In their combination of intensity and geographical extent, the 1848 revolutions were unique—at least in European history. Neither the great French Revolution of 1789, nor the July Revolution of 1830, nor the Paris Commune of 1870, nor the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 sparked a comparable transcontinental cascade. 1989 looks like a better comparator, but there is still controversy as to whether these uprisings can be characterized as “revolutions.” In 1848, by contrast, parallel political tumults broke out across the entire continent, from Switzerland and Portugal to Wallachia and Moldavia, from Norway, Denmark and Sweden to Palermo and the Ionian Islands. This was the only truly European revolution that there has ever been.
But it was also in some respects a global upheaval, or at least a European upheaval with a global dimension. The news of revolution in Paris had a profound impact on the French Caribbean, and the measures adopted by London to avoid revolution on the British mainland triggered protests and uprisings across the British imperial periphery. In the young nations of Latin America, too, the European revolutions galvanized liberal and radical political elites. Even in far-off Australia, the February Revolution created political waves—though it was not until June 19, 1848 that the news of the February events reached Sydney in the Colony of New South Wales—a reminder of what the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey once mournfully described as “the tyranny of distance.”
The revolutions involved a vast panorama of charismatic and gifted actors, from Giuseppe Garibaldi to Marie d’Agoult, author (under a male pseudonym) of the best contemporary history of the revolutions in France, from the French socialist Louis Blanc to the leader of the Hungarian national movement, Lajos Kossuth; from the brilliant conservative liberal social theorist, historian and politician Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville to the Wallachian soldier, journalist and agrarian radical Nicolae Bălcescu. From the young patriot poet Sándor Petőfi, whose recitation of a new national song for the Hungarians electrified the revolutionary crowds in Budapest, to the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, whose ultimately unsuccessful struggle to reconcile his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from the writer George Sand, who composed “revolutionary bulletins” for the Provisional Government in Paris, to the Roman popular tribune Angelo Brunetti, known affectionately as Ciceruacchio, or “Chubby,” a true man of the people, who did much to shape the unfolding of the Roman revolution of 1848–9. Not to mention the countless women who sold broadsheets and newspapers in the streets of the European cities or fought at the barricades (they are very prominent in the visual depiction of these revolutions). For politically sentient Europeans, 1848 was an all-encompassing moment of shared experience. It turned everyone into contemporaries, branding them with memories that would last as long as life itself.
These revolutions were experienced as European upheavals—the evidence for this is superabundant; but they were nationalized in retrospect. The historians and memory managers of the European nations absorbed them into specific national stories. The supposed failure of the German revolutions was sucked into the national narrative known as the Sonderweg, or “special path,” where it helped to power a thesis about Germany’s aberrant road into modernity, a road that culminated in the disaster of the Hitler dictatorship. Something similar happened in Italy, where the failure of revolution in 1848 was seen as pre-programming an authoritarian drift into the new Italian kingdom and thereby paving the road to the March on Rome in 1922 and the fascist seizure of power that followed. In France, the failure of 1848 was seen as ushering in the Bonapartist interlude of the Second Empire, which in turn anticipated the future triumph of Gaullism. In other words, focusing on the supposed failure of 1848 also had the consequence of allowing these stories to be channelled into a plurality of parallel, nation-state-focused narratives. Nothing demonstrates better than these connected upheavals and their fragmentation in modern memory the immense power of the nation-state as a way of framing the historical record—we are still feeling that power today.
There were three phases to the events of 1848. In February and March, upheaval spread like a brush fire across the continent, leaping from city to city and starting numerous spot-fires in towns and villages in-between. The Austrian Chancellor, Metternich, fled from Vienna, the Prussian army was withdrawn from Berlin, the kings of Piedmont–Sardinia, Denmark and Naples issued constitutions—it all seemed so easy. This was the Tahrir Square moment: one could be forgiven for thinking that the movement encompassed the entirety of society; the euphoria of unanimity was intoxicating; “I had to go out into the winter cold and walk and walk until I had worn myself out,” one German radical wrote, “just to calm my blood and slow down the beating of my heart, which was in a state of unprecedented and baffled agitation and felt as if it were about to blow a hole in my chest.” In Milan, complete strangers embraced each other in the streets. These were the spring days of 1848.
Yet the divisions within the upheaval (already latent in the first hours of conflict) soon became glaringly apparent: by May, radical demonstrators were attempting to storm and overthrow the National Assembly created by the February Revolution in Paris, while, in Vienna, Austrian democrats protested at the slowness of liberal reforms and established a Committee of Public Safety. In June, there were violent clashes between the liberal (or in France republican) leaderships and radical crowds on the streets of the larger cities. In Paris, this culminated in the brutality and bloodshed of the “June Days,” which killed at least 3,000 insurgents. This was the long hot summer of 1848, gleefully diagnosed by Marx as the moment at which the revolution lost its innocence and the sweet (but deceptive) unanimity of spring made way for the bitter struggle between classes.
Excerpted from Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark. 2023.
1848:
Europe’s Year of Revolt and Revolution. By Christopher Clark. LitHub, November
15, 2023.
Russia
has returned to its pre-20th century role, tension between Greece and Turkey is
heightened and the revolutions of 1848 feel less distant
Viewed on a timeline, the events and the people of history seem to grow ever more distant as the past slips away from a “modern” world that is constantly being made anew. For us, it is axiomatic that “this time it’s different”, because we are always covering new ground, always leaving the past further behind us.
But the truth is that we have a non-linear relationship with the past, both with our own personal stories and with history more generally. There are moments when a history that had seemed finished and packed away suddenly moves into our vicinity, grabs us by the shoulders and starts to speak to us. Right now, this is happening with the 19th century.
Take the “Eastern Question”. This central preoccupation of 19th-century European diplomacy bundled together problems arising from the enfeeblement of the Ottoman empire, the issue of access to the waterways linking the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, imperial rivalries in north Africa, Syria and Mesopotamia and the struggle to secure control over the land and sea routes linking the great powers with their global empires.
In the course of the 20th century, the Eastern Question receded from view. The Ottoman empire was no more, Turkey was admitted to Nato, and in the light of the bipolar stability of the cold war, the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean no longer seemed of such pressing importance. There was no shortage of conflict in the region, but it unfolded within the framework imposed by the standoff between the two nuclear superpowers. In recent years, the Eastern Question (or at least the bundle of issues that were once known under that rubric) has acquired a new salience.
We see it in the heightened geopolitical tension between Greece and Turkey, the squabbling between Egypt, Turkey and other players over the future of Libya, the disastrous effects of intervention in Syria, the conflict over grain exports from the Black Sea ports, and the consciously neo-Ottoman language and gestures of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president.
Our epoch is marked – this is hardly a new observation – by the return of a genuine multipolarity, such as we have not known since 1945. This multipolarity has many dimensions. New regional powers have emerged, determined to shape events in their own spheres – Turkey and Iran are two of the most important examples. The transition from Deng Xiaoping’s policy of restraint under the maxim: “hide your power and always be patient” to the confident demeanour of today’s China is another facet of the new multipolarity. The tension between the US and Russia remains, but it no longer has the power to stabilise the system as a whole. This multipolarity is unsettling for us; for the people of the 19th century, it was all they knew.
There are other commonalities. In the 20th century (or for most of it at least), Russia represented a radical alternative to western-style liberal democracy, a power driven by a philosophy of historical change whose attraction for people on the political left worldwide was never entirely extinguished. In today’s world, Russia has returned to its 19th-century role as the reactionary negation of western “liberalism”. To be sure, the special status of Russia and the US as custodians of the world’s largest strategic nuclear arsenals persists, as a legacy of the cold war. But the current war in Ukraine has less to do with the binary ideological oppositions of the 20th century than with a deeper history of wars and annexations along the Russian imperial periphery, a history that extends through and beyond the 19th century.
I have spent the past few years writing a book about the 1848 revolutions – a cascade of political tumults that extended across the European continent – and here too I have been struck by the many resonances with our own time. The present anxiety around social precarity, the working poor and the cost of living – exacerbated today by the return of supply chain disruptions and fuel and grain price shocks – is reminiscent of the panic around the “Social Question” of the 1840s. Then, as now, people argued over whether mass impoverishment was the consequence of over-regulation, whether it resulted from deregulation and the resulting erosion of older forms of social cohesion, or whether it could be something produced by the modern economic system itself.
The fascinating – and vexing – thing about these revolutions is their polyvocality, the fact that so many programmes and aspirations found simultaneous expression. The political forces that coalesced in the revolutionary spring of 1848, shaking the foundations of monarchies across the continent, soon spiralled off in different directions. The slow liberal politics of chambers and the fast radical politics of clubs and demonstrations came unstuck from each other. The rivalry between national groups pitted German and Croatian liberals and radicals against their Czech and Hungarian fellows.
Nothing cohered. For contemporaries, it was difficult to make out the general direction of travel, so paradoxical and contradictory were the forces that the revolutions had unleashed. The complexity of 1848 was not primarily a function of the intrinsic difficulty of the problems confronting European societies, but rather of the great number and diversity of political groups and perspectives brought to bear on them. Karl Marx anticipated this when he observed in an essay of 1842 that the many-sidedness of the world was a function of the one-sidedness of its countless constituent parts.
History does not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain remarked, it often rhymes. What do these moments of déjà vu mean? They may in part be symptomatic of a narrow “presentism” that can see in the past nothing but endless reflections of its own preoccupations. But we should not exclude the possibility that such resonances reveal authentic affinities between one moment in history and another.
The revolutions of 1848 seemed as old as ancient Egypt when I learned about them at school in the 1970s. Their complexity was a futile, antiquarian scrawl. But it’s different today. We are re-emerging from something that they did not yet know. The era of high industrialisation; the “take-off into sustained growth”; the rise of the great ideological party-political formations; the ascendancy of the nation-state and the welfare state; the rise of the great newspapers and the national television audience. These things, which we used to call “modernity”, are now in flux, their hold on us is waning. And as we cease to be the creatures of high modernity, new patterns of attention become possible. As the 20th century begins to lose its power over our imagination, it becomes engrossing, even instructive, to contemplate the people and situations of the 19th century: the fissured, multifarious quality of their politics; the churn and change without a settled sense of the direction of travel; the anxieties around inequality and the finiteness of resources; the entanglement of civil tumult with international relations; the irruption of violence, utopia and spirituality into politics.
In 2011, as a chain of political upheavals cascaded across the Arab world, attention turned once again to the forgotten revolutions of 1848, which had exhibited a similarly contagious quality. In the west, too, we have seen symptoms of instability – chamber invasions, pop-up protest movements, crosscurrents of activism on social media – that recall the volatility of 1848. If a revolution is coming, it may look something like 1848: poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions.
Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark will be published on Thursday
Ancient rivalries, social panic, revolution … the 19th century is back. By Christopher Clark, The Guardian, April 23, 2023.
Viewed on a timeline, the events and the people of history seem to grow ever more distant as the past slips away from a “modern” world that is constantly being made anew. For us, it is axiomatic that “this time it’s different”, because we are always covering new ground, always leaving the past further behind us.
But the truth is that we have a non-linear relationship with the past, both with our own personal stories and with history more generally. There are moments when a history that had seemed finished and packed away suddenly moves into our vicinity, grabs us by the shoulders and starts to speak to us. Right now, this is happening with the 19th century.
Take the “Eastern Question”. This central preoccupation of 19th-century European diplomacy bundled together problems arising from the enfeeblement of the Ottoman empire, the issue of access to the waterways linking the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, imperial rivalries in north Africa, Syria and Mesopotamia and the struggle to secure control over the land and sea routes linking the great powers with their global empires.
In the course of the 20th century, the Eastern Question receded from view. The Ottoman empire was no more, Turkey was admitted to Nato, and in the light of the bipolar stability of the cold war, the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean no longer seemed of such pressing importance. There was no shortage of conflict in the region, but it unfolded within the framework imposed by the standoff between the two nuclear superpowers. In recent years, the Eastern Question (or at least the bundle of issues that were once known under that rubric) has acquired a new salience.
We see it in the heightened geopolitical tension between Greece and Turkey, the squabbling between Egypt, Turkey and other players over the future of Libya, the disastrous effects of intervention in Syria, the conflict over grain exports from the Black Sea ports, and the consciously neo-Ottoman language and gestures of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president.
Our epoch is marked – this is hardly a new observation – by the return of a genuine multipolarity, such as we have not known since 1945. This multipolarity has many dimensions. New regional powers have emerged, determined to shape events in their own spheres – Turkey and Iran are two of the most important examples. The transition from Deng Xiaoping’s policy of restraint under the maxim: “hide your power and always be patient” to the confident demeanour of today’s China is another facet of the new multipolarity. The tension between the US and Russia remains, but it no longer has the power to stabilise the system as a whole. This multipolarity is unsettling for us; for the people of the 19th century, it was all they knew.
There are other commonalities. In the 20th century (or for most of it at least), Russia represented a radical alternative to western-style liberal democracy, a power driven by a philosophy of historical change whose attraction for people on the political left worldwide was never entirely extinguished. In today’s world, Russia has returned to its 19th-century role as the reactionary negation of western “liberalism”. To be sure, the special status of Russia and the US as custodians of the world’s largest strategic nuclear arsenals persists, as a legacy of the cold war. But the current war in Ukraine has less to do with the binary ideological oppositions of the 20th century than with a deeper history of wars and annexations along the Russian imperial periphery, a history that extends through and beyond the 19th century.
I have spent the past few years writing a book about the 1848 revolutions – a cascade of political tumults that extended across the European continent – and here too I have been struck by the many resonances with our own time. The present anxiety around social precarity, the working poor and the cost of living – exacerbated today by the return of supply chain disruptions and fuel and grain price shocks – is reminiscent of the panic around the “Social Question” of the 1840s. Then, as now, people argued over whether mass impoverishment was the consequence of over-regulation, whether it resulted from deregulation and the resulting erosion of older forms of social cohesion, or whether it could be something produced by the modern economic system itself.
The fascinating – and vexing – thing about these revolutions is their polyvocality, the fact that so many programmes and aspirations found simultaneous expression. The political forces that coalesced in the revolutionary spring of 1848, shaking the foundations of monarchies across the continent, soon spiralled off in different directions. The slow liberal politics of chambers and the fast radical politics of clubs and demonstrations came unstuck from each other. The rivalry between national groups pitted German and Croatian liberals and radicals against their Czech and Hungarian fellows.
Nothing cohered. For contemporaries, it was difficult to make out the general direction of travel, so paradoxical and contradictory were the forces that the revolutions had unleashed. The complexity of 1848 was not primarily a function of the intrinsic difficulty of the problems confronting European societies, but rather of the great number and diversity of political groups and perspectives brought to bear on them. Karl Marx anticipated this when he observed in an essay of 1842 that the many-sidedness of the world was a function of the one-sidedness of its countless constituent parts.
History does not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain remarked, it often rhymes. What do these moments of déjà vu mean? They may in part be symptomatic of a narrow “presentism” that can see in the past nothing but endless reflections of its own preoccupations. But we should not exclude the possibility that such resonances reveal authentic affinities between one moment in history and another.
The revolutions of 1848 seemed as old as ancient Egypt when I learned about them at school in the 1970s. Their complexity was a futile, antiquarian scrawl. But it’s different today. We are re-emerging from something that they did not yet know. The era of high industrialisation; the “take-off into sustained growth”; the rise of the great ideological party-political formations; the ascendancy of the nation-state and the welfare state; the rise of the great newspapers and the national television audience. These things, which we used to call “modernity”, are now in flux, their hold on us is waning. And as we cease to be the creatures of high modernity, new patterns of attention become possible. As the 20th century begins to lose its power over our imagination, it becomes engrossing, even instructive, to contemplate the people and situations of the 19th century: the fissured, multifarious quality of their politics; the churn and change without a settled sense of the direction of travel; the anxieties around inequality and the finiteness of resources; the entanglement of civil tumult with international relations; the irruption of violence, utopia and spirituality into politics.
In 2011, as a chain of political upheavals cascaded across the Arab world, attention turned once again to the forgotten revolutions of 1848, which had exhibited a similarly contagious quality. In the west, too, we have seen symptoms of instability – chamber invasions, pop-up protest movements, crosscurrents of activism on social media – that recall the volatility of 1848. If a revolution is coming, it may look something like 1848: poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions.
Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark will be published on Thursday
Ancient rivalries, social panic, revolution … the 19th century is back. By Christopher Clark, The Guardian, April 23, 2023.
Christopher Clark: The 1848 Revolutions.
In his Winter Lecture, Christopher Clark asks why we should think about the Revolutions of 1848 now. Recorded at the British Museum on 15 February 2019.
London Review of Books, February 27, 2019.
In Revolutionary Spring. Europe aflame and the fight for a new world, 1848-1849 Christopher Clark describes 1848 as ‘the particle collision chamber at the center of the European nineteenth century’, a moment when political movements and ideas were tested and transformed. The revolutions of 1848 were short-lived, but their impact on public life and political thought throughout Europe and beyond has been profound.
After the key note lecture by Christopher Clark, parallels to the current day and age are drawn in a discussion with invited experts and the audience.
Do democracies need revolutions? Can freedom thrive without? And what about the situation of the Netherlands, where no revolution took place at all and that still went through a democratic transformation in 1848?
KNAW, June 27, 2023
In the final pages of Revolutionary Spring, the historian Christopher Clark writes that “the revolutions of 1848 seemed as old as ancient Egypt when I learned about them at school.” Now, however, he sees important parallels with the present. Just as revolutionary flames seemed to leap from country to country in 1848, so they have done in recent decades, notably in the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, which spread from
Tunisia to Libya, Egypt, Syria, and beyond. Just as politics today often involves “a blend of carnivalesque style and insurrectionary logic,” so it did 175 years ago (the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Clark writes, “was thick with echoes” of 1848). Then, as now, ideologies were in flux: Self-identified “liberals” and “radicals” oscillated between uneasy alliance and open conflict, while populist nationalism proved to be the enemy of progressive social change. “As I wrote this book,” Clark concludes, “I was struck by the feeling that the people of 1848 could see themselves in us.”
But is Clark right to emphasize these connections? One certainly cannot criticize his command of the material: Revolutionary Spring’s 74 pages of tightly packed small-font endnotes—nearly 2,000 of them, in at least 10 languages—testify to the vast extent of his research. Although the events he surveys, each with its own chronology and cast of characters, took place across a score of separate locales, he manages to distill everything into a clear and compelling narrative, aided by his knack for the striking phrase. And Clark also has an eye for wonderful details, as in his description of observers climbing the highest buildings in Milan to observe the enemy outside the city’s walls. “To save time,” he tells his readers, “they attached their reports to a metal ring and sent them whizzing down ziplines to the ground, where they were picked up and taken to headquarters by the boys of a college of orphans.”
Yet despite having written a book that emphatically deserves the term “magisterial,” Clark ends up straining in his attempts to connect 1848 to the present moment. Sometimes, the differences between earlier times and our own are more instructive than the similarities. And the similarities that Clark points to are overshadowed by one very great difference: the almost unlimited faith that the people of 1848 put in the idea of revolution itself. That faith died in the ashes of the 20th century.
The very first revolution of 1848 testified to that faith. In Palermo, Sicily, printed notices appeared at the start of the year announcing that an uprising—and an era of “universal regeneration”—would begin on January 12. As Clark notes, it might have seemed a silly idea for the conspirators to announce their plans ahead of time—but there was no conspiracy. The author of the notices, a veteran of radical politics named Francesco Bagnasco, thought “the announcement of a revolt would suffice to bring one about,” and he was right. Long-standing resentment of the king of Naples’s heavy-handed rule, exacerbated by severe economic inequality, led crowds to pour into the streets on the appointed day to fulfill—if only for a short time—the dream of Sicilian independence.
Revolution soon spread to mainland Europe, driven by social conflict. Europeans were not, in the aggregate, poorer than they had been in the past, but the economic disruptions of the industrial revolution had created a newly mobile labor force living a starkly precarious existence, especially in the cities. Nor were reform-minded Europeans as ready as they once had been to accept social misery as inevitable. As emerging socialist movements insisted, impoverishment was a human phenomenon, and human action—political action—could relieve it. In region after region, precarity and the hope for a more secure life fueled popular support for political movements struggling against corrupt, despotic, and foreign rulers (the working classes generally did not start the revolutions, but revolutions could not succeed without them). And in region after region, the news of uprisings elsewhere fell on the dry timber of troubled societies like a shower of sparks.
In February, the French overthrew King Louis-Philippe and proclaimed the Second Republic (Napoleon Bonaparte had overthrown the first one 49 years earlier). The next month, revolution spread to the German states, with many rulers, notably in Austria and Prussia, compelled to promise liberal reforms. They granted constitutions and guaranteed rights. Delegates from the German territories assembled in Frankfurt to start planning for German unification. And from there, uprisings spread across Central Europe and Italy. National minorities throughout the Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian empires called for autonomy or independence. The 1848 revolutions extended as far east as the Balkans and the Ionian Islands and led rulers in many places to make anxious, preemptive concessions to the reformers.
The 1848 revolutions also had consequences beyond Europe, notably in France’s overseas colonies, where enslaved people seized freedom for themselves in anticipation of legal emancipation—which the Second Republic duly enacted. Clark gives far more attention to 1848’s global ramifications than earlier historians, and also to the role of women—although feminists who hoped the revolutions would bring women expanded rights were everywhere met with bitter disappointment. France’s Jeanne Deroin, who called for female suffrage, tried to run for a seat in Parliament herself, and campaigned for the creation of workers’ cooperatives, ended up in prison during a wave of postrevolutionary repression.
Surprisingly, Clark writes, self-conscious revolutionaries like Deroin “tended to play a very marginal role in the events of 1848.” Instead, most often, uncoordinated spontaneous uprisings led to a sudden and unexpected collapse of authority, followed by frantic efforts to cobble together a new political order. The pattern repeated itself in place after place, with a virtually identical vocabulary. “The same words rang out everywhere: constitution, liberty, freedom of the press, association and assembly, civil (or national) guard, franchise reform.” Clark also points to a similar “euphoria” that gripped revolutionary crowds throughout Europe, especially in the cities. He writes of “the sense of immersion in a collective self, the presence of an emotion so intense that it is almost painful.”
In writing these words, Clark clearly has more recent scenes in mind as well: Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989; Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011; the Maidan in Kyiv in 2014—history not exactly repeating itself but rhyming, as Mark Twain once put it. The parallels are clear. But they are also, in an important sense, deceptive.
For what did the euphoric crowds of 1848 think they could accomplish, beyond the immediate goals of obtaining a constitution and national rights? In this very long and detailed book, this is one of the few questions to which Clark does not devote sufficient attention. In his conclusion, he refers to “a mythical ideal of revolution as the generative moment when actors in pursuit of a new order of things smash the world and make it anew in the image of their vision.” But to the men and women of 1848, the idea that a revolution could create a whole new social order, perhaps even change human nature itself, was not simply a myth: It was a burning faith they had inherited from their own recent past, and it is to that past, not our own present, that 1848 is most closely linked.
As Clark himself notes, very late in the book, “The revolutions of 1848 broke out in a world that remembered an earlier epoch of transformation.” He then briefly cites some of the “rhymes and echoes” of that earlier epoch: Phrygian liberty caps, the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” and the name “Committee of Public Safety,” all from the French Revolution of 1789. He might have added the concept of the republic itself. France not only proclaimed itself a republic soon after 1789 but subsequently sponsored (often at bayonet point) the founding of more than two dozen other republics throughout Europe. But at the start of the year 1848, every significant state in Europe, with the sole exception of Switzerland, again had a hereditary ruler. In other words, the 1848ers were following a sort of script.
And the script was not limited to words and slogans. The 1848ers still remembered—and many still believed in—the wild hopes of that earlier epoch for the radical transformation of humankind: the imminent end to all forms of oppression and the arrival of an era of equality and justice. The French revolutionaries had not only held those hopes but also did more than any other group to invent the modern idea of “revolution” as a means for realizing them. Before the era of the French Revolution, the word had denoted a sudden, unpredictable, and most likely violent change of regime, but little more. Many political philosophers and political actors, as the historian Dan Edelstein noted in a recent article for the Journal of the History of Ideas, tended to see “revolutions” as something to avoid. They designed political systems with the goal of preventing revolutions. But in the late 18th century, for millions of Europeans, “revolution” ceased to be a problem and became a solution. It ceased to be a sudden and unpredictable event and became a conscious program driven by human will that could continue indefinitely into the future. It became a means of repairing injustice, of relieving misery, of building new nations, and of regenerating the spirit. It was liberation, not merely from oppression but from unhappiness. “Happiness is a new idea in Europe,” Saint-Just declared in 1794.
After the Revolution of 1789 had given way to the Terror of 1793–94 and then Napoleon Bonaparte’s dictatorship and empire, many Europeans muted those exalted hopes. Many subsequent revolutionary movements, including those in Spain and Italy in 1820 and France in 1830, had more modest goals than their great predecessor. Like the protesters in 21st-century Cairo and Kyiv, they fought principally for a liberal constitution, the rule of law, and a guarantee of human rights. But the old dreams of changing human nature and bringing about an era of equality and peace remained potent. In Palermo, Francesco Bagnasco spoke of “universal regeneration,” of relieving popular misery, and he promised the blessings of heaven itself on the Sicilian Revolution. The men who took power in France the next month named a common worker as a member of the provisional government and promised sweeping social reforms, beginning with a series of national workshops for the unemployed. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the nationalists among the revolutionaries of 1848 spoke of reviving ancient nations, freeing them from imperial oppression, cleansing them of troublesome minorities, and forging them anew.
If the 1848 revolutionaries achieved less than their 18th-century predecessors had, it was not because of any lack of ambition, but because of the strength of the opposition. Europe’s ruling elites in 1848, unlike those in 1789, knew exactly what revolution meant, and they saw the threat to their power with limpid clarity from the start. More than a few regimes (notably in Britain, Scandinavia, and Spain) in fact managed to avoid revolution thanks to an adroit combination of strategic concessions and targeted repression.
In France, Louis-Philippe lost his throne, but the social elites soon regrouped and dominated the election of the new republic’s Parliament: Two-thirds of its members had held office under or had otherwise sworn an oath of loyalty to the monarchy. The elites also recognized, as Parisian radicals did not, that France was still a heavily rural society and that the peasantry had little sympathy for social programs aimed largely at urban workers. Parisian radicals in turn denounced the elections for what the novelist George Sand called the “perversion” of the public will and a “false national representation.” There followed, with sad inevitability, the bloody confrontation of the June Days of 1848, in which the French Army put down a Parisian insurrection with thousands of casualties and decisively ended the revolution’s radical phase.
The same pattern emerged elsewhere. Clark notes the shrewd maneuvering of Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who strategically withdrew his army from Berlin only to reimpose his authority later. Faced with Hungarian calls for complete autonomy, the Austrian emperor exploited the resentment of other national minorities who would then have to live under Hungarian rule. As his troops fought the Hungarian revolutionaries, Croats joined the emperor’s cause.
Ruling elites also cooperated across borders, notably in the suppression of the last great revolution of the period, in Rome, by a France now presided over by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, soon to be Emperor Napoleon III. Clark insists that we should not think of the 1848 revolutions in terms of success or failure, and he notes their many long-term effects, including the spread of constitutionalism and the consolidation of recognizably socialist programs on the left. Still, almost everywhere in Europe, the actual forces of revolution were defeated.
It is no accident that the most vivid character in Revolutionary Spring is also 1848’s greatest martyr: Robert Blum, the German “former bronzeworker, lantern-seller, theater-administrator and autodidact publisher of radical essays and lexicons,” who opposed the ethnocentric nationalism of many of his comrades. In October 1848, Blum traveled to revolutionary Vienna to help defend it against the approaching armies of the emperor. Arrested when the city fell, he died in front of a firing squad. His touching letter of farewell to his wife—“Everything I feel runs away in tears”—became a holy relic for generations of German revolutionaries.
In the conclusion to Revolutionary Spring, Clark poses a series of what-if questions about 1848. What if the liberals had not, in many cases, abandoned their radical allies? What if the radicals had muted their demands? It is tempting to play that game: Liberals and radicals love to blame each other for their collective defeats. But Clark’s own stirring narrative strongly suggests that, in 1848, the choices made by these groups mattered far less than the sheer strength of reaction and what the great historian Arno Mayer called the “persistence of the Old Regime.”
This is not the world we live in today. The men and women of 1848 had a faith in what revolutions could achieve that is far harder to sustain after seeing what that faith led to in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. Likewise, many of these revolutionaries—though not all, by any means—justified violence in a way that very few radicals and liberals would be willing to do today. Yet the alternatives do not seem to offer much hope. In the West, many still echo George Sand’s frustration with the electoral system and the way it produces results so often at odds with the interests of the people. But nonviolent protest methods, from Occupy Wall Street to the French gilets jaunes and Nuit Debout, have also failed to achieve any of their desired results. Clark himself speaks of “the often shallow and incoherent politics of today’s pop-up protests,” which he compares unfavorably to the rigorous 19th-century reformism of France’s Louis Blanc.
The opposition is different as well. The Old Regime persists no more. The dominant neoliberal elites of the West enthusiastically voice their support for the rule of law, regular democratic elections, and human rights. Passionately cosmopolitan, they excoriate nationalism even as their policies help push millions into the arms of the nationalist populist right in country after country. Faced with this situation, the left is forced either to join broad liberal coalitions (à la Joe Biden’s) that are unlikely to achieve serious structural reforms of the economy or of government (such as a reining-in of the Supreme Court), or to hope that a more successful version of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon will someday lead a radical movement to victory. But revolution, in any case, is off the table. And while the instructive and engaging Revolutionary Spring is a joy to read, one should not read it in the hopes of finding, in 1848, lessons for 2023.
A Shower of Sparks : The year Europe revolted. By David A. Bell. The Nation, October 31, 2023.
What’s
the best way to build a barricade? A carriage or wagon is a good start, heaved
over to form a sturdy base. Next: Peel up the street cobbles and stack them any
which way—so long as the bulwark is tall enough to hide a regiment of street
fighters and a squadron of women with rocks in their aprons. For this rugged
foundation, any old junk will do. Dining chairs, window shutters, gilt-edged
chaises longues from the houses of the rich; bricks and lumber from warehouses;
barrels from the local breweries (which can be quickly emptied—for courage, of
course). Behind the parapet, weapons are an eclectic mix: blacksmiths’ hammers
and butchers’ cleavers, perhaps an ancient shotgun or, if luck is on your side,
a musket lifted from a slain soldier. All that’s left is to glance over at the
faces of your comrades, pale with terror at their own daring.
Much of Europe went to the barricades in 1848—the first and last truly European revolution there has ever been. This seismic year, documented with panache by Christopher Clark in his authoritative new history, Revolutionary Spring, cracked open the “all-embracing system of tranquillity” regnant since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In Paris and Prague, Vienna and Budapest, Berlin and Bucharest, public squares, cafés, and clubs gave Europe fresh constitutions and new parliaments, and a sense of the slate being wiped clean—the prospect of beginning the project of History over again. The continental uprising, Clark writes, was “the particle collision chamber at the centre of the European nineteenth century. People, groups and ideas flew into it, crashed together, fused or fragmented, and emerged in showers of new entities.”
Strange and diverse dreams brought them there. For the moderate liberal in his top hat and frock coat, here was a chance to overturn the monarchies that sat so heavily on top of every society and usher in a new regime of virtue and merit, of free trade and fair exchange. The radicals had coarser, wilder ideas: that every man (and maybe every woman too) should have the vote, that the press censor should be dunked in the river with stones tied to his ankles, that something should be done for the workers—something more than letting them rot in their hovels. The workers spoke for themselves, engaging in unbridled rebellion against this terrifying new machine called capitalism that stripped them of all pride, which the French socialist Louis Blanc called “a system for the extermination of the people.”
Much of Europe went to the barricades in 1848—the first and last truly European revolution there has ever been. This seismic year, documented with panache by Christopher Clark in his authoritative new history, Revolutionary Spring, cracked open the “all-embracing system of tranquillity” regnant since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In Paris and Prague, Vienna and Budapest, Berlin and Bucharest, public squares, cafés, and clubs gave Europe fresh constitutions and new parliaments, and a sense of the slate being wiped clean—the prospect of beginning the project of History over again. The continental uprising, Clark writes, was “the particle collision chamber at the centre of the European nineteenth century. People, groups and ideas flew into it, crashed together, fused or fragmented, and emerged in showers of new entities.”
Strange and diverse dreams brought them there. For the moderate liberal in his top hat and frock coat, here was a chance to overturn the monarchies that sat so heavily on top of every society and usher in a new regime of virtue and merit, of free trade and fair exchange. The radicals had coarser, wilder ideas: that every man (and maybe every woman too) should have the vote, that the press censor should be dunked in the river with stones tied to his ankles, that something should be done for the workers—something more than letting them rot in their hovels. The workers spoke for themselves, engaging in unbridled rebellion against this terrifying new machine called capitalism that stripped them of all pride, which the French socialist Louis Blanc called “a system for the extermination of the people.”
The collision chamber of 1848 hardened these varied and often eccentric theories about how to change the world into solid and coherent political blocs. Our understanding of conservatives, liberals, radicals, and socialists was formed in the crucible of revolution. Nationalism too exploded as a potent, undimmable force to challenge the ancient imperial order. For those enslaved at the periphery of that imperial world, the yawning difference between legal emancipation and the full meaning of liberation was clarified all over again. And the experience of men’s mockery at their cries—for the vote, for recognition, for the most basic dignities—girded isolated groups of feminists for the combat to come. Put another way, 1848 was the breech birth of the modern world. It arrived roaring and ashen with gunpowder, holding high the magical documents of a new epoch.
The ink was not yet dry before they were torn up. The barricades had barely been assembled when they were shattered. And, for all its thrill and excitement, 1848 has not left the same impression on the public imagination as 1789 or 1917. The bite of failure still clings to that year, and as Eric Hobsbawm once put it, “Historians, like politicians, tend to shy away from failure, unless it can be transmuted into heroic myth.” Revolutionary Spring rescues that crucial moment when possibility was cracked open; Clark also looks unflinchingly at the methods used to weld that crack shut. He shows that instead of producing hot and immediate change, the lasting outcome of 1848 was cool and slow transformation—a longer-term set of underappreciated consequences. Even as conservatives believed themselves to be restoring the old power, circumstances had been decisively shattered. Nobody emerged from 1848 unscathed.
The Revolutions of 1848 were shocking but hardly unexpected. Hunger lashed the mid-1840s with a doubly deadly grain and potato crisis (Clark’s ancestors were among the many thousands who fled Ireland for Australia). Yet hunger alone does not spark a sustained assault on political order. Destitution, Clark notes, was “more likely to render people ‘speechless’ and inactive than drive them to concerted action.” Tension had been steadily building across Europe. In the winter before the storm, the atmosphere was so charged that in the Sicilian port of Palermo a series of posters pasted to city walls predicting a revolution was enough to spark an uprising.
Behind their self-assured façades, the old regimes were proving precarious. When the French King Louis Philippe—installed after a revolt in 1830—tried to shut down the banquets liberals used as their campaign platform, all of Paris turned out against him. Over the border, south German provinces with a long history of republican agitation burst into general insurrection. Across the Habsburg lands—Hungary, Bohemia, Wallachia, and Galicia—small cliques of revolutionaries took the chance to openly declare for rights and privileges on the basis of their own emerging sense of nationhood, and even demanded outright independence. In divided Italy, Milan rebelled while Venice announced itself a republic. The Prussian king fled Berlin; the Austrian emperor escaped from Vienna. Between February and March, powers that had seemed so permanent and immovable were running for their lives. Klemens von Metternich, once the honoured architect of European reaction, left the Austrian capital for London a blind, decaying, defeated man.
In capitals across the continent there was a tremendous, breathless euphoria. History had ruptured. Anything was possible. The crowds on the boulevards in Paris were, one French politician wrote, as “naïve as the delirium of a child and as terrible as the frenzy of a giant.” Where had the victory come from? An alliance of the streets and the parlours, the barricade and the drawing-room, common cause made between liberal elites and insurgent radicals rising from the slum quarters. The early triumph of 1848 was an example of that rare thing in history: a coming together of antagonistic social classes.
It’s difficult not to be roused by Clark’s stylish narrative of this intoxicating opening phase. In the insurgent cities, provisional authorities formed in the offices of major newspapers, new Cabinets nominated by their editors and writers. In Paris, the staff of the liberal Le National joined with the more radical La Réforme to decide the immediate future of the country. From these interim bodies came a spree of diets, radas, national assemblies, and Reichstags—popular parliamentary bodies which, though still not decided by a truly universal franchise, represented a vast expansion of democracy in countries that had barely known the ideal at all. And from those parliaments came constitutions. Such an efflorescence of freedom marked the zenith of liberalism in 1848.
The radicals and socialists had done much of the heavy lifting to establish the legitimacy of these new governments, and sanctified the revolution with their own blood. They placed a nervous trust in the assemblies and charters, hoping that truly representative forums might bend the attention of deputies to the urgency of fixing social questions: They wanted relief for the poor, rights for workers, rescue from the ruins of unemployment. Their anxiety was quickly vindicated. As the first votes were returned and the new deputies took their seats in the spring of 1848, it became apparent that, as Clark puts it, the liberals would not continue the fight. Instead they were using their hard-won newborn institutions to spend weeks fiddling over the most impotent points of procedure. “Poetic gleam deserts them,” the German radical Franz Schuselka sneered while observing the inching tedium of the Frankfurt parliament, “and their height and greatness shrink considerably.” All the while, they ignored the building tumult and rage.
Their hesitancy was driven by a visceral fear of proletarian violence. Unlike their forebears of 1789, the moderates had a model on which to base their assumptions about how the revolution was supposed to turn out. They were self-consciously aware of the Jacobin terror 50 years earlier, and they did not flinch in deploying undiscriminating force against any whiff of a challenge from workers and radicals. In Vienna, the National Guard of taxpaying riflemen and the Academic Legion of beret-clad student guerrillas were called upon to stifle repeated risings from below. During the showdown of the June Days in Paris, provoked by the closure of the National Workshops (a kind of make-work scheme for the unemployed), deputies of the National Assembly were more than happy to crush a bewildered and frustrated left with extreme violence: Many of the 3,000 dead were captured then shot without trial. If the first stage of 1848 was the victory of a cross-class alliance, the whirlwind of the summer saw the rebirth of irreconcilable class hatred.
That summer, the forces of conservatism realized that the revolution was not as formidable as it first appeared. Social schisms were evident everywhere. Within the patchwork Austrian Empire, national revolts were splintering domains apart. If the Hungarian uprising had been the cause célèbre of the patriotic spring, it was quickly being challenged from within by other groups on territory the Magyar claimed for themselves: by Czechs, Croatians, Poles, and Ukrainians, all desiring their own liberation. Regrettably for the health and future of the revolution, both the Prussian and Austrian monarchs were able to escape with their armies intact and plan next moves. Their greatest friend turned out to be the laboring poor of the countryside.
From Calais to Kyiv, peasants made up between a half and two-thirds of the total European population, and they were overwhelmingly immune to the charm of the revolution. In October, on the eve of the Austrian counteroffensive, Emperor Ferdinand I was mobbed by a crowd of adoring farmers on a rural road. “In Vienna there are some people who have it in for me,” he cried out, his face wet with tears. “They want to seduce you.” The crowd roared their approval, their faith and loyalty firmly intact. And it was the rural French poor that delivered Louis Napoleon, the preening nephew of France’s last great leader, a massive supermajority in the presidential elections at the end of the year.
By the autumn of 1848, the old regimes were on the march—with the peasantry firmly behind them and bolstered by a vast Russian army. The result: immense repression. “It seems,” the German feminist Fanny Lewald mourned, “as though an iron net has been spread out over us and we are denied even the sight of the heavens.” With much of the French left imprisoned or exiled after the June Days, Louis Napoleon was not only secure in his own position; he was able to volunteer an expeditionary corps on the side of the pope to put down the exuberant but doomed Roman Republic. South German democrats fought a dwindling guerilla campaign. A final spasm of radical revolt in Vienna was blasted apart in tough urban combat. The Hungarians survived longest and battled hardest in a war of total mobilization that ended with the Austrian seizure of Budapest in July 1849.
The old regimes of Europe secured their victory by traditional methods. They won through “naked violence,” Clark writes, “the triumph of one force over another.” But this was a trick that could only be used once. Strict discipline and pure autocracy had governed the years between 1815 and 1848 and had won them an unsettled peace, yet such techniques would only rouse resistance in the future. For the next 30 years they learned to adopt a more thoughtful strategy of what Clark calls “carefully dosed counter-revolutionary prophylaxis.”
They threw out the constitutions issued in the name of “the people” and published their own charters finely machined to give the illusion of popular sovereignty while cloaking the retention of their power. Post-’48 regimes finally expunged the last residues of feudal economics and unleashed the transformative capacity of capital in a campaign of industrialization and railway-building, in the hope that a blooming economy might quiet down the rancor of the workers. Baron Haussmann’s boulevards in Paris and Vienna’s Ringstrasse were gigantic urban projects built as a monument to the productive power of the state, and as a way to make the building of barricades impossible. The press censor—for so long a malevolent presence in the lives of even the most pacific journalists—was largely set aside. Instead, the post-’48 regimes realised they could massage, corral, and manipulate public opinion rather than continually choking it. The real revolution was followed by a more modest revolution in administration, hand in hand with the telegraph, to bolster the authority of ministries and enact specific publicly declared policies and programs to improve the nation and glorify its resilience.
These profound alterations in European life were only possible after 1848, necessary for the establishment to reassert its grip on the neck of the people without squeezing too tight.
Clark writes that he was put off studying 1848 because he had been taught to regard it as a disappointment—a particularly bloody bump in the road toward progress. But as his book shows, dismissal is too easy, and “failure” is a misleading word. It suggests the revolutionaries, from radicals and workers to some well-meaning liberals, supported incoherent goals or that their cause collapsed because of innate flaws in their ideas. There was plenty of incoherence, sure, a great number of poor decisions, and too much backstabbing. Clark demonstrates that the better and more accurate term for 1848 is “defeat.” The Revolutions of 1848 were murdered: put down deliberately with overwhelming cruelty.
Defeat, however stinging, can be revelatory. Liberals found that 1848 exposed the vulnerability of their position (and of the concept of liberalism itself). As February and March had shown, they could never hope to overthrow an authoritarian ruler without the help of the lower classes. But when threatened from below, they had to make common cause with the very same conservatives they had sworn to challenge. For the radicals, 1848 proved that all the gorgeous, gleaming language of the age—justice, emancipation, liberty, solidarity—was nothing when faced with the sharp point of a bayonet.
A beautiful or bold idea could urge you to the barricade, but it could not, on its own, guarantee a victory. Life and death in 1848, Clark shows, depended on a brutal equation of power and violence, and as so often in the history of revolutions, those who run headfirst to the fight with only a few friends by their side and a swelling song in their chests are destined to meet the unassailable force of the state. “Grass has grown over them all,” Clark writes mournfully of the unremembered dead of 1848. The world built by their vanquishers—however crumbling and decayed it might seem now—is the one that endured.
The 1848 Revolutions Did Not Fail. By James Robins. The New Republic, August 8, 2023.
In “Revolutionary Spring,” the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark argues for the lasting impact of the uprisings that engulfed Europe in 1848.
