Revolution!

The essential question of this unit was "Were the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 really failures as many historians have concluded?"  We did a project in groups where we each were responsible for one of the major revolutions and we had to research it using primary sources and determine whether it was a complete failure or not.

The revolution that my group had the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848.  In this revolution, the Prussian liberals forced King Frederick William IV to agree to a constitution, but a year later he dissolved it.  The reason he dissolved it is stated in "Between Myself and my People..."(1848) it says "the king made it clear that he had no intention of allowing his God-given rule to be diminished by a piece of paper, namely a piece of paper."  He refused to have a constitution because it limited his power as a monarch.  At the Frankfurt assembly, they offered King Frederick William IV the throne to a united Germany, however he declined it because the offer came from the German people and not the German kings, the nobility.  In his proclamation of 1849 he states, "I am not able to return a favorable reply to the offer of a crown on the part of the German National Assembly, because the Assembly has not the right, without the consent of the German governments, to bestow the crown which they tendered me." Eventually the assembly had to dissolve due to the threat of the Prussian Army which was one of the greatest at the time.  We made a survey monkey to show the class what the outcome of this revolution was.  http://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-NH3QX7KV

Here are some screenshots to show how well our classmates did:

The Frankfurt Assembly was a complete failure because not only did some people get killed in a fight, but also, many German citizens moved to America because of the young countries new promise.  The Decembrist Revolt was also a partial failure because the new king that came to power did not give the people what they wanted, so they revolted and finally got a new king that granted them a lot of the things they wanted.  However, a lot of social classes still did not get stuff they wanted so it was still a partial failure.  In the Hungarian revolution, people started protesting and Metternich tried to silence these protests, but more people joined so Metternich resigned, and fled.  The revolution spread throughout the empire and eventually the government had to give in to reforms, but this did not last because soon after, most of the rebels were then killed, imprisoned, or exiled and the empire was taken back.  So this was a complete failure as well.  In my opinion, the answer to the essential question is both yes and no, most of them were some type of failure, but seeing how some of the revolutions gained stuff from them, I wouldn't call all of them a failure.