MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · March 18 · 1848
ON THIS DAY · 18 MARCH 1848
Barricades 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.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
Watch the map light up, because nothing like it had ever happened: revolution as continental weather. Palermo rises in January; Paris in February (three days, a fallen monarchy, a Second Republic decreeing universal male suffrage — the electorate jumps from 250,000 to nine million); and then, at telegraph-and-railway speed, the wave the markers trace — Vienna (Metternich flees in a laundry cart, 13 March), Budapest (the 15th), Berlin (the 18th), Milan’s Five Days (18th–22nd), Venice, Prague, fifty German and Italian cities. The red zones show the deepest risings: the liberal Rhineland and southwest, Lombardy-Venetia in open war against Austria, Hungary self-governing under the April Laws. In May a parliament of professors and lawyers convenes in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche to write a constitution for a Germany that does not yet exist. For roughly six months, almost nothing remains of Metternich’s Europe but the Russian and Ottoman flanks. Serfdom is abolished in the Habsburg lands in September — the one decree of 1848 no restoration will dare touch.
From Chapter 12 — 1848: The Springtime of Peoples of The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848 (MAR 1848).
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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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