Christopher Clark Keynote Lecture

Summary:

On 6 June 2023, the Rafael del Pino Foundation organised a keynote lecture entitled "A New Europe", given by Christopher Clark, Professor of History at Cambridge University, on the occasion of the publication of his latest work entitled "Revolutionary Spring. The Struggle for a New World 1848-1849".

In their combination of intensity and geographical spread, the revolutions of 1848 were unique, at least in European history. Neither the French revolution of 1789, nor the July revolution of 1830, nor the Paris commune of 1871, nor the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 triggered a comparable transcontinental cascade. 1989 seems a better comparison, but its direct impact was limited to the Warsaw Pact states.

In 1848, by contrast, political turmoil broke out all over the continent at once. It was the only true revolution that ever existed, and its effects were felt far beyond the confines of the European continent. The Africans of Martinique did not wait for the decree to come from Paris. They rose up and won their freedom with their own hands. It came for the inhabitants of Martinique, Réunion, Senegal, Algeria and the other inhabitants of the possessions of the French Empire. The decision to abolish slavery in the French colonies had great consequences.

1848 is the rear-view mirror, metaphorically, because it allows us to connect what is in front of us with what is behind us. All this may sound a little strange. After all, the 19th century has been hidden behind the dawn of the 20th century. In many American history schools, nineteenth-century European history is in decline. To reflect on the contemporary relevance of these revolutions is because this era is closer to us than it was thirty or forty or fifty years ago.

The question of the East is once again with us. It was a recurring theme in 19th century international relations, bringing together the problems arising from the gradual weakening of the Ottoman Empire and, in particular, the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean. In the course of the twentieth century, this issue was eclipsed. The Ottoman Empire no longer existed, Turkey was admitted to NATO and, in the light of Cold War bipolarity, the issue of the balance of power in the Mediterranean Sea no longer seemed of great importance. But in recent years it has resurfaced. We see it in the heightened political tension in the eastern Mediterranean, in the disputes between Egypt and Turkey over the future of Libya, and in the language of President Erdogan's neo-Ottoman texts.

Our era is marked by the return of a true multipolarity such as we have not known since 1955. This multipolarity has many dimensions. New regional powers have emerged, determined to shape events in their own spheres. Turkey and Iran are two important examples. The transition from Den Xiaoping's policy of containment under the maxim "hide your power and always be patient" to the brazen, aggressive behaviour of today's China is another facet of today's multipolarity. Vladimir Putin's regime has opened up a frightening new conflict for which there is no obvious solution in sight. As a result of the invasion of Ukraine, the Danube grain export ports are back in the news, as they were in the early 1850s on the eve of the Crimean War.

This return of multipolarity worries us. For the people of the 19th century, it was all they knew. The 19th century phenomena that have re-emerged in our time are fluid political constellations with minimal party discipline, the return of the social question, the problem of workers' poverty even if they have jobs, the theft of timber, rising prices of basic foodstuffs, concern about social inequality, skilful mergers of politics and religion, and the awakening despite globalisation of classical nationalism. Russia is no longer a counter-revolutionary model, as it was in the days of the Soviet Union, a polity whose materialist Marxist ideology still held some attraction for parties of the Western left. Today, on the contrary, Russia is the opposite, as it was in the 19th century, the reactionary pole of the West.

Clairvoyant children with global signalling power are a distinctive feature of both eras. Greta Thunberg is the Bernadette Soubirous of the present day. In 1858, the fourteen-year-old Soubirous had an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Her account of this experience was so persuasive, so clear and compelling, that it overcame the scepticism of the local clergy that it laid the foundations for a worldwide pilgrimage movement, the pilgrimage to Lourdes. Since 2018, Greta Thunberg, then fifteen years old, has spoken to the consciences of millions of people. The apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes and the current climate crisis are not equivalent phenomena.

This list could be extended further. Some of the connections are stronger than others. What matters, quite simply, is that history does not move in a straight line. There are moments when a story that seems finished, buried in the past, suddenly appears next to us.

With this in mind, if we turn our attention to the revolutions of 1848, a number of commonalities immediately come to mind. What is interesting, but difficult and frustrating, about these revolutions is their polyvalence, the fact that so many passions, programmes and aspirations were expressed simultaneously. Some were progressive, others anything but progressive, others liberal, radical, conservative or reactionary. For decades, police commanders across Europe had been preparing for a revolution planned in advance by conspirators, but they were preparing for the wrong revolutions. They focused their attention on clandestine networks, on secret revolutions, and discovered or became involved in many of them using spies. But the revolutions of '48 were not the result of a conspiracy. If they had been, they would have been better organised. In reality, they were pan-social convulsions, moments of general disinhibition of the existing political order.

Perhaps the most poignant image of the revolutions of the mid-19th century is Eugene Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People". The canvas commemorated the Parisian revolution of July 1830. The revolts of 1848 produced no painting of comparable allegorical intensity. In 1851, the historian Marie Dague, author of the best contemporary history of these revolutions, observed that the arts had proved utterly incapable of visibly capturing the idea that had animated the revolution of 1848.

The revolutions of 1848 were driven by conflicting, incompatible or simply mutually canceling forces. The political mobilisation of that year took many forms: new ministries, radical clubs, violence in the streets, election campaigns and parliamentary debates, women's clubs, attacks on policemen, attacks on customs officials and soldiers, scathing caricatures, assaults on deputies, fights between national guardsmen and members of the civil legions, attacks on Jewish citizens and their property, or simply on foreigners and outsiders. In the wooded areas of southern France, the so-called Girls' War broke out between peasants dressed as women and state forestry officials. This also belongs to the revolutions of 1848, although the peasants were fighting against the state forestry administration and thus against the newly formed Republic.

Liberals feared reaction, but they also feared democracy, and sometimes they did not know which they feared more. Radicals were attracted by the angry mobs, but also wary of them. The coalitions that were forming in March '48 soon scattered in different directions. Nothing came together. For contemporaries, it was often difficult to distinguish the general direction of the march. So paradoxical and contradictory were the forces that the revolutions had unleashed. One could even say that revolution and counter-revolution were born twins in the same bed. Hence the complexity of '48.

Such complexity was not a function of the intrinsic difficulty of the problems that pre-revolutionary societies had faced, but was the result of the sheer number and diversity of political groups and perspectives. During these revolutions, many new newspapers were born, generating an overabundance of new ideas and narratives that aroused a certain ambivalence among contemporaries. The political world had not yet been structured and disciplined by the large mass parties. The diversity of voices and agendas was exciting, but it was easy to feel overwhelmed. It is interesting how often one found, even in liberal newspapers, scepticism about the new freedom of the press. Many were concerned about the increasingly scathing tone. Suddenly it became fashionable in Vienna to denounce people by name in the press. This was something new. For the first time, anonymous and threatening letters were circulating in the city. In this sense, the citizens of '48 are our contemporaries.

In Paris, as in most of Europe in 1948, the outcome of the elections held that year was a bitter disappointment for the left. Radicals had joined with liberals to demand the extension of suffrage, but that extension resulted in assemblies dominated by moderate and conservative interests rather than radicals. It was a blow from which the European left struggled to recover. In May 1848, the intruders who stormed the Parisian parliament announced that the incumbent government was dissolved and that the new government was waiting in the wings to take power. The national guard arrived and dispersed them, and soon parliamentary business resumed. It is similar to the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. In both cases, liberal democracy was challenged in the most dramatic way.

The revolutions of '48 seemed as old as Pharaonic Egypt. Their complexity was a futile and outdated scribble incapable of generating the kind of narrative that nourishes the people of today. But something has changed. We are emerging from something that the people of '48 did not yet know: the era of high industrialisation, the rise of the great ideological party formations, the rise of the nation state and the welfare state, the rise of the big newspapers and the national television audience. These things, which we used to call modernity, are changing. Their grip on us is waning. The old trigonometry of left and right, which we used to use to chart and describe our paths as political beings, no longer works. The perplexity generated by the new movements, the Trump demonstrations, Occupy Wall St., the anti-vaccination protests, the perplexity is a symptom of this transition. But if we read them against the backdrop of the upheaval of the revolutions of the mid-19th century, they seem less unfamiliar. The storming of the Capitol had many echoes: the rejection of the electoral process as a trap and a lie, the improvised theatrics and extravagant costumes, the euphoric posturing coupled with appeals to high principles (liberty, rights, the constitution, all reminiscent of the tumults of '48.

The unstable leadership structures, the partial fusion of disparate ideologies, and the mobile, protean, improvised quality of much of today's political dissent are reminiscent of 1848, as are the efforts of intellectuals to make sense of them. Ross Douthat, columnist for the New York Times describes the conway of freedom as the last battle of a new class war between virtual, educated people, and practical, people who make things with their hands. This dichotomy recalls the opposition between idlers and industrialists, invoked by the followers of the socialist savant Saint Simon. In an article he published for the magazine Atlantic, George Packer observes that the working class has become terra incognita for the cosmopolitan, intelligent elites of the cities. This observation is reminiscent of the mystery literature of the 1840s, in which writers invited their affluent readers to ponder the unknown world of their cities' poorer neighbourhoods. In general, the heightened awareness of the environment, of precariousness, and the concern about dwindling social cohesion are reminiscent of the bleak diagnoses of the 1840s.

Today, the measures taken by different governments to tackle climate change are judged not only by their effectiveness in achieving that goal, but also by their social impact, by their distributional effects. It is difficult to reconcile the end of coal with political interests, and this resistance occurs at all levels of decision-making because it will not only be a question of international agreements, but also of difficult domestic compromises. And the search for a global solution is made even more difficult by the fact that the means employed to solve one problem may simultaneously worsen another. In an article he wrote in the 1840s about the forest industry in the Rhineland, the young Karl Marx wrote: "The bewildering multiplicity of facets of the world is a function of the one-sidedness of the numerous parts of which it is composed. The distorting multifaceted character of the world is a function of the one-sidedness of the many parts of which it is composed". By this he meant that if the problems of the political economy are so complex, it is because the individuals and groups affected by them stubbornly cling to their conflicting interests.

A look back to 1848 may show us how to get out of the current world historical polycrisis. But it offers us a picture of a complete crisis and invites us to reflect on the tense relationship between particular and general needs. Between the people of 1848 and us, the epoch of high modernity stretches out. They were on the eve of this era of transformation. We are at the end, we are about to say goodbye to something they did not yet know. Perhaps that is why we see resonances between our era and theirs. It remains to be seen whether the exit from this era will be as tumultuous as our journey into and through it. But as we cease to be creatures of high modernity, new affinities become possible. It is exciting, even instructive, to contemplate people in the situations of the 48th. The fissure and modernity of their politics, the upheaval and change without a fixed sense of direction, the anxieties around inequality and finitude of resources, the lethal entanglement of civil tumult with international relations, the irruption of violence, utopia and spirituality into politics, yes a revolution is coming, and it seems we are a long way from a non-revolutionary solution, the polycrisis we face today may well resemble that of 1848: ill-planned, dispersed, irregular and made of contradictions.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for the comments, opinions or statements made by the people who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their sole responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference are the result of the debates held at the meeting held for this purpose at the Foundation and are the responsibility of their authors.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for any comments, opinions or statements made by third parties. In this respect, the FRP is not obliged to monitor the views expressed by such third parties who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their own responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference are the result of the discussions that took place during the conference organised for this purpose at the Foundation and are the sole responsibility of its authors.

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