The Paris revolution of February 1848 precipitates a succession of liberal and national revolts against autocratic governments.

Revolutionary disturbances pervade the territories of the Austrian Empire, and Emperor Ferdinand I (1835-48) promises to reorganize the empire on a constitutional, parliamentary basis.

In the Bohemian Kingdom, a national committee is formed that includes Germans and Czechs, but Bohemian Germans favor creating a Greater Germany out of various German-speaking territories.

The Bohemian Germans soon withdraw from the committee, signaling the Czech-German conflict that will characterize subsequent history.

František Palacký proposes Austro-Slavism as the creed of the Czech national movement.

He advocates the preservation of the Austrian Empire as a buffer against both German and Russian expansionism.

He also proposes the federalization of the empire on an ethnographic basis to unite the Bohemian
Germans with Austria in one province and Czechs and Slovaks in another.

Palacký further suggests that the various Slavic peoples of the empire, together constituting a majority, should form a political unit to defend their common interests.

In June 1848 the Czechs convene the first Slavic Congress to discuss the possibility of political consolidation of Austrian Slavs, including Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs.

The 1848 revolution in the Kingdom of Hungary temporarily topples Habsburg absolutism, and there is an attempt at establishing a liberal constitutional government.

Conflict soon ensues between the Hungarians and several other nationalities as to how Hungary is to be restructured.

Hungarian liberals like Louis Kossuth, who favor the overthrow of the Habsburgs and an independent Hungary, are at the same time opposed to the aspirations of the non-Hungarian nationalities.

The liberals seek to create a national state solely for the Hungarians.

National revival for both Czechs and Slovaks had been begun by small groups of intellectuals.

At first, the national movements were confined to discussion of language, literature, and culture, but during the revolutions of 1848, the Czechs and Slovaks make bold political demands.

The revolutions of 1848 also reveal that the German and Hungarian liberals, who are opposed to Habsburg absolutism, are equally hostile to Czech and Slovak aspirations.

It has become clear that the Czech and Slovak national movements have to contend not only with Habsburg absolutism but also with increasingly virulent German and Hungarian nationalism.

While relations between Czechs and Germans worsen in Bohemia, they remain relatively tranquil in Moravia.

Although the separate administrative status of Moravia had been abolished in the eighteenth century, the area is reconstituted by Austria as a separate crown land in 1849.

General unrest in France leads to the February Revolution and the end of the July Monarchy in 1848.

The abolition of slavery and male universal suffrage, both briefly enacted during the French Revolution, are re-enacted in 1848.

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who had been elected President of the French Republic, stagesa coup d'état on December 2, 1851, by dissolving the National Assembly without having the constitutional right to do so.

He thus becomes sole ruler of France, and re-establishes universal suffrage, previously abolished by the Assembly.

His decisions are popularly endorsed by a referendum later that month that attracts an implausible ninety-two percent support.

At this same referendum, a new constitution is approved.

A liberal rising in Paris on February 22, 1848, replaces France’s constitutional monarchy under Citizen King Louis-Phillipe with a provisional government committed to a democratic franchise and a program of “national workshops” aimed at reducing unemployment.

The leaders of the opposition set out to take advantage of the restless mood in France and to force the regime to grant liberal reforms.

Since public political meetings are illegal, they wittily undertake a series of political “banquets” to mobilize the forces of discontent.

This campaign is to climax in a mammoth banquet in Paris on February 22, 1848, but the government, fearing violence, orders the affair canceled.

That day, crowds of protesting students, workers and others gather in the streets and begin to clash with the police.

The king and Guizot expect no serious trouble: the weather is bad, and a large army garrison is available in case of need.

But the disorders continue to spread, and the loyalty of the National Guard begins to seem dubious.

Barricades are erected and fighting begins.

Louis-Philippe, faced with the difficult choice of either unleashing the army, which would mean a bloodbath, or appeasing the demonstrators, replaces the hated Guizot with Count Louis-Mathieu Molé; the following day.

That evening, an army unit guarding Guizot's official residence clashes with a mob of demonstrators, some forty of whom die in the fusillade.

The angry crowd is threatening the royal palace by the morning of February 24.

Louis-Philippe, confronted by the prospect of civil war, hesitates, then retreats once more; after the National Guard refuses to cheer his presence, he announces his abdication in favor of his nine-year-old grandson, Prince Philippe, Count of Paris, and flees to England.

A rump meeting of the Chamber of Deputies, invaded by a mob that demands a republic, ignores the abdication and chooses a provisional government of moderate republicans, whose members range from constitutional monarchists to one radical deputy, Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin.

Led by the poet-deputy Alphonse de Lamartine, the members of the government proceed to the Hôtel de Ville, where the radical republican leaders have begun to organize their own regime.

After considerable palaver, the provisional government co-opts four of the radical leaders, including the socialist theoretician Louis Blanc and a workingman who calls himself Albert.

That evening, under heavy pressure from the crowd surrounding the Hôtel de Ville, the government proclaims the Second Republic.