“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.
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”.
The uprisings were initially strikingly successful, bringing in their wake new parliaments, new freedoms and new constitutions. Within a year, though, the old order had begun to reassert itself, often with great ferocity, and many of the newly gained political and social freedoms were rolled back. The moral of the story, Clark writes, is that revolutionaries were unable to build sufficiently robust international solidarity that could withstand “the threat posed by the counter-revolutionary international”.
Perhaps the most important thread running through Revolutionary Spring is the fraught relationship, and often open conflict, between liberals and radicals. This was a period in which the meanings of both liberalism and radicalism were still being fashioned, and 1848 played an important role in helping delineate the two.
Liberals were mainly bourgeois writers, thinkers and politicians who viewed themselves as trapped between “revolution and despotism” and wished “to trace a middle path” between the privilege and hierarchies of the traditional ruling order and what they saw as the authoritarianism and social extremism of the radicals, exemplified by the Jacobin terror unleashed during the French Revolution. Liberals, in Clark’s words, “rejected privileges of birth” while “affirming the privilege of wealth”, demanded “political equality without insisting on social equality”, asserted “the principle of popular sovereignty” while also “limiting that sovereignty, lest it come to endanger liberty”. They were not democrats, because while they “aspired to speak for the people”, what they really meant by “the people” was “a small proportion of educated male taxpayers.” They were, at best, “reluctant revolutionaries”.
Radicalism was even less well defined, a concatenation of principles and philosophies from utopianism to nascent Marxism. Radicals took their stand primarily on what became called the “social question” – the debates over how to ameliorate the shocking conditions faced by the working class and the poor, out of which emerged demands for the right to work, minimum wages, price controls on staples, and so on. Liberals were more focused on questions of political freedom, such as the extent of the franchise, freedom of the press, the equality of women, the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of Jews. Radicals, in placing the social question at the forefront of debate, also often went much further than liberals were willing to on political issues, many demanding universal suffrage, much greater press freedom and more extensive forms of democracy. They also went much further in their willingness to use force and violence to transform the political landscape.
Though he gives a rounded assessment of these debates, Clark’s sympathies lie more with the liberals than with the radicals, leading to a tendency to downplay the degree to which the social disorder unleashed in 1848 darkened the liberal mood, which became shaped by the need to protect society from the “dangerous classes”. Pessimism, as the historian Daniel Pick has observed, “began to colonise liberalism”. Insofar as the political demands of 1848 were eventually vouchsafed, it was often as much in spite of, rather than because of, liberalism.
None of this, however, is to detract from the significance of Clark’s work. His previous book, The Sleepwalkers, is now seen as perhaps the defining narrative of the origins of the first world war. Revolutionary Spring is likely to occupy a similar place in discussions of 1848.
Kenan Malik’s most recent book is Not So Black and White (C Hurst & Co)
• Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark is published by Allen Lane (£35). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
