Europe Ablaze: The 1848 Revolutions

[Celerity]

This is the story of the 1848 European revolutions, one of the most dramatic and significant moments in the history of the continent. Hungry workers and peasants joined forces with liberals and nationalists, and in a series of tumultuous events, toppled the French monarchy, and forced reforms across Italy, Germany, and the Austrian Empire. But the revolutionaries were divided between middle class liberals seeking limited reforms, and radicals and workers who wanted sweeping change. As they argued over political and economic reform, counter-revolutionary forces recovered their confidence, and gathered their strength for a brutal onslaught against Europe's revolutionaries.









Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark review – the revolts that reshaped Europe

This magnificent reappraisal of the 1848 revolutions illuminates their impact on the fraught relationship between liberals and radicals

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/08/revolutionary-spring-by-christopher-clark-fighting-for-a-new-world-revolts-that-reshaped-europe-1848



“We are standing at a turning point in Europe’s fortunes,” warned the Prussian diplomat Joseph von Radowitz in February 1848. He was speaking of the year in which revolution spread through Europe at startling speed. In January, Sicily erupted in revolt against the Bourbon king Ferdinand II. Six weeks later, an insurrection in Paris overthrew the French king Louis-Philippe. By March, the flames of revolution were engulfing cities from Milan to Vienna, from Berlin to Budapest.


Joseph Maria Ernst Christian Wilhelm von Radowitz

The 1848 revolutions occupy a strange place in European historiography. Most historians acknowledge their significance as a Europe-wide set of uprisings. Yet they remain largely a submerged presence in European consciousness, viewed not so much as Radowitz’s “turning point” but “the turning point at which modern history failed to turn”, in GM Trevelyan’s pithy phrase.

Revolutionary Spring, Christopher Clark’s magnificent new history of the revolutions, challenges that judgment, seeking to reset our understanding of 1848. Regius professor of history at Cambridge University, Clark rejects the historians’ consensus that the insurrections failed, arguing that to talk of “success” and “failure” is to miss the point. We can, he insists, only judge uprisings by their impact and, in his view, the legacy of 1848 is immense.

Clark begins by describing in great detail the material backdrop to revolution, the “economic precarity” of vast numbers of Europeans, ravaged by hunger and plague, and the greed and immorality of employers, landlords and rulers. Revolution, though, was not simply the product of discontent at such social conditions. “The geography of hunger,” as Clark puts it, does not map on to “the geography of revolution.” Political, more than economic or social, concerns drove the insurrections.

Clark does a remarkable job weaving together the myriad strands that make up the narrative, allowing us to see the events in granular detail and with synoptic, Europe-wide vision. While revolutions in different countries quickly followed one another, it was not a case of one being the spark for the next. Rather, all the revolts were spawned by a common set of social and political conditions that spanned the continent, rooted, as they were, “in the same interconnected economic space, unfolding within kindred cultural and political orders”.

snip

[Drum]

1. Thank you, Celerity.

[WSHazel]

2. Interesting post

I have been reading a lot of economic histories in recent years. I believe that the west was going through a profound and accelerating change that began slowly with the Reformation and started to accelerate in the late 18th century with as the Enlightenment took hold. Nothing groundbreaking there, BUT a strictly hierarchical Feudal culture existed throughout Europe that was repulsed and terrified by the freedom of what would become Liberalism. I believe that almost every major conflict in the industrialized world over the last 250 years has been the result of the reaction of Feudal culture to a rapidly advancing technological society that was enabling increasing freedom and prosperity for the masses.

We are experiencing this in the U.S. now with Trump.

[Wounded Bear]

3. Read a book about the 1948 Revolutions in Europe...

Not sure if it was the Clark work, but he's pretty good. On edit: Not the Clark book. I read the one I found many years ago. This appears to be a new work.

What I remember most about it was how depressing the ending was. Basically everything reverted back to the status quo and nothing really improved for workers until the 20th Century.