Not All Failures

Some historians say that the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 were a failure but were they really? That was the essential question of the day. To learn the information needed to answer this question we split into groups with each group assigned one revolution. We read many sources and learned about our revolutions and then made a SurveyMonkey. A SurveyMonkey is an online survey that you can create and it shows the submitted answers of the class on various pie charts. Each group would make a survey and one at a time the other groups would answer each of the other groups survey after reading their documents. After each groups survey was taken by the rest of the class they would go over the answers and important pieces of information. This way we were able to learn about the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 without taking up too much time.

My group had the revolution of Hungary in 1848. The Hungarian movement began in Vienna were the whole idea was to spur nationalism but people also wanted some liberal reforms from the Austrian Monarchy. Metternich, who was in power of the Austrian monarchy, was conservative and also not willing to recognize Hungarian national independence. Naturally, the Hungarian people wanted him out of power. In source number 1 it states "Metternich, who had dominated Austrian politics for more than 30 years, tried to silence the students who took to the streets. But when workers supported the students, Metternich resigned and fled in disguise. The Austrian emperor then promised reform." So eventually the people got their wish and Metternich was out of power. There was a big meeting held to decide about the government and this was called the Diet. All in all the revolution as a whole was a partial failure; all of the Hungarian rebels were eventually killed or imprisoned by Austria with the help of Russia. But the people were able to get Metternich out of power. I think that the class really learned from our SurveyMonkey.

screen- shot of the results from the  Hungarian SurveyMonkey 

As you can see from the screen shots most if not all the students got the right answers.

Overall I do not think that the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 were huge failures, except for Decembrist. Some revolutions, while having many down sides, did get some things accomplished. For example, even though in the end mostly all the Hungarian rebels were killed or imprisoned they still got Metternich out of power. In the Frankfurt Assembly in 1848 the people wanted all states to be under one constitutional monarchy, the Frankfort Assembly was held to decide if they should have a constitutional monarchy or not. The people asked the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm to become their king, but he declined. While what they set out to do was not successful they did have good attempts of trying to succeed and in the end it was not a big tragedy. The one revolution that is safe to say was a complete failure was Decembrist. The people did not want Nicholas, the son of Alexandar, to rule because he was very strict and unprepared. There were revolts because people wanted to end serfdom as well but in the end nothing changed and the rule stayed the same, not to mention that a lot of people died in the effort of the revolt. But overall there were some mild stone achievements in these revolutions that made them not as much as a failure as historians set them up to be.