1848: Year of Revolution (review)

The revolutions of 1848 have long had a public relations problem: less acclaimed, less remembered and certainly much less esteemed than their counterparts of 1789, 1917, or, more recently, 1989. Over the years, there have been various literary efforts to restore the mid-nineteenth century uprisings to a more dignified place in the European revolutionary pantheon, and bring their excitement, struggles, aspirations, victories and defeats to a general audience. The best-known English-language example of such a work is Priscilla Robertson’s 1952 book, The Revolutions of 1848: A Social History. In spite of its name, Robertson’s was not a social history, but a dramatic narrative, focusing on climactic scenes and colorful revolutionary leaders. Since 1952, social and, more recently, cultural historians have been studying, in a more analytic mode, social conflicts, political organizations, mass movements, and cultural and discursive articulations of politics and of the nation before and during the mid-nineteenth century revolutions. Much of their work has been summed up in publications appearing during the revolutionary sesquicentenary in 1998. Reading Mike Rapport’s new history of the 1848 revolutions poses the question of whether the results of all this analytical scholarly research, focused more on groups and structures than on individuals and events, can be incorporated into a narrative history, designed for the general educated reader.

There can be no doubt that Rapport’s book is just such a history. Written in an eminently readable style, with repeated efforts to evoke the pathos of the events, the book has the familiar 1848 set pieces—the Parisian June Days, the Frankfurt National Assembly, Garibaldi’s heroism in the Roman Republic and Kossuth’s rallying Hungary to war against Austria—but it also includes less well known episodes, such as the great Romanian mass meeting in Blaj, or the uprisings in the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. As a specialist on French history, the author seems a little unsure at times when he discusses central and eastern Europe—it is incorrect, for instance, to say that the Jews were “granted full civil rights” in Prussia in 1812 (p. 170), and the parliament meeting in Prussia during 1848 was a constituent national assembly, not a diet (p. 218)—but, overall, the factual narrative is reliable. The volume is graced with a number of excellent illustrations, including some that are quite unfamiliar. I particularly liked one showing the mass meeting in Blaj, done in a primitive style.

If 1848 Year of Revolution does conform to the model of a broad narrative account for a general reader, along the lines of Priscilla Robertson’s work, it does not fit some other historical genres. The book does not lay claim to being a serious, scholarly synthesis of the 1848 revolutions, as a glance at the footnotes will confirm—not only are they almost all to secondary sources, but a very large proportion are to textbooks and general accounts; many of the important monographs on 1848 go unmentioned. It is not a textbook either, since there is no bibliography or other aids for students.

Bringing Robertson’s work up to date is not just a matter of adding or subtracting from a narrative; it also involves taking into account five decades of a very different kind of scholarship, part of a broader intellectual movement that has transformed what it means to write history. Rapport attempts a reconciliation by placing chunks of social and cultural history into his narrative: popular anti-Semitism and debates on the emancipation of the Jews, as well as women’s political participation are put at the end of a chapter on the “springtime of the peoples,” (pp. 170–79); the labor movement and communism, including Marx and Engels, appear after an account of the June Days (pp. 211–18); social conflicts in rural areas, and the mass movements of the peasantry in a discussion of the rise of counter-revolution in the fall of 1848 (pp. 268–79). Some of the important subjects of recent social and cultural...