The Rest Is History: 326: The Year of Revolutions: 1848

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On the 27th of January, 1848, Alexei de Tocqueville, French aristocrat and probably best known in the English-speaking world as the author of a groundbreaking study of democracy in America, addressed the Chamber of Deputies in Paris, and I will quote,

As if a gale or revolution were in the air, this gale, no one knows where it springs from, whence it blows, nor believe me whom it will carry with it.

Can you say today that you are certain of tomorrow? Do you know what may happen in France a year from now, or even a month or a day from now? You do not know.

But what you must know is that the tempest is looming on the horizon, that it is coming towards us.

So Dominic, momentous words, and as it turns out, prophetic, because that year of 1848 is commemorated as the year of revolutions.

The voice of prophecy, Tom, is often all the more resonant when it's read out in the voice of Chief Inspector Jacques Cluzot as that was.

I thought you were going to say in French the language of diplomacy.

No, I wasn't going to say that. But yes, so we welcome Inspector Cluzot to the podcast for this episode of the 1848 revolutions.

So yeah, 1848 is remembered as the year of revolutions. And yet, of course, the question is, what was it all for and what's it achieve?

Because lots of people listen to this will have a sort of vague idea that 1848 is a bit like 1789 or 1968.

It's one of those dates that conjures up images of barricades and people on the streets.

But it's more like 1968, though, isn't it? Because actually the revolutions fizzle out.

And there's lots of kind of young people rushing around standing on barricades.

Yeah, and then lots of people shooting them.

Yes, basically, basically. And so the standard question about 1848 is why does it fail?

Yes.

Why do the revolutions fail? However, in a groundbreaking study, Revolutionary Spring Fighting for a New World, 1848, 1849 by the great Christopher Clarke,

who is with us on the show.

The Regis Professor of History.

Sir Christopher Clarke, Tom. We're very big on titles.

Professor Sir Christopher Clarke.

And what's more, Tom, I know he's going to speak in a second, but just let me say we're particularly indebted to Christopher joining us because he's Australian.

And like a lot of people, he'll be in mourning because of the very recent passing of day Medina average.

Chris, was that a traumatic moment for you when you learned the news?

It was a sad moment, I have to say. And I mean that, actually.

Oh, my word. I spent nothing less than the Regis Professor of History.

She was a very remarkable lady.

Yeah. And she spoke for us all.

I have to say, I didn't think that we'd be, we'd be talking about any of Regis, our first topic.

Dominic, can I go back to what I was going to say before you do diverted us?

Yeah, you're always welcome to do that, Tom.

Okay. So the takeaway, I mean, there are lots of takeaways from this book, which is on an absolutely comprehensive scale, because the takeaway that I found particularly intriguing is that you basically say that the whole question of did they succeed or fail?

Is a nonsense question. Towards the end of the book, you say, we don't say of an ocean storm, a solar flare or 16 days of heavy snowfall, that they succeeded or fail.

We simply measure their effects.

Yeah. I think that the problem with asking whether a revolution failed or succeeded is that, I mean, you might argue that, you know, look, we don't say that about 16 days of heavy snowfall, but that's because snow is a natural phenomenon.

Whereas a revolution is a political phenomenon driven by a political intention.

And so we ought to be able to ask the question, was the intention fulfilled?

Is there a match between outcomes and intentions?

And if there is, we can say it was a success.

And if there isn't, we can say it was a failure.

But the problem with that is that a revolution doesn't actually have an intention.

It has thousands of intentions.

This revolution was not planned in advance.

It was very chaotic in the way it unfolded.

A lot of entropy was built into the whole process.

Groups and people kept seceding from the common enterprise.

And so the question, what was the intention driving the revolution has no answer.

There were thousands of potentially conflicting intentions.

And so that makes the question, was it a success or not?

A problematic question because for some it was a huge success.

For others, it was a disastrous failure.

I mean, people died, their lives, there is everything for this revolution.

So it makes more sense, it seems to me, to think of the revolution as a process.

I mean, I like to think of it as a sort of, as a collision chamber at the heart of the 19th century.

Everything fell into this chamber.

It got crushed together with everything else under conditions of extreme density and pressure.

And then these entities showered out the other end of the process into the rest of the 19th century.

But everything was changed.

No one was the same shape, no ideas were bent out of shape.

Some things disappeared, others appeared.

And so that's the way I like to think.

I think we should be thinking about this revolution as a kind of engine of change at the heart of the 19th century.

So if we go back to the very basics, your book starts with a couple of thematic chapters where you're talking about kind of poverty in Europe and the condition of people in the cities and people in the countryside and so on and so forth.

But so Europe in the 1840s.

So this is the first decade of the life of Queen Victoria.

Railways are beginning to come in.

It's not yet a landscape completely transformed by the telegraph, let's say.

So in some ways it feels, if you're living in a little village somewhere in the middle of Poland, well, what's now Poland or France or something, it probably feels like a very sleepy world.

But in the cities, there's a tremendous sense of velocity, exchange of ideas, new technology.

But Europe in the 1840s, what is it about Europe in the 1840s that makes it?

I mean, it's not an Asien regime.

So what is it that explains the sort of, why is it a revolutionary tinderbox as a word?

I mean, that's a terrible cliche, but you know what I mean?

Well, it's a revolutionary tinderbox for lots of different reasons.

I mean, one is the point you've already mentioned that, you know, a lot of people are under very high levels of social and economic stress.

And this stress isn't a constant.

It sort of pulses.

It comes at some moments and then recedes because this is a system.

It's not that everybody's that there's a generalized shortage of food.

There's plenty of food to go around, but every so often there are disruptions to the food supply, as indeed we're experiencing again today.

That's one of the parallels between then and now.

And these short term disruptions to the food supply can push people in huge numbers over the edge, over the brink of subsistence into real crisis.

And this one of the moments at which this happens is 1846, 47 is a very bad, very cold harvest.

The price of grains shoots up.

And because most of what most poor people eat is bread or grain based food of one kind or another, they can't substitute for it with other foods.

They can't just eat chicken instead or cake as famously Marie Antoinette had once suggested they should do in the context of an earlier revolution.

So they're pushed into a genuine state of emergency.

And that has the effect of bringing people onto the streets.

That means there are a lot of discontented, angry, resentful apprentices, artisans and so on, available in the big cities for a tumult if a tumult should arise.

So that's part of the background.

But there's also the fact that this is a continent which is incubating lots of different political movements.

I mean, one of the fascinating things about the 1830s and 40s in Europe is the extraordinary political biodiversity.

There are several hundred different kinds of socialism.

People talk about socialism, but the term has no fixed meaning.

And Marx is around and he's commenting on things in a sort of very brilliant and modern and polemical and rather one sided way.

But Marxism has not yet dominated this spectrum of socialism.

So an immense diversity of left wing thinking about, you know, how to live a better life, how to create a form of state order which allows humans to flourish and so on and so forth in the broadest possible sense.

And then there are many liberalisms, the liberals are the people who want to somehow balance, you know, authoritarian structures like absolute monarchy,

of which there are plenty in Europe in the 1830s and 40s with the power of parliaments.

And then there are conservatives who are starting to think about how you preserve what is valuable about the Ancien regime in the face of this tide of change that everyone recognizes as there.

I mean, even Metony speaks of, he says, we must build a dam to contain the flood.

And already in that formulation, we see that, you know, this man who's the kind of elder statesman of the continent, the chancellor or the foreign minister at various points in his career of the Austrian Empire,

even he recognizes that there's this river like flow of change, which you're either going to swim with or try and dam in and stop.

And everybody acknowledges that it's there.

So it's a time when everybody recognizes the potential for conflict and change, but people aren't sure about how this can be achieved.

And the people who are at the top, to my way of thinking, they don't look peculiarly repressive or indeed authoritarian.

So if you take France, for example, King Louis Philippe, he is famously the kind of bourgeois king.

Everybody makes fun of him. They say he looks like a pair. He seems like a nice guy.

He's like a sort of middle class Englishman.

He's got Gizzo, who I think is his prime minister, isn't he, who's very civilized, cerebral kind of.

Yeah, he wrote over 70 books.

Yeah. So, you know, if you're casting a film, these are not people who make satisfying repressive villain, top-hatted villains or something.

No, you'd probably choose Tom Hanks to play Louis Philippe, I think, rather than some bad guy.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So what is it they are doing wrong, as it were?

Well, that's a very good question. Actually, Gizzo was not doing a huge amount wrong.

It was actually in many ways quite a successful government, as you say it.

But it was a government that had managed to wind up in a kind of war with the media.

That's one of the problems, that there was this shower, a kind of flood of invective against the monarchy,

which denounced the king as corrupt, as disgusting.

The image of his face as a pair and so on, it sounds rather innocent to me.

It's just, you know, that rather likable fruit.

But in fact, you know, I'm thinking now of a particular cartoon, which is widely reprinted.

I wanted to appear in the early 1840s.

The cartoon, which shows a pair-like object seated on top of a thing called a coque de melasse,

a sort of barrel full of molasses.

But you have to remember that molasses was the sort of slang word for excrement in French.

And underneath it is a royal-looking chair.

And this horrible contraption is supposed to be the king, you know, a pear-shaped head

and a barrel full of excrement and a nice sort of antique chair.

And it's being gawked at by a group of French people who are standing around it, looking at it disgustedly.

That's the sort of image of the regime.

And at the same time, there's the problem of who is represented in the representative politics of this monarchy.

It is a constitutional monarchy, and that's one of the weird things.

You know, they've had a revolution in 1830.

They revised the constitution that they got in 1814.

So it is a constitutional, in that sense, a liberal order.

But the constitution enfranchises fewer than 2% of the population.

This is a male franchise only, but it's a tiny, tiny fragment of the wealthiest.

And obviously in France, there is the memory of the Primal Revolution.

There is.

The 1789 Revolution, the memory of the terror, the memory of the Napoleonic regime.

So France is peculiarly associated with revolution.

But the thing about 1848 is that it's not confined to France and that it spreads across...

In fact, I mean, in 1848, it's not initially France where a revolution breaks out, is it?

It's in Sicily.

It is in Sicily.

In fact, I mean, you say the French have this revolution in their minds.

Of course they do.

It's playing like an old film at the backs of their heads, but it's doing that right across Europe.

I mean, Europeans in general, this is something they have in common.

They have a lot in common in this Europe.

Perhaps more even than they do today.

They have common stories and narratives.

And one of these narratives is the narrative of this revolution in France.

If it's sequence of phases, the liberal revolution, followed by the Jacobin terrorist experiment,

followed by the directory, followed by Napoleon, they all have that story in their heads.

So they all have that script available.

But that script isn't necessarily a sort of recipe for revolution because the memory of

revolution is also an argument against revolution.

Those who remember the Jacobin terror, for example, say, let's not take any risks.

I mean, Giseaux's father was executed when he was five years old.

His father was executed by the guillotine in Nîmes.

And he remembered that, of course, it was a traumatic memory and he remained deeply opposed to the death penalty

and opposed to violent or extremist political experiments of any kind.

So he was a conservative in one way and would fall when the 1848 revolution broke out.

But he was also someone who remembered very vividly the French Revolution,

but he remembered it as a lesson against risking experiments.

So when we get to, let's say, the end of 1847, there'd been ban harvests, there'd been food shortages.

So to give us, I mean, just to remind people about the map of Europe, you have France,

there was no Germany, Germany's fragmented.

There's a kind of German confederation, isn't there?

Yes, there's a loose confederation of German states called the Deutsche Bund,

which consists of 39 sovereign states.

Switzerland is still a very loosely confederated state.

It's not really a state at all.

In fact, the cantons are virtually independent with a very weak government,

which moves from one place to another.

There is no Italy.

And North Italy is ruled by Austria.

North Eastern Italy is ruled by Austria.

Lombardy and Venetia are both under Austrian control.

Piedmont is independent and then you have the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Yeah, so that's a crucial thing as well, isn't it?

The Pope is a temporal ruler as well as a spiritual ruler.

The Pope has his own state.

That's another exotic feature of the European people at this time.

And another exotic sort of piece of local color is the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the South,

which is the bizarrely named amalgam of Sicily, the island,

and of the Neapolitan mainland of the south of Italy, south of the Papal States.

So there are lots of states that don't exist anymore.

On the other hand, there is a state that didn't exist and does now, and that's Poland.

Poland is nowhere on the map because in the 18th century it had been partitioned

by its three neighboring states, the Prussians, the Austrians, and the Russians.

So there's no Polish state, but there is very much a Polish nation

with a memory of what it was like to inhabit the great Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

And that again is a factor in the revolution because these unhappy Poles

are going to play a very important role in carrying the agenda of revolution from one place to another.

And so, Chris, that is one further element.

So you've talked about the legacy of the French Revolution and the social pressures,

but this is also an age of nationalism.

And you have a brilliant description that its effect on the revolutions of 1880 as a whole

was like that of heroin on the body and mind of an addict.

So that is something that is enhancing the revolutionary spirit

but also turning it into courses that the powers that be don't recognize.

Absolutely. Nationalism is the most difficult theme for 1848

because after 1848 happened, the memory of 1848 was processed

by the national movements of Italy, Germany, France, and later of Hungary and so on.

And it's still part of the national memory of Hungary

where Viktor Orbar never fails to mention the struggles for Hungarian freedom in 1848,

always distorting them and turning them obviously to contemporary objectives.

So nationalism is part of what shapes what we remember about 1848.

And so we have to think our way past that lens,

that lensing effect, if you like, and put ourselves in a world where nationalism is present

and has a drug-like effect on people, but it's a periodic effect.

People can become extremely excited.

They wear national clothing when they come together

and they see everybody else wearing their red caps or their blue cinched jackets

or whatever it is, whether they're Croats or Hungarians

or Germans wearing national costume.

The effect on people is absolutely overwhelming.

The emotional power of these moments of patriotic feeling is extraordinary.

So in one way it brings people together and it submerges them in a larger collective self.

On the other hand, it also divides them because, you know, the Hungarians,

when they rise up against the Austrians, they find themselves dealing with national movements

of the Slovaks, the Croats, and the Romanians,

people who are minorities within the Kingdom of Hungary

who don't wish to be ruled by an independent Hungary

or rather be ruled from more distant, more impartial Vienna.

So it's a very complex presence.

And the other interesting thing about nationalism,

and nationalism has this peculiar, almost magical effect,

that it comes with the illusion that it is old.

So when people experience national feeling,

they feel they're inheriting something from the Middle Ages

or even before that, something very, very ancient.

Ancient Magyars or whoever it might be.

Ancient Magyars, exactly.

Magyars spreading out in the 11th century across the Danubian plain and so on.

Whereas in fact, these nationalist experiences are very new.

They're created by newspapers and communication networks

and the national clothing people wear is mostly an invented retro style

that people have come up with in the 19th century.

Like the kilts, Tom.

Inventive traditions, exactly.

I mean, on that topic, you have a wonderful quote by Metanik,

the kind of the conservatives, conservative, the Austrian Foreign Minister,

to Count Rezetzky, who's basically the military commander

with responsibility for Austrian possessions in North Italy.

And he's writing in August 1847, so just before the explosion,

that if the past imposed great efforts on us,

it was at least better than the present.

You and I know how to fight against bodies,

but against phantoms, material force can achieve nothing.

And today we are fighting phantoms everywhere.

Is he expressing something that is commonly felt by the elites in this period?

That they're aware, of course, of the revolutionary potential

because they have the history of the French Revolution,

but that the manifestation of it is something strange, new,

that they don't know how to fight, they don't know how to cope with.

Yes, and nationalism is a phantom and a terrifying phantom for Metanik

because he's a senior politician in a multinational empire.

I mean, we would call it multinational now.

It's that word then, but it's a commonwealth of ethnicities

with, you know, 11 or 12 different major languages

and many other dialects beside.

So for an empire like that, nationalism is a dissolving poison.

It will simply tear the thing apart.

And so, you know, he's right to see nationalism as a threat.

It's also a threat in another way, and that is that,

although it may not voice a principled objection to monarchy,

nationalists can also be monarchists.

Nevertheless, nationalism proposes implicitly at least

that the center of authority, the kind of center of gravity of a population

is not its dynasty, but its ethnic substance.

And that means the people.

So it's a way of taking power from the crown

and placing it in the heart of an ethnic group,

which is, of course, disturbing to the holders of traditional power in Europe.

So to sort of turn to the narrative,

I mean, Tom mentioned that the first sort of flash point is actually not in France,

but in Sicily and Palermo.

I think one of the things that your account of it does quite brilliantly

is to show all the contingencies and all the twists and turns.

And France is the big, I mean, France is the big one, isn't it?

So that starts in the first weeks of 1848,

and it's all to do with banquets, the cancellation of political banquets,

a very sort of banal trigger you one would think for a continental-wide upsurge

of popular and enthusiasm.

One could sort of quip and say, you know,

only France would rise up in revolution because of a cancelled banquet.

But, you know, it's true.

The Parisian revolution is important.

But, you know, think about that speech by Tocqueville,

which is the Tocqueville which Tom cited at the beginning,

or Inspector Cluzot cited,

that, you know, Tocqueville can make this prophecy

because he's been reading the papers,

and the papers are full of tumults from all over Europe by the end of January,

which is when he speaks, the 27th of January.

By the end of January, there's news coming up from the south of Italy,

from Palermo and from Naples, but also from Switzerland.

I mean, Switzerland had already had a civil war in the previous year,

the Sonderbundt Krieg, as it's called in Switzerland,

which creates, you know, a modern constitutional state.

In fact, it creates the Switzerland we have today.

The modern Switzerland today is born in 1848.

So that's already been happening,

and it's widely reported in the press.

The horizons of press reportage are very much European.

They're not, you know, siloed in national or regional or territorial silos.

They're very much looking to the extent of the continent.

And, you know, Tocqueville is drawing on that when he says, you know,

this storm that you see now on the horizon is coming for us.

So the contagiousness of these tumults is already recognizable

by the time the revolution happens in Paris.

And the interesting thing about this year, Dominic mentioned

the contingent sort of happenstance quality of this.

It is on how virtually every one of these uprisings

begins almost kind of by accident.

So the one in Palermo starts when a poster appears,

which simply says, you know, a few days there's going to be a revolution.

Get prepared. Sicilians rise up.

Your moment of freedom has arrived.

Signed Comitato Revolutionario, the Revolutionary Committee.

Now, there was no Revolutionary Committee.

This whole thing was a prank put up by a guy called Bagnasco.

I just thought, I think maybe people will rise up

if I put a, you know, a sheet on a wall.

So he did that.

And sure enough, on the day that the revolution had been announced for,

everybody did turn up to see what was going to happen.

And nothing happened because nothing had been planned,

except that the troops had been doubled and tripled throughout Palermo.

So there are many more troops than usual and inevitably,

you know, a clash broke out between the people and the troops.

And that was the beginning of the revolution.

And something very similar happened in Paris, you know,

shots fired by accident and so on led to a massive upheaval.

La Martin, a French sort of, you know, liberal slash radical politician,

very much involved in the February Revolution.

It said it was almost as if the revolution was engendered

by the curiosity of the crowds that had gathered

to see if a revolution would happen.

Yeah. But also, as if I had to say in the case of Paris,

we were talking about the silent film playing in people's heads,

that Louis Philippe doesn't want to be Louis XVI.

As soon as the revolution breaks out,

it's precisely because he has the memory of 1789

and what happened afterwards.

So he's like, OK, I'm out of here. I'm gone. I'm abdicating.

He's gone, absolutely.

And he actually didn't need to do it. Is that right? Would that be fair?

He could have stuck it out, I suppose.

I mean, the main problem was that the French police in Paris,

the municipal guards and the mobile guards and the National Guard

and the army, in fact, had all been preparing for decades

for a conspiratorial revolution organised by underground networks.

And so they were going to concentrate on the areas of Paris

where the trouble was starting and crush it there.

And then, you know, the plan was all organised around the idea

of a conspiratorily organised and planned revolution.

But what actually happened was more like a societal tsunami.

The society threw off the regime and decided

it didn't fear the forces of order anymore

and it didn't respect the government anymore.

And that's a really dangerous thing.

And there was absolutely nothing that Louis Philippe...

I mean, at one point, for example, it was impossible to deploy troops in Paris

because the crowds were simply too large.

The troops couldn't move through them.

So they simply faced a situation that they were not prepared

to handle and were incapable of handling.

And quite wisely, Louis Philippe decided,

well, really, my time's up and it's good.

So France is obviously, as Dominic said, the big one.

It's the great monarchy.

It's got the history of the French Revolution.

Narratives of revolution in France are something

that people can comprehend and understand.

But what then happens is that revolution starts to spread

in a cascade effect across Europe.

And I don't want to frighten people,

because we're going to have a break in a minute.

But this is what you say about this process.

From the beginning of March 1848,

it becomes impossible to trace the revolutions

as a linear sequence from one theater of turbulence to the next.

We enter the fission phase

in which almost simultaneous detonations

create complex feedback loops.

The narrative bursts its banks.

The historian despairs.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

So I think we should take a break at this point.

And then when we come back,

perhaps you could express why you despair

and how you triumphantly overcome your despair

and give us a sense of this cascade effect.

Absolutely.

So we'll see you back in a few minutes.

My dear, good, beloved wife,

farewell, live well for the times

as is called eternal, but is not.

Bring up our now only your children to be fine people.

Sell our few possessions with the help of our friends.

God and good people will help you.

Oh, everything I feel runs away in tears.

So I say again, live well, dear wife, farewell.

Thousand, thousand, the last kisses from your Robert.

Written in Vienna on the 9th of November at five in the morning.

Oh, that's six.

It will all be over.

So that Tom Holland is described as one of the most

affecting passages of 19th century German prose

by the readest professor of history

at Cambridge University, Christopher Clark.

And I don't think, Christopher, you've ever heard it read

with such feeling.

Have you?

I'm still, I'm still drawing my eyes.

It's wonderful, isn't it?

And Spectaclusso is joined by Hair Flick.

Tom, that is very cruel.

And I think a lot of listeners will be quite shocked at that remark.

I think they will.

I think they will.

But Dominic, yes.

So tell us who is talking there.

So we were talking about how the story was going to spread.

And this is a guy called Robert Bloom, who is the son of a Cooper,

I believe, and a seamstress or something like that.

I can't remember.

But he had become an apprentice bronze worker

and then was a great autodidact and had become a pamphleteer

and a poet and a radical, a German radical who believed

in a united liberal democratic Germany.

And his trajectory is he becomes one of the faces

of the German Revolution of the Frankfurt Parliament.

And it all ends in tears for him because he's shot in Vienna

having written this beautiful letter so beautifully read.

So his story, Christopher, is the kind of story

of what happens to the revolution in microcosm, isn't it?

High hopes, heady excitement, liberalism, and then bang,

end of story, he's dead.

Yes, yes, it is.

And for me, Robert Bloom is the kind of human face of the revolution

because his story captures so much of that move

from the extreme euphoria of the spring days.

I mean, the revolution, the narrative is complicated,

but it's not that complicated.

There's a spring, there's a summer,

and there's a kind of autumn and winter.

And the spring is all about everybody is out on the streets,

perhaps on barricades, but perhaps simply marching

or taking part in demonstrations.

There's an extraordinary sense of euphoria,

and I'm thinking here of one account from Berlin,

from a young radical law student who says,

my heart was beating so hard,

I felt it was going to blow a hole in my chest.

I had to get out of my room.

So he goes out of his sort of student gigs,

finds himself on the street amongst thousands of people,

and he says, I felt I could hear everyone else's hearts beating.

This experience, and there's endless testimony to this,

this was an experience of submersion in the collective self

of euphoria, collective euphoria,

which people remembered for the rest of their lives.

So that's how the revolution starts.

Then in the summer comes the kind of breakdown of unity,

the fractious disagreements between different bits of the revolution.

And Robert Bloom, who's part of that spring moment

and travels to the Frankfurt Parliament,

first to the pre-parliament and then to the parliament itself in May,

is full of high hopes for what's going to happen,

this massive work of transformation,

which he sees is about to take place.

And he joins the parliament, takes part in its business,

and in the summer he watches the project of the revolution

start to fray, to come apart.

And by the autumn he's exhausted by it

and decides to go to Vienna

to bring sort of fraternal greetings to the Viennese parliament.

But unfortunately, just as he arrives,

the city is surrounded by the Austrian armies

and the revolution is crushed in Austria.

A very violent process which results in hundreds of dead

and Bloom is arrested.

And although he pleads parliamentary immunity,

he says, I'm a member of the Frankfurt Parliament,

I have immunity, they say, yeah, whatever,

and execute him, as you say, on the 9th of November.

And there's a song about this,

which tells the story of his walk to the place where he was executed.

And in the course of this song,

the point is made, the observation is made,

which we have from several sources,

that one of the officers commanding the firing squad

noticed a tear rolling down his face

and sort of patted him on the shoulder and said,

you know, kind of Saga, Bloom,

he says, no, for we were something like that.

You know, don't worry, old chap,

it'll all be over like in a jiffy, right?

I don't know if anybody would be comforted

by these words in a situation like that, but there you are.

And Bloom turns to this man

and pulls himself up to his full height,

which is about five foot four,

and says, this tear is not the tear

of the parliamentary deputy, Robert Bloom.

It's the tear of the father and the husband.

So in other words, he insists on his right

to experience a private emotion

in the middle of this public event.

And that tells us something about what a revolution is like

in mid-19th century Europe.

It means bringing people out of their private lives

into public roles, which they've never had before.

I mean, people had to discover their public selves,

but they brought their private selves with them

into this new public work of revolutionary activism.

And he articulates that in this song,

and there's a wonderful moment in this song

where it says,

The tear for one's wife and children does not dishonour a man.

That is the ethics, if you like, of a middle-class revolution.

I want to go to the barricades after that.

Tom is very moved by that.

That was so stirring.

That's the best song we've ever had on the podcast, isn't it?

We don't really do singing.

I mean, we should have more singing.

I think the last one was Diamond's Your Girl's Best Friend.

Yes, you sang that, but Chris's singing was,

I think it's fair to say, in a very, very different league.

I'm happy to see that.

So Christopher, the people who are in the revolution,

are they mainly people like Robert Bloom?

Are they high-minded, idealistic, young?

Well, Dominic, isn't the archetype of that

is a guy called Friedrich Hecker?

Is that right?

Who kind of legal student from Heidelberg,

who is, I mean, much more than Bloom,

seems to be the prototype for Che Guevara,

and the idea of revolutionary is romantic,

has a famous beard that everyone copies.

So can you just tell us about him?

Because he seemed a very romantic fit,

I mean, romantic in every sense of the word.

Yeah, I mean, Hecker's a fascinating figure,

because Bloom and Hecker had been very close,

and they'd collaborated and published in the same journals,

and they were part of this radical network

that existed in Germany in the 1840s.

But Hecker decides that he's had enough of the parliament.

Parliaments are slow, they're talkative,

it's just talk, talk, talk.

And this is the great point of contrast, isn't it,

between those who want to constitutions and those who want...

That's right, exactly.

And it's a little bit like, you know,

it's also a kind of confusion

or a contrast in political timing.

So, you know, on the one hand, parliaments are slow,

they're ponderous, they're a little bit boring.

I mean, sadly, I mean,

it's just a fact about parliaments,

they're supposed to be boring, and they should be.

But they're full of procedural details,

and people have to take their time,

have to wait their time to talk,

and they mustn't speak longer than a certain time, and so on.

So it's very rule-bound,

whereas Hecker wants to break away from all that

and go for direct action.

So he sets up this kind of armed insurrection in Barton,

which goes horribly, horribly wrong.

He wastes a lot of people's lives,

doesn't achieve anything.

Eventually, he takes another shot at it in the following year,

but then flees to First of Switzerland

and then to the United States,

where he later, by the way, plays a role as a commander

in the Union Army.

So a lot of these people have very interesting, you know,

afterlives after this moment of 1848.

But, you know, for Bloom and Hecker,

this is a kind of parting of the ways.

You know, Hecker represents that violent

revolution by direct action,

which Bloom believes is doomed to fail,

and in fact, the fate of Hecker's escapade

shows that Bloom is right.

And on the other hand, Bloom remains faithful

to the Parliament, to this process of discursive

debate of discussion,

even though he knows, which is hard for a man of the left,

he knows that in 1848,

the process of election is unlikely

to produce a radical majority.

You have to work from a minority position

and argue for, you know,

for pragmatic agreements on particular policies.

And that's what Bloom decides to do.

So he becomes part of that complicated business

of Parliament, which Hecker rejects.

But it's Hecker who ends up

shaping the kind of memory of what it means

to be a revolutionary, because he styles,

you mentioned Che Guevara before,

he's a very vain man,

he wears a broad-brimmed hat and a long beard,

which comes to be known as a Hecker Bart,

a Hecker beard, a red sash,

baggy trousers tucked into

piratical boots, and so on.

So he becomes a kind of sexy

avatar of revolution,

which people find disturbing

and yet also perversely attractive.

And there are lots of cartoons

and caricatures of him.

And the interesting thing about him is,

even when he's being caricatured,

he still kind of has a certain, you know,

raw appeal.

A sort of very basic question.

So these revolutions in Germany,

I mean, Germany tends to end up,

I mean, the German speakers often tend to dominate

in 1848, because you've got what's going on in Germany,

and then you've got what's going on with Austria,

and the revolt in Hungary against Austria, and so on.

But in Germany specifically,

are we able to say what they want?

So it's because it's there, you've got a real

combination of socialism, radicalism, liberalism,

and nationalism, the idea of a Germany.

So is there ever a sort of common,

really a common program in Germany,

or is it too

confused and chaotic for that?

Well, it's all happening so fast

that there's not much time to establish

a common program. That's one of the difficulties.

And there are lots of tensions

between different objectives.

So people may share, you know,

many radicals like Bloom, for example,

believed in parliaments. They thought,

we do need a parliament. We need the people to be represented

through a process of election, and so on.

We can't just make it up as we go along.

On the other hand, they also wanted a social transformation.

They wanted the imbalance between

labour and capital to be re-rebalanced,

so that the poorest

strata of society would be better seen to.

There would be a stronger position to bargain,

for example, for improvement in their conditions.

And so they were in favour

of various forms of trade unions,

or even of state intervention in the economy

to support the working classes, this kind of thing.

But of course, the liberals

were what we would today call thatcherites.

They wanted deregulation.

They wanted the state to pull back out of the economy.

As far as they were concerned, the private

character of the economic relationships

between people was an almost sacred

conviction. And they said,

the state has no business interfering

in the relationship between an employer

and an employee. This is a form of tyranny.

And these are arguments which have not gone away,

incidentally. I mean, they're sharpened by

1848, but they have not left the world.

They're still very much at the centre of our politics,

which is another reason for taking an interest

in this very tumultuous episode.

So there are many

different, you know, agendas

maturing in that

respect, trying to balance

social and political reforms.

And at the same time, there's this question of the nation

because there is no nation's German nation

state. There are 39 different states

that a German parliament does form

and this is a remarkable thing.

It doesn't happen in Italy, but in Germany

a parliament forms to resolve

the future character of

a nation that does not exist.

I mean, that is an extraordinary state of affairs.

Of course, there is no parliamentary

building to put this parliament in.

So it's put in a church, the St. Paul's Church

of Frankfurt, a beautiful round

18th century church, a very fine

building, and it's decorated with

the red, black and gold tricolor of the

German Revolution. And it's there to discuss

the affairs of the German nation, of a

German nation state that does not yet exist.

So what happens?

What happens is people come up

with endless proposals and

disagreements. It's very difficult to get agreements

on anything. And of course, it's a little bit

like the EU today. While this imaginary

Germany is sort of trying to make decisions

about its future, that the individual

territorial states, Prussia, Saxony,

Bavaria, Wurttemberg, all the rest

of the 39 of them, have not gone

away. And they're still making decisions.

In fact, Prussia very much

takes the initiative again by the

early autumn of 1848 and

starts doing deals over issues which

are of great importance to

the German national movement.

And that is one of the things that leads

to the collapse of public esteem

for and trust in and belief

in the parliament at Frankfurt is the fact

that Prussia seems to be in a position

to defend the interests of the

German nation better than

the Frankfurt parliament is. After all, the

Frankfurt parliament has no army. It has a

tiny sort of shrunken bureaucracy, but

it has no means of projecting power

or of making people do what it wants

them to. So under the

pressure of all that sort of powerlessness,

it starts to fray

and it starts to wane

as a presence in people's minds.

Just before we come to the backlash,

can I ask a question that I know a lot of British

reviewers have already commented on? Why

not Britain? So in other words,

now you will say, you might

say, well, there's a big chartist meeting

in Kennington or whatever, but I mean

the truth of the matter is

1848 is not a date to conjure

within Britain and Britain does look in that

regard like

a bit of an exception. Now, is that

too strong or are you going to? No, it's not

too strong. It's true. I mean, Britain,

there is no revolution on the British

mainland or in Ireland, which is where

a tumult had also been expected. I mean

Ireland was seen as the most tumultuous

part of the United Kingdom

and that is a very interesting and important

fact. It's interesting in this connection

to read the Sydney Morning Herald

down in Australia where I come from. I come from

Sydney and it's still going strong, the

Sydney Morning Herald, but anyway, in the context

of 1848, they had to wait a long time

to get the news. I mean, it was months and months

and months before the news reached

Sydney, but when they commented on this,

they said, why have things been so

quiet in the motherland,

meaning Britain, whereas France and

Germany and Italy and so on have experienced

these sanguinary revolutions

and the good burgers of the Sydney Morning

Herald conclude, well, the reason is

because when you have colonies, you can take

all your trouble makers and

expose them out to the Scourts of

Empire, to the outskirts of empire. In other

words, here in Sydney, so we're getting all

the trouble makers, the Sons of Free

London, you know, anybody who's sort of

drawn the attention of the police in Ireland

winds up in Australia on some kind of

transportation charge. So

we end up, as it were,

bearing the consequence. That's not really the

reason, surely? It's part of the reason. There are

several reasons. One is, I mean, that Ireland

obviously was coming to the end of an

absolute, the unexampled demographic

shock in the form of the Irish famine.

Because even then, you quote this

astonishing thing that the Prussians

are sending inspectors

to Ireland to see how you repress

a revolution. Well, this is another

part of the story. See, there are multiple reasons

for this. One is, it really

is true that the British have been quite good

at selecting key

trouble makers and moving them out of the zone

of trouble, mainly through transportation,

partly to Australia and partly to South

Africa, to the Cape Colony. And in

fact, that practice leads to

movements in both those places against

the further transportation of convicts.

So it's partly that. It's partly the

famine in Ireland, which obviously areas which

are suffering from very serious hunger of that kind.

We see it elsewhere in Europe as well. Don't become

active during the revolution because people are just too

depleted. And then finally

it's the fact that Britain is the most

robustly policed country in Europe

by a very large margin.

And the Prussians recognize

this. And that's why they send in the summer of 1840

they send a fact finding group to

London in the first instance, but then to Dublin

to Cork and other locations

to find out what are the British getting

right. And how can we the Prussians

get better at policing

our own population. Indeed, they do

introduce various changes to Prussian policing on the

back of what they find out about British

policing. So it's a combination of all those

different things. And also the fact that

Britain is able to keep the price of staple

goods down fairly low during

1848 by dismantling

the tariff protections

of Britain's outlying colonies, places

like Jamaica and

or by reducing the fiscal

burden of places like Ceylon

for example. And as a result of that

of those measures, those sort of counter

if you'd like prophylactic

counter-revolutionary measures, you see

unrest breakout on several of those

peripheral locations.

Ceylon has a massive

uprising against the British

the structures of British rule

in 1848-49. There are peoples in

Jamaica and unrest

along many other parts of the periphery

of the British Empire. So

one could say there's a British 1848

just not in Britain.

You tell the extraordinary

story of British repression

of revolution

in the Ionian islands in Greece.

So Corfu and so on.

That's a fascinating story because

it's a little scatter of

seven tiny islands and the one that's

particularly important in 1849

is Kefalonia.

And on that island there is a sort of rural

uprising which is put down with exemplary

by the British authorities. And I think

it's quite an interesting example because

when I was at school

we were told the answer to that question

why wasn't there a revolution in Britain

was that Britain was already so liberal

that people's desire for reform

was already satiated thanks to the

Glorious Reform Act of 1832 and so on

and the Chartists were okay, well

they were

a movement for reform not for revolution

and your Chartist was a sensible kind

of fellow who would rather go home and have tea with his wife

than set fire to someone else's house

and this kind of thing. And so those are

the arguments that were made

and there was the liberality of British institutions

that say Britain from revolution

but on the Ionian islands

we don't see too much liberality, what we see

is a lot of flogging and hanging

and in fact there's a

kind of Europe wide

scandal over how the British

handled this uprising in Kefalonia.

And so that's an interesting example

of when you actually do see

British authorities facing

a local tumult of the kind

that broke out across the continent

they behave more or less as the Austrians

and the Germans and the Prussians

and other European states too.

But is there no element of truth

to the traditional story that you were taught?

I think there is an element of truth

and the element of truth and it connects

that argument about liberality

with the argument about policing

and that is that when the

mass meeting on Kennington Common took place

that Dominic referred to

there's no mass meeting of charters

I mean it was very alarming at the time

people were worried about what would happen

in fact Metonich who was on his way out of Europe

fleeing to Britain stopped in Rotterdam

for a few days because they were waiting

out the news of what was

It rained very heavily didn't it?

The rain stopped play basically

which is never a health

but in addition

80,000 special constables turned up

including Gladstone

the future Napoleon III

who'd signed up as a special constable

was hoping to get his hands on some charters

and give them a right drubbing

never got the chance to do that

but there's a commentary by a Tory

at the time called Sibthorpe

who says that by God

if only those special constables

had a chance to get stuck into those charters

they would have given them such a hiding

as no man ever received

and I think he wasn't wrong

what's special about Britain

is that it's part of its own society

counter-revolutionary forces

on a scale which

we don't see anywhere else in Europe

that Gizor can't summon up

80,000 special constables

wielding clubs

because these people are volunteers

they're not even paid

they want to get stuck in

so there's a sense in which you have

a sufficiently large

stakeholder element

in the society

and the defence

of the current political order

against those who would challenge it

I'm talking about counter-revolutionary

it's a huge canvas to try and cover

in just under an hour

but when we get to the late summer autumn

there is this backlash

do you think that was

the Austrians sending in the troops

the French turned to

the guy who becomes Napoleon III

and so on and so forth

do you think ultimately that was inevitable

but do you think

that was always likely to happen

that the forces of reaction

were always too strong

and that the Robert Blooms of this world

were never really going to get what they wanted

that's a really interesting question

was it always going to happen that way

some of these outcomes are profoundly surprising

the fact that someone

like Napoleon III

he's not Napoleon III yet

but the fact that the man who will become

Emperor Napoleon III

President of the Republic in December

1848 which is one of the deathblows

to the revolutionary movement in Paris

in France as a whole

that's actually a very unexpected and rather

odd outcome because

in the 1830s and 40s he'd been a figure of ridicule

so he kind of comes from nowhere

from left fields a bit like Trump

in fact in many ways he is a Trumpian kind of character

so that was

there's nothing inevitable about that

what seemed at the time to be unlikely

was the rapid success of the revolutions

if you like sequences of very unlikely

events

it's unlikeliness following unlikeliness

and so nothing in a way about any of this

was particularly likely

but nevertheless in retrospect

obviously it becomes

clear that the forces of the Ancien

regime which is not really

the right term for them but the forces of order

that had been challenged

by the revolution they had cards up

their sleeves more cards up their sleeves

and perhaps they seemed to

when the revolution was initially in the full flush

of its success they had loyal armed forces

that was one of the most important things

and another sort of

a thing that I think they didn't know themselves

was they had the support of a surprisingly

large part of the population

it seemed during the revolution

that the liberals

and the radicals are absolutely making the running

all the newspapers all the pamphlets

all the posters all the public

manifestations were for revolution

in one form or another

but what emerged as the revolution began to wane

was a sort of backlash

of popular conservatism

that no one had really known was there

and this is one of the great sort of discoveries

for the conservatives

that you know perhaps it's us

this is what they're saying you know perhaps we're the ones

who really know the little people

the revolutions were living in a bubble

in an urban bubble

people like each other

so this is your 1968 parallel right

1968 ends with the election of Richard Nixon

of Vietnam continues and all these kinds of things

and you know when president de Gaulle

calls out the people of France

and actually there are more of them than they are

of the people throwing cobblestones

of the police right it's the same story

but in a way isn't it even more primal

than that that perhaps you we think

of 1848 as the revolutionary

year but it's also the year that gives

birth perhaps to conservatism

as a political force in the way that we would

understand it now absolutely that's

the complexity of 1848 that revolution

and counterrevolution are born

twins in the same bed

that's the weird thing about 1848

it's a fascinating thing but of course

counterrevolution you know

conservatism is not the same as reaction

there are reactionaries who are saying

you know we've got to unmake this revolution

we've got to turn the clock of history

back but they are in a small minority

and they all fail

whereas the conservatives who are going to

shape the future are conservatives

who've learned from the revolution

being the classic. Bismarck is a classic example

a man of brilliant

intellect who immediately sees

this revolution cannot be

undone it's a new point of departure

we've got to live with it and anyone who tries

to resuscitate the pre-revolutionary past

is a fool and throughout

his life he recognized that

1848 was the sort of pivotal moment

in his own career it was the enabling

moment that without it he could never

have become the person that he became

because it was the revolution that allowed

him to enter public life and because

it unleashes the power of nationalism right

because it creates the idea of the nation

as the main vehicle

for kind of popular idealism and aspirations

and crowds and modernity

nationalism is modern

after 1848 isn't it? Well that's right

although Bismarck sees very clearly that

nationalism is going to have to be a managed force

it'll have to be managed by a media

which is itself carefully

managed and overseen and that's the great

lesson of 1848 that nationalism

kind of as a free-floating

potential in European society is not going to

achieve very much but nationalism

when it's yoked to state power

will achieve enormous amounts and that's

what happens after 1848

So lots of the more radical

constitutions and so on get repealed

and to that extent we could perhaps talk

of the ambitions and hopes of the more

radical revolutionaries failing

but one of the things that struck me in the book was

that actually there are a number of constitutions

in Europe that

are still kind of basically current today

that do reach back to 1848

so you mentioned Switzerland has reached back to

1847 but the Netherlands

and I thought the most interesting one was Denmark

which had been the kind of absolute monarchy

and then becomes a kind of model

liberal democracy and that

constitution stays in place after 1848

Absolutely to this day

the Danes still celebrate

the day of the promulgation of that

constitution during basic law

so it's you know

just one of many examples of constitutions

that still survive today, I mean the Swiss constitution

of 1848, it's not until 1848

they actually promulgate it

is still in force with many amendments and so on

the Dutch constitution

the revised Dutch constitution

of 1849

which comes about as a result of the 1848 revolutions

those revisions are still in place

you know in many ways the Italians too

the Italian constitution

winds up being the Piedmontese constitution

the Piedmontese constitution is issued

in March 1848, the Statuto Albertino

and it's two survives

and bits of its language are still present

in today's Italian constitution

and so are bits of the German constitution

of 1848, they're still present

in the Grundgesetz

of today's German Federal Republic

so a huge amount of what was achieved

in the course of these revolutions

did stand

the test of time

and did survive

We haven't really got time to touch it

but we have to argue that modern contemporary Catholicism

dates back to this time as well

Well that's another fascinating story

the Catholic Church

we don't have time for that

but it has to completely remake itself

and it does in the aftermath of 1848

and most of what we think of as the Catholic Church

is actually born in that moment

and your last lines so you basically say

we're not supposed to see ourselves when we look back in the past

I mean I think Tom and I would completely agree with that

however, intriguingly

you think the revolutionaries of 1848

could see themselves

in us so the resonances between

then and now you find very striking

I find them very striking

and I wanted to say two things with that

closing comment one is that the resonances

are there and the more you think about them

the more they are

and the more persuasive they seem

and the second thing is

that those people were smart

it's easy to think

of people in the past as crackpots

with flawed schemes and so on

their schemes don't come off

but actually they were incredibly

thoughtful and intelligent people

they were at least as smart as us

they were thinking about the future

so they were thinking about us

I mean even though they didn't know us individually

sadly for them but nevertheless

they were thinking about the future

and they were doing that in a very interesting

adventurous and intellectually

resourceful way

and that's one of the real fascinations

of this revolution

a wild experimental laboratory

and that's why

I think it repays our attention today

and that's why the book

really is an attempt to refute a comment

made by a very beloved teacher

actually a history teacher at school

who announced that when we were doing 1848

he said to us boys

the 1848 revolutions are complicated

and they're a failure

I remember thinking

I remember thinking that's a very

unattractive combination

and the book is really

a document to my discovery

of how wrong that is

it's not entirely wrong, they are complicated

but they're not a failure

and they're very very interesting

Well the book is Revolutionary Spring

Fighting for a New World 1848

to 1849, it's a huge book

but enormously readable

I can't recommend it enough, Tom you enjoyed reading it didn't you?

I really did

as my Twitter followers will know I

quoted vast chunks of it

So Christopher thank you so much for joining us

thank you for

enduring Tom's shocking French accent

in the first half

And Dominic's, I mean appalling

German accent

Christopher agreed that you were very harsh on it

I was deeply moved by both performances

Thank you

Wow, you did a bit of singing yourself

which is always

good on the rest of this history

Do you have a

revolutionary song from 1848 that you could take us out with?

Well yes, there's a nice one

that the poet Freilichkart did

in the form of a translation

of Robbie Burns' song

for all that, a man's a man for all that

He translated it into

really beautiful German

and it's really one of the loveliest songs of 1848

Take it away

Thank you very much

Goodbye everyone

Goodbye

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