Revolutionary Spring
Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • From the bestselling author of The Sleepwalkers comes an epic history of the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe, and the charismatic figures who propelled them forward
“Refreshingly original . . . Familiar characters are given vibrancy and previously unknown players emerge from the shadows.”—The Times (UK)
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times
As history, the uprisings of 1848 have long been overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century. And yet in 1848 nearly all of Europe was aflame with conflict. Parallel political tumults spread like brush fire across the entire continent, leading to significant changes that continue to shape our world today. These battles for the future were fought with one eye kept squarely on the past: The men and women of 1848 saw the urgent challenges of their world as shaped profoundly by the past, and saw themselves as inheritors of a revolutionary tradition.
Celebrated Cambridge historian Christopher Clark describes 1848 as “the particle collision chamber at the center of the European nineteenth century,” a moment when political movements and ideas—from socialism and democratic radicalism to liberalism, nationalism, corporatism, and conservatism—were tested and transformed. The insurgents asked questions that sound modern to our ears: What happens when demands for political or economic liberty conflict with demands for social rights? How do we reconcile representative and direct forms of democracy? How is capitalism connected to social inequality? The revolutions of 1848 were short-lived, but their impact on public life and political thought throughout Europe and beyond has been profound.
Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and filled with a cast of charismatic figures, including the social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, the writer George Sand, and the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, who struggled to reconcile his faith with politics, Revolutionary Spring offers a new understanding of 1848 that suggests chilling parallels to our present moment. “Looking back at the revolutions from the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is impossible not to be struck by the resonances,” Clark writes. “If a revolution is coming for us, it may look something like 1848.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bitter defeat bequeathed lasting victories in the pan-European revolutions of 1848, according to this sweeping history. Cambridge historian Clark (Iron Kingdom) untangles the chaotic political conflagrations that engulfed Europe, starting with a rebellion in Sicily; then moving to Paris, where an uprising forced French king Louis Philippe to abdicate to a revolutionary provisional government; then on to Vienna, Berlin, and other capitals where governments conceded constitutional reforms, an end to censorship, the emancipation of Jews, and other freedoms. These euphoric liberal triumphs gave way, he continues, to acrimonious divisions between middle-class revolutionary leaders and radicals who demanded guaranteed jobs, wages, and labor rights for workers—in Vienna even the choirboys went on strike—along with nationalist programs that threatened to unravel Europe's empires. The revolutions seemed to fail in 1849, when liberals and conservatives united to bloodily reimpose authoritarian, monarchical control, but Clark argues that they left behind a durable new regime of constitutional, parliamentary, reformist politics. Clark integrates the welter of local conflicts into a coherent grand narrative, grounding it in searching analyses of the era's economic and social tensions, political instabilities, and ideological fervors while also spotlighting the magnetic personalities (Karl Marx, Richard Wagner) and tragic romance of the upheaval. It's a magisterial recreation of an explosion that birthed the modern world. Illus.
