When we read about violent upheavals in history — most particularly the French Revolution of 1789 — our habit is to associate them with radical causes, subversive organizations, and characters who emerge from the morass in a more or less confined theatre.

In Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring we are seeing something quite different, a series of events more akin to the Arab Spring the Middle East experienced in 2011-2012 where almost simultaneously independent nations of an entire region of the world seemed to explode with no premeditation. Ergo Clark’s title for this work about the upheavals all over Europe in 1848-1849.

These revolutions are characterized by little rhetoric, virtually no conspiracies, and few leaders either with revolutionary credentials or serious charisma. These revolutionaries didn’t really participate in building from the ruins. That was left more or less to the people who were in power before all the violence broke up the party.

These revolutions were spread across the continent. Sometimes they were about voting rights, or workers’ rights, control over Parliament by linguistic majorities, even a say in government by subject peoples. Some were about a cultural nationalism, but not always. It was the unusual revolution that sought to completely overthrow monarchies.

The upheavals surprisingly started in Switzerland of all places over a move to reinstate Jesuits in the educational system. They spread to France, the German principalities, Palermo, Rome, Naples, Milan, the Netherlands, Budapest, Vienna, Spain, and Prague.

There were initiatives to end slavery of blacks in Guadalupe, to end the repression of Jews, to enfranchise the poor, even to end the slavery of Roma peoples in the area we associate with Romania today. But almost none of these issues were resolved after counter-revolutions which followed almost all of the initial violence.

Women’s rights? Nope.

Post revolutionary states left conservatives and some liberals in power. Radicals were left on the periphery. And new violence broke out this time led by radicals, but these were squelched once more.

The revolutions almost seemed like new opportunities to trick the poor. The very poor didn’t even want the revolutions. In some readings you might say the later Russian Revolution was a big trick on the poor.

In hatred of the Hapsburgs local governments kept trying to redraw the maps with little success.

I think it no accident that Clark focuses on the June Days of 1948 in Paris where radicals invaded and sacked the Chamber of Deputies, a new legislature Parisians had created only months earlier.

The parallels with the January 6, 2021, sacking of the US Capital are abundantly clear.

What is not clear is how historian Clark views the Trump uprise: is it a revolution or a counter-revolution over the moderates in Washington? As in the earlier revolutions, violence did not legitimize it. There was little faith in republican ideals then or now.

I was struck in Clark’s work about how little the Europeans cared about the revolution in America or spouted its ideals.

The authorities of the 1840’s reversed almost all of the gains of the revolutionaries. The rabble were poorly armed. The situation in America is quite different: there are more than 400 million quite lethal firearms in the hands of Americans. There are means to communicate over secret (often encrypted) computer networks, and cheerleaders of the violence in almost every segment of American society, even in the police and likely in the armed forces.

Who could believe even two years ago a coup-d’état would be attempted in modern Germany by neoNazis and white supremacists?

A revolution in America — shrill, chaotic, unhinged — to reverse the gains of the Republic over 200 years is not so unimaginable. It could have succeeded with the first Trump administration. It may yet with a second.

Clark’s book is long and his writing style, well, I frequently nodded off. But I must tip my hat to the range of research used. It had to cover many languages, periods, and a lot of dusty archives. I hope all the researchers got their due in the acknowledgements. I didn’t read them. Sorry. ( )

This was chosen by Michael Ledger-Lomas, author of Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown (Oxford, 2021), as one of History Today’s Books of the Year 2023.

Find out why at HistoryToday.com.

One afternoon in January 1848, in the Sicilian city of Palermo, the streets began to fill with crowds. What brought people out of their homes en masse, or what they wanted, no one was entirely sure. Attempts to disperse them, however, rapidly turned violent, and running battles spread through the streets and squares of the city. Demonstration soon spawned insurrection. Within days the authorities had lost control, first of the city and then, partly due to the help the Royal Navy gave the revolutionaries, of all Sicily.

From here, revolutionary sparks flew to almost all of Europe’s cities. In the months that followed, smouldering resentments born of generations of underclass deprivation and despair, fanned by a bewildering range of bourgeois isms and ideas, soon burst into flame. The streets filled with demonstrators. Armies lost control. Governments lost their nerve. Revolution gripped Europe from one end to the other. Old regime ministers and monarchs, such as Metternich in Austria, Ludwig I in Bavaria and Louis-Philippe in France, fled to exile. Those who stayed on their thrones scurried to draw up new, more democratic, constitutions, for fear of something worse. Elsewhere, new republics convened assemblies to draft their own. Some proved more conservative than others. In the Netherlands, for instance, royal absolutism gave way to a parliamentary monarchy but property qualifications restricted the electorate to 11 per cent of men over the age of 23. In the French Second Republic, meanwhile, every man over 21 had the vote.

These new parliaments talked and debated as never before. And as they talked, they realised how little they all agreed with each other. They had started with no coherent plan, nor even a shared vision of the world they wanted to build, and they certainly had little in common now that they were facing the problems of real-world government. As a result, as soon as the conservatives regained their equilibrium and launched their own wave of counter-revolution, the new regimes splintered and fell.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Jonathan Boff is Reader in Modern History at the University of Birmingham.