Failure is a Matter of Opinion

Our failure scale

As students, we don’t exactly know how to measure failure. We have so much time left in our lives that any “failure” made now can be fixed by the time the books of our lives are sealed shut. Only when looked back on things can we decided whether or not they should be deemed a failure. In class, we inspected the way many historians have judged the revolts of the mid 1800s by posing this question: were the revolutions of 1830 and 1948 really failures as many historians have concluded? To start off the week, we created a scale that defined the outcomes of revolutions ranging from a complete failure to a complete success. SurveyMonkey to create a quiz about our revolution for our class to take. We then worked in groups of 4-5 to research specific revolts during this time. We read an online document about our assigned revolution, answered some guiding questions, and used

As you can see from our results on our
 SurveyMonkey questions, we recieved a
 variety of different answers.

I had the pleasure of working with the Decembrist group. The Decembrist Revolt  took place throughout December 1825 in Russia. People were unhappy with Tsar Alexander I’s ruling tactics and planned to overthrow him.

Some questions, such as this one, required
students to pay more attention to things other
than just the writing in the source. (The
answer to this question was in the title).

They wanted to replace him with his older brother Constantine, despite Constantine’s blatant statement that he did not want to be in power. After the Tsar’s unexpected death, Nicholas took to the throne. The rebels revolted in hopes of developing a weaker monarchy, abolishing slavery and abuse of power. Dmitry Zavalishin, a Decembrist, writes about the 1793 constitution granted to Poland and says, “Russians were offended at the granting of a constitution to defeated and conquered Poland before one was given to Russia, which vanquished it.” If Poland, who had been defeated by Russia, could handle the implementation of a constitution, then Russia, their superiors, should be able to too. Nicholas ended up firing on his own people to defeat the rebels. He shut down any contact outside of the country and took away religious freedom as well as all other rights. Nicholas explains his reaction to the revolt by saying, “The laws demand retribution and, in their cases, I will not use my power to grant mercy. I will be unbending; it is my duty to give this lesson to Russia and to Europe.” Nicholas was too stuck in his conservatism mindset to see past the threat of the revolution and look into its meaning. He didn’t even consider implementing changes to the way he ruled, he only thought to prevent any future revolutions.

Like the Decembrist Revolt, many other revolutions during this time were not successes. The French Revolution of 1848 lived a short success: the bourgeoisie prospering for a short time until Napoleon eventually brought down his empire and ended France’s leadership in Europe. The Frankfurt Assembly concluded with hundreds of people killed and thousands of Germans leaving their homeland. The Hungary revolt led to the imprisonment, execution, and exile of many. These revolts were all in favor of liberalism, the people wanted more rights and a weaker monarchy. Historians are right to consider these revolutions to be a failure, seeing as they led to the death of thousands of people. But despite that, they succeeded in spreading liberalist ideas throughout Europe. These revolutions helped created the world we live in today. The immediate outcome of these revolts wasn’t a success, and because of the massive number of deaths they caused I can’t imagine they’d ever be considered one, but because they succeeded in spreading a message, I think it’s fair to put them fairly close to neutral on the grand scale of failure.