1848: Reaction and response

REVOLUTIONARY SPRING: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 

Author: Christopher Clark

Publisher: Crown

Pages: 872

Price: $40

In January of 1848, a mysterious poster appeared on the walls of Palermo announcing a revolution set to coincide with the king’s birthday. In fact, no insurrection had been planned, but the curious crowds that descended on the central squares to catch a glimpse of one provided the conditions for an actual uprising as troops moved in to clear public spaces.

Here as elsewhere the old regime was not unprepared: If the Spanish Bourbon king Ferdinand II was unpopular, he had plenty of ships, cannons and soldiers to make up for it. “The strangest thing about the uprising,” writes the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark in his new book, Revolutionary Spring “is that it was ultimately successful.” The breadth of social resistance — from Palermitan gentry and liberal lawyers to armed artisans and peasant squadre — made a purely military solution impracticable. As protests spread to Naples, Ferdinand appeared to retreat, promising a constitution.

For months afterward, kingdoms across the continent convulsed as insurrectionists demanded the drawing up of constitutions that would enshrine basic political rights and rein in monarchical authority. “There was no single issue,” Clark explains, but “a multitude of questions — about democracy, representation, social equality, the organization of labor, gender relations, religion, forms of state power.”

Clark presents the unrest at street level through eyewitness accounts, and he weaves this material into an impressive transcontinental tableau. As the feudal order went into retreat, novel political forms emerged. Karl Marx, a figure who floats through Clark’s book as an observer, wrote The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels early in 1848. The fighting spread across borders just as new nation-states struggled to come into being. “This was the only truly European revolution that there has ever been,” Clark writes.

The clearest indication that a new kind of revolution was at hand came a few weeks after the uprising in Palermo and 900 miles away. In February, Parisians streamed toward the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Boulevard des Capucines. French infantry panicked and fired their guns. More than 1,000 barricades sprang up across the city. Army units “sent to secure strategic posts found themselves drowned in crowds, their weapons pulled from their hands by demonstrators.” King Louis-Philippe gave up his crown and fled.

The revolutionary wave emerged from the French capital with new energy. It crossed the Rhine into Munich, Berlin and Vienna — moving not just across, but up and down the central spine of Europe, to Milan and Venice. Even states within this zone that avoided major crises — Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Piedmont — did so only thanks to harried doses of political and social reform.

In Clark’s view, the press was the medium conducting this spark across Europe, allowing city dwellers who read — or heard — the news to understand events as interconnected. The spontaneous quality that took the police and army by surprise in late winter made the uprisings hard to organise or lead. These revolutionaries agreed on little. Moderates favoured a constitutional monarchy, while radicals and socialists pressed for universal manhood suffrage and the creation of state-sponsored “national workshops” that would provide guaranteed employment.

The counter revolutions came fast. Insurrections lost steam and constitutions were torn up. In France, radicals did poorly in elections to the Assembly in April; in Central Europe, the Hapsburgs — forced to flee Vienna for Innsbruck in May — regained the upper hand in June, reconquering Prague and parts of northern Italy.

Foreign intervention finally brought the curtain down on the revolutionary spring. In 1849, Russian soldiers swept in to suppress the Hungarian revolution on Austria’s behalf — after Emperor Franz Joseph fell to his knees before Czar Nicholas I in Warsaw, imploring him to save “modern society from certain ruin.” In April, France, in violation of its own constitution, sent 10,000 men to crush the short-lived Roman Republic for Pope Pius IX, with the backing of the liberal statesman Alexis de Tocqueville.

The revolutions, Clark insists, did not fail. In his view, they encouraged states from Portugal to Prussia to become far more active — channelling investments into railways and telegraphs, and setting up statistical bureaus and ministries to promote economic development and public health. In the Austrian Empire, serfdom never returned.

Clark’s book is a major achievement in representing the lived experience of the revolutions. Revolutionary Spring  brims with poetry, novels, memoirs and paintings, and Clark is drawn to colour, sound and dress. If this kaleidoscopic accumulation of details and viewpoints greatly enriches our understanding of 1848 as a political phenomenon, it reduces other themes to background noise. The disruption of agrarian life and the decline in living standards that came with the onset of industrialisation and the emergence of capitalism had a lot to do with the scale and simultaneity of the discontent.

Clark acknowledges the spectral presence of the French Revolution for the actors involved in this drama, but, in making comparisons, he is more interested in musing on the present. The arc of protest that runs from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, a decade ago, to Jan 6 — “poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions” — may match the mood of the 1840s, but the conclusions suggested by these resonances are a little too felicitous.

The sense of failure that hovers around 1848 cannot be dispelled by counting the rail lines laid down in its aftermath. Liberals, frightened of worker uprisings, embraced “Family, Work, Property, Public Order” — in short, conservatism. They were content to see economic liberalisation proceed without the risks entailed by the political kind.

The reviewer is author of Liberalism at Large: The World According to The Economist

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