to this effect was entered upon the protocol. The congress of Paris thus set a precedent more hopeful than those of the congresses held earlier in the century, because the issues were not confused by the supposed necessity for upholding “legitimacy” at all costs; it was a stage in the progress from the ideals of the Grand Alliance to those of the Hague Conference.
The conclusion of the Crimean War left the emperor Napoleon the most influential personage in Europe; and Paris, the seat of the congress, became also the centre of the diplomatic world. Russia had been bled almost to death Preponderance of France. by the war; Austria was discredited and isolated owing to the dubious part she had played in it; Prussia had not recovered from the humiliation of Olmütz; Great Britain was soon plunged into the critical struggle of the Indian Mutiny. The time was obviously opportune for the realization of some of the aspirations implied in the Napoleonic idea. The opportunity came from the side of Italy. By sending Sardinian troops to fight in a quarrel not their own, Napoleon and Italy. War of 1859. alongside the Allies in the Crimea, Cavour had purchased for Piedmont the right to be heard in the councils of the powers—a right of which he had made use at the Paris congress to denounce before all Europe the Austrian misrule in Italy. The Italian unionists were at one with Napoleon in desiring to overset “the treaties”; and the Franco-Italian alliance which, in 1859, drove the Austrians out of Lombardy and established the nucleus of the Italian kingdom was the beginning of a process which, within twelve years, was to change the balance of Europe. It was ominous of the future that it was largely the menace of Prussian intervention that persuaded Napoleon to conclude the armistice of Villafranca (July 11, 1859), which, contrary to his agreement with Victor Emmanuel, left Venice to the Austrians. In spite of the peace of Zürich (November 10), indeed, the union of Italy continued during the succeeding years, and Savoy and Nice were the reward of the French emperor’s connivance (see [Italy]). France thus once more gained her “natural frontier” of the Alps; the question was whether she would be able to regain her other natural frontier on the Rhine. The times were not unpropitious for an enterprise which was undoubtedly one of the main objects of Napoleon’s policy. The European concert had ceased to exist as an effective force; the treaties had been violated Napoleon and Germany with impunity; in Germany, where the tension between the two great powers had not been eased by Prussia’s dubious attitude during the war, there was little prospect of a united opposition to French aggression, and the conditions seemed highly favourable for reviving the traditional policy of exploiting German disunion for the aggrandizement of France. Prussia was arming, but her armaments were directed not against Napoleon but against Austria, and the beginning of the reign of William I., who had become regent in 1858 and king in 1861, pointed to the development of a situation in which the French emperor would once again become the arbiter of Germany. On the 29th of March 1862 Prussia signed a commercial treaty with France on a basis that involved the exclusion of Austria from the Zollverein, and replied to the protests of the court of Vienna by recognizing the new kingdom of Italy. In September of the same year King William placed the supreme direction of Prussian policy in the hands of Otto von Bismarck, whose views on the exclusion of Austria from Germany were known to all the world.
The outcome of the Polish insurrection of 1863, however, again altered the aspect of things, and in a direction unfavourable to France (see [Poland]: History). Napoleon had been forced by French public opinion to come forward as Decline of Napoleon’s influence. the protector of the Poles; but the spectacle of a Bonaparte posing as the champion of “the treaties” was not impressive; his brave words were not translated into action; and he only succeeded in offending Russia by his protests and alienating Great Britain by his tergiversations. The proffered intervention of Austria, France and Great Britain was rejected in a note of Prince Gorchakov to Baron Brunnow, the Russian ambassador in London (July 1, 1863); no action followed; and the last effort to put forward the treaties of Vienna as the common law of Europe ended in a fiasco. British ministers, who had been made to look somewhat ridiculous, henceforth began to be chary of active intervention in continental affairs; Austria and France were alike discredited and isolated. Prussia which, under Bismarck’s auspices, had aided Russia in suppressing the Poles (convention of February 8, 1863) alone emerged from the crisis with increased prestige. Bismarck, indeed, was too wary to accept the tsar’s suggestion of an offensive alliance and an immediate combined attack on Austria and France; but in the coming struggle for the hegemony of Germany he was assured at least of Russia’s neutrality.