Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849

"This is simply magnificent. Here is a great historian at the height of his powers—the control to tell this extraordinary story across such an epic range. This is history on the grand scale. It’s full of important historical truths—very deep and profound ones—and, also, particular accounts of particular people and particular places. It’s very vivid. He’s looking at the great revolutions of 1848, from Budapest and Vienna and Galicia and Moldavia to France and Milan and Sicily. The number of languages and the range of understanding is extraordinary. He takes you to the particular sufferings of the peasantry and the townspeople—but finds that economic suffering may be partly a cause, but it’s not a sufficient cause of these revolutions. He’s looking to politics and political ideas. He describes the precarious state in which people were living and shows how the revolutions ricochet, as one country and one city rises. The revolutions in different countries are quickly succeeded by each other but they don’t necessarily spark each other off. It’s been a mystery how the revolutions happened, but he shows how they happen and, also, the consequences. They bring new freedoms, new constitutions, new parliaments, but in the end, the old order re-establishes itself. He describes a counter-revolutionary international. It’s an extraordinary achievement: a brilliant series of set pieces, but also this larger narrative. It’s pretty hefty. You wouldn’t want to fall asleep with the book on your nose—you would be knocked out. I read on, agog. It’s just full of wonders and surprises and particular people with whom you feel sympathy and the bravery of the participants in all this."

"Christopher Clark is one of the great historians of our moment. He writes very elegantly and smoothly, so even though it’s long, you could read shorter books that would be more of a struggle. You might instinctively lean towards saying it’s a traditional big history book. He takes a topic and goes at it to tell you a big story. He’s very learned, has read everything and thought about everything. He does find original avenues of approach to events that, he claims, are largely forgotten. If you studied 1848 at school, you might have a vague notion that Marx reflected on it. Other than that, it’s not really in the canon: it’s not the French Revolution , or the First or Second World War. It’s somehow lost. He’s saying, ‘Hang on! This was an extraordinary moment because across pretty much the whole of Europe, there was a form of uprising or revolution.’ It happened in spring, they’d fallen out with each other by the summer, and by the autumn the counter-revolution kicked in and the whole thing was “over.” But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to see here. It had profound influences that we still feel today. Clark goes back and describes—and I thought these were the most interesting parts of the book—the Europe of the early and mid-19th century. What you see there are lots of conflicting movements and tides—some of them quite dynamic, some of them quite static—driven by industrialisation, the collapse of the old order, new ideas about how society should be organised etc. Something is bubbling up. It’s not one thing: lots of things are interacting that are quite complex. He draws an analogy and asks, ‘Does any of this sound familiar?’ In the world we’re living in now, there are these new developments. In our age, a lot of it is around technology and what that is doing to all our societies, from personal relationships to whether you’re going to have a job to who has the most money. He organises that all quite well into a big picture, then tells you about the revolutions themselves as you go through the year. He then reflects on what their legacy was. He says that every country in continental Europe was, in some form, reconstituted after that event and re-tuned for the modern era. It’s a work of history that drags your perspective to somewhere you didn’t expect. It causes you to pause. Where Christopher Clark is really good is that he brings to life that world as a historian. He goes through the annual bills for a weaver in Lyon, and says, ‘This is how much you got paid. This is how much your rent was. This is how much bread cost.’ You realise the social distress for many people at a very basic level: something was going to give."