The European Revolutions and Revolutionary Waves of the 19th Century: Their Causes and Consequences

The nineteenth century was the century of industrialization, modernization, demographic explosion, new means of transportation and communication as well as of great transformations in other spheres. It was the century of grandiose changes that the world had never seen before: growing literacy, rapid urbanization, changes in political institutions, the rise of national identity, the rise of culture, fantastic discoveries in science, and a powerful change of lifestyles. Such tremendous transformations naturally led to drastic social changes. It is not surprising then that the nineteenth century also became the age of revolutions. Leonid Grinin in this chapter shows the main changes occurring in the nineteenth century and the way they influenced revolutionary movements. Powerful waves of revolutions were observed in the nineteenth century. Grinin discusses the theoretical issues connected with the notion of ‘a wave of revolution’ and how to distinguish it. In this chapter he formulates the criteria and conditions for a revolutionary wave and then describes three such waves in Europe (and another wave of revolutions in Spanish Latin America which was generated by the first Spanish revolution of 1808–1812). The first wave of European revolutions can be dated to the 1820s. The second wave of revolutions occurred in 1830–1831. The subsequent—third—overwhelming wave of revolutions started in 1848. It is very characteristic that in the second half of the nineteenth century we do not observe revolutionary waves (they will come to the fore again only in the twentieth century). Grinin explains this fact as well. In the chapter he also characterizes revolutions which were beyond the waves and presents characteristics of various types of revolutions.