For those not quite familiar, what is 1848?
What’s interesting about 1848 and also incidentally, what’s unique about it, is that it’s the only truly European revolution that there’s ever been. The French Revolution is called that for a very good reason, although its effects, of course, are profound and widespread. The commune, this revolution in Paris remains very much a French affair. So does the Revolution of 1830, of July 1830, which does leap over into sort of sympathy revolutions in Belgium and in a few Italian cities and elsewhere, but doesn’t get anything like the kind of European scale of cascading tumultuousness that you see in 1848. And finally, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, they too are very much Russian in their inception.
In 1848, by contrast, you see this, it’s a bit like brush fires. It’s a revolution which cascades across the entire continent from Palermo in Sicily to Naples to Paris to Vienna to Berlin. Where it starts is really still a matter of controversy. You could say it starts in Paris. The Parisian Revolution of February 1848 was important. But when that happened, the Sicilian Revolution in Palermo was already underway.
And even before that, we have a sort of revolution come civil war that breaks out in the previous year, in the autumn of the previous year, 1847, in Switzerland, which actually completely transforms the Swiss state. So in some ways, you could say it’s the Swiss who started it, the Swiss being curiously considered, since we think of Switzerland now as an island of, banking, clock making, peaceniks. In those days, Switzerland was the most unstable country in the whole of Europe. And it demonstrated this by experiencing this very tumultuous period of revolution and upheaval in civil war in 1847. And that’s, in a way, what starts the avalanche going.
Well, I suppose you know things are serious when the Swiss get in on the act. What was the world of 1847 then?
It doesn’t actually look very much like our Europe. just looked at this map. The first thing you’d notice is there’s no Poland. It was swallowed up in the 18th century in a sequence of partitions, meaning sort of concentric invasions from its three neighbouring states, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. And there’s no Italy. Instead of that, there’s five independent Italian sovereign states, including one with a bizarre name, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilys, which combines Sicily and the mainland around Naples. Then there are the Papal States, whose capital city is Rome, which are run by the Pope. Then you had the Grand Duchies of Panama, Modena, Lucca, which then is absorbed into another state in 1847.
In the north, you have the most important Italian state, one that plays a very active role in 1848, Piedmont. But it’s really not a state. It’s a province of a larger kingdom called the Kingdom of Sardinia, which is run by the House of Savoy. So it includes bits of France, what we now call Savoie in France. It includes the island of Sardinia.
In addition to that, you have the two Austrian-occupied areas, Lombardy, capital city Milan, and Venetia, capital city Venice, both under Austrian control and run as a joint Lombardo-Venetian kingdom from Vienna. So Italy doesn’t look anything like today’s unified Italy. And Germany is divided into 39 states.
And what about each political group? I had it in my mind that you had the conservatives, these are the reactionaries, aristos and landowners; The second group are the liberals – social democrats; technocrats; Blairites or however you want to call it; and the third group, the radicals and these are, for want of a better word, Corbynistas.
That is a good summary. We need names for these people. We have to find something to order the chaos. But the fact is, of course, that conservatives were actually just a vast sort of ecosystem of very diverse political positions, and so was liberalism, and so was radicalism. People didn’t call themselves radicals by and large. They found all sorts of other terms for themselves.
And so what we’re looking at actually is not really a spectrum of clearly identifiable partisan positions of the sort we think of, in the 20th century of going from left to right, how the hard left, communism, various forms of social democracy, left liberalism, right liberalism, and then a variety of different kinds of conservatism. That didn’t really exist.
What you had was endless variations of political thinking and argument unfolding in different locations around, sometimes around charismatic and sage-like figures like Charles Fourier, the Comte de Saint-Simon, or the German socialist Weichling. But Karl Marx was not such a charismatic figure, but certainly an increasingly important one in the 1850s and 60s.
Many voices, all competing with each other for attention, all trying to make it up as they go along. This is the other thing that’s interesting about the people of the first half of the 19th century. People don’t say, when they reach the age of 21, “I’m a liberal.” Then just stay a liberal for the rest of their lives. They keep on evolving. And this is a very striking thing. All kinds of people that we think of as liberals or as radicals are in fact moving – they’re in motion, from the left to the right, or from the right to the left, for lack of a better term.
This was a period when people make long, I journeys through a kind of archipelago of political options, a bit like the Indonesian archipelago, the thousand islands, they just move from island to island, picking up ideas here, picking up ideas there. There are no big powerful catechetical textbooks that everybody in a particular party signs up to. There are no powerful political parties that can tell you what to think. People are making it up as they go along. And that’s part of the excitement of that era.
It seems to go, you have revolution, then counter-revolution, and then re-revolution. Is that about right?
Yes, it’s got the revolutions have a curious and slightly sort of baffling chronological structure. It’s actually quite straightforward once you sort of commit it to memory. It has basically three phases, which is not too difficult. Now, the first phase is the spring.
Everything just pops off. Nobody was expecting it. And one of the interesting things about spring is that it becomes clear that this is not a revolution made by revolutionaries. Revolutionaries are made by the revolution. Those are the revolutionaries. There are no plots and conspiracies going on here. Nobody’s planned this in advance. There are a couple of small regional exceptions, but by and large, the so-called revolutionaries, are as surprised by the revolution as anybody else. Once that happens, there’s this tremendous euphoria. It’s like the Tahrir Square moment of the Arab Spring. Everybody’s in the square: All the school teachers are there; the artisans are there; the apprentices; the journeymen; the labourers; the wage labourers; the poorest; but also people with brushed top hats and nice jackets and ladies with attractive dresses and women are waving flags from the windows. It feels like the whole of society is on the move. Everybody who experienced this moment remembers it for the rest of their lives. It’s a flashbulb moment for everybody.
So that’s the spring. Then, unfortunately, just as after a wonderful party, sometimes a nasty morning follows with headaches and nausea, so in the summer, it becomes clear. And the same thing happened in the Arab Spring, and if you look at what happens to the Tahrir Square movement, the people realize actually they don’t really agree on everything. They don’t really agree about the next steps. One could fill hours and hours of conversation about what they disagree about. They disagree about virtually everything one can imagine as a political question. But one fundamental thing they disagree about is the nature of the revolution. And that’s one way of capturing all the other disagreements.
People who whom I think we could call radical because they want a deep social transformation and they want life to become better for the poorest, most vulnerable in society. People like that, on the one hand, think that the revolution is a process. It started in February or March, wherever it takes off, it takes off at different times and different places. But it’s a process that has to be deepened and pushed forward until the process of revolutionization is complete. But for more moderate heads, we might think of them as liberals, the revolution is an event. It’s something that once it’s happened, has to be contained in ropes of law. Stability has to be re-achieved. You’ve got to the idea of the liberals is the very last thing they want is just continuing turmoil.
They say, “We’re going to make a constitution, then we’ll summon a parliament and we’ll get on with the busy big boy work.” Because it is all men, of course, drawing up laws and create and make sure the press is free and that people are free from arbitrary arrest and all these sort of legal reforms that liberals love.
That’s not enough for the people on the left. They say, “No, but the revolution isn’t over. What about the poor people? What about the people who are the precarity of people who are living on the subsistence borderline, who are very numerous in the cities of Europe at this time?”
So that’s the fundamental disagreement, I would say, and it causes deepening tension as the liberals in most places succeed in securing the high ground of political power in one way or another. By and large, the liberals are quite successful in securing a position of advantage and the left then become a kind of enraged opposition. They feel they’ve been locked out. They’ve been hoodwinked. The revolution has been hijacked, stolen from them. That’s where the trouble starts. And by the summer, the left and the centre are openly at odds with each other. you see armed conflict in the streets of Berlin, of Vienna, of Paris and in other places between left and centre options for the revolution, between liberals and radicals.
So that’s when the worm turns, and things get difficult. Finally, in the in the autumn, two things happen. That was the summer. In the autumn, two things happen: The counter-revolutions begin. In Vienna, for example, the Habsburg army returns, it crushes a major uprising in Vienna and reasserts royal Habsburg imperial power, and so you have several of those in Berlin. The same thing happens in other places.
A second wave of revolutions kicks off, as it were, in response to these counter-revolutions. And it’s a different kind of revolution. It’s more dominated by the left. It’s not the sort of insurrectionary, hard communist left represented by some of the most kind of conspiratorial insurrectionists on the left in the 1840s. It’s looking more and more like a kind of social democracy. People want social goods, social benefits. They don’t want to demolish private property, but they do want some kind of safety net for the most vulnerable classes of society.
The left is also evolving towards something more moderate and better organized. They have very deep and very large associations and organizations. This goes on and they end up fighting; in several places there are armed insurrections in the southwest of Germany in particular, and in Hungary at the same time.
The Hungarian pro-independence movement pulls away from Austria and fights during the winter and spring and summer of 1849, until in the summer, finally, of the next year, 1849, these revolutions are more or less put down. They’re crushed in the southwest of Germany by Prussian and other German army contingents. The French go into the Republic of Rome, which had sprung up in the spring and put that down in the summer of 1849. The Russians and the Austrians and various other Croat and other groups helped to bring down the Hungarian Revolution.
So that brings an end to the whole thing. So three phases: spring, euphoria, unanimity; summer, everybody starts to disagree and the squabbling starts; the autumn and winter, on the one hand, counter-revolution begins and on the other hand, the second sort of revolution, 2.0, kicks off and it’s then put down in the summer of the following year.
Complicated, but not that complicated.
Sir Christopher Clark is Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, and most recently Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849. You can listen to an extended chat with Sir Christopher on the Aspects of History Podcast.
