After nearly a decade of relative quiet, 1848 and 1849 were two very bumpy years for Europe.





In January, the island Kingdom of Sicily declared itself independent of the Kingdom of Naples. Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany declared a new and liberal constitution in February to quell unrest, as did, unexpectedly, Pope Pius IX for the Papal States, and the French overthrew King Louis-Philippe Orléans and proclaimed another republic. Even the long-powerful Klemens von Metternich resigned his post in March as the Foreign Secretary and fled Vienna because of violent unrest across the Austrian Empire.



Also in March, King Charles Albert of Sardinia granted a liberal constitution under duress, and the same pressures which made him do that also forced him to invade the Austrian component kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and take advantage of its rebellion. Initially successful in forcing the Austrian General Joseph Radetzky to retreat, the French and British applied pressure to withdraw from Lombardy-Venetia. This was a major blow to Piedmontese designs to unite the Italian Peninsula.



North in Denmark where uprisings were also underway, King Frederick VII joined the list of monarchs forced into granting liberal constitutions to their realms. Banking on the anti-interventionist policies of the Concert of Europe as well as the parallel rebellious distractions across Europe, he included the mostly German duchies of Holstein, Schleswig and Saxe-Lauenburg in the process, giving them separate but subordinate constitutions and parliaments in order to integrate them more firmly into the Danish realm while still giving the citizens expanded rights. Duke Christian August II of Augustenborg, also took advantage of the 1848 uprisings and claimed the dukedoms of Schleswig, Holstein and Saxe-Lauenburg. Because the three are largely populated by Germans and he himself is German, Christian Augus tried to get Prussian support for them to leave Denmark and become full members of German Confederation. Christian August was initially able to attract many of the rebellious people as well as Prussian help in the form of an army which entered Schleswig in April. However, after several losses to Danish forces as well as significant pressure from Britain and Russia, Prussia gave into to all Danish demands and signed the Treaty of Malmö in August. In the meantime, the petty nobility and bourgeoisie of the three duchies were withdrawing their support from Christian August after learning of the new Danish constitution and their own local parliaments. As a result he drops his claims to the three duchies in return for being named heir presumptive to Frederick VII who is childless and believed to be infertile. When Congress of London in January, 1849 accept the Treaty of Malmö, it requires Denmark to join the German Zollverein. This is based in part on the precedent from Luxemburg and Limburg ten years previous. In order to offset any economic losses that would arise from the new constitutions of Holstein and Saxe-Lauenburg, being subordinate to the Danish one, only nominally leaving them in the German Confederation.



In Austria, Kaiser Ferdinand I is faced with insurrections throughout his empire and is forced in April 1848 to enact a set of reforms written by the Hungarian Diet, granting them wide powers. However, even though the Hungarian Prime Minister, Batthyány, was a supporter of Hungary remaining in the Empire, the young Franz Joseph who had become Kaiser after his uncle and father had abdicated in quick succession, revokes the new laws in August. As a result, Batthyány declares open revolution in September and hastily gathers an army. The Hungarians are defeated in October at Schwechat when they try to come to the aid of the rebellion in Vienna, but they are able to mostly hold their own inside Hungary to start. Their undoing, though, is two-fold. First, the Kingdom of Hungary is in some ways the Austrian Empire in miniature right down to the mistreated subordinate ethnic groups wanting to rebel, which Austria uses to its advantage. The second, is thanks to the British and French pressures on Piedmont-Sardinia, the Kaiser is able to call General Radetzky and his armies back from Italy in August. Because of the difficulties crossing the Alps, Radetzky marches through Trieste, Laibach and Agram and enters Hungary from the south in November, surprising the militarily inexperienced Hungarian head of state Lajos Kossuth who was having problems controlling his generals. By the time Kossuth cedes control to Artúr Görgey in June, 1849, it is too late. Though preventing Hungarian independence, Radetzky’s return is actually a good thing for Hungary in that Austria no longer needed the Russian troops the new Foreign Minister Schwarzenberg was requesting from Tsar Nicholas I for. Letters between the two indicate that Nicholas would have sent 200,000 troops which would have annihilated the Hungarians, and many historians believe the repercussions would have been far worse than the so-called “12 Prisoners of Arad” and other possible reactions. As it was, while Radetzky’s military genius allowed the 70,000 troops he brought from Northern Italy to decide things against the otherwise numerically matched Austrian and Hungarian armies, in the end Franz Joseph still had to accept the April Laws of the previous year when the treaty was signed at Világos in August by Görgey and Radetzky.



The Germanies were not free of strife, either, with everything from protests to ouright armed insurrection breaking out in many of the states. The Frankfurt Parliament was called, populated by deputies from across the German Confederation but from the beginning was rife with the combination of regional politics, Austro-Prussian rivalries and moderate/radical dissension causing serious problems in talks to ostensibly unify the states. The Frankfurt Parliament ultimately failed and the constitution it produced was only recognized the smaller states but not by Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Hanover and Saxony.



In Baden, Bavaria’s Rhenish Palatinate exclave and Saxony as a result there were significant armed insurrections in the spring of 1849. While Baden’s and the Rhenish Palatinate’s rebellions were successful, the Saxon one was disorganized, being mostly students, and lacked weapons. In spite of not being able to receive Prussian assistance, the Saxon army was still able to crush the rebellion and continue the constitutional monarchy which had been in place since 1830. Because Austria’s own internal issues were under control, through not resolved, by this time, it stood with Great Britain and France against Prussian assistance of local monarchs across the confederation uder the guise that these were independent states and the Concert of Europe had a tradition of maintaining the balance of power by preventing such intervention. In reality, though, this was just another facet of the Austro-Prussian rivalry.



As a result, the new Republic of Baden and the Rhenish Republic were the only significant political changes in the confederation, though the high emigration to the new countries in North and South America lessening the workforce population did what the Frankfurt Parliament could not - increase the pace of industrialization and economic integration and thus favourable views of unification across Germanized Central Europe.