Revolutions - 7.32- The Bitter End

Episode Date: March 25, 2018

The bitter end of the Revolutions of 1848 arrived in the summer of 1849. Visit Audible! audible.com/revolutions Recs: The Storm Before the Storm (duh) and 30 Greatest Orchestral Workd

And welcome to Revolutions. Episode 7.32, The Bitter End. So, my friends, we come to the final episode of our series on 1848. But before we launch into the various last stands that were staged in the summer of 1849, I will begin today with some announcements concerning the Revolutions podcast and adjacent activities. First, after this episode airs, I will be taking a five-week hiatus to get ready for our next series, which will focus on the Paris Commune. That next series, though, will necessarily begin with a big round-up episode that will

review the seminal events of 1848, discussing what was supposed to happen, what really did happen, and what happened in the aftermath. So, please temper your expectations about this episode providing that grand summation. That grand summation will come, just not yet. Remember when the French Revolution retrospective took me a while to get released? This is a little like that. But looking a bit beyond that, for reasons I will get into after we're back from the hiatus, series eight of revolutions will run for just nine episodes.

Then I will take another five-week hiatus before returning for a prolonged plunge into the Mexican Revolution that will likely take us to the end of 2018. So that's going to be the schedule going forward. Five-week hiatus, then nine episodes, then another five-week hiatus. Then we will come back to get blasted full in the face by the winds that swept Mexico. But wait, there's more. Remember the other day when I said to keep your ears open about news of another fundraiser? Well, here comes that news.

Coinciding with my return on April the 29th and running concurrently with the Paris Commune episodes will be a new fundraiser, which means a new opportunity to support the show and get cool stuff. This new fundraiser will run like the previous too. There will be four T-shirts available. Two of them will be brand new additions to the lineup, but after talking to a lot of people online and during the book tour, I have also decided to re-release two classics, the Livya Did It shirt, and the Gentleman Johnny's Party Train shirt.

These will be released on different colored shirts, so if you have an original, it will still be a classic collector's item, but if you did not get the chance to pick up one of those two popular shirts at the time, now is your chance. Same great design, same great art, just a slightly different colored shirt. Those will be joined by two new additions to the T-shirt family that I will reveal when the fundraiser launches on April the 29th, 2018. And as if that wasn't exciting enough, I will also be dropping for the fundraiser a new set of History of Rome appendices. That's right, new History of Rome content is on the way. The first set of appendices, the one covering the ancient historians, will of course still be

available for purchase. If you haven't purchased that yet, you should. But these new episodes will cover the absolutely fascinating history of the Spanish Wars. Now, I'm doing the Spanish Wars for two big reasons. First, as with the episodes on the ancient historians, this comes from material that informed the storm before the storm and served as a backdrop for the first few chapters, but was just enough outside the scope of the book that I couldn't really fit it in. But the other big reason is that looking back over the history of Rome, I was pretty silent about events in Spain.

A few mentions here and there, but honestly, it's a pretty big hole in the show. And if I'm going to be doing appendices for the history of Rome, then it really ought to cover stuff that I regret not covering, and the Spanish wars for sure fit that bill. So in these episodes, we'll talk about the Roman arrival in Spain after the second Punic War, the conquest and organization of the two new Spanish provinces. by Cato the Elder, which is where the war feeds itself, quote, comes from. We'll talk about the peace brokered by the criminally underrated Tiberius Gronkis, the elder, that is the father of Tiberius and Gaius. We'll also be talking about how Roman conduct in Spain was in so many ways, the Romans at their absolute worst, unprovoked aggression, broken treaties, mass slaughter,

miserable legionaries, greedy commanders. It's not a pretty story. But it does lead to the rise of one of the greatest opponents Rome ever faced, Viriatus, who was basically a Spanish Hannibal, and who merited not even a mention in the history of Rome to my everlasting regret. So I've been dying to tell these stories for years, and I'm thrilled to finally have the opportunity. So, new History of Rome material in five weeks, get pumped. And as if that was not all exciting enough, we come now to another moment that I have been. been very much looking forward to, the announcement that thanks to the success of the storm before

the storm, I have now signed a contract for a second book. That is correct. My second book is now officially in the works, and there is only one book I wanted that second book to be. My friends, I am going to deliver unto you a book dedicated to one of the great boon companions of the Revolutions podcast. It's going to be a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette. It will be called simply citizen Lafayette. The thing about Lafayette is that despite the substantial role he played in not one, not two, but count them three great revolutions. There are not that many books about him. And those books that do exist, at least in English, either focus exclusively on his time in America, or if they do explore his role in the French Revolution, they pretty much act like his life

ended after he got tossed in an Austrian prison in 1792. Oh, sure, eventually he gets released and then comes back for like a nice retirement tour of America in the 1820s, but that's about it. Except we know that Lafayette was hip-deep in revolutionary politics after the restoration of the bourbons in 1815. Carbonari plots, army mutinies, seditious newspapers, Lafayette supported it all, both morally and financially. The trip to America was not a retirement tour. It was a brief vacation that preceded one of the most important periods of his life. So among the many things I hope to accomplish with this book, one of the big ones is rescuing that whole back half of Lafayette's life from the unjust obscurity into which it has fallen.

Now, if you're listening to this, you know that I've already told the big picture stories of the three revolutions he participated in, but Citizen Lafayette will give us an opportunity to go back through and re-explore those events through the eyes of just one man. A man who was in George Washington's tent, who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and who sealed the July monarchy with his Republican kiss, even if he did wind up regretting it. We will also get to explore in more detail his sometimes simplistic and sometimes complicated relationship with concepts like liberty and equality and fraternity, the concepts that define the age of democratic revolution, and which Lafayette self-consciously attempted to personify, sometimes courageously, sometimes foolishly, and more often than not both at the same time.

But whether he was being battered from the right or battered from the left, and both the right and the left beat the hell out of him, he never wavered. He never yielded, and he never abandoned his principles. As Samuel F. B. Morse said in his speech toasting Lafayette in Paris in 1832, Lafayette stood like a tower amid the waters. Now I'm going to have to do a ton of new research for Citizen Lafayette. It will require digging around in the dusty old archives. So unlike the new history,

of Rome episodes, which are going to come out in just five weeks, you'll be able to find Citizen Lafayette on the bookshelves in the spring of 2021. This will coincide, and this is going to be the last thing I say, I promise, before we get on with the show. But that will coincide with the conclusion of the revolutions podcast. Now, don't freak out. We're still talking about three more years here, but there is now an end date to the show. So in the spring of 2021, we'll all get together and have a big fond farewell celebration with the end of the podcast and the publication of Citizen Lafayette, and then I will move on to whatever my next big project is. What will that next project be? Hell, I don't know. I've still got three more years of revolutions to produce and a book about

the Marquis de Lafayette to write. And as I famously predicted back in 2009, podcasts probably still won't even be a thing after about 2012 or so. And so, as I said then, it doesn't pay to look too far into the future. Okay, so that is quite enough of all that. It is time now to get to the bitter end of the revolutions of 1848, which, as we've established, did not actually come until the summer of 1849. At the end of last week's penultimate episode, we left four major regions still holding out, an extinction burst of liberal, democratic, revolutionary energy. Those areas were in order of their final capitulations. Rome, the Grand Duchy of Baden, Hungary, and finally Venice. Today, we are going to kill them off in order one by one. But we do have to start with the last one first just to

catch them up. So we begin today in Venice, where the inhabitants were forced to watch helplessly as the great project of Risorgimento circled the drain all around them. Now Venice had been and continuously besieged by the Austrian Imperial Army all through the winter of 1848, 1849. But thanks to the threat posed by Piedmont in the West and God knows what was happening in the Kingdom of Hungary, Field Marshal Redetsky never committed to a full-blown attempt to capture Venice. The Venetians and their leader, Danielle Manin, hoped against hope that when King Charles Albert recommenced the war, which he surely must, it would give them the opportunity to break out. but on April 2nd, Venice was hit with the devastating news.

Charles Albert and the Piedmontese had been defeated by the Austrians at Novara. Piedmont was in full retreat. The king himself had abdicated the throne. Now personally, I can't imagine wanting to go on after this. The hopelessness must have been oppressive. But the ever-energetic and ever-resilient Venetians instead decided to rally. Menin himself refused to give up, and he gave public speeches rallying the flagging spirits of the population. Venice was isolated and without allies,

but the Austrians were going to have to spend a lot of blood and treasure if they wanted to crack Venice's network of fortresses. Blood and treasure, they might prefer not to waste, and so come to terms with Venice, on Venice's terms. So for the rest of April, the Venetians further reinforced their network of fortresses, most especially the great Fort Marghera, which stood on the mainland side of the lagoon, and would be the principal rock against which the Austrians would have to throw themselves if they wanted to crack Venice. And again, brief reminder that when I say the Austrians, I'm talking about the Austrian Imperial Army. The rank and file soldiers are mostly Croatian and Hungarians. But now free of the threat from Piedmont, Field Marshal Radetsky himself spent April reinforcing the siege lines around Venice.

he too knew that Fort Marghera would be the principal rock against which his men would have to throw themselves. So, first things first, he would blast that rock to smithereens. The Austrians were finally ready to begin their assault by the end of April, and on May the 4th, they began a sustained artillery bombardment of Fort Marghera that would continue for the next three weeks. As the Venetians endured this assault, they finally got some good news for a change. Hungarian envoys slipped through the naval blockade to talk about an alliance. As we saw last week, the Hungarian defeats in the winter campaign had given way to the Hungarian successes of the spring campaign.

These Hungarian envoys said that things were going so well that they were eyeing an attack on Trieste to take out the Austrian naval port. The Hungarian envoys promised money, supplies, and whatever else the Venetians wanted if they launched a simultaneous offensive to bog down, potential Austrian reinforcements in Venetia. Thankful to have anyone on the outside offering them assistance, Danielle Manin readily agreed to an alliance with the Hungarians on May the 20th. Now, given that Venice is presently enduring a sustained artillery barrage, it's tough to imagine what the Venetians would have been able to do, really, especially when, just a few days later, Fort Marghera fell.

After three weeks of sustained assault that saw something like 60,000 cannonballs and rockets fired at fort, that's 60,000, it was now little more than a pile of barely defensible rubble. A third of the defenders had been killed, and the Austrian siege trenches had been built practically up to the base of the walls. The final attack came on May the 25th, when fully 15,000 of those 60,000 projectiles were launched in one day, recognizing that they could not hold the fort any longer, the Venetians withdrew, blowing up all bridges behind them as they fled back to the city. But even though they were now confined to the island itself, the Venetians still refused to give up. Redetsky was going to have to do better than just take Fort Marghera.

And so Redetsky had to spend all of June resting his troops and placing new artillery batteries to rain destruction down on the city of Venice proper. The Venetians, meanwhile, battened down the hatches. So that means that things went temporarily quiet in Venice in June of 1840. which is pretty perfect timing for us, because it coincides with the resumption of hostilities around Rome. Now, when we last left the Romans, the invading Gauls had landed 6,000 warriors and made one ill-advised attempt to capture the city, but they were now reinforced to the tune of 30,000, and the invading Gallic tribe was poised for a second attempt to capture the Eternal

City. Okay, I'm not going to beat that into the ground, but the Romans were up against it, because in addition to the invading French army, a Neapolitan army of about 10,000 men, now freed from having to worry about Sicily, invaded the papal states in early May. Garibaldi, now one of Rome's leading generals, sallied forth to drive the Neapolitans away, and he did a pretty dang good job of it, beating the Neapolitans at the Battle of Palestrina on May the 9th, and then at the Battle of Velletri on May the 19th. This second defeat sent the Neapolitan army running back across the border, and Garibaldi was about to chase them all the way back to Naples,

but he was recalled because of the much greater threat posed by the French army, who now seemed ready to launch their second bid at conquering, I mean defending, Rome. By the 1st of June, the French army numbered 30,000, and they carried plenty of siege equipment and heavy guns, which they started rolling slowly towards Rome. The Romans, meanwhile, were only able to concentrate about 19,000 fighters, and though they had many officers, Garibaldi was obviously their best, most tenacious, and most inspiring general. The French began their assault on Rome on June 3, 1849, launching a hugely important strike at the crest of the Janiculum Hill, which sits on the west side of the tiber and overlooked the heavily fortified Porta San Pancaccio.

If the French took that position, they would be able to place their artillery and bombard the gate and the city into submission. The Romans fought all day and all night, but by the morning of June the 4th, they were forced to retreat. And though the Romans fought on valiantly after that, Garibaldi later agreed that it was June the 3rd that marked the day Rome fell. After that, it was just a matter of time. But it still did take some time. As they put their artillery in place, the French infantry dug siege lines up to the Portisand-Pencrasio, and it wasn't until the night of June the 21st that they were were. ready to storm the gate. This attack drove the Romans back again, but Garibaldi and his fighters

refused to yield more than a couple hundred yards. Refusing to just run away, they pulled back to a reinforced palace called the Via Spada, which is like a one-minute walk from the Porta Sen pancratio. There they withstood constant bombardment and firing for another full week, and it wasn't until the night of June the 29th that the French were in a position to launch one last full-blown assault. The Romans were forced to retreat again, but they could take some grim satisfaction in having forced the French to take an entire month to move about 500 yards. So even though looking back at things, Garibaldi pinpointed June the 3rd as the big day, it was really June the 29th that spelled the end of the revolution in Rome. Both Matzini and Garibaldi argued that

the Romans should keep fighting. But the rest of the Assembly of the Damned, the men who were actually Roman citizens rather than dedicated Republican revolutionaries decided it was high time to raise the white flag. On June the 30th, they voted to end the Matzini-led executive triumvirate, symbolically ratify a new constitution for the Republic of Rome, and then surrender to the French. And despite the major ringer they had just been put through in their attempt to conquer, I mean defend, Rome, the French were ready to be lenient in victory. For them, the capture of Rome was more about larger geopolitics than bitter enmity. It was, at its core, a power move by Prince President Bonaparte, to block the Austrians from getting credit for putting the Pope back in Rome,

and maybe also preserve some of the liberal gains the Romans had been granted. So Matzini was allowed to hang around town for a week tying up loose ends before receiving permission to depart on a ship bound from Marseilles. And from there, he headed back to exile in Switzerland. Garibaldi, meanwhile, led 3,000 dedicated fighters out of Rome up into the Apennines with a plan to make for Venice, but the dedication of these 3,000 holdouts did not last for very long. By the time Garibaldi got to the Adriatic coast, only about 200 remained. This small crew commandeered a ship, which they pointed at Venice, but they were spotted by the Austrian Navy, forced to land and go hide in the forest.

While in hiding, Garibaldi and the cause of Risorgimento was dealt a cruel blow. his pregnant wife Anita, who had fought by his side since they had first met all the way back in South America, succumbed to a fever, and she died. Forced to leave his beloved behind, Garibaldi made his way through Tuscany to Genoa. There he was arrested and temporarily detained by the authorities until he too was allowed to leave for exile. He spent the next ten years abroad, much of it in New York City, where he nursed the still-not-dead dream of one day completing the great purpose. project was the liberation and unification of Italy. With the hardline Republicans out of Rome, the French declared papal rule back in effect, giving authority to what the Romans later dubbed the Red Triumvirate, three conservative cardinals sent by the Pope to take power. But they were

not called the Red Triumvirate just because of the red robes they wore, because unlike the more lenient attitude of the French themselves, or say, Field Marshal Radetsky, whose position was usually everyone gets amnesty except for a few exceptions. The Red Triumvirate wanted amnesty for no one except a few exceptions. So while it was Metzini, who was so often painted as an Italian robespierre, it was the Red Triumvirate, who literally brought out the guillotine, a real guillotine, and then went out hunting for men and women to cram into it. But the Romans refused to rat each other out,

and the Red Terror never really got going the way that the Cardinals had planned. Meanwhile, in correspondence with the Pope, Prince President Bonaparte tried to convince Pius to keep some of the liberal reforms that had been enacted in 1848, but by now the Pope was just super duper pissed. He refused. He refused to even return to his rebellious capital until the spring of 1850. And from now on, he's going to be an avowed opponent of liberalism and nationalism and liberation and unification and resurgimento.

Indeed, the next next day. time Rome finds itself besieged, it would not be the last stand of revolutionaries, but the last stand of the Pope's stubborn absolutism. But that would be 22 years in the future. For now, the revolution of 1848 in Rome is over. With Rome off the board, that leaves three last stands to go. And the next last stand followed just a few weeks later up in Germany. Now, last week, we took a vote.

events in Germany through the May rebellions in the Prussian Rhineland, the Bavarian palatinate, and the Grand Duchy of Baden, rebellions that coincided with the disintegration of the Frankfurt Parliament. But though the Frankfurt Parliament was mostly disintegrated, the hundred or so delegates that refused to quit departed Frankfurt for the relative safety of Stuttgart, which I must apologize for the slip of the tongue at the end of last week's episode when I said that Stuttgart was in Baden. It was not. It was next door in the kingdom of Wittenberg. Sorry about that.

The king of Wurtenberg would have very much preferred these refugee radicals go to Baden, especially because Stuttgart was one of those cities with a high concentration of support for the Frankfurt Parliament. The members of this Rump Parliament were cheered upon entering the city, and the liberal government of Wurtenberg made public that even if no one else was going to accept the Frankfurt Constitution, that they were going to accept the Frankfurt Constitution. So, like the Grand Duke of Baden, the king of Wurtenberg said, Screw this, I'm out of here, and he departed the city in a hoff, signaling that if the Prussians wanted to, you know, make good on their promise of military intervention,

he was all good with that. And King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia was very serious about making good on his promise. With the Prussian Rhineland having gone down mostly without a fight in May, the Prussian army marched south into the Bavarian palatinate on June the 12th. It was then strongly hinted to the liberal government in Wurtenberg that they would be next if they continued to shelter the rump of the Frankfurt Parliament. So on June the 17th, the government ordered units of their infantry and cavalry to lock down Stuttgart to prevent any further meeting of the parliament no matter how small, even blocking access to private locations that the remaining delegates might even informally use. And that, my friends, is that.

The Frankfurt Parliament, which had convened with such high hopes and broad claims to being the moral and political voice of Germany, was now dead. Like a sand castle that had been blown apart by the wind, the final grains of sand separated and flew off in to the dustbin of history. The last stand of the German Revolution, though, was in Baden. This was now the third armed rebellion that had rocked the Grand Duchy in the last year, though this one was driven not by race, at the Frankfurt Parliament's weak-willed liberalism, but rather rage at the King of Prussia's crushing absolutism. Since the King of Prussia had refused the crown from the gutter, and the Grand Duke had subsequently fled, the radicals and Democrats in Baden had been furiously organizing, forming a Republican provisional government and inducting volunteers into a defensive militia.

Reinforced by outsiders looking for a safe haven and joining with rebels in the Bavarian palatinate, they swelled an army up to 20,000 men. In early June, this growing army was put under the command of, you guessed it, Ludvick Miroslowski. Fresh off his defeat in Sicily, and a little less fresh off his defeat in Poland, this non-stop revolutionary general was given command of the palatinate-bodan forces. Now, I never really see Miroslowski criticized for being a bad general as a way of explaining his constant defeat. mostly it's just that he kept being dealt really bad hands. And this was no different, because even 20,000 new recruits aren't going to match up against the cream of the Prussian army.

And they weren't even going to have very much time to train either. The rebels that had seized control of the Bavarian palatinate in May made a nice show of resistance to the Prussian army, but come on, it's the Prussian army. So those who wanted to keep up the fight retreated to Mannheim on the Rhine River, and after failing to hold Mannheim, they ditched across the river. On June the 20th, the Prussians followed. The next day, June the 21st, 1849, the Prussians were met by Miroslowski and his roughly 20,000-man army at Vaghuisel. And, as you might have seen coming, since this is our last episode of the series on 1848, the Prussians blew these baden forces to pieces, sent them running in all directions. Now, despite this pretty major defeat, men like Gustav Straub, said,

we need to keep fighting. But by now, most everyone was giving up or fleeing into exile. Only about five or six thousand were left defending the fortress in Rostadt, though these guys were not very happy about their situation. They had been waiting for the news that Mirosowski's army would soon be on the way to shore up their numbers and instead got word that he had no army left. In the first week of July, the Prussians identified Ristadt as the last remaining outpost at the Revolution of 1848, and they moved in for the final kill. After being surrounded for three weeks, and with utterly no hope of relief, I mean none, the guardians of Rostadt elected to surrender. In the chaos of that surrender, many made good

their own individual escapes, but the rest became prisoners of war. Any Prussian citizen that was detected by the Prussian army was executed on site, and as for the rest, the rather harsh Prussian general brought back decimation, literal decimation. He hauled up one out of every 10 prisoners and had them summarily shot. The third and final insurrection in Baden was over. The revolution of 1848 in Baden was over. The revolution of 1848 in Germany was over. When the unification of Germany was finally achieved, it was not through the fancy speeches of liberal Democrats. It was through the blood and iron of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. So two down, two to go.

And we turn our attention now to the Kingdom of Hungary, where blood and iron was about to bring Hungary back into the Austrian Empire. And not just any blood and iron, Russian blood and iron. The spring of 1848 had gone very well for the Hungarians. They had pushed the Austrians all the way back to the western fringes of the kingdom, and they began a siege to take back the castle of the castle of the war. Budapest and liberate their capital for good. Meanwhile, over in Transylvania, the uprising of Romanians, which had begun back in October,

was pushed back by a Polish general now serving in the Hungarian army. His name was Joseph Bem. Bem is another one of those roving Polish revolutionary generals like Miroslowski. He had been among the leaders of the resistance during the final siege of Vienna, and he had slipped out of the Austrian capital just ahead of the final capitulation of the city. presenting himself to Lyosh Koshut, he was put in charge of Hanved battalions in Transylvania and proceeded to roll the Romanians back. By the spring, Transylvania was mostly controlled by the Majar again,

though something like 50,000 Romanian guerrillas made the region a source of permanent strife and forced Kosciut to keep a lot of troops tied down in Transylvania. Meanwhile, the rest of the Hungarian Revolutionary Army was tied down in Budapest. Having made the decision to lay siege to the castle in Budapest, it took them fully two and a half weeks of constant bombardment before General Gorgay was able to blow a hole in the side of the wall on the night of May the 20th and lead a final bloody assault. Neither side offered quarter,

and something like a thousand imperial Austrian soldiers were killed. But though Budapest was retaken, the Hungarian army was now exhausted. They expended a lot of their scarce munitions, and they could not immediately carry on the war against the Austrians. But Koshuth and the Hungarian parliament were thrilled. They were finally able to depart the backwater little town of Debrison, and they planned to reconvene in the Grand Capital of Budapest on July the 2nd. But that was high tide in the Hungarian War of Independence,

because with the Austrian army getting rolled back, Austrian Prime Minister Schwarzenberg decided that it was better to ask for help then stubbornly refused to ask for help. So after securing an agreement from the Russian Tsar through back channels, young Emperor Franz Josef traveled to Warsaw, and there he met the Tsar on May the 21st, asking in person for the Russians to invade Hungary. Now, Russian motives for getting into this is complicated.

They were rivals with the Austrians, sure, but also brothers in absolutism. But most especially, A strong Hungary meant a weak Austria, and a weak Austria meant a strong Prussia. And a strong Prussia was big trouble for Russia. So the Tsar promised more than 200,000 troops to help the emperor crush his disobedient Hungarian subjects. Combined, the Austrian and Russians now commanded 375,000 men.

And whatever the details of the details I'm about to give you, that's pretty much the ballgame. To make sure the Austrians held up their end of the fight, the emperor also a appointed a new supreme commander of his forces in Hungary. Julius Jacob von Hainau. Hainau was the polar opposite of Radetsky, and frankly, he made Vindschrots look like an old softy. A reputation for almost gleeful cruelty preceded Haino from a command in Italy, where he had celebrated a victory by flogging civilians.

With this sadistic hand, now in charge of the Austrians, Haino did not even wait for the Russians to cross the border before ordering a new offensive in mid-June. Against the combined strength of the Austrians and Russians, their numbers now close to 400,000, the Hungarian army could muster no more than 170,000, and their levion mass no longer looked so formidable. Beset on two sides, with the Austrians approaching from the west and the Russians from the east, General Gargay led the forces under his immediate command down south, but he still had independent armies in Transylvania and Central Hungary that remained separated from the rest.

With the Austrians frast approaching and Gorgay heading south, Lyoskut and the recently reconvened Parliament had to abandon Budapesth again on July the 8th. The Austrians retook the capital on July the 13th. This is partly why historians pointed the decision to get bogged down taking the Budapest Cashel a mistake. They wound up giving it back six weeks later. Having fled from Budapest, the final session of the Hungarian parliament convened in a tiny, random city from July the 21st to July the 28th. In this final session, it belatedly dawned on them that maybe they had made a huge mistake alienating the minority nationalities of the Kingdom of Hungary. So trying to rally everyone now to see the Austrians and Russians as a common enemy, the parliament proclaimed all kinds of things, they said, recognition of national rights and language and culture.

and dignity if the Croats and the Serbs and the Romanians and the Jews if you all join us in a great patriotic resistance. But seriously, it's a little late for that, guys. That ship sailed like a year ago. It was frankly fantasy land nonsense to think that after getting treated with an awfully high hand during peacetime and an awfully brutal hand during the fighting of the last nine months, that these minority nationalities would just switch sides. And that's to say nothing of the fact that they would have been agreeing to switch to the losing side. I mean, the Austrians and Russians are about to win. Needless to say, this last-ditch effort to form an international revolutionary coalition went exactly nowhere. And speaking of fantasy land nonsense, General Gerge was

still holding out hope that this would all end with a settlement on the basis of the April laws. But my man, that ship has sailed too. He opened a line to the Russians to try to get them to support this initiative, but after no doubt laughing hysterically, they sent back a note that said, A unconditional surrender, those are the terms. After a few more defeats for the Hungarians, the last staggering blow came at Timisora, where, on August 9, 1849, about 50,000 Hungarians led by Joseph Bem,

were finally caught by about 90,000 Austrians under Hainau. The Hungarians fought for their lives all day, but the weight of the numbers and a few bad breaks were too much for them to overcome. This defeat at Timisora snuffed out any last lingering hope of salvaging an independent Hungary. Lyoshkochut got the news on August the 11th, and he did what any right-thinking revolutionary facing inevitable execution would do.

He resigned his position, he shaved off all his trademark facial hair, and fled the country. First he headed for Constantinople, and then eventually to the United States. General Gerge was vested with all military authority, but that military authority was only there for him to choose who to surrender to. He determined that the best way to save himself, his men, and his officers, would be to surrender not to the sadistic high now, but to the far more temperate Russians, who were not here to extract bitter reprisals, just to restore order in Central Europe. On August the 13th, 1849, General Artur Gerge surrendered to the Russian army at Villagos.

The revolution of 1848 in Hungary was over. So we now turn to the last of our last stands, the last of the 1849 holdouts, Venice. As you may have gathered by now, the alliance with the Hungarians that Danielle Manin had so readily agreed to at the end of May didn't much bear any fruit, what with the Hungarians being conquered and all. After the Austrians took Fort Marghera, Radetsky tried to induce a surrender, and Manin said, sure, we'll stop fighting, but we will. We will. want autonomous rule inside the empire. Redetsky scoffed at this and said, well, how about this? I offer everyone inside the city amnesty and won't stand in the way of anyone who wants to go in exile.

Nothing more. So that's a pretty big gap in the negotiations, and the siege of Venice continued. And while the siege continued, the Austrians were placing artillery for a massive barrage of Venice. And so at the beginning of July, the cannons started firing. But the thing is, remember, Venice is an island and kind of a ways out there. Not that it made it hard to hit, but the distance the projectiles had to travel reduced their destructive impact. Many cannonballs didn't explode at all upon impact, and it was a lot of cold rocks just landing on buildings. It wasn't pleasant. People died and there was a lot of property damage. but the Venetians decided it was surprisingly bearable, even a little bit novel, as the Austrians

attempted to surmount the distance with what I believe was the first air raid in military history. They use balloons to sail over the city and drop bombs. As you know, I hate mentioning historical first because there's always something out there, but balloons dropping bombs on a city seems like the first time in modern warfare that an air raid was used, though I do look forward to the email from somebody out there who's a little bit of a city. going to tell me that like Genghis Khan did it or something. So the Venetians were never broken by the military assault. It was the conditions inside the city that finally took them down, as is so often the case with sieges. The Venetians mostly evacuated the west end of the city, and they

crammed together in close quarters, and a cholera epidemic set in. On top of that, the food supplies were now running dangerously low, and a general riot was becoming a real possibility as the disease and the hunger set in. Danielle Manin calculated that they would run out of food by the end of August. Now, the next step for those enduring sieges after the food has run out is turning to, like, eating leather and dirt and drinking diseased water. And Manin decided there was no point in letting it get to that. So at the beginning of August, he asked the Venetian Assembly for permission to negotiate

with the Austrians. The next few weeks were spent going back and forth between the two sides, and despite the Venetians choosing to hold out, which is the United States, which is the usually grounds for a good sacking and pillaging, Radetsky again promised generous leniency. He wanted this over. He wanted Venice back in the empire. He wasn't going to decimate anybody or roll out the guillotine. So the final terms were pretty simple. Venice surrenders. Everyone gets amnesty, except for about 40 specifically identified leaders, including, of course, Menin and General Pepe and men of that rank. And for them, it wouldn't even be death. It would only be exile.

Whatever fight was left went out of the leaders in Venice when they heard that the Hungarians had themselves been defeated and surrendered. So, Manine boarded a ship provided by the French resident consul, and he sailed for exile. The city leaders of Venice signed an agreement on August the 22nd, and they raised the white flag. On August the 27th, 1849, the Austrian army entered Venice. The revolution of 1848 in Venice was over. The revolution of 1848 in Italy, who had been in Germany, who had been in Germany, who had been in. over. The revolution of 1848 was over. So that's it. The bitter end. All the hope and idealism of the spring of 1848 crushed by the steamroller of counter-revolutionary absolutism.

And it was, in the end, a failed revolution. They are the failed revolutions of 1848. For as much hope as they began with, bitterness turned out in the end to be their greater legacy. The Italians and the Germans who gave up on Europe and fled for America. The frightened liberals in France who ultimately reembrace the order promised by an empire, rather than try to make good the open liberty of a democratic republic. The Hungarian hatred engendered by Austrian reprisals after their reintegration into the empire. The leftists and socialists, radicals and anarchists who carried the memory of 1848 as a memory of their betrayal by the liberals, and it marked the beginning of a near permanent breach

as the forces of social revolution divorce themselves from the forces of political revolution in the decades to come. Their brief alliance on the barricades of March 1848 was for them a cruel joke, rather than the foundation of future solidarity. But we'll talk all about this when I return in five weeks, as we turn our attention to the collapse of the Second French Empire,

the rise of a new German empire, the resulting Franco-Prussian war, the grueling siege of Paris, and the declaration of a revolutionary Paris commune. I will see you all back here on April the 29th for all of that, plus new episodes of the history of Rome, and in the meantime, clock's ticking. I better get to work on this book about Lafayette.