The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Americas (review)

This edited collection is the result of a workshop held at London's Institute for Latin American Studies in November 1998. As the straightforward title suggests, its goal was to explore the effects of the 1848 revolutions ("the springtime of the people") on political events in the Americas. The volume's nine articles were written by Roger Magraw (on French historiography), Clara E. Lida (on events in Spain), Timothy Roberts (on the perspective from the United States), Nancy Naro (on Brazil's Praieira Revolt), David Rock (on events in Argentina), Leonor García-Millé (on Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna's observations while traveling in Europe), Cristián Gazmuri (on events in Chile), Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (on events in Peru), and Eduardo Posada-Carbó (on events in Colombia). Given the flurry of political activism and the nature of the mid-century movements, this collection raises interesting issues and questions about the connection between European and American events. In a way that is not dissimilar to the fall of the Orleanist monarchy in France and the creation of the Second Republic, Latin American artisans also took to the streets to advocate for a broader franchise and recognition of their concerns. Worker radicalism increased and liberal intellectuals sketched out broad new social visions, often utilizing words and phrases lifted from the Parisian barricades (e.g., anarchism, socialism, saintsimonism, National Workshops). This collection, like most in its genre, is uneven in the articles' quality. It is, however, successful in its larger purpose of convincing the reader that this is clearly a topic that bears further empirical investigation.

Taken as a group, the articles are weak and anecdotal in their research. To prove their collective point, that Americans absorbed and made it their own the republican rhetoric, the organizational model, and the socio-political message of the European revolutions, nearly all of the authors rely wholly on extracts from editorials published in various liberal, conservative, and artisan newspapers. We learn that Colombians spawned "Industrial Workshops," that Kossuth became the name of both a town in the United States and a newspaper in Pernambuco, that the Chileans had a song "La Igualitaria" that was comparable to The Marseillaise, and that the Young Argentina movement was modeled on Mazzini's Young Italy. Bolivia under Belzú was briefly home to the "republic of artisans," and Santiago's jubilant youth formed the Society of Equality not just to celebrate the founding of France's Second Republic, but to press for a similar opening in their own country. Though interesting and suggestive, the danger of relying wholly on highly polemical, urban, printed sources is that the words and their significance can be magnified beyond their actual impact. These editorials can provide some insight into the mentality of the chattering classes, but the voices of the artisans themselves remain absent and for a topic such as the one under investigation here, that is a major omission.

The most successful articles are those that reach beyond anecdotes and try to link ideas and comments with action. Gazmuri includes many statistics and factual data that help anchor his observations in Chilean social history; similarly Posada-Carbó points out the many ways in which Colombian conditions were very different not just from European countries but also from those of their fellow Latin Americans. Timothy Roberts makes many insightful observations about the ambivalent heritage of revolution among United States' citizens and public figures; in this country, Americans celebrated the victory of their republican form of government in the formerly monarchical European nations while fearing the revolutionary social content of those same movements. On the other hand, Naro's article about the Praieira Revolt in Brazil scarcely mentions the European revolutions and fails to make a convincing case that there was much connection between them; fortunately, Rock begins his article on Argentina by mentioning a few ways in which...