INTRODUCTION

The Restoration came to a sudden end on February 24, 1848, when angry mobs stormed the Palais Royal in Paris and forced King Louis Philippe to abdicate. Uprisings spread to the Austrian empire and into Germany, and within a matter of weeks Prince Metternich had been driven into exile. In Berlin matters came to a head on Saturday, March 18, as crowds gathered to hear the king order the convening of a general assembly. In her novel Revolution und Contrerevolution (1849), Louise Aston captures the sense of delight and near disbelief among the people gathered to hear the king's proclamation, but the mood changes abruptly when soldiers advance into the throng in a menacing gesture that reminds people where they are: “Prussia was a police state, but even more, a military state.” Aston's protagonist Alice watches in horror as two soldiers approach a harmless bystander “and suddenly – whether by accident or on purpose she could not tell – discharged their rifles” (2:75). Savage fighting breaks out, and we soon find Alice standing on the barricades, “fully armed with a musket and a sword.” Her friend Ralph offers to bring her to a safe haven, but Alice has no patience for his condescension: “‘Bah, do you think I'm a coward, even if I am a woman? Say “du” to me, for here we are all comrades’” (2:99). What had begun with the peaceful transition of power from the king to the people had become a bloodbath, a turn of events that presaged the fate of the 1848 Revolution as a whole.