In “Revolutionary Spring,” the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark argues for the lasting impact of the uprisings that engulfed Europe in 1848.

By Alexander Zevin

June 13, 2023 BUY BOOK ▾ (NYTimes.com)

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REVOLUTIONARY SPRING: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849, by Christopher Clark

In January of 1848, a mysterious poster appeared on the walls of Palermo announcing a revolution set to coincide with the king’s birthday. In fact, no insurrection had been planned, but the curious crowds that descended on the central squares to catch a glimpse of one provided the conditions for an actual uprising as troops moved in to clear public spaces.

Here as elsewhere the old regime was not completely unprepared: If the Spanish Bourbon king Ferdinand II was unpopular, he had plenty of ships, cannons and soldiers to make up for it. “The strangest thing about the uprising,” writes the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark in his new book, “Revolutionary Spring,” “is that it was ultimately successful.” The breadth of social resistance — from Palermitan gentry and liberal lawyers to armed artisans and peasant squadre — made a purely military solution impracticable. As protests spread to Naples, Ferdinand appeared to retreat, promising a constitution.

For months afterward, kingdoms across the continent convulsed as insurrectionists demanded the drawing up of constitutions that would enshrine basic political rights and rein in monarchical authority. “There was no single issue,” Clark explains, but “a multitude of questions — about democracy, representation, social equality, the organization of labor, gender relations, religion, forms of state power.”

Clark presents the unrest at street level through eyewitness accounts, and he weaves this material into an impressive transcontinental tableau. As the feudal order went into retreat, novel political forms emerged. Karl Marx, a figure who floats through Clark’s book as an observer, wrote “The Communist Manifesto” with Friedrich Engels early in 1848. The fighting spread across borders just as new nation-states struggled to come into being. “This was the only truly European revolution that there has ever been,” Clark writes.

The clearest indication that a new kind of revolution was at hand came a few weeks after the uprising in Palermo and 900 miles away. In February, Parisians streamed toward the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Boulevard des Capucines. French infantry panicked and fired their guns. More than 1,000 barricades sprang up across the city. Army units “sent to secure strategic posts found themselves drowned in crowds, their weapons pulled from their hands by demonstrators.” King Louis-Philippe gave up his crown and fled.

The revolutionary wave emerged from the French capital with new energy. It crossed the Rhine into Munich, Berlin and Vienna — moving not just across, but up and down the central spine of Europe, to Milan and Venice. Even states within this zone that avoided major crises — Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Piedmont — did so only thanks to harried doses of political and social reform.

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In Clark’s view, the press was the medium conducting this spark across Europe, allowing city dwellers who read — or heard — the news to understand events as interconnected. Stories from Paris brought protesters to the streets in Berlin; word of Chancellor Metternich’s fall in Vienna caused the Prussian court to wobble. Dispatches crossed oceans. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, slave insurrections received an added jolt from reports of a crumbling monarchy back in France.

The revolutions of 1848 were not organized in advance. They were, Clark writes, “inchoate, multifocal, socially deep,” arising as trust in the old regimes waned, and freedom of press and assembly emerged as issues capable of uniting “heterogeneous disaffected elements” against feudal power.

The spontaneous quality that took the police and army by surprise in late winter made the uprisings hard to organize or lead. These revolutionaries agreed on little. Moderates favored a constitutional monarchy, while radicals and socialists pressed for universal manhood suffrage and the creation of state-sponsored “national workshops” that would provide guaranteed employment.

What made city-dwelling constitutionalists most vulnerable was their isolation from the countryside and the grievances of the peasantry, who were everywhere a majority. There was also disharmony within cities. Affluent liberals dreamed up the constitutions; the laboring poor fought for them. But their interests diverged. In June 1848, thousands of the latter were killed in Paris when they rose up against the decision of the former to close the national workshops, on which, by then, more than 100,000 depended for survival.

Nationalist rhetoric could mobilize radicals, but it was also exploited to limit cooperation among them — pitting Germans against Czechs and Poles, and Hungarians against Croats and Romanians — to the benefit of temporarily back-footed Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Bourbons.

The counterrevolutions came fast. Insurrections lost steam and constitutions were torn up. In France, radicals did poorly in elections to the Assembly in April; in Central Europe, the Hapsburgs — forced to flee Vienna for Innsbruck in May — regained the upper hand in June, reconquering Prague and parts of northern Italy.

Foreign intervention finally brought the curtain down on the revolutionary spring. In 1849, Russian soldiers swept in to suppress the Hungarian revolution on Austria’s behalf — after Emperor Franz Joseph fell to his knees before Czar Nicholas I in Warsaw, imploring him to save “modern society from certain ruin.” In April, France, in violation of its own constitution, sent 10,000 men to crush the short-lived Roman Republic for Pope Pius IX, with the backing of the liberal statesman Alexis de Tocqueville.

The revolutions, Clark insists, did not fail. In his view, they encouraged states from Portugal to Prussia to become far more active — channeling investments into railways and telegraphs, and setting up statistical bureaus and ministries to promote economic development and public health. In the Austrian Empire, serfdom never returned. Royal ministers now had to take account of a “much broader range of social and economic interests” than before.

Clark’s book is a major achievement in representing the lived experience of the revolutions. Spectators became participants almost before realizing it. Over a few days in Berlin, Clark recounts, a radical law student gives his first speech in the Tiergarten, sees cuirassiers beat women and kill a child outside Café Volpi, fights alongside workers on the barricades and is hidden by a bourgeois family under a four-poster bed “in the darkness, listening to the boots of the officers and floorboards creaking as they search the apartment.”

“Revolutionary Spring” brims with poetry, novels, memoirs and paintings, and Clark is drawn to color, sound and dress. There must be more hats per capita here than in any other account of 1848 — from brushed bourgeois top hats to Phrygian caps with tricolor cockades and the black Calabrian hats with long red feathers favored by student rebels.

If this kaleidoscopic accumulation of details and viewpoints greatly enriches our understanding of 1848 as a political phenomenon, it reduces other themes to background noise. The disruption of agrarian life and the decline in living standards that came with the onset of industrialization and the emergence of capitalism had a lot to do with the scale and simultaneity of the discontent.

Clark acknowledges the spectral presence of the French Revolution for the actors involved in this drama, but, in making comparisons, he is more interested in musing on the present. The arc of protest that runs from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, a decade ago, to Jan. 6 — “poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions” — may match the mood of the 1840s, but the conclusions suggested by these resonances are a little too felicitous.

The sense of failure that hovers around 1848 cannot be dispelled by counting the rail lines laid down in its aftermath. Just as important were the paths it foreclosed. The revolutions were not a failure of liberals and leftists “to listen to each other,” as Clark writes. Marx did not discount the freedoms sought by liberals in 1848, but he expected that socialists would need to go beyond them. Liberals, frightened of worker uprisings, embraced “Family, Work, Property, Public Order” — in short, conservatism. They were content to see economic liberalization proceed without the risks entailed by the political kind.

Alexander Zevin is a professor of history at the City University of New York and the author of “Liberalism at Large: The World According to The Economist.”

REVOLUTIONARY SPRING: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 | By Christopher Clark | Illustrated | 872 pp. | Crown | $40

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 21 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Only Revolutions That Matter. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)