The Imperial Perspective

Abstract

The reputation of 1848 as the ‘Springtime of Nations’ seems at first sight grossly inflated. All the nationalist fervour generated at the time and all the retrospective evaluations of ‘the watershed of nineteenth-century Europe’ cannot disguise the glaring limitations of the 1848 exercise in revolution. Although many nationalist movements either stirred for the first time or had their most successful showings to date, not a single permanent or substantial victory was scored by nationalism: the imperial structure of eastern Europe survived the nationalist onslaught of 1848 without a casualty. And yet if the concrete achievements of the ‘Year of Revolutions’ were so meagre, with the challenged Habsburg and Romanov Empires surviving territorially almost intact into the twentieth century, why have contemporary nationalists and subsequent historians accorded 1848 so much respect? The present chapter sets out to compare the Habsburg and Romanov Empires over the period 1815 to 1914 in order to assess the long-term significance of 1848, the viability of the defending imperial establishments and the historical progress of their national minorities.