Christopher Clark on 1848: The Revolutionary Spring

Our editor met with acclaimed historian Christopher Clark to talk about the momentous and tumultuous year that in many ways created the Europe we live in today.

For those not quite familiar, what is 1848?

What’s interesting about 1848 and also incidentally, what’s unique about it, is that it’s the only truly European revolution that there’s ever been. The French Revolution is called that for a very good reason, although its effects, of course, are profound and widespread. The commune, this revolution in Paris remains very much a French affair. So does the Revolution of 1830, of July 1830, which does leap over into sort of sympathy revolutions in Belgium and in a few Italian cities and elsewhere, but doesn’t get anything like the kind of European scale of cascading tumultuousness that you see in 1848. And finally, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, they too are very much Russian in their inception.

In 1848, by contrast, you see this, it’s a bit like brush fires. It’s a revolution which cascades across the entire continent from Palermo in Sicily to Naples to Paris to Vienna to Berlin. Where it starts is really still a matter of controversy. You could say it starts in Paris. The Parisian Revolution of February 1848 was important. But when that happened, the Sicilian Revolution in Palermo was already underway.