INFORMATION BULLETIN

The rigid and antidemocratic policy imposed on Europe by the Holy Alliance after 1815 generated a wave of social, political and national movements during the next decades, in very different regions of the continent. In 1848, a series of simultaneous revolutions swept across Europe, moving from France towards the east, inflaming Germany, Italy, the Habsburg Empire, and the Romanian countries. In the fourth and fifth decades of the 19th century, the various revolutionary societies and organizations in Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania tried to find ways of solving the fundamental problems of the Romanian nation: independence, unity, and the modernization of Romanian society’s structure. Gradually, the conviction spread that revolution was the only path towards these goals. As intellectuals came and went across the Carpathians, public opinion became aware of the global problems of all Romanians, so that, in the spring of 1848, when revolution broke out in Paris and spread like wildfire towards the east, the Romanian elites were ideologically prepared to start * general movement of social and national liberation. Nicolae Bălcesu, historian and participant in the Revolution, explained this in a study in 1850. Thus, he wrote that “The 1848 Romanian Revolution was not an unregulated, ephemeral phenomenon with neither past nor future, with no other cause but the random will of a minority or the general European trend. The general revolution provided the opportunity, but was not the cause of the Romanian Revolution. Its causes are to be found in eighteen centuries of hardship, suffering, and internal Romanian turmoil.” Although the 1848-1849 Revolution was a manifestation of the whole of the Romanian nation, because of the specific circumstances in each province, it did not break out simultaneously, not did it know the same development or intensity in all of them.