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282 The Rising Tide of Revolution While Fuller was packing her bags for England, most of the European countries from France eastward to Russia were on the brink of revolution, an uprising of the people against their autocratic rulers. The two years leading up to the revolutions of 1848 were to see reform banquets and the incendiary effects of socialist writings on the intelligentsia in France, a constitution and United Diet in Prussia, a civil war in Switzerland, a political awakening in the Italian states led by the exiled Romantic radical, Giuseppe Mazzini, as well as the rise to popular power of the Polish poet and activist Adam Mickiewicz, a messianic-Romantic nationalist set on redeeming Poland from the ravages of foreign invasion and domination. In sympathy with the quickly unfolding events abroad, Fuller wrote in her 1846 “First of January” article that the “cauldron simmers, and so great is the fire that we expect it soon to boil over, and new Fates appear for Europe.”1 Fuller’s millennial language indicates her eagerness to enter the theater of revolutionary action, the explosive social and historical conditions of which provided the scenic backdrop for her actions and interactions with key players—players and conditions the reader needs to be familiar with in order to comprehend fully the transformation of Margaret Fuller from a reform-minded, middle-class American journalist into a radical revolutionary. 47SPassionate Players and Incendiary Social Conditions As Fuller’s ship sailed into Liverpool on 12 August 1846, the peoples of Europe were preparing to overthrow the despots imposed on them by not only the combined powers of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, but also the Roman Catholic Church. The recently deceased Pope Gregory XVI had been an aristocrat determined to suppress democratic reforms.1 Pope Gregory had wanted to quash reform, which, having grown up during the French Revolution, he equated with revolution. As well part seven he might have. For the 1848 European revolutions, like the French Revolution, had their origins in liberal Enlightenment thinking that argued the existence of universal laws regarding basic human rights. Yet the 1789 revolution had ended in a bloodbath, further tyranny, and a general sense of disillusionment when Napoleon rolled over Austrian, Prussian, and Russian forces in 1805–7, only to be defeated at Waterloo. The 1814–15 Congress of Vienna divided his empire among the old absolutist powers in their effort to suppress nationalism and democracy. Still, by 1840 the ideas that the French Revolution had let loose upon the world—that all men are born free and equal and, when given the right circumstances as well as the free use of their reason, will progress to a state of moral perfection and the recognition of their common humanity—were deeply embedded in the minds of many of Europe’s intellectual leaders, as they were in Fuller’s. These “liberal” ideals fed the fires of the 1848 revolutions.2 The causes of the fifty revolutions that erupted in Palermo and Paris and spread through most of the countries to the east of France—through the German states, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then the rest of the principalities and states that constituted Italy, igniting finally the papal states—were complex and at times conflicting. In many of these revolutions, constitutional, national, and social issues became intricately intertwined and, in the end, undermined each other, as the social revolution in France was to undermine the Constitutionalists. Only Russia, which Czar Nicholas I controlled with an iron fist and a network of spies, as well as England, where reform measures and the use of thousands of special constables and troops defused a potentially explosive April 1848 Chartist demonstration, escaped these revolutions that ended in failure and sidelined for the time not just liberal dreams of political freedom, but also many nineteenth-century totalistic Romantic notions about transforming society.3 Not all who rebelled against their repressive monarchs wanted a total change in political and social arrangements. Nearly all, however, did want a constitution to limit the monarch’s power by expanding the franchise and permitting more people to take part in their government. Political moderates who fought for parliamentary reforms tended to be suspicious of Romantic radicals like Fuller who sided with them in revolution but who dreamed not just of political change but also of change in social relations. In France, for example, the reasonable leadership of the moderate republican Alphonse de Lamartine, whose propagandistic 1847 History of the Girondists inspired...

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