And the Survey Says...

Our class’s essential question for this lesson was whether the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 were failures, as many historians have decided. The Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 began in France, but the ideas spread to many other European regions, which also began to have their own revolutions. To determine the level of success/failure for each of the 5 revolutions we studied, we first made a small scale of complete failure to complete success and described what we thought each outcome would mean for the revolution. Then we, in groups, were each given a revolution to study, with a summary of events and primary sources. We used these to create a Surveymonkey on the revolution, which the other groups were given the information for and tested on to see how much they understood.

One of the questions of the Surveymonkey. Most
of the class got it right, citing that the Prussian king
was the enemy because he refused the crown and
constitution offered to him by the Frankfurt Assembly.

An 1848 caricature, titled "No Piece
of Paper Will Come between Myself
and My People." It illustrates King
Frederick William IV's refusal of
the Assembly and its constitution.
Source: Frankfurt Packet

Our group did the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848 (surveymonkey here). Germany, at the time, was not its own country, but rather a large group of German states, ruled by various princes. In 1848, delegates from the German states created the Frankfurt Assembly, an attempt to make Germany its own country. The Assembly eventually offered for King Frederick William IV of Prussia to dual-rule over both Prussia and Germany, considering Prussia to be more “German” than the alternative, Austria. However, King Frederick William IV, a conservative ruler, turned away their offer of a crown and constitution, since it came from the people of Germany, rather than the German princes. In his Proclamation of 1849, he explains: "...the Assembly has not the right, without the consent of the German governments, to bestow the crown which they tendered me, and moreover because they offered the crown upon condition that I would accept a constitution which could not be reconciled with the rights of the German states." Eventually, he also sent military to the Assembly, dissolving it and stopping the revolt. Some people were killed and some went to prison, but most left the country, often to the United States, where more liberal ideas had begun to take root.

The final question on the survey, where the class was
asked to rate the effectiveness of the Frankfurt Assembly.
Most of them got it in the right range, from neutral to
complete failure.

The Frankfurt Assembly was a general failure. Not many people died, but no real change occurred. In contrast, the Decembrist revolt (Russia, 1825) resulted in the deaths of near everyone involved, having been shot by troops in Senate Square. Tsar Nicholas, the Russian ruler of the time, clamped down on Russia and kept a strict rule after the revolt. And while the French revolutions in 1830 and 1848 brought about superficial changes like a new ruler, it eventually came back to a monarch: Louis Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew. The Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, in one way or another, each fell in the neutral to failure category, and therefore, the movement as a whole was a failure.