Victor Hugo's novel, Les Misérables, about the 1830 French Revolution captivated readers in 1862. The Broadway musical version of the work has captivated American theater-goers since 1986.

By the spring of 1848, King Louis-Philippe had fled Paris in disguise. Hungary had demanded autonomy and liberal reforms. Metternich had resigned under pressure from the Austrian emperor. And Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had issued The Communist Manifesto, which declared, "workers of the world unite." The ground shook across Europe.

The liberal reaction to the repression practiced by members of the Concert of Europe set up by Metternich had been diverse, but it was persistent. Adding to the protests of liberal reformers in the 1830s and 1840s were those of socialists protesting the injustices of industrial life and those of nationalists eager to overthrow a foreign oppressor. There was a strange and powerful confluence of forces at work in 1848, which in combination brought an end to Metternich's Concert of Europe and an end to Metternich's influence in international affairs.

The French Revolt ... Again?

The city of Paris had become a center for underground activity leading up to the Revolutions of 1848. King Louis-Philippe of France, seen here with his sons, was forced to flee the city in disguise during the spring of 1848.

An economic depression had visited Europe in the 1840s. High grain prices in 1847 aggravated French economic problems. For the French middle class, a connected issue was France's poor track record of railway production, which paled in comparison to England's and Germany's. Just one out of every 200,000 Frenchmen could vote, creating bitter middle class and labor resentment against the maintenance of privilege.

A repressive police force run by François Guizot did not help reduce tensions, nor did Guizot's motto for Philippe's regime, Enrichissez Vous ("get rich"). There was then no shortage of French citizens prepared to fight for change in the face of a status quo that did not incorporate their needs. After Philippe abdicated the throne, the Second Republic was born. Universal male suffrage was adopted — a radical development in Europe.

You Say You Want a Revolution or Two?

Along with his friend and writing partner Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx (pictured) issued The Communist Manifesto in the tumultuous year of 1848. This work demanded that the "workers of the world unite" to fight for their interests.

And yet in the end these revolts failed. Reactionary monarchs finally used the methods of Metternich to crush nascent democracies. In violent fighting, Austrian military forces, with the help of Russia, ended the Hungarian Revolution led by Lajos Kossuth and bombed the Czechs of Bohemia into submission. Newly installed Louis Napoleon of France strangled the republic of Rome in its cradle. And in the Humiliation of Olmutz, Austria retained its influence among the German states, ending a brief period of German unification.

Class Conflict and Failure

A young French student from the 1848 Revolution is depicted carrying the flag of the Republic, now a sentimental and idealized memory 50 years after the first French Revolution.

French middle class citizens were content with the new Second Republic, but unemployed workers were not. During the so-called June Days of 1848, workers protested the decision of the new republican government to close the national workshops that had been set up to provide meaningful work to the unemployed. Blood flowed in the streets of Paris when republican forces led by General Louis Cavaignac violently suppressed the protests. For many French liberals, the toiling masses were a dangerous force. Cavaignac subsequently created repressive measures to keep workers under control.

The result of this intense revolutionary period was a counter-revolutionary victory. Order, of the Metternich kind, was restored with great violence. Thousands of Europeans were killed, imprisoned, or exiled, many of them emigrating to America.

But liberal reforms were instituted in several countries, and the concept of parliamentary politics, though restricted in every sense, took hold even in conservative countries. Finally, nationalistic passions remained just below the surface, simmering, while waiting for another opportunity to explode.