Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849

by Christopher Clark

The choice of history as a genre enabled Amari to achieve effects that would have been denied, for example, to a novel, a play or an epic poem. He chose history because he believed that the consciousness of a nation was stored in its knowledge of its own past.[158] History released contemporaries from the tyranny of the present, implicitly posting a question mark over the present order of things.

Victor Schoelcher, who published the abolitionist tract De l’esclavage des noirs in 1833 after his return to Paris from a journey to Mexico, Cuba and the southern United States, knew all too well how difficult it was to overcome the inertia of a society that was aware of the iniquity of slavery but not sufficiently alarmed to act against it. The arguments against this institution, he wrote, were so well rehearsed and of such long standing that it was impossible to come up with new points that might catch the attention of the public. Europeans were easily roused to indignation by this or that narrative of injustice or atrocity, but their sympathy and interest quickly waned. In a compelling passage near the beginning of the book, Schoelcher reflected on the ease with which European visitors to the colonies were seduced into partisanship for slavery. On arriving in a slaving country, he wrote, you are surrounded entirely by the warmth, hospitality and anecdotes of the whites. The whole of the (white) society around you forms a ‘league’ dedicated to educating you in the virtue and necessity of captive labour. You begin blushing at the naivety of your opinions, your earlier ideas seem to have no traction in the world you now find yourself in. You are soon converted, for your initial doubts were weakly sustained, and your isolation is enough to ensure that you are unable to push back the forces that surround you, especially in a country where your generous principles are regarde...

As the revolution receded into the still very recent past, its charisma and its hold over the political imagination faded fast. In Paris, conservatives used the debates of the assembly to unpick the ‘principles of February’, focusing their efforts, for example, on extirpating the right to work, which had once been such a central preoccupation of the ‘social revolution’, from successive drafts of the new constitution.[118] Already in early June, the writer Fanny Lewald noticed, the word ‘revolution’ seemed to have fallen out of favour; instead, people spoke of the ‘occurrences’ or the ‘events’ of March.

As for the members of the public who sat in the galleries cheering or whistling, these were not the representatives of a free public, capable of forming its own opinions, but ‘hired men’, and ‘friends and dependants of the ministers’ bearing tickets handed out by the government. Whereas ministers were greeted with loud applause as soon as they stood up to speak, interpellations or critical comments by deputies were drowned out by shouts, whistles and other signs of disapproval, so that it was sometimes impossible to carry on.

Reliable stenography was an important, if overlooked, aspect of this public resonance. Tachygraphy – the art of swift writing – was an ancient skill and parliamentary stenography was already established in eighteenth-century Britain, but it was only in 1848 that the broad outlines of a modern parliamentary stenographic service first saw the light of day in Paris. In the Constituent Assembly of 1848, two stenographers, a ‘rolling stenographer’ (sténographe rouleur) and a reviser (réviseur) perched on opposite sides of the tribune. The former succeeded each other in rotation, taking stenographic notes for two minutes and then transcribing them in haste, while the reviser, working in eighteen-minute stints, collated the transcriptions of his colleagues and established the sense or meaning by ‘revising’ the text. The whole thing was then reassembled, verified and certified by the head of service, who was also present during the session for as long as the assembly was sitting. Once this was done, the pages of transcript were carried by a porter to the printing works of the official Moniteur Universel, corrected once and then signed off for printing, authorized for publication and made available to the principal press organs on the day following the session recorded.[143] This put an end to the parallel circulation in the political press of conflicting versions of the same speeches that had vexed the legislators of the July Monarchy.

Like the words ‘history’ and ‘revolution’, the word ‘nation’ underwent a dramatic process of semantic inflation. People used it ‘with an almost universal confidence in its legitimizing power’.[139] It didn’t seem to matter that it signified contradictory things. It became a word through which time flowed. The path towards a fuller form of nationhood seemed for many people the only imaginable way into the future. In a commentary published on 22 April 1848, the Helsinki-based Finnish newspaper Suometar captured this sense of movement and destiny. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Magyars, the Scandinavians and the Slavs, the editor observed, all hoped, ‘unimpeded by any national division, to come together in a self-united life of fellowship and thus…to play a part in the furtherance of civility’. This ‘feeling for one’s nationality’ had awakened in every people ‘emotions that were hitherto unknown’. ‘From now on’, the Finnish writer concluded, ‘this is how European nations will walk into the future.’