With the end of the Napoleonic era, the European monarchies met with the objective of containing the proposals for transformation disseminated by the French Revolution. This meeting took place at the so-called Congress of Vienna, when part of the monarchs who were there decided to form the so-called Holy Alliance. In this agreement, several monarchs pledged to militarily assist any monarchy that had its authority threatened.
However, this project that was supposed to preserve the Ancien Régime was not able to contain the march of the new revolutions that would take over Europe. In the year 1848, the various new political currents emerging throughout the Old World were determined to put an end to the monarchical regime. In general terms, the European political context was taken over not only by liberal proposals arising from French experience, but also counted on the rise of nationalist and socialist trends.
Just before these uprisings took place, between 1846 and 1848, a string of bad harvests caused an economic crisis responsible for the sudden rise in food prices. Concomitantly, the drop in consumption of industrialized products led to the dismissal of workers in urban centers. In fact, the entire European capitalist economy was facing a delicate process of stagnation that would give rise to the uprisings that marked the so-called “People's Spring”.
Reacting to this unfavorable situation, members of the working class and the peasantry began to demand better living and working conditions. Taking advantage of emerging trends, they strongly opposed the monarchic regime through a series of uprisings. Further nurturing this feeling of change, we should also point out that in that same year there was the publication of the Communist Manifesto, work by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels that defended the mobilization of workers.
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Communing with the union expressed by that book, several cities were taken by barricades of workers who spread to cities in France, the German States, Austria and other large cities. urban centers. Despite romantic ideals and colorful flags in favor of a fairer society, the “Spring” failed to definitively transform Europe. However, they demonstrated the new political articulation that was being engendered.
From this historical event, the bourgeois society had some of its principles assured, because even having a popular character, these revolts did not they would give up conceptions favorable to civil equality, to the end of feudal privileges, the new legal institutions and access to positions public. Furthermore, it demonstrated to the new bourgeois order the potential for mobilizing the working classes around their own political interests and projects.
By Rainer Sousa
Graduated in History
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
SOUSA, Rainer Gonçalves. "Spring of the Peoples"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiag/primavera-dos-povos.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.