Exceptions
Great Britain, the Netherlands, the Russian Empire (including Congress Poland), and the Ottoman Empire were the only major European states to go without a national revolution over this period. Sweden and Norway were little affected. Serbia, though formally unaffected by the revolt as it was a part of the Ottoman state, actively supported the Serbian revolution in the Habsburg Empire.
Russia's relative stability was attributed to the revolutionary groups' inability to communicate with each other. In the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, uprisings took place in 1830–31 (the November Uprising) and 1846 (the Kraków Uprising). A final revolt took place in 1863–65 (the January Uprising), but none occurred in 1848.
Switzerland and Portugal were also spared in 1848, though both had gone through civil wars in the preceding years (the Sonderbund War in Switzerland and the Liberal Wars in Portugal). The introduction of the Swiss Federal Constitution in 1848 was a revolution of sorts, laying the foundation of Swiss society as it is today. In the Netherlands, no major unrests appeared because the king, Willem II, decided to alter the constitution to reform elections and effectively reduce the power of the monarchy. While no major political upheavals occurred in the Ottoman Empire as such, political unrest did occur in some of its vassal states. In Serbia, feudalism was finally abolished in 1838, and power of the Serbian prince was reduced with the Turkish constitution.
Read more about this topic: Revolutions Of 1848
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“Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does not see, that, as he eats, so he thinks: as he deals, so he is, and so he appears; he does not see that his son is the son of his thoughts and of his actions; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits; that relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly,—but method, and an even web; and what comes out, that was put in.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools’ caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud—and it is here above all that exceptions prove the rule—that everything that exists in nature exists in art.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)