From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 157-158:
Never before or since have Europeans seen common hopes smashed so rapidly as in 1848, the year of democratic revolutions. In February and March, after a disguised King of France escaped the wrath of his people, populations across the continent rose up against princes and kings, unified as never before, seeming to act according to one script. Divisions of nation or religion that had caused countless wars no longer seemed to matter, and even terms like “east” and “west” became secondary. The watchword was self-rule. Crowds demanding rights and democracy forced divine-right rulers to retreat and negotiate, from Italy and France through central Germany and into Bohemia, Prussian as well as Austrian Poland, all of Hungary (including Transylvania), and even farther east, into the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (the heart of today’s Romania), still under nominal Ottoman rule. Everywhere in this vast space, Europeans were telling the same story: they were leaving feudalism behind for better lives under democracy. If kings or princes survived, they would be bound to constitutions, as was the norm in Britain or the Netherlands.
But as early as April, the push for democracy was exposing divides among populations that few had imagined existed, and the stunned princes began surging back, making use of resources, some old (like a well-trained military), others new and unexpected. For the Habsburgs, virtually every national group turned out to be a potential ally against German and Magyar democrats, but they also exploited class divisions, playing peasants off against urban liberals, and urban liberals off against suburban proletarians. When pogroms broke out across Central Europe in 1848, the House of Habsburg also revealed itself as the defender of Jews and their property against urban mobs, who claimed that Jews stood with their ethnic enemies. That house was not only a bastion of the old order but also a defense of life and liberty against an emerging new order, of liberalism and national self-determination, but also of seemingly intractable interethnic feuding.
By the fall of 1848, the Habsburgs and other monarchs were rebounding, even if the final victories were not scored until the spring and summer of 1849, when imperial authorities closed down the elected parliament in Austria and crushed the democratic revolution in Hungary, with the assistance of Croat, Austro-German, Serb, and Romanian forces recruited from within Habsburg territories. The fighting between Hungary’s democrats trying to establish their national state and these nationalities became so intense that the region became a staging ground for ethnic cleansing: Magyar, Serb, and Romanian forces staked claims for territory by expelling ethnic others and burning their villages.
The difficulties of making a transition from feudalism to freedom were shocking because Habsburg subjects had not known the full extent of the realm’s complexity. The historian Joseph Redlich wrote much later that censorship and poor internal communications had kept the various parts of the monarchy ignorant of one another. There was little critical higher education, and for the elites, the “state almost completely coincided with German Austria,” and they assumed it would govern from Vienna with no concern for the “nationally foreign” inhabitants of the Sudeten and Alpine countries. Little was known about Czechs and South Slavs, and few anticipated that people speaking in their names might demand independence.1 Inhabitants of Central and Eastern European were neighbors who got to know one another only after they had to deal with one another as free human beings for the first time.
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