Christopher Clark: The 1848 Revolutions

thank you very much in the combination of intensity and geographical extent the 1848 revolutions were unique at least in European history neither of the great French Revolution of 1789 nor the July revolution of 1830 nor the Paris Commune of 1871 revolutions of 1890 no.5 and 1917 sparked a comparable transcontinental cascade 1989 looks like a better comparator but there's still controversy as to whether these uprisings can really be characterized as revolutions and in any case their direct impact was largely limited to the Warsaw Pact states in the east of Europe in 1848 by contrast parallel political tumult broke out across the entire continent from Switzerland and Portugal to Walachia and Moldavia in what is today's Romania from Norway Sweden Denmark and Holland to Palermo and the Ionian Islands this was the only truly European revolution that there has ever been but it was also in some respects a global upheaval or at least a European upheaval with a global dimension the news of revolution in Paris had a profound impact on the French Caribbean and the measures adopted by London to avoid revolution on the British mainland triggered protests and uprisings across the British Imperial periphery in the young nations of Latin America to the European revolutions galvanized liberal and radical political elites even in far-off Australia where I come from the February revolution created political waves though it wasn't it with though it wasn't until the 19th of June 1848 that the news of the February events in Paris actually reached Sydney in the colony of New South Wales a reminder of what the Australian historian Geoffrey Blaney once mournfully described as the tear of distance the revolutions involved a vast panorama of charismatic actors from giuseppe garibaldi to the romanian radical anna uppity school from the French Socialist lui blah author of a famous study printed in the 1840s of the organization on the organization of labour Logan he's a co new table eye to the leader of the Hungarian nationalist movement lyashko short or courtly OSH from the brilliant conservative liberal social theorist historian and political writer Alexei's shallow he clearly de Tocqueville to the troubled priest felicity de la moune who's ultimately unsuccessful struggle to reconcile his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous and interesting thinkers of the pre 1848 world from George saw who refused to stand for election to the French National Assembly on the grounds that for as long as women legally at least remained under the tutelage and the dependency of men they could not be free political agents to the Roman popular Tribune Angelou Brunetti known affectionately as chit Cherokee or chickpea if you look at him you can see why a true man of the people very popular mainly because he was a wine wholesaler which meant he where whenever he arrived he had wine with him which makes you popular in Rome and he didn't much to shape the unfolding of the Roman Revolution of 1848 49 not to mention of course the countless women whose names by and larger not known who sold broad sheets and newspapers in the streets of the European cities or fought at the barricades they are very prominent in contemporary to visual depictions of these revolutions we see here a woman involved in carrying away a wounded insurgent and here of course a woman on a barricade in in Paris and there are simply women so a woman socialising or women socializing with insurgents during the March days for politically sentient Europeans 1848 was an all-encompassing moment of shared experience it turned everyone into contemporaries branding them with memories that would last as long as life itself these revolutions were experienced as European upheavals the evidence for this is superabundant in the contemporary sources but as the UCL historian Axl Kona has pointed out they were nationalized in retrospect the historians and memory managers of the European nations absorbed them into specific national teleology z' and path dependencies the supposed failure of revolution in germany was sucked into the German national narrative known as the Zonda week the special path where it helped to power a thesis about Germany's aberrant road to modernity a road that culminated in the disaster of the Hitler dictatorship something similar happened in Italy where the supposed failure of revolution in 1848 was seen as pre-programming an authoritarian drift into the new Italian Kingdom and thereby paving the road to the march on Rome in 1922 and the fascist seizure of power that followed in France the failure of 1848 was seen as assuring in the bone of artists interlude of the Second Empire which in turn anticipated the future triumph of gaullism in other words focusing on the supposed failure of 1848 also had the consequence of allowing them to be absorbed into a plurality of parallel nation state focused narratives nothing demonstrates better than these connected upheavals and their fate in modern memory the nothing else demonstrates better than this the immense power of the nation-state as a way of framing or distorting the historical record and historical memory we're still feeling that power today there were three phases to the events in 1848 and the chronology is a bit baggy but it's worth revisiting it just very briefly in February and March 1848 these are the so called spring days the March days that they start in February in Paris there's Berlin and March there's Budapest and also in March there's shun Dada Petofi reading out the text of the nemzeti Dali the national song which he wrote himself still one of the main sort of national Suntech song texts for contemporary Hungarians there's Barratt cease painting of the five days in Milan when there's an inspection of the National Guard effectively taxpayers under arms who've been brought in drafted in or allowed they actually they were volunteers brought in to replace the army and allow the troops to be removed from urban space so this these were the spring days upheaval spread like a brush fire across the continent leaping from city to city and starting numerous spot fires in towns and villages in between the Austrian Chancellor met Anish fled from Vienna the Prussian army was withdrawn from Berlin had to move out to Potsdam the kings of piedmont-sardinia Denmark and Naples all issued constitutions it all seemed so easy this was a tough year square moment one could be forgiven for thinking that the movement encompassed the entirety of society the euphoria of unanimity was intoxicating it felt one German radical later recalled as if we were walking on air in Milan complete strangers embraced each other in the streets these were the spring days the weather was actually a little bit like today yet the divisions within the upheaval already latent in the first hours of the conflict soon became glaringly apparent in May radical demonstrators were already attempting to storm and overthrow the National Assembly created by the February revolution in Paris while in Vienna Austrian Democrats protested against the slowness of liberal reforms and established a committee of public safety a term of course with very deep resonances in a society whose politically literate classes all remembered the events of the great Paris of the great French Revolution of 1789 particularly the part that of 1793 and 94 marked by the Jacobin dictatorship from the post was the Jacobin convention that established a committee of Public Safety in June there were violent clashes between the liberal or in France Republican leadership's and radical crowds on the streets of the larger cities in Prussia and in France and in Paris this cumulate is culminated in the brutality and bloodshed of the so-called June days which killed at least at least 3000 Parisian insurgents this was the long hot summer of 1848 here we see fighting there you note the the flag with the word du Paola more we want bread or death it's social demands that are prevalent here not political ones image of the intimacy and and sort of cruelty of the fighting on the Rousseau floor around a barricade and illness miss Anya's marvellous depiction of a barricade after the Fighting's done strewn with corpses and here's the man who ran the revenant the Republic's counter-revolution against itself the right Republic's counter-revolution against the left Republic General Kevin Young these days are of course of course gleefully diagnosed by Karl Marx as the moment at which the revolution lost its innocence and the sweet but deceptive unanimity of spring made way for the bitter struggle between classes the autumn of 1848 offers a more complex picture in September October and November counter-revolution unfolded in Berlin Prague the kingdom of Naples Vienna and Prussia and here you see the deputies being sent home by troops from their Parliament which had been moved from Berlin to the little rural town of Brandenburg and here the troops Austrian troops or troops of the Austrian army they went all well there were Austrians but they weren't all Germans fighting under Field Marshal vindicates closing in on Vienna to shut down the revolution in the city Parliament's were closed insurgents were arrested and sentenced troops returned on mass to the streets of the cities but at the same time a second phase radical revolt dominated by this time by Democrats and socialists of various kinds broke out in the southern German states especially Barton and rothenburg here we see two images of insurrection in Luwak in Baden street fighting in Frankfurt and then Dresden in May 18-49 in western and southern France and in Rome where the radicals after the flight of the Pope on the 24th of November 1848 eventually declared a Roman Republic you see it being proclaimed in the south of Germany the second wave upheaval was only extinguished in the summer of 18-49 so these really aren't just the revolutions of 1848 for the revolution they extended into 1849 and martial law remained in place in many parts of Central Europe until into the early 1850s in Germany and the south of Germany was Prussian troops that broke up significant forces near Mannheim in June and the struggle came to an end with the disarming of insurgents at the fortress of Ashdod they'd been promised a safe passage if they handed over their arms which they did but the safe passage was not granted and instead many of them were found guilty of a rebellion and executed on the walls against the walls of the fortress one of them who escaped was called Schwartz who went on to become a general of the Union Army in the German Civil War some of these people had in the American Civil War some of these people had extraordinary transnational careers and shortly afterwards in August 18-49 French troops crushed the Roman insurgency the Roman Republic they you see them assaulting the aurelion walls of Rome again in the summer of 18-49 and around about the same time the bitter war over the future of the kingdom of Hungary was brought to an end as Austrian and Russian troops occupied the country by the end of the summer of 18-49 the revolutions were largely over and that gives a sense that map gives a sense of the complexity of some of these wars which involved multiple international interventions in this case particularly importantly Russian troops entering via air via Moldova Latia and Moldavia in other words via Romania from the Black Sea to help put down the Hungarian Revolution these bitter and often very violent days of reckoning meant among other things or they mean among other things that the narrative of these revolutions lacks a moment of redemptive closure and it was precisely the stigma of failure that put me off these revolutions when I first encountered them at school complexity and failure are an unattractive combination why then should we make the effort today of reflecting on 1848 there are many reasons it seems to me where we should do so but tonight I want to touch on just a few the first I'm sure you've guessed it already is that the 1848 revolutions were in fact not a failure at all in many countries they produced Swift and lasting constitutional and administrative change it's more interesting to think of this continental uprising as the particle collision chamber at the center of Europe's 19th century people groups and ideas flew into it crash together fused or fragmented and emerged in showers of new entities whose trails can be traced through the decades that followed political movements and ideas from socialism and democratic radicalism to liberalism nationalism corporatism syndicalism and conservatism were all tested in this chamber all were transformed with profound consequences for the modern history of Europe the revolutions also produced notwithstanding the persistence of failure as a way of thinking about them a profound transformation in political and administrative practices across the continent a European revolution in government I want to come back to this point very briefly at the end of the lecture a second point is that the questions that the insurgence of 1848 asked have not lost their power there are exceptions obviously we no longer rack our brains over the temporal power of the papacy or over the schleswig-holstein question although I do have a few colleagues who still worry about those things but but by and large the general public does not but we do still worry about what happens when demands for political or economic liberty conflict with demands for social rights freedom of the press was all very well the radicals of 1848 never tired of pointing out but what was the point of a newspaper if you were too hungry to read it the problem was captured by German radicals in the playful juxtaposition of the freedom to read press a fry hide with the freedom to feed fair surf eye height for Isaiah Berlin that question remained one of the central questions of liberalism the question of whether you should give someone who is both very poor and ver unfree should you give that person liberty or boots and of course his answer was always Liberty first but that's a liberal answer not a radical one the specter of pauperization had loomed over the 1840s how was it possible that even people in full time work could scarcely manage to feed themselves entire sectors of manufacture Weaver's were the most prominent example appeared to be engulfed by this predicament but what did this tired of immiseration mean what was the gaping inequality between rich and poor simply and divinely ordained feature of man's estate as the Conservatives claimed or was it a symptom of backwardness and over-regulation as liberals claimed or was it something generated by the political and economic system in its current incarnation as the radicals insisted conservatives looked tomorrow reformed and charitable amelioration liberals looked to economic deregulation and industrial growth but radicals were less sanguine to them it seemed that the entire economic order was founded upon the exploitation by the stronger of the weaker these questions have not faded away the problem of the working poor is today one of the hot-button issues in social policy and not just in Britain and the relationship between capitalism and social inequality is of course still under scrutiny particularly difficult was the question of labor what if work itself became a scarce commodity the downturn in the business cycle in the winter and spring of 1847 48 had pushed hundreds of thousands of men and women across Europe out of work did citizens have the right to demand that if necessary labor be apportioned to them as something essential to a dignified existence it was the effort to answer this question that produced the controversial national workshops in Paris at Elena's you know but it was never going to be easy to persuade hard-working farmers in Alamosa for example to part with extra taxes in order to fund work creation schemes for men they regarded as Parisian layabouts and here is a hostile contemporary caricature what went on at the national workshops on the other hand it was the sudden closure of the workshops which poured 100,000 disgruntled unemployed men back onto the streets of the capital that triggered the violence of Paris's juste June days the dusseldorf artist johann peter Hassan Cleaver captured the same issue and his brilliant canvass workers before the City Council painted in 18-49 and widely exhibited in a number of versions though it shows an event by the way from October 1848 and widely exhibited in a number of versions it shows a delegation of laborers whose work creation scheme which involved excavation works and the various arms of the River Rhine had just been shut down in the autumn of 1848 for lack of funds they're seen here presenting a petition of protests to the city fathers of Dusseldorf in an opulent council chamber through a large window an orator can be seen on the square addressing a raging crowd Karl Marx loved this painting for its stark depiction of what he saw as the conflict between classes in a rave review for the New York Tribune he praised the artists for conveying with an I quote dramatic vitality in one image a state of affairs that a progressive writer could only hope to analyze over many pages of print questions about social rights poverty and the right to work tour the revolutions apart during the summer and autumn of 1848 and they cannot be said to have lost any of their urgency a third point as a nonlinear convulsive it's a intermittently violent and transformative unfinished revolution 1848 remains an interesting study for present-day citizens in 2010 to 11 many journalists and historians noted the uncanny resemblance between the untidy sequence of diverse upheavals that are sometimes called the Arab Spring and the revolutions of 1848 also known as the springtime of the people's like the upheavals in the Arab states they would diverse geographically dispersed and yet connected the single most striking feature of the 1848 revolutions was there similar Tenaya t-this was a puzzle to contemporaries and has remained one state one to historians ever since it also happens to be one of the most enigmatic features of the recent era of events still poorly understood and poorly explained they had deep local roots but they were clearly also interlinked it would obviously be tedious to push this parallel too far in a lot of ways Cairo's Tahrir Square was not like the Piazza San Marco in Venice and the washes washes at faucets itong sorry the physicians item or the chronically favilla gear to bailina shirts item was not Facebook as you can see there are no apps on it for example the important point is a more general one in their swarming multitudinous 'no sand the unpredictable interaction of so many forces operating along so many different vectors the upheavals in the mid 19th century did resemble their chaotic upheavals of our own day in which clearly defined end points are hard to come by the Revolution of 1848 of the revolutions of 1848 were revolutions of assemblies the constitutional they've sorry the Constituent Assembly in Paris which made way for the single chamber legislature known as the Assembly nación ah the Prussian Constituent Assembly or not soon Alfa zomling and Berlin which as you can see didn't have a building of its own obviously there hadn't been a parliament in Prussia until 1848 so it met in the bolinas Inge Academy it was elected and convoked and the new laws created with that purpose the Frankfurt Parliament which came together in the elegant circular chamber of st. Paul's Church in the city of Frankfurt and then the Hungarian diet now the Hungarian diet as such was actually a very old body dating back into the early 16th century but in the course of the Hungarian revolutions of 1848 a new national diet came together in the city of pest you see it here and when the Austrian Emperor Theron ant the first dissolved the diet by decree a new Hungarian assembly met in the protestant great Church of Deborah Chen here we see an image of Deborah at sensoria he was the enemy of that the revolutionary in sir of Naples piedmont-sardinia Tuscany and the papal States all established new parliamentary bodies the revolutionaries of Sicily seeking to break away from the rule of Naples founded their own old Sicilian Parliament which in April 1848 deposed the Bourbon King in Naples Farren under the second still the sovereign also of the island of Sicily but the Assemblies were merely one theater of action by the summer of 1848 there were not just under pressure from the monarchical executives in many states so that was certainly also the case but also from a range of competing agencies of more radical color networks of clubs and committees for example or radical counter Assemblies such as the general crafts and manufacturing Congress founded in Frankfurt in July 1848 to represent those workers in the skilled trades whose interests were not represented in the liberal and middle-class dominated national assembly even this body split after five days into two separate congresses because it proved impossible to bridge the divide between masters and journeymen and apprentices liberals revered Parliament's and they looked with disgust and alarm upon the clubs and assemblies of the radicals which seemed to them to parody the sublime procedural culture of properly elected and constituted chambers even more disturbing from the perspective of chamber liberals as there were sometimes called was the prospect of organized demonstrations prepared to intervene directly in the affairs of Parliament's exactly this happened in Paris on the 15th of May 1848 when a crowd broke into the lightly guarded chamber of the National Assembly disrupted the proceedings read out a petition and then marched off to the hotel-de-ville to proclaim an insurrection Airy government to be headed by noted radical personalities the tension between parliamentary and other forms of representation between representative and direct forms of democracy is another feature of 1848 that resonates with today's political scene in which Parliament's faced a fall in public esteem and a diverse array of competing non or extra parliamentary groups has emerged using social media and organizing around issues that may not command the attention of professional politicians one interesting point emerges from the chaotic closing phase of the revolutions and that is that there was an international but it was not revolutionary as the radical and some of the radicals and some of the Liberals had claimed or at least hoped it was counter revolutionary the Prussians intervened against the revolution in Baden and votin Burke the French intervened in the papal States against the Roman Republic in fact they reinstalled the papacy the Russians intervened in Hungary to crush the Hungarian national revolution the radicals and liberals were impressively successful in creating transnational networks but these networks were horizontal they lacked the vertical structures and resources required to wield decisive force the counter-revolution by contrast drew on the combined resources of armies whose loyalty to the traditional powers had never been seriously in question tomorrow Neil Ferguson's binary categories towers prevailed over squares hierarchies beat networks power prevailed over ideas and arguments the effort to make sense of this outcome gave rise to one of the most interesting and important intellectual consequences of this revolution the quest for theories or forms of politics founded not on ideas but on the realities of force you find this same question Marx and Engels especially angles in lewd visualized realpolitik he's the inventor of that term realpolitik in the st. Simonian technocracy that infiltrated administrative practice in France after 1848 and in the primacy of blood and iron so memorably articulated by Bismarck 1848 wasn't just a story of revolutionaries 20th and sorry 20th and 20th and 21st century historians of liberal instincts have naturally been drawn to the cause of those whose demands whether they were for freedom of associations speech in the press for constitutions regular elections and Parliament's whose demands have entered the DNA of modern liberal see but while I share this genetic affinity for newspaper reading coffee drinking process-oriented liberals it seems to me I imagine perhaps quite a few people in this room do it seems to me that an account that views events only from an insurgent or liberal or radical standpoint will miss an essential part of the drama and meaning of these revolutions it was a complex or they were a complex encounter between old and new powers in which the old ones did as much to shape the shorter and longer term outcomes of these revolutions as the new even this correction falls short though because the old powers that survived the revolution were themselves transformed by it the future Prussian minister-president and German statesmen German Chancellor later after 1871 Otto von Bismarck was still a small player in 1848 but the revolution enabled him to fuse his personal destiny with the future of his country Prussia throughout his life he continued to acknowledge 1848 strangely enough for a man who who manifested himself in such a counter revolutionary way he continued to acknowledge 1848 as a rupture between one Epoque and another as a moment of transformation without which his own career would have been unthinkable the papacy of Pius the 9th was profoundly altered by the revolutions as was the Catholic Church in its relationship with the modern world today's catholic churches in many respects the fruit of that moment Louis Napoleon the third did not depict himself or think of himself as the crusher of revolution but as the restorer of order he spoke of the need not to block but to channel the forces unleashed by the revolution to establish the state as the vanguard of material progress that's not to say of course that he wasn't in favor of brutal counterrevolutionary measures where he felt these required but his central objective was to channel the revolution to take it from the streets into the bosom of government as he wrote himself in a pamphlet he published in the 1830s Lizzy D Napoleon en this was an an upheaval in which the lines between revolution and counter-revolution were and are sometimes hard to draw many 18:8 many 1848 errs died or suffered exile and imprisonment for their convictions but many others cross the floor making their peace with post-revolutionary administration's that atoms that had themselves been transformed or chastened by the revolutionary shock thus began a long march through the institution's more than a third of the Profi regional police officials of post 1848 Bonapartist france were ex radicals so was the Austrian Minister of the Interior from July 1849 Alexander von Bach whose name had once stood on the lists of suspect liberals kept by the Vienna Police Department counter revolutionaries were as often as not in their own eyes at least the executives rather than the gravediggers of the revolution understanding that enables us to see more clearly how this Revolution changed Europe in memory the revolutions at least for its former participants took on a stark emotional chiaro-scuro the bright euphoria of the early days and then the frustration bitterness and melancholy that came when the iron net of counter-revolution as the Berliner fanny leave output it descended on the insurgent cities euphoria and disappointment were part of this story but so was fear soldiers feared angry townsman almost as much as the latter feared them the sudden panics of crowds confronted by troops produced unpredictable surges that can be seen in every insurgent city fear wrote Emil Toma architect of the National workshops in Paris and later a zealous Bonapartists fear has been the presiding emotion of our revolution liberal leaders feared they might be unable to control the social energies unleashed by the revolution people of humbler social standing feared that a conspiracy was underway to stitch up the revolution reverse its achievements and plunged them forever into poverty and helplessness urban middle class residents winced when uncouth figures from the suburbs poured in through the city gates now bereft of them reposts they feared for their property and sometimes for their lives in Palermo there was a rough diverse and potentially unguardable social undercurrent to the uprising in the city the early leaders of the Palermo revolution was solid and predictable dignitaries who could be counted on to behave with moderation and good sense but as ferry Nando Malvika author of a major unpublished contemporary chronicle of the pollutant revolution pointed out the streets soon also filled with the armed mayest transit craftsmen's corporations and more disturbingly with squads from the surrounding country these he wrote were and I quote ferocious men almost devoid of human feeling as bloodthirsty as they were boorish ugly people by whom the beautiful Civic capital of Sicily found itself surrounded infernal tribes Radzi in finale peopled only by creatures in whom nothing was human but their sunburnt countenances it may be that without the driving force and supposed Menace exercised by such people the risings of 1848 could never have succeeded on the other hand a pervasive fear of the lower orders also paralyzed the revolution in its later stages making it easy to play off different interests against each other to wound liberals into the arms of the established authorities and to isolate radicals as enemies of the social order specific displays of emotion could be developed as articulations of revolutionary sensibility and some of these conveyed the distinctiveness of 1848 as a moment of middle-class revolt the former apprentice gardener and left-liberal deputy at the Frankfurt National Assembly Robert bloom agreed there is agreed late in September 1848 to travel to Vienna he was working as a deputy in Frankfurt getting bit bored with the with the proceedings because basically the Parliament didn't seem to have very much interesting to do anymore and so when the opportunity came up to travel to Vienna to bear the fraternal greetings of the German parliament to the revolutionary assembly in the Habsburg capital he took the opportunity and did the job his journey was oddly timed to put it mildly mildly he arrived just as the Austrian armies and Field Marshal finish plates were closing in to crush the revolution in the city and in the desperate fighting that followed Blum accepted the command of a company of defending troops and is seen here in a contemporary lithograph urging his men into battle from the top of a barricade he survived the fighting unharmed but was captured after the surrender of the insurgent forces and sentenced to death despite his very reasonable pre-plea that as an emissary of the Frankfurt National Assembly on official deputy business he enjoyed parliamentary immunity that was overlooked or overruled and you see that de novo on his way to the brig et al where he was to be shot by a company of Croat riflemen a tear was seen to roll down one of his cheeks when one of the officers in Austrian remarked don't be a flirt don't be afraid bloom is that his victim is this him no four women said don't be afraid it will be over in a jiffy fantastically comforting words and hearing this remark bloom brushed off the effort to comfort him and drawing himself up to his full but not very great height he retorted this tear is not the tear of the parliamentary deputy of the German nation of about bloom this is the tear of the father and the husband blooms tear was not forgotten it entered liberal and radical legend the song of the death of Robert blooms sung across the southern German states well into the 20th century includes a reference to this moment of private grief amidst the public ritual of a political execution and here you see him there with the text and forgive me now but it goes roughly like this detainer of I pond kinder in Tainan mum late fall yet ski you toss to stare burn UD freiheit meet loot at severe urban here Jaeger below salt on this tier thank you this tier lived on in memory precisely because it identified bloom as a man of middle-class attachments and values a private man who had entered public life this was politics in a bourgeois key to this day the phrase as dead as dead as Robert bloom is still a proverbial expression in parts of southern Germany if you want to say somebody's very dead you say he's dead as Robert room counter-revolutionaries had emotions too of course revolutionaries had no monopoly on those at the end of an extraordinary speech to the United diet in Berlin in which Otto von Bismarck reluctantly declared that he now accepted the revolution as an irreversible historical fact and the new Liberal ministry as and I quote the government of the future he left the podium sobbing violently these tears unlike blooms were emphatically public both in their performative character and in their causation it's surely pertinent to the unlovely career of general vindicates faithful servant of the House of Habsburg and one of the grave diggers of the revolution in the Austrian lands that his wife was shot dead and his son wounded while observing a demonstration from the windows of their residence during the pentecost uprising in prague in June 1848 the cry Berlin pig's ballerina Shriner uttered by rural peasant army recruits from backwoods Brandenburg as they beat suspected barricade fighters in the capital with clubs and iron rods during the march days tell us something though certainly not everything about the feelings that country youths brought to the tasks of urban counterinsurgency vengefulness and anger played a crucial role in the brutality of Austrian generals like Heiner who appeared to delight in the death sentences and executions he meted out to defeated Hungarian insurgents one of the striking things about these revolutions is the intensity of historical awareness among so many of actors this was one key difference between the 1848 revolutions and the French Revolution of 1789 contemporaries of the revolutionary events read them against the template of the great original and they did so in a world in which the concept of history had acquired a tremendous semantic weight for them much more than for the men and women of 1789 history was happening in the present its movements could be detected in every twist and turn of the revolutions even of the revolutions development for some this connection made the events of 1848 miserable parodies of the great French original the most eloquent exponent of that view was of course marks in his eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon but for others the relationship was the other way around it was not that the epic energy of 1789 had wasted away into caricature but rather that the historical awareness made possible by the first revolution had accumulated deepened and propagated itself more widely the French Revolution of 1848 produced a powerful echo in Chile the contemporary Chilean writer journalist historian and politician Ben Herrmann vicuna McKenna a marvelously Chilean name wrote in his memoirs and he seen here with his wife was her first name of Victoria's Rebecca Zhu and he added these words which I think are very interesting for us poor Colonials living on the shores of the Pacific Ocean enormous Suns like an Australian for us poor Colonials living on the shores of the Pacific Ocean its predecessor the predecessor of 1848 in 1789 so celebrated in history had been but a flash of light in our darkness half a century later its twin had every mark of brilliant radiance we had seen it coming we had studied it we understood it we admired it and I think that's the great difference between that the first time something happens and the second I mean there had been other two miles in between but people felt that they they could read this revolution in a way that had been completely unthinkable to those who experienced the new world of in 1892 1815 across northern and southern America South Asia and the Pacific Rim the ripples generated by the European revolutions passed into complex societies polarizing or clarifying political debates reminding everyone of the malleability and fragility of all political structures in the colonial Caribbean the news of revolution triggered local insurrections that put an end to slavery even before the metropolitan government could issue edicts of emancipation and once the slaves of Martinique and Guadeloupe had secured their freedom here we see the emancipation of the slaves after an insurrection reluctantly conceded by General Howe stolen who simply says you're all emancipated we don't need an edict it's over and once the slaves of Martinique and Guadeloupe had had grasped their own freedom with their own hands it proved impossible to sustain the authority of the slave owners on the nearby Dutch islands of the Lesser Antilles Samata st. Eustatius and Saba and something broadly similar happened on sant quoi a Danish possession of the Lesser Antilles in other words the impact of edicts from the center mattered less at least in the Caribbean than what Sujit Siva Sundaram has called the South to South signaling of societies on the colonial periphery the news of 1848 initially prompted scenes of you for air in the great American cities there was broad support in the Senate for a motion by a senator William Allen of Ohio there we see him that the Senate should formally congratulate the French people and I quote upon their success in their recent efforts to consolidate liberty by embodying its principles in a Republican form of government here in the Americans congratulating themselves on france's having at last chosen to follow america's example but the news of the caribbean slave emancipations complicated the issue on the following day when the debate on allen's resolution began senator john P Hale of New Hampshire proposed an amendment in which the French were conditions were additionally congratulated for and I quote manifesting the sincerity of their purpose by instituting measures for immediate emancipation of the slaves of all the colonies of the Republic unquote so it was this amendment that brought the pro-slavery senators into open opposition the great Pro slaver Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina a man with a remarkably frightening face that's the face of pro-slavery spoke against this motion conceding archly he was like a super intelligent manner and intellectually extremely able but he was in very much very passionate slaver he spoke against the proposal conceding archly that the upheaval was to be sure a wonderful event but that the real test of a revolution was whether or not it would continue to guard against violence and anarchy and that as he put it the time had not yet arrived for congratulation well the motion to congratulate was kicked into the long grass the pointers sometimes made that if we compared the impact of 1848 worldwide with the transformative power of the transatlantic revolutions of the so called axial era between the 1770s and the end of the Napoleonic Empire then the global balance of our 1848 revolutions must appear rather modest but this contrast is really only meaningful if we exclude from view the enormous political and social impact of warfare between 1792 and 1815 the continent was wracked by wars in which vast conscript armies on a scale never before seen were pitted against each other in battles that that beggared the imagination of contemporaries six hundred thousand men took part in the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 and across the wider world many places from India and the Caribbean to Egypt and Java were flexed by conflict among the great powers well the revolutions of 1848 were different they were not born in war for all their cruelty the wars sparked by the revolutions Denmark Italy southern Germany Hungary were counter-revolutionary police actions that for the most part came to an end once order had been restored they tended to shut the revolution rather than to defuse its ideology a continental revolutionary power capable of projecting and embodying ideology by force by force of arms in the manner of 1790s and a teen teens France never emerged in the absence of revolutionary armies the good tidings of revolution in 1848 had to travel in civilian clothes they arrived in the form of books newspapers and charismatic personalities they reverberate it in cafes and political clubs circulating in communicative networks that would denser socially deeper and more sophisticated than their late 18th century breed Assessors they could do this because the locations and societies we've examined were connected through Imperial structures through post-colonial social and cultural ties through migrant diasporas or through common institutions the architecture of in token of intercontinental communications was much more diverse and robust than at the turn of the century after all these revolutions the revolutions of 1848 with the first overseas tumult to which several American univers sent their own correspondence if the revolutions failed in most places outside Europe that carribine was an obvious exception to work deep social transformations this was because in differentiated public spheres the spectacle of revolution tended to trigger responses that were nuanced selective and ambivalent the understanding of revolution that took root in such settings was not necessarily less deep or less important it was just more subtle the true legacy of 1848 on the European continent is to be seen in the breadth of administrative change triggered by the upheavals pragmatic centrist coalition's emerged in the aftermath of the turmoil the connubial or the marriage between the left liberals and the flexible conservatives in piedmont in which kavod was involved the onion labelled in Spain the Regina asam in Portugal formations whose rhetoric and outlook marked a clear departure from the ideologically polarized positions of left and right in the pre march era the pre 18:48 era the rigid and unimaginative official censorship regimes of the restoration gave way to a more nimble collaborative and systematic approach to the press government scaled down the censorship apparatuses of the 1840s and went instead for systems of information management involving media subsidies and the structured siphoning of news stories to selected newspaper editors to greater to a greater extent than ever before the European governments of the post-revolutionary years legitimated themselves by reference to their capacity to stimulate and sustain economic growth they refurbished Europe's cities from Paris transformed by Osman to Vienna where the old city walls were demolished to create space for the ring-tosser to Madrid with the urban planners missile narrow and Castro transformed the inner city they launched public works projects on a scale that exceeded anything attempted during the restoration era they established a technocratic romanticism focused on the improvement of infrastructure and the pursuit of a form of material progress that would make the polarized politics of the 1840s obsolete or so at least they hoped in other words and I want to close here the revolutions of 1848 may have ended in failure marginalization exile imprisonment even death for some of their protagonists but their momentum communicated itself like a seismic wave to the fabric of the European administration's changing structures and ideas bringing new priorities into government or reorganizing old ones reframing political debates the vienna based political theorist lawrence von stein captured the meaning of these changes when he observed that as a consequence of the revolutions europe had passed from what he called that site Alta despotism the age of constitution to that site alta devil tome to the age of administration and the enabling phenomenon that the core of this transformation was the ascendancy of the political center over the polarized formations of left and right that had dominated the 1840s many radicals and conservatives moved inwards from the fringe to affiliate with centrist groups close to the state those who did not risked irrelevance and even ridicule the result was a new kind of politics who manova política as the portuguese regenerators were fond of saying it was and i'm going to stop here it was one might say the exact reverse of what is happening right now when the center is weakening and ideas and personalities that once seemed extreme or outlandish command an increasing share of public attention thank you [Applause] [Music] can we start thank you for your lecture I rather hoped you draw some parallels with today could you do that now I thought I thought I yeah that's a few things come to more two things come to mind above all I've sort of hinted at them one of them is this you know I mean there are problems with the 1850s and that dream of a kind of you know technocratic managerial approach to all of you know all of what had been politics as sort of superseding and super session of politics by management or by you know technocratic you know quantitative expert assessment of the problems that are the material needs of society let's put it that way that that dream of the 1850s obviously was turned out to be short-lived I mean the the left and the right do return especially in the 1818 80s and 90s the far left in the far right and they take off again in the in the what Eric Hobsbawm called the age of extremes in the 20th century so it's you know it's not a dream which is going to go on forever but in a way there is a sort of revival of that sort of post crisis technocracy after 1945 and that's the EU the EU is a sort of flight into into technocratic structures away from the conflictual political models of of a prior era of the you know preceding age and so I do see a sort of parallel there and I think we're coming out of that now and that connects to the other point which is that you know about the the the fact that what the 1850s see what what enables people to put the hungry 1840s behind them is you know is a sort of an ascendancy of the centre which in its the the the chief mark of it six is that people you know the the people who had corporate romantic conservatives who wanted to make the revolution unhappen and now irrelevant I mean that is obsolete figures they they're marked in the in the press even in the official government press and you know they sort of disappear from public view though they cease to be interesting I mean nobody does anything against them but they just seems to be relevant or interesting personalities and the same applies to the reader the hard left edge of the old radical groups so the center in the very broad sense drawing ideas from left and right but operating as aware from a kind of broad center ruled supreme and that sense and I think what we've seen now is the exact reversal of that but I've already made that point one further thought is that you know what it's very striking when you look at the people who were caught up in 1848 how European their frame of references you know Cavour wrote I was very struck I remember when I when I read on a piece that Kemal wrote a long article that he wrote a sort of essay about the Irish question in 1846 it's an incredibly subtle and well-informed question and I wonder how many you know of Italy's for the politicians senior politicians today could write a 10-page essay on Ireland I very much doubt that there's even one you know how many of the senior politicians anywhere in Europe today possess that sense the continent is a joined up cultural system of course they did that we're talking here about a elites and these a letes had been trained and educated in very similar ways they'd often traveled to each other's countries I mean Cavour had been in Paris and Zurich as well as in as well as in Piedmont and that's the case with many of his contemporaries they moved around a lot and learned more than just one language so in a sense you know I'm very struck by how much more European people were then and how difficult it seems to be to relearn how to be European the nation's so deep as the impact of the nation-state on on our awareness so that would be my response to you sorry my name is Robert Fox I've been a journalist for 52 years and I've worked in a way as much in Italy as I have in this country by the way I would rather query what you said I know many senior civil servants and politicians in Italy who could probably write you a very decent essay on nationalism and so we'll park that wonderful talk thank you very much and excellent food for thought particularly at this time and I don't mean to be condescending but two things that struck me from it yeah one is that you emphasized about party topology movements and so on in the 1848 18-49 crisis which does resonate with today is how they became less matters of political debate and arrangement but cults yeah the cult of the charismatic individual I'd like you to comment on that and the other thing which you have raised you've traded trailed with a ghost if I'm like this one is those that got left behind we know the artifact more than art of the gutter peddler of land producer yeah is what happened with those that left behind and it's the left behind that we're looking at now whether it's in the brexit revolt or the shock weary of the G Luzerne would you care to comment on those two aspect please yes yeah I mean I that that would be another parallel with the president if I just start with you the second comment first yeah they're left behind or people who feared to be left behind or already were left behind there was absolutely central questions the revolution a central reason reason for its failure was the fact that the you know in France you have the the sort of right wing of the revolution for closing the the left and the the political revolution shuts down the social revolution and often very very violently it's different in Central Europe where the whole question is overshadowed by nationalism there it get smoked that's the multi vectorial quality of these conflicts but even there the you have their people having to face really difficult choices if you're a you know Romanian radical does that mean you join the Hungarian radicals or do you join the Romanian nationalists or the room and nationalists who want in a transylvania which is not going to be oppressed by some new majah and in state so these kinds of choices tear the movement apart along every possible fault line and I think it is a it is a feature today of you know the debate we see over Europe that that the critiques the critique of Europe has a social dimension as well as a political one I mean the argument for example which one hears from the left that Europe has been insufficiently sensitive to the social demands of people who are you know that there's been a drifting a part of live worlds and a sort of heightening of the income pyramid and a drifting apart of different worlds of experience also between south and north between the southern European states and the northern ones in other words that the failure to attend to issues of of equality of opportunity and also just equality of quality of life equal access to meaningful forms of labor and so on that that has undermined the coherence or the cohesion of the the coherence of the European project in ways that perhaps an excessively liberal and technocratic aliyah lined or attuned elite had failed to anticipate so in that sense there is a parallel I like very much your your thought about how parties become cults there are I mean there's no shortage of cult personalities at this time you know Friedrich Hecker is one wonderful South German radical cult figure who's remembered in many lithographs in which it looks like he's as in Christ returning after the crucifixion being adored by his people Mazzini was uniformly described as priestly possessing a priestly dignity Garibaldi was a you know an extraordinary cult figure who was worshipped rather than followed there are many characters like that and it's true that when parties developed that Celtic quasi confessional dimension then pragmatic reasoning and horse-trading get more difficult and I think that that happened and just as it is today thank you for your comments and you're quite right by the way about the sort of that there still exists a European you know an EU elite which would be you know a you Italians you'd be brilliant at writing an essay on Ireland it's just that they don't possess that unoccupied political office there are senior civil servants who are you know the the this this kind of much-maligned cadre of EU functionaries is actually one of the most magnificently educated and civilized groups of human beings this has ever been created but anyway we leave that to one side could I ask you to reflect on the relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe in 48 yeah Britain obviously was on the verge of a mass unrest with the Chartists why why didn't it revolt that's a very interesting question I remember when I was a school boy learning about this the answer we were given was when Britain didn't need to have in 1848 because Britain was too liberal already things are already so good for the British that they didn't need to revolt that turns out not quite to have been the case and that's why there were so many choices Chartists why it didn't break out into a revolution well one good answer I think has been given by Miles Taylor who wrote a fantastic essay about this for past and present many years ago not that many is give it some time ago in which he argued that it's a little bit along lines of what I was saying which is drawn from that article that Britain franchised out its social tensions to the Imperial periphery so although chart ISM was a very serious threat and I'll come back to that the moment they reduce the risk of mass subsistence crisis driven disaffection and by keeping the price of staple goods down firstly by firstly by relieving lower middle class taxpayers and middle class taxpayers of their tax burdens and pushing fiscal burdens onto the periphery places like salon for example where taxes were raised well they are kept low in Britain and secondly keeping state with the prices of staples like sugar down by removing the preferential tariffs on goods coming in from other places than the British Empire so in other words they allowed goods from anywhere to come in got the prices of staples down but at the pret at the cost of course of planters and of local elites in places like Jamaica so what you have is you know a revolt and protests in places like Jamaica and salon but peace on the British mainland so in other words they franchised out the British leadership in a very sophisticated way France some of the problems some of the social problems that drove revolution on the continent out to the Imperial periphery and it's very interesting to read The Sydney Morning Herald you know in those days a wonderful newspaper I'll say no more than that but in any case beautifully written and to read the burghers of the Sydney Morning Herald commenting on this and saying well you know you know you know you know you know while Daryl rather dear why the dear old mother country hasn't had you know violence and bloodshed to compare with France the reason is because they can send all their undesirables out to places like this right and there and they were not wrong I mean a lot of you know sons of free Ireland and other sort of ne'er-do-wells had been transported to Australia and in fact 1848 triggers a protest movement as it does in in in the Cape Colony to end transportation and indeed convict convict transportation stops so these two these Imperial donate destinations stop shortly after 1848 one last point how is it possible to keep the charters down well by the deployment of immense coercive resources 80,000 special constables are mobilised in order to prevent chart ISM from taking hold or from causing a serious public order threat and among those special constables is none other than the future Napoleon the third but the only thing he gets to do by the way is to arrest what he describes in his memoirs as a very drunk woman professor the theory you were putting out was that centrism took hold as a result of the failure of any of the revolutions to take hold in regime change in the way it did in 1789 do you think if it had and one of these had succeeded in creating a state that fulfilled the ambitions of the 1848 revolutionaries that it would have been much harder then for that kind of centrist politics to take hold that's a very interesting question because it raised the question of you know when what because people say 1848 was unfinished or failure whatever then you have to ask yourself when when is when does the Revolution succeed and if you think about these the revolutions we we we think of as you know major landmarks of history the French Revolution of 1789 at what point did it succeed and in whose eyes there was never one revolution that's the point and in France you know of course at the 1789 model which was in playing through like a like a movie in the back of everybody's heads in 1848 was about how one revolution succeeded another and was then succeeded by another so the revolution of Liberty of 1789 is followed by the revolution of equality and then a fraternity you know forced fraternity you must not keep anything privately if it should be shared among your brothers that's the the the revolution of the jacobins of 1793 and 94 and then the freezing and then they then they sort of unhappy attempts of the directory to try and you know bot together a compromise solution which doesn't work and then the seizure of power by Napoleon and the freezing into institutional form of the of the sort of centralizing impulses of the revolution at what point would you say the revolution was finished or at what point had it succeeded and the same problem applies to 1848 you know what would it mean to say to imagine that in some place or another the revolution succeeded it would have to be you know you'd have to ask yourself which revolutionaries would think of this as a success some radicals thought the revolution had failed within a few weeks of its outbreak and you read that a lot in radical letters and correspondence you know it's over it's finished we can you know the revolutions given up the ghost but liberals still felt there was everything to play for and in fact the that the troops you know the question has been asked in the case of the Prussian army a wonderful book by an historian called Sabrina Miller and she has argued that she's asked the question which I think is a really interesting question why did the soldiers of these armies who were recruited from the same proletarian manure as the insurgents why didn't they run across to the barricades and join them and she says the reason is because most people in the Prussian most of the men serving in the Prussian army believed when they attacked insurgents in the summer and autumn of 1848 and again in the summer of 18-49 they believed they were protecting the moderate revolution of march against the radical social revolution of summer and autumn so there again this division opens up and the question is whose revolution is supposed to prevail and that's one of the real difficulties you know that the and that's why that sort of Tuffy or square moment lasted such for such a short time and broke up so that would be my response I think to your question that the that the that you know it's very interesting mental experiment but it opens up precisely these these problems that the revolutionaries of that time faced thank you you you emphasized the sort of the pan-european character of these revolutions but I've had the impression that nationalism played a pretty big role in in these revolutions and certainly some of the people you mentioned you know as nationalists so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the role of nationalism absolutely yes you're absolutely right of course that nationalism is central to these revolutions though it depends where you are I mean the further east you go the more important it becomes it's not so important in France or Holland or Belgium in Belgium nationalism have been more important in 1830 31 but but in places like Hungary it obviously is that nationalism could be disintegrative it could be about pulling your country either out over into a more autonomous relationship to another sort of towards some kind of multi-ethnic Commonwealth as was the case for the various subject peoples of the Habsburg monarchy the Austrian the Austrian Empire or it could be into creative like the Italian nationalists who wanted to pull together the seven different states of the Italian peninsula and make it into one country or the German nationalists who wanted to achieve some kind of union of the 39 states possibly - Austria so yes nationalism is very very important that doesn't make it it's it's it's not as it were evidence that this is again it's not as a counter-argument to the argument about the pan-european quality of this because nationalism itself was a transnational European phenomenon and it was very it was constantly exchanging DNA national movements were learning from each other all the time and reacting to each other and and that's not just a sort of you know sort of a Jesuitical point it's a serious one that you know in the 1830s and 40s think of to gain yes novel on the eve where he describes a bulgarian nationalist from the who's the subject of the Ottoman Empire who goes to to Venice and thinks of hanging about and then piazza san marco and he pulls he his the the kind of brim of his hat down low so as he doesn't have to see the muzzles of the austrian cannon poking out between the columns of the church because he's so horrified at the idea of another people's oppression there was a lot of this in europe people gathered money for the polish question you know in the 1840s Poland fire in Germany for example dish clubs Greek clubs during the Italian during the Greek revolution in the age intermediate between the 1828 e21 to the 18th early 1830s so in other words there's a lot of vicarious Nationals and people sharing enthusiasm and eat for each other's cases it causes what happens after 1848 is that begins to come to an end and that I think is what you're what you are suggesting 1848 is if you like in some ways a moment of D Europeanisation it's the beginning of the era that we're still in where the nation-state becomes you know comes to wield a kind of primary claim on people's affiliations and we're still living with the effects of that moment but 1848 is still on the cusp between an older much more European world and something which is going to be more sundered international camps I hope that is an answer to your question amongst the revolutionary years you've compared 1848 with you haven't mentioned 1968 I don't know whether you feel able to reflect upon the significant significance of that year but clearly there were global dimensions in 68 and also of course most importantly a sense of failure came from that perhaps also you might be able to suggest some unintended consequences rather as you did with the 1848 revolution that's very you know I hadn't thought about though there is a sort of shadow of a parallel there in the in the in the phrase the long march through the institution's because of course that's one of the interesting things about the 68 is you know as is they're the people who start you know throwing Molotov cocktails of the police and so on people like Joshua Fisher end up being foreign ministers and not just for our ministers day and they they it's a school for you know in political awareness and maturation and so on which takes people into all kinds of locations they don't remain in that radical position and I wish I knew more about 1968 I don't know enough to give you a really subtle answer to that but I'm sure that there is it would be interesting to think of it in 1968 as a transformative revolution I know that I mean I I feel very intuitively very strongly and also from Germans that I've spoken to that I had a deeply transformative effect in Germany it really transformed the culture and whether it's that's also the case for France and for the other places where it took very intense forms I don't know but I imagine it may well also be but that would be something well worth following up a kind of revolution that succeeded despite itself [Applause] you

Channel: London Review of Books (LRB)

Views: 87,922

Rating: 4.8319068 out of 5

Keywords: 1848, Revolutions, Otto von Bismarck, Arab Spring

Id: 782P0YcOOOQ

Length: 70min 44sec (4244 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 27 2019