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1
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1
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Acknowledgements
In 1848 Europe became newly conscious of itself. But in Britain, 1848 revealed a
schism between ‘Europeans’ and ‘Little Englanders’. A schism which is still with
us: I was researching and writing Serial Revolutions:1848 across the Brexit refer-
endum and up to the final throes of Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiations. I finished
this book during the first lockdown caused by the COVID-19 crisis, an epidemic
which pushed Brexit out of the news headlines to reveal instead the fragility and
futility of national boundaries in an irreversibly globalized world. Just as I was
finishing the first draft of the book, the Black Lives Matter protests started their
own serial global movement. In the US they moved from state to state, in Europe
from country to country, city to city. Unlike the revolutions of 1848, they were
largely peaceful and bloodless. But the call to think politically again about the
social was like a déja vue. For nearly two centuries since Frederick Douglass
called out ‘the gross injustice and cruelty to which [the black woman and man] is
the constant victim’, that cruelty and injustice has shown little sign of abating.1 As
historians, literary critics, academics, and citizens, we need to know our history
better. We need to better understand how European our ‘British’ identity truly is,
and how the violence of empire and the catastrophe of slavery are still determin-
ing our modern world. The nationalisms of 1848 which had briefly seemed to
belong to ‘the people’ were quickly co-opted and they developed into something
much darker in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now nationalism
seems to have taken deep root. We live with and in history, and it is not inevitable
that the history of today will necessarily be any less appalling than that of yester-
day. But 1848 also generated ideas of universalism, pacifism, feminism, and dif-
ferent versions of socialism and communism. Returning to 1848, we can choose
to look back on that ‘springtime of the peoples’ as a moment of tragi-comic fail-
ure, obliterated by the brutalities that followed, or we can look again, and see it as
a proleptic moment of stored potential, an extraordinary series of events that
generated long-distance and sustainable ideas about global citizenship, inter
national cooperation and a shared and common humanity which have not yet
been fully understood or realized. The springtime of 1848 has been long delayed,
1 Frederick Douglass, ‘“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”: Oration delivered in
Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, by Frederick Douglass, 5 July 1852’, Frederick Douglass:
Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Chicago Review Press,
2000), pp. 188–206, p. 196.
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viii Acknowledgements
but, with some effort, and more understanding, we can bring its forgotten meanings
back to life so they can blossom and flourish in the present.
I gave very full acknowledgements in the first volume of this series, Serial
Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815–1848, and as this second volume
goes to press only eighteenth months later, I will not reiterate them all here.
I would however like to thank the people who helped me with this particular
book in very specific ways: Caroline Arscott; Mary Beard; Laurel Brake; Trev
Broughton; Christopher Clark; David Edgerton; Bernhard Fulda; Paul Gilroy;
Isobel Hofmeyr; Richard Kirkland; Julia Kuehn; David Laven; Claire Lawton;
Sharon Marcus; Roger Parker; John Stokes; Harriet Thompson; Mark Turner;
Adam Tooze; and Patrick Wright. My husband, Cristiano Ristuccia, was an
inspiration throughout, having been taught an entirely different version of the
history of the nineteenth century at his school in Rome to the British-imperial
history that was delivered at mine in Manchester. My elder daughter Kitty helped
me with page numbers and references. Of course, all the views expressed in this
work, and any mistakes in the chapters that follow, are entirely my own.
Part of the book was written while I was on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship
in 2019, and I am extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting my
work, but I am even more grateful for all that they do to sustain research in the
humanities more generally in this country. I wrote most of Chapters 1, 6, and 7 at
Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden and I thank the staff there for their welcome and
hospitality. I want to thank King’s College London once more for its commitment
to research in the humanities, and its generous contribution towards image repro-
duction and indexing costs for this book. And I again thank Johanna Ward and
Domniki Papadimitriou in the Cambridge University Library who welcomed me
back for this second deluge of digital image orders without flinching. The
Bibliothèque nationale de France was also exemplary in dealing with my many
image orders with great care and efficiency in the midst of a pandemic.
Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University Press has shown an ambition on my
behalf which has been immensely empowering. Thank you, Jacqueline. The
anonymous reader of this book manuscript for the Press was generous and atten-
tive to the whole argument, suggesting specific improvements that were spot-on,
and I thank them wholeheartedly for that. Aimee Wright once again guided the
book through the Press with consummate skill and attention to detail. Howard
Emmens copy-edited this book, as he did my last one, with great erudition and
precision and it is much better for his input. Vasuki Ravichandran and her team
at Straive were impeccably efficient and kept us all to production deadlines.
Hardly anything in this book has been previously published, but an earlier ver-
sion of Chapter 10 did appear as ‘Dickens and the Form of the Historical Present’,
in Daniel Tyler (ed.), Dickens’s Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), pp. 110–36, and it is repurposed and republished here with the permission
of Cambridge University Press.
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Acknowledgements ix
I started presenting material that would eventually find its way into this book
in June 2007, when I gave a conference paper on Dickens in the 1840s in Genoa,
Italy. Since then, I have given plenaries, papers, and seminars about aspects of
1848 at Hong Kong University and in Venice, at the Media History Seminar in
London, and in Birmingham, New York, Delhi, Exeter, Los Angeles, Nottingham,
Oxford, Surrey, Warwick, and York. In Cambridge, I have presented material
to the Cultural History Seminar, the Cambridge Italian Research Network
Symposium, the French Department Nineteenth- Century Seminar, and the
Cambridge University Gender Studies Seminar. My thanks to all these very vari-
ous audiences for helping me to discover that this was really a project about
Britain, Europe, and America in 1848, and also a project about Britain, Europe,
and America in 2021.
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Contents
Bibliography 403
Index 441
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List of Illustrations
0.1. Julius Steinmetz, ‘Berlin am 18. und 19. März 1848’ (Meißen, 1848)
[Berlin 18–19, March 1848] [Credit: bpk/Deutsches Historisches
Museum, Berlin]. 3
0.2. ‘Alexandre Dumas Borne in Triumph by the People’, Illustrated London
News (11 March 1848): 162. [Reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]. 35
0.3. Alexandre Lacauchie, ‘Frédérick Lemaître, dans Toussaint-Louverture’,
lithograph (Paris: Martinet, 1850). The white French actor, Frédérick Lemaître
as Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian revolution in the play of
the same name by Alphonse de Lamartine at the Théâtre de la
Porte Saint-Martin. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 36
2.1. [Anonyme], ‘Le Trône Brulé’: ‘The People Burning the Throne at the Place
de la Bastille, 1848’, French lithograph. [Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée
Carnavalet, Paris, France © Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images]. 75
2.2. Nathaniel Currier, ‘The Burning of the Throne Paris 25th February 1848’.
Hand-coloured American lithograph (1848). This lithograph was produced
in France (see Fig. 2.1). It then travelled swiftly to America, where its
caption was offered in both French and English. [D’Amour Museum
of Fine Arts, Springfield, Mass. USA/Alamy]. 76
2.3. ‘View of the Conflagration of the City of Hamburg’, Illustrated London News
(14 May 1842): 1. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]. 84
2.4. ‘Revolution in Prussia: Conflict before the Royal Palace, At Berlin’, Illustrated
London News (1 April 1848): 214. [Reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]. 85
2.5. Masthead, Illustrated London News (London) (8 July 1848). [Reproduced by
kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]. 89
2.6. Masthead, L’Illustration (Paris) (26 juin 1847). [© Bibliothèque nationale de
France].89
2.7. Illusterad Tidning (Stockholm), (21 Maj 1859). [Credit: Royal
Danish Library]. 89
2.8. Masthead, Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) (1 Juli 1843). [© Bibliothèque
nationale de France].89
2.9. Illustreret Tidende (Copenhagen) (12 October 1862). [Credit:
Royal Danish Library]. 89
2.10. Masthead, Il Mondo Illustrato (Turin) (18 dicembre 1847). [© Bibliothèque
nationale de France]. 89
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xiv List of Illustrations
2.11. Paul Gavarni, ‘Insurgent Prisoners in Paris Receiving Relief from their
Families’, Illustrated London News (22 July 1848): 33. [Reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]. 94
2.12. ‘Les femmes et les enfants des insurgés aux portes des prisones’, L’Illustration
(29 juillet 1848): 325. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 95
2.13. ‘Barricade in the rue St. Martin’, Illustrated London News (4 March 1848).
[Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library NPR.C.313]. 97
2.14. ‘Barricade in der Rue St. Martin in Paris am 23 Februar’, Illustrirte Zeitung
(11 März 1848): 177. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 98
2.15. ‘Death of Archbishop of Paris’, Illustrated London News (8 July 1848).
[Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library NPR.C.313]. 99
2.16. ‘Tod des Erzbischofs von Paris’, Illustrirte Zeitung (8 Juli 1848).
[© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 100
2.17. ‘The Great Sea Serpent of 1848’, Punch, or the London Charivari 15
(4 November 1848): 193. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library T992.b.1.8]. 101
2.18. ‘Apparition du serpent de mer’, Le Charivari (23 décembre 1848), n.p.
[© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 102
2.19. ‘Die Große Seeschlange von 1848’, Illustrirte Zeitung
(30 Dezember 1848): 436. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 102
2.20. ‘Newsvendor on the Boulevards’, Illustrated London News (1 April 1848): 211.
[Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library NPR.C.313]. 103
2.21. ‘Le marchand des Journaux ambulant’, L’Illustration (10 juin 1848): 229.
[© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 104
2.22. ‘Les grandes industries du jour, scènes de moeurs par Andrieux: ‘Les Crieurs
de journaux. – La onzième edition de la Presse; tirage de l’après-midi’,
L’Illustration (1 avril 1848): 68. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 105
2.23. ‘Das Reichsministerium’, Illustrirte Zeitung (16 Dezember 1848): 396.
[© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 106
2.24. ‘Vue intérieure de la salle de l’Assemblé nationale’, L’Illustration (13 mai 1848):
169. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 107
2.25. ‘The French Provisional Government: Louis Blanc, President of the
Operatives’ Commission; Garnier Pages, Minister of Finance; Armand
Marrast, Mayor of Paris’, Illustrated London News (18 March 1848):
181–2. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library NPR.C.313]. 108
2.26. ‘Portraits of the French Deputies’, Punch, or the London Charivari xiv
(13 May 1848): 203. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library T992.b.1.7]. 108
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List of Illustrations xv
xvi List of Illustrations
3.6. ‘The Effects of Our Own Revolution’, Punch, or the London Charivari
(25 March 1848): 130. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics
of Cambridge University Library T992.b.1.7]. 141
3.7. [Anon.] ‘Dips into the Diary of Barrabas Bolt, Esq.’, Man in the Moon 3:17
(1848): 243. G.W.M. Reynolds is shown here fraternizing with a French
socialist who resembles caricatures of the extreme French radical republican
Louis Auguste Blanqui. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library T900.e.6.3]. 147
3.8. Ackermann’s Print of Benjamin Haydon, ‘Waiting for The Times (after an
adjourned debate)’ (1831). [© The Trustees of the British Museum]. 149
3.9. Charles Joseph Traviès de Villers, ‘Caricatures du jour: la lecture des
Mystères de Paris: “Après vous, monsieur, s’il vous plait!” ’ Le Charivari
(7 novembre 1842): n.p. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 150
3.10. ‘Literature at a Stand’, Punch, or the London Charivari (13 March 1847): 113.
[Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library T992.b.1.6]. 151
3.11. Map of Castelcicala, G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London (II, CLXXIV).
[Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library 8700.b.161]. 155
5.1. Arthur Clough’s Rome Notebook, 1846–48. [Reproduced with the kind
permission of Balliol College Oxford archives]. 212
8.1. Giorgio Mignati, ‘Salon at Casa Guidi’ (1861), watercolour. [Special
Collections, F.W. Olin Library, Mills College]. 293
8.2. ‘Quelli che leggono i giornali con comodo. Attualità Caricature di Japhet’
[Those who read the newspapers in comfort], Il Mondo Illustrato
(18 dicembre 1847): 809. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 299
8.3. ‘Il Débats messo al Pileri, al caffè dell’Ussaro a Pisa. Attualità Caricature
di Japhet’ [The Débats newspaper put in the pillory, at the caffè dell’Ussaro
in Pisa], Il Mondo Illustrato (18 dicembre 1847): 809. The caffè dell’Ussaro
was a meeting place in Pisa for intellectuals and supporters of the Italian
national cause. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 300
8.4. Tiny sketch by Elizabeth Barrett Browning of Piazza San Felice during the
September procession on the first page of a letter to her sisters Arabella and
Henrietta Moulton-Barrett (Florence, 13 September 1847) The Brownings’
Correspondence 14, p. 307. The editors explain the locations in the sketch.
In the centre, above the crowd: ‘Piazza San Felice alive & filled with people’;
to the right: ‘viva P. IX’; to the left: ‘The procession ending up at Piazza Pitti’;
vertical in left margin: ‘our palazzo’ [i.e. Casa Guidi]; above in left margin:
‘via maggio’; top margin: ‘Palace of the Pitti—surrounded by balconies of
stone, most of them thronged’; below (starting at ‘balconies’): ‘Foreign
ladies being admitted to the top of the great tower’. [Image courtesy of
The Camellia Collections]. 307
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List of Abbreviations
FD Life and Writings 1 Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Life and Writings of Frederick
Douglass, vol. 1: Early Years, 1817–1849 (New York:
International Publishers, 1950)
FDP1 The Frederick Douglass Papers 1841–1846, ed. John
W. Blassingame et al., Series One, vol. 1
FD Speeches and Writings Frederick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed.
Philip S. Foner, abridged and adapted by Yival Taylor (Chicago:
Lawrence Hill, 1999)
Later Lectures Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (eds), The Later Lectures of
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1843–1871, 2 vols (Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 2010)
MF Margaret Fuller
MF Letters 5 Robert N. Hudspeth (ed.), The Letters of Margaret Fuller,
vol. 5: 1848–1849 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988)
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xx List of Abbreviations
Sad but Glorious Margaret Fuller, ‘These Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe,
1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991)
WEF T. Wemyss Reid, Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Forster,
vol. 1 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1888)
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Introduction
Why 1848 Matters
1 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected
Works, vol. 11: Marx and Engels 1851–1853 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979), pp. 99–197, p. 105.
All further references are to this edition. ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’ was originally published in 1852 in
Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York City.
2 I am challenging Benedict Anderson’s version of the newspaper and the novel in his 1983
Imagined Communities here, but I agree with Anderson when he says, ‘how basic to the modern
imagining of collectivity seriality always is’: Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons:
Nationalism, South East Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), p. 40.
Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form. Clare Pettitt, Oxford University Press. © Clare Pettitt 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830412.003.0001
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3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, especially Thesis 13, in Illuminations,
trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana 1992), pp. 245–55, p. 252.
4 As I discuss in greater detail below, at pp. 26ff., I have found Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of social
seriality helpful here as articulated in Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans.
Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976), originally published as Critique de la raison
dialectique, précedé de questions de méthode (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
5 The 1848 revolutions did not start in Paris. On 12 January 1848, the people of Palermo and
Messina in Sicily rose in a full-scale revolt against Ferdinand II, Bourbon king of Naples and Sicily.
Other towns in Sicily followed and riots broke out on the mainland in Naples and in Austria as
Metternich threatened to intervene on the part of the Bourbon king. In February Ferdinand granted
Naples and Sicily a popular constitution and the people established a new provisional government.
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Introduction 3
Fig. 0.1 Julius Steinmetz, ‘Berlin am 18. und 19. März 1848’ (Meißen, 1848) [Berlin
18–19, March 1848].
[Credit: bpk/Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin].
‘a series’. Serial forms emerged to meet the serial revolutions. Historian of comic
strips Andreas Platthaus has noted that one of the earliest ‘serialized’ printed
news images in Germany appeared in 1848. A news sheet produced in Meissen,
Saxony represented the Berlin revolution through a formal sequence of framed
vignettes6 [see Fig. 0.1].
6 Andreas Platthaus, an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, notes the opinion of Berlin
historian Margret Dorothea Minkels that Julius von Minutoli, the then Chief of Police of Berlin, might
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have produced this broadsheet. Minutoli’s moderate stance towards the March revolutionaries brought
him into disfavour with the King and when, three months later, the Berlin Arsenal was stormed by the
revolutionaries, he had to resign. Andreas Platthaus, lecture at the Deutsches Historisches Museum
(28 September 2017), https://www.dhm.de/blog/2018/01/25/the-power-of-the-picture/.
7 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy [1848], in Principles of Political Economy and Chapters on
Socialism, ed. Jonathan Riley, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 135.
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Introduction 5
There were warning tremors well before the full eruption in 1848. In 1846, the
Cracow revolt by the Polish Democratic Society against Austrian rule had been
put down so violently and effectively that there would be no hope of a revolution
in 1848, but even so the revolt provided inspiration to others, including Marx and
Engels. Similarly, the Chartist movement in 1840s England was brutally repressed
by the British secret police and prevented from organizing mass protests that
might have led to revolution. After the ‘Sonderbund War’ of 1846 and 1847, dele-
gates of the Swiss cantons drafted a new national constitution which was finalized
on 12 September 1848 and made Switzerland a federal state. This represented a
victory for the cantons run by socially minded Protestants over the more authori-
tarian Catholic-run cantons. Charles Dickens, who arrived in Geneva in autumn
1846, was deeply impressed, writing, ‘I believe there is no country on earth but
Switzerland in which a violent change could have been effected . . . in the same
8 [Anon.], ‘Retrospect of 1848’, Illustrated London News (30 December 1848): 417.
9 Kurt Weyland, ‘The Diffusion of Revolution: “1848” in Europe and Latin America’, International
Organization 63 (2009): 391–423, p. 396.
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proud, independent, gallant style.’10 Meanwhile, calls for reform and national
unification were getting louder and louder in the German-speaking states; the
Hungarian opposition had overthrown the parliament in elections; and there was
a series of protests and riots in Lombardy.11
The year 1848 started as it meant to go on: on 12 January 1848, the people of
Palermo and Messina in Sicily rose in a full-scale revolt against Ferdinand II,
Bourbon king of Naples and Sicily. Ferdinand II had come to the throne in 1830,
the same year as Louis Philippe in France, and had developed a regime of harsh
repression and police surveillance. Tension was growing across Europe. That
January, American journalist, Margaret Fuller, wrote from Rome that ‘[e]very day
the cloud swells, and the next fortnight is likely to bring important tidings.’12 In
February the storm-cloud began to break when a rattled Ferdinand granted
Naples and Sicily a popular constitution and the people established a new provi-
sional government. Other towns in Sicily followed and riots broke out on the
mainland in Naples and in Austria as Metternich threatened to intervene on the
part of the Bourbon king.
1848 has long offered a specifically scalar challenge to historians. That spring,
more than fifty revolutions broke out across Europe within a period of a few
months. They ignited through the cities and towns of Austria, Prussia, Italy, and
the German states with further uprisings in Spain, Ireland, Denmark, and
Romania. The French 1848 revolution began on 22 February, with a demonstra-
tion organized by the radical press in Paris. A huge phalanx of unemployed and
poor people, many of them women, along with hundreds of students, marched
through the streets in heavy rain loudly singing the ‘Marseillaise’. From 22 to
24 February the barricades went up in Paris, King Louis Philippe escaped
to England, and the poet Alphonse de Lamartine was declared leader of the
Provisional Government. That February, too, the citizens of Rome began to organize
a revolt. and by November a full-scale popular revolution had led to the flight of
Pope Pius IX and the establishment of the second Roman Republic. On 13 March,
Metternich was forced to resign as Austrian Chancellor and also fled to England.
Two days later, on the morning of 15 March 1848, Hungarian lawyer and celebrity-
revolutionary Lajos Kossuth started a revolution in the Pilvax coffee palace in
Pest. Revolutionaries marched peacefully around the city declaring an end to all
forms of censorship. Then they marched directly to the print shops and printed
10 CD to Macready (24 October 1846), The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 4: 1844–1846, ed.
Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 646. All subsequent references to Dickens’s let-
ters are to the Clarendon edition.
11 See Hans Joachim Hahn, The 1848 Revolutions in German-Speaking Europe [2001] (London:
Routledge, 2013).
12 [Margaret Fuller [MF]], ‘No. XXII’, New-York Daily Tribune (13 March 1848): 1; repr. in ‘These
Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco
Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 199–208, p. 208. Fuller started writing this
dispatch in Rome in January. All subsequent references to Fuller’s dispatches for the New York Tribune
from Europe are to this edition, abbreviated as Sad but Glorious.
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Introduction 7
the poet Sándor Petőfi’s banned nationalist poem together with their constitu-
tional demands. On 18 March in Milan, a street brawl between Austrian soldiers
and local civilians escalated into the cinque giornate, a furious five-day battle
which temporarily expelled the Austrians from the whole of north-eastern Italy.
And on the same day, 18 March, the chain of revolutions which had been spread-
ing northward from Munich to Frankfurt, Nassau, Cologne, and Solingen finally
reached Berlin. After eight hours of street-fighting, King Frederick William IV of
Prussia withdrew his troops from the city and agreed to the election of a constitu-
ent assembly. Four days later, on 22 March 1848, the city of Venice proclaimed the
rebirth of the ‘Venetian Republic’ and established a provisional government with
Daniele Manin, freed from prison by the revolutionaries, as its President. Large
crowds of Venetians gathered in front of the American Consulate shouting ‘Long
live the United States! Long live our sister republic!’ In London, the Chartist
‘monster’ demonstration of 10 April was overrun with special constables and
dampened by pouring rain. In truth, the Chartist Movement had already been
eviscerated and many of its leaders and members had been imprisoned or trans-
ported during the 1840s.13
In 1848 American poet Walt Whitman was working in New Orleans where
there were large French and German populations in exile from despotic regimes.
Whitman was the editor of a newspaper, the Crescent. ‘One’s blood rushes and
grows hot within him’, he wrote in the paper on 31 March, ‘the more he learns or
thinks of this news from the continent of Europe! Is it not glorious? This time, the
advent of Human Rights, though amid unavoidable agitation, is also amid com-
parative peace.’14 Violent revolutionary agitation was ramping up though. When
the dissolution of the National Workshops in Paris was announced on 22 June,
workers took to the barricades to defend the right to labour and the notorious
and bloody June Days (22 to 26 June 1848) followed as the fragile alliances
between the socialists and the liberals collapsed and divisions appeared between
Paris and the taxpayers of the rest of France.15 In Vienna on 6 October 1848,
13 More than a hundred men were transported to Tasmania for crimes associated with Chartism:
ten in 1839–40 after the Newport Rising, at least eighty-five in 1842–3, sixteen in 1848. Many more
were imprisoned and intimidated. Figures calculated from George Rudé, Protest and Punishment
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 131–44, quoted in Robert Fyson, ‘The Transported Chartist: The
Case of William Ellis’, in Robert Fyson, Owen R. Ashton, and Stephen Roberts (eds), The Chartist
Legacy (Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1999), pp. 80–101, p. 98.
14 [Anon.] [?Walt Whitman], ‘Editorial’, New Orleans Crescent (31 March 1848), p. 2, quoted in
Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1988), p. 14. The piece is unsigned, but Whitman scholars have attributed it to him.
15 Jonathan Israel explains the June Days thus: ‘But the cause of the ferocious strife setting the poorest
against the rest, and leading to the breakdown of the republic, in the process overthrowing the new
freedom of the press and expression, was not a property loving provincial bourgeoisie fighting the
Parisian proletariat but a socialist revolt against a weak republican regime refusing to act unconstitu-
tionally in the face of a conservative election victory’: Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the
American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017),
pp. 564–5.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/21, SPi
troops of the Austrian Empire were preparing to leave the city to suppress the
Hungarian revolution when crowds sympathetic to the Hungarian cause rioted
and attacked the soldiers, and the Austrian Minister of War was lynched by the
crowd. Vienna’s October Days resembled the June Days in Paris in the severity of
punishments meted out to protestors. On 26 October, Austrian and Croatian
troops retook the city and the leaders of the insurgency, many of them writers and
journalists, were executed. Meanwhile, Russian troops were called in to help put
down the Hungarian revolution, and writers and artists were targeted and killed
there too. In Russia, Czar Nicholas prevented revolution from starting by extreme
and violent repression, ordering, for example, the torture and imprisonment of
the writer Dostoyevski and others in the Petraskevski circle who had been
inspired by the French Revolution.
After the Paris June Days, 4,000 insurgents were deported to Algeria, which
had been a French colony since 1830.16 England also used its colonial possessions
to dispose of revolutionary elements. And not only did the imperial and monar-
chical powers of Europe use their colonies as a punitive dumping ground, they
also brought repressive military practices from the colonies to the cities of Europe
to use in counter-insurgency operations.17 It was a two-way traffic, as surveillance
methods designed to keep track of radicals in the capitals of Europe were subse-
quently adapted and exported to control and coerce colonial peoples. One colo-
nial strategy of control was to set a country against itself, so the Austro-Hungarian
imperial command encouraged the Croats against the Magyars in Hungary and
the Czechs against the Germans in Prague; and England stoked the resentments
between the nationalists and unionists in Ireland.18 A Young Irelander uprising
(sometimes called the ‘Famine Rebellion’) in County Tipperary on 29 July 1848
was put down, after some bitter fighting, by the British-controlled Royal Irish
Constabulary. Resistance was occasionally successful. Abolitionist Victor Schoelcher,
who had just returned from a French posting in Haiti, headed a commission for
the French Provisional Government of 1848. Schoelcher reported a ‘trickledown’
effect of revolutionary ideas in Haiti: ‘[t]he slaves, despite the profound degrad
ation into which they had been plunged, could not long remain strangers to the
16 Jennifer Sessions has argued that ‘[t]he Revolution of 1848 was critical to the history of the
French colonies, including Algeria, but it is equally impossible to comprehend the Revolution of 1848
without consideration of France’s North African colony. In 1848, revolutionary politics was colonial
politics, and vice versa.’ Jennifer E. Sessions, ‘Colonizing Revolutionary Politics: Algeria and the French
Revolution of 1848’, French Politics, Culture and Society 33:1 (Spring 2015): 75–100, p. 95.
17 Frederick Cooper agrees that ‘[t]he Haitian Revolution in the French empire, the combination of
slave revolts and antislavery mobilization in the British empire, and the tensions between creole elites
and peasants and slaves in the era of revolution in Spanish America all point to the possibility that
politics in metropoles could not be neatly segregated from colonies’: Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in
Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 28–9.
18 Kay Boardman and Christine Kinealy agree that 1848 was ‘a watershed in the polarisation
between nationalists and unionists that dominated Irish politics in the following century’: Kay
Boardman and Christine Kinealy,‘Introduction’, in Kay Boardman and Christine Kinealy (eds), 1848:
The Year the World Turned? (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 1–20, p. 10.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/21, SPi
Introduction 9
movements that were happening above their heads. The colonists spoke of inde-
pendence, the petits blancs of equality, the mulattos of political rights, the negroes
in their turn talked of liberty.’19 In fact, the slaves had already worked it out for
themselves, and when the Emancipation Decree of 27 April arrived in the
Caribbean on 3 June, the enslaved Haitians, through a series of ‘revolts’ or revolu-
tions, had already established their own freedom.20
Colonies were milked for resources and capital to mitigate the economic disas-
ter of the 1840s in Europe, as Miles Taylor has demonstrated for the British case.21
The British Government had been squeezing all its colonies hard in the 1840s and
consequently there were rebellions in Ceylon, the Ionian Islands, British India,
and the West Indies. Barricades were erected in Montreal and the Canadian
Parliament building was burnt down. In Cape Colony and Australia there were
anti-transportation societies protesting about their use as dumping grounds
for radicals and criminals. There were fifty-eight deaths during one protest in
Cape Colony.22 The events of 1848 were also felt in Chile and Brazil. In Brazil,
the Praiera revolt (1848–52) was an attempt by liberals to oust conservatives
from power. It was eventually defeated by government forces. Also inspired by
European events was the Young Argentina movement, and movements in
Columbia, Peru, and Bolivia. The Chilean revolution commenced on 20 April
1851, again inspired by France, but by the end of the year it had been brutally put
down by the conservative government.
1848, then, was not so much a ‘European Revolution’ as a global event. Or, more
accurately, a global series of events.23 In 1849, the Brazilian Insurgents issued a
19 Victor Schoelcher, Colonies étrangères et Haïti, vol. 2 (Paris: Pagnerre, 1843), p. 98. Jonathan
Dusenbury notes that free man of colour Cyrille Bissette contested Schoelcher’s view, claiming that
‘history is disfigured beneath his pen’ and protesting that the slaves of Haiti exercised much greater
political agency than Schoelcher admits: Cyrille Bissette, Réfutation du livre de M. V. Schoelcher sur
Haïti (Paris: Ébrard, 1844), p. 100. Translations from Jonathan Dusenbury, ‘Slavery and the Revolution
Histories of 1848’, Age of Revolutions (10 October 2016), https://ageofrevolutions.com/2016/10/10/
slavery-and-the-revolutionary-histories-of-1848/.
20 On the Haitian revolution, see David Brion Davis, ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture and the
Phenomenology of Mind’, in The Problem of Slavery in an Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 557–64; Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry 26:4
(2000): 821–65; Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009). For the effects of Haiti on America, see Edward Rugemer, The Problem of
Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State
University Press, 2008); and Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early
Republic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New
World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Laurent
Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Susan Buck- Morss suggests that
G. W. F. Hegel’s master–slave dialectic depended on Hegel’s reading of accounts of the Haitian upris-
ing. See also Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Universal History Upside Down’, Journal of Contemporary African Art
46 (May 2020): 28–39.
21 Miles Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire’, Past and Present 166 (2000): 146–80.
22 See Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions’, p. 150.
23 See Chapter 10, ‘Revolutions: From Philadelphia via Nanjing to Saint Petersburg’, in Jürgen
Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans.
Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 514–71.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/21, SPi
‘Manifesto to the World’ which demanded universal voting rights, the freedom of
the press, guaranteed work for Brazilian citizens, and the establishment of a feder-
alist government.24 Both within Europe and outside Europe, the demands of 1848
were remarkably similar: they were the demands of colonized and oppressed
people everywhere. As if in one voice, they all asked for political representation,
civil liberties, self-determination, self-governance, work, and freedom of information.
The 1848 revolutions, jeered at by Marx as a failure, did deliver constitutions to
most countries in Europe and by 1870 Germany and Italy were both united and
independent.25 (Ireland, however, did not achieve this until 1921, and even then,
the country was partitioned.) With the exception of Russia, the feudal system was
swept away in Europe after 1848 and counter-revolutionary governments were
forced to deliver social reforms if they were to hold on to power. The balance had
shifted and the social contract was under revision. It is true that the December
1848 parliamentary elections in France severely damaged radical republicanism,
but they boosted some new forms of socialism, such as Marxism, non-Marxist
communism, and militant anarcho-socialism as well as the libertarian socialism
of Charles Fourier.
Exiled radicals continued to build international alliances and associations in
the wake of 1848. After the 1830 revolution in France, Giuseppe Mazzini had
sought shelter in London, where he planned the next stage of his Italian national-
ist campaign.26 American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson, on his European travels,
noticed the self-sufficiency of the German community in Whitechapel and the
French in Spitalfields.27 London hosted large communities of exiles and also
migrant communities of workers, such as young German workmen on their
apprenticeship tours. ‘Why’, The Times asked, ‘are they here?’ Lady Charlotte
Guest thought that the answer was clear: these foreigners were here ‘to promote
anarchy’.28 But on the whole, the exiles educated their hosts about the horrors of
European tyrannies and fundraised peaceably for their nationalist campaigns.
The 1848 revolutions in their turn created wave after wave of exiles to London
24 Antônio Borges da Fonseca, ‘Manifesto au Mundo’ (‘Manifesto to the World’) (1 January 1849),
trans. Molly Quinn, in James N. Green, Victoria Langland, and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (eds), The Brazil
Reader: History, Culture, Politics, 2nd edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 197–8.
25 Linda Colley argues for the importance of constitutions in her recent book The Gun, The Ship
and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World (London: Profile, 2021).
26 See Lucy Riall, ‘The Politics of Italian Romanticism and the Making of Nationalist Culture’ in
Christopher A. Bayly and Eugenio Biagini (eds), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic
Nationalism, 1830–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 167–86 and Christopher
Duggan, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini in Britain and Italy: Divergent Legacies, 1837–1915’ in the same volume,
pp. 187–210.
27 Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
vol. 10: 1847–1848, ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press), (1973), p. 237. Hereafter
abbreviated to RWE JMN 10.
28 The Times (12 April 1848); see also The Times (6 April 1848) and Diary of Lady Charlotte Guest
(8 April 1848), in Lord Bessborough, The Diaries of Lady Charlotte Guest (London: John Murray,
1950), p. 209, both cited in Leslie Mitchell, ‘Britain’s Reactions to the Revolutions’, in R. J. W. Evans
and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds), The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to
Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 83–98, p. 95.
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Introduction 11
and Paris, some of whom then travelled onwards to America. A flurry of repub
lican nationalist publishing started up in New York City, and links developed
there between Giovane Italia, Joven Cuba, and Young America.29 After the putting
down of the Young Irelander Famine Rebellion of July 1848 the organizers, James
Stephens and John O’Mahony, escaped to Paris where they supported themselves
by teaching. In 1856, O’Mahony left Paris for America where he founded the
Fenian Brotherhood in 1858, the same year in which Stephens, who had returned
to Ireland, founded the Irish counterpart of the American Fenians, the Irish
Republican Brotherhood. The ongoing effects of 1848 would be felt long into the
twentieth century and beyond.
These are the bare facts, or some of them.30 They offer some valuable clues as to
what was at stake in this extraordinary year. Walt Whitman’s use in 1848 of the
term ‘human rights’ is important. More than anything, 1848 was about what it
meant to be human, and, as a direct result, 1848 was a much more important
moment for the global politics of race than has been generally recognized. The
spectacle of the poor and unemployed, the misery and poverty and neglect of the
people in every city in Europe, forced the social into political visibility in an
unprecedented way through a newly pervasive media. The means of this visibility
was important. A free press and the end of censorship was high up on every revo
lutionary’s agenda.
Historians still do not agree about the significance of the 1848 revolutions. There
is a general feeling that they must have been important. Sir Lewis Namier wrote in
1946 that the revolution of 1848 ‘was super-national as none before or after; it ran
through, and enveloped, the core of Europe’.31 Eugene Kamenka agreed that ‘[i]t
was in 1848, rather than in 1789 or in 1917, that revolutions spread like wildfire
and with remarkable family resemblance in trends and response throughout the
whole of Europe’.32 These revolutions, or, perhaps more accurately, this serial
revolution, had extended much further than the local or national revolutionary
events which had preceded it, and reached well beyond Europe. Eric Hobsbawm
wrote in 1962 that ‘[t]here has never been anything closer to the world-revolution’
than 1848.33 Despite an influential Essex Conference on the Sociology of
29 See Michael Paul Rogin, ‘Moby-Dick and the American 1848’, in Subversive Genealogy: The
Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983).
30 Serial Revolutions is not attempting an exhaustive history of the 1848 revolutions.
31 Lewis Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1946), p. 3.
32 Eugene Kamenka, ‘Introduction’, in Eugene Kamenka and F. B. Smith (eds), Intellectuals and
Revolution: Socialism and the Experience of 1848 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), pp. vii–xiii, p. xii.
33 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789 to 1848 [1962] (New York: Vintage Books,
1996), p. 112.
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Literature on the subject of 1848 which took place in July 1977, literary studies
has never organized itself around this ‘hot year’ in history.34 The results and
consequences of this remarkable serial conflagration of 1848 have even now
not been fully examined.
There are complex reasons for this. One is, of course, Marxism. Marx and
Engels published The Manifesto of the Communist Party in February 1848, but it
was not taken up as a manual by the revolutionaries of that year.35 The Manifesto
was only to become the go-to text for revolutionaries during the Paris Commune
of 1871, and then for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and beyond, after both its
authors were dead. Marx was in Paris in 1848 for five weeks, arriving on 4 March,
and he managed even in this short time to set up a revolutionary club for German
workers and to speak at others of the Parisian clubs.36 Paul Lafargue later remem-
bered that ‘Engels told me that it was in Paris in 1848, at the Café de la Régence
(one of the earliest centers of the Revolution of 1789) that Marx first laid out for
him the economic determinism of his materialist theory of history’.37 But Marx’s
ideas had not yet coalesced into the ‘‑ism’ they were later so powerfully to become.
While ‘Marxism’ was not a motive force during the events of 1848, it was to have
a lasting and profound effect on the twentieth-century historiography of 1848.
After acknowledging the remarkable reach of the revolutionary moment of
1848, Eugene Kamenka is typical in concluding that the revolution ‘proved, within
one year, to be a momentous failure’.38 Axel Körner, writing in 2000, agreed that
‘the revolution is almost always described as a failure’, pointing out that even such
different political commentators as de Tocqueville and Marx had agreed on this at
the time.39 That 1848 was a failure remained the consensus view throughout the
twentieth century, and to some extent it still persists. In 1984, Paul de Man, cogi-
tating on revolution, reminded us that ‘[t]he future is present in history only as
34 The phrase ‘hot year’ is James Chandler’s: James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of
Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
p. 77. 1848 was one of the years chosen as a significant single year by the ‘Essex Conference’, men-
tioned by Chandler. See Francis Barker et al. (eds), 1848: The Sociology of Literature: Proceedings of
the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1977 ([Colchester]: University of
Essex, 1978).
35 In 1847, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were asked by the newly formed League of Communists
to write a manifesto. The Manifesto of the Communist Party was published in the German language in
London in 1848. It would be called The Communist Manifesto only after 1871. Before the Paris
Commune of 1871 and the publication of a new German edition, there were only two limited editions
available in Swedish and English, and the manifesto was not much read.
36 Marx was in Paris from 4 March to 11 April 1848. See Samuel Bernstein, ‘Marx in Paris, 1848:
A Neglected Chapter’, Science and Society 3:3 (Summer 1939): 323–55; and Gareth Stedman Jones,
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Allen Lane, 2016), pp. 249ff.
37 Paul Lafargue, ‘Persönliche Erinnerungen an Friedrich Engels’, Die neue Zeit 23:2 (Stuttgart,
1905), p. 558, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 108.
38 Eugene Kamenka, ‘Europe in Upheaval’, in Kamenka and Smith (eds), Intellectuals and
Revolution, pp. 1–13, p. 1.
39 Axel Körner, ‘The European Dimension in the Ideas of 1848 and the Nationalization of its
Memories’, in Axel Körner (ed.), 1848—A European Revolution? International Ideas and National
Memories of 1848 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), pp. 3–28, p. 9.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/21, SPi
Introduction 13
the remembering of a failed project that has become a menace’.40 In 1994, Jonathan
Sperber neatly summed up the three available historiographies of 1848. The first
was the ‘romantic idea’, the gestural performance of revolution with no political
traction: this is the version that belongs to the hero-revolutionaries such as the
Hungarian Kossuth or the Venetian Daniele Manin. The second, following Marx
in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’, is ‘the farce’, in which the revolutionaries are all
professors, dilettantes, and pedants. Sperber tells the story of the French poet-
revolutionary drinking in a café who sees through the window a crowd of work-
ers go by and springs up and cries: ‘ “I am their leader; I must follow them!” ’41 And
the third version of 1848, which Sperber says is the most pervasive interpretation
of all, is ‘the failure’ which rests on the evidence that ‘after a shorter or longer—
and usually shorter—interval, the authorities overthrown at the onset of the revo-
lution returned to power’.42 Nothing happened, and the revolutions achieved
nothing. A. J. P. Taylor’s famous judgement that in 1848 ‘German history reached
its turning point and failed to turn’ still has currency today.43
All history is, of course, the history of the present. Taylor claimed that in
Germany, ‘[t]he success of the revolution discredited conservative ideas, the fail-
ure of the revolution discredited liberal ideas. After it, nothing remained but the
idea of Force.’44 But he was writing in the post-war devastation of 1945, with
Europe lying in ruins about him. In 1952, Priscilla Robertson wrote that ‘[t]oday
millions of classless, stateless people crowd the continent in hatred and despair—and
in a way they are the end product of the futility and ruthlessness of the 1848
revolutions’.45 Bitterness about the fruits of nationalism is understandable, but to
blame the revolutionaries of 1848 for the growth of totalitarianism is surely unfair,
and suggests much too straight a path from Romantic nationalism, through
popular politics, to Nazi and fascist ideologies. Instead, it might be closer to the
truth that the so-called ‘failure’ of the revolutions in 1848 helped to create both
liberalism and socialism, albeit by complex and indirect means, setting radicals
40 Paul de Man, ‘Wordsworth and Höderlin’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), pp. 47–65, pp. 58–9.
41 The poet-revolutionary is identified as republican Ledru-Rollin in Anthony Wood, Europe
1815–1945 (London: Longman, 1964), p. 133.
42 Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions: 1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), p. 2. Sperber goes on to suggest a fourth version of 1848 which emerges particularly
after 1989, influenced by social history: ‘The meetings of a political club of a small provincial town
can be no less fascinating than the impassioned debates of national parliamentarians; the aspira-
tions and struggles of impoverished and illiterate peasants no less moving than those of romantic
poets’, p. 3.
43 A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History
Since 1815 [1945] (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 71. Taylor was borrowing from G. M. Trevelyan,
‘From Waterloo to Marne’, Quarterly Review 229 (1918): 73–90, p. 76. Some recent scholarship has
taken this on: for example, see Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds), The 1848
Revolutions and European Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
44 A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History, p. 71.
45 Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1952), p. 419.
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against the bourgeoisie and decoupling them from their formerly united struggle
against aristocratic absolutism. It was certainly not true that the authorities who
were returned to power were identical to those who had been ousted at the start
of the revolution, and Marx was wrong to describe the ‘restoration’ as ‘a return to
a dead epoch’. Although his disappointment at the failure of the social revolution
is understandable, a new kind of politics was genuinely to emerge in the wake of
1848. Marxist readings, powerful though they have been in both diagnosing and
constructing class consciousness for several generations, have nevertheless con-
tinued to distort a full understanding of this important mid-century moment.
Other, quieter voices have been drowned out, voices that suggested that the real
gain of 1848 was exactly that liberalism excoriated by Marx in ‘The Eighteenth
Brumaire’.46 And even after the apparent collapse of the revolution, these same
revolutionary liberals continued to exert enormous influence over constitution-
making both in the German States and elsewhere. In many cases, the very same
men who had taken part in revolutionary activities became members of the post-
revolutionary administrations. Marx understood the revolutions of 1848 as being
closely connected, but the idea that only the socialist tradition kept the inter
nationalism of the revolutions alive is not the whole truth.47 One thing 1848 did
undoubtedly deliver was an internationally minded polylingual technocracy of
educated professionals and administrators across Europe, for good or for bad.
Serial Revolutions is not attempting to ‘recuperate’ liberalism, but it challenges the
traditional historiography which describes the revolutions of 1848 as a series of
failures that were barely registered in Britain and were rapidly extinguished by a
counter-revolution abroad. Instead, it argues that the changing cultural condi-
tions which produced the revolutions also enabled forms of internationalism and
a ‘serial’ model of citizenship to embed themselves in British, Continental
European, and American culture after 1848. For radical American democrat Walt
Whitman, writing in Leaves of Grass (1855), 1848 was a seminal and generative
event that would continue to change the landscape long into the future:
Not a grave of the murdered for freedom, but grows seed for
freedom . . . . in its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the
snows nourish.48
46 G. A. Kertesz suggested that ‘in 1848 the radical or socialist left was, even in France, a fairly small
minority . . . it was the liberals who emerged at the head of the revolutionary movement, particularly in
Germany’: G. A. Kertesz, ‘The View from the Middle Class: The German Moderate Liberals and
Socialism’, in Kamenka and Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution, pp. 61–75, p. 61.
47 See Körner, ‘The European Dimension’, p. 7.
48 Walt Whitman, ‘Resurgemus’. This poem was first published in the New York Tribune (21 June
1850); revised and published (in this version) in Leaves of Grass in 1855: Walt Whitman, Leaves of
Grass, The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1959), p. 134 (ellipses in origi-
nal). In 1856, Whitman began to date his poems in relation to the formation of the American republic
and ‘Resurgemus’ became ‘Poem of the Dead Young Men of Europe, the 72nd and 73rd Years of These
States’.
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Introduction 15
Far from the damp squib that Marx claimed them to be, the 1848 revolutions
represent an unprecedented moment of urgent European synchronicity and they
have important consequences for political discourse. Historian of Germany
Christopher Clark sees that ‘[t]he new political synthesis achieved in these years
set a pattern for politics whose imprint can still be discerned in the political cul-
tures of our own day’.49 He wants to move away from ‘what Hans Ulrich Wehler
once called “counter-revolutionary innoculation” ’ and to think about the restoration
period of the early 1850s as representing a profoundly significant reordering of
priorities that led to the economic liberalization of Europe.50 Clark is surely right,
but perhaps the even bigger historiographical challenge is to change how we think
about revolutions in the first place.
The historical focus usually squarely remains on the revolutionary moment
and the barricades and battles on the street. Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann
concedes that ‘[t]he long-term failure of the European revolutions does not imply
that their effects were not of tremendous importance’. Such a statement reveals a
structural and conceptual problem.51 Too much of the focus is on the revolution-
ary moment, oddly separated from its ‘effects’.52 This is the problem meticulously
explored by Hannah Arendt in her On Revolution, in which she criticizes Marx
and Engels for their fixation on the revolutionary coup. Arendt warns against ‘the
historian who tends to place his emphasis upon the first and violent stage of
rebellion and liberation, on the uprising against tyranny, to the detriment of the
quieter second stage of revolution and constitution’, thus perpetrating the ‘harm-
ful theory that the constitutions and the fever of constitution-making, far from
expressing truly the revolutionary spirit of the country, were in fact due to forces
of reaction and either defeated the revolution or prevented its full development’.53
Arendt makes a fierce and uncompromising argument against Marxism’s seduc-
tion by what she calls the ‘social’, and his neglect of what she calls the ‘political’.54
49 Christopher Clark, ‘1848: The European Revolution in Government’, Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society (Sixth Series) 22 (2012):171–97, p. 174. Clark also argues that ‘[t]he 1848 revolutions
were European revolutions in a sense that does not apply to the great upheavals of 1789–99, 1830–31,
1871 or 1917’, p. 195.
50 Clark, ‘1848: The European Revolution’, pp. 187–8. Clark suggests that economic liberalization is
presented after 1848 as ‘the remedy for all social ills and thus, ultimately, for all political conflict’, p. 188.
51 Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘1848–1849: A European Revolution?’, in Evans and von
Strandmann, The Revolutions in Europe 1848–1849, pp. 1–8, pp. 7–8.
52 Eugene Kamenka says of Marx and Engels, ‘Revolution, not constitution-making, was their con-
cern’. Eugene Kamenka, ‘ “The Party of the Proletariat”: Marx and Engels in the Revolution of 1848’, in
Kamenka and Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution, pp. 76–93, p. 79.
53 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 140.
54 Jacques Rancière has pointed to Marx’s separation of the social and political as one of the weak-
nesses of his philosophy, suggesting that Marx sees ‘emancipation’ as happening in a realm of the
social which is never contiguous with the realm of the political. Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement:
Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),
originally published in French, 1995. See particularly pp. 82ff. Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer
Peeples have suggested that, for our contemporary moment, ‘[c]ertainly, the public sphere evokes
echoes of ancient Greece. In so many ways, the small city-state of Athens has stunted the Western
imagination, especially with respect to what constitutes political activity and citizenship.’ Kevin
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/21, SPi
Marx and Engels, she claims, are not interested in forms of government as the
American revolutionists originally were, and the early French revolutionists were.
Overawed and overwhelmed by the spectacle of the vast influx of the rural poor
into Paris, the revolutionaries were distracted from the reconstruction of the polis.
The aim of revolution shifted, from ‘freedom for all’ to ‘abundance for all’. And,
Arendt argues, abundance does not necessarily lead to freedom; indeed, it can
lead in the other direction. But Arendt totally separates the political from the
social because she is invested in a classical model of the polis, a model that ultim
ately proves overly severe, and allows her to sidestep issues of social exclusion.
Crucially, her model misses the connections between race, poverty, and social
exclusion: it effectively eliminates the structural enmeshment of racism in polit
ical systems.55 Ralph Ellison was right to see a problematic ‘Olympian authority’
in her work.56
1848 redefined what ‘politics’ was. Jacques Rancière has complained that any
denomination of ‘the political’ suggests that there is somewhere else which is
‘not-politics’. ‘The political’ can then be used to invent and defend boundaries
around what qualifies as ‘political’ and what does not, and thereby can operate to
obstruct democracy.57 1848 tore down these boundaries around the ‘political’
sphere. The ‘reform’ debate about the parliamentary relationship between the rep-
resentative and the represented was transformed into a global debate about the
contested spaces of representability.58 And in 1848, it was the city that became the
primary site of representation in popular literary, artistic, graphic, and political
terms in a way which powerfully exposed the interconnectedness of urban
Europe. The events of that spring showed that cities were more closely intercon-
nected across state borders to each other than to their own rural populations. In
the new media age of the 1840s, ‘representation’ shifted from being the subject of
discussion about electoral mechanisms and the extension of the franchise in
polite periodicals and broadsheet newspapers, to a bitter and violent struggle over
Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, ‘From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism,
and the “Violence” of Seattle’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 19:2 (2002): 125–51, p. 129.
55 Most notoriously, Arendt displayed what Charles Mills has called ‘white ignorance’ in her 1959
article ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, in which she defends racial segregation in schools in the American
South: Charles Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan (eds), Race and
Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 13–38.
Focusing on ‘political’ rights as opposed to the ‘social’ allows Arendt to dismiss the struggle for racial
integration as ‘social climbing’, while focusing her attention on the anti-miscegenation laws. She does
not see any connection between the two. See Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, Dissent 6:1
(1959): 45–56. Michael D. Burroughs has called this ‘a pervasive epistemic error in Arendt’s work’:
Michael D. Burroughs, ‘Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” and White Ignorance’, Critical
Philosophy of Race 3:1 (2015): 52–78, p. 70. See also Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro
Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014).
56 Ralph Ellison, ‘The World and the Jug’, in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 108.
57 See Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the subject of the Rights of Man?’ in Dissensus: On Politics and
Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 70–83.
58 Matthias Lievens, ‘Contesting Representation: Rancière on Democracy and Representative
Government’, Thesis Eleven 122:1 (2014): 3–17.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/21, SPi
Introduction 17
visibility, over who gets to be seen at all. As we shall see, commentators in 1848
were interested in precisely this meeting of the social and the political: Margaret
Fuller remarked of the situation in France in 1848 that ‘it would appear that the
political is being merged in the social struggle’ and, she added emphatically, ‘it is
well’.59 The German writer Fanny Lewald, who was in Paris in February and
March 1848 before hurrying back to her native Berlin to catch the March revolu-
tion there, felt that ‘[i]t will not only be a matter of political change; a social revo-
lution will inevitably follow on its heels’.60 In many ways, making the social
political was the supreme achievement of the 1848 revolution and it was the seri-
ality of the revolutions, rather than the revolutions themselves, that brought a
new global social form into visibility and made it impossible ever again to imagine
the world as it had appeared before 1848.
Nationalisms in 1848
Perhaps the greatest irony of the historiography of 1848 is that it tells us that many
colonized peoples, and peoples living under foreign rule, considered nationhood
to be their best hope of emancipation. The international consensus after 1848 that
national struggles were emancipatory for the people would result in a hardening
of national boundaries, an embedding of monolingual cultures, a consolidation of
ethnic and racial ‘theory’, and a competitive colonialism between European national
powers, which would eventually and inexorably lead to the First World War.61
I argue that the 1848 revolutions were remarkably successful in establishing a new
‘universal’ script for the rights of the people, but their unfortunate and parallel
investment in a seemingly emancipatory nationalism did develop in unintended
ways towards xenophobic nation-states and the invention of the lie of ‘scientific’
racism in the second half of the century. It is important to remember the success
of the universalism of 1848, though, even as we acknowledge the slow sinking of
the universalist agenda under the growing weight of competition between
increasingly militarized nation-states later in the nineteenth century.62 The chain
of European events in 1848 cannot be satisfactorily explained as a nationalist
63 Axel Körner has warned against ‘the reduction of 1848 to the issue of national revolutions’: Axel
Körner, ‘National Movements against Nation States: Bohemia and Lombardy between the Habsburg
Monarchy, the German Confederation, and Piedmont–Sardinia’, in Moggach and Stedman Jones
(eds), The 1848 Revolutions, pp. 345–82, p. 370.
64 Christopher Bayly has helpfully reminded us that ‘[b]efore 1850, large parts of the globe were
not dominated by nations so much as by empires, city-states, diasporas’: C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert,
Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, ‘AHR Conversation: On
Transnational History’, American Historical Review 111:5 (December 2006): 1441–64, p. 1442. He
adds, ‘[w]e should not fall back again into a wider world history constituted simply by “nations and
nationalism” and the forces that transcended them, though Hobsbawm’s books remain among the few
works that students can read and understand’ (p. 1449). See also C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern
World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Jürgen
Osterhammel claims that ‘[t]he revolutions of 1848 were not a global event’: Osterhammel,
Transformation of the World, p. 546. I disagree. Osterhammel (p. 544) quotes Dieter Langewiesche,
who says that Europe in 1848 becomes a ‘communications space’. Dieter Langewiesche,
‘Kommunikationsraum Europa: Revolution und Gegenrevolution’, in Dieter Langewiesche (ed.),
Demokratiebewegung und Revolution 1847 bis 1849: Internationale Aspecte und Europäische
Verbindungen (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1998), pp. 11–35, p. 32.
65 Körner, ‘National Movements against Nation States’, p. 348.
66 Axel Körner takes the case of Italy, usually cited as a ‘nationalist’ cause in 1848, as an example of
the variety of thinking that was available at the time: ‘there was a distinct and widespread feeling in
Lombardy, most prominently expressed by the political theorist and protagonist of 1848 Carlo
Cattaneo, that the region’s submission under Piedmont would destroy a historically rooted notion of
civic identity that had been largely compatible with Habsburg rule, but was doomed to vanish under
the autocratic centralism of the Piedmontese monarchy and an emerging Italian nation state’: Körner,
‘National Movements against Nation States’, p. 352.
67 As Chris Bayly writes, ‘I have tried to think of these issues in terms of different “drivers” of
change (ideologies, economic change, the role of the state) at different periods and in different parts of
the world. The interaction of these “drivers” produced “chaotic” changes (such as transnational revolu
tions) which cannot be traced back to any one of these “drivers” or domains alone.’ Bayly, ‘AHR
Conversation’, p. 1450.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/21, SPi
Introduction 19
We possess those things which other nations are everywhere demanding at the
gates of the Palace or the door of the Legislature!—free press, legislature,
etc. . . . The State becomes a society for the common good, giving to all its mem-
bers a rateable share in the common benefit and stock. . . . The British Empire is a
great friendly society.70
The Times is countering the fear verbalized by Matthew Arnold, who wrote to his
sister in the same month that ‘if the new state of things succeeds in France, social
changes are inevitable here and elsewhere . . . but, without waiting for the result,
the spectacle of France is likely to breed great agitation here, and such is the state
of our masses that their movements now can only be brutal plundering and
destroying’.71 Arnold understands the serial possibilities of the French revolution,
and doubts whether the so-called ‘free press’ and the ‘legislature’ (along with that
glib ‘etcetera’), will prove sufficient to restrain a miserable and desperate British
people. In the event, a revolution did not transpire in Britain, but the surviving
public record is partial and misleading as to the levels of state violence and insur-
gent anger in play during the 1840s.
Opinion about Britain’s relationship with Europe and the importance of
European politics to British domestic affairs was hotly divided then, as it is now.
F. B. Smith is right that ‘[t]he debate on 1848 forms a vivid moment in that con-
tinuing schism in British life between “Europeans” and “Little Englanders” ’.72
A representative of the latter, the pro-Reform politician Henry Brougham, an old
man by 1848, complained that the French revolution of 1848 was entirely inex
plicable, ‘without pretext, without one circumstance to justify or even to account
for it’, and he warned darkly that as a result, ‘all sense of security in any existing
government’ is gone.73 J. S. Mill reviewed Brougham’s pamphlet in the Westminster
Review, ‘vindicating the Revolution, and the Provisional Government, from as
unjust aspersions as ever clouded the reputation of great actions and eminent
characters’.74 Mill saw the revolution differently, as the logical outcome of a set of
legible causes, and his deep knowledge of French politics exposes Brougham’s
ignorance and anti-French prejudice. The Provisional Government had taken
over from ‘a government [which] found itself, in 1848, so feeble that it fell at the
first onset’.75 Mill was right about the French case. But what about all that did
happen in Britain after 1848, some of it as a direct result of events in Continental
Europe? Matthew Arnold felt that social changes in Britain were inevitable after
1848, and they certainly arrived. Margot Finn has launched an energetic attack on
nationalist history-making, claiming that ‘[t]he common but false antithesis in
historical writing between nationalism and internationalism acts to obscure the
two concepts’ fundamental interrelation . . . [and] masks their mutual contribu-
tion to both class formation and liberal popular politics in the industrial era’.76
71 Matthew Arnold to Jane Arnold (10 March 1848), Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848–1888, ed.
George W. E. Russell (London: Macmillan and Co., 1895), vol. 1, p. 6.
72 F. B. Smith, ‘Great Britain and the Revolutions of 1848’, Labour History 33 (November 1977):
65–85, p. 71.
73 Lord [Henry] Brougham, Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, K.G., Lord President of the
Council, on the Late Revolution in France (London: James Ridgway, 1848), p. 22 and p. 31.
74 J. S. Mill, Review, Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, K.G., Lord President of the Council, on the
Late Revolution in France (London: James Ridgway, 1848), Westminster Review 51 (April 1849):
1–47, p. 47.
75 J. S. Mill, Review, Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, p. 6.
76 Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 12. For the persistence of such exceptionalist
historiography into the twentieth century, see David Edgerton, ‘The Nationalization of British
History: Historians, Nationalism, and the Myths of 1940’, English Historical Review, 2021; https://doi.
org/10.1093/ehr/ceab166.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/21, SPi
Introduction 21
Quarantining Britain from the rest of European history in the nineteenth century
under the guise of British exceptionalism is patently absurd, but remains a
remarkably entrenched approach.
Citizenship in 1848
The revolutions were not exclusively urban, but they were mainly so. They took
place in city squares and city streets. This made them much easier and faster for
the urban press to report than military engagements on remote battlefields, so
that their unprecedented representation in ‘real time’ inaugurated an urgent con-
versation about the politics of the city which would have long-running conse-
quences. Where did politics belong in the space of the city? In palaces,
parliaments, or on the streets? What should be the fiscal relationship between
countryside and city, which was often hotly contested?77 How was the (often reac-
tionary) peasantry to be folded into the idea of citizenship? And finally, and per-
haps most importantly, what did citizenship now mean? The urban sequence of
the revolutions meant that the concept of citizenship was arguably more import
ant in 1848 than that of nation. But citizenship was a highly unstable concept.
Both the French and American revolutionary versions of citizenship were ener-
getically entangled and disentangled and hotly debated. The 1789 French
Revolution had been underpinned by an Enlightenment language of natural
rights, through Rousseau, which meant that the governed had the right to with-
draw their consent to be governed if the government was felt to have exceeded its
limits or to have failed. In Britain, a similar Enlightenment view was authorized
by Locke’s argument that legitimate government rested upon the consent of the
governed and went back to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9. This was the lan-
guage of Chartism and the radical constitutionalism that was used by the
Northern Star in 1839: ‘Every member of a political state is entitled to certain
privileges, which are either the residue of natural rights, whose surrender was not
required for the public good, or those civil liberties, which society provides and
guarantees in lieu of the natural rights so given up.’78 The American constitutional
system, modelled on ancient classical models of the polis, meant that the state
granted freedom to the people. Men in ancient Greece, explains Hannah Arendt,
‘received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth. Neither
77 Jonathan Sperber points out that peasants stealing wood from the forest and urban revolutionar-
ies organizing protest banquets do not have an immediate cause in common: Sperber, European
Revolutions, p. 62. I argue that their sense of shared grievance against aristocratic absolutism was
enough to unite them.
78 Northern Star (14 September 1839) cited in Josh Gibson, ‘Natural Right and the Intellectual
Context of Early Chartist Thought’, History Workshop Journal 84 (2017): 194–213, and requoted in
Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Elusive Signifiers: 1848 and the Language of “Class Struggle”’, in Moggach and
Stedman Jones (eds), The 1848 Revolutions, pp. 429–51, p. 435.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/21, SPi
all men should live under constitutional, ‘limited’ government. The proclam
ation of human rights through the French Revolution, on the contrary, meant
quite literally that every man by virtue of being born had become the owner of
certain rights. The consequences of the shifted emphasis are enormous, in prac-
tice no less than in theory. The American version actually proclaims no more
than the necessity of civilized government for all mankind; the French version,
however, proclaims the existence of rights independent of and outside the body
politic, and then goes on to equate these so-called rights, namely the rights of
man qua man, with the rights of citizens.80
Introduction 23
(originally published in French in 2011). Emily Apter in her foreword to this volume explains the
contradiction as one of ‘the subject as transindividual subjectus at once collective and singular, where
the “I” (as Rousseau would have it), has “become a property that belongs to each and everyone, or to
whatever citizen-subject . . . on the condition that he or she is ‘indivisibly’ part of the ‘common’” . . . [so
that] ‘the conflict of conflicts that Balibar deduces from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit: the “con-
flict of universalities” [is] replicated in the “conflict of communitarian principles”’: Emily Apter,
‘Foreword’, in Balibar, Citizen Subject, p. xiii.
84 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 50. 85 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 65.
86 T. Wemyss Reid, Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Forster, 2 vols (London: Chapman
& Hall, 1888), vol. 1, p. 231. Hereafter all references are to this volume and edition, abbrevi-
ated to WEF.
87 Robertson, Revolutions of 1848, p. 412. 88 Israel, Expanding Blaze, p. 557.
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Seriality in 1848
‘[T]he French have begun a new revolution’, wrote the English poet Arthur Hugh
Clough at the end of February 1848.90 But was this a new revolution or just a
continuation of the series? Both Marx and de Tocqueville saw 1848 as part of one
revolutionary process that had begun in 1789, and neither expected it to stop in
1848 either.91 The German poet Heinrich Heine, who was living in Paris in
February 1848, wondered:
Is the great author repeating himself? Are his creative powers failing? Wasn’t the
play, presented to us last February with such pride, the same as he produced
eighteen years ago in Paris under the title of ‘The July Revolution’? But one can
always see a good piece twice. At any rate, it has been improved and expanded
and the conclusion in particular is new and was received with thunderous
applause.92
The pattern of repetition, reprise, return, the possibility of difference, and the
conceit of the ‘play’ return again and again in contemporary accounts of the évé-
nements of 1848. Hannah Arendt reminds us that ‘the term “permanent revolu
tion,” or révolution en permanence’ was coined by Proudhon in the middle of the
nineteenth century.93 It has since become part of the Marxist credo ‘that there is
only one revolution, selfsame and perpetual’.94 But as Arendt points out, this way
of thinking leaves us with very few tools to understand the ‘times of quiet and
restoration’ which in this model recede into merely ‘the pauses in which the
89 Christopher Clark, ‘From 1848 to Christian Democracy’, in Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman
Jones (eds), Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 90–213, p. 193. Clark points out that far from being defeated in 1848, ‘European political
Catholicism had more future locked up inside it’: p. 201.
90 Anthony Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet’s Life (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 125.
91 Eric Hobsbawm agrees, describing this as ‘[t]he great revolution of 1789–1848’: Hobsbawm,
‘Introduction’, Age of Revolution, p. 1.
92 Heinrich Heine, Article for the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung (1 March 1848), republished as
‘Die Februarrevolution’ Werke, VII, pp. 377–85, p. 377.
93 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 44. 94 Ibid.
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Language: Esperanto
Tradukita de
Ach. Motteau
Eldonata de
THE ESPERANTIST
LONDON
CHATHAM:
PRINTED BY W. & J. MACKAY & CO., LTD.
Antaŭparolo.
La plej malnova presita ekzemplero de La Ventego troviĝas en la
foliega volumo, kiun la aktoroj Heminge kaj Condell—ambaŭ kolegoj
de Shakespeare—preparis en la jaro 1623ᵃ; kaj ĝia unua prezentiĝo
okazis la 1ᵃⁿ de Novembro, 1611ᵃ, laŭ samtempaj raportoj.
Tiuj faktoj klarigas la maturan belecon, la riĉege imagitan fantazion
de tiu nobla dramo, videble verkita dum la maturaĝo de ĝia kreinto
unu el liaj lastaj ĉefverkoj—eble la lasta.
Al la Majstro, la Elpensinto de Esperanto!
Ĉu La Ventegon Esperantigante
Mi tro atencas? Diru al mi, Majstro.
Ho! ŝajnas mia Shakespeare tia fonto
Ke ĉiutage ĉerpas mi belaĵojn
En liaj helaj paĝoj! Do rigardu
Ne tro severe tiun ĉi libreton,
Malindan eĥon je l’ Avona Cigno.
A.M.
La Ventego.
Personoj:
Alonzo, Reĝo de Neapolo.
Sebastiano, frato de Alonzo.
Prospero, rajta Duko de Milano.
Antonio, frato de Prospero, duka uzurpulo de Milano.
Ferdinando, Reĝido de Neapolo, filo de Alonzo.
Gonzalo, honesta maljuna konsilano.
Adriano, Francisko, kortegaj sinjoroj.
Kalibano, Sovaĝa kaj malbela sklavo.
Trinkulo, kortega amuzulo.
Stefano, drinkema kelisto.
Ŝipestro, Subestro, Maristoj.
Mirando, filino de Prospero.
Arielo, aera spirito.
Iriso, Cereso, Juno, Nimfoj, Rikoltistoj, spiritoj.
Aliaj spiritaj servistoj de Prospero.