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1848 AND BEYOND
“WHEN HISTORY REACHED ITS TURNING POINT YET FAILED TO TURN”
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1848 STARTED IN SICILY IN JANUARY
The stage for the 1848 upheaval was set – just like today — by a severe economic depression, which had broken out in 1847. Events of 1848 got going on January 12 with a rebellion in Sicily seeking independence for the island.
Sicily is within sight of Tunisia and this was the Tunisia of 1848. Naturally, the British Admiralty had long paid close attention to the Mediterranean islands, of which Sicily was one of the most important. But then the insurrection spread rapidly. Barricades went up in Paris on February 22, 1848, and within two days King Louis Philippe, who had been in power since July 1830, abdicated and fled to London. The Second French Republic came into existence. On March 13, 1848 workers and students started an insurrection in Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire, and soon invaded the Imperial Palace. The Austrian regime became hysterically disoriented, and Prince Metternich absconded in disguise, also to London. On March 15, rioting began in Berlin, where King Frederick William IV immediately promised a written constitution. The governments of most of the other 37 German states also quickly collapsed.
Also on March 15, the Hungarian assembly declared its total separation from Austria, although the Habsburg Emperor was still kept as head of state. Bohemia demanded the same status a few days later. In Milan, Italy, the richest city of Austrian Empire, the revolt began on March 18 and by March 22 the Austrian garrison had been ejected. Venice declared its return to the status of an independent republic. The grand Duke of Tuscany was toppled by revolt. King Charles Albert of Sardinia, the only independent Italian state, declared war on Austria on March 23 with the intent of adding Milan and Venice to his realms, although this attempt to begin Italian unification would be defeated by military means.
This series of events was much more dramatic, more rapid, and more breathtakingly stunning for contemporary observers than the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya we have seen since the beginning of 2011. The flight of Louis-Philippe and Metternich amounted to much more than the ouster of Ben Ali and Mubarak, since France and Austria were among the five great powers of Europe. The events of 1848 also exceeded in geographic scope the fall of the Communist regimes of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania in the summer and autumn of 1989.
As Palmer summed it up: “In the brief span of these phenomenal March days, the whole structure based on Vienna went to pieces: the Austrian Empire had fallen into its main components, Prussia had yielded to revolutionaries, all Germany was preparing to unify itself, and war raged in Italy.
Everywhere constitutions had been wildly promised by stupefied governments, constitutional assemblies were meeting, and independent or autonomous nations struggled into existence.” (Palmer, p. 480)
EGYPT AND TUNISIA: PALACE COUPS CAMOUFLAGED BY STREET DEMONSTRATIONS, NOT REVOLUTIONS
The rapid march of rebellion across Europe shocked, stunned, and temporarily paralyzed existing governments, but did not definitively defeat them or break their power, since institutions and especially armies remained intact. This points to the superficiality of the alleged revolutions in 2011 in places like Tunisia and Egypt, which are really more like palace coups conducted behind the scenes by bureaucrats and generals, accompanied by some street demonstrations; in neither Tunis nor Cairo have the existing political institutions or governing system been altered. At most, some personalities at the top have been changed, but little more.
Revolutions are different; they destroy old institutions (slavery, foreign protectorates, monarchies, feudalism, serfdom, the IMF, NATO) and create new ones.
1848: THE REVOLUTIONS THAT MISFIRED
By June of 1848, the tide was beginning to turn. Social revolutionaries and republicans began to quarrel among themselves in Paris. The Second French Republic, with the help of the brutal General Cavaignac, crushed the National Workshops of the social republicans in the June Days of June 24-26, 1848. For a time it looked like France was headed for a military dictatorship under General Cavaignac, but Louis Napoleon, a descendent of the Emperor who had become a political adventurer and putschist in the service of Britain’s Lord Palmerston, soon emerged with the support of pro-British Freemasonic networks. Louis Napoleon was elected president of France by a wide margin in December 1848, and by December 2, 1851 he had abolished the parliament in a coup d’état.
In London, Lord Palmerston rushed so quickly to grant full diplomatic recognition to Louis Napoleon’s new regime that he offended Queen Victoria, who was of course a monarchist. In a plebiscite on December 20, 1851, Louis Napoleon was made president for 10 years, but within a year he had proclaimed France again an empire and himself the Emperor Napoleon III.
Napoleon III functioned as a satrap of the British Empire in Continental Europe, providing troops for the British Crimean War against Russia, and later invading Mexico as part of the attempted British envelopment of the United States during the American Civil War. He also invaded Indo-China. His regime displayed a number of characteristics that would become associated with fascism in the 20th century. Such were the bitter fruits of the vague slogans and enthusiasm of 1848.
MOPPING UP: CAVAIGNAC, WINDISCHGRAETZ, AND RADETZKY
What General Cavaignac did in Paris was accomplished in the Austrian Empire by two key military figures. Prague was bombarded and subdued by General Windischgrätz, who dispersed a Pan-Slav Congress that was meeting there. Windischgrätz soon went on to Vienna and put an end to the new regime there on October 31, 1848.
South of the Alps, a similar role was played by Marshal Radtezky, who defeated the Sardinians in the battles of Custozza and Novara, and violently subdued Milan, bringing Lombardy and Venetia back into the Austrian Empire.
In Hungary, where the Magyar landlords were resented by the Slovaks, Romanians, Germans, Serbs, and Croats, these minorities found an effective leader in the person of the Ban (or viceroy) of Croatia, Jellachich, and was supported by Austrian Chancellor Schwarzenberg in the name of the Habsburg Emperor. Eventually, the Vienna government invited 100,000 Russian troops to crush the rebellion in Hungary according to the provisions of the Congress of Vienna, which was accomplished by August 1849. This offers parallels to the entry of Saudi and UAE forces into Bahrain on March 14, 2011, allegedly to restore order. This suggests that the Gulf Cooperation Council, made up of the Arab Gulf states, has become a kind of new Holy Alliance, eerily similar to the old one in that its purpose is the rigid defense of absolute monarchy against reforms of any kind.
Egypt’s Field Marshal Tantawi may end up as the Cavaignac of Cairo this time around, pushed aside by some more capable adventurer. Some of Qaddafi’s sons, or some of the Libyan army commanders, are already on their way to being the Windischgrätz or the Radetzky of the Libyan insurrection.
The last flareup of the 1848 revolutions started with November 1848 assassination of Pellegrino Rossi, who had been appointed prime minister of the papal states by the reformer Pope Pius IX. The assassin was the son of a certain Ciceruacchio of Trastevere, an agent of Britain’s Lord Minto and thus of Palmerston. (There may be some modern Ciceruacchios working for NATO and gunning for Karzai, Maliki, and various Pakistani leaders, to name just a few.) On November 24, 1848 Pius IX fled in disguise to Naples, and a Roman Republic was proclaimed by Mazzini and Garibaldi. Mazzini was driven out on July 3, 1849 by a French army sent by Louis Napoleon, which was destined to stay in Rome for the next 20 years.
In Germany, the Frankfurt Assembly was unable to agree on a workable plan for national unification. It finally urged the King of Prussia to become the constitutional sovereign of a united Germany. Frederick William IV rejected the offer, saying he could not “pick up a crown from the gutter.” Soon Prussian troops dispersed the Frankfurt Assembly, and a new era of authoritarianism was consolidated.
FORMAL DEMOCRACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES ONLY, OR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RIGHTS AS WELL
The typical demands of the 1848 revolutions were very similar to the so-called democracy slogans being raised across the Arab world today.
Agitators demanded constitutional government, the independence and unification of national groups, representative assemblies, the right to vote, restrictions on the police and secret police, trial by jury, civil liberties, freedom of the press and other media, and the right to assemble and demonstrate. As the French 1848 story shows, there was a potentially violent contradiction between an exclusive commitment to these formal democratic demands on the one hand, and the additional demands of working people for economic rights on the other.
Today, there is a potentially violent contradiction between the affluent golden youth who are concerned with Internet freedom but fundamentally believe in neoliberal-monetarist financial globalization with free trade and private central banks as the basis of their personal prosperity on the one hand, and working people who are interested in more robust food and fuel subsidies, higher minimum wages, labor legislation, a crackdown on foreign monopolies and cartels, trade union rights, the maintenance of a state sector, and other limitations of the mythical “free market,” on the other.
THE ROLE OF THE MAZZINI NETWORKS IN DETONATING 1848
As Palmer noted about 1848, “contemporaries sometimes attributed the universality of the phenomenon to the machinations of secret societies….” (Palmer, p. 470) The secret societies in question are first of all those of the Italian pseudo-revolutionary provocateur Giuseppe Mazzini, an agent of the British Admiralty. Mazzini had created a network of ultranationalist or cut-throat nationalist clandestine and semi-clandestine subversive groups in many countries with names like Young Italy, Young Germany (where Karl Marx’s future sidekick Frederick Engels was a member), Young France, Young Poland, and Young America. Young America was favorable to slavery and southern secessionism, and future US President Franklin Pierce had been close to this group. Young England became supporters of Tory Prime Minister Disraeli.
Revolutionary leaders like Louis Kossuth of Hungary and Ledru-Roland of France were part of the Mazzini orbit. The Austrian view of Mazzini was that he was used by the British to make Italy turbulent and rebellious, which would be bad for Vienna, without making Italy strong and unified, which would be a threat to London. This is a good summary of the destabilization method used by the Mazzini networks in numerous countries, and by the NED today.
In addition to Mazzini’s radical republicans, the British also fostered a smaller but growing tendency of social republicans, typified by at the beginning of 1848 by Louis Blanc and his National Workshops, which attempted an insurrection against the regime of more moderate Republicans in Paris in June of 1848 – an event which has been celebrated by true believers in the mythology of revolution as the dawn of proletarian violence, and which evoked a violent right-wing reaction across the rest of France. In the course of 1848 we also have the emergence of the German Communist League of Karl Marx and Young Germany alumnus Friedrich Engels, whose Communist Manifesto appeared at the beginning of the year. Communism was not the leading force of 1848, but it spread rapidly in the climate of destabilization. Marx later operated in London for several decades under British auspices, working closely with former UK Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire David Urquhart.
A third prong of the British ideological influence on the 1848 events was the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whose radicalized followers would become hard-core terrorists in the service of British intelligence against progressive reformers, including Czar Alexander II, in the coming years.
FROM MAZZINI TO GERSHMAN AND GENE SHARP
Mazzini, Marx, and Bakunin can be compared to Wikileaks, the nihilists Julian Assange and Ghonim of Google, Gershman, color revolution theorist Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institute, Joseph Nye of the US soft power group, and similar figures. Lord Palmerston of England corresponds to Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein of the Obama White House. The Mazzini networks represented the 19thcentury equivalent of the CIA, MI-6, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and the many nongovernmental organizations and foundations financed by the privatized Anglo-American intelligence community.
The 1848 revolutions made little progress in bringing lasting parliamentary rule to continental Europe, with the main partial exceptions being the Sardinian statuto or constitution and the Prussian constitution of 1850, which had three classes of property qualifications but was still more broadly based than the British system at that time. They did succeed in ending serfdom everywhere but in Russia.
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Source, Cross posted, Title image
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