Ron Peters's Reviews > 1848: Year of Revolution

Rapport’s book provides an insightful overview of this year of revolution and is engagingly written, but it may give more detail than some are looking for. If you’re more interested in analysis than specific details, the first chapter describes the causes well, and the Conclusion gives a good summary of the results and implications for the future. The final sections of each chapter are also good and can be skimmed.

Government-funded educational systems predictably downplay historic events that aimed at toppling the government itself.

We’ve all heard of the Russian Revolution, but are we taught that workers and the military also brought Britain to the verge of a revolution in 1919 (see Simon Webb [2016] 1919: Britain’s Year of Revolution)? Likewise, we may have heard of the French Revolution of 1848 by reading Flaubert’s (1869) Sentimental Education, but few of us are taught that most of Europe came within a hair’s breadth of falling to revolutionary uprisings in that year.

In the early nineteenth century, Europe was still largely under the rule of kings and aristocrats, but the rise of capital under the industrial revolution forged changes that destabilized the old system.

Industrial capitalists and their support system of financiers and lawyers came from the burgeoning middle class, and this group was dissatisfied at being barred from meaningful political participation. Workers underwent a tumult of social and economic change and, in places like Russia, the masses still labored under medieval conditions as serfs. The social safety net was nearly nonexistent, and the early decades of the industrial revolution were characterized by frequent and massive boom and bust cycles that forced workers to struggle for simple physical survival. A new political system arose, socialism.

These factors combined to raise demands for greater democratic participation and legal and constitutional protections. A string of economic depressions and bad crops provided the spark that spread revolutionary activity across Europe in 1848, starting with France. Their success in deposing Louis-Phillipe instilled tremendous fear among European royalty and led to promises to pursue varying levels of democratic change.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels initially thought this year would inaugurate the great global revolution of the proletariat, but this proved not to be so. In the end, the middle class realized it could negotiate, separately and peacefully, for its own socioeconomic and political improvements and protections, and it quickly threw the workers and their revolution under the bus. Isolated in this way, the workers succumbed to the violent ministrations of the military. Equally, though, the often reflexively conservative views of the rural poor reasserted themselves when it became clear that the tide had turned.

For a good discussion of similar issues in the next historical period, see Eric Hobsbawm’s (1975) The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, which introduces the factor of imperialism as a societal force.

A seemingly obvious key lesson is that successful revolutions must have majority support from all groups opposed to the existing regime. Whenever dissatisfied sub-groups can be played off against each other revolution will fail. Reading this book gave me a new respect for successful revolutionaries such as Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel.