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Chapter Two Revolution: 1848–1849 Eighteen-hundred-forty-eight Bringer of the morning star Peoples, earth are now awakened! Night is fled; and Day is here. Red the cheeks, Dawn’s red splendor Spreads beside the dusky light Over grove and plain Showing—blood, and shame, and fury In awakened nations’ eye. ... Great the times! Holy now the words made flesh: “One flock only and one shepherd”— Only one religion reigns: “Freedom!” Gods are falling, From their rubble A new temple we will build, Great and glorious, none so mighty, Roof—the sky’s great brilliant tent— And for altar’s light—the sun! —Sándor Petöfi, 1848 Progress has settled on the barricades ... It advances with giant steps, and covers great distances on the wings of electricity. The telegraph turns to the left to tell us that freedom arrived at Brussels; it turns to the right and we learn that liberty has reached London and Berlin. ... Long live the European republic!. ... In a year, long live the universal republic! —François Vincent Raspail, 1848 For those who could read, hear, or see, there were auguries, portents, and forewarnings of an imminent explosion. They were there in the writings of journalists, in the speeches of politicians and statesmen, but most unmistakably in the actions and faces of men, women, and children. The “Hungry Forties” spoke out more forcibly than any other voices. Of these years, those between 1846 and 1848 were probably the worst 210 Europe had ever seen. While not the sole example, the “Great Hunger” of Ireland that stalked that land from 1845 on was not only the most glaring but also the most symbolic aspect of the current state of public misery and human decimation. For even as late as 1851 a Census Report described the situation in Ireland in the following terms: The starving people lived upon the carcasses of diseased cattle, upon dogs, and dead horses, but principally upon the herbs of the field, nettle tops, wild mustard, and water cresses. In some places dead bodies were found with grass in their mouths.1 Such was the consequence of the potato blight that struck all of Europe (and America as well) in 1845. The misery and depopulation of Ireland, of course, had no equal anywhere else, compounded as it was by the indifference of the British government , with its traditional antipathy toward the Irish Catholics, by a religious devotion to the operation of “natural causes,” as well as the “cash-nexus” that prohibited the violation of the Corn Law tariff and interference with private trading enterprise—a complex of attitudes abetted by a touch of genocidal intent. “God sent the blight,” the Irish said, “but the English landlords sent the Famine!”2 Conditions in the rest of Europe were only slightly less disastrous. The world had entered upon its cycle of economic crises, and industry as well as agriculture felt the impact. Since England was the prince of economic powers, what happened there had almost immediate international repercussions. The general commercial and industrial crisis in England, already heralded in the autumn of 1845 by the wholesale reverses of the speculators in railway shares, delayed during 1846 by a number of incidents such as the impending abolition of the corn duties, in the autumn of 1847 ... finally burst forth with the bankruptcy of the London banks and the closing of the factories in the English industrial districts. The after-effect of this crisis on the Continent had not yet spent itself when the February Revolution broke out.3 The great depression of the 1840s swept all of Europe, producing large armies of unemployed who became dependent upon public and private relief. As if the additional scourge of the potato blight—which destroyed the entire potato crop of Ireland , Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany—were not enough, a disastrously poor grain harvest followed in 1846. There were food shortages in Western and Central Europe beginning with 1847. Wheat and bread prices rose by over 100%; in a number of regions the price of potatoes went up by almost 600%. Added to starvation came eruptions of cholera, typhus, dysentery. It might have seemed that once again the ten Egyptian plagues were rampant ... In Flanders the populace fed on roots and carrion. Belgium alone was forced to extend relief to 700,000. Bread and potato riots occurred in many localities, and frequently troops were called out to quell them. In Berlin and Vienna barricades came into evidence. In Ireland...

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