Book of the Month
Christopher Clark: "Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848 - 1849"
No period of European history may be as immediately relevant to our own historic situation as the revolutions of 1848-1849. Reason enough to read Christopher Clark’s tour de force on what, by any measure, was much more than an important event. Politically speaking, it’s when democratic populism began in all but name.
To write a history of the revolutionary events of 1848 - 1849 that is accessible also to non-specialists, that combines splendid narrative, stupendous knowledge of detail with a comparative view generating a series of remarkable arguments; which presents readers with the diversity of events and experiences of those involved — from peasants and citizens to women, slaves and Jews to the political protagonists operating from the metropolises — in all their complex contradictions, rather than packaging them into a series of convenient ideal types; and which nevertheless manages to keep readers both entertained and safely guided: is such a story even possible?
The short answer is: yes, if the author is called Christopher Clark. Anyone who has experienced this Sydney-born historian, who has been teaching at Cambridge for nearly four decades, knows how he combines ingenuity with rhetorical brilliance. He has not only emerged as one of the best-known historians of his generation, but is also an outstanding performer and wordsmith. The title metaphor of his book on the First World War, The Sleep Walkers, immediately made it into the rhetorical arsenal of Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, which is no mean achievement. Although the arguments in his latest work (some of which have been circulating freely for decades) have not always been attributed to their earliest proponents, this is understandable in a synthesis written at this level of ambition. What remains impressive, despite this omission, is the amount of scholarship that went into this impressive synthesis.
The formalities alone command respect: Clark’s book has over eight-hundred pages and more than two-thousand notes; the wealth of inter-woven themes is immense, and Clark has also used sources that have received little attention to date. His book’s architecture is reader-friendly: the nine main chapters present the material chronologically, but are subdivided into thematic sections. Even if some things will seem familiar to connoisseurs of this period of European history: what has been created here represents narrative history at the highest level.
A FAILED REVOLUTION?
As we learn at the outset: Clark’s Australian history teacher had nothing positive to say about the revolutions of 1848: they had been an utter failure, he told his class. On a formal level of political history, this position can certainly be defended, as from the summer of 1848, after numerous petty wars and executions, some of the reforms that had been fought for (for example in the area of press censorship or equal rights for religious minorities) were undermined or completely overturned almost everywhere. However, such a binary scheme — success or failure — naturally fails to do justice to the dynamics of a revolutionary era. After all, who are we taking as our standard here, the revolution or the revolutionaries? Which of the various theatres of action are we talking about: Rome, Berlin, Vienna — or are we talking about Pest, Palermo or Heidelberg? Surely, place matters when it comes to passing a judgement. As does the historian’s approach: politics, albeit important, isn’t everything.
Besides: the idea of failure presupposes the existence of a plan, or at least an intention. However, according to Clark, in the vast majority of cases anything resembling a plan is difficult to detect. Despite the calls throughout Europe for constitutions, freedom of assembly and the press, electoral reforms or civil defences, these concepts concealed different ideas and demands depending on the geographical and cultural context. They also changed in the heat of revolutionary events. People were being thrown into events, so they had to forge their plans as they went along: sink or swim.
DIVERSITY
By posing the question of the failure of the revolutions in order to quickly deny it, Clark creates the space he needs to develop his narrative with the necessary creative freedom. Instead of postulating causalities, he emphasises the selective appropriation of widespread ideologies, demands, tactics and institutions by actors of various kinds: “It was not a single issue that dominated the revolutions, but a multiplicity of issues — relating to democracy, representation, social equality, the organisation of work, the relationship between the sexes, religion, forms of state power — and an even greater multiplicity of competing answers.” This centrality of process(es) also makes it difficult to determine the impact of revolutions on a transnational or global scale. Clark’s ability to make interdependencies visible and, above all, how he reconstructs the revolutions from the perspectives and experiences of the individuals and groups concerned into a vivid panorama makes for his book’s greatest achievement. He also has a knack for uncovering connections behind seemingly insignificant details and episodes.
Most of all, perhaps, he remains curious throughout, and it is this curiosity that endows his book with real analytical flair. He does not fall into the trap of setting up dichotomies between the good, the bad, and the ugly — even the contrast between progress and reaction, so popular with historians producing textbook-level writing and calling it research, remains suspect to him. Even if the revolutionary period can initially be understood as a struggle between progress and reaction, little is ultimately gained from such a perspective. Clark also uses this insight to elucidate the political history of 1848, where he examines the weaknesses and strengths of radicals, liberals and conservatives in equal measure. He begins with a rather conventional distinction between the three movements: Liberals wanted constitution and the protection of property; Radicals struggled for social equality and political inclusion; and Conservatives defended the status quo.
But he uses this merely as a starting point to develop a more complex picture. There were hybrid forms that took shape in response to events, which in retrospect can be described as options that were taken. Once such option was dogmatic rigidity: for example, when radical revolutionaries refused to accept the decisions of parliaments, or when conservative hardliners in the imperial capitals regarded even moderate liberals as a mortal danger to the existing order. In addition to this dogmatisation on the extreme fringes, however, the revolutions also produced something else that could be described as political learning: for example, when avowed conservatives (such as the later Chancellor Bismarck or the British Prime Minister Robert Peel) took up demands for reform, or when radical democrats (such as Robert Blum) came to terms with liberal concerns, or when liberals (who did not follow François Guizot) set aside their reservations about the democratic inclusion of the wider population.
TOWARDS THE MODERN STATE?
Perhaps the book’s most interesting arguments can be found in its final chapters. Here Clark shows how he envisions the productive consequences of revolutions. The social question, which was fought over on the streets in 1848-1849, tended to shift to the desks of the rapidly growing state bureaucracies. Civil servants tackled it with the instruments of statistics, laws and regulations. In the decades following the revolutions, the modern administrative state became the most important guardian of order in many places. The result was a new edition of enlightened absolutism under modern political auspices. Depending on the context, conservative-reformist, liberal or even democratic-republican milieus were in charge. As Clark puts it: “Like their Napoleonic predecessors, the experts of the 1850s were also agents of post-revolutionary stabilisation.” This conclusion would, in itself, be an interesting starting for a diachronic comparison. Under what circumstances did bureaucracies and experts play a productive role for society? When did they get detached from people’s real concerns? What about bureaucratic control, then and now?
HISTORY AS THE PRESENT
In the Introduction, Clark argues that the 1848 generation would have understood our own era and its challenges rather well; because, like ours, their time was characterised by contradictory diversity and confusion: “While they belonged to a world to which the great structuring identities of modern politics were still largely alien, we are part of a world in which these are in rapid dissolution.”
It might be added that the great historians of the nineteenth century would also have understood Clark. They might have recognised in him a fellow proponent of Geschichtsphilosophie. In the nineteenth century, the historians of power-conscious states tried to distinguish their own nation (supposedly rooted in historical reality) from other (supposedly merely invented) nations. In contrast, Clark encourages us to understand the 1848 revolutions and their consequences as a genuinely European experience, one that was appropriated in national terms only in hindsight. We may ask: Is there such a thing as a “European” — or “regional” or “national” - experience? Or are they merely ciphers of the kind that Reinhard Koselleck called “politische Bewegungsbegriffe”: semantics employed to justify a certain political movement and development?
There is no doubt, however, that Christoper Clark has succeeded in creating a work that could breathe new life into the discussion about the causes and consequences of the “European spring of nations”.
Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848 - 1849 (Allen Lane, 2023)