Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Enlightenment Era Representations of the Nation
- 3 The Enlightenment Nation as a Site of Practice
- 4 The French Revolution and Napoleonic Inheritance
- 5 The Greek Revolution of 1821
- 6 Revolutions of 1830
- 7 Revolutions of 1848
- 8 Epilogue
- Bibliography
- About the Author
- Index
7 - Revolutions of 1848
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Enlightenment Era Representations of the Nation
- 3 The Enlightenment Nation as a Site of Practice
- 4 The French Revolution and Napoleonic Inheritance
- 5 The Greek Revolution of 1821
- 6 Revolutions of 1830
- 7 Revolutions of 1848
- 8 Epilogue
- Bibliography
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract The present chapter explores the historiographical problems surrounding the role and relative strength of national sentiment in the revolutions of 1848. Here again the national problem is considered in relation to other contemporary sources of political and social discontent. In each of the cases under review, from Germany to Habsburg Europe to Italy, historians portray a sharp and even abrupt rise in the strength and assertiveness of, in the words of James Sheehan, ‘liberal political action’ in the years immediately preceding the 1848 revolutions, with a corresponding elevation in the perceived stature of national sentiment and demands.
Keywords: 1848 revolutions, Risorgimento, German unification, Habsburg Empire, The Social Question
Les révolutions se font malgré les révolutionnaires.
In a well-known paper delivered at a conference commemorating the one-hundred-year anniversary of the 1848 revolutions, Ernest Labrousse argued that if the tempests of the period beginning in 1789 had ‘distant origins,’ each was immediately preceded by the sudden onset of ‘economic tensions.’ This was furthermore the ‘only force powerful enough’ for revolutions of the type 1789, 1830 and 1848, which he clarified as spontaneous, mass uprisings stemming from social grievances of an ‘endogenous’ nature. All were thus the product to a considerable degree of ‘hazard’ or chance, and ‘appeared to their contemporaries comme des révolutionssurprises.’ Labrousse's paper elicited a lively response from his listeners, some of whom pointed out that the hardships cited by the author were present elsewhere, and yet, did not have the same ‘explosive’ consequences. Labrousse's ruminations on the role and primacy of chance seemed in this case to be at odds with the conspicuous frequency of revolution in France, leading another to ask whether these results might be traced more precisely to ‘psychological’ factors (e.g., that the French people had come to regard revolution as a ‘phénomène normal’). Although Labrousse did not address this question directly in his essay, he believed that France's susceptibility to revolution in 1789, 1830 and 1848 accrued instead from the fact that certain economic and social imbalances persisted over the period and were even augmented by the emergence of new insecurities linked to the spread of industrialization.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763–1848 , pp. 173 - 202Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020