Review of Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849, Christopher Clark, Penguin 2023
Strangers embraced like brothers and ‘men of grave demeanour’ were seen ‘leaping and singing in the public thoroughfares’
As Clark points out, this contemporary account of the revolutions in 1848 could as easily have described the 'Arab Spring' protests of 2010, and it is a comparison he will make again. Like him, I was taught in school that the revolutions of 1848 ‘failed’, because they didn’t last. Clark is concerned in this book to show that this isn’t really the case. Pretty much everywhere in Europe, although there were counter-revolutions, they did not take their countries back to the status quo ante, because too many things had changed and monarchies, having been reminded of their mortality, were terrified of them changing again. Certainly the radicals, who saw revolution as a continuing process that would only end when the last king had been strangled with the entrails of the last priest, would have seen them as failures. But the moderate liberals who simply wanted things like a wider franchise and fairer distribution of resources would have had reason to feel vindicated.
Clark charts the conditions that led to 1848, the events of that year, when “what was scarcely conceivable yesterday is reality today and history tomorrow”, the counter-revolutions and the ultimate effects of all these events. For the first of these, the lead-up, he naturally has to go a fair way back; one cannot discuss 1848 without first examining 1830, and then there is the effect of the French Revolution on that… when reading history, one soon begins to think Cecil B de Mille may have had a point and that the Book of Exodus probably is somehow relevant to the Wars of the Roses.
Luckily the lead-up is in its way as fascinating as the main events. Clark handles his cast of thousands well, moving between countries all over Europe without confusing the reader. He is particularly good on the split, present from the start, between liberals and radicals, and on the problematic fear, among liberals, of the working classes who went out on the streets to fight. The moderates were never absolutely certain that ‘the mob’, having finished with the aristocracy, might not come for middle-class property owners as well ('The landowners invoked the sanctity of property, but the peasants, as James Morris observes, “refused to recognise property as sacred until they had some of their own”.’) As Clark remarks of Guizot in France; ‘he embodied the ambivalent pathos of those political actors who hope to arrest the process of change at what seems in their eyes to be the optimal moment’. This was one reason for the plethora of constitutions that sprang up after the revolutions; liberals saw them as ‘peace treaties designed to manage the relations among structurally antagonistic groups’.
And there were plenty of those. Class, nationality (or more often regionality), religion, were all dividers, and how people defined themselves depended on which was most important to them at the time. When, in 1846, Polish nobles in various locations in Galicia rose up against the Austrian empire and invited their peasant workforce to be cannon fodder, they were genuinely astonished to find that said peasants in no way identified with them and indeed preferred the Austrian emperor, he being further away. It was at this point that the nobles usually regretted telling the peasants to bring along their flails and scythes. If they were lucky, the peasants merely overpowered and arrested them but mostly they slaughtered them.
For some months in 1848, though, many did make common cause, and the heady joy of those days, plus the frenetic pace of events, is well conveyed. In Milan, ‘astronomers and opticians took up positions in observatories and on the city walls to discern the movements of the enemy outside the city walls’. They sent their reports down via ziplines, where they were picked up by students who rushed them to the insurgents. Enrico Dandolo wrote of ‘universal joy and affection’.
Once in power, however, the revolutionaries faced problems not just from their enemies but within their own ranks, principally, as Clark puts it, ‘the difficulty of synchronizing the slow politics of the chamber with the fast politics of clubs and streets’. Those who had put their lives on the line wanted Utopia at once; the men now in power could see that this was impossible. ‘Men’, by the way, is exact; while in most places the revolutionaries were doing what they could to emancipate and, to a very limited degree, to enfranchise peasants, Jews and slaves, nobody in power anywhere was proposing to extend the franchise to women.
The personal violence, both by the revolutionaries and later the counter-revolutionaries, is breathtaking and reveals how polarized European societies had become. Yet there was, after things settled down, a kind of synthesis; constitutions were amended but not discarded; the franchise was extended, though nowhere near enough, and there was a huge expansion in public works - railways, civic planning and building. Some of this, like Baron Haussmann’s wide boulevards in Paris, was aimed at making it harder for 'the mob' to build barricades or vanish down side alleys. But it was also about providing work and lessening public discontent. Censorship of news, too, eased as politicians found less obvious ways of managing it.
This book is not only thorough and comprehensive but very readable. Its major figures, like Robert Blum, come alive and engage one’s sympathy, and there are unforgettable vignettes along the way, such as the London special constable, recruited to combat the Chartists, who would later be known as Louis Napoleon III. Probably my favourite incident concerns the small town of Votice, in what is now the Czech Republic. After the counter-revolution, Votice was ordered to surrender its revolutionary guns, banner and drum. This proved awkward. The banner had been returned to its original role as a weathervane on the town hall. Nor could the drum be spared, as it was the municipal drum used to announce civic events. As for the guns, it turned out they were facsimiles the citizens had carved from wood, all except one, which the local potter had made out of clay. Few stories could show so plainly how much the folk of Votice had wanted to be part of this great event.