Germany’s 1848 revolution failed from weak bourgeois concentration and the national question

Evidence

In Germany, the movement of 1848 failed as a result of the scanty bourgeois concentration (the Jacobin-type slogan was furnished by the democratic Far Left: “permanent revolution”), and because the question of renewal of the State was intertwined with the national question. The wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870 91 resolved both the national question and, in an intermediate form, the class question: the bourgeoisie obtained economic-industrial power, but the old feudal classes remained as the governing stratum of the political State, with wide corporate privileges in the army, the administration and on the land. Yet at least, if these old classes kept so much importance in Germany and enjoyed so many privileges, they exercised a national function, became the “intellectuals” of the bourgeoisie, with a particular temperament conferred by their caste origin and by tradition. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 484

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Concrete historical grounding for how a class can hold economic power while old elites keep state/governing power — useful for later modernization-and-nationalism arguments.

Related

• A failed bourgeois revolution stems from economic weakness and historical timing (similarity 0.80)
• Bourgeoisie rule can hide behind the facade of old aristocratic classes (similarity 0.79)
• German middle-class liberals abandoned working-class revolutionaries in 1848 (similarity 0.78)