At about 750 pages, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849, may seem a little much in the effort department to justify the time: A tightly-written an detailed review of the many concurrent revolutions erupting across Europe at almost exactly the same time, in the middle of the 19th century – revolutions that nearly all failed and did not revive.
Unless you’re already well up to speed with European history of the period, most of the people involved won’t be familiar either (though a number of them were striking characters with dramatic story arcs). The best-known probably is Karl Marx, who was merely an observer of the action (he wasn’t at all well-known at that time, and is only a minor figure in the book) and often misread the events as they transpired.
What’s the point?
The point here, besides filling in a lot of prospective gaps in knowledge of history (it filled some for me), is the usefulness of seeing the dynamic, how these eruptions from seemingly out of nowhere did emerge, what ground was needed to sustain them, what happened at first and why they were crushed.
And the point of absorbing that is the connection with our world today. The dynamics of human society may change over time but human nature often stays much the same, and while the author Christopher Clark makes only a few quick, peripheral explicit references to the state of our world today, a thoughtful read will find parallels between that unusual time and place and ours – with some implicit lessons for what could happen if our future turns darker.
The story here starts at around 1830, nearly a generation after the Napoleonic wars and at a time when Europe’s political and governmental structure seemed mostly settled, that being a major goal of a lot of people, not just royalty, after the upheaval of the Frank revolutionary period. But while Napoleon and the politics of the earlier revolutionary time may have been crushed militarily and administratively, with mostly strong monarchies left in place, the ideas and desires that had made them popular in the first place had not gone away. France had a small-scale revolution, resulting in a regime change, in 1830, and the shock waves from it spread across Europe. While modern transportation and communication weren’t yet around (no long-distance railroads or telegraphs quite yet) word of what was happening tended to spread fast, resulting in 1848 in a series of revolts, monarchical abdications and radical takeovers in country after country, almost all within a few weeks of each other, even though no one was actively trying to orchestrate it that way. The rebels were acting as a result of receiving distant signals – newspapers and other publications were central to this, as the internet would be now – but there was no coordination.
The details of how all this happened should in some ways seem startlingly familiar to people in our age. An example: The radical rebels were extremely popular in the capital and main regional cities, and in many cases were able to chase monarchs out of town. But the monarchs didn’t have to go far: The people in the countryside were much friendlier to them, and provided a strong base of support when time came, as it did, for the counter-revolution. That’s one reason the powers that got removed were able to return. (Clark does make some references to how, later on, many of them would lose their way in years yet to come.)
The background is not simply analytical; Clark threads the historical narrative with accounts from people, famous and unknown, put concrete detail, sometimes of a grisly nature, on the proceedings.
We understand our world better when we can look at it from different angles. In Revolutionary Spring, there’s a fresh angle for looking at where we are now, and where we could be going.
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