The Age of Revolutions was a period of European history which ran for over half a century. It began in 1789 with the French Revolution and continued into the nineteenth century, climaxing in 1848 when revolutions swept across the continent, a period known in some countries as ‘The Springtime of the Peoples’. The revolutions of 1848 were considerable in France, the Austrian Empire, many of the small German states and Italy, but smaller revolts against government authority were also seen in countries like Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and Poland. Much of this was compounded by the Great Potato Famine which ravaged the continent in the mid-to-late 1840s. The years around 1848 saw enormous levels of migration around Europe, some driven by famine in countries like Ireland and some driven by the political changes which occurred in several countries as a result of the revolutions. The Age of Revolutions can be said to have lasted until 1871 when the reunification of Italy, which had started in 1848, was completed and the Second German Empire was established out of over thirty smaller German states. By 1871 the revolutions and the events surrounding them had led to the migration of millions of people, both within Europe and overseas to North America and other regions.[1]
Chronology of events
In the eighteenth century, Europe went through of a period of profound intellectual and ethical evolution, a movement known as the Enlightenment in which figures like Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Edmund Burke and David Hume, building on seventeenth-century political theorists such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, questioned the very structure of society and the political systems which underpinned it. In the 1770s this had led to the American Revolution and the birth of the United States as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams argued that it was legitimate for the colonies there to free themselves from British tyranny.[2]
These very same concepts led to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, a defining moment which along with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is generally viewed as the point at which the early modern period ended and modern history began. Over the next three-quarters of a century revolutions swept Europe periodically as, in line with Enlightenment beliefs, people sought to overthrow absolute monarchies and establish democratic nation states. The French Revolution was followed by numerous revolutions in the Mediterranean in the early 1820s, most notably leading to the Greek War of Independence from Ottoman rule, while further revolts followed in France and Belgium in 1830. But the real peak came in 1848 when revolutions swept much of the continent in developments known as ‘The Springtime of the Peoples’. The final stages were in 1871 with developments in Italy, France and Germany. Other revolutions also occurred outside of Europe, notably in Central and South America where Spain’s vast empire fragmented into new nation states in the course of the 1810s and 1820s. The period has become known as the Age of Revolutions following the popularization of the term by the British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm.[3]
The revolutions which occurred during this period were not uniform in their causes or the goals of the revolutionaries. For instance, in France in 1789 the protagonists wished to establish a more democratic form of government after two centuries of absolutist monarchy. In Italy, the primary goal was to unite the dozen or so small states there and also reclaim the north of the country from the Austrian Empire. Equally, the causes were different in various countries. Curiously the last stages of the Italian Revolution were facilitated by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, a development which led Emperor Napoleon III of France to withdraw the French garrison from Rome which had been defending Papal control of the city for decades, a move which allowed the new Italian state to move in and annex the city. The revolts in many countries in 1848 were driven by the failure of the potato crop and famine in many countries like Ireland and Denmark which had become hugely reliant on this as a staple crop.[4]
Impact on migration
Huge levels of migration occurred throughout the Age of Revolutions. Some of this was determined by whether or not a revolt succeeded in its aims. For instance, in Denmark in 1848 the insurrectionists sought and acquired a more constitutional form of monarchy where the people would have a greater say in the management of the country. In other regions the revolts were less successful. For instance, in Ireland the Young Irelanders revolt of 1848 met with complete failure and this, combined with the devastating effects of the potato famine, led to hundreds of thousands of people leaving Ireland in the late 1840s and early 1850s.[5] In other cases, concessions were made in 1848, but were later rolled back by reactionary governments. Often thousands of people who had been involved in the revolts left their homes as political refugees.
However, the greatest source of migration as a result of these revolutions was Italy. The unification of the country or Risorgimento (‘Resurgence’), achieved primarily between 1848 and 1861, was driven primarily by the Kingdom of Sardinia, a power which ruled the Savoy and Piedmont regions straddling the modern-day border of France and Italy and the island of Sardinia.[6] After it united the peninsula it largely imposed Savoyard economic and agricultural policies on the rest of the country. These were unsuitable for many parts of the country and they caused enormous economic difficulties in a country which was already overpopulated. Owing to this, an estimated seven million people left Italy, primarily for the Americas, between 1861 and 1900.[7]
Demographic impact
The demographic impact of all this migration was very complex. There are elements of it which are well-known, notably the migration of millions of Irish and Italians to the United States and other countries in the western hemisphere such as Argentina between the 1840s and the early twentieth century. But there were many migrants from other areas whose stories are less familiar. For instance, tens of thousands of political refugees began leaving Central Europe in the late 1840s and early 1850s, disappointed with the failure of the revolutions of 1848 to achieve a united Germany, reform of the Austrian Empire and more democratic politics in both regions. The demographic impact of this was significant. Nearly one million Germans arrived to North America in the 1850s.[8]
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There was also a large amount of internal migration within Europe attendant on the revolutions. A good example is provided by the Niçard Italians. As part of the final stages of Italian unification the new Italian government negotiated the Treaty of Turin in 1860 with the French to determine the border between the two countries. Under the terms of this, the county of Nice was ceded to France in 1861. Many people here considered themselves to be Italian and one of the fathers of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was himself born in Nice. This Italian heritage led some 11,000 Niçards, approximately a quarter of the entire population of the county, to voluntarily migrate from Nice into Italy in the first half of the 1860s, most settling in the Liguria region in the northwest part of the country around Genoa and its hinterland. Thus, the demographic landscape of Europe and the western hemisphere was transformed by the Age of Revolutions.[9]
Explore more about the Age of Revolutions
- Italy, Births and Baptisms, 1806-1900 at MyHeritage
- Germany, Births and Baptisms, 1558-1898 at MyHeritage
- Irish Emigration to North America: Before, during and after Famine at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Shaping Europe: 5 important events at MyHeritage Blog
References
- ↑ https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/revolutions-age
- ↑ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/
- ↑ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962).
- ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/2698022
- ↑ Patrick J. Blessing, ‘Irish’, in Stephan Thernstrom (ed.), Harvard Encyclopaedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980), p. 528.
- ↑ https://www.vox.com/2014/12/1/7314717/italian-unification
- ↑ Frank J. Cavaioli, ‘Patterns of Italian Immigration to the United States’, in The Catholic Social Science Review, Vol. 13 (2008), pp. 213–229.
- ↑ https://www.loc.gov/rr/european/imde/germchro.html
- ↑ https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-68846-6_620-1