1848 (63 page)

The revolutionaries with the most ‘European' outlook tended to be those whose national aspirations would benefit most from a political reshaping of the continent. Carlo Cattaneo, in an address to the Hungarian Diet shortly after the March revolutions, reminded the Magyars that for centuries Poland, Hungary and Venice had stood together as left, centre and right flanks against the Turks. Now the same nations (for ‘Venice', read ‘the Italians') should stand shoulder to shoulder against the new common enemy: Russia.
²⁷
It is perhaps no coincidence that Cattaneo should - rhetorically at least - have named as allies the three nationalities who would have had the most to gain from a reordering of the European states system. Above all, the Poles, whose homeland had been torn apart by the three great ‘eastern' powers, had everything to gain from such an upheaval. This was reflected in the truly internationalist language adopted by the Polish Democratic Society when it appealed to the French for arms on 28 March 1848:

 

The Polish democrats (not for the last time) were claiming for Poland the role of European buttress against the forces of repression and reaction.

Although such appeals were based on broadly European rhetoric, they were not pacifist, for everyone understood that the restoration of Poland, in particular, would require a war, and most likely a general European war at that. For ultimately, too, all European nationalists of 1848 wanted to realise, first and foremost, their own dreams of freedom, independence and greatness. Consequently, the cosmopolitan language was largely empty rhetoric. Since the national aspirations of the liberals of one country invariably overlapped with those of their neighbours, the talk of Europe and of international fraternity was all too much hot air. There was no overarching European liberal movement to secure the revolutionary gains of 1848; rather, the liberals acted within their own national frameworks and, ultimately, for their own national interests. The fact that so many of these interests worked against each other is one of the primary explanations for the failure of the revolution.
²⁹
As Axel Körner argues, ‘despite its idealism, Europe was not one of the revolution's priorities'.
³⁰
Arguably, Europeans paid a terrible price for ignoring this bitter lesson of 1848: only after two murderous world wars and, more recently, several bitter ethnic conflicts are truly European political and economic structures being forged. It can only be hoped that these will act as a conduit for the peaceful resolution of future conflicting national interests. The extremes of European nationalisms and the conflicts that they have engendered in the century and a half since 1848 are, Reinhart Koselleck argues, reason enough not to forget the common experience of the mid-nineteenth-century revolutions.
³¹

In some parts of Europe they have never been forgotten. Despite their intensely problematic legacy of failure, the revolutions of 1848 remained an inspiration for later generations. Socialists saw the bloody repression in the summer of that year as the martyrdom of the working classes, which confirmed that their interests - and democracy itself - would always be betrayed by the property-owning bourgeoisie. In East Germany the communist regime appropriated the legacy of 1848 ‘as an indisputable element in the revolutionary tradition of the German Democratic Republic'. It claimed that the ‘achievements of the socialist German state also have their roots in the battles and endeavours of the revolutionary masses of 1848'.
³²
Yet, for others, 1848 was a confirmation of democratic principles. After the creation of the Weimar Republic in 1918 the Social Democratic chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, worked hard to reconnect with the liberal heritage of 1848. At a ceremony at Saint Paul's Church in Frankfurt in 1923, commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the opening of the first German parliament, he told his huge audience that 18 May 1848 had been the day when the German people slipped from the grasp of reactionary governments and took its destiny in its own hands. After the same church was bombed during the Second World War, it was rebuilt after the conflict in time for the revolution's centenary, as a ‘credo of German democracy'.
³³
The memories of 1848 were also held dear in Hungary, where in 1941 left-wing demonstrators protested against the authoritarian regime's entry into the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany by laying wreaths at the statues of Kossuth and Petőfi on the symbolic date of 15 March. While the post-war communist regime appropriated these revolutionary figures as its own heroes, they also became symbols of protest against totalitarianism. During the anti-communist uprising of 1956 the Hungarian insurgents sang Petőfi's patriotic hymns. After seizing control of the state radio station, they called it Radio Kossuth.
³⁴

Finally, the revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe had profound echoes of 1848. The parallel is by no means exact, not least because many of the intellectuals and dissidents who led the resistance to communism were adamant that they wanted to break with Europe's heritage of revolution, not reignite it. Above all, they wanted their revolution to be an ‘anti-revolution', a rejection of what the novelist and sociologist György Konrád (explicitly linking 1789 with 1917) dubbed the ‘Jacobin-Leninist' tradition, which was foisted on Eastern Europe after 1945. In 1984 the Czech playwright Václav Havel had declared himself in favour of ‘antipolitical politics',
³⁵
by which he meant that the opposition to communism was not about a violent seizure of power, but rather involved elevating the cultural opposition in civil society to greater importance than the repressive state. For Konrád, the revolutionary tradition would be rejected by occupying the polar opposite of centralised political authority: ‘decentralized spiritual authority'.
³⁶

Nevertheless, the revolutions of 1989 brought about the collapse of communism - and Havel himself, of course, did take power, as Czechoslovakia's first post-communist president. It was one thing to speak of ‘antipolitics' while a dissident, but the old regime was replaced by a new democratic order that required the engagement of those who had done so much to create it. Ultimately, therefore, the 1989 revolutions were not just the process by which the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe rejected the legacy of 1917. They were also (perhaps despite themselves) the means by which those peoples became reacquainted with traditions of the French revolution of 1789 - the principles of ‘liberty, democracy, civil society, nationhood'.
³⁷
But these ideals were not merely imported from the West; they tapped into the history of Eastern and Central Europe itself. On the eve of the collapse of communism, Timothy Garton Ash remarked that ‘Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles are rediscovering their own history; and they are making it again'.
³⁸
The uprisings of 1989 may have rejected the communist revolutionary tradition, but in so doing they reconnected their peoples to the liberal revolutions of 1848.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In writing this book I have received a lot of help and support, so I have many people to thank. My former doctoral supervisor and friend Bill Doyle first brought me to the attention of Tim Whiting at Little, Brown, so ‘Salut et Fraternité!' I am grateful to Tim for his enthusiasm in the early stages of this book, and to his successor, Steve Guise, who has been a patient, kind and generous editor. I should also like to thank Iain Hunt, Kerry Chapple, Philip Parr (a superb copy editor: all blunders and errors - of judgement and of fact - are of course my own) and Jenny Fry at Little, Brown for their great work in the editing process and the publicity. Among colleagues, I salute Jim Smyth, who has been a good friend and a fine head of department; and Bob McKean, whom we were sorry to lose to retirement, for his generosity and his irrepressible enthusiasm - he has always taken a great interest in my work, such as it is. Looking beyond the history department, I should thank the University of Stirling for granting me a semester's sabbatical leave to allow me to start work on this project in the autumn of 2005. Kevin Adamson set me right on some important details, while Daniela Luigia Caglioti gave me a copy of her interesting article on foreign Protestants in southern Italy during 1848. My friend and colleague, the excellent Dave Andress, read a full copy of the typescript: if this book is ever thought to be any good, it will be largely thanks to his perceptive comments. The library staff at the University of Stirling have, as always, been cheerfully helpful. In particular, this book could not have been written without the assistance of the nice people at the Document Delivery Service. I should also add that the staff at Glasgow University Library are excellent and the collections there superb. Furthermore, I acknowledge the help of the National Library of Scotland, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Archives Nationales in Paris. Thanks also go to my mother and Mike for putting up with me during the research trips to Paris, while my father and Jane provided me with urgently needed computer technology at an important stage of this project. My mother-in-law, Elizabeth Comerford, and Brenda Swan, Maureen and Robert Burns, Michael Bell and Sophie Rickard, also helped ease the pressure at a crucial stage in the editing.

During the writing of this book, our little daughter, Lily Jessica Anita, arrived: she is a firecracker with all her mother's strength of will. She has made the late evenings of tapping at the laptop worth it - and, besides all the joy she has brought us, I thank her for sleeping through the night! Finally, the last year has been one of the busiest, but perhaps one of the happiest, of my life: this is thanks to Helen, who has done so much to make this book possible. I have no doubt that, given her feisty nature, she would have been among the women standing on the barricades in 1848. This book is dedicated to her with gratitude and love.

It is also a tribute to the memory of my grandfather, a great, expansive, generous and good man, and to that of my brother-in-law, John, a kind, gentle, decent and dependable friend who passed away suddenly during the last day of editing. Both are sorely missed. Eternal and blessed memory.

Mike Rapport
Stirling, April 2008

NOTES

PREFACE

1
Most notably (among many others) by Priscilla Robertson,
Revolutions of 1848: A Social History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952); Jonathan Sperber,
The European Revolutions, 1848-1851
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Roger Price,
The Revolutions of 1848
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); David Ward,
1848: The Fall of Metternich and the Year of Revolution
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970).

2
J. A. Hawgood, ‘1848 in Central Europe: An Essay in Historical Synchronisation',
Slavonic and East European Review
, vol. 26 (1947-8), pp. 314-28.

3
J. Keates,
The Siege of Venice
(London: Chatto and Windus, 2005), p. 2.

 

 

CHAPTER 1

1
A. Herzen,
My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 313-14.

2
On Herzen, see E. H. Carr,
The Romantic Exiles
(London: Serif, 1998); I. Berlin, ‘Introduction', in A. Herzen,
From the Other Shore
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. vii-xxv; J. E. Zimmerman,
Midpassage: Alexander Herzen and European Revolution, 1847-1852
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989); E. Acton,
Alexander Herzen and The Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

3
R. Tombs,
France 1814-1914
(London: Longman, 1996), p. 357.

4
Quoted in A. Palmer,
Metternich, Councillor of Europe
(London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 132.

5
Quoted in ibid., p. 35.

6
Prince Richard de Metternich (ed.),
Mémoires, documents, et écrits divers laissés par le Prince de Metternich
, vol. 3 (Paris, 1881), pp. 440-1.

7
Ibid., vol. 3, p. 444.

8
I. Deak,
The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians 1848-1849
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 3-4, 15-16.

9
P. Robertson,
Revolutions of 1848: A Social History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 335-6.

10
A. Sked,
The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire 1815-1918
(London: Longman, 1989), pp. 46-50.

11
R. Okey,
The Habsburg Monarchy c. 1765-1918: From Enlightenment to Eclipse
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), p. 78.

12
R. Tempest, ‘Madman or Criminal: Government Attitude to Petr Chaadaev in 1836',
Slavic Review
, vol. 43 (1984), pp. 281-7.

13
Quoted in H. A. Winkler,
Germany: The Long Road West, 1789-1933
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 78.