Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) observed many of the pivotal moments of the revolution in France from its outbreak onward. De Tocqueville described the events he had witnessed in his Recollections. The excerpt below begins with his account of the events of February 24, 1848, the day on which the provisional government took power and proclaimed France a republic.

This painting by Nicolas L. F. Gosse (1787-1878) celebrates the French Republic's abolition of slavery, one of the lasting legacies of the 1848 revolution in France.

In March 1848, the wave of revolution spread from France to the states on the Italian peninsula. The Austrian Habsburg empire controlled much of northern Italy, including the provinces Lombardy and Venetia, when the revolutions broke out. Much of the revolutionary enthusiasm focused on the expulsion of Austria and the creation of a unified Italian nation, as expressed in the Declaration of the Provisional Government of the Venetian Republic, March 26, 1848, reprinted below.

The provisional government of France moved to address workers' concerns in the days following the February Revolution. It declared that it would guarantee work for all citizens. It established national workshops, which served both to assist the unemployed and to provide some measure of control over idle workers. On February 28, 1848, the provisional government resolved to appoint a commission to study the problems of workers. That decree appears below.

The national workshops proved a disappointment both to socialists and their opponents. The socialist Louis Blanc (1811-82), who had proposed organizing social workshops under workers' control, castigated the state-run national workshops as an unproductive make-work scheme that wasted state money while humiliating the workers employed in them. To critics on the right, the national workshops appeared as the entering wedge of communism. Below is reprinted the view of one worker in the national workshops.

The provisional government formed in the wake of the February Revolution in Paris promptly scheduled national elections in France in which all adult men voted to elect representatives to a National Assembly. The political left, recognizing that Paris was more radical than most of France, formed a Club of Clubs, whose members fanned out into the countryside to campaign for leftist republican candidates. Their efforts proved unsuccessful, as rural France proved suspicious of Parisian radicalism, as described below.

The French artist Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) is famous for his caricatures dealing with politics and daily life under the July Monarchy and the Second Republic. A long-time supporter of republicanism, Daumier worked for many years for the satirical republican journal, Le Charivari. In 1848, the journal ran a series of his drawings on the subject of Les Divorceuses (the women advocates of divorce). In the drawing below, Daumier mocks the calls by some feminists for the reinstatement of the right of divorce, which had been abolished in 1816 and women's emancipation.

In June 1848, the French National Assembly dissolved the national workshops, prompting the popular uprising known as the June Days. In a few days of bloody street fighting, more than a thousand people died. The Russian socialist Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen (1812-1870) recorded his reaction to the suppression of the June Days in the published letter excerpted below.

The Russian Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876), who was to become known as a revolutionary anarchist, traveled through Europe during 1848, witnessing events in France, Germany, and the Habsburg empire. In Prague he attended the Slav Congress, which brought together Slavs living in several states in an attempt to formulate a common policy. His account, taken from his remarkable Confession to Tsar Nicholas I, composed while under arrest, illuminates the national divisions that weakened the revolutionary forces.

Heroines of the Barricades

Women participated in the revolutionary struggles of 1848 in highly visible ways, sometimes even "manning" the barricades, or more traditionally, caring for wounded husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons. The drawing below, of street fighting in Prague, is one of a number of works from the period valorizing the women of the barricades.

In September 1848, Josip Jelačič (1801-1859), the Ban, or governor, of Croatia, led an army into Hungary to reassert the authority of the Habsburg rulers. The Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894) published a call to resist the invaders excerpted below.

Friedrich Wilhelm IV (r. 1840-1861) was the king of Prussia, one of the two most powerful states in the German confederation, when revolution broke out in 1848. He responded initially by grudgingly meeting some liberal demands. German nationalists meeting in the Paulskirche as the Frankfurt National Assembly to plan German national unification placed their hopes in him, offering him the crown of emperor of Germany in April 1849. Friedrich Wilhelm declined, however, to accept it. In a confidential letter to a friend reprinted below, he explained his reasons.

The most autocratic of European states in the early nineteenth century was Russia, particularly under Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855). Nicholas ascended to the throne amidst the "Decembrist uprising," a revolt of officers who demanded an end to serfdom and political reforms. After crushing the revolt, Nicholas remained obsessed with the dangers of revolution for the remainder of his rule. He stressed the role of the military, and led numerous exercises, reviews, and ceremonies at the head of his enormous army. In September 1848, Russian forces intervened to quell unrest in the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. In April of 1849, at the request of the Habsburgs, Nicholas sent his troops to assist in subduing Hungary.

On December 2, 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1811-82), the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, staged a coup d'état against the short-lived Second Republic to which the 1848 revolution in France had given birth. Karl Marx (1818-1883) composed a series of articles for publication in a New York journal edited by his friend Josef Weydemeyer in which he reflected on the path from the February Revolution of 1848 to Louis Napoleon's seizure of power. His essay has proven influential both for its interpretation of events in France and for its more general theory of history.

A leading historian of the 1848 revolutions describes the causes of the revolutions and the reasons they were not more successful.