The Legacy of 1848 641

The generals who crushed the insurgency within the Habs­

burg Empire: Jelacic, Radetzky, and Windischgratz.

the era of civic or national guards, which had been demanded by the people
of Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. Professional armies enforced the counter­

revolution, restoring Habsburg authority in Bohemia, Hungary, and north­
ern Italy; the Prussian army crushed the last gasps of revolution in the
German states; and the French army put down subsequent resistance to
Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat. Louis Napoleon’s plebiscite reinforced the
centralized character of the French state.

Nonetheless, the Revolutions of 1848 marked the first time workers put

forward organized demands for political rights. Moreover, radical peasants in

southern France helped dispel the myth of the inevitably conservative peas­

ant. Although the Revolutions of 1848 ultimately failed, they left crucial po­

litical legacies. The period was one of political apprenticeship for

republicanism in France and nationalism in the German and Italian states.

Portugal completed a liberal revolution begun in 1820 with the establish­

ment of a parliamentary government. The revolutions were not only separate

national phenomena but also part of a common process that anticipated the

emergence of mass politics in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

While many of the goals of the revolutionaries centered on middle-class

demands for liberal reforms, such as freedom of the press, the Revolutions

of 1848 also had a popular quality characterized by demands for universal

male suffrage, as well as by a few calls for political rights for women. Hun­

dreds of thousands of ordinary people participated, if only somewhat briefly,

in political life. The mid-century revolutions influenced the subsequent po­

litical evolution of each country that had had a revolution in the spring of

1848.