Revolutions of 1840-1848

During class this week we learned about the Revolutions of 1840-1848. The activity we did to help us learn in a fun and effective way was that the class was split up five groups and each group was assigned a revolt. Each group made a Survey Monkey about their assigned revolution. A Survey Monkey is a way to make an online 10-12 question test. Once all the surveys were done the class took all of each others survey after reading about the revolts. after all the people had submitted their answers we looked over the correct answers and saw the percentages of the answers that people chose. We mostly focused on the last question of each survey, “Would you rate this revolution on a scale from a success, minor success, neutral, minor failure, to complete failure?" the question at the end was there to help us answer the essential question which was, “Would you rate this revolution as a success, minor success, neutral, minor failure, or complete failure?"

My group was assigned to the Hungarian Revolution. The Hungarian Revolution was in 1848, in Hungary, Austria, and the Czech Republic. The revolution began in Austria. Metternich fled right when the revolution started. Louis Kossuth led the Hungarian Nationalist Movement. This movement was about them wanting an independent government, end to serfdom, and a they wanted a written constitution. It wasn't just the Austrians that felt this way. The Czech people  wanted similar things that the Hungarian nationalists in Prague did. The Austrians were in over their heads so they agreed to the reforms. But then the Austrians and the Russians teamed up and put the rebels that were in Budapest in jail, exiled them, and even executed them. Kossuth fled. We used a lot of these facts and others from the other information provided to create our survey monkey. This is a link to our survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TDY99M2

We said that our revolution was neutral. It didn’t really make anything better or worse it just happened and nothing came from it. Some of the other groups had slightly more successful revolutions, but there were no real successes. For example, The French revolution was a partial success. First of all the biggest reason why it was not a great success was because their President Louis Napoleon I was an awful leader. The people of France made a great decision by letting all adult men vote and that they elected Louis Phillipe to be the new leader. “It created a strong president and a one-house legislature.” (French Revolution of 1848 document) There were even some revolutions that were more of a failure, like the Decembrist Revolt. This was a complete and utter failure, many people were killed in very harsh and cruel ways. The people that were killed were mostly the leaders and instigators of the conspiracy. All this revolution did was cause a commotion and all of Russia was taught a lesson because of it. Even though most of the revolutions weren’t complete successes there was more revolutions that ended in a neutral or positive way than there was negative outcomes. So all in all the revolutions of 1840-1848 were more neutral and successful than they were failures.