The Four Horsemen
Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe
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- 27,99 €
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- 27,99 €
Publisher Description
In a series of revolts starting in 1820, four military officers rode forth on horseback from obscure European towns to bring political freedom and a constitution to Spain, Naples, and Russia; and national independence to the Greeks. The men who launched these exploits from Andalusia to the snowy fields of Ukraine--Colonel Rafael del Riego, General Guglielmo Pepe, General Alexandros Ypsilanti, and Colonel Sergei Muraviev-Apostol--all hoped to overturn the old order. Over the next six years, their revolutions ended in failure. The men who led them became martyrs.
In The Four Horsemen, the late, eminent historian Richard Stites offers a compelling narrative history of these four revolutions. Stites sets the stories side by side, allowing him to compare events and movements and so illuminate such topics as the transfer of ideas and peoples across frontiers, the formation of an international community of revolutionaries, and the appropriation of Christian symbols and language for secular purposes. He shows how expressive behavior and artifacts of all kinds--art, popular festivities, propaganda, and religion--worked their way to various degrees into all the revolutionary movements and regimes. And he documents as well the corruption, abandonment of liberal values, and outright betrayal of the revolution that emerged in Spain and Naples; the clash of ambitions and ideas that wracked the unity of the Decembrists' cause; and civil war that erupted in the midst of the Greek struggle for independence.
Richard Stites was one of the most imaginative and broad-ranging historians working in the United States. This book is his last work, a classic example of his dazzling knowledge and idiosyncratic yet accessible writing style. The culmination of an esteemed career, The Four Horsemen promises to enthrall anyone interested in nineteenth-century Europe and the history of revolutions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Published posthumously, Stites's final work is both a career-defining accomplishment and something of a departure. The preeminent European historian broadens his focus from Russia and popular culture to encompass the entire continent and the spread of democracy, revolution, and self-determination. Writing primarily for academics, Stites examines the revolutionary wave of the 1820s and how uprisings for popular, constitutional rule cross-pollinated in Greece, Spain, the Kingdom of Naples, and Russia. Relying largely on primary sources and contemporary accounts, he maps the intellectual ferment of the period and traces how ideas were disseminated across borders and translated into action along the European periphery. The doctrines of both revolutionaries and reactionaries resounded across the Continent; each of the revolutions lured foreign freedom fighters to join the cause many of whom would go on to influence movements in their homelands and throughout Stites uncovers fascinating details, as when "travelers and philhellene volunteers from Europe often voiced their disappointment at finding in Greece no one who resembled the heroes chronicled in their schoolbooks." "How Losers Can Win" emerged as one of the decade's enduring lessons, as each of the four campaigns, in failure, inspired future generations of liberals. While much of the text is dry and challenging, Stites's work contains ample rewards for the dedicated reader.
