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Revolutionary Tourists

If it were not for all these blessed revolutions, I should sink into hopeless lethargy.¹

When the British poet Arthur Hugh Clough arrived in Paris in May 1848, he was eager to take in all the revolutionary sights. ‘I have been to the Jardin des Plantes and the column erected in honour of the revolution of July 1830, on the site of the Bastille’, he wrote back to his sister in Liverpool, ‘[i]t was here that the Republic was solemnly inaugurated in February, and here I think it was that they burnt the Throne’.² He was right: on 24 February 1848 the throne of Louis Philippe had been publicly burnt on La Place de la Bastille, and revolution had rapidly spread eastwards through the capital cities of Europe. After 24 to 26 February in Paris, it reached Munich on 4 March, Vienna on 13 March, Budapest on 15 March, Venice and Cracow on 17 March, and Milan and Berlin on 18 March.

Clough was just one of the many English writers who chased the revolution to Paris, hoping to see it actually ‘transacting’, in Byron’s phrase.³ The American journalist Margaret Fuller missed it as she had left Paris for Rome in late 1847, although the rolling international revolution would catch up with her there later in the spring of 1849. American essayist and Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Manchester novelist Geraldine Jewsbury, poet and politician Richard Monckton Milnes, writer Elizabeth Paulet, German novelist Fanny Lewald, Oxford classics dons Benjamin Jowett, Francis Palgrave, and Arthur Stanley, and liberal-minded industrialist William Forster, among many others, all hurried over the Channel in the spring of 1848, eager to witness the founding of the new République with the poet-orator, Alphonse de Lamartine, at its head.⁴ Milnes was determined not to miss this one, as ‘[h]e could not forgive himself for having missed the 1830 Revolution, which Augustus Fitzroy and other Trinity friends had enviably seen’.⁵

Clough was ready for a break: he was in the process of giving up his Oxford Fellowship and unsure of what to do next, and he felt that this might be his last opportunity in a while because ‘[t]he chances of going abroad will be very likely cut off, for we may shortly see Europam flagrare bello’.⁶ Emerson vacillated about the trip, anxiously: ‘I have not even decided to go to Paris, but I probably shall’, and, ‘I much doubt whether I go to France’.⁷ And again, writing to his wife Lidian in February: ‘I am by no means decided to go to France’, and in March, ‘France may presently shut its doors to me, & to all peaceful men, so that I may not go there at all’.⁸ To his friend Margaret Fuller he wrote that he might ‘go to Paris about 1 May’, but only ‘if bullets have ceased to sing on the Boulevards’.⁹ He seems half hopeful of avoiding the trip, and it was true that the political situation in Paris was reported as so volatile that visiting was not a plan devoid of risk. Benjamin Jowett had to work hard to persuade his nervous Oxford friends to accompany him, promising them ‘no danger anywhere except at Paris; railroad almost the whole way; no night journeys’, and reminding them of ‘the effects of the revolution on all the countries and races of Europe; the interest never to be forgotten; a work to be written immediately on return, entitled “The Capitals in Europe in 1848” ’.¹⁰ Emerson said that Tennyson had gloomily predicted ‘that I should never come back alive from France, which he, in common with his all his countrymen, distrusts & defies’.¹¹

The news of the new French Revolution spread out fast. It reached Oxford on 26 February and Arthur Stanley wrote to his mother that he had got up late that morning, ‘so that I did not hear it till just before my lecture at ten. “The Abdication of Louis-Philippe”; “The Palais Royale Stormed”; “The Tuileries Sacked”; “The King on his Way to England”. I could hardly get through my lectures.’¹² Margaret Fuller had moved on from Paris to Rome the previous year, and she wrote back to America that ‘[t]he news of the dethronement of Louis Philippe reached us just after the close of the Carnival’.¹³ When news of the revolution reached New York a few weeks later the American editor Evert Ducykinck reported to his brother that it ‘imparted to everyone [in New York City] that vivacity of eye, quickness of intelligence and general exhilaration which great public events impart to private ones’, and he added that walking down Broadway ‘I have heard one rather quiet man say he would have given a thousand dollars to have been there’.¹⁴ A week or so later in the French colony of Martinique the owner of a sugar plantation was sitting under his neighbour’s tamarisk trees on the evening of 27 March 1848 quietly reading a novel by Victor Hugo, ‘when two riders arrived’.¹⁵ They brought a letter telling the news that Louis Philippe had fled to England. ‘We were astounded, stunned!’¹⁶ And such was the potency of the news that by May, he was confronted with a slave revolution in Martinique.¹⁷

All over the world, people were following French events at a distance: ‘[t]omorrow through all these wondrous French news which all tongues & telegraphs discuss, I go to London’, wrote Emerson to Margaret Fuller from Manchester at the beginning of March.¹⁸ In London he did the usual tourist sights, the British Museum, the House of Lords and the Commons, “[b]ut every one now is full of this astounding French revolution, and I read the Times newspaper through day by day’.¹⁹ The French king arriving in exile in London added to the drama: ‘The personnel too of Louis Philippe, & Guizot, & the rest, daily arriving here, a week ago, added wonderful interest.’²⁰ American publisher, Evert Duyckinck’s brother George was in Paris in February 1848 and followed the mob into the Tuileries as they stormed the throne room, with muskets firing so that the glass droplets of the chandeliers shook and tinkled.²¹ Evert was very jealous: ‘[w]hat a happy man then must you have been on the spot tingling all over with revolutionary imaginations, roused by the authentic cannon which echo those of ’89…You have fairly shaken hands with History’.²² Then, as Evert is writing, George’s latest letter is delivered and Evert exclaims: ‘the letter has arrived. Bravo! You are an able hand at a reconnoiter, here and there and everywhere over the map of Paris with just that best information which puts me alongside of you throughout. I am fairly en rapport with the Revolution.’²³ Across the Atlantic ocean people were reading the newspapers avidly and tracing out the spread of the revolutionary engagements on maps.

The European revolutions inevitably prompted national comparisons for British and American observers. In 1846, when Margaret Fuller was about to set off for Europe from America, she was already aware of the social unrest across the Atlantic: ‘[t]he caldron simmers, and so great is the fire that we expect it soon to boil over.’²⁴ She pondered the role of America in Europe’s ongoing struggle for democracy: ‘[America’s] eagle will lead the van; but whether to soar toward the sun or to stoop for helpless prey, who now dares promise? At present she has scarce achieved a Roman nobleness, a Roman liberty.’²⁵ After what she considered the shameful annexation by the United States of slave-holding Texas in 1845, Fuller clearly felt that the idea of a Roman ‘America’ was uncomfortably spread-eagled between the virtuous Republic and the corrupt Empire. ‘Texas annexed…Slavery perpetuated, as the most striking new feature of these movements. Such are the fruits of American love of liberty!’²⁶ Across the Atlantic, in the early months of 1848 it was felt as a real possibility that this serial, international revolutionary movement could reach Britain too. Emerson reported Chartist agitations in England and Scotland through February and March 1848: ‘there are dangerous mobs in Glasgow & in Lancashire’.²⁷ The tension was building up for the Chartist demonstration on 10 April: ‘the revolution, fixed for the tenth instant, occupied all men’s thought until the Chartist petition was actually carried to the commons’.²⁸ The miseries of the famine in Ireland added to the political instability, and the Chartist movement in the industrial North and in London drew new energy from the news of revolution in Paris.

The radical G. W. M. Reynolds gave a speech at Trafalgar Square on 6 March which incited a two-day riot.²⁹ In March, Salford Chartists demonstrated in support of the February Revolution in France and Chartist congratulations were carried to the Provisional Government in Paris. On 1 April, the Chartist newspaper the Northern Star gave away free portraits of the new Pope, Pius IX, who was believed to be a reformer, along with images of Chartist leaders Feargus O’Connor and Ernest Jones. At Chartist meetings the French revolutionary symbols were rapidly adopted: women draped themselves with the tricolour, ‘speakers often invoked the tree of liberty, the cap of liberty was hoisted as an emblem and proceedings usually ended with the Marseillaise, sung in a newly prepared “Chartist” translation’.³⁰ When Emerson, at Carlyle’s urging, attended a Chartist meeting on 7 March at National Hall, Holborn, ‘[i]t was crowded and the people very much in earnest’ and ‘the Marseillaise was sung as songs are in our [American] abolition meetings’.³¹ As we shall see in Chapter 7, he would later bring the American anti-slavery campaign, the British Chartist protests, and the European revolutions of 1848 together in the series of lectures that he gave on his return from Paris. In England and Scotland, there were even attempts to form corps of ‘National Guards’. When William Forster finally managed to get inside the Hôtel de Ville in Paris on 3 May he saw material evidence of this international solidarity: ‘[i]n one room there was a congregation of flags—presents to the republic—among others, the green flag of Erin, from Smith O’Brien and Co. In a corner of the room was the address of the English Chartists; framed.’³²

Richard Monckton Milnes was ‘all for the Charter’, and most of the writers he knew were in sympathy with the revolutions, even the recalcitrant Carlyle, ‘in his way’.³³ Emerson reported that ‘for the first time in his life [Carlyle] takes in the Times newspaper daily’ so that he could follow events across the Channel closely.³⁴ But how close these British and American bystanders felt to the événements in France is a vexed question. In the spring of 1848 this group of liberal-minded friends gathered into travelling groups to cross the Channel and see revolutionary Paris for themselves. They all seem to have known the Carlyles, although the Carlyles did not go to France that spring. Emerson had met the Paulets (he a Swiss merchant, she a well-read English lady) in November 1847 when they had entertained him in Liverpool, where he had also met Clough’s sister Annie, who had attended all his Liverpool lectures.³⁵ In Liverpool he had heard extracts read out from a paper written by Arthur Clough, on retrenchment and the Irish famine, although he had not yet met Arthur himself.³⁶ The Manchester novelist Geraldine Jewsbury, another friend of the Caryles, attended all Emerson’s lectures in Manchester and hosted him at her house on 9 November. Clough wrote to Emerson inviting him to visit Oxford and Emerson finally made the visit on 31 March 1848 and was introduced to Stanley and others. On 1 April Clough took Emerson to London and introduced him to Matthew Arnold. Emerson had got to know Milnes in London before leaving for Paris, and had been elected into the Athenaeum Club where he found that ‘Milnes is always there…made of sugar; he is everywhere, & knows everything’.³⁷ Milnes was famous for his sociable ubiquity. He had dined with the Carlyles when they were visiting William Forster in Yorkshire in the summer of 1847. On 7 April 1848, Benjamin Jowett, Francis Palgrave, Arthur Stanley, and Robert Morier all left together for Paris, and on 18 April Milnes followed them to the French capital.³⁸

At the end of April, William Forster travelled down from Bradford to stay with the Carlyles in London. The year before, he had accompanied his father to Ireland as distributor of the Quaker Friends’ Relief Fund for the famine in Connemara, staying with Daniel O’Connell, and the trip had made a deep impression on him.³⁹ On Sunday 30 April he joined Mr and Mrs Paulet and Geraldine Jewsbury to travel to Folkestone and on to Paris. On 1 May Clough managed to bring Emerson and Carlyle together in London and he also introduced Emerson to Francis Palgrave, who by then had returned from his trip to Paris and was eager to discuss his experiences there. On 2 May Clough himself left for Paris for what would turn out to be a five-week stay.⁴⁰ A few days later, on 6 May, Emerson also left London for Paris, regretting that this meant he missed hearing Jenny Lind sing in La Sonnambula that evening.⁴¹ Emerson and Clough spent much of their time together in Paris: Emerson wrote of Clough as his ‘chief dependence at the dining hour & afterwards’.⁴² On a day trip to Versailles on 7 May, William Forster ‘picked up’ Ward the journalist, ‘an informing acquaintance…an ally of Milnes’.⁴³ Frederic Oldfield Ward was ‘a correspondent of the Weekly Chronicle, and especially up in the Communists’: the two became friends and rattled around Paris in each other’s company.⁴⁴

What did these people think they were going to Paris to do? Did they see themselves as tourists? Were they spectators hoping to catch the revolutionary show? Or were they going to show solidarity with the French? Perhaps all three of these reasons motivated them. If they were going to show solidarity with the French, with which of the French exactly? The ‘blouses’ and ouvriers, or the poets and lawyers in the National Assembly? Were they perhaps deliberately staking a claim to their own cosmopolitanism in the face of the narrow nationalism of many of their countrymen and women? Or were they going further than that, and attempting to establish a new form of transnational citizenship, recognizing their own connectedness to the French political situation? None of them makes a clear statement about motives for the trip, although an ‘enthusiasm’ for France and the revolution is repeatedly evinced. Emerson declared himself against tourism: ‘if you ask me what I think of travelling, I am only confirmed in my old cynicism. Few men are fit for it, and one ought to be supported by a commanding motive to save it from being a long impertinence. Yet for my own ends, I think I shall go to France.’⁴⁵ His sense is unclear: is his commanding motive a political one, and what exactly are his own ends? Emerson wrote lectures while he was in Paris, and the influence of the political events around him is certainly discernible in his writing in 1848, but it is not certain that he went to France in order to write lectures. Maureen Moynagh has suggested that ‘[p]olitical tourism as a cultural practice offers a peculiar mix of engagement and detachment’.⁴⁶ The dance between engagement and detachment comes through strongly in these encounters with French republicanism in 1848 and it goes on to inform the literary work produced by Clough and Emerson upon their return. Even more significantly, the negotiation between national traditions and international innovations created by the events of 1848 would profoundly affect the development of literary form in the 1850s and 1860s.

Sightseeing in Paris in 1848

Whatever were the multiple and complicated motives for the trip, a recognizable revolutionary tourist itinerary emerged and much of it was straightforward Parisian sightseeing. The hotels, restaurants, and bars were all open for business, and the streets were mostly passable. The German Jewish novelist and travel writer Fanny Lewald, visiting Paris in March 1848, conducted a busy social life in the city: ‘[w]e have crossed Paris by day and night, on foot and by coach, almost always without a male companion, and often in full formal dress, and have never encountered the slightest problem.’⁴⁷ Arthur Stanley was surprised to see so little evidence of the Revolution, noting that

The placards on the walls containing the decree of the Provisional Government, the notices of clubs, the tricolours flying over every public building, the caricatures ‘in numbers numberless’, the three words ‘Liberté,’ ‘Egalité,’ ‘Fraternité,’ painted over the walls, the white shot-marks on the Château d’Eau, were almost the only outward signs of the political earthquake.⁴⁸

Fanny Lewald had seen more of the aftermath of the February Revolution when she had arrived in Paris a month before Stanley in early March, only three weeks after the event, and she had written that ‘[t]he damages caused by the late revolution are evident everywhere. The paving stones are laid loosely at the street corner and not pounded down. Wrecked breadwagons and overturned buses show where the most important barricades were.’⁴⁹ By April, a lot of the immediate damage and rubble had already been mended and cleared away. Stanley and his friends went to services at Notre Dame and walked in the Jardin des Plantes and the Luxembourg Gardens just as they would have done at any other time. Geraldine Jewsbury and Mrs Paulet shopped for hats.⁵⁰ Forster visited the Luxembourg and enjoyed ‘wander[ing] through those grand galleries and magnificent gardens’.⁵¹ The Revolution had added a welcome frisson to these walks: Clough delighted in ‘the purified state of the Tuileries’ now that the King had been turned out, but Stanley found it ‘truly awful to see the vast grey mass standing as before, with the consciousness of all within gone, or dead forever’.⁵² The British and American visitors formed into small groups and went on day trips to Saint-Denis, to see the tombs of the Kings, and to the Palace and gardens of Versailles. William Forster recorded in his diary that ‘Mob having pulled the railway bridge down, had to cross the Seine by a raft bridge—a most inconvenient practical result of the revolution. Too late to go into the palace, but saw the fountains play.’⁵³ Here, the detachment seems fairly complete. The revolution has become ‘inconvenient’ and obstructive of their touristic enjoyment of the aristocratic Parisian sights.

Sightseeing was combined with literary and political tourism. Intent on immersing themselves in the Parisian experience, they hunted down the ‘lions’ of French literature and letters. Matthew Arnold had given Stanley a letter of introduction to the veteran Hegelian historian Michelet, and the Balliol party duly visited him on 10 April. Francis Palgrave reported that Michelet ‘seemed to anticipate much from the Chartist demonstration to-day’. Jowett told him that ‘[i]t will be of little consequence’ and Stanley said that ‘Ireland will be our revolution’.⁵⁴ Michelet told them that they had come to Paris either too late or too soon: ‘C’est l’entr’act’, he said, between revolution and counter-revolution, introducing a theatrical metaphor which was to become pervasive in accounts of 1848. Clough was much less energetic in his pursuit of the famous. ‘You know I am a bad hand at lionizing’, he wrote to Stanley: ‘I do little else than potter about under the Tuileries Chestnuts and here and there about bridges and streets, pour savourer la république.’⁵⁵ But he is sharp in observing the details of Paris’s sudden reconversion to a republic, confiding that ‘one finds it rather pointed to be seen in the streets with gloves on’, as gloves appeared suspiciously aristocratic, and he asks Stanley, ‘[d]id you observe a fur shop in the Rue St. Honoré Au Tigre Royal, with Royal carefully obliterated?! In two places too!’⁵⁶ The tiger was clearly now a thoroughly republican beast.

They all had to adjust to the French language, of course. Clough’s French was good. Emerson had taken French conversation lessons before leaving New England.⁵⁷ Forster’s was less good, and he struggled when he arrived in Paris to speak the language, ‘[n]evertheless, I did get on beyond my expectation—more, however, by dint of roar and gesture than words, as Miss Jewsbury said, “as if I talked with my fists”’.⁵⁸ The French language frequently tripped them up. In Boulogne, Stanley and his friends had tried to visit Louis Napoleon’s pet eagle in the ‘abattoir’ mistaking the word to mean a zoological garden or a menagerie.⁵⁹ In fact the eagle had been killed in the Boulogne slaughterhouse. One member of Stanley’s party was fluent, though: Robert Morier, who had grown up in various European countries, ‘speaks French better than English, and is to wear a blouse, and go about disguised to the [revolutionary] clubs’.⁶⁰ All of them resorted to reading the English-language press while in Paris to work out what was going on around them. Stanley heard Lamartine give a speech and then subsequently read a transcript in Galignani’s English-language paper: ‘How curious it is to read the report of a half-understood speech! On the whole, I had followed it tolerably well, but with some ridiculous mistakes.’⁶¹ Forster’s delight at meeting the journalist Ward was partly because Ward spoke fluent French and could therefore take him closer to the centre of the action.

It was, though, hard to know exactly where the centre of the action was, as sudden events and demonstrations would spring up unannounced all over the city. Often the travellers would only hear about them after they were over and everyone had packed up and gone home. Maybe the experience of these British and American visitors was simply the authentic experience of a revolution: an ongoing large-scale event that is always fragmented, always difficult to follow, and always happening somewhere else. Difficulty of admittance to meetings and assemblies was a perennial Parisian problem. When Margaret Fuller had been in Paris in 1847, she had been ‘very desirous’ of seeing Dumas speaking in court:

I…went there in what I was assured would be very good season, but a French audience, who knew the ground better, had slipped in before me, and I returned, as has been too often the case with me in Paris, having seen nothing but endless staircases, dreary vestibules, and gens d’armes…treasures of the past are at [the tourist’s] service; but when anything is happening in the present, the French run quicker, glide in more adroitly, and get possession of the ground.⁶²

Even the fixed points of revolutionary activity were hard to penetrate. It proved extremely difficult, for example, to gain admittance to the Assemblée Nationale in order to view the Provisional Government, an attraction which was high on everyone’s ‘to do’ list. Everybody wanted to get a closer look inside, but Clough soon discovered it was ‘impossible, meantime, to gain admittance’ into the Chamber. ‘The Assembly is said to be crowded more and more every day’, he reported.⁶³ Nearly two weeks after he arrived in Paris, Clough was lamenting that ‘I am still a stranger to the Assembly. The difficulty is extreme. Miss Jewsbury got, through Milnes, a diplomatic ticket for 2 or 3 hours. She describes them as very good, sensible-looking men. She has never been in the H. of Commons.’⁶⁴ On 12 May Forster tried to gain admittance: ‘this morning made a desperate attempt to get into the national assembly, which is almost as difficult as to get elected, as no influentiality likes to give tickets over the mob, and the mob stands guard all night’.⁶⁵ In a crowd on 21 May, Clough’s ‘modesty’ prevented him from pushing through the National Guards, ‘so that I did not come into the presence of the Government and Assembly, which I believe I might have done’. In the end he was defeated: ‘the perpetual gunfiring gave me a headache and I retired early’.⁶⁶ The most business-like of the party, Forster, resorted to brokering a deal with a man who worked at his hotel, agreeing to pay a ‘blouse’, or workman, to keep a place for him in the Assembly, but the scheme blew up and he had to abandon it ‘after some struggling, much scolding, and fraternizing in wine shops with riff-raff over cognac and sour wine’.⁶⁷ Access continued difficult and obstructed, although Clough eventually got hold of a ticket. Milnes, on the contrary, had known Lamartine (whom he thought vain) for eight or more years, and he ‘trotted backwards and forwards from the Hôtel de Ville to the Assemblée, for which he was given a ticket of admission marked Citoyen Milnis rentier’.⁶⁸ Emerson eventually managed to get hold of a ticket for a Wednesday visit, and wrote home that ‘I heard Lamartine speak yesterday in the Chamber, his great speech, the papers say, on Poland’. With characteristic attention to rhetorical style, Emerson added that ‘he did not speak however with much energy, but is a manly handsome greyhaired gentleman with nothing of the rust of the man of letters, and delivers himself with great ease & superiority’.⁶⁹

The Political Clubs

It was easier to attempt the clubs. These were the revolutionary debating clubs which had sprung up all over Paris. ‘Now for the Clubs,’ wrote Stanley, ‘[t]hey sit, you know, in every part of Paris, and at night, that the lower classes may attend.’⁷⁰ The most politically extreme were Blanqui’s and the ‘Club de la Révolution’, otherwise known as Barbès. But even these places could be difficult for the visitors to get into. Forster, Emerson, and Mrs Paulet went in search of Barbès’ Club but found that it did not meet on Mondays. The next night they tried again, but found it put off till the next day. When Forster and Mrs Paulet ventured out to buy tickets for Blanqui’s Club in a grimy working-class district, they felt conspicuous and uncomfortable, ‘at the office, near the Faubourg St. Antoine, up three pairs of stairs; a pair of dark gloomy rooms, filled with most suspicious-looking blouses, more like animals than men, with their fierce eyes’.⁷¹ Blanqui’s and Barbès clubs managed to shock even the radical-sympathizers Clough and Emerson, with their fierce and bitter brand of socialism. Clough felt that ‘Citizen Blanqui had, I confess, a certain hang-dog conspirator aspect which did him no credit. I have not been again.’⁷² Forster agreed that Blanqui was a bad-looking man and probably armed, and ‘[t]he club was known to have depôts’ of weapons.⁷³ Forster wrote that ‘we at last accomplished the Barbès’ Club, and a most stormy affair it was, even disturbing Emerson’s equanimity. A large, low concert room, bad to hear in from its lowness and number of pillars.’⁷⁴ The club was held in a theatre: ‘[w]e were in a side box, but the pit was crammed full, and in fact all the room. They were a fierce, wild-looking set, but mostly well-dressed.’⁷⁵ Fanny Lewald also saw Blanqui at a meeting of the Central Club of the Republicans at the Conservatoire de Musique, ‘a small man with a sharp look and greying smooth black hair cut “à la mécontent”’.⁷⁶ Lewald was allowed to sit in the central box that had previously been reserved for Louis Philippe ‘in the first row’ where she had an excellent view, and could watch the crowd as ‘they hissed, screamed, pounded the floor with their canes; [and] a shrill whistle sounded’.⁷⁷

Then there was the Club des Femmes, which Clough visited on Wednesday 31 May.⁷⁸ It was presided over by Mme. Niboyer:

Alas, poor woman! she has a terrific task—not to speak of having to keep women silent, she has to keep men or say, beasts, in order—the place is filled with them, and a more grievous spectacle of the un-politesse of Frenchmen I never saw, but I believe it has been a good deal worse. Occupying the seats reserved for women—laughing and shouting—greedily seizing and creating double-entendres etc., etc. However Mad. Niboyer is a woman of considerable power and patience, and she works through it: though to what effect I don’t know. Perhaps it may be useful for Frenchmen to see a woman face them and present herself before them not for purposes of flirtation. I got disgusted with my male neighbours and came away before it ended. The subject was divorce. The feeling, I think, was against the present projet—the cries, certainly so…⁷⁹

Forster was equally troubled by the shocking behaviour of men in the club and their lack of respect for the women: ‘[i]n the evening to the Club des Femmes, the first, and I should think, the last séance. A most desperate crushing crowd. Barbès’ club room. Two guardsmen with bayonets fixed at the door.’⁸⁰ The women were constantly interrupted and the men jeered and ruined the evening until ‘the séance broke up’.⁸¹ There is no record of what Geraldine Jewsbury or Mrs Paulet thought of the Club des Femmes, alas.⁸² Eugénie Niboyet sent Fanny Lewald a copy of her periodical La Voix des Femmes and invited Lewald to get involved, writing that ‘[w]e must all participate in its publication without regard to our own national origins. We are sisters in the name of humanity.’⁸³ Milnes was reportedly impressed by how politically engaged Parisian women were: one of Lamartine’s female supporters had ticked him off, calling him ‘paresseux’ (lazy), for dozing off during a long political debate, while she had remained attentive to the discussion.⁸⁴

There were more moderate clubs, too. The Free Trade Club was set up to oppose the Communists. Forster, who enjoyed the rougher clubs, was bored and found it ‘[v]ery respectable, but scanty and tame, altogether a flat affair’.⁸⁵ Stanley visited first the Club de la Sorbonne, ‘an assembly of 1,500 people, promiscuous, but chiefly of the common people, in blouses, beards, long flowing hair, women, &c.’ He was impressed that, ‘though there were vehement applaudissements, the most perfect order was preserved’, and ‘[t]he speeches, so far as I could follow them, seemed extremely fluent and clear—nothing of revolutionary character’. But the next night he went to the Club des Interêts des Peuple held in a ‘hall, dimly lighted with tallow candles’ and for two hours it was ‘one continued uproar…a French mob of 1,000 persons, shouting and yelling at the tops of their voices’. He found himself squashed and pummelled in the crowd with his ‘head enclosed within the embrace of two huge arms of a rough-bearded and bloused man, who was leaning over me, and every now and then pouring his complaints into my fraternizing ears[.] Yet with all this, the most perfect good-humour prevailed.’⁸⁶

The motives for these repeated visits to the clubs are never made entirely explicit but perhaps they seemed to offer an unmediated experience of ‘revolution’. Obviously, there was a seductive sense of getting close to the action and being part of things, even if this meant having your head in an ouvrier’s [workman’s] armlock. The American Emerson found the clubs politically inspiring: ‘[t]he fire & fury of the people, when they are interrupted or thwarted, are inconceivable to New England…the deep sincerity of the speakers who are agitating social not political questions, and who are studying how to secure a fair share of bread to every man…is very good to hear.’⁸⁷ Forster was particularly fascinated by the more extreme and dangerous clubs and went often with anyone he could persuade to come with him: ‘[i]n the evening, went with Milnes to the Club des Ateliers (workmen opposed to Louis Blanc), held at L’Ecole de Médecin.’⁸⁸ He remembers that he and Milnes left the club that night, ‘much struck by the picturesque beauty of the old narrow streets, with their tall gable roofs, in the bright moonlight’.⁸⁹ Picturesque old Paris and political intrigue seem to combine into a spectacle for the travellers’ consumption. And indeed, many of the clubs were held in theatres, and the travellers seemed to experience them as theatrical, often remarking on the quality of the performances and the behaviour of members of the ‘audience’. Blanqui’s, for example, ‘was held in a small handsome theatre, the members in the pit, and the audience, many of them well-dressed ladies, in the galleries’.⁹⁰ The theatrical settings added to the sense of a revolution that was being acted out and was not quite real. Emerson may have been serious in his political appreciation, but he was also delighted by the costumes and props: ‘[t]he costume is formidable. All France is bearded like goats & lions, then most of Paris is in some kind of uniform red sash, red cap, blouse perhaps bound by red sash. Brass helmet & sword, and every body supposed to have a pistol in his pocket.’⁹¹ It was all very exciting, and all at some remove from their own lives. Ward and Forster were the most adventurous and they pushed their way into political debates on the streets, to find that their interference was not always welcome: on one occasion at least they were chased away with cries of ‘A Bas les Anglais!’⁹²

Forster also went with Geraldine Jewsbury and her friend and admirer, known as ‘The Bey’, Charles Lambert, ‘to a club of the National Guard, or the Moderates—I suppose all guard men and so bourgeois—held in a large riding-school.…Many ladies. We thought it would be a tame affair, but it turned out violent enough. The main subject was a denunciation of Blanqui, Barbès, and the Exaltés, who had put out a violent proclamation that day, and were thought to be projecting an émeute’ [an insurrection or coup].⁹³ Forster took Emerson back to Blanqui’s club on 14 May and, unbeknownst to them both, on this occasion an émeute was really being projected at the club. A conspiracy was under way and the next day, under cover of a demonstration in support of Polish nationalists, a coup d’état was to be staged by the socialists against the Provisional Government. Forster, Jewsbury, Clough, and Emerson and the Paulets were all in Paris for the 15 May émeute but none of them understood what was happening until after it was all over.

What they recorded instead are a series of partial and blocked views and puzzling street scenes, sounds of distant gunshots, crowds that bear them along, and incomprehensible shouting. They are all taken by surprise when they realize the importance of what has taken place that day. Emerson missed it altogether because he was listening to Michelet lecture on Indian Philosophy, and only heard about it at dinner that night: ‘Emerson joined us from a lecture of Michelet’s quite innocent of the émeute.’⁹⁴ Emerson was to write home to America that ‘[o]n Monday, (day before yesterday) as you will read in the papers, there was a revolution defeated, which came within an ace of succeeding’.⁹⁵ In fact, even though they were on the spot in Paris, the visitors had also had to read about it in the papers before they fully understood what had happened. The scale of the revolution and its dispersal across the city made it impossible to assess or understand at a local or street level, and this was probably as true for the French as for the English spectators and participants. Its mediation by the press was vital in mapping the revolution’s progress and fuelling its onward movement.

A month before, Stanley had been in Paris during the first attempt to overthrow the Provisional Government by the Communist faction led by Louis Blanc and Albert, the workman-member of the Government.⁹⁶ An army of 30,000 workmen delegates had met at the Luxembourg Gardens on Sunday 16 April. Stanley and his group had gone to Notre Dame early to get places for the Palm Sunday service but ‘[w]e were severed from each other in the crowd’.⁹⁷ After the service, having lost Jowett, he was heading back to the hotel when he saw ‘an immense procession, extending the whole way from the Tuileries to the Hôtel de Ville, along the quay’.⁹⁸ He thought it was a parade of guards, ‘or something of the kind’:⁹⁹

There were no cries not any appearance of disorder, except that at one moment, just as I was escaping from the crowd, someone appeared at the windows of the Hotel de Ville, and there were cheers, and hats and caps waved on the ends of bayonets. I thought it was merely fraternisation of some kind between the Gardes Mobiles and the Nationaux, and ran back as fast as I could to the English Church at 4, meeting on the way some troops of the line. Jowett and I had to dine with Lord Russell at 6.30. I had only just time to dress and go there, and then, for the first time…we heard a formidable movement had taken place, but that the provisional government had triumphed.¹⁰⁰

He had to untangle what had happened afterwards, running back over the day and seeing its events in a new light: ‘the drums I heard in Notre Dame were the celebrated rappel of the national Guard; that the loud cry was a man rushing in and calling out On se bat, believing that the collision was about to take place instantly; and that the procession which I saw was the great demonstration of the workmen’.¹⁰¹ But at the time, he did not know what he was looking at: ‘[i]f one had happened to be there at the exact moment of the appearance of Lamartine at the window (which I cannot be sure that I was not), one would have seen more. Otherwise…there was so little to see that, had one not been told, I should have thought it was only a fete or parade.’ Nevertheless, ‘[o]ur friends congratulate us on having seen an emeute.’¹⁰² But he admits to his correspondent that ‘I am afraid you will be sadly disappointed by my account of it’.¹⁰³ Eyewitness accounts were not necessarily informed accounts, and the most authentic experience of the revolution in Paris seemed to be one of confusion. But the visitors were nothing if not tenacious in their determination to chase every revolutionary event, even if they ended up unsure of what they had just seen. Not all of these events were émeutes or involved street-fighting; there were also the more picturesque revolutionary festivals sponsored by the Provisional Government and designed to inaugurate, legitimize, and celebrate the new republic.

La Fête de la Fraternité and an émeute (15 May 1848)

A few days later, on 20 April, Stanley and his party got up at the crack of dawn on a rainy morning for the Fête de la Fraternité.¹⁰⁴ They managed to get good seats on ‘the platform immediately under the Arch’ [Arc de Triomphe] and they had had the foresight to bring ‘cotton-wool to stuff our ears’ against the ceremonial gunfire. The occasion was the distribution of colours to the troops of the Republic who filed past in ‘one continuous stream of bayonets, first grey in the dull morning, then, as the sun came out, glittering like silver waves’, for thirteen hours.¹⁰⁵ They waited for hours in the rain and Stanley became restless and started wandering around: ‘[b]ut how provoking! Lamartine only came out once, when I was not by. I flew to the spot on hearing the cry “Vive Lamartine!” but he was gone.’ To add insult to injury, ‘Palgrave saw him well’.¹⁰⁶ Stanley carried on waiting in the hope of another sighting. He managed a glimpse by ‘climbing up on Morier’s back, by which means I was enabled to look down into the tribune, the two others giving me an opera-glass—the celebrated opera-glass—the moment I was fairly on the shoulders of the good-natured giant, and telling me where and what to look for’. Milnes meanwhile was ‘scampering from one point of vantage to the next’.¹⁰⁷ The rain gave way to ‘gleams of sunshine’ and Jowett recorded ‘the long stream of bayonets that poured for twelve hours incessantly from the distant Tuileries or Place de la Concorde, [which] lighted up the waving lines like a silver cornfield. There was every variety of colour in the advancing thousands.’¹⁰⁸ Later in the morning, increasingly desperate to see something, Stanley ‘attach[ed] myself, in company with Jowett and Palgrave, to one of the advancing legions, and actually walking bareheaded, amidst the shouts of the people, as one of the troops underneath the platform, and so looking up to the great eleven as they sat on their thrones’.¹⁰⁹ Jowett remembered that ‘[t]he members of the Government frequently passed between the platform and the stairs which led downwards in front of the gallery under the arch;…when Lamartine, tall and noble, with thoughtful and care-worn looks, passed among us, with loud shouts of “Vive Lamartine!” There was one rough fellow in a blouse who offered him a rose-bud, an “offrande pour la patrie,” to cheer him through the long, weary day.’¹¹⁰

On 15 May, Forster, Jewsbury and the Paulets were due to leave Paris on the evening boat train.¹¹¹ Aware that something strange was happening outside, but not sure what, that morning Forster and Mrs Paulet ‘took a cab in search of news’.¹¹² Clough told his sister that from eleven that morning to nine o’clock in the evening, or even later, there was nothing to be seen but crowds and excitement.¹¹³ Forster was out chasing events all day and he and Mrs Paulet were confused as to exactly what was happening. They found Ward who explained that the mob had pushed their way over the bridge and invaded the National Assembly. In the crowd, the demonstrators were handing down twigs of trees, ‘as trophies, I suppose, and we asked for some which they willingly pitched us, especially “pour une dame.” Mrs. P. hoisted one on the top of her parasol, and I flourished it in my hand, and so with the watchword of “Vive la Pologne!” the English passed through with a clap of hands. The mob seemed on the whole good humoured enough.’¹¹⁴ Later on that confused afternoon, Forster remembered that he met Lamartine on horseback, at the head of a troop of horses, returning from the arrest of Barbès.¹¹⁵ Forster did not know the nature of Lamartine’s mission at the time, though, he tells his story here with the knowledge of hindsight. ‘I got close to his horse, and walked or rather trotted with him, amid a tremendous crowd of soldiers and bystanders roaring “Vive Lamartine!” ’¹¹⁶ Clough also reported running alongside Lamartine’s horse: ‘I was at his side for a quarter of a mile, and saw him, of course, distinctly. There was no firing, and scarce any fighting.’¹¹⁷ Forster managed to tailgate Lamartine into the Assembly but found that he could hear little and understand less, so he went to a café to try and pick up some information, and then made his way back to the hotel to find that none of his friends had left Paris as it was unclear if the trains would be running. They discussed which restaurant to go to instead. ‘Thinking that the Exaltés had been contented with showing their power, and with this manifestation for Poland, and not knowing they were then dissolving the Assembly and proclaiming a new government of Barbès, Blanqui, and Co., we went out to the Palais Royal to dinner.’¹¹⁸ But during dinner, they heard the rappel. The rappel was the signal for the National Guard to assemble because violence had broken out on the streets. Forster remembers the party heard the rappel, ‘and out we rushed. Ward ran into a communist café, and directly after we saw his head out of the upstairs window, proclaiming a new Provisional Government, of which he began the list, but was stopped, for fear of the house being burnt.’¹¹⁹ The Paulets went back to their hotel, but Forster was too excited to sit still and had already given up on any idea of leaving Paris that night and went off with Ward to the Hôtel de Ville, and then they both went back to the Meurice hotel where they met Milnes, who had been in the Assembly all day and was full of news and gossip. He had watched the invasion of the Chamber by the Paris mob, and ‘likened it to the bursting over of a sea’.¹²⁰ The National Guard had repelled the coup and the Provisional Government remained in power. The next day Forster, the Paulets, and Jewsbury had to set off home from Paris, ‘sorry enough to leave’.¹²¹ Clough afterwards reflected that it was probably Blanqui, and not Barbès, who had been responsible for plotting the émeute. ‘I incline to think that the conspiracy was confined to Blanqui, Sobrier and their immediate friends…But I don’t deny that there was a good deal of danger, in the actual result.’¹²² He concluded that ‘[t]he whole thing is put down, for the present, and I am glad it is, on the whole. The cry was, “Vive la Pologne;” but the object was to get rid of the Assembly, and set up a more democratic set of people.’¹²³

The position of the English in the crowd is always ambivalent: they were there as if at a spectacle or a play, watching the show through an opera-glass, and lionizing Lamartine as its star. They are carried along by the crowd, but not fully part of it. They attach themselves to the troops and march or run ‘alongside’, but they are not marching wholeheartedly ‘with’ the soldiers. It is tempting to suggest that they are dilettante tourists. But although they surely are political tourists, they are perhaps more similar to others in the crowd than they initially seem. The semi-attachment and semi-detachment which Maureen Moynagh ascribes to political tourism also attaches to everyone participating in large-scale protest marches, demonstrations, and revolutions. Participation in a grand spectacle always means that individual members of the crowd can never see nor entirely understand the whole of the event.

The Labour Question: Visiting Louis Blanc’s ateliers

Louis Blanc’s socialist atelier scheme was well known to the friends before they left England, and a visit to the government ateliers or workshops was very high on the revolutionary tourist itinerary in 1848. Labour was at the heart of the revolutionary crisis and was also the motive for the repeated attempts at coups against the Provisional Government. The atelier, or workshop, system had been put in place by the socialist Louis Blanc, to provide full employment. Before he had left Lancashire for Paris, Forster, himself a mill-owner, had been appalled by the increasing distress in Bradford as the economic slump meant that more and more men and women mill-workers were thrown out of work, and ‘he was strongly tempted by the notion of national workshops, in which the honest labourer might always find sufficient work for his hands, and an adequate recompense for his toil’.¹²⁴ Forster was a supporter of some of the demands of the Moderate Chartists, and he had done his research well before leaving for France.¹²⁵ He had spent time

reading Louis Blanc’s ‘Organisation de travail,’ re-reading Carlyle’s ‘Chartism and the Peril of the Nation,’ Thornton’s ‘Over Population,’ etc. This book of Louis Blanc’s is the exposition of his social workshops, whereby he expects to remodel society and banish misery, and which he is now trying on a large scale in Paris, to utter failure, say the papers. But so short a trial, in such a turbulent time, can hardly, I think, prove the failure.¹²⁶

He was still hopeful, then, as he left England, that the workshops might prove a success at last. But when he arrived in Paris and visited them, he was terribly disappointed: ‘went to Louis Blanc’s tailor workshop. Some one thousand five hundred tailors in the old debtor prison on Clichy, working away, or professing to do so, singing the Marseillaise; all—good workers and bad—earning two francs a day; a species of organization which will produce but little labour, be a premium upon idlers, and quickly disgust the good worker, as I heard before I left it had done.’¹²⁷ Clough saw the power of a strong economy and high employment to abate revolutionary feeling, and remarked that ‘I don’t think there’s likely to be any stir in our own blessed country, if only the money bags get tolerably replenished to set people to work,—be it at railways, or anything else’.¹²⁸ Clough was right. Labour reform, massive railway construction, and increased wages would play a large role in preventing a British revolution in 1848. He had also correctly identified labour, and not land distribution or taxes, as the most internationally important revolutionary issue of 1848, as is discussed further in Chapter 4.

La Marseillaise

The difficulties and disappointments involved in revolutionary tourism, the obstructions to seeing and to understanding, and the sense that the revolutionary events were always happening somewhere else perhaps account for the immense popularity of the one attraction that absolutely every traveller to Paris was sure to head for, and many often went to more than once. Milnes was a frequent attendee, Stanley and his party headed straight there in April, and Forster, Mrs Paulet, and Geraldine Jewsbury went immediately on their first evening in Paris—and left Mr Paulet and some friends outside because they ‘could not get in, the throng was so great’. Clough made haste to get there when he arrived. When Emerson landed in Paris the following week he went straight there, and he visited three times during his stay in Paris. The venue in question was of course the theatre, but it was not the play that was the main attraction. The great citoyenne-tragedienne Rachel was at the peak of her fame in the late 1840s. Emerson was uncharacteristically fulsome in his praise, announcing that ‘[s]he deserves all her fame. And is the only good actress I have ever seen.’¹²⁹ Margaret Fuller had been entranced with her the year before, rating her above any male actor, saying that watching Rachel in almost any part, ‘you see also that common tragedy, a woman of genius who throws away her precious heart, lives and dies for one unworthy of her’.¹³⁰ Rachel was acting in various tragedies in the spring of 1848 at the Theâtre de la République and at the Comédie-Française, including Lucrece, Phèdre, and Horace; but her pièce de résistance was her passionate rendition of La Marseillaise at the end of each performance. Stanley reported that ‘[i]t is difficult to describe it. She had seemed to be a woman—she became a ‘being’—sublime irony, prophetic enthusiasm, demoniacal fierceness, succeeded each other like flashes of lightning…Madame de M. thought it “the most shocking sight she had ever seen”…They say that Rachel enters into it herself heart and soul, and is so wrought up by it that she usually faints away when it is over.’¹³¹ ‘It was very grand’, he concluded, and ‘Morier declared that it was itself enough to annihilate a monarchy’.¹³² This was perhaps the point. Having failed to see the revolution itself ‘transacting’, the travellers were looking for a performance of revolution that would satisfy their appetite for political drama better than the incoherent crowds jostling outside on the streets. Fanny Lewald gave a remarkably detailed description of the experience of seeing Rachel sing. Before she started singing, Lewald said that ‘her face showed what the rage of deepest oppression, what the anger of the dehumanized slave aware of his own humanity can imprint in an ominous expression upon the features of a human face’.¹³³ When she starts the song, ‘[s]he does not have a strong voice and half sings half speaks the song to very soft music from the orchestra’, and then ‘[s]uddenly she gathers herself up, moves with a firm stride to the backdrop, where the tricolor was planted, seizes it and holds it aloft with her right hand, unfurling it freely, a free banner…which she herself raises and holds…which she clasps with fervent adoration to her breast’.¹³⁴

Théophile Gautier left perhaps the most dramatic description of Rachel’s performance:

the audience was shivering with fright before the actress had delivered a single one of her powerful words. The pale, livid mask, the black look of suffering and revolt shining out of bloody sockets, brows twisted like snakes, lips dropping at the corners, holding within their superb curves a hurricane of threats, that were ready, as Shakespeare said, to sound the trumpet of curses, nostrils flaring with curses as if ready to breathe the free air outside a foetid fortress: all this produced an effect like lightning…Then in an angry voice, both harsh and dull like an alarm-bell, she began the first verse:

Allons enfants de la patrie!¹³⁵

He agrees with Lewald that Rachel ‘did not sing, neither did she recite, it was a kind of declamation in the style of ancient chants’.¹³⁶ Rachel performed La Marseillaise nightly with accompanying bells, and sometimes even cannon fire. There was undoubtedly an erotic charge to the performance, as Forster obliquely admitted, excited by ‘her rich tones of defiance, she as, as it were, an incarnation not of liberty, but of license’.¹³⁷ Clough seems deliberately to collapse performance and revolution when he says ‘For the last time but one I return from Rachel’s ‘Marseillaise.’ To-night here is some rappel-ing going on somewhere.’¹³⁸ Fanny Lewald perhaps best expresses the emotion of the crowd and the actress’s effect when she says, ‘Rachel is the personified human Marseillaise, the incarnate concept of the fight for freedom.’¹³⁹ Not only could Rachel re-enact the excitement of the revolution for the belated visitors who had missed all the action in February, her performance could also pull together everything that was incoherent and frustrating about the confused and uncertain state of post-revolutionary Paris, and bring it together into an exquisite and stirring revolutionary point. And she could do this every night, contradictorily returning her audience to the urgency of the ‘revolutionary present’ in a long series of repeated performances. Of course, every theatrical performance pivots on the paradox of a repeated present, but the repetition of this particular performance was especially significant: it seemed both commemorative of a revolution that had been achieved and also a call to arms to the permanent revolution. Or was the performance really about the impossibility of holding on to any revolutionary moment? Did the ephemerality of Rachel’s performance mirror the ephemerality of the February Revolution, exposing it for what it was—itself, a brief evanescent and ‘provisional’ performance, leaving no permanent trace, and needing to be constantly re-enacted?

Revolution and Performance in 1848

Viewing the French Revolution of 1848 at a distance from America, John Pendleton Kennedy described it as, “a great, gorgeous, crashing, thundering and volcanic opera, apparently got up after full rehearsal in private, with the programme, scenery and decorations carefully prepared…Is it not the most comical and the most sublime pageant,—take it altogether—that the world ever saw?”¹⁴⁰ Even at closer range the revolution appeared theatrical. During February 1848, the German poet, Heinrich Heine was mostly confined by illness to a clinic in Paris. Making an unusual journey on 23 February across the city back to the clinic from his apartment, his carriage was overturned and requisitioned to build a barricade.¹⁴¹ As Marx was to do later in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’, in his memoirs Heine reached for theatrical metaphors to describe the feeling of repetition and the precarity of the events of 1848:

on this great world stage it all happens just as it does in our own poor little sideshow, there are also drunken heroes, kings who forget their parts, scenery that get stuck hanging there, resounding prompter’s ‘whispers’, danseuses who make their impression with the poetry of their thighs, costumes whose main point is that they glitter.¹⁴²

When the English visitors arrived, they found the whole of Paris in mid-performance, and Forster sometimes tired of the theatre which seemed a poor substitute for the drama of the streets: ‘[e]vening to some theatre, to hear Frederick [sic] Lemaître, a comic notoriety, in Robert le Diable; but I could not sit it out, nor take pleasure in representations of dramatic scoundrels when the whole city was the scene of such a stirring drama.’¹⁴³ Performance was a fraught concept in 1848 and it was to cause the travellers some problems. Milnes ‘was especially glad to have been present in the Assemblée during the “Revolution and Counter-Revolution” of 15 May’, but he was to get into trouble for his gleeful spectatorship. When he left Paris on 17 May, he had upset some of his French friends by his unashamed self-identification as a tourist during their revolution. It never seems to have struck Milnes as bizarre to be sitting in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris during an attempted coup, and he treated this political event as an amusing and exciting performance. After his trip his old friend Tocqueville wrote to him on 21 June, enclosing a pamphlet that Milnes had asked for, but he ended his letter: ‘Je ne veux pas cependant terminer celle-ci, sans vous faire connâitre et vous mettre a même de démentir un bruit qui a couru sur vous et qui a affligé vos amis.’¹⁴⁴ [I do not want to close this letter without making you aware, and at least giving you the opportunity of denying, a rumour that has been flying around about you here, and which has caused your friends some pain.] Milnes’s behaviour in public during the 15 May Revolution had caused wide offence, as ‘he was said to have been seen by the Assembly with a smile on his face and overheard to say that the spectacle amused him very much. He was accused of looking on at this scene of violence and revolution as though it were a cock-fight or a play.’¹⁴⁵ The accusation could have been levelled at any of the travellers, whose relationship to the political events that they had eagerly rushed over the Channel to witness was always ambivalent. But the very same Tocqueville who had reprimanded Milnes gently but firmly for gawping at the revolution as if it were a ‘cock-fight or a play’ was already himself noting of the Revolutionary Assembly in 1848 that ‘[t]he imitation [of 1789] was so manifest that it concealed the terrible originality of the facts; I continually had the impression they were engaged in play-acting the French Revolution far more than continuing it.’¹⁴⁶

Revolution is, always has been, deeply connected to performance. The French revolution of 1848 remobilized the symbols of 1789, and the barricades of 1830, in a way that was itself quite deliberately theatrical.¹⁴⁷ The literal spilling out onto the street of a stage revolution in 1830 in Belgium, from the final act of La Muette at the opera house, into a ‘real’ revolution was discussed in Serial Forms.¹⁴⁸ In the spring of 1848 festivals and fêtes were quickly got up to celebrate and ‘christen’ the new Republic and they drew, inevitably, on the traditions of former revolutions. Writing about the 1789 revolution, Richard Taws has noticed that ‘the vast majority of visual materials that conveyed the Revolution’s symbolic message around France, whether issued by the State or private interests, were mobile, ephemeral, and multiple’.¹⁴⁹ The ephemerality of the festivals was a problem as their rapid improvisation uncomfortably reflected the provisional nature of any government in the immediate aftermath of revolution: the streamers and papier mâché could look dangerously fragile. In 1848 this effect was amplified, as re-enacting the festivals of previous revolutions in France inevitably suggested the analogy of counter-revolution and failure for this iteration of the series: as John Breuilly has noticed, ‘the myth of 1789…both enabled and disabled the revolutionaries of 1848’.¹⁵⁰ But the festivals were a necessary and enjoyable part of the popular celebration of the Republic, and on 4 May, Forster and his party ‘ensconsed [them]selves, about eleven, in chairs in the garden of the Tuileries’ in eager anticipation of the fête.¹⁵¹ Once the event was under way the crowds were ‘immense’ and Forster left his chair to ‘swarm…up one of the statues by the obelisk, amid the acclamations of the surrounding populace—sitting on some good lady’s lap, name unknown, Victory, probably—and there fraternized between two blouses, to my great comfort, till driven down by the guards, who would not allow the statue to be desecrated’.¹⁵² After he was ordered down from this advantageous vantage point, he could see very little and grew bored: “[i]t was vain to attempt to discern the members of the Government as they walked up, and it was so long before the assembly came to the actual…proclaiming of the republic—that all the party, barring Mrs. Paulet and self, were tired and hungered off’.¹⁵³ He and Mrs Paulet also eventually gave in to hunger and were in a café eating some ‘mysterious preparation of cold meat’ and drinking champagne when they heard ‘firing of cannon’.¹⁵⁴ They ran through the Place de la Concorde and up to the Chamber of Deputies, and not for the first time Forster was glad to have a female companion, as ‘gallant guardsmen ma[de] way for a lady’.¹⁵⁵ They were rewarded, as ‘[w]e caught a glimpse of the deputies, in their white waistcoats, announcing the republic, but could not descry faces’.¹⁵⁶ They stayed for the rest of the ceremony and decided that ‘[t]he clashing of the bayonets, and the hoisting of the caps on their points were the most picturesque portions of the manifestation’.¹⁵⁷ For Forster this was a performance without words, which he followed almost entirely with his eyes, admiring the flashes and glimpses of the deputies (although not being able to see their faces properly) and enjoying the ‘picturesque’ military manoeuvres. The lack of privileged access to any of the French elite, and the necessity of swarming with the crowd, meant that he and his friends enjoyed the spectacle in a genuinely popular fashion.

On 21 May, Clough got up at 6 a.m. and was at the Place de la Concorde by 6.45 a.m. in readiness for another fête, the spectacular Fête de la Concorde. Clough was quite charmed by the event: ‘[t]he illumination in the evening in the Champs Elysées was extremely pretty—the whole avenue was like a great ball-room, with double rows and pendant chandeliers and continuous festoons of lampions on each side. The crowd was enormous.’¹⁵⁸ He also thought that ‘the jeunes filles looked pretty in their white dresses, with the tricolour streaming from the left shoulder and (artificial) oak-wreaths in their hair, pretty en masse, but individually not by any means remarkable either for face or figure. Moreover they were de-classicized by their use of parasols.’¹⁵⁹ As a classically educated poet with republican sympathies, Clough was interested in the deployment of classical symbolism for republican performance. The fête was designed by the architect Henri Labrouste, and the painter Pierre-Victor Galland was responsible for most of the decorations. T. J. Clark has discussed the problem of creating state art and spectacle for the Republic of 1848, and he concludes that ‘[s]tate art was a failure. It failed to find a form for the revolution, it failed to decide on a style for public statement. It never escaped from stifling tradition.’¹⁶⁰

Clark focuses here only on visual art, for in the theatres and opera houses of Paris and other European cities there was state-sponsored art that did publicly represent revolution, and it was available to almost everyone. In Paris, for example, Rachel’s rendition of La Marseillaise, Frédérick Lemaître’s Le Chiffonnier, and Dumas’s dramatization of Le Compte de Monte Cristo at his Théâtre Historique were all ‘revolutionary’ pieces and were all playing in 1848. At the climax of the cinque giornate in Milan, the revolutionary opera La muta di Portici was provocatively and deliberately staged at the Teatro Carcano on 24 April.¹⁶¹ Revolution is a performative form of politics, and therefore it was the performing arts, rather than the visual arts, which were better able to represent it.¹⁶²

Clough enjoyed the performance of the Fête de la Concorde, although it did make him aware of the problem of representing the new republic. He remarks that ‘[i]t was funny in the afternoon to see the classical virgins walking about with their papas and mamas. People of the under-shoemaking and back-street-shopkeeping class.’¹⁶³ The ‘funniness’ is lodged in the incongruity between the real walking working people and their classical festival costumes and the classically inflected statues and models of an abstract ‘People’ that were installed in the streets for the occasion.

Like Clough, Emerson was delighted by the genuine class interaction he witnessed on the Parisian streets: ‘[k]nots of people converse everywhere in the street, and the blouse or shirtsleeves-without-blouse becomes as readily the centre of the discourse as any other, & Superfine and shirt,—who never saw each other before, converse in the most earnest yet deferential way. Nothing like it could ever happen in England. They are the most joyous race and put the best face on everything. Paris, to be sure, is their main performance.’¹⁶⁴ But even as he describes this scene of cross-class debate, Emerson reverts to caricature: the ‘blouse’ and the ‘Superfine and shirt’ that he describes are as generic as ‘the “type” of the worker, and of the bloused, bearded revolutionary’ in the drawings and paintings of the time.¹⁶⁵ He remains outside the conversation, but the fact that the conversation happens at all offers the shadow of an alternative political possibility. T. J. Clark has suggested that the Parisian people were very rarely represented by artists in this revolutionary period other than as grotesquely caricatured or as classicized abstractions. ‘The life of the Paris streets was increasingly what everyone saw but almost no one could find forms for.’¹⁶⁶ But 1848 was to become a crucial pivot point in finding a form for ‘the life of the streets’, and not just in Paris, but across Europe. The revolutions and their serial representations as they moved across the Continent would help to create an international style of realism after mid-century, as is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.

Revolutionary performance could be ‘joyous’, but there was a serious side too. Hannah Arendt identifies this, when she claims that the new content of the word ‘revolution’ denoted the spectacular in a depoliticized sense:

[Revolution]…obviously carried an even greater plausibility for those who watched its course, as if it were a spectacle, from the outside. What appeared to be most manifest in this spectacle was that none of its actors could control the course of events, that this course took a direction which had little if anything to do with the wilful aims and purposes of men, who, on the contrary, must subject their will and purpose to the anonymous force of the revolution if they wanted to survive at all…Theoretically, the most far-reaching consequence of the French Revolution was the birth of the concept of history in Hegel’s philosophy…Politically, the fallacy of this new and typically modern philosophy is relatively simple. It consists in describing and understanding the whole realm of human action, not in terms of the actor and the agent, but from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle.¹⁶⁷

In Arendt’s view the spectacle and performance of the revolution is in political bad faith as it robs the people of their own political will and ties them instead to a Hegelian model of historical necessity. Politics is overwritten by ‘history’, and the radical possibility of the ephemeral present is lost. Watching the revolutions from a cultural distance as they did, the travellers were never quite inhabiting this present moment, but rather aware that they were watching ‘history’. And if we stand by and watch history, as Arendt suggests, we do not participate fully in its making. The travellers all created historical distance between themselves and the French political situation. Clough had returned to England and to the ‘umbrageous blessing’ of a constitutional monarchy before the terrible June Days (23–26 June 1848) in which a proletarian uprising was suppressed and 10,000 workers killed, which represented a greater loss of life than in any of the insurrections of 1789.¹⁶⁸ But even before this crisis, Clough had seen the precariousness of the Republic. He wrote to his friend Thomas Arnold:

there is little doubt that France’s prospects are dubious and dismal enough, and one is almost inclined to think that the outbreak was premature; with their ideas so far from ripe, the French had better, if possible, have endured a little longer the immorality of Louis Philippe’s government; but yet, on the whole, one accepts the thing with gratitude. It will, I think, probably accelerate change in England: and perhaps you may yet live to see some kind of palingenesy effected for your repudiated country.¹⁶⁹

Palingenesy refers to metempsychosis, or the classical doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Clough’s prognosis is not that the revolution itself will spread to England, as he sees that the Republic is already collapsing in France, but that something of its soul or spirit will transfer across the Channel and ‘accelerate change’. Revolutionary seriality is not always about direct copying or repetition, but can also be about rhetorical change, which travels fast and quickens movement in the style of political thinking. A new political style generates a new politics.

The End of the République?

Towards the end of May, Clough, who was still in Paris, wrote to Stanley in England:

Ichabod, Ichabod, the glory is departed. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, driven back by shopkeeping bayonet, hides her red cap in dingiest St. Antoine. Well-to-do-ism shakes her Egyptian scourge to the tune of Ye are idle, ye are idle; the tale of bricks will be doubled. And Moses and Aaron of Socialism can at the best only pray for plagues,—which perhaps will come—paving stones for vivats, and emeutes in all their quarters.¹⁷⁰

Clough, as usual, deliberately muddles the ancient and modern, here the biblical and the political, in his description, with complex effects. Casting the revolution as a biblical story distances it from the present and consigns it to the realms of myth, but the story of Moses leading the slaves of Egypt to the Promised Land creates a reserve of optimism for the Socialism of the future. ‘Meantime’, Clough continues, ‘the glory and the freshness of the dream is departed…[and] the world begins once more to move on its axis and draw on its kid gloves…The golden age of the Republic displays itself now, you see, as a very vulgar parcel-gilt era.’¹⁷¹ By the end of May he is depressed: ‘Paris is tranquil and dull.’¹⁷² His reaction to reading the reports of the massacre of the June Days seems at first oddly classicized and distanced. ‘I confess I regard it in the same light as a great battle—with, on the whole, less horror and certainly more meaning than most great battles that one reads of.’¹⁷³ Stanley returned to Paris in the first week of October 1848, to find that the glory had now really departed from the streets: ‘[t]he Trees of Liberty were withered, and shorn of half their decorations; the tricolours were faded; the rainbow-coloured placards had disappeared from the walls.’¹⁷⁴

The travellers left France and returned to England, and in June Emerson returned to America, so that he was no longer writing to his wife ‘at this Ocean-breadth’.¹⁷⁵ France became an increasingly distant memory as ordinary quotidian life closed over them all once more, but the effects of the trip continued to echo through their work, as subsequent chapters will show. The Parisian tourists would take their revolutionary experiences into their subsequent professional lives in ways which are exemplary of the long-term effects of 1848. The journalist Frederic Oldfield Ward would spend much of his subsequent life in Brussels working on sanitary engineering and reform, while his boon-companion on the Parisian revolutionary jaunt, William Forster, already radicalized by a trip to Connemara in Ireland during the famine in 1846 and 1847, would marry Matthew Arnold’s sister, Jane Martha, and become part of a British Liberal elite.¹⁷⁶ Forster’s experiences in Paris in 1848 left him with a strong interest in parliamentary reform and the cooperative labour movement. The politics of education and labour would become his life’s work.¹⁷⁷

Clough was to go on to experience another revolution in Italy in 1849. In 1847, horrified by the number of empty champagne bottles piling up in the quads of the Oxford colleges during Commemorations Week while the starving Irish desperately ate seaweed, he had already thought about the importance of ‘seeing’ the invisible suffering of people who are distant. Even before Clough and Emerson met, Emerson had heard Clough’s thoughts about the importance of retrenchment in the face of the Irish Famine.¹⁷⁸ In his pamphlet on the subject, Clough admitted that ‘[i]t is perhaps scarcely natural for young men to feel strongly that which they do not see. It were absurd to affect a gloom which does not exist.’ But he argues ‘it is not absurd to lay down a few rules beforehand which will keep up in our minds the general impression that those unseen miseries are, though unseen, not unreal’.¹⁷⁹ In France, the travellers had seen at first hand some of the miseries that had produced the revolution, and they would not quickly forget the lesson. Being present in 1848 had made them feel the Parisians as their contemporaries and had made the troubles of their French neighbours seem very real.

It is often said that around the mid nineteenth century a new language of nationality is learned. And that as the revolutions receded, nations and proto-nations turned inwards once more, focusing back on their own struggles for self-determination. But this is only partly true. The internationalism engendered by the revolutionary moment of 1848 did not die. As Alberto Mario Banti has observed, ‘while this language [of nationalism] creates divisions, differences, and discontinuities, and—in one sense—erects boundaries, what is particularly interesting is that, everywhere it always seems to obey the same syntactic rules, to possess the same vocabulary and to make recourse to the same repertoire of symbols and narratives’.¹⁸⁰ It was through print that these vocabularies, symbols and narratives were transmitted across Europe and beyond in 1848. Without the rapid international connectivity of print, the European revolutions could not have imagined themselves into being. The legacy of connectivity through the print networks established during the revolutionary moment ensured that the governments of the 1850s were obliged to understand that the citizen and the nation were not singular but serial categories.

The friends’ failure to locate a revolutionary ‘event’ was not their fault. Revolutions cannot be understood as events, but only experienced as a feeling of scalar immensity. They could join the enormous processions, the crowded rowdy debates in the clubs, the massive workers’ demonstrations, but revolutions cannot be directly apprehended. They are pieced together from hearsay, rumours, sensational newspaper reports, posters, songs, the chat of second-hand witnesses: all of these together create a sense of their vast scale and their terrific contingency. The repeated spectacles of the revolution are, therefore, a necessary part of its function for its participants who are inevitably both actors and observers. Margaret Fuller wrote to Emerson excitedly in May 1848, ‘I am deeply interested in this public drama, and wish to see it played out. Methinks I have my part therein, either as actor or historian.’¹⁸¹ She was right: when the revolutionary wave reached her in Rome, she was to become both actor and historian. Repetition is part of the way that a revolution makes itself visible. All revolutions are, therefore, necessarily experienced as serial because it is seriality that makes sense of the scale of history. And it is to the serial print that transmitted the large-scale of the 1848 revolutions that the next chapter turns.

¹ AHC to J. C. Shairp (16 March 1848), AHC Remains, p. 123.

² Letter 173 to Anne Clough (Thursday 11 May [1848]), The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Frederick L. Mulhauser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), vol 1: [1829–54], pp. 203–4. Unless otherwise referenced, all references hereafter to Clough’s letters are to this volume and edition, abbreviated to AHC Corr.

³ In 1813, Byron was keen to go to Holland, as on 15 November 1813 the people of Amsterdam had expelled the French and revolution was under way: ‘I never saw a Revolution transacting—or at least completed—but I arrived just after the last Turkish one—& the effects were visible—& had all the grandeur of desolation in their aspect—Streets in ashes—immense barracks (of a very fine construction) in ruins’: Byron to Annabella Milbanke (29 November 1813), George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron, Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), pp. 81–3, p. 83.

⁴ Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61) was an English poet and educationalist; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) was an American thinker, essayist and Transcendentalist, visiting Europe in 1847–8; Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury (1812–80) was a Manchester feminist and novelist, author of Zoë: The History of Two Lives (1845), a novel which she started in collaboration with Jane Carlyle and Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) Paulet; Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–85) (1st Baron Houghton) was a poet, patron of literature, and a politician, first a conservative, and then a liberal. Elizabeth Paulet (1806–79) was a close friend of Jane Carlyle and of Geraldine Jewsbury. She was married to a Swiss businessman and consul in Liverpool, Mark Etienne Paulet who accompanied her to Paris. She later published a novel, Dharma: or, Three Phases of Love (1865); Fanny Lewald (1811–89) was a German Jewish feminist and novelist; Benjamin Jowett (1817–93) was a reform-minded Oxford classicist who became Master of Balliol College, Oxford in 1870; William Forster (1818–86) was a philanthropist and industrialist and was to become a Liberal MP; Francis Palgrave (1824–97) was a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford at the time of the trip to Paris. He edited the highly influential Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861); Arthur Stanley (1815–81), a fellow of University College, Oxford at the time of his trip to Paris, was made Dean of Westminster Abbey in 1863.

⁵ James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Years of Promise, 1809–1851 (London: Constable, 1949), p. 281. Disraeli wrote to Lord John Manners that ‘Dicky dying of envy of Lamartine, and ready to put himself at the head of the gamins and break the windows of Buckingham Palace’: see William Moneypenny and George Buckle, Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (London: Macmillan, 1910–20), vol. 3, p. 95; quoted in Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes, p. 281. All references to Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes hereafter are to this edition, abbreviated to JPH.

⁶ AHC to Tom Arnold (31 January–25 February [1848]) AHC Corr., p. 200.

⁷ RWE to Margaret Fuller (5 December 1847) and AHC to Lidian Emerson (15 December 1847), The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), vol. 3, pp. 448, 452. Henceforth abbreviated to RWE Letters 3.

⁸ RWE to Lidian, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, vol. 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 6, 44. Henceforth abbreviated to RWE Letters 4.

⁹ RWE to Margaret Fuller (2 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 27.

¹⁰ Rowland E. Prothero, The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley D.D., Late Dean of Westminster (London: John Murray, 1893), vol. 1, p. 390. Henceforth abbreviated to Stanley 1.

¹¹ RWE to Lidian Emerson (17 May 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 74.

¹² Stanley 1, p. 390.

¹³ Margaret Fuller, Sad but Glorious, p. 211.

¹⁴ Evert Duyckinck Letter to George Duyckinck (18 March 1848), Duyckinck Family Papers; Rare Books and Manuscripts Division; New York Public Library, quoted in Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 10. Evert Duyckinck (1816–78) was editor of the magazine The Literary World and leader of the literary Young America group campaigning for a national American democratic consciousness and a more politically engaged literature.

¹⁵ Pierre Dessalles, Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race: The Letters and Diary of Pierre Dessalles, Planter in Martinique, 1808–1856, ed. and trans. Elborg Forster and Robert Forster (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 206.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ There was a ‘slave revolt’ or revolution on 19 and 20 May 1848 in Martinique. Partly due to the lobbying by abolitionists such as Cyrille Bissette, who was from Martinique, and Victor Schoelcher, the French government ended slavery in the French West Indies in 1848.

¹⁸ RWE to Margaret Fuller (2 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 27.

¹⁹ RWE to George Partridge Bradford (8 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, pp. 30–1, p. 31.

²⁰ RWE to Lidian Emerson (8–10 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 34.

²¹ Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 9.

²² Evert Duyckinck, Letter to George Duyckinck, quoted in Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 10.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ [MF], ‘1 January, 1846’, New-York Daily Tribune (1 January 1846): 1.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ RWE to George Partridge Bradford (8 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, pp. 30–1, p. 31. For more on the disturbances in Britain in 1848, see Chapters 3 and 4.

²⁸ RWE to Lidian Emerson (20–21 April 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 54.

²⁹ See Chapter 3.

³⁰ F. B. Smith, ‘The View from Britain I: Tumults Abroad, Stability at Home’, in Kamenka and Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution, pp. 94–120, p. 105.

³¹ RWE to Lidian Emerson (8–10 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 34.

³² WEF, p. 230. William Smith O’Brien was an Irish nationalist Member of Parliament and leader of the Young Ireland movement.

³³ JPH, p. 281 and RWE to Lidian Emerson (8–10 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 34.

³⁴ RWE to Lidian Emerson (8–10 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 34.

³⁵ Perhaps the least well remembered of these friends is Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) Paulet. She was well-off thanks to her Swiss husband’s firm, Charles Imer, Paulet & Co. of Liverpool, and she was able to entertain her friends generously at Seaforth House on Merseyside, which the Paulets rented from the Gladstone family. Mark Etienne Paulet, her husband, died in 1850. Elizabeth Paulet was ‘a keen student of French fiction and, later, of Italian’, and she met Mazzini in 1844: Bettina Lehmbeck, ‘Elizabeth Paulet and the Carlyles’, Carlyle Newsletter 8 (Spring 1987): 23–8, p. 25. J. A. Froude described Mme. Paulet as ‘young, gifted, and beautiful’: James Anthony Froude, Froude’s Life of Carlyle, abr. and ed. John Clubbe (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1979), p. 427. But in Paris, Clough found her ‘almost too Hindooish’: AHC to T. Arnold (16 July 1848), AHC Corr., p. 216.

³⁶ Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘A Consideration of Objections Against the Retrenchment Association at Oxford During the Irish Famine in 1847’, in AHC Remains, pp. 283–301.

³⁷ RWE to Lidian Emerson (?15 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 42.

³⁸ Stanley describes Robert Morier as ‘a Balliol undergraduate of gigantic size’: Stanley 1, p. 391. Stanley’s party arrived in Paris at 5 a.m. on Sunday 9 April and stayed at the Hotel Meurice: Stanley 1, p. 392.

³⁹ Forster married Thomas Arnold’s daughter Jane Martha in 1850, leaving the Quakers for Anglicanism. See Allen Warren, ‘William Edward Forster (1818–1886)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi-org/10.1093/ref:odnb/9926 (3 January 2008).

⁴⁰ He arrived in Paris on 3 May and took a room on the rue Mont Thabor at 12 francs a week.

⁴¹ Emerson writes that ‘after spending a couple of days at the Hotel Montmorency, I have been at lodgings ever since in the Rue des petits Augustins, where I manage to live very comfortably’: RWE Letters 4, p. 72.

⁴² RWE to Lidian Emerson (24–25 May 1848), RWE to Lidian Emerson (8–10 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 77.

⁴³ The Palace of Versailles had been converted to a museum under the July Monarchy: see Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 86.

⁴⁴ WEF, p. 235. Frederic Oldfield Ward (?1817–77) had briefly edited Hood’s Magazine in 1845 for Thomas Hood when Hood’s sickness and bankruptcy had incapacitated him. He was a friend of Charles Dickens and of Robert Browning.

⁴⁵ RWE to George Partridge Bradford (8 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, pp. 30–1, p. 31.

⁴⁶ Maureen Anne Moynagh, ‘Introduction: Political Tourism and its Texts’, in Political Tourism and its Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 9. She also says that ‘political tourists are not cosmopolitans in the traditional sense, even as they exhibit some of the features typically associated with cosmopolitanism, such as its privilege’: p. 6. But not all political tourists and emigrés are ‘privileged’ in quite the way Moynagh suggests here.

⁴⁷ Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, p. 70.

⁴⁸ Stanley 1, p. 367.

⁴⁹ Fanny Lewald (Paris, 12 March 1848), Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, p. 41. Lewald also noticed that ‘[t]he workers walk through the streets singing the Marseillaise and the old Girondist song’.

⁵⁰ Susanne K. Howe, Geraldine Jewsbury, Her Life and Errors (George Allen & Unwin, 1935), pp. 97–9.

⁵¹ WEF, p. 230.

⁵² Stanley 1, p. 392. Stanley presumably uses ‘awful’ in its true sense, as he was a supporter of the revolution.

⁵³ WEF, p. 235.

⁵⁴ Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell (eds), Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, MA, Master of Balliol College Oxford (London: John Murray, 1897), vol. 1, p. 134. For more on Ireland in 1847–9, see Serial Forms, pp. 251–86 and Chapter 7 of the current volume.

⁵⁵ AHC to A. P. Stanley ([14 May 1848]), AHC Corr., p. 206.

⁵⁶ Ibid., both quotations p. 207.

⁵⁷ RWE JMN 10, p. 158.

⁵⁸ WEF, p. 228.

⁵⁹ Stanley 1, pp. 402–3.

⁶⁰ Stanley 1, p. 391.

⁶¹ This was on a return visit to Paris in October 1848, on 6 October 1848. Stanley 1, p. 405.

⁶² MF, New-York Daily Tribune (3 March 1847), Sad but Glorious, pp. 102–11, pp. 106–7. In early 1847, Alexandre Dumas was tried for violation of contract by La Presse, La Constitutionnel, and several other newspapers for not providing feuilletons he had agreed to write. The judgement eventually went against him, but the fine was greatly reduced from the prosecution’s expectations.

⁶³ AHC to Anne Clough (11 May [1848]), AHC Corr., p. 204.

⁶⁴ AHC to A.P. Stanley ([14 May 1848]), AHC Corr., p. 205.

⁶⁵ WEF, p. 239.

⁶⁶ AHC to A. P. Stanley (19 May 1848), AHC Remains, p. 129.

⁶⁷ WEF, p. 239.

⁶⁸ JPH, p. 282.

⁶⁹ RWE to Lidian Emerson (24–25 May 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 77.

⁷⁰ Stanley 1, p. 394.

⁷¹ WEF, p. 233.

⁷² AHC to A. P. Stanley ([14 May 1848]), AHC Corr., p. 206.

⁷³ WEF, p. 234.

⁷⁴ WEF, p. 236. The friends made this visit to Barbès’ Club on 10 May 1848.

⁷⁵ WEF, p. 237.

⁷⁶ Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, p. 64.

⁷⁷ Ibid., pp. 64, 65. Lewald also attended a lecture given at the Conservatoire des arts et métiers by Professor Blanqui, the brother of Louis Blanqui. She was tremendously impressed by ‘how politically educated the common people in France really are’: Ibid., p. 84.

⁷⁸ The Club de l’Emancipation des Femmes [Club for the Emancipation of Women], changed its name in May 1848 to La Société de la Voix des Femmes [Society for Women’s Voice]. Eugénie Niboyet was also the editor of the periodical The Woman’s Voice. A Socialist and Political Journal: Voice of Everyone’s Interests. See James F. McMillan, France and Women, 1789–1914: Gender, Society and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000).

⁷⁹ AHC to R. W. Church (30 May–31 May [1848]), AHC Corr., p. 213.

⁸⁰ WEF, pp. 237–8.

⁸¹ WEF, p. 238.

⁸² Geraldine Jewsbury seems to have kept no record of her Paris trip, or it has not survived. Susanne Howe, her biographer, takes her itinerary of Jewsbury’s 1848 trip from Forster’s account: Howe, Geraldine Jewsbury, pp. 97–9.

⁸³ Letter from Niboyet to Lewald, quoted by Fanny Lewald (Paris, 15 March 1848), Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, p. 62. Lewald does not seem to have attended Niboyet’s club.

⁸⁴ JPH, p. 283.

⁸⁵ WEF, p. 236.

⁸⁶ Stanley 1, pp. 394–5.

⁸⁷ RWE to Lidian Emerson (Paris, 17 May 1848), RWE Letters 4, pp. 72–5, pp. 73–4.

⁸⁸ WEF, p. 239.

⁸⁹ WEF, p. 240.

⁹⁰ WEF, pp. 233–4.

⁹¹ RWE to Lidian Emerson (Paris, 17 May 1848), RWE Letters 4, pp. 72–5, p. 73.

⁹² JPH, p. 283.

⁹³ WEF, p. 231 (emphasis original). Forster was an old friend of Jewsbury’s. Jewsbury did not feel that she and Emerson hit it off, though: ‘Emerson has taken his departure. He called here on Sunday, but I was out. I don’t fancy he took to me. I am too tumultuous for him, and he is not quite sure but that I am satirical.’ Mrs Alexander Ireland (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Geraldine Endor Jewsbury to Jane Welsh Carlyle (London: Longmans and Green, and Co., 1892), pp. 235–6.

⁹⁴ WEF, p. 242.

⁹⁵ RWE to Lidian Emerson (17 May 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 72.

⁹⁶ The Provisional Government split into factions: Louis Blanc, Cremieux, and Albert wanted Communism; Flocon and Ledru-Rollin desired the Red Republic and Terror; Arago, Marie, Garnier-Pages, and Marrast all represented the moderate party. Lamartine hoped to conciliate everybody.

⁹⁷ Stanley 1, p. 397.

⁹⁸ Stanley 1, pp. 397–8.

⁹⁹ Stanley 1, p. 398.

¹⁰⁰ Stanley 1, p. 398.

¹⁰¹ Stanley 1, p. 398.

¹⁰² Stanley 1, pp. 398–9.

¹⁰³ Stanley 1, p. 396.

¹⁰⁴ The occasion was the return of the regular troops into Paris, to be officially welcomed by the Government.

¹⁰⁵ Stanley 1, p. 401.

¹⁰⁶ All quotations are from Stanley 1, p. 400.

¹⁰⁷ JPH, p. 282.

¹⁰⁸ Abbott and Campbell (eds), Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, vol. 1, p. 134.

¹⁰⁹ Stanley 1, p. 400. The ‘eleven’ were the ministers of the Provisional Government.

¹¹⁰ Abbott and Campbell (eds), Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, vol. 1, p. 135.

¹¹¹ Le Moniteur universel reported the émeute as follows: ‘Paris. 15 May. Today at about 1pm the National Assembly was invaded by a crowd which was not at first that numerous but soon grew to several thousands, on the pretext of presenting a petition in favour of Poland.’ The clubistes then announced their true purpose. The National Guard rallied to the defence of the National Assembly and ejected the conspirateurs, who retreated to the Hôtel de Ville and announced a new government, but they were unable to hold their ground for long. Towards five o’clock the whole affair was over and the assembly was functioning again. See Le Moniteur universel: Journal officiel de la République Française 137 (16 Mai 1848), n.p. (p. 1).

¹¹² WEF, p. 240.

¹¹³ AHC to Anne Clough (18 April–16 May 1848), AHC Remains, p. 125.

¹¹⁴ WEF, p. 241.

¹¹⁵ WEF, p. 243.

¹¹⁶ WEF, p. 243.

¹¹⁷ AHC to Anne Clough (11–16 May [1848]), AHC Corr., p. 205.

¹¹⁸ WEF, pp. 241–2.

¹¹⁹ WEF, p. 242.

¹²⁰ JPH, p. 283.

¹²¹ WEF, p. 244.

¹²² AHC to A. P. Stanley (19 May [1848]), AHC Corr., p. 208.

¹²³ AHC to Anne Clough (11–16 May [1848]), AHC Corr., p. 205.

¹²⁴ WEF, p. 219.

¹²⁵ Although Forster did not support the idea of an annual parliament, payment for MPs, or the secret ballot, and he was ‘strenuously opposed’ to Physical Force Chartism: WEF, p. 221.

¹²⁶ WEF, p. 226. William Thomas Thornton’s Over-Population, and Its Remedy: Or, an Inquiry Into the Extent and Causes of the Distress Prevailing Among the Labouring Classes of the British Islands, and Into the Means of Remedying It (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longman’s, 1846) was an influential work, warmly welcomed by J. S. Mill. See Bruce L. Kinzer, England’s Disgrace?: J. S. Mill and the Irish Question (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 55–6.

¹²⁷ WEF, p. 230.

¹²⁸ AHC to Tom Arnold (31 January–25 February [1848]), AHC Corr., p. 200.

¹²⁹ RWE to Lidian Emerson (17 May 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 73.

¹³⁰ MF, Dispatch 10, Sad but Glorious, p. 106.

¹³¹ Stanley 1, p. 394.

¹³² Stanley 1, p. 394.

¹³³ Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, p. 79. The reference to slavery is significant in 1848: see Chapter 7 of the current volume.

¹³⁴ Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, p. 79.

¹³⁵ Theophile Gautier quoted in John Stokes, ‘Rachel Félix’, in Michael R. Booth, John Stokes, and Susan Bassnett, Three Tragic Actresses: Siddons, Rachel, Ristori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 66–116, p. 111.

¹³⁶ Ibid.

¹³⁷ WEF, p. 229.

¹³⁸ AHC to A. P. Stanley (26 May 1848), AHC Remains, p. 131.

¹³⁹ Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, p. 80.

¹⁴⁰ John Pendleton Kennedy writing from Baltimore to a friend in England, quoted in H. T. Tuckerman, The Life of John Pendleton Kennedy (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1871), pp. 407–8; quoted in Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 11.

¹⁴¹ Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, p. 53.

¹⁴² Heinrich Heine, Ideas: The Le Grand Book (Das Buch Le Grand) and Memoirs, trans. Richard Hollick (Kindle edn, n.p.) Das Buch Le Grand was first published in 1826 and Memoiren in 1854.

¹⁴³ WEF, p. 236. For more on Lemaître’s revolutionary credentials, see Chapter 3.

¹⁴⁴ JPH, p. 283.

¹⁴⁵ JPH, p. 283.

¹⁴⁶ This translation quoted by Arendt, On Revolution, p. 264. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), p. 53.

¹⁴⁷ See Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Tom Stammers has written on souvenir-hunting after the 1789 revolution: see Tom Stammers, ‘Scavenging Rococo: Trouvailles, Bibelots and Counter-Revolutionary Politics’, in Melissa Lee Hyde and Katie Scott (eds), Rococo Echo: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola (Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2014), pp. 71–86, and ‘The Bric-à-Brac of the Old Regime: Collecting and Cultural History in Post-Revolutionary France’, French History 22 (2008): 295–315.

¹⁴⁸ Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 164–5, 175–6.

¹⁴⁹ Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), p. 4.

¹⁵⁰ John Breuilly, ‘The Revolutions of 1848’, in David Parker (ed.), Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West 1560–1991 (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 109–31. See also Dick Geary, ‘The Revolutionary Tradition in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’ in the same volume, pp. 132–50.

¹⁵¹ WEF, p. 232.

¹⁵² WEF, p. 232.

¹⁵³ WEF, p. 232.

¹⁵⁴ WEF, p. 232.

¹⁵⁵ WEF, p. 232.

¹⁵⁶ WEF, pp. 232–3.

¹⁵⁷ WEF, p. 233.

¹⁵⁸ AHC to A. P. Stanley (19–22 May [1848]), AHC Corr, p. 209.

¹⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 208.

¹⁶⁰ T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), p. 71.

¹⁶¹ The cinque giornate di Milano (18–22 March 1848) were five days of fierce street fighting when revolutionaries in Milan successfully drove Marshall Radetzky and his Austrian troops out of the city. La Muta di Portici is an Italian version of Auber’s French opera La Muette de Portici (1828), discussed in Serial Forms as the opera which had become associated with the 1830 revolution in Brussels: Pettitt, Serial Forms, pp. 164–5 and pp. 175–6. See Chapter 3 of the current volume for a fuller discussion of Le Chiffonnier.

¹⁶² The operas of Giuseppe Verdi were only retrospectively attached to 1848. Roger Parker argues that there is little evidence that the chorus ‘Va pensiero’ from Verdi’s Nabucco communicated a revolutionary theme to its first audiences in the early to mid-1840s. Indeed, ‘the chorus seems to have moved fairly uneventfully through a historical period of great political tension, only to emerge later as the representative music of that period’. In sum, the chorus becomes ‘a vehicle of nostalgia’ for the Risorgimento movement: Roger Parker, ‘Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati’: The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1997), pp. 98–102, pp. 99, 100.

¹⁶³ AHC to A. P. Stanley (19–22 May [1848]), AHC Corr., p. 209.

¹⁶⁴ RWE To Lidian Emerson (24–25 May 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 76.

¹⁶⁵ Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, p. 25. Clark claims that, by not describing the poor realistically or giving the people faces, ‘art, as usual, led the counter revolution, the long march away from the sight of one’s enemies’: p. 30. For Clark, it was the artist Gustav Courbet who finally broke the deadlock and found a way to represent the people, but he achieved this, significantly, far from Paris. In 1849, Courbet retreats from Paris to Ornans to paint ‘the great trilogy of Realism, the Stonebreakers, the Burial at Ornans, and The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair’: T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustav Courbet and the 1848 Revolution [1973] (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), p. 51.

¹⁶⁶ Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, p. 102.

¹⁶⁷ Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 44–6.

¹⁶⁸ AHC to A. P. Stanley (6 June 1848), AHC Remains, p. 135.

¹⁶⁹ AHC to Tom Arnold (16 July 1848), AHC Remains, pp. 136–7.

¹⁷⁰ AHC to A. P. Stanley (19 May [1848]), AHC Corr., p. 207.

¹⁷¹ Ibid. Parcel-gilt means partly gilded.

¹⁷² AHC to R. W. Church (30 May [1848]), AHC Corr., p. 212.

¹⁷³ Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough, p. 129.

¹⁷⁴ Stanley 1, p. 403.

¹⁷⁵ RWE to Lidian Emerson (26 January 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 8.

¹⁷⁶ See, for example, Frederic Oldfield Ward, Purification of the Thames: a Letter by F.O. Ward, Esq., and addressed to William Conningham, Esq., M.P. (London: Henry Renshaw, 1858).

¹⁷⁷ Jonathan Parry argues that others took this experience into the Christian Socialist movement, like John Ludlow, who ‘entered Paris on the very first train that was allowed to do so’ during the 1848 Revolution: John Ludlow, The Autobiography of a Christian Socialist, ed. A. D. Murray (London: Frank Cass and Company, 1981), p. 109. Parry says that in parliament in the 1870s ‘[t]heir well-intentioned but limited reading of popular concerns goes a long way towards explaining the failures as well as the successes of Liberal politics at this time’: Jonathan Parry, ‘Christian Socialism, Class Collaboration, and British Public Life after 1848’, in Moggach and Stedman Jones (eds), The 1848 Revolutions, pp. 162–84, p. 163. I think this reading underestimates the radicalism of the Christian Socialists in the 1840s: for my discussion of this see Chapter 4.

¹⁷⁸ On 20 November 1847, after giving the sixth of his Liverpool lectures, on Goethe, Emerson had met Clough’s sister, Anne, at Samuel Bulley’s house in Liverpool and Bulley had read to the company from Clough’s pamphlet on retrenchment and the Irish question.

¹⁷⁹ Clough, ‘Consideration of Objections’, pp. 299–300.

¹⁸⁰ Alberto Mario Banti, ‘Conclusions: Performative Effects and “Deep Images” in National Discourse’, in Laurence Cole (ed.), Different Paths to the Nation: Regional and National Identities in Central Europe and Italy, 1830–70 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 220–9, p. 223.

¹⁸¹ MF to RWE (19 May 1848), Robert N. Hudspeth (ed.), The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1848–1849 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), vol. 5, p. 66. Hereafter MF Letters. See also Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vol. 2: The Public Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 387. In the same letter, Fuller upbraids Emerson for not getting to Paris faster; ‘why did you not try to be in Paris at the opening of the Assembly?’, referring to the inauguration of the Constituent Assembly on 5 May, eight days before Emerson got to Paris. Her journalistic instincts make her want to ‘scan’—her own word—the situation, while she sees that Emerson ‘sees much, learns much always’ but is not moved to enter the experience as she is: MF to Mary Rotch (29 May 1848), MF Letters 5, p. 72.