CHRISTOPHER CLARK
Penguin Books
£18.99
ISBN 9780141988313
REVIEWED BY
Eoin Dillon
Eoin Dillon is an independent scholar.
Europe erupted in 1848. Starting in Palermo in January, an unplanned but deeply rooted and popular revolt broke out, and royal reinforcements, sent from the mainland, where liberal and radical forces had also asserted themselves, failed to retake control. By the end of the month Ferdinand II was promising a constitution. In Paris, on 22 February, a liberal banquet pressing electoral reform was banned. A festive occasion turned into an armed confrontation; the National Guard, defenders of the status quo, joined with the ordinary people, and the impressively cerebral but deeply conservative prime minister, Guizot, resigned. King Louis Phillippe jumped ship to England and in three days, as in 1830, it was all over. Immediately, Austria, Hungary, Prussia and Lombardy were embroiled. After a day of tumult in Vienna, Metternich decamped to London on 13 March; four days later, reformers were in charge of a Magyar administration. Street battles in Berlin killed ten times the number in Vienna and on 19 March the king was forced to withdraw his troops from the city. By 27 March Austrian troops had been forced out of Milan. Other towns in Germany and Italy were similarly embroiled, and by June revolution had reached Bucharest.
The revolutions of 1848 bypassed England. Concessions to Chartist demands obviated some social unrest but, perhaps more importantly, by 1848 England and Ireland had the densest police network anywhere in Europe. Constabulary were deployed in significant numbers around both countries—not least in Liverpool, where it was feared that Irish insurgents from America might disembark—for the purpose of suppressing sedition. The United Kingdom had enacted a measure of electoral reform in 1832, and the Act of Union of 1801 was considered to have imparted a measure of reform to Ireland. Thus the twin European themes of electoral reform, pursued in England by radical Irish working-class Chartists, and nationalist assertion were deeply present in a generalised Irish politics. Meetings were held to consider the implications of events in Europe for Ireland, and a rebellion, generally written off as risible, took place; the only supposed fatality, James Stephenson, subsequently turned up in Paris, where he founded the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Rather 1848 is noted as a seminal moment in the development of Irish intellectual and literary nationalism. But Ireland was in the throes of a much deeper transformative event beside which everything else pales: the Famine. Nothing could expose more brutally the limits of liberal political economy just as the British government was instituting empire free trade.
This book very much history from below: activists and commentators, men and women, and noticeably women, are brought back to cast their light on events that in some cases proved terminal. In Revolutionary spring they often reach centre stage. Here Clark gives his skills as a writer full rein: public meetings, street battles, the dying and the dead, the last poignant moments of a family man and radical about to be executed. At the end of the book he gives account of the numbers certainly or probably killed, the last rites of the executed, the psychic difficulties of the survivors, the fates of those forced into exile.
The Kingdom of Naples saw the opening European revolution of 1848; it also saw the opening of the counter-revolution that would end them. In mid-May crowds still demanding constitutional reform were fired on by Swiss Guards; martial law ensued, dissent was suppressed, and by September Sicily had been reconquered by Bourbon troops. Much of Europe would follow the same path: emboldened counter-revolutionaries moved against the revolutions in Prague, Lombardy and Milan, while Ottoman and Russian interventions ended Romanian innovations. Radical Vienna fell to forces led by Windischgratz and a young Franz Joseph was made emperor. In France in December Louis Napoleon won an overwhelming victory at the polls for president of the republic with the promise of a return to order and the glory of the first consul.
At a broad level, 1848 saw the crystallisation of forces and ideas that would shape Europe over the next century: nationalism, conservativism, liberalism, social democracy and perhaps most literally communism, with the publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto that year, producing in one constellation national socialism and fascism, as well as post-Second World War liberal social democracy. More immediately, it saw the election of parliaments, only in France by universal male suffrage, and brought people to a kind of power that they had never encountered before. Constitutions were proclaimed, the Danish one still extant. Measures of emancipation proved short-lived, however: the Second Republic abolished slavery, but it remained the reality in the Caribbean and other colonies. Women were active at every level in the revolutions, but patriarchal structures remained firmly in place. Jews were emancipated, while in Romania/Wallachia Roma were formally emancipated but remained slaves. Nevertheless, for Clark, the revolutions were not failures: ‘their momentum communicated itself like a seismic wave to European administrations, changing structures and ideas, bringing new priorities into government or reorganising old ones, reframing political debates’.