List of Abbreviations

AHC

Arthur Hugh Clough

AHC Corr.

The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Frederick L. Mulhauser, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957)

AHC Remains

The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough: with a selection from his letters and a memoir, edited by his wife [Blanche Clough] (London: Macmillan & Co., 1888)

CD Letters 3

The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 3: 1843–1847, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)

CD Letters 4

The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 4: 1844–1846, ed. Kathleen Tillotson, pp. 645–7, p. 646 (hereafter)

EBB

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

EBB Letters

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1897) vol. 1

EBB/RB Recollections

Martin Garrett (ed.), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000)

FD Life and Writings 1

Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1: Early Years, 1817–1849 (New York: International Publishers, 1950)

FDP1

The Frederick Douglass Papers 1841–1846, ed. John W. Blassingame et al., Series One, vol. 1

FD Speeches and Writings

Frederick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, abridged and adapted by Yival Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999)

ILN

Illustrated London News

JPH

James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Years of Promise, 1809–1851 (London: Constable, 1949)

Later Lectures

Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (eds), The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1843–1871, 2 vols (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010)

MF

Margaret Fuller

MF Letters 5

Robert N. Hudspeth (ed.), The Letters of Margaret Fuller, vol. 5: 1848–1849 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988)

RWE

Ralph Waldo Emerson

RWE JMN 10

The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 10: 1847–1848, ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1973)

RWE Letters 3

The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939)

RWE Letters 4

The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 4, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939)

Sad but Glorious

Margaret Fuller, ‘These Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991)

Stanley 1

Rowland E. Prothero (ed.), The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley D.D., Late Dean of Westminster, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1893)

WEF

T. Wemyss Reid, Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Forster, vol. 1 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1888)

Introduction: Why 1848 Matters

Stuttering, scattered, and various in their outcomes, a series of revolutions erupted in the mid to late 1840s which spanned from the Atlantic to Ukraine, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, reaching Peru, Brazil, and Chile, catapulting millions of people across the European continent into political life and breaking Europe open once again in ways unseen since the Napoleonic period. By 1851 most of these revolutions had ‘failed’. Karl Marx announced in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ that ‘[f]rom 1848 to 1851 only the ghost of the old revolution wandered about…an entire people, which had imagined that by means of a revolution it had imparted to itself an accelerated power of motion, suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct epoch’.¹ Since then the profound and lasting effects of 1848 on the international construction of modern political and aesthetic sensibilities have remained underacknowledged. Rather than just a brief period of international volatility and rebellion which collapsed, failed, and capitulated to the reactionary forces of the counter-revolution, 1848 was a game-changer. The problem was that nobody was quite sure what the game had changed into.

My three-book series sets out a new historiography of the nineteenth century by focusing on and establishing the centrality of the increasing purchase of serial practices. The ‘novel’ in this period, for example, is not a closed volume, but a series of time-released parts; the ‘newspaper’ is not a regular daily event, but a variety of much messier unevenly distributed serial forms; and ‘politics’ is not an elite conversation, but a fast-evolving popular understanding of constitutional formats and possibilities.² Seriality offered a century that was already on the move a way of modelling movement. The form of the serial moves onwards through calendar time: by its dynamic forward trajectory, it seems to unspool into the empty future. Indeed, I argue that it is actively constructing that very model of a future in a way that echoes Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the ‘homogeneous, empty time’ of modernity.³ In my argument, the nineteenth-century serial is not just a literary category, but a political, historical, and social one. In a series, each linked element has something in common with every other element of a series, but this does not mean they are identical: the series is a format which allows for growth and development across time and space. Therefore, the series can achieve commonality without erasing difference.⁴ Time-released, it is a flexible and usefully unstable form that can respond quickly to a changing social situation. My work starts with print and shows how the gathering strength of the rhythm of serial print in the first half of the nineteenth century created a new sense of shared social time and inaugurated a new politics of seriality too: a politics of connections, of development, and of international equivalence.

Using seriality to think about history allows us to see how by the mid-nineteenth century ideas about progressive historical time are interacting with a live new universalism, and an international sense of commonality. Historians have used contagion or circulation to think about the transnational spread of political ideas but such models obscure historical agency and possibility. Seriality, by contrast, can reorientate our historical understanding and allow us to see the things that the traditional historiography has missed. In 1848 the serial conversation was not about ‘nation’, ‘class’, or ‘industrial labour’: it was about raggedness, constitutional democracy, and the city-polis. In Serial Revolutions I track a self-conscious pan-European seriality which helps us to rethink the historiography of 1848. This seriality generated tropes and forms at the time which have been ignored by subsequent historians, who are often evaluating 1848 with the benefit of hindsight or with a kind of catastrophic presentism, which perhaps amount to the same thing. Thinking with seriality helps us to reopen the live debate of 1848. Seriality, then, can help us to model the 1848 revolutions much more flexibly than can such monolithic categories as ‘nation’, ‘class’, or ‘religion’: viewed through the model of seriality these events manifest as a series of responses to a similar pressure from very different places and political contexts. This helps to reconfigure the 1848 revolutions not as identical copies emanating eastwards from Paris, but rather as distributed parallel responses to similar (but not identical) provocations and forms of oppression.⁵ And as they roll across Europe, the self-conscious sense of their own seriality increases, until they become popularly understood as ‘a series’. Serial forms emerged to meet the serial revolutions. Historian of comic strips Andreas Platthaus has noted that one of the earliest ‘serialized’ printed news images in Germany appeared in 1848. A news sheet produced in Meissen, Saxony represented the Berlin revolution through a formal sequence of framed vignettes⁶ [see Fig. 0.1].

Fig. 0.1 Julius Steinmetz, ‘Berlin am 18. und 19. März 1848’ (Meißen, 1848) [Berlin 18–19, March 1848].

[Credit: bpk/Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin].

In Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), I focused on Britain, and primarily on London, arguing that a daily news culture developed alongside an emergent popular culture of historicism. The rapid expansion of print in London after the Napoleonic Wars meant that the historical past and the contemporary moment were emerging into public visibility through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, shows, and new forms of mediation. As a prequel to the extraordinary revolutionary event-sequence of 1848–9, Serial Forms argues that the rhythms of seriality in the early nineteenth century did not create political subjects out of people overnight, but that they did crucially start to create the feeling of being part of a daily politics for more and more British people. Serial Revolutions traces the onward development of this new understanding of seriality. This means that seriality is both the subject of the book and its method. Using seriality as a form to think with, I reinterpret the world of 1848 and show how the distributive function of the serial worked to transmit ideas and identities across a Europe which was already being recalibrated and reconstructed into a newly imagined space by a shared historicism.

In early nineteenth-century Britain, under a brutal counter-revolutionary regime of censorship, people were hungry for novelty. Novelty brought with it new forms of knowledge and at least some pieces of the apparatus of citizenship. Understanding nineteenth-century historicism as a series of material practices, and not as a purely ‘intellectual history’, means that we can investigate what equipment was newly put within people’s grasp, sometimes quite literally, and how they chose to use it. What is vital for Serial Revolutions is how these linkages coalesced through the 1830s and 1840s into new forms of collectivity. John Stuart Mill observed in 1848 that in England the working classes would no longer accept a ‘patriarchal or paternal system of government’ and had irrevocably ‘taken their interests into their own hands’ once ‘they were taught to read, and allowed access to newspapers and political tracts’, brought ‘together in numbers to work socially under the same roof’, and enabled by railways to ‘shift from place to place’.⁷ As Serial Revolutions will show, all of these factors were important in the transnational spread of the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1848: literacy, the press, visual technologies, organized labour, social collectivity and mobility. It was only when Europe began to read about itself, to imagine itself, and to see itself represented, that its nationalisms became possible. Serial Revolutions will argue that the revolutions of 1848, far from being the failure that Marx claimed them to be, were the powerful response to a remarkable cross-class diagnosis of the political failure of governments across Europe.

In its ‘Retrospect of 1848’ the Illustrated London News somewhat smugly reflected that ‘[i]t is obvious to all that the revolutions and commotions of 1848 are not things of to-day merely, but that they took their rise in times far remote…These commotions date, in fact, from the invention of printing. That invention emancipated the mind of humanity.’⁸ But in reality, since the French Revolution of 1789, ferocious censorship laws across the whole of Europe had been deliberately hampering this emancipation. Under the Hapsburg Empire in Austria and Italy the censorship regulation of 14 September 1810 was enforced by a special department for Police, Censorship and the Press, answerable directly to the Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich. King Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily was draconian in controlling information. The French Press Law of 1814, the Danish Law of Press Freedom of 1799, the Karlsbad Decisions of 1819 in Germany, and the Six Acts of 1819 in Britain: all acted together to ensure that it was exceedingly hard for ordinary working people in Europe to follow the news and join in political debates. All the more extraordinary, then, that these revolutions, which were to be the ‘most dramatic, rapid, and far-reaching spread of regime contention in history’ happened at a time ‘when networks of communication and transportation were underdeveloped’.⁹ Serial Revolutions suggests that it was a new imagination of social seriality promulgated by serialized texts that created the European and global synchronization of the events of 1848.

What Actually Happened?

There were warning tremors well before the full eruption in 1848. In 1846, the Cracow revolt by the Polish Democratic Society against Austrian rule had been put down so violently and effectively that there would be no hope of a revolution in 1848, but even so the revolt provided inspiration to others, including Marx and Engels. Similarly, the Chartist movement in 1840s England was brutally repressed by the British secret police and prevented from organizing mass protests that might have led to revolution. After the ‘Sonderbund War’ of 1846 and 1847, delegates of the Swiss cantons drafted a new national constitution which was finalized on 12 September 1848 and made Switzerland a federal state. This represented a victory for the cantons run by socially minded Protestants over the more authoritarian Catholic-run cantons. Charles Dickens, who arrived in Geneva in autumn 1846, was deeply impressed, writing, ‘I believe there is no country on earth but Switzerland in which a violent change could have been effected…in the same proud, independent, gallant style.’¹⁰ Meanwhile, calls for reform and national unification were getting louder and louder in the German-speaking states; the Hungarian opposition had overthrown the parliament in elections; and there was a series of protests and riots in Lombardy.¹¹

The year 1848 started as it meant to go on: on 12 January 1848, the people of Palermo and Messina in Sicily rose in a full-scale revolt against Ferdinand II, Bourbon king of Naples and Sicily. Ferdinand II had come to the throne in 1830, the same year as Louis Philippe in France, and had developed a regime of harsh repression and police surveillance. Tension was growing across Europe. That January, American journalist, Margaret Fuller, wrote from Rome that ‘[e]very day the cloud swells, and the next fortnight is likely to bring important tidings.’¹² In February the storm-cloud began to break when a rattled Ferdinand granted Naples and Sicily a popular constitution and the people established a new provisional government. Other towns in Sicily followed and riots broke out on the mainland in Naples and in Austria as Metternich threatened to intervene on the part of the Bourbon king.

1848 has long offered a specifically scalar challenge to historians. That spring, more than fifty revolutions broke out across Europe within a period of a few months. They ignited through the cities and towns of Austria, Prussia, Italy, and the German states with further uprisings in Spain, Ireland, Denmark, and Romania. The French 1848 revolution began on 22 February, with a demonstration organized by the radical press in Paris. A huge phalanx of unemployed and poor people, many of them women, along with hundreds of students, marched through the streets in heavy rain loudly singing the ‘Marseillaise’. From 22 to 24 February the barricades went up in Paris, King Louis Philippe escaped to England, and the poet Alphonse de Lamartine was declared leader of the Provisional Government. That February, too, the citizens of Rome began to organize a revolt. and by November a full-scale popular revolution had led to the flight of Pope Pius IX and the establishment of the second Roman Republic. On 13 March, Metternich was forced to resign as Austrian Chancellor and also fled to England. Two days later, on the morning of 15 March 1848, Hungarian lawyer and celebrity-revolutionary Lajos Kossuth started a revolution in the Pilvax coffee palace in Pest. Revolutionaries marched peacefully around the city declaring an end to all forms of censorship. Then they marched directly to the print shops and printed the poet Sándor Petőfi’s banned nationalist poem together with their constitutional demands. On 18 March in Milan, a street brawl between Austrian soldiers and local civilians escalated into the cinque giornate, a furious five-day battle which temporarily expelled the Austrians from the whole of north-eastern Italy. And on the same day, 18 March, the chain of revolutions which had been spreading northward from Munich to Frankfurt, Nassau, Cologne, and Solingen finally reached Berlin. After eight hours of street-fighting, King Frederick William IV of Prussia withdrew his troops from the city and agreed to the election of a constituent assembly. Four days later, on 22 March 1848, the city of Venice proclaimed the rebirth of the ‘Venetian Republic’ and established a provisional government with Daniele Manin, freed from prison by the revolutionaries, as its President. Large crowds of Venetians gathered in front of the American Consulate shouting ‘Long live the United States! Long live our sister republic!’ In London, the Chartist ‘monster’ demonstration of 10 April was overrun with special constables and dampened by pouring rain. In truth, the Chartist Movement had already been eviscerated and many of its leaders and members had been imprisoned or transported during the 1840s.¹³

In 1848 American poet Walt Whitman was working in New Orleans where there were large French and German populations in exile from despotic regimes. Whitman was the editor of a newspaper, the Crescent. ‘One’s blood rushes and grows hot within him’, he wrote in the paper on 31 March, ‘the more he learns or thinks of this news from the continent of Europe! Is it not glorious? This time, the advent of Human Rights, though amid unavoidable agitation, is also amid comparative peace.’¹⁴ Violent revolutionary agitation was ramping up though. When the dissolution of the National Workshops in Paris was announced on 22 June, workers took to the barricades to defend the right to labour and the notorious and bloody June Days (22 to 26 June 1848) followed as the fragile alliances between the socialists and the liberals collapsed and divisions appeared between Paris and the taxpayers of the rest of France.¹⁵ In Vienna on 6 October 1848, troops of the Austrian Empire were preparing to leave the city to suppress the Hungarian revolution when crowds sympathetic to the Hungarian cause rioted and attacked the soldiers, and the Austrian Minister of War was lynched by the crowd. Vienna’s October Days resembled the June Days in Paris in the severity of punishments meted out to protestors. On 26 October, Austrian and Croatian troops retook the city and the leaders of the insurgency, many of them writers and journalists, were executed. Meanwhile, Russian troops were called in to help put down the Hungarian revolution, and writers and artists were targeted and killed there too. In Russia, Czar Nicholas prevented revolution from starting by extreme and violent repression, ordering, for example, the torture and imprisonment of the writer Dostoyevski and others in the Petraskevski circle who had been inspired by the French Revolution.

After the Paris June Days, 4,000 insurgents were deported to Algeria, which had been a French colony since 1830.¹⁶ England also used its colonial possessions to dispose of revolutionary elements. And not only did the imperial and monarchical powers of Europe use their colonies as a punitive dumping ground, they also brought repressive military practices from the colonies to the cities of Europe to use in counter-insurgency operations.¹⁷ It was a two-way traffic, as surveillance methods designed to keep track of radicals in the capitals of Europe were subsequently adapted and exported to control and coerce colonial peoples. One colonial strategy of control was to set a country against itself, so the Austro-Hungarian imperial command encouraged the Croats against the Magyars in Hungary and the Czechs against the Germans in Prague; and England stoked the resentments between the nationalists and unionists in Ireland.¹⁸ A Young Irelander uprising (sometimes called the ‘Famine Rebellion’) in County Tipperary on 29 July 1848 was put down, after some bitter fighting, by the British-controlled Royal Irish Constabulary. Resistance was occasionally successful. Abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, who had just returned from a French posting in Haiti, headed a commission for the French Provisional Government of 1848. Schoelcher reported a ‘trickledown’ effect of revolutionary ideas in Haiti: ‘[t]he slaves, despite the profound degradation into which they had been plunged, could not long remain strangers to the movements that were happening above their heads. The colonists spoke of independence, the petits blancs of equality, the mulattos of political rights, the negroes in their turn talked of liberty.’¹⁹ In fact, the slaves had already worked it out for themselves, and when the Emancipation Decree of 27 April arrived in the Caribbean on 3 June, the enslaved Haitians, through a series of ‘revolts’ or revolutions, had already established their own freedom.²⁰

Colonies were milked for resources and capital to mitigate the economic disaster of the 1840s in Europe, as Miles Taylor has demonstrated for the British case.²¹ The British Government had been squeezing all its colonies hard in the 1840s and consequently there were rebellions in Ceylon, the Ionian Islands, British India, and the West Indies. Barricades were erected in Montreal and the Canadian Parliament building was burnt down. In Cape Colony and Australia there were anti-transportation societies protesting about their use as dumping grounds for radicals and criminals. There were fifty-eight deaths during one protest in Cape Colony.²² The events of 1848 were also felt in Chile and Brazil. In Brazil, the Praiera revolt (1848–52) was an attempt by liberals to oust conservatives from power. It was eventually defeated by government forces. Also inspired by European events was the Young Argentina movement, and movements in Columbia, Peru, and Bolivia. The Chilean revolution commenced on 20 April 1851, again inspired by France, but by the end of the year it had been brutally put down by the conservative government.

1848, then, was not so much a ‘European Revolution’ as a global event. Or, more accurately, a global series of events.²³ In 1849, the Brazilian Insurgents issued a ‘Manifesto to the World’ which demanded universal voting rights, the freedom of the press, guaranteed work for Brazilian citizens, and the establishment of a federalist government.²⁴ Both within Europe and outside Europe, the demands of 1848 were remarkably similar: they were the demands of colonized and oppressed people everywhere. As if in one voice, they all asked for political representation, civil liberties, self-determination, self-governance, work, and freedom of information. The 1848 revolutions, jeered at by Marx as a failure, did deliver constitutions to most countries in Europe and by 1870 Germany and Italy were both united and independent.²⁵ (Ireland, however, did not achieve this until 1921, and even then, the country was partitioned.) With the exception of Russia, the feudal system was swept away in Europe after 1848 and counter-revolutionary governments were forced to deliver social reforms if they were to hold on to power. The balance had shifted and the social contract was under revision. It is true that the December 1848 parliamentary elections in France severely damaged radical republicanism, but they boosted some new forms of socialism, such as Marxism, non-Marxist communism, and militant anarcho-socialism as well as the libertarian socialism of Charles Fourier.

Exiled radicals continued to build international alliances and associations in the wake of 1848. After the 1830 revolution in France, Giuseppe Mazzini had sought shelter in London, where he planned the next stage of his Italian nationalist campaign.²⁶ American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson, on his European travels, noticed the self-sufficiency of the German community in Whitechapel and the French in Spitalfields.²⁷ London hosted large communities of exiles and also migrant communities of workers, such as young German workmen on their apprenticeship tours. ‘Why’, The Times asked, ‘are they here?’ Lady Charlotte Guest thought that the answer was clear: these foreigners were here ‘to promote anarchy’.²⁸ But on the whole, the exiles educated their hosts about the horrors of European tyrannies and fundraised peaceably for their nationalist campaigns. The 1848 revolutions in their turn created wave after wave of exiles to London and Paris, some of whom then travelled onwards to America. A flurry of republican nationalist publishing started up in New York City, and links developed there between Giovane Italia, Joven Cuba, and Young America.²⁹ After the putting down of the Young Irelander Famine Rebellion of July 1848 the organizers, James Stephens and John O’Mahony, escaped to Paris where they supported themselves by teaching. In 1856, O’Mahony left Paris for America where he founded the Fenian Brotherhood in 1858, the same year in which Stephens, who had returned to Ireland, founded the Irish counterpart of the American Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The ongoing effects of 1848 would be felt long into the twentieth century and beyond.

These are the bare facts, or some of them.³⁰ They offer some valuable clues as to what was at stake in this extraordinary year. Walt Whitman’s use in 1848 of the term ‘human rights’ is important. More than anything, 1848 was about what it meant to be human, and, as a direct result, 1848 was a much more important moment for the global politics of race than has been generally recognized. The spectacle of the poor and unemployed, the misery and poverty and neglect of the people in every city in Europe, forced the social into political visibility in an unprecedented way through a newly pervasive media. The means of this visibility was important. A free press and the end of censorship was high up on every revolutionary’s agenda.

What Did It All Mean? The Historiography of 1848

Historians still do not agree about the significance of the 1848 revolutions. There is a general feeling that they must have been important. Sir Lewis Namier wrote in 1946 that the revolution of 1848 ‘was super-national as none before or after; it ran through, and enveloped, the core of Europe’.³¹ Eugene Kamenka agreed that ‘[i]t was in 1848, rather than in 1789 or in 1917, that revolutions spread like wildfire and with remarkable family resemblance in trends and response throughout the whole of Europe’.³² These revolutions, or, perhaps more accurately, this serial revolution, had extended much further than the local or national revolutionary events which had preceded it, and reached well beyond Europe. Eric Hobsbawm wrote in 1962 that ‘[t]here has never been anything closer to the world-revolution’ than 1848.³³ Despite an influential Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature on the subject of 1848 which took place in July 1977, literary studies has never organized itself around this ‘hot year’ in history.³⁴ The results and consequences of this remarkable serial conflagration of 1848 have even now not been fully examined.

There are complex reasons for this. One is, of course, Marxism. Marx and Engels published The Manifesto of the Communist Party in February 1848, but it was not taken up as a manual by the revolutionaries of that year.³⁵ The Manifesto was only to become the go-to text for revolutionaries during the Paris Commune of 1871, and then for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and beyond, after both its authors were dead. Marx was in Paris in 1848 for five weeks, arriving on 4 March, and he managed even in this short time to set up a revolutionary club for German workers and to speak at others of the Parisian clubs.³⁶ Paul Lafargue later remembered that ‘Engels told me that it was in Paris in 1848, at the Café de la Régence (one of the earliest centers of the Revolution of 1789) that Marx first laid out for him the economic determinism of his materialist theory of history’.³⁷ But Marx’s ideas had not yet coalesced into the ‘‑ism’ they were later so powerfully to become. While ‘Marxism’ was not a motive force during the events of 1848, it was to have a lasting and profound effect on the twentieth-century historiography of 1848. After acknowledging the remarkable reach of the revolutionary moment of 1848, Eugene Kamenka is typical in concluding that the revolution ‘proved, within one year, to be a momentous failure’.³⁸ Axel Körner, writing in 2000, agreed that ‘the revolution is almost always described as a failure’, pointing out that even such different political commentators as de Tocqueville and Marx had agreed on this at the time.³⁹ That 1848 was a failure remained the consensus view throughout the twentieth century, and to some extent it still persists. In 1984, Paul de Man, cogitating on revolution, reminded us that ‘[t]he future is present in history only as the remembering of a failed project that has become a menace’.⁴⁰ In 1994, Jonathan Sperber neatly summed up the three available historiographies of 1848. The first was the ‘romantic idea’, the gestural performance of revolution with no political traction: this is the version that belongs to the hero-revolutionaries such as the Hungarian Kossuth or the Venetian Daniele Manin. The second, following Marx in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’, is ‘the farce’, in which the revolutionaries are all professors, dilettantes, and pedants. Sperber tells the story of the French poet-revolutionary drinking in a café who sees through the window a crowd of workers go by and springs up and cries: ‘ “I am their leader; I must follow them!” ’⁴¹ And the third version of 1848, which Sperber says is the most pervasive interpretation of all, is ‘the failure’ which rests on the evidence that ‘after a shorter or longer—and usually shorter—interval, the authorities overthrown at the onset of the revolution returned to power’.⁴² Nothing happened, and the revolutions achieved nothing. A. J. P. Taylor’s famous judgement that in 1848 ‘German history reached its turning point and failed to turn’ still has currency today.⁴³

All history is, of course, the history of the present. Taylor claimed that in Germany, ‘[t]he success of the revolution discredited conservative ideas, the failure of the revolution discredited liberal ideas. After it, nothing remained but the idea of Force.’⁴⁴ But he was writing in the post-war devastation of 1945, with Europe lying in ruins about him. In 1952, Priscilla Robertson wrote that ‘[t]oday millions of classless, stateless people crowd the continent in hatred and despair—and in a way they are the end product of the futility and ruthlessness of the 1848 revolutions’.⁴⁵ Bitterness about the fruits of nationalism is understandable, but to blame the revolutionaries of 1848 for the growth of totalitarianism is surely unfair, and suggests much too straight a path from Romantic nationalism, through popular politics, to Nazi and fascist ideologies. Instead, it might be closer to the truth that the so-called ‘failure’ of the revolutions in 1848 helped to create both liberalism and socialism, albeit by complex and indirect means, setting radicals against the bourgeoisie and decoupling them from their formerly united struggle against aristocratic absolutism. It was certainly not true that the authorities who were returned to power were identical to those who had been ousted at the start of the revolution, and Marx was wrong to describe the ‘restoration’ as ‘a return to a dead epoch’. Although his disappointment at the failure of the social revolution is understandable, a new kind of politics was genuinely to emerge in the wake of 1848. Marxist readings, powerful though they have been in both diagnosing and constructing class consciousness for several generations, have nevertheless continued to distort a full understanding of this important mid-century moment. Other, quieter voices have been drowned out, voices that suggested that the real gain of 1848 was exactly that liberalism excoriated by Marx in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’.⁴⁶ And even after the apparent collapse of the revolution, these same revolutionary liberals continued to exert enormous influence over constitution-making both in the German States and elsewhere. In many cases, the very same men who had taken part in revolutionary activities became members of the post-revolutionary administrations. Marx understood the revolutions of 1848 as being closely connected, but the idea that only the socialist tradition kept the internationalism of the revolutions alive is not the whole truth.⁴⁷ One thing 1848 did undoubtedly deliver was an internationally minded polylingual technocracy of educated professionals and administrators across Europe, for good or for bad. Serial Revolutions is not attempting to ‘recuperate’ liberalism, but it challenges the traditional historiography which describes the revolutions of 1848 as a series of failures that were barely registered in Britain and were rapidly extinguished by a counter-revolution abroad. Instead, it argues that the changing cultural conditions which produced the revolutions also enabled forms of internationalism and a ‘serial’ model of citizenship to embed themselves in British, Continental European, and American culture after 1848. For radical American democrat Walt Whitman, writing in Leaves of Grass (1855), 1848 was a seminal and generative event that would continue to change the landscape long into the future:

Not a grave of the murdered for freedom, but grows seed for freedom … . in its turn to bear seed,

Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish.⁴⁸

Far from the damp squib that Marx claimed them to be, the 1848 revolutions represent an unprecedented moment of urgent European synchronicity and they have important consequences for political discourse. Historian of Germany Christopher Clark sees that ‘[t]he new political synthesis achieved in these years set a pattern for politics whose imprint can still be discerned in the political cultures of our own day’.⁴⁹ He wants to move away from ‘what Hans Ulrich Wehler once called “counter-revolutionary innoculation” ’ and to think about the restoration period of the early 1850s as representing a profoundly significant reordering of priorities that led to the economic liberalization of Europe.⁵⁰ Clark is surely right, but perhaps the even bigger historiographical challenge is to change how we think about revolutions in the first place.

The historical focus usually squarely remains on the revolutionary moment and the barricades and battles on the street. Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann concedes that ‘[t]he long-term failure of the European revolutions does not imply that their effects were not of tremendous importance’. Such a statement reveals a structural and conceptual problem.⁵¹ Too much of the focus is on the revolutionary moment, oddly separated from its ‘effects’.⁵² This is the problem meticulously explored by Hannah Arendt in her On Revolution, in which she criticizes Marx and Engels for their fixation on the revolutionary coup. Arendt warns against ‘the historian who tends to place his emphasis upon the first and violent stage of rebellion and liberation, on the uprising against tyranny, to the detriment of the quieter second stage of revolution and constitution’, thus perpetrating the ‘harmful theory that the constitutions and the fever of constitution-making, far from expressing truly the revolutionary spirit of the country, were in fact due to forces of reaction and either defeated the revolution or prevented its full development’.⁵³ Arendt makes a fierce and uncompromising argument against Marxism’s seduction by what she calls the ‘social’, and his neglect of what she calls the ‘political’.⁵⁴ Marx and Engels, she claims, are not interested in forms of government as the American revolutionists originally were, and the early French revolutionists were. Overawed and overwhelmed by the spectacle of the vast influx of the rural poor into Paris, the revolutionaries were distracted from the reconstruction of the polis. The aim of revolution shifted, from ‘freedom for all’ to ‘abundance for all’. And, Arendt argues, abundance does not necessarily lead to freedom; indeed, it can lead in the other direction. But Arendt totally separates the political from the social because she is invested in a classical model of the polis, a model that ultimately proves overly severe, and allows her to sidestep issues of social exclusion. Crucially, her model misses the connections between race, poverty, and social exclusion: it effectively eliminates the structural enmeshment of racism in political systems.⁵⁵ Ralph Ellison was right to see a problematic ‘Olympian authority’ in her work.⁵⁶

1848 redefined what ‘politics’ was. Jacques Rancière has complained that any denomination of ‘the political’ suggests that there is somewhere else which is ‘not-politics’. ‘The political’ can then be used to invent and defend boundaries around what qualifies as ‘political’ and what does not, and thereby can operate to obstruct democracy.⁵⁷ 1848 tore down these boundaries around the ‘political’ sphere. The ‘reform’ debate about the parliamentary relationship between the representative and the represented was transformed into a global debate about the contested spaces of representability.⁵⁸ And in 1848, it was the city that became the primary site of representation in popular literary, artistic, graphic, and political terms in a way which powerfully exposed the interconnectedness of urban Europe. The events of that spring showed that cities were more closely interconnected across state borders to each other than to their own rural populations. In the new media age of the 1840s, ‘representation’ shifted from being the subject of discussion about electoral mechanisms and the extension of the franchise in polite periodicals and broadsheet newspapers, to a bitter and violent struggle over visibility, over who gets to be seen at all. As we shall see, commentators in 1848 were interested in precisely this meeting of the social and the political: Margaret Fuller remarked of the situation in France in 1848 that ‘it would appear that the political is being merged in the social struggle’ and, she added emphatically, ‘it is well’.⁵⁹ The German writer Fanny Lewald, who was in Paris in February and March 1848 before hurrying back to her native Berlin to catch the March revolution there, felt that ‘[i]t will not only be a matter of political change; a social revolution will inevitably follow on its heels’.⁶⁰ In many ways, making the social political was the supreme achievement of the 1848 revolution and it was the seriality of the revolutions, rather than the revolutions themselves, that brought a new global social form into visibility and made it impossible ever again to imagine the world as it had appeared before 1848.

Nationalisms in 1848

Perhaps the greatest irony of the historiography of 1848 is that it tells us that many colonized peoples, and peoples living under foreign rule, considered nationhood to be their best hope of emancipation. The international consensus after 1848 that national struggles were emancipatory for the people would result in a hardening of national boundaries, an embedding of monolingual cultures, a consolidation of ethnic and racial ‘theory’, and a competitive colonialism between European national powers, which would eventually and inexorably lead to the First World War.⁶¹ I argue that the 1848 revolutions were remarkably successful in establishing a new ‘universal’ script for the rights of the people, but their unfortunate and parallel investment in a seemingly emancipatory nationalism did develop in unintended ways towards xenophobic nation-states and the invention of the lie of ‘scientific’ racism in the second half of the century. It is important to remember the success of the universalism of 1848, though, even as we acknowledge the slow sinking of the universalist agenda under the growing weight of competition between increasingly militarized nation-states later in the nineteenth century.⁶² The chain of European events in 1848 cannot be satisfactorily explained as a nationalist revolution.⁶³ The revolutions were ‘nationalized’ only in retrospect: they were experienced at the time as European. The revolutions happened across many states with many varieties of governance and many diverse forms of social and collective identity.⁶⁴ By 1848, after all, the French had absolutely no need to fight for national identity, and the British Chartists were after something other than ‘nationhood’ too. Independent national statehood was not the only, or even the main, driver of these upheavals.

Again, it is partly a legacy of Marx and Engels that we now think of the ‘Springtime of the Peoples’ as the springtime of ‘nationalism’. In truth, in 1848, many revolutionaries were demanding more federal power within imperial territories.⁶⁵ Czechs and Germans in Bohemia, for example, were advocating a federal solution that could maintain their linguistic diversity.⁶⁶ 1848 was driven by many factors, and not just the idea of the nation.⁶⁷ If anything, it might be more accurate to say that it was less about nationhood and more about the role and function of the state. Rather than the nation-state, what 1848 actually gave birth to was a brief but grand universal series, a truly global ‘world history’, but the anti-federalist reaction this provoked resulted quite quickly in its fracture into individual nations, each one a small-scale series of its own. The forces of ‘reaction’ and ‘counter-revolution’, for all their brutality, were much weaker and less sustainable than we tend to remember. The 1848 revolutions succeeded remarkably easily; the governments that were restored after them were, in their turn, easily defeated, and subsequent governments were fragile. It was this fragility, and the need to shore up wavering power, that spawned ever-hardening nationalisms. States became nations, ‘politics’ became national politics, ‘literature’ became national literature, and the grand universal world series sank from view. The post-1848 nation became a singular entity but crucially it had first come into being as part of an international series. It was internationalism that had created the modern nation state, and conservative British historiography has tended to ignore this fact.

Another reason for the downplaying of this crucial episode in European and world history in accounts of British history is, of course, the much-vaunted theory of British exceptionalism. In the autumn of 1848, the conservative Edinburgh Review felt it could maintain a haughty distance from the ‘revolutions, which have threatened to subvert the constitution and the relations of almost every state, except our own’.⁶⁸ That Britain famously did not produce a revolution in 1789, 1830, or 1848, makes the most important event in British nineteenth-century history the one that did not happen.⁶⁹ The very frequency and the brazen inaccuracy with which the British conservative press gloats over this glorious British exceptionalism is itself revealing of a deep fear of domestic revolution. In March 1848, The Times reminds its readers yet again that:

We possess those things which other nations are everywhere demanding at the gates of the Palace or the door of the Legislature!—free press, legislature, etc.…The State becomes a society for the common good, giving to all its members a rateable share in the common benefit and stock.…The British Empire is a great friendly society.⁷⁰

The Times is countering the fear verbalized by Matthew Arnold, who wrote to his sister in the same month that ‘if the new state of things succeeds in France, social changes are inevitable here and elsewhere…but, without waiting for the result, the spectacle of France is likely to breed great agitation here, and such is the state of our masses that their movements now can only be brutal plundering and destroying’.⁷¹ Arnold understands the serial possibilities of the French revolution, and doubts whether the so-called ‘free press’ and the ‘legislature’ (along with that glib ‘etcetera’), will prove sufficient to restrain a miserable and desperate British people. In the event, a revolution did not transpire in Britain, but the surviving public record is partial and misleading as to the levels of state violence and insurgent anger in play during the 1840s.

Opinion about Britain’s relationship with Europe and the importance of European politics to British domestic affairs was hotly divided then, as it is now. F. B. Smith is right that ‘[t]he debate on 1848 forms a vivid moment in that continuing schism in British life between “Europeans” and “Little Englanders” ’.⁷² A representative of the latter, the pro-Reform politician Henry Brougham, an old man by 1848, complained that the French revolution of 1848 was entirely inexplicable, ‘without pretext, without one circumstance to justify or even to account for it’, and he warned darkly that as a result, ‘all sense of security in any existing government’ is gone.⁷³ J. S. Mill reviewed Brougham’s pamphlet in the Westminster Review, ‘vindicating the Revolution, and the Provisional Government, from as unjust aspersions as ever clouded the reputation of great actions and eminent characters’.⁷⁴ Mill saw the revolution differently, as the logical outcome of a set of legible causes, and his deep knowledge of French politics exposes Brougham’s ignorance and anti-French prejudice. The Provisional Government had taken over from ‘a government [which] found itself, in 1848, so feeble that it fell at the first onset’.⁷⁵ Mill was right about the French case. But what about all that did happen in Britain after 1848, some of it as a direct result of events in Continental Europe? Matthew Arnold felt that social changes in Britain were inevitable after 1848, and they certainly arrived. Margot Finn has launched an energetic attack on nationalist history-making, claiming that ‘[t]he common but false antithesis in historical writing between nationalism and internationalism acts to obscure the two concepts’ fundamental interrelation…[and] masks their mutual contribution to both class formation and liberal popular politics in the industrial era’.⁷⁶ Quarantining Britain from the rest of European history in the nineteenth century under the guise of British exceptionalism is patently absurd, but remains a remarkably entrenched approach.

Citizenship in 1848

The revolutions were not exclusively urban, but they were mainly so. They took place in city squares and city streets. This made them much easier and faster for the urban press to report than military engagements on remote battlefields, so that their unprecedented representation in ‘real time’ inaugurated an urgent conversation about the politics of the city which would have long-running consequences. Where did politics belong in the space of the city? In palaces, parliaments, or on the streets? What should be the fiscal relationship between countryside and city, which was often hotly contested?⁷⁷ How was the (often reactionary) peasantry to be folded into the idea of citizenship? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, what did citizenship now mean? The urban sequence of the revolutions meant that the concept of citizenship was arguably more important in 1848 than that of nation. But citizenship was a highly unstable concept. Both the French and American revolutionary versions of citizenship were energetically entangled and disentangled and hotly debated. The 1789 French Revolution had been underpinned by an Enlightenment language of natural rights, through Rousseau, which meant that the governed had the right to withdraw their consent to be governed if the government was felt to have exceeded its limits or to have failed. In Britain, a similar Enlightenment view was authorized by Locke’s argument that legitimate government rested upon the consent of the governed and went back to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9. This was the language of Chartism and the radical constitutionalism that was used by the Northern Star in 1839: ‘Every member of a political state is entitled to certain privileges, which are either the residue of natural rights, whose surrender was not required for the public good, or those civil liberties, which society provides and guarantees in lieu of the natural rights so given up.’⁷⁸ The American constitutional system, modelled on ancient classical models of the polis, meant that the state granted freedom to the people. Men in ancient Greece, explains Hannah Arendt, ‘received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth. Neither equality nor freedom was understood as a quality inherent in human nature.’⁷⁹ She goes on to limn the difference between the French and the American theories of civic liberty, explaining that under the American Constitution:

all men should live under constitutional, ‘limited’ government. The proclamation of human rights through the French Revolution, on the contrary, meant quite literally that every man by virtue of being born had become the owner of certain rights. The consequences of the shifted emphasis are enormous, in practice no less than in theory. The American version actually proclaims no more than the necessity of civilized government for all mankind; the French version, however, proclaims the existence of rights independent of and outside the body politic, and then goes on to equate these so-called rights, namely the rights of man qua man, with the rights of citizens.⁸⁰

In Europe in 1848, ‘democracy’ was a term under extreme pressure. A radical constitutionalism emerged as philosophically distinct from the liberal-moderates’ concept of representative government. Republicanism was different again. Nevertheless, Thomas Cooper lectured on ‘the magnificent themes of the Athenian democracy’ at the City Chartist Hall in London.⁸¹ During the ‘Mexican War’ of 1846–8, Margaret Fuller turned classical republican models against her native America: ‘[a]t present she has scarce achieved a Roman nobleness, a Roman liberty.’⁸² Whether power was given by or to the people, and if given to the people, to which people in particular, was a matter for fierce debate. Ideas of possessive individualism proved difficult to reconcile with those of republican citizenship. And republican citizenship, as we have seen, meant different things in America and France: Alexis de Tocqueville misunderstood American democracy, for example, by reading it with French eyes. The conflict between a version of personhood that depends on the freedom to own property, and a version that depends on being subject to the common good, is precisely the conflict that is played out in 1848, particularly in France, but also in European cities elsewhere. America had already had its revolution, but throughout the 1840s Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass were both continuing to wrestle with an inherent conflict between subjection and emancipation in their appeals to a universalism that is socially flexible whilst not exclusionary.⁸³ Arendt considers the American Revolution to have been ‘triumphantly successful’, and she wonders why it had so little influence in the world as a model of revolution.⁸⁴ But then fifteen pages later into her discussion, she appears to remember that ‘abject and degrading misery was present everywhere [in post-revolutionary America] in the form of slavery and negro labor’, and she concedes that we are forced to ask ourselves ‘if the goodness of the poor white man’s country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black labour and black misery’.⁸⁵ What was for Arendt an afterthought about ‘black labour and black misery’ shaped the American response to 1848. Frederick Douglass eloquently contended that the American Revolution, far from being ‘triumphantly successful’, was in reality far from complete, and America stood in urgent need of re-constitution. The form and the limits of the state and the relationship of the people to that state were the fundamental questions of 1848 across a vastly diverse range of places. If the revolutions did not immediately produce modern democratic states, they cleared the way for the renegotiation of the social contract.

Another deeply-rooted Marxist myth about 1848 is that the revolutions were about class. When William Forster, visiting Paris in 1848 says that ‘all Paris is now absorbed in this contest between the bourgeoisie, the property men and friends of peace and order, with the ouvriers, or rather, with the demagogues, communists, and other ultras, who strive to excite them’, he offers a caricatured and crude class version of the complex political drama that is being played out in front of him.⁸⁶ This version persisted in the histories: Priscilla Robertson, for example, judges that ‘the 1848 revolutions turned into class struggles, and failed because they did’.⁸⁷ But the contest was less between the bourgeoisie and the ouvriers than between different versions of socialism. In Marx’s native Germany, between 1847 and 1849 Mainz, Speyer, Mannheim, and other south-western German towns, including Marx’s birthplace, Trier, were ‘hotbeds of furious ideological strife that were typically undifferentiated and socially indistinct in the sense that shopkeepers, off-duty soldiers, students, peasants, and members of societies randomly abounded on both sides, rendering social difference no guide to the factional splits’.⁸⁸ Class offered no definitive guide to revolutionary allegiances, and despite his best efforts even Marx himself failed to create a coherent class narrative around 1848. He abandoned the chapter on class he had originally intended to include in Das Kapital. Nor does anti-clericism explain the wave of connected upheavals, although it was undoubtedly a common feature of many of the uprisings. Christopher Clark has resisted the ‘secularisation thesis’, arguing that ‘the religious conflicts of mid and late nineteenth-century Europe cannot be explained solely in terms of the tension between secular and clerical interests’.⁸⁹ But if the 1848 revolutions were not non-events and failures, and if they cannot be entirely explained by nationalism, class, or religion, what were they about?

Seriality in 1848

‘[T]he French have begun a new revolution’, wrote the English poet Arthur Hugh Clough at the end of February 1848.⁹⁰ But was this a new revolution or just a continuation of the series? Both Marx and de Tocqueville saw 1848 as part of one revolutionary process that had begun in 1789, and neither expected it to stop in 1848 either.⁹¹ The German poet Heinrich Heine, who was living in Paris in February 1848, wondered:

Is the great author repeating himself? Are his creative powers failing? Wasn’t the play, presented to us last February with such pride, the same as he produced eighteen years ago in Paris under the title of ‘The July Revolution’? But one can always see a good piece twice. At any rate, it has been improved and expanded and the conclusion in particular is new and was received with thunderous applause.⁹²

The pattern of repetition, reprise, return, the possibility of difference, and the conceit of the ‘play’ return again and again in contemporary accounts of the événements of 1848. Hannah Arendt reminds us that ‘the term “permanent revolution,” or révolution en permanence’ was coined by Proudhon in the middle of the nineteenth century.⁹³ It has since become part of the Marxist credo ‘that there is only one revolution, selfsame and perpetual’.⁹⁴ But as Arendt points out, this way of thinking leaves us with very few tools to understand the ‘times of quiet and restoration’ which in this model recede into merely ‘the pauses in which the current had gone underground to gather force to break up to the surface again—in 1830 and 1832, in 1848 and 1851, in 1871, to mention only the more important nineteenth-century dates’.⁹⁵ It is not so much that revolutions fail, she suggests, as that governments fail repeatedly and continuously. Otherwise, revolutions could not even begin to be fermented.⁹⁶

Heine’s wry description of 1848 as a theatrical revival of a ‘good piece’ and Marx’s description of it as a tragi-farcical ‘return to a dead epoch’ both betray underlying anxieties about progress and history. The revolution had reproduced itself, but to many it seemed to have returned in a degenerate form. ‘The basis for most evaluations of 1848 is the idea that history is a teleological process’, says Axel Körner; and even at the time, contemporaries worried about whether the revolutions represented a step forward or a step backwards on this imagined linear scale.⁹⁷ Die-hard radicals such as Margaret Fuller interpreted the events of 1848 as one more step towards universal freedom:

The next revolution, here and elsewhere, will be radical…It will be an uncompromising revolution. England cannot reason nor ratify nor criticize it—France cannot betray it—Germany cannot bungle it—Italy cannot bubble it away—Russia cannot stamp it down or hide it in Siberia. The New Era is no longer an embryo; it is born; it begins to walk—this very year sees its first giant steps, and can no longer mistake its features.⁹⁸

She saw this as an episode in an ongoing developmental series. But not everyone agreed. Historian Daniel Pick has since connected the experience of 1848 to emerging ideas of racial degeneration:

In the wake of 1848 there was an extraordinary flurry of historical interpretation and re-orientation. Certainly, to many contemporaries the vicissitudes of revolution seemed to call into question the very terms of liberal progressivism. Pessimism began to colonize liberalism in increasingly powerful and sustained ways.⁹⁹

Seriality is not necessarily teleology. What was perhaps ultimately more important than the progressive or retrospective direction of these revolutions was the sheer fact of the serial response of very different peoples across very different territories. When disparate groups spread across wide distances identified themselves with a common cause, they created a category identity between groups which historically had not been at all contiguous or close. There was not necessarily a conscious or deliberate identification between peoples, but the rapid communication of a codified idea of ‘revolution’ united them and tied them into series that overrode different languages, countries, and religions. Benedict Anderson identifies the emergence of international serial categories such as ‘nationalist’, ‘monarch’, and ‘agitator’ and claims that ‘[i]t was from this logic of the series that a new grammar of representation came into being, which was also a precondition for imagining the nation’.¹⁰⁰ 1848 remains one of the crucial episodes for the formation of a political model that we still recognize as ‘modern’ today. The seriality of the 1848 revolutions created a new model of international connectedness for the citizens of those countries involved, and demonstrated, in Anderson’s words, ‘how basic to the modern imagining of collectivity seriality always is’.¹⁰¹ In 1848, alongside the international terms ‘worker’ and ‘revolutionary’, the ‘citizen’ and the idea of citizenship emerged powerfully as a serial category. New ideas and practices of transnational synchronicity and seriality emerge through the representation of revolution in 1848. But while Anderson’s idea of horizontal seriality is useful, the 1848 chain of revolutions are better modelled with the Sartrean concept of social seriality.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s important and influential 1960 social theory describes the seriality of ‘ordinary…everyday life’ in a city, where people find themselves placed in a ‘relation of isolation, of reciprocity and of unification (and massification) from outside’.¹⁰² The mass experience of the modern city, unlike earlier models of community, substitutes seriality for collectivity. ‘There are serial behaviour, serial feelings, and serial thoughts’, Sartre claims; ‘[a] series is a mode of being for individuals both in relation to one another and in relation to their common being, and this mode of being transforms all their structures’.¹⁰³ Sartre’s mode of seriality has some generative potential. It can produce a ‘group-in-fusion’ with the capacity for political resistance.¹⁰⁴ The événements in Paris in 1968 produced a burst of energetic engagement with ideas about the relationship of the ‘serial’ to the ‘event’.¹⁰⁵ A Sartrean seriality, then, can help us to model the 1848 revolutions much more flexibly than can such monolithic categories as ‘nation’, ‘class’, or ‘religion’: viewed through Sartre’s seriality the revolutions manifest as a series of responses to a similar pressure from very different places and political contexts. This helps to reconfigure the revolutions not as identical copies unfurling themselves eastwards from Paris, but rather as a distributed series of parallel responses to similar, but not identical, provocations and forms of oppression. In this Sartrean reading, the series did not originate in Paris, but was a synchronized global phenomenon. Paris was only one part of the whole, and not even host to the first of the 1848 revolutions.

Historians have not thought very much about the revolutionary imaginary, nor about how it very effectively transferred some of its structures after 1848 into a broader social imaginary. Jürgen Osterhammel, in his enormous global history of the nineteenth century, gestures towards such an enquiry:

A further striking feature of the nineteenth century may be described, somewhat technically, as its tendency to asymmetrical reference density. ‘Increased perception and transfer across cultures’ would be a less cumbersome, but also less precise, formulation for the same phenomenon. What is meant is that ideas and cultural content in general—more than the pieces of information transmissible by telegraph—became more mobile in the course of the nineteenth century.¹⁰⁶

But his somewhat clumsy attempts to describe such a phenomenon reveal how little historians have really thought about these crucial processes of the transfer of ideas, metaphors, and affects. ‘The “Revolution of the Intellectuals” exhausted itself without achieving concrete results’, claimed Namier; ‘it left its imprint only in the realm of ideas.’¹⁰⁷ But the realm of ideas is important. What 1848 really did was to create an imaginary of ‘1848’ which was far more powerful and long-lived than the separate events themselves. As Kristin Ross has argued about the Paris Commune, because ‘political struggle itself produces new conditions, modified social relations, changes the participants in the event, and the way they think and speak’, 1848 would have a profound effect on culture across the world as ‘the struggle itself creates new political forms, ways of being, and new theoretical understanding of those ways and forms’.¹⁰⁸ People were confused at the time of the revolutions and so-called counter-revolutions and their meanings were not immediately clear, but in the years that followed 1848, new political forms did appear. The way that people thought and spoke changed, as did the way they imagined themselves and their roles as citizens, as is manifest in the literature and art of the 1850s and 1860s. Serial Revolutions argues that from the perceived seriality of the 1848 revolutions came a strengthening of a form of political seriality. The revolutions gave seriality the appearance of powerful historical agency, and this lasting impression helped to remake the world in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The metaphors most often used to describe the spread of ideas are either epidemiological or circulatory. Cultural and literary scholars have tracked the rhetorical and political uses of ideas of ‘contagion’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and demonstrated that these metaphors have a long and complex history and are far from neutral.¹⁰⁹ Crowd theory and ‘contagion theory’ were developed at the end of the nineteenth century to explain the irrationality and psychological manipulability of crowd behaviour.¹¹⁰ But many historians still describe the 1848 revolutions in terms of contagion, as, for example, ‘the spreading contagion of revolution’.¹¹¹ Duncan Kelly has invoked ‘[t]he revolutionary contagion which flowed across national boundaries in Europe throughout 1848’; Blackey and Paynton have speculated that ‘[p]erhaps the notion of contagion may help to lend further credence to 1848 as a composite revolution’; and Geoffrey Ellis has invoked ‘contagion’ or ‘virus’ theories to explain the spread of the 1848 French Revolution.¹¹² Frank Eyck wrote that, in 1848, ‘[o]f the three Eastern Powers, only the third, Tsarist Russia, escaped the contagion and was preserved under Nicholas I’.¹¹³ It is striking that it is largely the modern historians of 1848, along with some few conservative commentators at the time, that choose to use this term. For very obvious reasons, and especially during the global cholera pandemic of 1846–55, analogy with disease was unlikely to be attractive to democrats and revolutionaries, and the actors in the 1848 revolutions never spoke in terms of ‘contagion’.¹¹⁴ They spoke instead in terms of communication, and most emphatically in terms of electrical communication.

In 1848, revolutionaries and their supporters were far more likely to figure the revolutions not as debilitating infectious disease, but as electrical energy pulsing down a wire sending a message coded as a series of dots and dashes. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail’s telegraph code had come into limited use from 1840, but, as I discuss in Chapter 2 of this volume, the proleptic take-up and prevalence of electrical and telegraphic imagery in descriptions of the revolutions at the time is very striking. Early telegraphic communication was linear and serial, as the duplex and quadruplex systems of sending more than one message in one direction down the line would not become viable until the 1870s. Like a telegraph message travelling in a linear series of electrical impulses down a cable, the revolutions were imagined by the revolutionaries as serial, travelling from point to point, relay to relay, to be retransmitted with redoubled energy to the next destination. Serial Revolutions brings together cultural, literary and book history and the history of performance to think about how the meanings of 1848 were being generated and transmitted at the time, and it finds that there is little or no representation of revolution as diffusive, miasmic, or contagious. By contrast, the electrical serial model of revolutionary transmission offered a rhetoric of urgency and control. Revolutionary sympathizers did not think of themselves as ‘catching’ a revolution like a cold, but rather as willing operators receiving the message and sending it swiftly onwards.

This travel onwards is important. Intellectual historians speak of the ‘circulation’ of ideas: a metaphor taken from commerce or physiology.¹¹⁵ While circulation suggests a movement outwards, the permeation of a group in wider and wider circles, as when Jonathan Sperber describes the ‘circulation’ of newspapers and ideas from Paris in 1848 ‘to rank-and-file political activists throughout the country’, circulation also implies a movement within limits and boundaries: limits which are often national.¹¹⁶ Circulatory movement cycles around the circuit. While circulation must depend on networks to some extent already established and bounded, seriality implies a movement onwards into an unknown future. And while revolutionary ideas may have been circulating around France, Germany, and Italy in the nineteenth century, they only became ‘serialized’ during the 1848 revolutions. Seriality implies not only movement, but connectivity across distances of time and space. Circulation can deliver novelty, but the serial can establish the new in ways that circulatory movement cannot. Because the serial is a prospective form which always heads forwards and onwards, it opens up the future and flings itself towards it. In 1848, revolutions were not caught like the flu, or passed around like small change; they appeared more like a bolt of lightning, or an electric shock, rearranging the landscape in which they arrived with a sudden flash of illumination. The serial revolutions of 1848 happened in advance of the technological and transport networks of the later century, as we shall see, but the series also anticipated those networks, enabling them to be imagined for the first time.

Many historians have already noticed the rhetoric around connectivity that fuelled the 1848 revolutions. Margot Finn points out the technological internationalism that facilitated them: ‘[r]ailways and the telegraph, transport and communication networks, combined to generate overlapping reticulations of consciousness, in which nationalism and internationalism were intertwined’.¹¹⁷ And Christopher Clark has noticed the way that such metaphors started to pervade governmental communication after 1848: ‘[t]he use of “developmentalist” arguments as such was not new, nor was the concept of unitary transport networks or the employment of circulatory metaphors; what was distinctive about the post-revolutionary era was the prominent place such topoi now occupied in government pronouncements and propaganda’.¹¹⁸ But how did the one lead to the other? What is very suggestive, and is explored in more detail in the chapters that follow, is the way that the serial functioned both as the metaphor of the revolutions and as the vehicle of that metaphor. As my first volume, Serial Forms, argued, the emergent seriality of the nineteenth century is both material and theoretical. And as the current volume shows, it was through novel material forms of serial writing, speaking, and performing that serial communication became the engine of revolution in 1848. Seriality then became so identified with the experience of 1848 that it swiftly became the central explanatory metaphor of those extraordinary events. This meant that it could and did slide quite easily into becoming a central metaphor of government in the 1850s.

Marx had recognized the importance of the imaginary ‘accelerated powers of motion’ in the revolution, as had Mazzini.¹¹⁹ When Clough met Mazzini in Rome in April 1849, the Italian nationalist leader told him that ‘[h]e expects foreign intervention in the end, and of course thinks it likely enough that the Romana Repubblica will fall’, but Mazzini explained that his campaign was as much to kindle the imagination of the Italians, to make them see themselves as connected, as to win.¹²⁰ In the immediate aftermath of 1848–51, people were unsure what exactly was the outcome: ‘did it portend change or stagnation?’—and historians have disagreed ever since.¹²¹ But perhaps what was really important about 1848 has yet to be understood. Walt Whitman was reaching for a common image when he wrote in Leaves of Grass that in 1848: ‘Like lightning Europe le’pt forth…half startled at itself, | Its feet upon the ashes and the rags…Its hands tight to the throat of kings.’ The flash of lightning, the electric current, sudden illumination, and rapid communication were the democratic metaphors of 1848. From Thomas Carlyle’s idea of revolutionary communication through ‘sympathetic subterranean electricities’ in 1848, to Feargus O’Connor’s ‘[k]nowledge, like an electric shock, played round the universe, [which] had taught the provisional government of France the necessity of finding work for the starving operatives’, the techno-fantasy of serial transmission pulses through almost every account of these revolutions.¹²² The very mobility of the metaphorical lexicon established during the revolution became the underpinning of the idea of a constitutional democracy that was part of the larger series of democracies. Samuel Moyn suggests a similar chronology in his history of human rights: ‘[a]lthough Bentham had coined the term “international” as early as 1780, the rise of internationalization in the form of economic and regulatory integration, together with a variety of other international projects, largely awaited the communications and transport revolution after 1850’.¹²³ But the transport revolution was itself dependent on the growth of an international consciousness. Lynn Hunt, in her history of human rights, suggests that ‘social and political change—in this case—human rights—comes about because many individuals had similar experiences, not because they all inhabited the same social context but because through their interactions with each other and with their reading and viewing, they actually created a new social context’.¹²⁴ Whatever 1848 did or did not achieve, it certainly created this new social context.

After 1848, a more open and self-knowing Europe made it easier for the ramification of a cross-continental infrastructure of railways, telegraphs, and international postal and trade routes. This infrastructure brought economic integration which helped political unification for ‘new’ nations such as Italy and Germany. Industrialization arrived at different rates in different places. In Germany, for example, according to one commentator, ‘[w]hat the Revolution of 1848 foreshadowed [stable employment and social mobility]…became a structural reality between 1850 and 1870 as a result of industrialization’.¹²⁵ In Italy, too, modernity would arrive towards the end of the nineteenth century: as Paolo Murialdi explains, ‘[i]t should not be forgotten that the moment of modernization…had also arrived for Italy: from the steam engine to the railways, from gas to electricity; and specifically to newspapers, from the first practical applications of the telegraph to the progress of photography. The debate on railway construction, fueled by many Italian newspapers, ends up transcending its material terms and taking on political meaning.’¹²⁶ France had been more technologically and bureaucratically advanced than Germany or Italy before the 1848 revolution, as Napoleon had already created a technocracy and invented an ideal of public service.¹²⁷ In 1848, across revolutionary Europe, capital punishment and slavery were abolished, press censorship was ended or restricted, the freedom of association was recognized, and the right to work was proclaimed. Despite the forces of ‘counter-revolution’, many of these principles endured in most states. And where they did not, they remained high on the progressive agenda, and often won the day later. Benedict Anderson has noticed that the first International Statistical Congress was held in the direct wake of the revolutions to establish the international comparability of census data.¹²⁸ European data had become internationally ‘comparable’ because the peoples of Europe had recognized their human seriality. 1848 shows us that metaphorical pathways and technological pathways are powerfully entwined; and this braiding of the imaginary and the material has always been, and will continue to be, world-making.

The form of liberalism that emerged after 1848 in France and England, and later in other countries too, deliberately distanced itself from social and class divisions by creating a version of the state designed to be ubiquitous and anonymous enough to absorb and contain social and political conflict. The way that the state absorbed class conflict and class violence was by arrogating to itself the right to commit violence against parts of its population. In Michel Foucault’s terms, ‘[i]ndividuals, the series of individuals, are no longer pertinent as the objective, but simply as the instrument, relay, or condition for obtaining something at the level of the population’.¹²⁹ Terry Eagleton has claimed that one reason that the 1848 revolutions are insufficiently understood, and often slide out of the picture altogether, is that they were ‘middle-class’. He explains that the subsequent liberal government across Europe, ‘[i]f it is to flourish,…must necessarily disown the process by which it came to power, consigning it summarily to historical oblivion, or at least rewriting the historical narrative in retrospect…to disavow its more traumatising and unpalatable elements’.¹³⁰ While this statement seems overly liable to the intentionality fallacy, it is perhaps true that a rapidly ramifying international bureaucracy institutionalizes the achievements of the revolutions so quickly and so effectively that the memory of their violent origin is soon smoothed away by fast-running trains, a relatively free press, and an efficient international postal service. The revolutions therefore achieve their aims during the so-called ‘counter-revolution’ in ways which we cannot now recognize as ‘revolutionary’ because our definition of ‘revolution’ remains so pitifully narrow.¹³¹ This forces a reassessment of the idea of the ‘failure’ of the revolutions. For example, historian Miles Taylor has argued that the Chartists in Britain, rather than being entirely defeated, were ‘reconciled to the mainstream of radical and parliamentary politics’: but it might be more accurate to say that parliamentary politics were reconciled to the Chartist view, and that this represents one of the many revolutionary achievements of 1848.¹³²

Revolutionary seriality was adapted by the national governments of the 1850s to mediate a new international polity, and as digital communications became available the connectivity of 1848 was materialized in copper wire and gutta percha through a global network of telegraph cables. As Serial Forms argued, even in the 1820s preparatory work had already been under way for the digital revolution that would eventually accompany and underpin the emergence of the internationalism and liberalism of the 1860s. The emerging centrality of mediation to politics, in the widest sense of ‘politics’, is the common subject of all three books in this series and the uneven impact of electronic communications will be the subject of the third and final book. The metaphor of connectivity which had energized the people during 1848 anticipated the next communications revolution and made it possible. And the next communications revolution—the digital switch—would change world politics forever.¹³³

The Argument of Serial Revolutions

Serial Forms both started and finished with Elizabeth Barrett in London greedily reading her way through all six volumes of Alexandre Dumas’s proto-revolutionary novel of 1846, The Count of Monte Cristo. In March 1848, the Illustrated London News pictured Dumas in his garde nationale uniform being carried through the streets of Paris in triumph by the people after the February Revolution [Fig. 0.2]. ‘Literary men,’ observed Walt Whitman, on 8 April 1848, ‘seem to have been not only the prime starters of this French revolution—but to be recognized as the ones from whom liberalism is to take body and form’.¹³⁴ As well as linking his literary work directly to the French revolutionary project, the Illustrated London News image conveys Dumas’s mixed-race origins through its insistence on the darkness of his face in contrast to the white faces around him. The image is of racial as well as class integration in the new Republic and one of the Republic’s first acts was to abolish slavery in all French colonies. The poet Alphonse de Lamartine, the leading light of the French Provisional Government in 1848, had linked literature to citizenship on the European stage in his verse play Toussaint Louverture, which he described as ‘un cri d’humanité en cinq actes et en vers’ (‘a cry of humanity in five acts and in verse’).¹³⁵

Fig. 0.2 ‘Alexandre Dumas Borne in Triumph by the People’, Illustrated London News (11 March 1848): 162.

[Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]

Lamartine, a committed abolitionist, wrote his account of the life and death of the leader of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) having repeatedly failed to persuade the government to abolish French colonial slavery, ‘résolut de s’addresser à un autre auditoire, et de populariser cette cause d’abolition de l’esclavage dans le coeur des peuples’¹³⁶ (‘determined to address another audience and to popularize this cause of the abolition of slavery in people’s hearts’). The famous republican French actor Frédérick Lemaître agreed to play Louverture [see Fig. 0.3] and Lamartine wrote gratefully that ‘un grand acteur a voilé sous la splendeur de son genie les imperfections de l’oeuvre. Le publique n’a vue que Frédérick Lemaître’ (‘a great actor veiled the imperfections of the work under the splendour of his genius. The public only saw Frédérick Lemaître’).¹³⁷

Fig. 0.3 Alexandre Lacauchie, ‘Frédérick Lemaître, dans \’, lithograph (Paris: Martinet, 1850). The white French actor, Frédérick Lemaître as Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian revolution in the play of the same name by Alphonse de Lamartine at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin.

[© Bibliothèque nationale de France]

Literature, print, and performance came together in potent ways in 1848 to represent the people. Matthew Arnold recognized that ‘[s]editious songs have nourished the F[renc]h people much more than the Socialist “philosophers” though they may formalize their wants through the mouth of these’.¹³⁸ Apprehending the power of mediation through text and performance, Arnold shows his dawning understanding of what will become the great liberal theme of his life: the politics of culture. The retelling of recent French history, both the revolution of 1789 and of 1830, and the July monarchy, would all contribute to what Fuller called the ‘swelling cloud’ across Europe and beyond. The French socialist Louis Blanc’s scathing analysis of Louis Philippe’s reign, Histoire de dix ans, 1830–1840, came out in parts between 1841 and 1844, and two volumes of his Histoire de la Révolution Française, which would eventually number twelve volumes, had appeared before the series was temporarily interrupted by the revolution of 1848. Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins (1847) offered a stirring narrative of the 1789 revolution. All were much read across the whole of Europe and provided an important stimulus to revolutionary projects elsewhere. The European universities were also key to developing, exchanging, and disseminating revolutionary ideas. Although by the mid-1840s their professors were being increasingly silenced and censored, the influence of their ideas on a mobile generation of students was already secure.¹³⁹ These were the internationally minded students who would later become national politicians or staff the liberal technocracies of various European states.¹⁴⁰ Three professors at the Collège de France, Jules Michelet, Edgar Quinet, and Adam Mickiewicz, were all great admirers of the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the early 1840s, they lectured in Paris on Emersonian themes of liberty and self-determination until their lectures were cancelled by Louis Philippe’s government.¹⁴¹ The ‘French’ Revolution of 1848 was not only transnational, but transatlantic.

Male professors were joined by female writers. Marie d’Agoult (who wrote as Daniel Stern), George Sand, Delphine Gay de Girardin, and Hortense Allart all commentated and wrote about the French revolution of 1848.¹⁴² Appolonia Jagiello took part in the Cracow insurrection of 1846 disguised as a male soldier, and Anita Garibaldi became an international celebrity as she fought (and died) alongside her husband on his revolutionary campaigns in Italy.¹⁴³ The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 in America was the first ever women’s rights convention, riding the wave of the European revolutions which had brought the issue of electoral representation, citizenship, and human rights into sharp focus.¹⁴⁴ Frederic Douglass’s attendance at the Seneca Falls Convention, shortly after he had returned from Europe, reveals how closely constructions of gender and race had been connected by the citizenship debates of 1848.

Serial Revolutions uses group biography and life writing to capture the experiential dimensions of the revolutions as they were happening across Europe. Rather than tracing, as Serial Forms did, the print and show culture that facilitated a new version of serial social time, Serial Revolutions follows individuals who found themselves immersed in that new version of time. These individuals travel through the book as they travelled through the year of 1848, appearing in different places and at different times. This is a book about movement: about the movement of people and about the transmission of ideas. Over the course of the book, Ralph Waldo Emerson appears in Manchester, in Liverpool, in London, in Paris, and in Concord, Massachusetts. Frederick Douglass is found in Concord, in Limerick, in Dublin, in Cork, in Belfast, in Glasgow, in London, in New York, and in Rochester, New York State. Margaret Fuller is in Paris and then Rome and then in Florence with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Arthur Clough is in Oxford and Paris with Emerson, then in Rome with Fuller, then in Concord with Emerson again, and then back to London. Fanny Lewald is in Paris and Berlin. Elizabeth Gaskell is in Manchester and London and Dickens is travelling through France, Switzerland, Italy, and America.

All of these restlessly mobile people are writing about their experiences of the 1848–9 revolutions and they are more often than not writing about them in serial forms. Their international encounters profoundly shape their writing and change their politics. Prompted by the revolutions, they revive old media forms and invent new ones to reflect and represent the urgent debate about the state of humanity around them. Serial Revolutions surveys the new aesthetic forms born of 1848: the illustrated journals, the ‘serial-epistolary’ forms such as letters to magazines, verse-epistles, public speaking, lecturing, operas, novel-poems, and avant-garde paintings. Many of these forms were experimental and provisional, responding to the experimental and provisional governments and republics that were popping up across Europe in these years, as politics and art both felt their way towards representing the social as political. These new serial forms, like the new serial constitutions, may have been ephemeral, and may therefore have been easily dismissed by their subsequent critics, but Serial Revolutions argues that we have been wrong to overlook this moment for so long, and that we need to restore 1848 to visibility as a complex and powerful matrix of social, political, and cultural modernity. If we can do this, we will see that 1848 is not over yet.

¹ Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 11: Marx and Engels 1851–1853 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979), pp. 99–197, p. 105. All further references are to this edition. ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’ was originally published in 1852 in Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York City.

² I am challenging Benedict Anderson’s version of the newspaper and the novel in his 1983 Imagined Communities here, but I agree with Anderson when he says, ‘how basic to the modern imagining of collectivity seriality always is’: Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, South East Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), p. 40.

³ Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, especially Thesis 13, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana 1992), pp. 245–55, p. 252.

⁴ As I discuss in greater detail below, at pp. 26ff., I have found Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of social seriality helpful here as articulated in Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976), originally published as Critique de la raison dialectique, précedé de questions de méthode (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

⁵ The 1848 revolutions did not start in Paris. On 12 January 1848, the people of Palermo and Messina in Sicily rose in a full-scale revolt against Ferdinand II, Bourbon king of Naples and Sicily. Other towns in Sicily followed and riots broke out on the mainland in Naples and in Austria as Metternich threatened to intervene on the part of the Bourbon king. In February Ferdinand granted Naples and Sicily a popular constitution and the people established a new provisional government.

⁶ Andreas Platthaus, an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, notes the opinion of Berlin historian Margret Dorothea Minkels that Julius von Minutoli, the then Chief of Police of Berlin, might have produced this broadsheet. Minutoli’s moderate stance towards the March revolutionaries brought him into disfavour with the King and when, three months later, the Berlin Arsenal was stormed by the revolutionaries, he had to resign. Andreas Platthaus, lecture at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (28 September 2017), https://www.dhm.de/blog/2018/01/25/the-power-of-the-picture/.

⁷ J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy [1848], in Principles of Political Economy and Chapters on Socialism, ed. Jonathan Riley, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 135.

⁸ [Anon.], ‘Retrospect of 1848’, Illustrated London News (30 December 1848): 417.

⁹ Kurt Weyland, ‘The Diffusion of Revolution: “1848” in Europe and Latin America’, International Organization 63 (2009): 391–423, p. 396.

¹⁰ CD to Macready (24 October 1846), The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 4: 1844–1846, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 646. All subsequent references to Dickens’s letters are to the Clarendon edition.

¹¹ See Hans Joachim Hahn, The 1848 Revolutions in German-Speaking Europe [2001] (London: Routledge, 2013).

¹² [Margaret Fuller [MF]], ‘No. XXII’, New-York Daily Tribune (13 March 1848): 1; repr. in ‘These Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 199–208, p. 208. Fuller started writing this dispatch in Rome in January. All subsequent references to Fuller’s dispatches for the New York Tribune from Europe are to this edition, abbreviated as Sad but Glorious.

¹³ More than a hundred men were transported to Tasmania for crimes associated with Chartism: ten in 1839–40 after the Newport Rising, at least eighty-five in 1842–3, sixteen in 1848. Many more were imprisoned and intimidated. Figures calculated from George Rudé, Protest and Punishment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 131–44, quoted in Robert Fyson, ‘The Transported Chartist: The Case of William Ellis’, in Robert Fyson, Owen R. Ashton, and Stephen Roberts (eds), The Chartist Legacy (Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1999), pp. 80–101, p. 98.

¹⁴ [Anon.] [?Walt Whitman], ‘Editorial’, New Orleans Crescent (31 March 1848), p. 2, quoted in Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 14. The piece is unsigned, but Whitman scholars have attributed it to him.

¹⁵ Jonathan Israel explains the June Days thus: ‘But the cause of the ferocious strife setting the poorest against the rest, and leading to the breakdown of the republic, in the process overthrowing the new freedom of the press and expression, was not a property loving provincial bourgeoisie fighting the Parisian proletariat but a socialist revolt against a weak republican regime refusing to act unconstitutionally in the face of a conservative election victory’: Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 564–5.

¹⁶ Jennifer Sessions has argued that ‘[t]he Revolution of 1848 was critical to the history of the French colonies, including Algeria, but it is equally impossible to comprehend the Revolution of 1848 without consideration of France’s North African colony. In 1848, revolutionary politics was colonial politics, and vice versa.’ Jennifer E. Sessions, ‘Colonizing Revolutionary Politics: Algeria and the French Revolution of 1848’, French Politics, Culture and Society 33:1 (Spring 2015): 75–100, p. 95.

¹⁷ Frederick Cooper agrees that ‘[t]he Haitian Revolution in the French empire, the combination of slave revolts and antislavery mobilization in the British empire, and the tensions between creole elites and peasants and slaves in the era of revolution in Spanish America all point to the possibility that politics in metropoles could not be neatly segregated from colonies’: Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 28–9.

¹⁸ Kay Boardman and Christine Kinealy agree that 1848 was ‘a watershed in the polarisation between nationalists and unionists that dominated Irish politics in the following century’: Kay Boardman and Christine Kinealy,‘Introduction’, in Kay Boardman and Christine Kinealy (eds), 1848: The Year the World Turned? (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 1–20, p. 10.

¹⁹ Victor Schoelcher, Colonies étrangères et Haïti, vol. 2 (Paris: Pagnerre, 1843), p. 98. Jonathan Dusenbury notes that free man of colour Cyrille Bissette contested Schoelcher’s view, claiming that ‘history is disfigured beneath his pen’ and protesting that the slaves of Haiti exercised much greater political agency than Schoelcher admits: Cyrille Bissette, Réfutation du livre de M. V. Schoelcher sur Haïti (Paris: Ébrard, 1844), p. 100. Translations from Jonathan Dusenbury, ‘Slavery and the Revolution Histories of 1848’, Age of Revolutions (10 October 2016), https://ageofrevolutions.com/2016/10/10/slavery-and-the-revolutionary-histories-of-1848/.

²⁰ On the Haitian revolution, see David Brion Davis, ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Phenomenology of Mind’, in The Problem of Slavery in an Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 557–64; Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry 26:4 (2000): 821–65; Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). For the effects of Haiti on America, see Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); and Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Susan Buck-Morss suggests that G. W. F. Hegel’s master–slave dialectic depended on Hegel’s reading of accounts of the Haitian uprising. See also Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Universal History Upside Down’, Journal of Contemporary African Art 46 (May 2020): 28–39.

²¹ Miles Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire’, Past and Present 166 (2000): 146–80.

²² See Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions’, p. 150.

²³ See Chapter 10, ‘Revolutions: From Philadelphia via Nanjing to Saint Petersburg’, in Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 514–71.

²⁴ Antônio Borges da Fonseca, ‘Manifesto au Mundo’ (‘Manifesto to the World’) (1 January 1849), trans. Molly Quinn, in James N. Green, Victoria Langland, and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (eds), The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, 2nd edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 197–8.

²⁵ Linda Colley argues for the importance of constitutions in her recent book The Gun, The Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World (London: Profile, 2021).

²⁶ See Lucy Riall, ‘The Politics of Italian Romanticism and the Making of Nationalist Culture’ in Christopher A. Bayly and Eugenio Biagini (eds), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 167–86 and Christopher Duggan, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini in Britain and Italy: Divergent Legacies, 1837–1915’ in the same volume, pp. 187–210.

²⁷ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 10: 1847–1848, ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press), (1973), p. 237. Hereafter abbreviated to RWE JMN 10.

²⁸ The Times (12 April 1848); see also The Times (6 April 1848) and Diary of Lady Charlotte Guest (8 April 1848), in Lord Bessborough, The Diaries of Lady Charlotte Guest (London: John Murray, 1950), p. 209, both cited in Leslie Mitchell, ‘Britain’s Reactions to the Revolutions’, in R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds), The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 83–98, p. 95.

²⁹ See Michael Paul Rogin, ‘Moby-Dick and the American 1848’, in Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983).

³⁰ Serial Revolutions is not attempting an exhaustive history of the 1848 revolutions.

³¹ Lewis Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 3.

³² Eugene Kamenka, ‘Introduction’, in Eugene Kamenka and F. B. Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution: Socialism and the Experience of 1848 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), pp. vii–xiii, p. xii.

³³ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789 to 1848 [1962] (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), p. 112.

³⁴ The phrase ‘hot year’ is James Chandler’s: James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 77. 1848 was one of the years chosen as a significant single year by the ‘Essex Conference’, mentioned by Chandler. See Francis Barker et al. (eds), 1848: The Sociology of Literature: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1977 ([Colchester]: University of Essex, 1978).

³⁵ In 1847, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were asked by the newly formed League of Communists to write a manifesto. The Manifesto of the Communist Party was published in the German language in London in 1848. It would be called The Communist Manifesto only after 1871. Before the Paris Commune of 1871 and the publication of a new German edition, there were only two limited editions available in Swedish and English, and the manifesto was not much read.

³⁶ Marx was in Paris from 4 March to 11 April 1848. See Samuel Bernstein, ‘Marx in Paris, 1848: A Neglected Chapter’, Science and Society 3:3 (Summer 1939): 323–55; and Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Allen Lane, 2016), pp. 249ff.

³⁷ Paul Lafargue, ‘Persönliche Erinnerungen an Friedrich Engels’, Die neue Zeit 23:2 (Stuttgart, 1905), p. 558, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 108.

³⁸ Eugene Kamenka, ‘Europe in Upheaval’, in Kamenka and Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution, pp. 1–13, p. 1.

³⁹ Axel Körner, ‘The European Dimension in the Ideas of 1848 and the Nationalization of its Memories’, in Axel Körner (ed.), 1848—A European Revolution? International Ideas and National Memories of 1848 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), pp. 3–28, p. 9.

⁴⁰ Paul de Man, ‘Wordsworth and Höderlin’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 47–65, pp. 58–9.

⁴¹ The poet-revolutionary is identified as republican Ledru-Rollin in Anthony Wood, Europe 1815–1945 (London: Longman, 1964), p. 133.

⁴² Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions: 1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 2. Sperber goes on to suggest a fourth version of 1848 which emerges particularly after 1989, influenced by social history: ‘The meetings of a political club of a small provincial town can be no less fascinating than the impassioned debates of national parliamentarians; the aspirations and struggles of impoverished and illiterate peasants no less moving than those of romantic poets’, p. 3.

⁴³ A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History Since 1815 [1945] (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 71. Taylor was borrowing from G. M. Trevelyan, ‘From Waterloo to Marne’, Quarterly Review 229 (1918): 73–90, p. 76. Some recent scholarship has taken this on: for example, see Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds), The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

⁴⁴ A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History, p. 71.

⁴⁵ Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 419.

⁴⁶ G. A. Kertesz suggested that ‘in 1848 the radical or socialist left was, even in France, a fairly small minority…it was the liberals who emerged at the head of the revolutionary movement, particularly in Germany’: G. A. Kertesz, ‘The View from the Middle Class: The German Moderate Liberals and Socialism’, in Kamenka and Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution, pp. 61–75, p. 61.

⁴⁷ See Körner, ‘The European Dimension’, p. 7.

⁴⁸ Walt Whitman, ‘Resurgemus’. This poem was first published in the New York Tribune (21 June 1850); revised and published (in this version) in Leaves of Grass in 1855: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1959), p. 134 (ellipses in original). In 1856, Whitman began to date his poems in relation to the formation of the American republic and ‘Resurgemus’ became ‘Poem of the Dead Young Men of Europe, the 72nd and 73rd Years of These States’.

⁴⁹ Christopher Clark, ‘1848: The European Revolution in Government’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series) 22 (2012):171–97, p. 174. Clark also argues that ‘[t]he 1848 revolutions were European revolutions in a sense that does not apply to the great upheavals of 1789–99, 1830–31, 1871 or 1917’, p. 195.

⁵⁰ Clark, ‘1848: The European Revolution’, pp. 187–8. Clark suggests that economic liberalization is presented after 1848 as ‘the remedy for all social ills and thus, ultimately, for all political conflict’, p. 188.

⁵¹ Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘1848–1849: A European Revolution?’, in Evans and von Strandmann, The Revolutions in Europe 1848–1849, pp. 1–8, pp. 7–8.

⁵² Eugene Kamenka says of Marx and Engels, ‘Revolution, not constitution-making, was their concern’. Eugene Kamenka, ‘ “The Party of the Proletariat”: Marx and Engels in the Revolution of 1848’, in Kamenka and Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution, pp. 76–93, p. 79.

⁵³ Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 140.

⁵⁴ Jacques Rancière has pointed to Marx’s separation of the social and political as one of the weaknesses of his philosophy, suggesting that Marx sees ‘emancipation’ as happening in a realm of the social which is never contiguous with the realm of the political. Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), originally published in French, 1995. See particularly pp. 82ff. Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples have suggested that, for our contemporary moment, ‘[c]ertainly, the public sphere evokes echoes of ancient Greece. In so many ways, the small city-state of Athens has stunted the Western imagination, especially with respect to what constitutes political activity and citizenship.’ Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, ‘From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the “Violence” of Seattle’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 19:2 (2002): 125–51, p. 129.

⁵⁵ Most notoriously, Arendt displayed what Charles Mills has called ‘white ignorance’ in her 1959 article ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, in which she defends racial segregation in schools in the American South: Charles Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan (eds), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 13–38. Focusing on ‘political’ rights as opposed to the ‘social’ allows Arendt to dismiss the struggle for racial integration as ‘social climbing’, while focusing her attention on the anti-miscegenation laws. She does not see any connection between the two. See Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, Dissent 6:1 (1959): 45–56. Michael D. Burroughs has called this ‘a pervasive epistemic error in Arendt’s work’: Michael D. Burroughs, ‘Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” and White Ignorance’, Critical Philosophy of Race 3:1 (2015): 52–78, p. 70. See also Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014).

⁵⁶ Ralph Ellison, ‘The World and the Jug’, in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 108.

⁵⁷ See Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the subject of the Rights of Man?’ in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 70–83.

⁵⁸ Matthias Lievens, ‘Contesting Representation: Rancière on Democracy and Representative Government’, Thesis Eleven 122:1 (2014): 3–17.

⁵⁹ ‘Rome, 29th March, 1848’, New-York Daily Tribune (4 May 1848): 1.

⁶⁰ Fanny Lewald, A Year of Revolutions: Fanny Lewald’s Recollections of 1848, trans. Hannah Bailin Lewis (New York: Berghahn Books, 1997), p. 81.

⁶¹ Lynn Hunt has argued that ‘[i]nterethnic competition doomed the 1848 revolutions and with them the link between rights and national self-determination’: Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), p. 184. Hunt overemphasizes the ‘doom’ of the revolutions of 1848, and thereby misses their importance in the history of declarative ‘rights-talk’.

⁶² Terry Eagleton, ‘Foreword’, in Boardman and Kinealy (eds), 1848, pp. xvii–xxi, p. xx. Eagleton adds that ‘[1848] signals…a number of national or nationalist insurgencies; yet, it also indicates in its European sweep that these occurred on an international scale. To this extent, it helps to dismantle any too-easy opposition between the national and the global.’ p. xx.

⁶³ Axel Körner has warned against ‘the reduction of 1848 to the issue of national revolutions’: Axel Körner, ‘National Movements against Nation States: Bohemia and Lombardy between the Habsburg Monarchy, the German Confederation, and Piedmont–Sardinia’, in Moggach and Stedman Jones (eds), The 1848 Revolutions, pp. 345–82, p. 370.

⁶⁴ Christopher Bayly has helpfully reminded us that ‘[b]efore 1850, large parts of the globe were not dominated by nations so much as by empires, city-states, diasporas’: C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review 111:5 (December 2006): 1441–64, p. 1442. He adds, ‘[w]e should not fall back again into a wider world history constituted simply by “nations and nationalism” and the forces that transcended them, though Hobsbawm’s books remain among the few works that students can read and understand’ (p. 1449). See also C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Jürgen Osterhammel claims that ‘[t]he revolutions of 1848 were not a global event’: Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, p. 546. I disagree. Osterhammel (p. 544) quotes Dieter Langewiesche, who says that Europe in 1848 becomes a ‘communications space’. Dieter Langewiesche, ‘Kommunikationsraum Europa: Revolution und Gegenrevolution’, in Dieter Langewiesche (ed.), Demokratiebewegung und Revolution 1847 bis 1849: Internationale Aspecte und Europäische Verbindungen (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1998), pp. 11–35, p. 32.

⁶⁵ Körner, ‘National Movements against Nation States’, p. 348.

⁶⁶ Axel Körner takes the case of Italy, usually cited as a ‘nationalist’ cause in 1848, as an example of the variety of thinking that was available at the time: ‘there was a distinct and widespread feeling in Lombardy, most prominently expressed by the political theorist and protagonist of 1848 Carlo Cattaneo, that the region’s submission under Piedmont would destroy a historically rooted notion of civic identity that had been largely compatible with Habsburg rule, but was doomed to vanish under the autocratic centralism of the Piedmontese monarchy and an emerging Italian nation state’: Körner, ‘National Movements against Nation States’, p. 352.

⁶⁷ As Chris Bayly writes, ‘I have tried to think of these issues in terms of different “drivers” of change (ideologies, economic change, the role of the state) at different periods and in different parts of the world. The interaction of these “drivers” produced “chaotic” changes (such as transnational revolutions) which cannot be traced back to any one of these “drivers” or domains alone.’ Bayly, ‘AHR Conversation’, p. 1450.

⁶⁸ [Anon.],‘State of Europe’, Edinburgh Review 178 (October 1848): 514–58, p. 514.

⁶⁹ The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9 was often cited in the nineteenth century, however, and British nationalism existed well before 1848, of course. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Colley charts the emergence of British identity from the 1707 Act of Union uniting Scotland with England and Wales to Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837. G. K. Chesterton wrote that ‘it is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenth century the most important event in English history happened in France. It would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise, to say that the most important event in English history was the event that never happened at all—the English revolution on the lines of the French Revolution.’ He argued that the English were nevertheless ‘rebels in arts’ while the French were ‘rebels in arms’. G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), pp. 17–18.

⁷⁰ The Times (21 March 1848).

⁷¹ Matthew Arnold to Jane Arnold (10 March 1848), Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848–1888, ed. George W. E. Russell (London: Macmillan and Co., 1895), vol. 1, p. 6.

⁷² F. B. Smith, ‘Great Britain and the Revolutions of 1848’, Labour History 33 (November 1977): 65–85, p. 71.

⁷³ Lord [Henry] Brougham, Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, K.G., Lord President of the Council, on the Late Revolution in France (London: James Ridgway, 1848), p. 22 and p. 31.

⁷⁴ J. S. Mill, Review, Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, K.G., Lord President of the Council, on the Late Revolution in France (London: James Ridgway, 1848), Westminster Review 51 (April 1849): 1–47, p. 47.

⁷⁵ J. S. Mill, Review, Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, p. 6.

⁷⁶ Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 12. For the persistence of such exceptionalist historiography into the twentieth century, see David Edgerton, ‘The Nationalization of British History: Historians, Nationalism, and the Myths of 1940’, English Historical Review, 2021; https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab166.

⁷⁷ Jonathan Sperber points out that peasants stealing wood from the forest and urban revolutionaries organizing protest banquets do not have an immediate cause in common: Sperber, European Revolutions, p. 62. I argue that their sense of shared grievance against aristocratic absolutism was enough to unite them.

⁷⁸ Northern Star (14 September 1839) cited in Josh Gibson, ‘Natural Right and the Intellectual Context of Early Chartist Thought’, History Workshop Journal 84 (2017): 194–213, and requoted in Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Elusive Signifiers: 1848 and the Language of “Class Struggle”’, in Moggach and Stedman Jones (eds), The 1848 Revolutions, pp. 429–51, p. 435.

⁷⁹ Arendt, On Revolution, p. 23.

⁸⁰ Arendt, On Revolution, p. 147.

⁸¹ Thomas Cooper, Speech reported in Northern Star (23 August 1845), p. 8. 1848 was also the year in which Bohn’s Classical Library was established, offering ‘faithful’ translations of the classics: 79 titles, 116 volumes, sold for between 3 and 5 shillings each. See Chapter 13, ‘Seditious Classicists’, in Edith Hall and Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689–1939 (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 271–92.

⁸² [MF], ‘1st January, 1846’, New-York Daily Tribune (1 January 1846): 1.

⁸³ More recently, Étienne Balibar has explored this problem in Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017) (originally published in French in 2011). Emily Apter in her foreword to this volume explains the contradiction as one of ‘the subject as transindividual subjectus at once collective and singular, where the “I” (as Rousseau would have it), has “become a property that belongs to each and everyone, or to whatever citizen-subject…on the condition that he or she is ‘indivisibly’ part of the ‘common’”…[so that] ‘the conflict of conflicts that Balibar deduces from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit: the “conflict of universalities” [is] replicated in the “conflict of communitarian principles”’: Emily Apter, ‘Foreword’, in Balibar, Citizen Subject, p. xiii.

⁸⁴ Arendt, On Revolution, p. 50.

⁸⁵ Arendt, On Revolution, p. 65.

⁸⁶ T. Wemyss Reid, Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Forster, 2 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1888), vol. 1, p. 231. Hereafter all references are to this volume and edition, abbreviated to WEF.

⁸⁷ Robertson, Revolutions of 1848, p. 412.

⁸⁸ Israel, Expanding Blaze, p. 557.

⁸⁹ Christopher Clark, ‘From 1848 to Christian Democracy’, in Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds), Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 90–213, p. 193. Clark points out that far from being defeated in 1848, ‘European political Catholicism had more future locked up inside it’: p. 201.

⁹⁰ Anthony Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet’s Life (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 125.

⁹¹ Eric Hobsbawm agrees, describing this as ‘[t]he great revolution of 1789–1848’: Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, Age of Revolution, p. 1.

⁹² Heinrich Heine, Article for the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung (1 March 1848), republished as ‘Die Februarrevolution’ Werke, VII, pp. 377–85, p. 377.

⁹³ Arendt, On Revolution, p. 44.

⁹⁴ Ibid.

⁹⁵ Ibid.

⁹⁶ J. S. Mill agrees in the case of the French Revolution of 1848, ‘a government [which] found itself, in 1848, so feeble that it fell at the first onset’: J. S. Mill, Vindication, p. 14.

⁹⁷ Körner,‘The European Dimension’, p. 9.

⁹⁸ MF, ‘The Next Revolution’, Florence (6 January 1850), Sad but Glorious, pp. 320–3, p. 321.

⁹⁹ Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 56.

¹⁰⁰ Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons, p. 34. Anderson identifies two styles of serialization: one figured by newspaper readership, unbound and unenumerated, the other, figured by the census, bound and enumerated.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., p. 40.

¹⁰² Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 256. Originally published as Critique de la raison dialectique, précedé de questions de méthode (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

¹⁰³ Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, p. 266.

¹⁰⁴ Fredric Jameson, in his preface to Sartre’s Critique, explains that ‘the group-in-fusion is hardly a social form at all, but rather an emergence and an event, the formation of a guerilla unit, the sudden crystallization of an “in-group” of any kind’: Fredric Jameson, ‘Foreword’, in Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol.1, pp. i–xxxiii, pp. xxvi–xxvii.

¹⁰⁵ Alain Badiou’s theory of ‘the event’ is discussed in Chapter 4 of Serial Forms.

¹⁰⁶ Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, p. 911.

¹⁰⁷ Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals, p. 31.

¹⁰⁸ Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2015), p. 93.

¹⁰⁹ There is a large body of literature on the theme and metaphor of contagion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. See for example, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion and Terror, 1817–2020 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Corinna Wagner, Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013); Kevin Siena, Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); Allan Conrad Christensen, Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: ‘Our Feverish Contact’ (London: Routledge, 2005); Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Annika Mann, Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2018); Andrew Robert Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the ‘Social Question’ in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Chung-jen Chen, Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination (London: Routledge, 2020); and Rico Vitz, ‘Contagion, Community, and Virtue in Hume’s Epistemology’, in Jonathan Matheson and Rico Vitz (eds), The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 198–215.

¹¹⁰ In England, Charles Mackay wrote Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in 1841. But it was not until the late nineteenth century that a full social theory of contagion was developed by Gabriel Tarde in Les lois de l’imitation (The Laws of Imitation) (1890) and L’opinion et la foule (The Opinion of the Crowd) (1901) and by Gustav LeBon in his Psychologie des foules (The Psychology of Crowds) (1895); La psychologie politique et la défense sociale (1910) (Political Psychology and the Defence of the Social); and La Révolution Française et la Psychologie des Révolutions (The French Revolution and the Psychology of Revolutions) (1912). The theory was developed in the twentieth century by Elias Canetti in Masse und Mache (Crowds and Power) (1960). See Rebecca Kingston, ‘Contagion Theory Revisited’ in Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2011), pp. 23–60.

¹¹¹ Jonathan M. House, Controlling Paris: Armed Forces and Counter-Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p. 79.

¹¹² Robert Blackey and Clifford Paynton, Revolution and the Revolutionary Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1976), p. 87; Duncan Kelly, ‘The Goal of that Pure and Noble Yearning: Friedrich Meinecke’s Visions of 1848’, in Moggach and Stedman Jones (eds), The 1848 Revolutions, pp. 293–321, p. 293; Geoffrey Ellis, ‘The Revolution of 1848–1849 in France’, in Evans and von Strandmann (eds), The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849, pp. 27–54, p. 47.

¹¹³ Frank Eyck, The Revolutions of 1848–49 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1972), p. 7.

¹¹⁴ One exception is the Chartist Ernest Jones, who did discuss the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 in terms of revolutionary contagion, but he was deliberately mobilizing racist ideas about the spread of cholera from Asia to turn them back against the British: ‘[d]o you not see that the Asiatic East can send us something better:—yet more terrible than cholera; the glorious contagion of successful revolution?’: Ernest Jones, ‘The Men of New York and the Working Classes’, People’s Paper (10 October 1857), quoted in Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019), p. 66.

¹¹⁵ Work on the impact of ideas of economic circulation on culture and literature includes David Trotter, Circulation: Defoe, Dickens, and the Economies of the Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988); Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (eds), The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (London: Routledge, 1999); Gail Turley Houston, ‘ “The Whole Duty of Man”: Circulating Circulation in Dickens’s Little Dorrit’, in From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Victorian Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

¹¹⁶ Sperber, European Revolutions, p. 166. Sperber also uses ‘circulation’, specifically about newspapers, on p. 66 and pp. 80–1.

¹¹⁷ Finn, After Chartism, p. 28.

¹¹⁸ Clark, ‘1848: The European Revolution in Government’, p. 186.

¹¹⁹ Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’, p. 105.

¹²⁰ AHC to F. T. Palgrave (23 April 1849), The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough: with a selection from his letters and a memoir, edited by his wife [Blanche Clough] (London: Macmillan & Co., 1888), p. 148. Henceforth abbreviated as AHC Remains. Clough met Mazzini several times while he was in Rome, first on 22 April 1849.

¹²¹ Axel Körner, ‘The European Dimension’, p. 10.

¹²² Thomas Carlyle, ‘No. 1: The Present Time’, in Latter-Day Pamphlets [1853], vol. 20 of The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Henry Duff Triall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1898] 2010), pp. 1–47, p. 5; Feargus O’Connor, report of speech, ‘Great Metropolitan Demonstration: The Republic for France and the Charter for England’, Northern Star (11 March 1848): 1.

¹²³ Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), p. 38.

¹²⁴ Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, p. 34. Hunt, however, gives little attention to 1848, dismissing these revolutions as ‘doomed’ by an ‘[i]nterethnic competition’ which broke the ‘link between rights and national self-determination’, p. 184.

¹²⁵ Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830–1870, trans. Renate Baron Franciscono (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 54. A slightly different version of this book was originally published in German as Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Literarische Kultur im Zeitalter des Liberalismus, 1830–1870 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985).

¹²⁶ Paolo Murialdi, Storia del giornalismo italiano: le vie della civiltà [1996] (new edn, Bologna: il Mulino, 2000), p. 41(translation my own).

¹²⁷ Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The revolution had taken many of the functions of government out of the hands of private entrepreneurs and created a class of public officials, which by 1798 had increased from 50,000 to 250,000. Under Napoleon, prestige was associated not with the acquisition of wealth, but either with military glory or with administrative achievement.’ Stedman Jones, ‘Elusive Signifiers’, p. 442.

¹²⁸ Benedict Anderson says ‘it was only in 1853, in the immediate aftermath of the European nationalist upheavals of 1848, that the first International Statistical Congress, held in Brussels, adopted a resolution establishing the basic “scientific” requirements for achieving international comparability of census data and the standardization of census content and techniques’: Benedict Anderson, ‘Nationalism, Identity, and the World-in-Motion: On the Logics of Seriality’, in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 117–33, p. 123.

¹²⁹ Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 42 (italics mine).

¹³⁰ Eagleton, ‘Foreword’, in Boardman and Kinealy (eds), 1848, p. xvii.

¹³¹ Writing about the Arab Spring of 2011, Steven Philip Kramer and Judith S. Yaphe make a similar point: ‘[i]f 1848 proves anything, it is that the significance of great revolutionary upheavals emerges only slowly and long after the barricades have been torn down. It is clear that 1848 was not so much an end as a beginning; it is too early to tell how the Arab Spring will end.’ Steven Philip Kramer and Judith S. Yaphe, ‘The European Spring of 1848 and the Arab Spring of 2011: Lessons to Be Learned?’, Mediterranean Quarterly 25:4 (Fall 2014): 45–63, p. 46.

¹³² Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism 1847–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 99.

¹³³ Paul C. Adams argues that ‘[c]reating racial economic justice may require a more place-based and community-based approach, but it still may find some solutions in non-place realm, for example through the use of music, film and even computer networking’: Paul C. Adams, ‘Protest and the Scale Politics of Communications’, Political Geography 15:5 (1996): 419–41, p. 436.

¹³⁴ Walt Whitman in the Crescent newspaper, New Orleans, quoted in Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 134.

¹³⁵ Alphonse de Lamartine, ‘Toussaint Louverture’, in Œuvres complètes de Lamartine, vol. 32: Toussaint Louverture; Raphaël; Le Tailleur de Pierre de Saint-Pont (Paris: Chez l’auteur, rue de la Ville-l’Evêque, 43, 1853), pp. 3–177, p. 3. The play was staged in 1850 but written in 1840.

¹³⁶ Georges Duval, Frédérick Lemaître et son temps, 1800–1876 (Paris: Tresse, 1876), p. 227. Duval explains the work was first written as a poem in 1840, then lost on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees in 1842. Some years later, Lamartine discovered a copy stuffed around some wine bottles in his cellar, revived it and staged it immediately after the Republic fell. In Spring 1850, Duval judges that ‘Toussaint Louverture n’eut qu’un succès mediocre’ : p. 230.

¹³⁷ Alphonse de Lamartine, ‘Toussaint Louverture’, p. 9. I discuss Frédérick Lemaître’s importance to the revolution of 1848 in Chapter 3.

¹³⁸ Matthew Arnold to AHC (8 March 1848), Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 74, quoted in Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 15.

¹³⁹ Claus Møller Jørgensen says the influence of the universities ‘can hardly be overestimated’: Claus Møller Jørgensen, ‘Transurban Iinterconnectivities: An Essay on the Interpretation of the Revolutions of 1848’, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’histoire, 19:2 (2012): 201–27, p. 205. See also Robert D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 66; Rüdiger vom Bruch, ‘Die Universitäten in der Revolution von 1848/49. Revolution ohn Universität—Universität ohne Revolution?’, in Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Revolution in Deutschland und Europa 1848/49 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), pp. 133–60, pp. 141ff.; Lawrence D. Orton, The Prague Slav Congress of 1848 (New York: Boulder, 1978), pp. 1ff., p. 13.

¹⁴⁰ Peter Uwe Hohendahl also suggests that the ‘prominent role played in the parliaments by the liberal intelligentsia [in Germany] precludes the conclusion that the economic elite was apolitical and unconcerned about the success of its goals. The intelligentsia still largely articulated the demands of the middle class in this epoch, not least in the delicate matter of defining the class’s lower limits.’ Hohendahl, Building a National Literature, p. 57.

¹⁴¹ Mickiewicz’s lecture course was censored by Louis Philippe’s government in 1844, Quinet’s in 1846 and Michelet’s in 1848.

¹⁴² See Whitney Walton, ‘Writing the 1848 Revolution: Politics, Gender, and Feminism in the Works of French Women of Letters’, French Historical Studies 18:4 (Fall 1994): 1001–24 and Jonathan Beecher, Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

¹⁴³ Sarah Josepha Buell Hale discusses Appolonia Jagiello, in Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, Woman’s Record; or Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from ‘The Beginning’ till AD 1850 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), pp. 704ff.

¹⁴⁴ I discuss Frederick Douglass’s role at Seneca Falls briefly in Chapter 7 of this volume.