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Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 Hardcover – June 13, 2023

by Christopher Clark (Author)

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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.”

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From the Publisher

Amitav Ghosh says “Christopher Clark is that rare thing”

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Refreshingly original . . . it’s fascinating, suspenseful, revelatory, alive. Familiar characters are given vibrancy and previously unknown players emerge from the shadows. Clark’s prose is beautiful but also crystal clear.”—The Times

“Magnificent, authoritative and deeply-researched . . . a supreme work of scholarship.”—The Telegraph

“Exhilarating, heroic, horrifying and tragic, the events of the mid-19th century in Europe invite a good retelling . . . Christopher Clark’s new book is, arguably, the best to date . . . deeply researched, rich, engaging and though-provoking. There is now no better place to turn for readers who want to immerse themselves in this period and to reflect on how it resonates today.”—Literary Review

“An engrossing dissection of a revolutionary year in European society.”—The Independent

‘Full of characters, colour and story, but also makes the arresting case that the revolutions . . . changed Europe and the world in ways felt to this day . . .the history teacher you wished you’d had.”—Daily Mail

“Christopher Clark is that rare thing: a great historian who is also a brilliant storyteller, with a gift for sketching scenes and delineating characters with a few deft brushstrokes. Revolutionary Spring is a beautifully written, richly detailed account of a historical moment that rhymes and resonates, in many strange ways, with our own era of turmoil and disruption.”—Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies and The Great Derangement

About the Author

Christopher Clark is a professor of modern European history and a fellow of St. Catharine’s College at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Sleepwalkers, Time and Power, Iron Kingdom, and other books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Social Questions

This chapter contains scenes of economic precarity, ambient anxiety, nutritional crisis and ultraviolence. It hovers over the societies of pre-1848 Europe, focusing on areas of pressure, displacement, blockage and conflict. Social discontent does not ‘cause’ revolutions—if it did, revolutions would be much more common. Nevertheless, the material distress of mid-nineteenth-century Europeans was the indispensable backdrop to the processes of political polarization that made the revolutions possible. It was central to the motivation of many participants in urban tumults. As important as the reality and quantity of suffering were the ways in which this era saw and tabulated social dysfunction. The ‘Social Question’ that preoccupied mid-nineteenth-century Europeans was a constellation of real-world problems, but it was also a way of seeing. The chapter opens with scenes from the lives of the poor and the not-so-poor and reflects on the mechanisms that alienated social groups from each other and pushed them over the boundary between subsistence and crisis. It explores the techniques employed by those who made things with their hands (weavers, in particular) to ameliorate their condition through the focused application of protest and violence. It closes with the political and social convulsion of 1846, when an abortive political uprising in Galicia was engulfed from below by a violent social upheaval—an episode rich in dark lessons for the people of 1848.

The Politics of Description

If you want to know how the poorest of our workers live, go to the rue des Fumiers, which is occupied almost exclusively by this class. Lower your head and enter one of the sewers that open onto the street; step into a subterranean passage where the air is as humid and cold as in a cave. You will feel your feet slipping on the filthy ground, you will fear falling into the mire. On every side as you pass you will find dark, frigid rooms whose walls ooze dirty water, lit only by the feeble light from a tiny window too badly made to be properly fastened. Push open the flimsy door and enter, if the fetid air does not make you recoil. But take care, because the dirty, uneven ground is caked with muck and neither paved nor properly tiled. Here are three or four mouldy, rickety beds, tied together with string and covered in threadbare rags that are seldom washed. And the cupboards? No need. In a home like this one, there is nothing to put in them. A spinning wheel and a loom complete the furnishings.

Thus two doctors, Ange Guépin and Eugène Bonamy, described the poorest street of their city in the year 1836. The setting was not Paris or Lyons, but Nantes, a provincial town on the River Loire in the Upper Brittany region of western France. Nantes was no teeming metropolis: nearly 76,000 people lived there in 1836, together with an overwhelmingly male transient population of around 10,700 itinerant labourers, sailors, travellers and garrison troops, numbers that placed it outside the list of Europe’s forty most populous cities. The city was still struggling to overcome the shock of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. These geopolitical disruptions had ruined the Atlantic Trade (especially in enslaved African people) that had enriched eighteenth-century Nantes, lining some of its best streets with the fine houses of prosperous slavers. Its population had fallen during the wars, and despite a commercial revival after 1815 growth remained sluggish, partly because the French Atlantic seaboard never fully recovered from the impact of the British blockade, partly because the environment for textile production became more competitive and partly because an accumulation of silt in the Loire now prevented larger vessels from reaching the town’s wharves. In 1837, the city’s external trade was still less than it had been in 1790. A statistical survey carried out by the mayor in 1838 revealed an industrial life dominated by quite small enterprises: 25 cotton mills employing 1,327 workers, 12 construction yards employing 565 workers, 38 woollen cloth, fustian and soft-goods factories, 9 copper and iron foundries, 13 small sugar refineries employing 310 workers, 5 conserve plants with 290 workers, and 38 tanneries with 193 workers. Far more numerous were those who worked outside the factories and foundries, taking in piecework, laundering, working on building sites or as servants of various kinds.

Yet this relatively modest town exhibited in microcosm extreme variations in the quality of human life and it was these that drew the attention of Guépin and Bonamy, physicians and public health experts with a keen social conscience. In a vast work of statistical description, the two doctors brought the city of Nantes to life before the eyes of the reader—its streets, quays, factories and squares, its schools, clubs, libraries, fountains, prisons and hospitals. But the most compelling passages of commentary can be found in a chapter towards the end of the book on the ‘Modes of Existence of the Diverse Classes of Nantes Society’. Here the emphasis was on the variety of social destinies. The authors discerned eight ‘classes’ in the city—this was not quite the dialectical triad that would dominate socialism after Marx. The first class consisted simply of ‘the wealthy’. Then came the four ranks of the bourgeoisie: the ‘high bourgeoisie’, the ‘prosperous bourgeoisie’, ‘the distressed bourgeoisie’ and the ‘poor bourgeoisie’. At the bottom of the pyramid were three classes of workers: the ‘well-off’, the ‘poor’ and the ‘miserable’.

The holistic, sociological quality of the observations is striking. The authors move beyond characterizing the economic conditions of each group towards an appraisal of styles, practices, awareness and values. ‘The wealthy’, they find, tend to have few children (the average is two) and to occupy apartments comprising between ten and fifteen rooms lit by between twelve and fifteen tall and wide windows. The life of the occupants is sweetened by ‘a thousand little comforts that one might regard as indispensable, were an enormous part of the population not denied them’.

Immense efforts are expended in support of the seasonal balls that the next stratum, the high bourgeoisie, holds for its daughters. Entire apartments are cleared to make space for the dancers. A daybed is installed in the attic for grandpa. Hairdressers go mad during the ball season; they are besieged like doctors during an epidemic (both Guépin and Bonamy had played a prominent role in fighting the cholera epidemic that ravaged Nantes in 1832, killing 800 residents). Whether the night of revels that followed was really worth all the effort expended was doubtful, at least in the estimation of the authors. For the truth was that a great ball at Nantes was ‘a throng where you sweat endlessly, breathe stale air and assuredly diminish your prospect of longevity’. And on the following morning, if the temperature was cold, one found in the joints of the windows ‘pieces of horribly dirty ice’. ‘The vapour which, in condensing, has formed these chunks of ice was last night the atmosphere where 300 guests breathed.’ Whereas the high bourgeois maintained their own horses and carriages, the members of a ‘comfortably off’ bourgeois household (stratum 3) were content to travel across town on the omnibus. The paterfamilias was a loyal subscriber to his reading club, but he was also forever anxious, because ‘he always knows that frugality and work will be required to cover all his expenses’. The need for economy ruled out the flamboyance exhibited by the two uppermost strata, though the children of this class mixed more easily with their social betters than their parents could.

Particularly deserving of sympathy were the ‘distressed bourgeois’ (bourgeois gênés: stratum 4). These were the employees, the professors, clerks, shopkeepers, ‘the lower order of artists’: together they formed ‘one of the least happy classes’, because their contacts with a wealthier class drew them into expenses beyond their means. These families, the authors wrote, can only sustain themselves by means of the strictest economy. The ‘poor bourgeois’ (stratum 5) occupied a paradoxical place in the social fabric: with about 1,000–1,800 francs per annum to spend, they earned little more than the better-off workers occupying the next class and could afford only two or three rooms, no servants and a patchy education for their children. These were the clerks, cashiers and lesser academics whose lot is ‘survival for the present and anxiety for the future’. But what was poverty for them was abundant wealth for the ‘comfortably off workers’ (stratum 6), who could live ‘without a care for the future’ on a smaller income (their revenues ranged from 600 to 1,000 francs). This was the class of the printers, masons, carpenters and cabinetmakers, ‘the class of good workers, generally honest, devoted to their friends, personable, tidy indoors, raising with solicitude a numerous family’. Their work was long and hard, but they laboured with courage and even joy. They derived a sense of accomplishment from the fact that their families were clothed and fed; when they returned home in the evening, they found ‘fire in the winter, and food sufficient to replenish their strength’. These were the happiest of the city’s inhabitants, because it was among them that means and aspirations were most perfectly aligned.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown (June 13, 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 896 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525575200
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525575207
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.65 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.7 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #30,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16 in European Politics Books
- #17 in French History (Books)
- #32 in German History (Books)

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4.4 205 ratings

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Christopher Clark

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Christopher Clark is a professor of modern European history and a fellow of St. Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, among other books.

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John B M Lordan

outstanding

Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2024

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WHAT A BOOK!!
it is by no means an easy read--[ in fact , its a long slog]--- but so much well worth the effort
700 pages of text,83 pages of footnotes at the back and roughly 50 pages of blackandwhite contemporary illustrations
I presume the primary target audience is graduate students in History / Political Science/ International Relations

FOR the General Reader a few cautions
1.if this is yr first essay into 1848 STOP! you will get hopelessly bogged down /turned off
2 the " canvas" is enormous -- he doesnt even begin to provide a narrative of the events of 1848 until page 265 chapter 4 "detonations"
3. eaxch area is not discussed individually and separated out as is done in Europe in 1848 bybDieter Dowe--which has 11 separate chapters on the events in 11 different locations from Sweden to Wallachia

For me, it took 6 weeks to read from cover to cover--( I did not read 20 pages426 to 443-- role of women}{otherwise as I say, I read the entire book and like a previous reviewer, I found that I couldnt wait to resume reading
there is in addtion
1.a 1 hour lecture by the author on You tube
2.WIKIPedia has extensive sries on this subject with marvellous maps and contemporary illustrations

the references at the back are really enormous and wideranging in a plethora of European languages I get the feeling the author has been focussing on this topic for many years a
with seminars and phd candidates I apprecaiated the panoply of erudition scholarship judgement on display in these pages
both for the events of 1848/1849 themselves and later on over the subsequent 30 year priod of European history that sees the Resorgimento, the Reunification of Germany and the ongoing evolutionary changes in the Balkans affecting both the Ottoman empir and Austria- Hungary

finally--- a minor quibble and a suggestion
1 im not sure I see the pont in connecting up the dots between 1848 and the Arab Spring and the truckers revolt in ottawa-- however if it please the author, im glad to indulge this i have learned so much from this enormous work of synthesis and am very grateful

2 I would love to read another 700 pager by prof Clark on Marx/ Marxism--it seems to me the events in this volume are the broth in which Communism was incubated yet Marx himself has only a very minor role in these pages yet his influence and legacy are so overwhelming in our current society, escpecally now almost 175 years after the events described in this wonderful amazing book
i would love another tourdeforce by sir Christopher Clark on this topic.

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Miroslav Beblavy

absolutely amazing but very long

Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2024

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This is one of the best history books I have ever read - and the situation in Európe at the time is in many respects similar to today

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wylie smith

almost too much (or me)

Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2023

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I thought that I knew a little about this period, but Clark's book showed me how little I knew. With hundreds of characters, many with their agendas, I fi9nd it hard to recount all that I read. Not that this is entirely bad as I now understand how diverse and complicated this period was. The conclusion comments that the telegraph and railroad network were in their infancies, and that comment heightened my understanding that, while the revolutions were connected in a way, the uprisings were based on local issues.
Clark also did a very good job delineating the problems that the radical left, radical right, and liberals/moderates had in establishing each's own program. Ultimately, this book has resulted in my buying more books, more specific books on this era.

3 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Dramatic narrative of what happened in 1848-49

Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2023

It takes me two months to finish this book, but I think it’s worth the time, as it gives a comprehensive picture of what happened. This is not easy because the revolutions spanned across so many places and involved so many people. The events are interlocking with each other. The author is super erudite. I appreciate that some facts usually omitted in history textbooks are covered, such as the roles of women, peasants in the countryside and enslaved Africans.

Moreover, while the core of the book is continental Europe, it also covers how the events spread their impacts on faraway places such as central and south America, and even Australia. The narration is vivid because the author cited many writings at that time, such as diaries, memoirs and newspaper articles. I read the book as if it were news reports rather than history.

Besides, the events sound so familiar, even though they happened almost 200 years ago. For example, after the revolutions were crushed, some songs were banned. Also, the counter-revolutionary government emphasized that the priority was economic and social development, and the building of infrastructure, rather than meeting the political demands of the people.

Finally, two things for would-be readers. First, this book is so well-researched that the notes account for almost half of the book. If you read the Kindle edition and see that you have finished 30% of the book, in effect you have done 60% (unless you want to read all the end notes). Second, a few scenes in this book are very violent and bloody. This is not for the faint hearted. Anyway, revolution is not a dinner party.

7 people found this helpful

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F. Bailey Norwood

Masterful ... no, beyond masterful

Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2023

I always wondered why there was no good book (in my opinion) on the 1848 revolution, but after reading Revolutionary Spring I now understand. The revolution and the events leading up to it are intricate, complex, and the manifestation of many people. Truly understanding the revolution requires comprehending all this complexity, and that's a hard thing to accomplish ... but Christopher Clark did accomplish it.

Yes it is long but the length seems necessary, and actually makes it better. Usually when an author has to weave many details into one cohesive narrative they either (a) achieve the details but produce a difficult read or (b) neglect the details and tell an only partially true story. Clark somehow covers all the details in an engrossing narrative. I'm actually quite envious of his skill as a writer!

Even though it is long, you can take it pieces at a time and enjoy it. Simply flip to any section of the book and its like reading a superb essay. So it's okay not to attempt to tackle the whole thing at once. Pick a section of a chapter and read ... you'll love it. Just the first chapter, due to its content and length, is a laudable book itself.

I've actually been listening to it on audio and then going back and reading what I heard. That's how much I like this book.

Bailey Norwood
baileynorwood.com
Professor
Oklahoma State University

15 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

walter ammann

A lecture you would skip

Reviewed in Canada on August 6, 2023

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Very well researched , but difficult read of a most important historical period. More of a lecture with some rather boring lengthy details.

One person found this helpful

"aldu"

Fascinating overview

Reviewed in Germany on January 4, 2024

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Clarke is a master in combining the big overview with description of details, that give color to the historical events. The book also offers a balanced discussion on how far the revolutions of that time "succeeded" or "failed". I wonder what the actors in these dramas would think about their long-term effects, that are still relevant today.

Arnieb

Brilliant coverage of a confusing but profound year

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 30, 2023

Verified Purchase

This is a huge book.

Clark's sleepwalkers has already established him as one of key historians of the 21st century. This will cement his place as the pre-eminent historian of 19th century Europe in the English speaking world.

Where to begin...Clark shows that in the 1830s and 1840s Europe was going through an intellectual and economic revolution with ideas pouring out everywhere, and new developments in agriculture (especially the importance of the potato) and industry. These were clearly developments from the late 18th century but they almost certainly meant that the Metternich system of "let's go back to 1789 as much as we can" would come under challenge at some point.

Clark chronicles these revolutions, stressing where they had things in common and where they didn't. T

He also shows the counter revolutions of late 1848 and 1849. How they came about (usually as the revolutionaries lacked a cohesive vision and the ancien regimes were able to pick off some revolutionaries, which allied with military power won the day).

I loved this book for 2 reasons

1) his coverage of the lesser revolutions of the era. Most accounts concentrate on Germany, France, Italy and the Habsburg lands. Clark covers the Netherlands and Denmark (where autocratic monarchies gave way to enduring constitution settlements) and also the Romanian principalities.

2) how the revolutions set the political and economic agenda for 20 years. For example 1848 put German unification firmly on the map and clarified 2 major issues - Schleswig/Holstein and Austria Vs Prussia, that Bismarck resolved. But also the similar response to 1848 in all the German states probably mandated a federal state. By contrast in Italy, piedmont took on the mantle of Italian unification against the aims of every other Italian state. For Piedmont to be right, Austrian, Papal and Neopolitan rulers had to be wrong.

Even in Romania - the outlines of future Romanian independence were set out in 1848 - basically it needed the weakening of Russian influence in the region

And economically every state decided that one way to deal with the threat of revolution was to modernise the economy. The 1850s and 1860s were the era of the railroad for much of Europe.

9 people found this helpful

Vicar of Bray

19th century history

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 9, 2024

Verified Purchase

Easy read and new perspective of our continent.

MR

A failure

Reviewed in Germany on January 26, 2024

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Clark‘s idea, to write a history of the revolution of 1848/49 from a bird’s eye perspective, to show the big trends that showed up in all the national revolutions, the commonalities and differences, was and is commendable. The execution though is anything but.
Clark puts way too much on what where - back then - fringe aspects of the revolutionary movement: radical socialists, feminists and so on, and he shows an obvious sympathy for them. By that he measures the revolutionaries of 1848by the values that we have now. That is a trend nowadays, but it makes history useless, and the book boring.

2 people found this helpful

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