Review of 1848: Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport
The mother of all turning points, even if it didn’t quite turn
I have long sought a detailed account of 1848: it was a time of myriad movements, crises, hopes, violent revolutions, and even more brutal counter-revolutions. As a moment of such utter complexity and import, it is key to understanding the tensions of the present day. While this uneven book dwells too much on the details of the violence and political machinations in at times an almost blow-by-blow narrative, it also covers the immediate causes, the dynamics, and the structural changes that were being set in motion. It is a bit of a slog as a reading experience.
There were a number of interacting factors that led to the upheavals of 1848. First, in their own ways, the rural regions of Europe were facing a severe economic crisis. This was the era of the potato famine, poor harvests, and collapsing rural revenues. In addition, there were few places that peasants could go, captive as land-bound serfs, but also in the lack of opportunities – urban areas were only beginning to grow, hence industrial labor options minimal. Second, there were dueling radical ideologies: democrats, social democrats and the socialist variants. In the wake of the French Revolution, their ideas were reaching a boiling point, threatening direct attacks on aristocratic privilege and landowners. The 1848ers were overwhelmingly an educated, urban elite. Third, the moderate advocates of 19th century liberalism were arguing in favor of constitutionalism, which would abolish autocratic fiat in favor of rule by law and guarantee private property owndership. This was the bourgeois option. Finally, Metternich’s post-Napoleonic order – of backward-looking repression by a feeble police state – was teetering beneath these developments. Moreover, the 5 major European powers were involved in delicate calculations to preserve the balance of power, on which they believed peace would depend, via a combination of threats, counter-revolutionary espionage, and the suppression of local ethnic minorities. Taken together, Europe was a tinderbox.
Once the explosions arrived, they took many forms. The French rebelled against their last king, Charles X. Hungary attempted to separate from Austria, to establish its own kingdom. Various factions in Italy were attempting to unite the country, ejecting foreign sovereigns and even creating local democratic institutions. Prussia experienced an armed insurrection that was in some quarters democratic, in many socialist, in others in favor of expanding a Federation (or Empire) to all German-speakers.
In virtually every case, the results tilted catastrophically in favor of reaction, pushing all hopes of democratic or socialist reform decades into the future. If France dethroned Charles X, a few years later Napoleon III was installed as dictator. Not a single independence struggle achieved its goals. Despotism and empire won.
The reasons for this pan-European defeat have always fascinated me. Most important, much of the democratic impulse came from urban elites. They had little idea of what motivated the rural population, which was more concerned with hunger than anything else. Peasants did not yet understand the Enlightenment ideals emanating from cities, indeed their fealty was to their sovereign’s “divine mandate” of legitimacy as well as their fear of violence pushed them into the hands of the reaction. Without them, the revolutions collapsed, usually within the year. Even in the cities, the elites vehemently disagreed with each other, further splitting opposition to the Ancien Régime. Democrats distrusted socialists, while the sporadic violence of the latter alienated them from the bourgeois liberals, who feared loss of their hard-won economic gains and autonomy in early modern capitalism. It would be decades before these groups could cooperate in the formulation of more representative institutions in a democratic mold. Furthermore, the forces of nationalism hindered many of the elites from uniting, not just across national borders but from within the ethno-linguistically diverse populations in all European countries. The resulting disorganization was fatal to their causes.
Finally, the Ancien Régimes controlled battle-hardened, professional armed forces, through which they cooperated on an international basis to devastating effect; notably, the armed forces only rarely allied themselves with the revolutionaries. For their part, the revolutionaries – armed with hunting rifles or perhaps only scythes – could not match this force and were quickly crushed.
Was anything accomplished by the revolutions? I would say yes. While the Ancien Régime came out clearly on top, it made a number of concessions. Peasants everywhere in Europe were liberated from serfdom, freeing them from quasi-slavery and enabling them to participate as freer agents in the new economic order. In practical terms, this meant that the great migration to the cities could begin, where industries were springing up and with them, new forms of political organization and more developed forms of socialism. In terms of political institutions, traditional sovereigns granted many new forms of representation, including forms of limited popular voting, constitutions (often based on French and American prototypes), and a tentative opening to talent from non-aristocratic ranks. Meanwhile, in an attempt to ride the tiger of emerging popular opinions, the sovereigns adopted a kind of official nationalism; this involved linguistic standardization and conformity, literacy campaigns, and a further opening of administration to talent. Of course, any progress was largely inchoate.
All of these developments would later coalesce into fundamental political evolution, running the gamut from democracy to nationalistic militarism and eventually, fascism and communism. But then, we see all of this only in retrospect and none of it was inevitable or foreordained. The concluding chapter offers an excellent sumup.
I have a number of criticisms of the book. The writing struck me as somewhat awkward and uneven. While many passages are wonderfully eloquent, others are marred with redundant adjectives, not quite le mot juste. More fundamentally, I did not get enough of a sense of how participants perceived developments on the ground. The book is weak on character as well as narrative. Moreover, so much was left out that I didn’t get a solid feel for the times and context. This was a serious disappointment. Finally, it was completely Euro-centric – similar developments in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere are not even mentioned; for example, the 1848 upheavals were held out as examples by Abe Lincoln of why the union should be preserved, one of the reasons I am curious about it.
All in all, this is a pretty good read, if pedantic and halting in presentation. I studied it more than read it for enjoyment.