Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849
Allen Lane / Penguin Books £35.00
The 1848 revolutions were unique in European history. None of the 1789 French Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 ‘sparked a comparable transcontinental cascade’ (p1), in which revolutions broke out from Switzerland to Romania, with only Britain and Russia being unaffected. The author draws a parallel to the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010-2011, similarly widespread and similarly a failure.
But Clark gives a very detailed and readable account of all the European revolutions, and correctly focuses on the one (France) which had the most significance for the future, where the class struggle and not just the struggle for a constitution was fought out to a conclusion. What does he add to our understanding of these revolutions?
Essentially he accepts what Marx had written in two pamphlets, The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France. The working class was as yet undeveloped, and in June 1848 its first attempt at an insurrectionary seizure of power lacked leadership and direction. Particularly in France, the rural population was at first quiescent and then actively hostile to the urban workers, giving its support instead to Bonaparte. In later revolutions, such as Russia (1917) and China (1949), peasant support or acquiescence was indispensable; and noticeable by its complete absence in the upheavals of the ‘Arab Spring’.
Clark gives a broader picture than Marx in two respects: he gives a very detailed account of the role of women in the revolutions, particularly in France; and he analyses the role of colonial domination in relation to the French revolution and the failure of the British Isles to be swept along by this wave of revolutions.
In France, women did everything that men did, and they were not just the domestic servants of the revolution. They rioted, built barricades and organised fighters, as well as feeding the fighters and nursing the wounded (pps 430-434). Their contribution may well be under-estimated since most of the texts recording their participation are written by men. With one significant exception : the best contemporary account of the revolution is by a woman, Countess Marie d’Agoult, though even a Countess had to write under a male pseudonym, Daniel Stern.
Where Clark’s account is particularly valuable and original is in drawing attention to the significance of imperialism (‘Global 1848’, pps 698-709), in his sense of the term. The June 1848 rising in Paris was viciously suppressed by forces led by General Cavaignac, who had learned his trade in Algeria, a French colony since 1831. To subdue native Algerians, he pioneered the use of ‘smoke-outs’ in which Algerians were smoked to death in caves. But the French ruling class had only just started to be imperialists, and no doubt looked very enviously across the Channel.
In a striking phrase, Clark writes : ‘Nowhere in the Europe of 1848 did the revolutions generate a serious challenge to imperialism and its dizzying asymmetries of power.’ (p 424). Britain was able to dam the wave of revolutions because of its colonial resources. Clark points out that the Chartist monster demonstration of 10 April 1848 was met with overwhelming force, as 150,000 unarmed Chartists were up against 12,000 troops, 4,000 police and 85,000 club-wielding special constables. But the usual explanation that the defeat of Chartism was due to a well-organised repressive force within Britain, backed by a relatively contented middle class paying low taxes (sounds familiar?) ignores the fact that it was colonial domination which made Britain’s immunity to revolution possible. Taxes were kept low by high taxation in the oppressed nations, and certain commodities (particularly sugar) were kept cheap by means of the imperialist connection.
Above I wrote ‘drawing attention to’ imperialism, and this is the weakest point in Clark’s book: he has very little to say about Ireland. While the Young Ireland movement was small and ineffectual, its leaders saw the role of imperialism quite clearly; and in the wake of the Famine, the British government could likewise see the possibility of a land war. One of the leaders of the Young Ireland movement, John Mitchel, along with 6 other leaders deported to Tasmania wrote at the time: ‘…((Britain’s)) institutions in Church and State have been saved from ruin…her commerce and manufactures were kept going on a fictitious basis – and India, Canada, and Ireland were debarred of their freedom.’
‘Debarred’ meant that in 1848 there were 29,000 British troops in Ireland (plus 13,000 police; in the rural areas there were five times as many troops as in England). Just to make doubly sure, in the same year 3,000 Irish people were deported to the colonies. Now only 30 of these were explicitly political prisoners, and many were ‘criminals’. In France, liberated galley slaves had taken part in riots and uprisings, and ‘criminals’ could all too easily become revolutionaries.
Keeping taxes low in Britain meant raising taxation in the colonies. Again Clark has a pointed phrase: ‘Britain protected itself against upheaval by adopting policies pacified home populations but heightened tensions on the imperial periphery’ (p339). Here imperialism showed its mailed fist. An uprising in Cephalonia (Greek islands) killed several landowners. In response, the Governor, Sir Henry Ward ‘personally hunted with the troops and kicked doors open’, before organising for 19 men to be hanged, and at least 96 flogged in public, for such dire offences as ‘refusing to give evidence.’ At home, Ward had opposed the Factories Act of 1847, which limited the working hours of women and children – in other words, an all-round good guy, or as Clarke rather acidly comments : ‘…a rather ordinary member of the British cultural and political elite.’ (p635). Space precludes further coverage of similar events in Ceylon (pps 703-704), Jamaica and British Guyana (p325).
Marx would have been amused by the paradox: a knighted Cambridge professor writes an excellent book about revolution and imperialism!
Patrick Newman
