Revolutions of 1848: Potato Blight, Banquet Campaigns and the June Days

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In 1848 revolution broke out in over 50 European countries and regions within weeks, prompting Austria's Klemens von Metternich to declare that it was all over. The pressure had built for decades. Enclosure of common lands criminalized foraging and firewood gathering: France's Forest Code of 1827 provoked the War of the Maidens, in which male peasants in dresses attacked foresters, and wood theft convictions in the Bavarian Palatinate rose from about 37,500 in the 1820s to nearly 185,000 by 1846. In the cities the guild ladder closed and the putting-out system let merchants squeeze weavers, while an intellectual proletariat of jobless graduates, a term coined by Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, took over the newspapers.

Potato blight arrived in 1845, killing 60,000 people in the Netherlands, doubling or tripling grain prices and throwing artisans out of work. Banned from rallying, the opposition held subscription banquets with political toasts, and when François Guizot banned one in Paris in February 1848, troops fired on protesters and Louis Philippe fled. Revolts swept Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Milan and beyond, but the coalition split. France closed its National Workshops, the June Days uprising was crushed under General Cavaignac, and nationalists turned on minorities. Austria retook Vienna, Russia crushed Hungary in 1849, and Louis Napoleon won the French presidency, yet serfdom ended in Austria and Hungary and Denmark ended absolute monarchy.

• The silk weavers of Lyon rose in the 1830s under the motto live working or die fighting.
• Metternich fled Vienna hidden in a laundry cart.
• In Mainz, Protestants, Catholics and Jews paraded together into the cathedral to celebrate liberty.
• Austria freed Ruthenian serfs in Galicia, turning them against their Polish noble masters' rebellion.
• Austrian forces executed Robert Blum, an envoy of the Frankfurt National Assembly.