Volume 8, Number 10 · June 1, 1967
1848 and All That
By E.J. Hobsbawm
1848: The Opening of an Era
edited by F. Fejtö, Introduction by A.J.P. Taylor
Howard Fertig, 471 pp., $11.00
1848: The Making of a Revolution
by Georges Duveau, Introduction by Georges Rudé
Pantheon, 254 pp., $5.00
The revolutions of 1848 have been both lucky and unlucky in their historians. They were fortunate to find contemporary analysts of unusually high quality. The layman who has read Marx's Class Struggles and Eighteenth Brumaire and Engels's Revolution and Counterrevolution can still hold his own reasonably well even among the experts. On the other hand, there has, until a few years ago, been very little in the record of 1848 to encourage the sort of serious and multi-dimensional analysis and reappraisal which the 1789 Revolution has almost continuously stimulated. Most of the revolutions of 1848 failed obviously and abjectly; few had even the limited achievements of 1830 to their credit. Historians, like politicians, tend to shy away from failure, unless it can be transmuted into heroic myth (such as that of the Paris Commune of 1871), and there is not much in 1848 which lends itself to this transmutation. Those countries like Italy and Hungary, in which 1848 has become part of the mythology of national liberation and unification, are the exception, but the effects on the many writers who have celebrated Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth, and their activities have been dispiriting.
Review, 2810 words
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