ON THIS DAY ·
March Revolution in Berlin
18 Mar 1848 — After troops fire on a crowd, some 300 die at the barricades; the king of Prussia rides through his capital wearing the revolutionary tricolor — for a while.
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The moment in context
The wave began in economic distress — failed harvests, high food prices, a credit crisis and urban unemployment. Paris’s rising in February overthrew the July Monarchy and established universal male suffrage, and the news moved so rapidly that within weeks Vienna had risen and Metternich had fled, Budapest had won the April Laws, Berlin’s king had conceded after street fighting, and Milan had driven out its Austrian garrison. Frankfurt’s delegates began writing a constitution for a Germany that did not yet exist. Habsburg authorities abolished serfdom, lifting obligations from more than forty million people.
From Revolutions of 1848, chapter 12 of The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848 (MAR 1848).
The place: March Revolution in Berlin — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Hunger, credit, and the last old-regime famine. The potato blight and failed harvests of 1845–47 doubled food prices, detonated a credit crash and mass urban unemployment — Europe’s last…
- The turn — Paris, 22–24 February 1848. A banned banquet, a volley on the Boulevard des Capucines, corpses paraded by torchlight, and by the third morning the July Monarchy — the…
- What it changed — What survived the defeat. The permanent ledger: serfdom abolished in Central Europe (40+ million people); constitutions retained in Piedmont, Prussia, Denmark, the…
Then ask the room: “1848: the turning point at which modern history failed to turn.” Is the famous verdict right? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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