The turning point of the century
"Deutschland, Deutschland frei und eining
keine kaiser, keine Joch
von den blut auf deutsche mennscher
wir könnt' jetz zusammenhält
Von der Maas bis an die Memel,
Von der Etsch bis an den Belt,
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,
Über alles in der Welt!"
-Opening stanza of the German "Victory March" as composed by Hoffmann von Fallersleben
When the first person on the island of Sicily placed the poster announcing revolution in three days time they could have scarcely realize the magnitude of their act and how it would come to shape history. Following the congress of Vienna, Europe had grown ever closer to a volatile powderkeg, with the dicates of monarchs and princes only serving as sparks to slowly but surely burn away at the fragile order, culminating on the 12th of January, 1848. Despite what some fringe scholars claim [1], the revolutions were indeed inevitable in their scope and sucess. No monarch could possibly have overwhelmed the masses of people taking to the streets all across Europe, erecting barricades and sometimes even convincing regiments of soldiers to take up their cause. As soon as it started, the fires of revolution spread up from the italian peninsula to the alps and the balkans. Books and films have since collected the unnumerable stories of people and the acts they comitted for a better, brighter world, some of wich me may explore throughout this series on the history of the world at large.
Flag of the provisional government of Southern Italy
To summarize: Following the sucessful revolution in sicily, southern italy was set ablaze and countless revolutionaries gathered in Palermo to discuss the future of Italy. During what would become know as the conference of Palermo, three camps sprung up: The Unionists, led by Giuseppe Garibaldi who favoured one united Italy stretching from Sicily to Venice; The Confederationists, led by Vincenzo Fardella who desired Two Italies: One Northern and one southern. They believed that a united Italy would only lead to a new system werein the wealthy, comparatively industrialized north would come to dominate the south; And finally there were the Republicans, who wished to reorganize the city-states and other small parts of italy into Republics, but otherwise keeping the peninsula splintered. As they bickered they were nevertheless opposed to the old order and revolutionary forces soon had Naples firmly under control. However, the provisional government of Southern Italy (a suitably neutral name that pacified all three factions) ordered them to stop and entrech themselves and to simply support local revolutions rather than continue to claim territory. In the north however, aside from the separatist aspirations of Venice, there was not the same factionalism in the south and the forces of the Republic of Italy had soon seized Rome itself, entering the city upon the invitation of the Holy Father.
Flag of the Northern Italian Republican movement
This pattern continued across Europe: for whilst some simply meant replacing the monarch with an elected president [2], other revolutions meant seismic shifts in the european balance of power. A Republican Germany was created under the supervision of the liberal parliament of Frankfurt, incorporating the formerly habsburg Austria despite the protestations of some South German nationalists. Similarly to the Italian confederationists, these wished for two separate Germanies: One northern and protestant, the other southern and catholic. One revolt that took many Germans by surprise was the Bohemian Revolution, who quickly seized upon the rapidly destabilizing balkans to unite the Czechs and Slovaks into one nation and quickly setting up a Rhutenian buffer state against Russian intervention. Whilst Russia had in the beginning supported the revolutions, especially those in the balkans that drove the habsburgs from power and established slavic entities like the kingdom of Serbia-Illyria and Czechoslovakia, the appearance of a previously German Polish state suddenly threatened to sunder the Russian state in the same way it had done to the many nations of central europe, a notion that would be proven correct just a few months into the revolution, as the grand duchy of Finland would soon split away from the monarchy and join its old master Sweden, but this time as an equal in a Scandinaivan Republic rather than as a subservient part of the former. Other revolutions in Ukraine, Rhutenia and the Baltics fared worse however, as the Tsar's troops slaughtered the revolutionaries down to a man.
Flag of the kingdom of Serbia-Illyria
The revolutionaries would even bring down the mighties empire in europe, as English Chartists and various Celtic nationalists spurred by Breton independence launched their own insurrections agains the British crown, forcing it into exile abroad. Their journey would first take them across the atlantic, were our series will resume next.
[1] Especially those pseudo-historical books like "The man in Neuschwanstein"
[2] Harold Miller, "The lesser revolutions of 1848" (1963)
(So yeah! Next time We'll take a look across the Atlantic, perhaps adress some more European states and hopefully make some friends along the way.)