The Revolutions of 1848

Studies in European History

by Roger Price

1848 saw an unprecedented wave of revolutions. The social order appeared shaken to its foundations. Even those countries, like Britain which did not experience revolutions endured severe political crises. Yet within months established elites were able to re-assert themselves, and to take advantage of their entrenched position within bureaucracies and armies. This book seeks to analyse the causes of both revolution and reaction. It aims to set political events with the context of a Continent undergoing complex processes of transition from essentially pre-industrial economic and social structures, towards more modern urban-industrial systems. It considers why, after 1848, except in the exceptional circumstances of war, governments were better able to prevent the development of revolutionary movements.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published October 28, 1988

Reviews

[Nick]

For most, 1848 is best remembered as a set piece in the Hugo novel Les Miserables, not to mention its various Broadway and screen adaptations. Yet Europe seemed on fire for much of the year, threatening the regimes of post-Napoleonic French, the somewhat organized German states, the remnants of the Habsburg dynasty in Austria and Hungary, not to mention the various rulers (including the Habsburgs) in what we now know as Italy. It in fact started in Sicily, then ruled by the Spanish branch of the Bourbons.

And yet it was all extinguished fairly quickly (if one compares it to the Russian or Mexican revolutions). For all the barricading and house-to-house fighting, all the temporary concessions to elected Legislatures, by the next decade France, having restored a Bonaparte to power, was facing off against a Germany strengthened by Bismarck and ever more Prussian, with the hapless Habsburgs preying on southern Europe--eventually expelled from Italy, their predation on the Balkans eventually caused the powderkeg to exploded in 1914.

So the essential issue is why the Revolutions failed and led to even greater autocracy. Price finds the causes of the revolutions in crop failures and increasing industrialization overseen by an inept political leadership. So the growth of a literate urban bourgeoisie distinguishes this from the medieval peasant uprisings like Wat Tyler and Michael Kolhaas--there were new means of communication and collaboration and new ways of organization the initial successes. Those initial success gave the elites breathing room to reformulate with tactical concessions but also strategic repression by the state.

My friends in the book trade used to always denigrate deaccessioned library copies because they got better prices for pristine books. But I like books with a history--underlines, notes, forgotten letters tucked between the pages, and, yes, a stamp of ownership from a library or even the old borrowing cards tucked into a pocket. I regret the pennies that go to an author who is not Dan Brown after a new purchase, but occasionally I find a gem like this, once purchases by a librarian for the local Episcopal Seminary and loaned out exactly once (although the card notes that it was also once put on display). I like thinking about librarians, how they spend their accession budgets, trying to calculate how to serve their populations and sometimes making mysterious whiffs, like this one evidently was.

I've found others--"Everyday Life in Byzantium", never checked out from the North Bergen, NJ, Library; the British Museum's "Byzantium", never checked out in Grand Blanc, Michigan; and
"Byzantium and the Roman Primacy", unloved in the Library of the intriguing Concordia Seminary in Exile in St. Louis. Just to prove I am not just a collector of lonely Byzantine scholarship, I have also found the Selected Writings of Ding Ling, the woman writer who accompanied Mao on the Long March only to be abused during the Cultural Revolution, which was a gift from a personal collection to the Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn. There is no card to see whether it was ever borrowed. Then there is the thick "The Flowering of the Middle Ages", full of great illustrations, cathedral plans, and old-book smell, a gift to a library that marked out its name (to avoid the shame, I suppose), but still has a sticker that says "For Reference - not to be taken from this room."

[Nick Harriss]

A good overview about one of the most interesting years of the 19th century. The start is excellent but it somewhat tails off towards the end.

[Emilija]

Brief and not altogether easy to follow.