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Ethnic Diversity within the Austrian Empire
Vienna, the capital of the ethnically diverse yet reactionary Austrian Empire, was a leading cultural center in Europe, full of artists, composers, writers, intellectuals, and soon, nationalist revolutionaries. The various ethnic groups in Austria had become increasingly nationalist over the preceding decades, and by now they all yearned to express their individual Volksgeist and gain independence. Metternich had worked for years to hold the Austrian Empire together, but now, in the wake of the French February Revolution, the ethnic groups vehemently opposed assimilation.
There were around a dozen ethnicities within the Austrian Empire in 1848, each with its own language and general areas of majority. Austria itself had a German majority, while the Magyars were the predominant ethnicity in Hungary. Czechs dominated Bohemia, and various groups of Slavs made up most of the remaining population of the Empire.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1848
In March 1848, a radical Hungarian Magyar group, led by Lajos Kossuth, began a vocal independence movement. Kossuth’s fiery speeches were soon printed in Vienna, sparking an uprising. Metternich became fearful and fled, exciting other Austrian revolutionaries, such as the Czechs and Italians, who would soon follow the Magyars’ lead. Some of the revolutionary excitement also spilled into Prussia, where, to ease the pressure, the Prussian King Frederick William IV promised a constitution. On March 15, Kossuth’s Hungary was granted independence under Hapsburg rule. The Czech movement in Bohemia soon received the same status, and Italian states like Milan also overthrew Austrian occupation.
In June 1848, a group of Slavic nationalists held a Pan-Slavism conference in Prague in an attempt to stop Bohemia from being swallowed by Germany. The conference soon became violent, and so Emperor Ferdinand of Austria smashed both the Prague insurrection and the rebellious Italian states of Lombardy and Milan with the army. In September and October of 1848, Lajos Kossuth started a movement to make Magyar the official language of Hungary, even though only half of its population spoke Magyar. The Serbo-Croatians, among those who did not speak the Magyar language, rebelled and asked the Hapsburgs for help. In December, another rebellion in Vienna led Emperor Ferdinand to abdicate, putting his son, Franz Joseph, into power. Franz Joseph quickly appealed to the Russians, who marched into Hungary and crushed the Magyars. The 1848 revolutions in Austria came to an end, restoring order in the Empire.
Results of the Austrian Revolutions
By June 1848, the revolutions in Austria had already begun to run out of steam. The big weakness of the Austrian revolutionaries lay in the structure of Austrian society. Unlike Britain and France, with its large middle class buoyed by industrialized wealth and its urban working class, Austria had no well-developed middle class. The Austrian revolutions, particularly in Vienna, therefore had no powerful support base. The students and intellectuals couldn't sway the illiterate and rural peasants in the army who had no notion of nationalism. The army thus stayed loyal to the Hapsburgs, helping to suppress the revolution and keep Vienna intact. With all of the revolutions suppressed, Austria, ever reactionary, became an even more autocratic and repressive state.
Incidentally, during the revolutions of 1848, a small nationalist German minority in Bohemia, in the area called the Sudetenland, made clear their desire to become a part of Germany. Though of minor significance in 1848, this desire would become important almost a century later when the Germans seized it as their ostensible reason for annexing the Sudetenland at the beginning of World War II.
