The Rest Is History - 326: The Year of Revolutions: 1848

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Few years in European History saw as much change and turmoil as 1848: across the continent, from Vienna to Paris to Palermo, mass protests took place, catching the old elites by surprise. The political order that stood strong since the defeat of Napoleon fell aside, making way for a newer, modern Europe, influenced by the rise both of socialism and nationalism. In today's episode, Tom and Dominic are joined by the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, Christopher Clark, to discuss 1848, and the lasting impact of the revolutions that came about that year. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. On the 27th of January 1848, Alexei de Tocqueville, French aristocrat and probably best known in the English-speaking world as the author of a groundbreaking study of democracy in America, addressed the Chamber of Deputies in Paris, and I will quote, Do you not feel, by some intuitive instinct which is not capable of analysis, but which is undeniable, that the earth is quaking once again in Europe? Do you not feel, what shall I say, as if a gale of revolution were in the air? This gale, no one knows where it springs from,

whence it blows, nor, believe me, whom it will carry with it. Can you say today that you are certain of tomorrow? Do you know what may happen in France a year from now, or even a month or a day from now? You do not know. But what you must know is that a tempest is looming on the horizon, that it is coming towards us. So, Dominic, momentous words, and as it turns out, prophetic, because that year of 1848 is commemorated as the year of revolutions. The voice of prophecy, Tom, is often all the more resonant

when it's read out in the voice of Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau, as that was. I thought you were going to say, in French, the language of diplomacy. No, I wasn't going to say that. But yes, so we welcome Inspector Clouseau to the podcast for this episode about the 1848 revolutions. So yeah, 1848 is remembered as the year of revolutions. And yet, of course, the question is, what was it all for and what did it achieve? Because lots of people listening to this will have a sort of vague idea that 1848 is a bit like 1789 or 1968. It's one of those dates that conjures up images of barricades and people on the streets. But it's more like 1968 though, isn't it? Because actually the revolutions fizzle

out and there's lots of kind of young people rushing around standing on barricades. Yeah. And then lots of people shooting them yes basically basically and so the standard question about 1848 is why does it fail yes why do the revolutions fail however in a groundbreaking study revolutionary spring fighting for a new world 1848 1849 by the great christopher clark who is with us on the show. The Regis Professor of History, Sir Christopher Clarke, Tom. We're very big on titles. Professor Sir Christopher Clarke. And what's more, Tom, I know he's going to speak in a second, but just let me say, we're particularly indebted to Chris for joining us because he's Australian.

And like a lot of people, he'll be in mourning because of the very recent passing of Dame Edna Everidge. Chris, was that a traumatic moment for you when you learned the news? It was a sad moment, I have to say. And I mean that, actually. Oh, my word. I expect nothing less from the Regis Professor of History. She was a very remarkable lady. Yeah. And she spoke for us all. I have to say, I didn't think that we'd be talking about Edna Everidge as our first topic.

Dominic, can I go back to what i was going to say before you do diverted us yeah you're always welcome to do that tom okay so the takeaway i mean there are lots of takeaways from that from this book which is on an absolutely comprehensive scale because the takeaway that i found particularly intriguing is that you basically say that the whole question of did they succeed or fail is a nonsense question. Towards the end of the book, you say, we don't say of an ocean storm, a solar flare, or 16 days of heavy snowfall, that they succeeded or failed. We simply measure their effects. Yeah, I think that the problem with asking whether a revolution failed or succeeded is that, I mean, you might argue that, you know, look, we don't say that about 16 days of heavy snowfall, but that's because snow is a natural phenomenon. Whereas a revolution is

a political phenomenon driven by a political intention. And so we ought to be able to ask the question, was the intention fulfilled? Is there a match between outcomes and intentions? And if there is, we can say it was a success. And if there isn't, we can say it was a failure. But the problem with that is that a revolution doesn't actually have an intention. It has thousands of intentions. This revolution was not planned in advance. It was very chaotic in the way it unfolded. A lot of entropy was built into the whole process. Groups and people kept seceding from the common enterprise. And so the question, what was the intention driving the revolution, has no answer. There were thousands of potentially conflicting intentions. And so that makes the question, was it a success or not, a problematic question, because for some, it was a huge success. For others, it was a disastrous failure. I mean, people died. They risked their lives. They risked

everything for this revolution. So it makes more sense, it seems to me, to think of the revolution as a process. I mean, I like to think of it as a sort of, as a collision chamber at the heart of the 19th century. Everything fell into this chamber. It got crushed together with everything else under conditions of extreme density and pressure. And then these entities showered out the other end of the process into the rest of the 19th century. But everything was changed. No one was the same shape. No ideas were bent out of shape. Some things disappeared, others appeared. And so that's the way I like to think. I think we should be thinking about this revolution as a kind of engine of change at the heart of the 19th century. So if we go back to the very basics, your book starts with a couple of thematic chapters

where you're talking about kind of poverty in Europe and the condition of people in the cities and people in the countryside and so on and so forth. But so Europe in the 1840s, so this is the first decade of the life of Queen Victoria. Railways are beginning to come in. It's not yet a landscape completely transformed by the telegraph, let's say. So in some ways it feels, if you're living in a little village somewhere in the middle of Poland, well, what's now Poland or France or something, it probably feels like a very sleepy world. But in the cities, there's a tremendous sense of velocity, exchange of ideas, new technology.

But Europe in the 1840s, what is it about Europe in the 1840s that makes it? I mean, it's not an ancien regime. So what is it that explains the sort of, why is it a revolutionary tinderbox, as it were? I mean, that's a terrible cliche, but you know what I mean. Well, it's a revolutionary tinderbox for lots of different reasons. I mean, one is the point you've already mentioned that, you know, a lot of people are under very high levels of social and economic stress. And this stress isn't a constant. It sort of pulses.

It comes at some moments and then recedes. Because this is a system, it's not that everybody's, that there's a generalized shortage of food. There's plenty of food to go around, but every so often, there are disruptions to the food supply, as indeed we're experiencing again today. That's one of the parallels between then and now. And these short-term disruptions to the food supply can push people in huge numbers over the edge, over the brink of subsistence into real crisis.

And this, one of the moments at which this happens is 1846-47. There's a very bad, very cold harvest. The price of grains shoots up. And because most of what most poorer people eat is bread or grain-based food of one kind or another, they can't substitute for it with other foods. They can't just eat chicken instead or cake, as famously Marie Antoinette had once suggested they should do in the context of an earlier revolution the streets. It means there are a lot of, you know, discontented, angry, resentful apprentices, artisans, and so on available in the big cities for a tumult, if a tumult should arise. So that's part of the background. But there's also the fact that this is a continent which is incubating lots of different political movements. I mean, one of the fascinating things about the 1830s and 40s in Europe is the extraordinary political biodiversity. There are several hundred different kinds of socialism. I mean, people talk about socialism, but the term has no fixed meaning. And Marx is around and he's commenting on things in a sort of very brilliant

and mordant and polemical and rather one-sided way. But Marxism has not yet dominated this spectrum of socialism. So an immense diversity of left-wing thinking about, you know, how to live a better life, how to create a form of state order which allows humans to flourish and so on and so forth in the broadest possible sense. And then there are many liberalisms. The liberals are the people who want to somehow balance, you know, authoritarian structures like absolute monarchy, of which there are plenty in Europe in the 1830s and 40s, with the power of parliaments. And then there are conservatives who are starting to think about how you preserve what is valuable about the ancien regime in the face of this tide of change that everyone recognizes is there. I mean, even Mettony speaks of, he says, we must build a dam to contain the flood. And already in that formulation, we see that, you know, this man who's the kind of

elder statesman of the continent, the chancellor or the foreign minister at various points in his career of the Austrian empire, even he recognizes that there's this river-like flow of change, which you're either going to swim with or try and dam in and stop. And everybody acknowledges that it's there. So it's a time when everybody recognizes the potential for conflict and change, but people aren't sure about how this can be achieved. And the people who are at the top, to my way of thinking, they don't look peculiarly repressive or indeed authoritarian.

So if you take France, for example, King Louis Philippe, he is famously the kind of bourgeois king. Everybody makes fun of him. They say he looks like a pear. He seems like a nice guy. He's like a sort of middle-class Englishman. He's got Guizot, who I think is his prime minister, isn't he? Who's very civilized, cerebral kind of. Yeah. He wrote over 70 books. Yeah. So if you're casting a film, these are not people who make satisfying, repressive villain, top-hatted villains or something. No, you'd probably choose Tom Hanks to play Louis Philippe, I think, rather than

some bad guy. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. So what is it they are doing wrong, as it were? Well, that's a very good question. Actually, Guizot was not doing a huge amount wrong. It was actually in many ways quite a successful government, as you say it. But it was a government that had managed to wind up in a kind of war with the media. That's one of the problems, that there was this shower, a kind of flood of invective against the monarchy, which denounced the king as corrupt, as disgusting, the image of his face as a pear and so on. It wasn't. It sounds rather innocent if it's just that rather likable fruit. But in fact, I'm thinking now of a particular cartoon which is widely reprinted when it appeared in the early 1840s, a cartoon which shows a pear

like object seated on top of a thing called a coque de molasse, a sort of barrel full of molasses. But you have to remember that molasses was the sort of slang word for excrement in French. And underneath it is a royal looking chair. And this horrible contraption is supposed to be the king, you know, a pear-shaped head and a barrel full of excrement and a nice sort of antique chair. And it's being gawped at by a group of French people who are standing around it looking at it disgustedly. That's the sort of image of the regime. And at the same time, there's the problem of who is represented in the representative politics of this monarchy. It is a constitutional monarchy, and that's one of the weird things. They've had a revolution in 1830. They've revised the constitution that they got in 1814. So it is a constitutional, in that sense,

a liberal order. But the constitution enfranchises fewer than 2% of the population. This is a male franchise only, but it's a tiny, tiny fragment of the wealthiest. And obviously, in France, there is the memory of the primal revolution. There is the 1789 revolution, the memory of the terror, the memory of the Napoleonic regime. So France is peculiarly associated with revolution. But the thing about 1848 is that it's not confined to France and that it spreads across. In fact, I mean, in 1848, it's not initially France where a revolution breaks out, is it? It's in Sicily. It is in Sicily. In fact, I mean, you say the French had this revolution in their minds.

Of course they do. It's playing like an old film at the backs of their heads. But it's doing that right across Europe. I mean, Europeans in general, this is something they have in common. They have a lot in common in this era, perhaps more even than they do today. They have common stories and narratives. And one of these narratives is the narrative of this revolution in France, of its sequence of phases, you know, the liberal revolution followed by the Jacobin terrorist experiment, followed by the directory, followed

by Napoleon. They all have that story in their heads. So they all have that script available. But that script isn't necessarily a sort of recipe for revolution, because the memory of revolution is also an argument against revolution. Those who remember the Jacobin Terror, for example, say, let's not take any risks. I mean, Guizot's father was executed when he was five years old. His father was executed by the guillotine in Nîmes. And he remembered that, of course, it was a traumatic memory. And he remained deeply opposed to the death penalty and opposed to violent or extremist political experiments of any kind. So he was a conservative in one way and would fall when the 1848 revolution broke out. But he was also someone who remembered

very vividly the French Revolution, but he remembered it as a lesson against risking experiments. So when we get to, let's say, the end of 1847, there'd been bad harvests, there'd been food shortages. So to give us, I mean, just to remind people about the map of Europe, you have France, there was no Germany, Germany's fragmented. There's a kind of German confederation, isn't there? Yes, there's a loose confederation of German states called the Deutsche Bund, which consists of 39 sovereign states. Switzerland is still a very loosely confederated state. It's not really a state at all. In fact, the cantons are virtually is still a very loosely confederated state. It's not really a state at all. In fact, the cantons are virtually independent with a very weak government,

which moves from one place to another. There is no Italy. And North Italy is ruled by Austria. North Eastern Italy is ruled by Austria. Lombardy and Venetia are both under Austrian control. Piedmont is independent. And then you have the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Yeah. So that's a crucial thing as well, isn't it? That the Pope is a temporal ruler as well as a spiritual ruler. The Pope has his own state. That's another exotic feature of the European map at this time. And another exotic sort of piece of local color is the kingdom of the two Sicilies in the south,

which is the bizarrely named amalgam of Sicily, the island, and of the Neapolitan mainland of the south of Italy, south of the Papal States. So there are lots of states that don't exist anymore. On the other hand, there is a state that didn't exist and does now, and that's Poland. Poland is nowhere on the map because in the 18th century, it had been partitioned by its three neighboring states, the Prussians, the Austrians, and the Russians. So there's no Polish state, but there is very much a Polish nation with a memory of what it was like to inhabit the great Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And that, again, is a factor in the revolution, because these unhappy Poles are going to play a very important role in carrying the agenda of revolution from one place to another.

And so, Chris, that is one further element. So you've talked about the legacy of the French Revolution and the social pressures, but this is also an age of nationalism. And you have a brilliant description that its effect on the revolutions of 1880 as a whole was like that of heroin on the body and mind of an addict. So that is something that is enhancing the revolutionary spirit, but also turning it into courses that the powers that be don't recognize. Nationalism is the most difficult theme for 1848 because after 1848 happened, the memory of 1848 was processed by the national movements of Italy, Germany, France, and later of Hungary and so on.

And it's still part of the national memory of Hungary where Viktor Orban never fails to mention the struggles for Hungarian freedom in 1848, always distorting them and turning them, obviously, to contemporary objectives. So nationalism is part of what shapes what we remember about 1848. And so we have to think our way past that lens, lensing effect, if you like, and put ourselves in a world where nationalism is present and has a drug-like effect on people, but it's a periodic effect. People can become extremely excited. They wear national clothing when they come together and they see everybody else wearing their red caps or their blue cinched jackets or whatever it is, whether they're Croats or Hungarians or Germans wearing national costume. The effect on people is absolutely overwhelming. The emotional power of these

moments of patriotic feeling is extraordinary. So in one way, it brings people together and it submerges them in a larger collective self. On the other hand, it also divides them because, you know, the Hungarians, when they rise up against the Austrians, they find themselves dealing with national movements of the Slovaks, the Croats, and the Romanians, people who are minorities within the Kingdom of Hungary who don't wish to be ruled by an independent Hungary, but would rather be it comes with the illusion that it is old. So when people experience national feeling, they feel they're inheriting something from the Middle Ages or even before that, something very, very ancient. Ancient Magyars or whoever it might be. Ancient Magyars, exactly. Magyars spreading out in the 11th century across the Danubian plain and so on. Whereas,

in fact, these nationalist experiences are very new. They're created by newspapers and communication networks. And the national clothing people wear is mostly an invented retro style that people have come up with in the 19th century. Like the kilt, Tom. Invented traditions, exactly. I mean, on that topic, you have a wonderful quote by Metternich, the kind of the conservatives, conservative, the Austrian foreign minister to count Rosetzky, who's basically the military commander with responsibility for Austrian possessions in North Italy.

And he's writing in August 1847, so just before the explosion, that if the past imposed great efforts on us, it was at least better than the present. You and I know how to fight against bodies, but against phantoms, material force can achieve nothing. And today we are fighting phantoms everywhere. Is he expressing something that is commonly felt by the elites in this period, that they're aware, of course, of the revolutionary potential because they have the history of the French Revolution, but that the manifestation of it is something strange, new that they don't know how to fight. They don't know how to cope with.

Yes. And nationalism is a phantom and a terrifying phantom for Metternich because he's a senior politician in a multinational empire. I mean, we would call it multinational now. Nobody would have used that word then. But it's a commonwealth of ethnicities with, you know, 11 or 12 different major languages and many other dialects beside. So, for an empire like that, nationalism is a dissolving poison. It will simply tear the thing apart. And so, you know, he's right to see nationalism as a threat. It's also a threat in another way, and that is that although it may not voice a principled objection to monarchy, nationalists can also be monarchists, nevertheless, nationalism proposes implicitly, at least, that the center of authority, the kind of center of gravity of a population is not its dynasty,

but its ethnic substance. And that means the people. So it's a way of taking power from the crown and placing it in the heart of an ethnic group, which is, of course, disturbing to the holders of traditional power in Europe. So to sort of turn to the narrative, I mean, Tom mentioned that the first sort of flashpoint is actually not in France, but in Sicily, in Palermo. I think one of the things that your account of it does quite brilliantly is to show all the contingencies and all the twists and turns. And France is the big, I mean, France is the big one, isn't it? So that starts in the first weeks of 1848. And it's all to do with banquets, the cancellation of political banquet, a very sort of banal trigger you one would think for a continental wide upsurge of popular enthusiasm.

One could sort of quip and say, you know, only France would rise up in revolution because of a cancelled banquet. But, you know, it's true, the Parisian revolution is important. But, you know, think about that speech by Tocqueville, which is de Tocqueville, which Tom cited at the beginning, or Inspector Clouseau cited, that, you know, Tocqueville can make this prophecy because he's been reading the papers, and the papers are full of tumults from all over Europe by the end of January, which is when he speaks, the 27th of January. By the end of January, there's news coming up from the south of Italy, from Palermo and from Naples, but also from Switzerland.

I mean, Switzerland had already had a civil war in the previous year, the Sonderbundkrieg, as it's called in Switzerland, which creates a modern constitutional state. In fact, it creates a modern constitutional state. In fact, it creates the Switzerland we have today. The modern Switzerland today is born in 1848. So that's already been happening, and it's widely reported in the press. The horizons of press reportage are very much European. They're not siloed in national or regional or territorial silos. They're very much looking to the extent of the continent. And, you know, Tocqueville is drawing on that when he says, you know, this storm that you see now on the horizon is coming for us.

So the contagiousness of these tumults is already recognizable by the time the revolution happens in Paris. And the interesting thing about this, Dominic mentioned the contingent sort of happenstance quality of this. It is odd how virtually every one of these uprisings begins almost kind of by accident. So the one in Palermo starts when a poster appears, which simply says, you know, a few days there's going to be a revolution. Get prepared. Sicilians, rise up.

Your moment of freedom has arrived. Signed, Comitato Revoluzionario, the Revolutionary Committee. Now, there was no Revolutionary Committee. This whole thing was a prank put up by a guy called Bagnasco. I just thought, I think maybe people will rise up if I put a sheet on a wall. So, he did that. And sure enough, on the day that the revolution had been announced for, everybody did turn up to see what was going to happen. And nothing happened because nothing had been planned, except that the troops had been doubled and tripled throughout Palermo. So there are many more troops than usual. And inevitably, you know, a clash broke out between the people and the

troops. And that was the beginning of the revolution. And something very similar happened in Paris, you know, shots fired and by accident and so on led to a massive upheaval. Lamartine, a French sort of, you know, liberal slash radical politician, very much involved in the February Revolution, said it was almost as if the revolution was engendered by the curiosity of the crowds that had gathered to see if a revolution would happen. But also, as I've heard say in the case of Paris, we were talking about the silent film playing in people's heads, that Louis-Philippe doesn't want to be Louis XVI. As soon as the revolution breaks out, it's precisely because he has the memory of 1789 and what happened afterwards. He's like, okay, I'm out of here. I'm gone. I'm abdicating. He's gone, absolutely.

And he actually didn't need to do it. Is that right? Would that be fair? I suppose. I mean, the main problem was that the French police in Paris, the municipal guards and the mobile guards and the National Guard and the army, in fact, had all been preparing for decades for a conspiratorial revolution organized by underground networks. And so they were going to concentrate on the areas of Paris where the trouble was starting and crush it there. And then, you know, the plan was all organized around the idea of a conspiratorially organized and planned revolution. But what actually happened was more like a societal tsunami. The society threw off the regime and decided it didn't fear the forces of order anymore. And it didn't respect the government anymore. And that's a really dangerous thing. And there was absolutely nothing that Louis Philippe, I mean, at one point, for example, it was impossible to deploy troops in Paris because the crowds were simply too large.

The troops couldn't move through them. So they simply faced a situation that they were not prepared to handle and weren't capable of handling. And quite wisely, Louis-Philippe decided, well, really, my time's up and skedaddled. So France is obviously, as Dominique said, the big one. It's the great monarchy. It's got the history of the French Revolution. Narratives of revolution in France are something that people can comprehend and understand. But what then happens

is that revolution starts to spread in a cascade effect across Europe. I don't want to frighten people because we're going to have a break in a minute, but this is what you say about this process. From the beginning of March 1848, it becomes impossible to trace the revolutions as a linear sequence from one theatre of turbulence to the next. We enter the fission phase, in which almost simultaneous detonations create complex feedback loops. The narrative bursts its banks. The historian bespares. Oh no. Oh no. So, I think we should take a break at this point. And then when we come back, perhaps you could express why you despair and how you triumphantly overcome your despair and give

us a sense of this cascade effect. Absolutely. So we'll see you back in a few minutes. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. My dear, good, beloved wife, farewell. Live well for the times as is called eternal, but is not.

Bring up our, now only your, children to be fine people. Sell our few possessions with the help of our friends. God and good people will help you. Oh, everything I feel runs away in tears. So I say again, live well, dear wife. Farewell. Thousand, thousand, the last kisses from your Robert. Written in Vienna on the 9th of November at five in the morning. Oh, at six, it will all be over. So that, Tom Holland, is described as one of the most affecting passages of 19th century German prose by the Regis Professor of History at Cambridge University, Christopher Clarke. And I don't think, Christopher, you've ever heard it read with such feeling, have you?

I'm still, I'm still drying my eyes. It's wonderful, isn't it? Inspector Clouseau is joined by hair flick. That is, yeah, Tom, that is, that is very cruel. Very cruel. And I think a lot of listeners will be quite shocked at that remark. I think they will. I think they will.

But Dominic, yes. So tell us who is talking there. So we were talking about how the the story was going to spread and this is a guy called robert bloom who is the son of a cooper i believe and a seamstress or something like that i can't remember but he had become an apprentice bronze worker and then was a great autodidact and had become a pamphleteer and a poet and a radical german radical who believed in a united, liberal, democratic Germany.

And his trajectory is he becomes one of the faces of the German revolution in the Frankfurt Parliament. And it all ends in tears for him because he's shot in Vienna, having written this beautiful letter so beautifully read. So his story, Christopher, is the kind of story of what happens to the revolution in microcosm, isn't it? High hopes, heady excitement, liberalism, and then bang, end of story, he's dead. Yes, yes, it is. And for me, Robert Bloom is the kind of human face of the revolution,

because his story captures so much of that move from the extreme euphoria of the spring days. I mean, the revolution, the narrative is complicated, but it's not that complicated. There's a spring, there's a summer, and there's a kind of autumn and winter. And the spring is all about everybody is out on the streets, perhaps on barricades, but perhaps simply marching or taking part in demonstrations. There's an extraordinary sense of euphoria. And I'm thinking here of one account from Berlin, from a young radical law student who says, my heart was beating so hard, I felt it was going to blow a hole in my chest. I had to get out of my room. So he goes out of his sort of student digs, finds himself on the street amongst thousands of people. And he says, I felt I could hear everyone else's hearts beating. This experience, and there's endless testimony to this,

this was an experience of submersion in the collective self, of euphoria, collective euphoria, which people remembered for the rest of their lives. So that's how the revolution starts. Then in the summer comes the kind of breakdown of unity, the fractious disagreements between different bits of the revolution. And Robert Bloom, who's part of that spring moment and travels to the Frankfurt Parliament, first to the pre-parliament and then to the parliament itself in May, is full of high hopes for what's going to happen, this massive work of transformation, which he fray, to come apart. And by the autumn, he's exhausted by it and decides to go to Vienna to bring sort of fraternal greetings to the Viennese parliament. But unfortunately, just as he arrives, the city is surrounded by the Austrian armies and the revolution is crushed in Austria, a very violent process which results in hundreds of dead. And Blum is arrested. And although he pleads parliamentary immunity, he says,

I'm a member of the Frankfurt Parliament, I have immunity, they say, yeah, whatever, and execute him, as you say, on the 9th of November. And there's a song about this which tells the story of his walk to the place where he was executed. And in the course of this song, the point is made, the observation is made, which we have from several sources, that one of the officers commanding the firing squad noticed a tear rolling down his face

and sort of patted him on the shoulder and said, you know, keine Sorge, Blum, es ist in nur vorüber, something like that. You know, don't worry, old chap, it'll all be over like in a jiffy, right? I don't know if anybody

would be comforted by these words in a situation like that, but there you are. And Blum turns to this man and pulls himself up to his full height, which is about five foot four, and says, this tear is not the tear of the parliamentary deputy, Robert Bloom. It's the tear of the father and the husband. So in other words, he insists on his right to experience a private emotion in the middle of this public event. And that tells us something about what a revolution is like in mid-19th century Europe. It means bringing people out of their private lives into public roles, which they've never had before.

I mean, people had to discover their public selves, but they brought their private selves with them into this new public work of revolutionary activism. And he articulates that in this song. And there's a wonderful moment in this song where it says, Die Träne für Weip und Kinder entehret keinen Mann. The tear for one's wife and children does not dishonour a man. That is the ethics, if you like, of a middle-class revolution. I want to go to the barricades after that. Tom is very moved

by that. That was so stirring. That's the best song we've ever had on the podcast, isn't it? We don't really do singing. I mean, we should have more singing. I think the last one was Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend. Yes, you sang that, but Chris's singing

was, I think it's fair to say, in a very, very different league.. Yes, you sang that. But Chris's singing was in a, I think it's fair to say, in a very, very different league. I'm happy to see that. So Christopher, the people who are in the revolution, are they mainly people like Robert Bloom? In other words,

are they high-minded, idealistic, young? Well, Dominic, the archetype of that is a guy called Friedrich Hecker. Is that right? Who kind of legal student from Heidelberg, who is, I mean, much more than Blum, seems to be the prototype for Che Guevara. And the idea of revolutionary is romantic, has a famous beard that everyone copies. So just tell us about him, because he seemed a very romantic, I mean, romantic in every sense of the word.

Yeah, I mean, Hecker's a fascinating figure, because Blum and Hecker had been very close, and they collaborated and published in the same journals. And, you know, they were part of this radical network that existed in Germany in the 1840s. But Hecker decides that he's had enough of the Exactly. And it's a little bit like, you know, it's also a kind of confusion or a contrast in political timing. So, you know, on the one hand, parliaments are slow, they're ponderous, they're a little bit boring. I mean, sadly, I mean, it's just a fact about parliaments, they're supposed to be boring, and they should be, but they're full of procedural details, and people have to take their time, you time, have to wait their turn to talk. They mustn't speak longer than a certain time and so on. So it's very rule bound.

Whereas Hecker wants to break away from all that and go for direct action. So he sets up this kind of armed insurrection in Baden, which goes horribly, horribly wrong. He wastes a lot of people's lives, doesn't achieve anything. Eventually, he takes another shot at it in the following year, but then flees first to Switzerland and then to the United States, where he later, by the way, plays a role as a commander in the Union Army. So a lot of these people have very interesting afterlives after this moment of 1848. But for Bloom and Hecker, this is a kind of parting of the ways. Hecker represents that violent revolution by direct action, which

Bloom believes is doomed to fail. And in fact, the fate of Hecker's escapade shows that Bloom is right. And on the other hand, Bloom remains faithful to the parliament, to this process of discursive debate of discussion, even though he knows, which is hard for a man of the left, he knows that in 1848, the process of election is unlikely to produce a radical majority. You have to work from a minority position and argue for, you know, for pragmatic agreements on particular policies. And that's what Bloom decides to do. So he becomes part of that complicated business of parliament, which Hecker rejects. But it's Hecker who ends up shaping the kind of memory of what it means to be a

revolutionary because he styles, you mentioned Che Guevara before, he's a very vain man. He wears a broad brimmed hat and a long beard, which comes to be known as a Heckerbart, a Heckerbeard, a red sash, baggy trousers tucked into piratical boots, and so on. So he becomes a kind of sexy avatar of revolution, which people find disturbing and yet also perversely attractive. And there are lots of cartoons and caricatures of him. And the interesting thing about him is even when he's being caricatured, he still kind of has a certain raw appeal. A sort of very basic question. So these revolutions in Germany, I mean, Germany tends to end up, I mean, Germany tends to end up,

I mean, the German speakers often tend to dominate the accounts of 1848 because you've got what's going on in Germany and then you've got what's going on with Austria and the revolt in Hungary against Austria and so on. But in Germany specifically, are we able to say what they want? So it's because it's there you've got a real combination of socialism, radicalism, liberalism, and nationalism, the idea of a Germany. So is there ever a sort of common, really a common program in Germany, or is it too confused and chaotic for that? Well, it's all happening so fast that people, there's not much time to establish a common program. That's one of the difficulties. And there are lots of tensions between different objectives. So people may share,

you know, many radicals like Bloom, for example, believed in parliaments, they thought we do need a parliament, we need the people to be represented through a process of election and so on. We can't just make it up as we go along. On the other hand, they also wanted a social transformation, they wanted the imbalance between labor and capital to be rebalanced, so that people, the poorest strata of society would be better seen to. They'll be in a stronger position to bargain, for example, for improvement in their conditions. And so they were in favor of various forms of trades unions or even of state intervention in the economy to support the working classes, this kind of thing.

But of course, the liberals were what we would today call Thatcherites. They wanted deregulation. They wanted the state to pull back out of the economy. As far as they were concerned, the private character of the economic relationships between people was an almost sacred conviction. And they said the state has no business interfering in the relationship between an employer and an employee. This is a form of tyranny. And these are arguments which have not gone away, incidentally. I mean, they're sharpened by 1848, but they have not left the world. They're still very much at the center of our politics, which is this question of the nation, because there is no German nation state. There are 39 different states, but a German parliament does form. And this is a remarkable thing. It doesn't happen in Italy, but in Germany,

a parliament forms to resolve the future character of a nation that does not exist. I mean, that is an extraordinary state of affairs. Of course, there is no parliamentary building to put this parliament in. So it's put in a church, the St. Paul's Church of Frankfurt, a beautiful round 18th century church, a very fine building. And it's decorated with the red, black and gold tricolour of the German Revolution. And it's there to discuss the affairs of the German nation, of a German nation state that does not yet exist. So what happens? What happens is people come up with endless proposals and disagreements. It's very difficult to get agreements on anything. And of course, it's a little bit like the EU today. While this imaginary Germany is sort of trying to make decisions about its future, that the individual territorial states, Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Württemberg, all the rest of the 39 of them have not gone away.

And they're still making decisions. And in fact, Prussia very much takes the initiative again by the early autumn of 1848 and starts doing deals over issues which are of great importance to the German national movement. And that is one of the things that leads to the collapse of public esteem for and trust in and belief in the parliament at Frankfurt is the fact that Prussia seems to be in a position to defend the interests of the German nation better than the Frankfurt parliament is. After all, the Frankfurt parliament has no army.

It has a tiny sort of shrunken bureaucracy, but it has no means of projecting power or of making people do what it wants them to. So under the pressure of all that sort of powerlessness, it starts to fray and it starts to wane as a presence in people's minds. Just before we come to the backlash, can I ask a question that I know a lot of British reviewers have already commented on? Why not Britain? So in other words, now you will say, you might say, well, there's a big Chartist meeting in Kennington or whatever.

But I mean, the truth of the matter is 1848 is not a date to conjure with in Britain. And Britain does look in that regard like a bit of an exception. Now, is that too strong or are you going to? No, it's not too strong. It's true. I mean, Britain, there is no revolution on the British mainland or in Ireland, which is where a tumult had also been expected. I mean, Ireland was seen as the most tumultuous part of the United Kingdom. And that is a very interesting and important fact. It's interesting in this connection to read the Sydney Morning Herald down in Australia, where I come from. I come from Sydney. And it's

still going strong, the Sydney Morning Herald. But anyway, in the context of 1848, they had to wait a long time to get the news. I mean, it was months and months and months before the news reached Sydney. But when they commented on this, they said, why have things been so quiet in the motherland, meaning Britain, whereas France and Germany and Italy and so on have experienced these sanguinary revolutions? And the good burgers of the Sydney Morning Herald conclude, well, the reason is because when you have colonies, you can take all your troublemakers and push them burgers of the Sydney Morning Herald conclude, well, the reason is because when you have colonies, you can take all your troublemakers and push them out to the skirts of empire, to the outskirts of empire.

In other words, here in Sydney. So we're getting all the troublemakers, the sons of Free Ireland and anybody who's sort of drawn the attention of the police in Ireland winds up in Australia on some kind of transportation charge. So we end up, as it were, bearing the consequences. That's not really the reason, surely. It's part of the reason. There are several reasons. One is, I mean, that Ireland obviously was coming to the end of an absolutely unexampled demographic shock in the form of the Irish famine.

But Chris, even then, you quote this astonishing thing that the Prussians are sending inspectors to Ireland to see how you repress a revolution. Well, this is another part of the story. See, there are multiple reasons for this. One is, it really is true that the British have been quite good at selecting key troublemakers and moving them out of the zone of trouble, mainly through transportation, partly to Australia and partly to South Africa, to the Cape Colony. And in fact, that practice leads to movements in both those places against the further transportation of convicts. So it's partly that.

It's partly the famine in Ireland, which obviously areas which are suffering from very serious hunger of that kind, we see it elsewhere in Europe as well, don't become active during the revolution because people are just too depleted. And then finally, it's the fact that Britain is the most robustly policed country in Europe by a very large margin. And the Prussians recognize this. And that's why they send in the summer of 1848, they send a fact-finding group to London in the first instance, but then to Dublin, to Cork and other locations to find out what

are the British getting right? And how can we, the Prussians, get better at policing our own population? Indeed, they do introduce various changes to Prussian policing on the back of what they find out about British policing. So it's a combination of all those different things. And also the fact that Britain is able to keep the price of staple goods down fairly low during 1848 by dismantling the tariff protections of Britain's outlying colonies, places like Jamaica, and or by reducing the fiscal burden of places like Ceylon, for example. And as a result of that, of those measures, those sort of counter, if you like, prophylactic counter-revolutionary measures,

you see unrest breakout on several of those peripheral locations. You know, Ceylon has a massive uprising against the structures of British rule in 1848-49. There are peoples in Jamaica and unrest along many other parts of the periphery of the British Empire. So one could say there's a British 1848, just not in Britain. Right. Because you also, I mean, you tell the extraordinary story of British repression of revolution in the Ionian Islands in Greece, so Corfu and so on. Well, that's a fascinating story because, you know, it's a little scatter of seven tiny islands. And the one that's particularly important in 1849 is Cephalonia. And on that island, there is a sort of rural uprising, which is put down with exemplary savagery by the British authorities. And I think it's quite an interesting example, because, you know, when I was at school, we

were told the answer to that question, why wasn't there a revolution in Britain, was that Britain was already so liberal that people's desire for reform was already satiated, thanks to the Glorious Reform Act of 1832, and so on. And the Chartists were, okay, well, they were a movement for reform, not for revolution, and your Chartist was a sensible kind of fellow who would rather go home and have tea with his wife than set fire to someone else's house and this kind of thing. And so those are the arguments that were made,

and it was the liberality of British institutions that saved Britain from revolution. But on the Ionian Islands, we don't see too much liberality. What we see is a lot of flogging and hanging. And in fact, there's a, you know, there's a kind of Europe-wide scandal over how the British handled this uprising in Kefalonia. And so that's an interesting example of, you know, when you actually do see British authorities facing a local tumult of the kind that broke out across the continent. We don't see that they behave more or less as the Austrians and the Prussians and other European states do.

But is there no element of truth to the traditional story that you were taught? I think there is an element of truth. And the element of truth, and it connects that argument about liberality with the argument about policing. And that is that, you know, when the mass meeting on Kennington Common took place that Dominic referred to, there's, you know, the mass meeting of charters. I mean, it was very alarming at the time. People were worried about what would happen. In fact, Metternich, who was on his way out of Europe, fleeing to Britain, stopped in Rotterdam for a few days because they were waiting out the news.

It rained very heavily, didn't it? I hope so. The rain very heavily, didn't it? The rain stopped play, basically. Which is never a help. But in addition, 80,000 special constables turned up. Including Gladstone. Exactly. And including the future Napoleon III, who'd signed up as a special constable, was hoping to get his hands on some chartists and give them a right drubbing.

Never got the chance to do that. You know, but there's a commentary by a Tory at the time called Sibthorpe, a sort of ultra-Tory, who says that, you know, by gum, if only those special constables had a chance to get stuck into those chartists, they would have given them such a hiding as no man ever received. And I think he wasn't wrong. I mean, what's special about Britain is it could mobilize, out of its own society, counter-revolutionary forces on a scale which we don't see anywhere else in Europe.

You know, Giselle can't summon up 80,000 special constables wielding clubs. Because these people are volunteers, right? Yeah. These people are volunteers. Exactly. They're not even paid. They want to get stuck in. Yeah. They're not even paid. They want to get stuck in. So there's a sense in which you have a sufficiently large

stakeholding element in the society to come to the defence of the current political order against those who would challenge it. And talking about sort of counter-revolutionaries, so it's a huge canvas to try and cover in just under an hour, but when we get to the sort of late summer, autumn, there is this backlash. Now, do you think that was, you know, the Austrians sending in the troops, the French turn to the guy who becomes Napoleon III and so on and so forth? Do you think ultimately that was inevitable?

I mean, I know historians were never allowed to talk about things being inevitable, but do you think that was always likely to happen, that the forces of counter, of reaction were always too strong, and that the Robert Blooms of this world were never really going to get what they wanted? That's a really interesting question. When you put it like that, was it always going to happen that way? I mean, some of these outcomes are profoundly surprising. I mean, the fact that someone like Napoleon III, well, he's not Napoleon III yet, but the fact that the man who will become Emperor Napoleon III is voted president of the Republic in December 1848,

which is one of the death blows to the revolutionary movement in Paris and in France as a whole, that's actually a very unexpected and rather odd outcome. Because, you know, in the 1830s and 40s, he'd been a figure of ridicule. So he kind of comes from nowhere from left field. It's a bit like Trump. In fact, in many ways, he is a Trumpian kind of character. So there's nothing inevitable about that. What seemed at the time to be unlikely was the rapid success of the revolutions. So revolutions are, if you like, sequences of very unlikely events. It's unlikeliness following unlikeliness following unlikeliness. And so nothing in a way about any of this was particularly likely. But nevertheless, in retrospect, obviously, it becomes clear that the forces of the ancien

regime, which is not really the right term for them, but the forces of order that had been challenged by the revolution, they had cards up their sleeves, more cards up their sleeves than perhaps they seemed to when the revolution was initially in the full flush of its success. They had loyal armed forces. That was one of the most important things. And another sort of a thing that I think they didn't know themselves was they had the support of a surprisingly large part of the population. It seemed during the revolution that the liberals and the radicals are absolutely making the running. All the newspapers, all the pamphlets, all the posters, all the public manifestations were for revolution of one form or another. But what emerged as the revolution began to wane was a sort of backlash of popular conservatism that no one had really known was there. And this is one

of the great sort of discoveries for the conservatives that, you know, perhaps it's us. This is what they're saying. Anyway, perhaps we're the ones who really know the little people. Yeah. The revolutions were living in a bubble, in an urban bubble. People like each other. So this is your 1968 parallel, right? That 1968 ends with the election of Richard Nixon and the war in Vietnam continues and all these kinds of things.

And, you know, when President de Gaulle calls out the people France, and actually there are more of them than they are of the people throwing cobblestones at the police, right? It's the same story. But in a way, isn't it even more primal than that? That perhaps we think of 1848 as the revolutionary year, but it's also the year that gives birth perhaps to conservatism as a political force in the way that we would understand it now. Absolutely. That's the complexity of 1848, that revolution and counter-revolution are born twins in the same bed. That's the weird thing about 1848. It's a fascinating thing. But of course, counter-revolution, you know, conservatism is not the same as reaction. There are reactionaries who are saying, you know, we've got to unmake this revolution. We've got to

turn the clock of history back. But they are in a small minority and they all fail. Whereas the conservatives who are going to shape the future are conservatives who've learned from the revolution. So like Bismarck being the classic. Bismarck is a classic example, a man of brilliant intellect who immediately sees this revolution cannot be undone. It's a new point of departure. We've got to live with it. And anyone who tries to resuscitate the pre-revolutionary past is a fool. And throughout his life, he recognized that 1848 was the sort of pivotal moment in his own career. It was the enabling moment that without it, he could never have become

the person that he became because it was the revolution that allowed him to enter public life. And because it unleashes the power of nationalism, right? Because it creates the idea of the nation as the main vehicle for kind of popular idealism and aspirations and crowds and modernity. Nationalism is modern after 1848, isn't it? Well, that's right. Although Bismarck sees very clearly that nationalism is going to have to be a managed force. It'll have to be managed by a media which is itself carefully managed and overseen. And that's the great lesson of 1848, that nationalism kind of as a free-floating potential in European society is not going to achieve very much. But nationalism, when it's yoked to state power, will achieve enormous amounts. And that's what happens after 1848.

So lots of the kind of the more radical constitutions and so on get repealed. And to that extent, we could perhaps talk of the ambitions and hopes of the more radical revolutionaries failing. But one of the things that struck me in the book was that actually, there are a number of constitutions in Europe that are still kind of basically current today that do reach back to 1848. So you mentioned Switzerland, I suppose, reached back to 1847, but the Netherlands. And I thought the most interesting one was Denmark, which had been the kind of absolute monarchy and then becomes a kind of model liberal democracy. And that constitution stays in place after 1848.

Absolutely. To this day, the Danes still celebrate the day of the promulgation of that constitution, the June Basic Law. So it's, you know, that's just one of many examples of constitutions that still survive today. I mean, the Swiss Constitution of 1848, it's not until 1848 they actually promulgate it, is still in force with many amendments and so on. The Dutch Constitution of 18, the revised Dutch Constitution of 1849, which comes about as a result of the 1848 revolutions, those revisions are still in place. And, you know, in many ways, these, the Italians too, the Italian constitution winds up being the Piedmontese constitution. The Piedmontese constitution is issued in March 1848, the Statuto Albertino, and it too survives and bits of its language are still present in today's Italian constitution. And so are bits of the German constitution of 1848. They're still present in the Grundgesetz

of today's German Federal Republic. So a huge amount of what was achieved in the course of these revolutions did stand the test of time and did survive. We haven't really got time to touch it, but you also argue that modern contemporary Catholicism dates back to this time as well. That's another fascinating story. The Catholic Church, we don't have time for that, but it has to completely remake itself. And it does in the aftermath of 1848. And most of what we think of as the Catholic Church is actually born in that moment. And your last lines, so you basically say, we're not supposed to see ourselves when we look back in the past. I mean, I think so you basically say, we're not supposed to see ourselves

when we look back in the past. I mean, I think Tom and I would completely agree with that. However, intriguingly, you think the revolutionaries of 1848 could see themselves in us. So the resonances between then and now you find very striking. I find them very striking. And I wanted to say two things with that closing comment. One is that, you know, the resonances are there. And the more you think about them, the more there are and the more persuasive they seem. And the second thing is that those people were smart. It's easy to think of people in the past as crackpots with flawed schemes and so on, especially when their schemes don't come off.

But actually, they were incredibly thoughtful and intelligent people. They were at least as smart as us. They were thinking about the future. So they were thinking about us. I mean, even though they didn't know us individually, sadly for them, but nevertheless, they were thinking about the future. And they were doing that in a very interesting, adventurous, and, you know, intellectually resourceful way. And that's one of the real fascinations of this revolution, that it was like a kind of wild experimental laboratory. And that's why I think it repays our attention today. And that's why the book really is an attempt to refute a comment

made by a very beloved teacher, actually, a history teacher at school, who announced that when we were doing 1848, he said to us, boys, the 1848 revolutions are complicated and they're a failure. And I remember thinking that's a very unattractive combination. And the book really documents my discovery of how wrong that is. I mean, it's not entirely wrong. They are complicated, but they're not a failure. And they're very, very interesting. Brilliant. Well, the book is Revolutionary Spring, Fighting for a New World, 1848 to 1849. It's a

huge book, but enormously readable. And I can't recommend it enough. Tom, you enjoyed reading it, didn't you? I really did. As my Twitter followers will know, I quoted vast chunks of it. Really great. So Christopher, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for enduring Tom's shocking French accent in the first half. And Dominic's, I mean, appalling German accent. Well, I think, no, no. Christopher agreed that you were very harsh on it. No, I was deeply moved by both performances.

Thank you. Well, you did a bit of singing yourself, which is always good on the rest is history. Do you have a revolutionary song from 1848 that you could take us out with? Well, yes, there's a nice one that the poet Freilichkart did in the form of a translation of Robbie Burns' song, For All That. A man's a man for all that. He translated it into really beautiful German, and it's really one of the loveliest songs of 1848.

Take it away. Thank you very much. Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

That's restishistorypod.com. I's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.