The Revolutions in Europe 1848-1849: From Reform to Reaction (review)

The Revolution in Europe 1848--1849: From Reform to Reaction. Edited by R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000) 250 pp. $60.00

Although hardly comparable to the to-do produced by the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, the 150th anniversary of the 1848 revolutions attracted a fair amount of commemoration, especially in continental Europe. The volume under review is one of its few echoes in the English-speaking world. The book contains two general, European-wide essays, written by the editors, and specific accounts of the 1848 revolution in France by Geoffrey Ellis, in Italy by Dennis Mack Smith, in Germany by Pogge von Strandman, and in the Habsburg monarchy by Evans. There are also essays on reactions to the revolution in Great Britain by Leslie Mitchell, in Russia by David Saunders, and in the United States by Timothy Roberts and Daniel Howe. A survey of commemorations of the revolution from 1873 to 1998 by Robert Gildea rounds out the volume.

The historiography of the 1848 revolutions has undergone considerable changes during the last thirty-five years, characterized, above all, by the application of classic social history in the style of Thompson and the Annales school.¹ Increasingly, scholars have focused on collective violence and popular mass movements, on the development of organizations and associations, on the nature of political mobilization, and on the role of collective mentalities and folkloric traditions in the revolution. Turning away from the well-studied set pieces of barricade fighting in the capital cities, or the proceedings of constituent assemblies, historians have moved to a "bottom up" approach to politics, concentrating on developments in the provinces--often in the years after 1848--and on neglected social groups, especially the peasants but, more recently, women as well. Starting with the works of Vigier and Agulhon in France, and most pronounced in French historical studies--including those by American historians of France such as Merriman and Berenson--this approach has become more common in works on the 1848 revolutions in Germany, has been used in studies of 1848 in Italy, and has just begun to be applied to the Habsburg monarchy.²

Historians of 1848 have generally not yet taken the linguistic turn, although the rich forms of discourse in the "romantic revolutions" would encourage such an effort. Such an approach might be particularly helpful for understanding the development of nations, nationalism, and the nationalities conflict in east-central Europe, the long history of which is still not adequately explained, and in which the 1848 revolutions were a crucial turning point.

However, nothing of these methodologies appears in the book. The authors of the national studies and the general overviews provide solid, workmanlike syntheses of the main, high-level, political events of the 1848 revolutions, largely as seen from the capital cities, the constituent assemblies, and sometimes the battlefields. The essays on reactions to the revolution emphasize diplomatic activities, newspaper opinions, and elite political correspondence.

Far and away the most interesting and original piece in the volume is Robert Gildea's discussion of the commemorations by democrats, socialists, nationalists, and anti-imperialists. However Gildea's wide-ranging and frequently insightful account never stops to analyze any of the commemorations via the many methods, pre-- and post--linguistic turn, that have been developed for the analysis of discourse, festivity, or "places of memory."

This work is a solid, up-to-date account of the main events of the 1848 revolutions in the major countries of Europe. Short bibliographies attached to each essay include more recent works offering newer ideas. However, as far as methodology and basic approach is concerned, this book offers nothing that could not have been found in the works published during the previous commemoration, the centenary of 1948.

Jonathan Sperber
University of Missouri, Columbia

Notes

1. Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New...