Dan Snow's History Hit - Europe's 1848 Revolutions

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

In 1848, Europe was wracked by a series of revolutions that turned the established political order on its head. Across the continent populations erupted in revolt, and the shockwaves of these revolutions rippled across the globe. But these uprisings hold a strange place in European history - did they succeed, or fail? And why are they not better understood in the European consciousness?On today's episode, Dan is joined by Christopher Clark, author of Revolutionary Spring. In a remarkable reinterpretation of this crucial period, Christopher explains how and why these revolutions broke out, and what their legacy has been.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In 1848 and 1849, Europe was wracked by a series of revolutions that transformed the political order.

It was a continent-wide uprising. In fact, the shockwaves extended even further, touching many places around the world. Some of these revolutions produced enduring liberal changes. Many of them did not, as the old rulers fought back. Reactionary forces proved powerful. To talk us through not just the uprisings of 48 and 49, but the many, many riots and revolutions and tensions that preceded them, I've got Christopher Clarke. I've wanted to have him on this podcast for years,

and it's a great privilege and pleasure to have him on. He's the Regis Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He's written a hugely successful book about the outbreak of the First World War, but also biographies of Kaiser Wilhelm II and many, many other wonderful books. He is a giant in the field. And his new book on 1848, I can't tell you how good it is. Packed with original research, packed with new takes that overturn whatever impressions you may have had of those tumultuous years. It's a fantastic chat with a very special scholar. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Christopher, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Dan, thank you very much for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here. The revolutions of 1848, I've naively always thought they kind of came out of a clear blue sky,

but you actually demonstrate that the early to mid-19th century was a tumultuous time. I mean, I was sort of halfway through your book reading about revolutions before we even got to 1848. What was going on? Was it the legacy of the Napoleonic Wars? Had a genie been unleashed from a bottle? Was it economic change, reading, literacy? What's going on in this period? Well, I'm sorry to say that it was all of the above, as it so often is. So it was both the increasing sophistication of literate dissenting publics and the growth of the public sphere, the growth of the critical press. If you look at France, for example, the emergence of powerful newspapers capable of waging war against a governing regime, both through arguments and

articles, through scandal, sometimes partially confected scandals, but also through cartoons and visual caricature. So it's partly that, it's the growth of critical potentials in European societies. It's also, as you mentioned, the kind of chronic ailments of the European economy, in which the population is growing very, very fast. There's plenty of food for everybody, but every now and then, there are drastic shortfalls. This is a system which is very vulnerable to what we would now call disruptions in the supply chain. Grain price spikes and food shortages can push whole sectors of society into subsistence

crisis from one week to the next. So it's a society which is prospering in some ways, but extremely vulnerable in others. And you mentioned the Napoleonic Wars. I think there is a long-term traumatic effect of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Napoleonic Wars had changed everything. I mean, if you think, for example, of the fact that 60% of German-speaking Europeans were in a different state, they lived in a different country at the end of the Napoleonic Wars from the one they had lived in when the French Revolutionary Wars began back in the 1790s. And that's not because they'd moved. It's because the borders, the political borders, had been redrawn around them. So you cannot emphasize enough how profound the changes are

that are caused by this era of revolutionary Napoleonic warfare. So all those things are playing together. You can mobilize people during a period of revolutionary Napoleonic warfare. So all those things are playing together. You know, you can mobilize people during a period of protracted warfare, but it's very difficult to demobilize them. People stay mobile. Things you can demobilize, you move a stone, you put it down, it's still. But if you move huge numbers of human beings to wage war, to become involved in political conflict, and so on, you mobilize them for political objectives. You can't simply say at the end of all that, now be still, go back home. There's nothing to see here. It's all over. People stay mobile. And you see that through the 18-teens and 20s and 30s. And Christopher, there's ideas around, aren't there, dear boy? There's so many ideas

and charismatic people spouting them. And I'd like to just talk a little about nationalism, because it's a dirty word today. And we get very worried when Donald Trump used the word nationalism, and we associate it with conquering lost lands, with exclusionary nationalism, racism, exceptionism. But help us to understand that nationalism in this period is progressive, it's liberal, it's young, it's exciting. What does it mean to people? Nationalism, of course, to us, through the basic sense, simply means a position which espouses that the political borders must be coextensive with the borders of an ethnic settlement. So, for example, the Germans should be inside something German, a German entity, a German state, or that the

Italians should live in something called Italy, which is a political reality. The truth in the period that we're looking at was that there was no Italy and there was no Germany. There were 39 different German states. There were six independent Italian states and a few more, if you count the ones that are inside under the control of the Austrians. So we have instances where a single nation is dispersed among different territories. We also have an instance like the Poles where, you know, you have a Polish nation and a Polish culture and a Polish language and Polish forms of religious expression and aesthetics. But what you don't have is a Polish nation state. So the Poles are locked inside Prussia, Russia, and Austria as a consequence of the partition of Poland in the 18th century.

So you have people who are trying to come together to form some kind of national entity. And then you have people like, for example, the Hungarians who are living inside an imperial multi-ethnic commonwealth like the Austrian Empire, but who want to, they don't necessarily initially want to form a completely separate nation state, but they want autonomy, greater national rights for their particular ethnicity. They want their language to be spoken more broadly in official contexts and so on. And so they want to break away from something that currently belongs together. So nationalism takes these different forms. Sometimes it wants to disintegrate. Sometimes it wants to grow together what is currently shattered into many parts. So it's complicated

in that way. But as you say, it is young, and it is fresh, and it is radical. One of the interesting things about nationalism is it's extremely inclusive. Everybody can be a nationalist, even children can be nationalists, women can be nationalists, or patriots, at least. And so we find that knowing the patriotic movements of Central Europe, women played a very important role, not as the editors of newspapers, they weren't in the engine rooms of patriotic politics, but they cultivated patriotic fashions, held a very important position in the eyes of nationalists, but they cultivated patriotic fashions, held a very important position in the eyes of nationalists because they were important in the education of the young. So it was very important to recruit women to the national cause. So nationalism or

patriotism is inclusive of women in a way that, for example, political radicalism often was not. Radicals and liberals belong to a macho culture, which was sort of men only. Women weren't really welcome. But nationalism was different. So it is young and it is fresh. And the interesting thing about the patriots of this era, of the 1830s and 40s, is some of these nations are very well established. I mean, the idea of the German nation goes back to the Renaissance and beyond. And so does the idea of the Italian nation.

I mean, you could take it back to Dante and back to ancient Rome if you want. But, you know, in many cases, for example, the Croats, what does it mean to be a member of a Croatian nation? There are many different Croatian dialects. There's no single Croatian literary language. And so in many cases, in order to be a patriot, you first have to learn what that nation is. And in order to learn it, you first have to invent it. I mean, you have to create a national press, you have to create a national language. And there are instances of people who feel that they are Croats, but haven't yet mastered Croatian. And that is certainly very much the case for the Hungarians. You have very excited Hungarian patriots who don't speak very

good Hungarian. And one of the key purposes of the Hungarian Patriot Movement in the 1830s and 40s is to improve the standard, the quality of spoken and written Hungarian, to establish it as a literary and scientific language, and to wean people away from German and French and other imported languages towards the cultivation of their own idiom. So nationalism is an evolving frontier of emotion and knowledge. It's not really a commitment to hard and fast political realities. And there's a sense, is there, that you can only achieve prosperity, is it? Freedoms or even greatness if you cast off the yoke of these strange foreign dynasties that through a process of ancient conquest, marriage, accident have ended up as your overlords. Absolutely. And this is one of the most radical features of nationalism in the world of the 19th century, that the European map is divided up exactly as you've just implied, dynastically.

Europe is still a continent of monarchies, and these monarchies are dominated by dynasties, the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, the Guelphs, the Wittelsbachs, you name it. And so what nationalism or what patriotism can do is to suggest that the real location of power is not in a dynasty, but in a people. It's in a culture. And everybody who speaks a particular idiom, everybody who participates in that national identity, that national culture, they are part of that. And that's what bestows them with political identity, not the fact that they are part of that. And that's what bestows them with political identity, not the fact that they are subjects of some king who sits on a throne. So nationalism is radical in that way, in the sense that it seems to undermine the inherited

authority of dynastic monarchies. That's one of the problems it seems to pose for people like the Austrian Chancellor Metternich, who sees nationalism as a sort of toxic and corrosive force in European affairs. And then we've got a little bit of socialism, we've got large urban populations, we've got factories, we've got the beginning of the kind of industrial process that we recognise as sort of modern. And does that change labour relations? Is it a sort of solidarity and a growing class awareness among these new groups of labourers? Are those engines for new ideas? Absolutely. I mean, the fascinating thing, though, about that, for me, this is one of the most interesting things when I was doing the research for this book was to find out what a diverse and

fascinating world the socialisms of pre-1848 Europe were. This is a socialism before the era when Marxism had come to wield this dominant influence over the whole socialist world. So what you actually have is hundreds of different utopian forms of experimental thought, reflections on what it is that amounts to a dignified, prosperous, and meaningful human life, what it is that enables humans to prosper in their relations with each other and the world around them. So the endless chains of thought that are sort of unfurling across Europe are terribly, terribly interesting. And one of the things you notice if you start looking at what people are saying and doing is that nobody is stationary. Everybody is on the move. People are improvising, making it up as they go along, pulling in new ideas from a whole range of sources. They're like sailors moving across an archipelago, landing first on this

island, then on that, picking up always a few ideas, moving on, picking up new ideas. In the literature, you get the impression that people sign up to some famous sage like Saint-Simon, Fourier, or Marx. But in fact, what people are doing is assembling highly idiosyncratic positions of their own in ways which are extremely interesting. And everybody is on the move. Nobody is staying still. Speaking of nothing staying still, what's so profound about 1848 and the reason lots of people were so interested in it around the Arab Spring is it's the contagion, the contagious nature of these uprisings. Now, you point out in the book that there were many rebellions, riots, revolutions

through the early 19th century, but in spring 1848, they go truly pan-European. We talked a bit about the context, but what is the immediate reason for the flames bursting out? Well, it's interesting because in 1830, there had been a revolution in Paris, which does spark sympathy revolts in other places. So it starts in July in Paris and then takes off in the following month in Brussels and results in a revolution in Belgium, which produces a new Belgian nation state. The Belgian we know today is born in that moment and it has knock-on effects in central italy and switzerland and other places some of the german states and so on so there is already a kind of prior tumult when this cascading effect can first be observed but it's nothing

compared to what happens in 1848 and i think the reason is has to do with this thickening of networks of communication that we were talking about before, that there's a larger reading public, there's a larger critical press, the newspapers are all exchanging stories with each other. If you read the press in the months coming up to the sort of outbreak of the revolutions in 1848, it's astonishing how European the horizons are. People in Paris take great interest in tumults and uprisings and also in a civil war in Switzerland, in Palermo, in Naples, in the south of Italy. Even the press in Wallachia, in Bucharest, is reporting on events in Switzerland and

Italy, you know, and you see this everywhere. It's quite clear that Europeans perceived Europe as a joined up system. It's not a series of national dynastic silos, all living, having their own, you know, historical narratives. It's a joined up society. And there's a very interesting speech, which the great liberal luminary is still much valued by conservative intellectuals today in the United States and in Europe, Alexis de Tocqueville. He stands up in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris, in the Parliament in Paris, and says, listen, the ministers of this government, they've got big news coming if they think that these tumults on the horizon in places like Italy and Switzerland are not going to come to Paris.

He says, believe me, in a very short time, the storm on the horizon will be here in our streets. Now, there's a clear avowal of the European character of these upheavals. So they are connected and they're cognate in the sense that they're all growing. They break out in political situations and social situations, which are already connected, already interacting with each other. And that, I think, helps to explain their simultaneity. It's partly diffusion effects. It's partly that when people in Berlin read about a revolution in Paris, they read about the king fleeing from the capital. This creates immense waves of excitement. And people do start thinking, well, if they can do that, we can do the same

thing. But we also see diffusion effects, which is so swift that they can't be explained by the passage of information in that way. Clearly, we're looking at parallel explosions in a system which has been evolving as a joined up system. So in other words, there's nothing particularly mysterious about the cascading effect. It's got to do with the fact that people are talking to each other, the political movements are talking to each other, and that the continent as a whole experiences these major economic pressures together because, whole experiences these major economic pressures together because, you know, the weather, bad harvests don't respect political boundaries. So we have things like the potato blight, we have the poor harvest of 1846-47. All of these things sweep across the continent and affect these different political systems in parallel ways. And that I think helps to explain why the cascading is more

intense in 1848 than at any other time. Well, you mentioned the news read deeply by people in Germany listening to Paris. If we go for a quick blow by blow, do we have to start in Paris with the collapse of the monarchy there? That's how most narratives have tended to start. And, you know, Metternich, the Austrian chancellor famously said, when Paris sneezes, Europe catches a cold. But that's not really, doesn't really do very good justice to what happened in 1848. Because in 1847, there'd already been a major civil war in Switzerland. Now, nobody cares because it was in Switzerland. So it was on a sort of Swiss model railway scale. I mean, I think the total number of fatalities was

about 100. I mean, still 100 people dead is still a tragedy, obviously. But nevertheless, it was a small scale civil war, but it was one with very deep and long lasting consequences. I mean, the Switzerland we know today is born in the Civil War of 1847. And the constitution of today's Switzerland is a sort of highly amended version of the constitution drawn up in 1848. So in a sense, this story begins in Switzerland. And in fact, Ferdinand Freilichkart, the radical bard of the revolution, wrote a poem called The Avalanche, in which he said, we should think of the revolution as an avalanche. And it began in the Alps in Switzerland and then spread to the rest of Europe. So there was already a kind of alternative narrative in which Paris was just another

waystation. And then even before Paris comes on stream, there's a major tumult, a really serious revolution, which is a successful one, at least a major tumult, a really serious revolution, which is a successful one, at least in the short term, in Palermo, the capital city of Sicily. And there the Sicilians throw off the Neapolitan troops. They challenge them in the streets. And with the assistance, interestingly enough, of the British Navy, they push the Neapolitans

back off the island and create a revolutionary polity of their own. And that all gets going before Paris has happened. In fact, when the Parisian revolution breaks out, the Sicilian press is jubilant. They say, for the first time ever, the Sicilians went first. We were there first, and then Paris came after. They followed us for once. So Paris is important because of its signal effect. Everybody knows that if a great city like Paris, heavily policed and heavily invested with troops and with this established monarchy, created itself by a revolution in 1830, the Orleanist monarchy, if it can undergo a revolution, then really everything is up for grabs. All bets are off. So it does have that effect.

And once the February Revolution is broken out in Paris, then I must say the revolution kicks off everywhere. And you enter the sort of fission phase where you have feedback loops and chain reactions right across the continent. Well, there's uprisings all over Europe, as you say. Initially, it's surprising how successful these uprisings are. It's astonishing. I remember one socialist, a memoir by a German socialist saying, you know, we felt as if we were walking on air. The door which we thundered with our fists turned out to be open. And we just walked through. And it's so much easier than anyone imagined. I mean, there is very serious fighting in Berlin. Over 300 people are killed on the insurgent side, and possibly as many as 200 odd

troops are also killed. And there are fights of that type in many centers of revolution. But nevertheless, after these brief spasms of violence, it seems that these regimes are kind of ready to back off. In some cases, the situation is very different from case to case. And in France, you know, the king actually exits from Paris and flees to England, along with most of his ministers. So that really is a comprehensive revolution. One regime is going to be replaced by something else. What that something else will be is something the revolutionaries still have to work out. But nevertheless, that is one power replacing another.

In places like the Austrian Empire, Vienna, in other words, and Berlin, it's a slightly more complicated story. You have a government which initially tries to defend itself against the insurgency, then backs off, starts making concessions, and it learns to live with new political constellations. It's not clear how this convivencia, how this cohabitation between insurgent ministers and traditional government will work. And in the longer term, it turns out not to be a very stable partnership. But for the moment, it looks like fundamental change, regime change has taken place. And it's astonishing how easy it turned out to be. And I think one of the reasons for that is that it's often the case with revolutions. The first sign that a revolution is going to happen is that moment when a regime loses faith in itself. It's often the regimes which, as it were,

withdraw their vote of confidence from themselves. That's the first sign that everything is going to hell in a handbasket. In the case of the Prussian and the Austrian regimes, but also of others, there's evidence of that. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about the revolutions of 1848. More coming up. This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Do these revolutions in the short term satisfy these pre-revolutionary demands, whether they're for slightly more abstract things like rights and recognition or for things like food and better labor relations and things? Do they chalk up any successes? Yeah, well, you've just put your finger on one of the neuralgic issues here for the revolutionaries. There is a great range of demands, and not everybody is making the same demands. And so just to make one very crude distinction, there is a categorical difference between

radical and liberal demands. Liberal demands tend to be organized very crude distinction. There is a categorical difference between radical and liberal demands. Liberal demands tend to be organized towards political rights, you know, the institutional transformations. We want to have regular elections. We want to have a parliament with certain powers that can't be bullied by the monarch or by the executive. We want to protect citizens against arbitrary action by the state. So sort of negative freedoms, if you like. We want freedom of the press, this kind of thing. That's the liberal agenda. The radical agenda is we want social rights, we want minimum wages, for example, or some kind of control for wages of wages to prevent them from drifting down too low. We want the state to step in, this is a common demand, to mute the

effects of competition, competition among rival capitalist enterprises, which has the effect of driving wages down. That was a widely held view at the time. Or we want the state to assist workers in forming union-like organizations in order to counter the operations of capital. In other words, they want a rebalancing of the relationship between labor and capital. These are the social demands of the radical movements. They may also encompass the complete removal of the remaining forms of feudalism on rural land. In other words, that rural land should be disincumbent of irritating restrictions on its sale and resale, and that people should stop tithing and taxing peasants under these old feudal systems that had existed in Europe since the Middle Ages. So these demands are demands for social transformation.

And the problem is that once people are in government and you have ministers of different persuasions sharing power with each other, they find it very difficult to agree on the priority. One further fundamental difference is between liberals, they want representative government, but when they talk about representing the people and empowering the people,

they mean educated people with wealth. So people who pay taxes, because they think unless you have contributed to the wealth of the nation through the payment of taxes at a certain level, you're not really a stakeholder and you don't deserve to play an active role in politics. Radicals, by contrast, they want the enfranchisement of everybody, at least of all men. Almost no radicals are arguing for the enfranchisement of women. So these are fundamental differences, and they drive cracks through the revolutionary fronts everywhere in Europe. They drive deep cracks through the revolutionary fronts as people realize that after this moment of euphoria and unanimity, which is an incredibly joyful moment, just like being at the best party you ever went to, and it lasts for a couple of

weeks. After that comes the hard awakening as people realize that the things they were fighting for are not the same things. Who are the key constituencies who the reactionary right find they can appeal away quite quickly? Are they the sort of upper middle class, wealthy liberals who actually realize that perhaps stability is better than revolution? How does the right play itself back into this picture? That's a really interesting question. The right plays itself back into the picture in two ways. One is, and you've already hinted at this, by playing different interests off against each other. They see very clearly that what the liberals want and what the radicals want are very different things. The radicals very quickly score some big successes. You asked about successes before,

and one of the big successes is the decision to draw up constitutions. We see dozens of new constitutions in 1848. They're being drawn up everywhere. We see parliaments being convened, and this is often a moment of high drama, you know, as people watch the representatives of the people who've been voted for process into chambers where they begin to debate and so on. At the beginning, these are very hopeful and exciting institutions. So the liberals score a lot of successes in that way. They create the beginnings of a liberal order. In the meanwhile, the radicals are not scoring too many successes.

The liberals believe that the economic relations between human beings are a fundamentally private affair in which the state has no business to intervene or interfere. And so they resist any of the social demands that are made by the radicals. And already the thing starts to sort of peel apart. And we see this in Paris on the 15th of May, when 15 or 16,000 radicals, they march up to the Chamber of Deputies where the parliament is meeting, the so-called Constituent National Assembly. They break into the assembly, so they invade the chamber, and they announce that the chamber is going to be shut down and a new government will be created, and they hold speeches and so on. In the end, they are driven away by the National Guard,

but it's an event that really I couldn't help thinking about the invasion of the House of Representatives on the Capitol. It's a sign that the fabric of the revolution starts to fray as the different parts, the different constituencies wind up in a relation of antagonism to each other. And the problem for the liberals is that they couldn't have taken power without the radicals. They couldn't have taken power without the thousands and thousands of artisans who manned the barricades and fought with the troops. Right across Europe, the people who fought and died for the revolution are mainly people of plebeian social standing. They're either artisans or more often journeymen, trainee artisans or apprentices, or they're simply laborers. They're not the people in top hats and nice coats who are going to wind

up sitting in the ministries and setting up the arrangements for a new constitution or the convening of a parliament or the announcement of elections. And so it's a kind of situation of bad faith. The liberals have been brought into power by these radicals, but now they fear their angry demands for a slice of the spoils of revolution. And what happens in Europe in the context of the counter-revolution that follows is that conservative forces recognize this split and begin to capitalize on it. They begin to exploit it. In France, this takes the form of a bizarre situation, a period of extreme violence in June 1848 in which a working-class insurgency is crushed by government forces, by the forces

of a government which was created by the revolution of February 1848, that revolutionary government shuts down the insurgent movement of the working class in Paris. So in a sense, a revolution forecloses on itself. It shuts itself down. In other countries like Prussia, for example, in Austria, what happens is that the monarchy, in Austria, what happens is that the monarchy, with its still loyal armed forces, regains its nerve, sees how divided the revolutionaries are, and begins to take action against them, first working with the liberals against the radicals, and then shutting down the whole experiment of parliamentarism and all the rest of it in the autumn and the winter of 1848. So what's the tally at the end?

Just as we did with the Arab Spring, and we slowly saw regime after regime claw their way back and rewind many of the gains, if you like, that appeared to have been made. Take me through Europe. Was there anywhere where there were profound and enduring changes, more progressive changes? Or is it a picture of reaction everywhere, partly with the help of the Russian army invading places like Hungary and the autocrats trade unions that are kicking in there? There are very deep changes come out of 1848. And we can highlight these in different ways. I mean, for one thing, a great number of the constitutions drawn up in

1848 and 1849 survive many into this current day. I mean, the Swiss constitution is still in force. So is the June constitution of Denmark. I mean, Denmark was an absolute monarchy until the revolutions. And then it convened a constituent assembly. And this assembly produced the June constitution. And the day of the promulgation of the constitution is still celebrated in Denmark today as a national holiday. So 1848 is a foundational moment. It transforms the Dutch constitution. I'm speaking to you from Amsterdam. And here in Holland, it wasn't a new constitution, but it was a revised constitution brought about in 1848 that placed the Dutch political culture on a completely new footing. That is an inaugural moment, as it were, for the modern Netherlands. In Prussia, the Prussians get their first constitution.

They'd never had a constitution before, nor had Piet Montt, this major power in the north of Italy. It gets a constitution for the first time in 1848. And in many other places, there are constitutions which may have been rescinded or never have gone into effect, like the constitution drawn up by the Frankfurt Parliament, this extraordinary national assembly which came together to preside over the creation of a Germany that never came to be. But even that constitution, which, as I say, never came fully into effect, survived in all kinds of bits and pieces in subsequent German constitutions.

Some of it is cut and pasted into the constitution of the Germany created after the war against France in 1870 and 1871, and bits of it survived into the Weimar constitution of 1919, and then into the constitution Germany has today of 1949. So it's a very complex story with a lot of long-lasting effects. These are, it must be said, mainly liberal victories. It was liberals who wanted constitutions. It was liberals who wanted parliaments and elections. And in many countries, they got them and that system survived. So it was a great step forward for the sort of global dominance of liberal political orders, if you like. It wasn't such a great step forward for the left. But nevertheless, in some ways, victories are poorer teachers than defeats. And the defeat of the left in 1848-49 was a deeply

instructive episode for the European left, and it produces profound evolutions. On the one hand, at the radical end, it leads to the sort of Marxization, the emergence of Marxism as the dominant theoretical construct for people on the far left. But it also molds that enormous biodiversity of utopian politics I was talking about before into something more pragmatic that we could call social democracy, focused not on utopian states of affairs and on inspiration and excitement, and on great sort of slogans like liberty and justice and equality and so on, but focused on the provision of social goods, of welfare, of the actual physical well-being of human beings. And that's effectively

the formation that becomes modern social democracy. And none of this is lost in history. You know, there's a kind of conservation of energy. You know, these things flow on and become part of the rebuilding of the left that takes place in the 1860s and 70s. And a lot of the people who were around in 1848, if they haven't been killed or ruined in the process of revolution, which obviously many were, they survived to be part of this remaking of the left. So did social democracy lose the battle and win the war? I mean, the vulnerabilities of autocracy were demonstrated in 1848. And did it ever regain that sense of inevitability about it? Or was it

now seen as clinging on? I love that question. That's a really interesting question. I think my instinctive answer is no, it actually never did. It certainly clung on with all the energy it could muster. It clung on to its power share. But it's interesting to see how certain arguments that were commonly heard before 1848 simply ceased to be heard after 1848. So one was, for example, the notion that which we often hear in the mouths of the monarchs themselves, you know, I simply can't accept a constitution because the constitution is an ungodly and indeed satanic interposition of a piece of paper between me and my people. It disturbs the mystical union of a monarch.

The monarchy, after all, is a God-given office. We see this in the Old Testament, Samuel and so on, monarchs anointed by God. And so that's the kind of argument you see in the 1830s and 40s. It vanishes after 1848 because nobody really is prepared even to make that claim anymore. Monarchs have to learn to live with parliaments and constitutions and plurality of political interests and all the turmoil and push and pull of politics. They have to learn to live with parliaments and constitutions and plurality of political interests and all the turmoil and push and pull of politics. They have to learn to live with that. And many of the monarchies of Europe, the Dutch monarchy, the Belgian monarchy already is quite a weak monarchy. The Prussian monarchy is still a relatively strong monarchy, but it still has its wings clipped by the new constitution. It can't simply do whatever it wants. The Habsburg monarchy

initially rescinds all the constitutions and says we're not having any of this nonsense, but by the 1860s they're back on the track of constitutionalism. So in the long run, the liberals win and the monarchies lose. They still make the most of what remains, and what's most important for the survival of these monarchies is control of the armed forces, and they become more and more militarized in that sense. The Prussian monarchy in particular and the Austrian monarchy become monarchies which depend on their particular personal, the term used in German was a great word, Kommandogewalt, the power of command, which inheres in the person of the monarch. So that continues, but it's a sort of compensation

strategy. Something very fundamental has been lost. Christopher, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and galloping through not just 1848, but most of the 19th century as well. Your brilliant book is called? Revolutionary Spring, Fighting for a New World, 1848-1849. Go and get it, everybody. Thank you very much, Christopher. Thank you so much, Dan. It was great fun. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.