Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark
This masterful new history of the 1848 revolutions has disturbing resonances for today’s world.
This masterful new history of the 1848 revolutions has disturbing resonances for today’s world.
On 14th March 1848 citizens of Austria, Hungary and Italy awoke to the end of an empire. After days of ratcheting tension and turbulence Chancellor Metternich had fled Vienna. Since the fall of Napoleon no one had done more to assure the new political arrangement, an authoritarian network of monarchies buttressed by surveillance and censorship.
At the heart of this conservative order had lain the Habsburg Empire, a constellation of territories and provinces under the unitary control of the Emperor. To its supporters the unifying sovereignty of the imperial model demonstrated its virtue - how else could disparate peoples of varying stages of development progress harmoniously. Transnational sovereignty was essential.
The cavalcade of national flags, anthems and poems that shook European capitals in these connected insurgencies was a seismic challenge to such complacency.
Few historians are better equipped to address these phenomena than Christopher Clark, author of the seminal ‘Sleepwalkers’, possibly the most well-regarded assessment of the causes of World War I of the last twenty years. Here his panoramic and multilingual perspectives are drawn to an even more complex series of events, made more opaque by the distance and unfamiliarity of the topic to modern readers. Not least disconcerting is the lack of finality and resolution these movements achieved as the forces of reaction consolidated, Clark himself candidly reveals that he avoided the subject at school because ‘complexity and failure are an unattractive combination’.
The renewed salience of this moment therefore sheds interesting light on the tensions in the modern world. For previous generations living through the epic certainties of the twentieth century, 1848 seemed a quaint unfulfilled uprising against a lost Ruritanian world. More recently liberal hegemony seemed to have made national strivings a superfluous form of expression, as the end of history seamlessly blended individual rights, free trade and globalisation into a universal culture. 9/11, the 2008 crash, Brexit, Covid, and the invasion of Ukraine have all radically recalibrated our understanding of modernity and the possibilities our institutions and networks can provide for us.
In this fragmentary and doubtful new era, 1848 seems, with all its compromises and complexities, a far closer place.
Building to the sequence of insurrections, Clark brings the underlying conditions of Europe in the mid-19th century into closer focus. Immediately apparent is the deep dislocation at the centre of economic and political life, which drew critiques and responses from a spectrum of philosophers. Labour had lost the security of the guilds without gaining an industrial voice; profound religious energies were being unleashed outside the forum of established churches; elites faced with both romanticism and liberalism were detaching from supranational loyalties and engaging with burgeoning nationalist agendas. There is an unmistakeable sense of a world hastened by technology and destabilized by growth pressuring a centre which cannot hold. Crucially for many the obvious inequalities had become inexplicable - bereft of either providential order or human merit, it was the first concerted attack on capitalism by its enemies as an agent of oppression.
Into this febrile vortex a loose coalition of visionaries, radicals and liberal conservatives were able to articulate a programme for reform oscillating wildly from place to place and time to time as momentum shifted and personalities rose in ascendancy or fell. What follows is a salutary correction to the idea of history as a simple morality tale, as freedom fighters and oppressors are far more ambiguous than any binary perception allows. Too often the rebels allowed consensus to slip their grasp by needless extremism or chauvinism. In polyglot regions the refusal of emerging nations to accommodate linguistic minorities made allegiance to Habsburg Empire seem a less severe sacrifice.
Beyond the material factors and military operations of the conflict lies a story of flawed and epic personalities. Hungary in particular is redolent of the spirit of hope that began with the fall of absolutism producing orators like Kossuth, strategists like Szechenyi and martyrs like the poet Sandor Petofi. All of whom helped engender a sense of national consciousness that withstood the trials of the twentieth century.
Unavoidably we are confronted with the restoration of the status quo and Marx’s famous quip ‘history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce’ contrasting the failure to the French Revolution. It is within this sense of defeat that ‘Revolutionary Spring’ offers some of its most powerful insights: essentially that the energies released could never be put back and that all future dispensations had to concede to new realities. As the eighteenth century wore on, the principles that animated 1848 became embedded and ultimately irrevocable. As the Soviet Union learned in Budapest in 1956 and Prague 1968 a tank is no use against an idea.
2023 is a world away from 1848 but there are curious parallels: the internet has created whole new cultures and diversified authorities, cryptocurrencies are experiments in anarchic capital which established institutions have yet to fully comprehend and hyper liberalism has created a moral vision which cannot tolerate divergence. Democracy still obtains and a vulnerable middle class continues to provide ballast but it would be well for those in authority to recall the danger of frustrated hopes and the battle cry of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin: ‘In every state the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces’.