The Lessons of 1848

Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848–1849
by Christopher Clark
Allen Lane, 2023, 873 pages, $42.99

I recently spotted an amusing “meme” on social media, which outlined a theory of history. Most people think our troubles started in the Second World War. Those who are better informed think it all began after the Great War. The punchline was that those really in the know lay the blame for our modern ills at the feet of the French revolutionaries.

This theory has a lot going for it. From the tumult that rocked France from 1789 to the triumph of Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Revolution set off a litany of destructive events and cataclysms. The effects of these were so great that the word French was regularly omitted; it was simply “the Revolution”. This Revolution, many would go on to argue, undermined the ancien régime that had held Europe together for centuries, hastened the secularisation of the Western mind, and generally changed the face of history. Thinkers like Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Paine, and Richard Price all drew different conclusions about the Revolution as it was unfolding. What they held in common was the conviction that it was a signal event. That history has vindicated this judgment is beyond dispute.

The French Revolution set off a litany of destructive events and cataclysms.

The long nineteenth century, which historians frequently argue started in 1789 and ended in 1913, was split down the middle by a series of dramatic political revolts. The revolutions of 1848 sit in the shade of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. However, they are crucial for our understanding of the liberal democratic settlement that eventually emerged in the wake of the Great War. They were also a corollary to the social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, these revolts represented the flowering of a new political phenomenon: nationalism. As they often sit in the shade and are forgotten, we should welcome Christopher Clark’s panoramic account of the 1848–1849 revolutions.

Clark is a decorated historian, and the author of a widely lauded book on the causes of the First World War, The Sleepwalkers (2012). His scholarship has focused on German religious and political history. In Revolutionary Spring, Clark turns his attention to pan-European political and cultural phenomena with startling breadth and depth. Beginning in Nantes in 1836, Clark addresses the social despair, dislocation, and disenfranchisement that accompanied industrialisation. Alongside these ills came a new consciousness amongst the female elites of the potential for intellectual, spiritual, and economic independence. Furthermore, and to the point made earlier in this review, new political ideas were stirring, including a new liberalism. This is, perhaps, best exemplified by Clark’s quotation of Germaine de Staël, who argued in 1797 that there could be “no repose without conciliation, no tranquility without toleration, no party which, when it has destroyed its enemies, can satisfy its enthusiastic followers”. Liberalism, which was arguably the biggest winner in the tumult of 1848, was, Clark observes, framed as a “kit for managing the mediation of conflicting interests”.

Clark also provides a rich background to the nationalist elements that undergirded the revolutions, including the radical Magyar Lajos Kossuth, the Czech historian František Palacký, and the Italian intellectual Giuseppe Mazzini. These nationalisms were accompanied by an undercurrent of social democracy. Karl Marx does not figure heavily in Revolutionary Spring, as his influence on the revolutions was limited. However, the growing working class, made up of the new caste of factory workers and artisans, were crucial to the political ferment. The more immediate outcomes of 1848–1849 reflect the preferences of the nationalist, liberal, intellectual class. However, the class consciousness that developed during these years, and the decades preceding them, formed the basis for later worker revolts and the political socialism that overran many nations in the twentieth century.

Clark’s account is dizzying, traversing what he sagely calls the only truly European revolution. He moves across France, Prussia, Hungary, Wallachia, Poland, Croatia, Spain, and beyond.

As Clark tells it, the outbreak of revolution at Palermo in January 1848 was preceded by a complex network of developments, including constitutional strain and crisis in most European polities, the crystallisation of what was later called “the social problem” of underclass despair, and the fermenting discontent with what remained of feudal agrarian societies. The riots at Palermo were, as Clark rightly notes, “no bolt from the blue”, a statement which applies to all the variegated events that played out across the European continent through the two years that followed.

Clark’s account is dizzying, traversing what he sagely calls the only truly European revolution. He moves across France, Prussia, Hungary, Wallachia, Poland, Croatia, Spain, and beyond. His command of original languages allows him to sample letters, tracts, books, diaries, and pamphlets penned by a wide array of figures, from those at the centre of the action to those on the periphery.

Clark’s narrative moves smoothly from intellectual history, to detailed accounts of military conflict on the streets and battlefields, to granular retellings of political machinations. He shows the bewildering array of motivations that drove the revolutionaries. Clark also deftly analyses the triumphs and failures of the revolutions. One way of summarising these is that the outcomes were surprisingly moderate. Clark notes that communism did not emerge from these revolts. Rather it was social democracy that found its seed form during 1848 and 1849. In a similar fashion, the masses did not discover their political voice, nor did they win wide suffrage. Instead, the acceptance of constitutional government and the necessary empowering of the capitalist middle class were evident in the decades after. Finally, conservatives were forced to move from a deep suspicion of written constitutions “as the fruit of rebellion and mayhem” to embracing them as “an instrument for the stabilization of politics”.

To critique a book like this is challenging if one is not a subject matter expert. It is surely the fault of the reader, and not the author, if the reader finds the scope and level of detail overwhelming. Clark’s analysis is lucid. His learning and scholarship are immense. His skill with languages, his grasp of the various contexts, and his ability to identify important outcomes, are all impressive. Perhaps most important are his observations in the concluding chapter about the import of the 1848 revolutions. For a revolution which was partly triggered by the masses of working men and women, the fact that the “post-revolutionary synthesis … was founded on the continuing political exclusion of the popular classes” is striking. Liberal politics might have won the day, with the triumph of procedure, constitutions, and rule of law. But the democratic spirit of the revolutions was suppressed for decades to come.

Clark also observes that the “exacting standard” we might apply to revolutions, where the actors “smash the world and make it anew” is rarely met. The European revolts addressed in his book strike Clark as layered, with “many cross-cutting vectors of intention and conflict”. This is a helpful point, as it is rare that a revolution should be seen in hindsight as comprehensively upending the existing order and establishing a new one. Perhaps the exception is France, but that is only when that revolution is set alongside the events that followed, including those of 1848–1849.

In 1847, the Dutch historian and politician Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer gave a series of lectures in his living room, which were published in the same year as Unbelief and Revolution. Groen characterised what unfolded in Europe across the first half of the nineteenth century less as a narrow political upheaval and regime change, and more as a deep spiritual and intellectual transformation. The Revolution was more than a political crisis—according to many thinkers, it worked itself out in deeper ways. For Groen, the final stop in the revolutionary movement was unbelief, a rejection of the Christian faith. He knew what he was witnessing in the late 1840s was the next cataclysm in a continuing historical development.

As Clark details in this remarkable book, the political and spiritual forces that were first unleashed in France in 1789 worked themselves out across Europe in 1848 and 1849. As he notes in his conclusion, there are important parallels between 1848–1849 and what is happening in the West today. Perhaps Clark is right to feel that “the people of 1848 could see themselves in us”. With the hindsight of another eighteen decades, it is reasonable to conclude that Groen was right to see the Revolution as a critical, negative turning point for Europe. So, too, are the makers of the aforementioned social media meme. 1789 really did matter for the course of history. What is often forgotten, and what Clark helps us rediscover, is that the revolutions of 1848 are also crucial for our understanding of Western history, offering insights for our own politically unstable age.

Simon Kennedy is the Managing Editor of Quadrant, a research fellow at the University of Queensland, and a non-visiting fellow at the Danube Institute.