I’ve always been fascinated by the failed revolutions of the 19th century and by the romantic socialists, democrats, and nationalists who made these revolutions. I think I have a better understanding of their world and the forces that brought them down than I have of the world I live in. But I do find in their writings remarkable echoes of my own fears and hopes about the future of democracy today.
I wrote
Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848
This magnificent study of the revolutions 1848 surpasses all the others in its sheer breadth. It makes 1848 a European and, in some respects, a global event. But what I find most appealing about the book is its vividness. The complex narrative is repeatedly punctuated by details and vignettes that bring the past to life.
If you listen to the wonderful audiobook, you will even hear Christopher Clark singing a song on the death of the great German 1848er, Robert Blum.
A Telegraph, Sunday Times, Economist and TLS Book of the Year
'One of the best history books you will read this decade' History Today
An exhilarating reappraisal of one of the most dramatic years in European history, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalkers
There can be few more exciting or frightening moments in European history than the spring of 1848. Almost as if by magic, in city after city, from Palermo to Paris to Venice, huge crowds gathered, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, and the political order that had held sway since the defeat of Napoleon simply collapsed.
T.J. Clark treats 1848 as a time when “art and politics could not escape each other,” and he offers a brilliant discussion of the efforts of artists to confront that situation. There are wonderful chapters on Delacroix’s anguished retreat into a private world, Millet’s portrait of the peasantry as a class in dissolution, and Baudelaire as a poet of post-revolutionary despair.
But for me, the most arresting portions of the book focus on Daumier, who was unique in his ability to depict the life of the Paris streets and create the great image of the Bonapartist con-man in the figure of Ratapoil. What I find most telling in these portraits, and the book as a whole, is T.J. Clark’s ability to “put back the doubt into revolution”—to recapture the confusion, the uncertainty, and the sense that everything was at risk.
When this book and its companion volume, Image of the People, appeared in 1973, they were taken as a challenge to the way art was usually written about. "This book," said the Times, "is a product of that school of art history whose history is as well read as its art, and whilst it covers only a small area of time and place, Clark's approach and style are such that it throws up enough ideas and pleasures to illuminate far beyond its rather special circumstances. It is suffused with wit and pathetic irony."
Who was the man who would become Caesar's lieutenant, Brutus' rival, Cleopatra's lover, and Octavian's enemy?
When his stepfather is executed for his involvement in the Catilinarian conspiracy, Mark Antony and his family are disgraced. His adolescence is marked by scandal and mischief, his love affairs are fleeting, and yet,…
This book is both an attempt to reclaim the legacy of the Paris Commune for our time and a rich and stimulating investigation of the Commune as “a working laboratory of political invention.” The focus is not on the traditional narrative culminating with the slaughter of Bloody Week. It is on the efforts of individuals—some far removed from the Communards’ Paris—to imagine a world marked by the inversion of longstanding hierarchies and divisions.
What makes the book especially compelling is Ross’s ability to “think with” both Communards like Elisabeth Dmitrieff and Elisée Reclus and outsiders like Kropotkin and Marx as they “open up the field of the possible” in reflecting on the Commune.
Kristin Ross's new work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today's concerns-internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice-frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of…
This is an eye-witness account of the French Revolution of 1848 by a major participant. It offers a fascinating, acerbic picture of the major actors, the revolutionary “days,” and Tocqueville’s unhappy experience as Foreign Minister. It vividly conveys a sense of both the fears of the propertied classes and the limitations of radicals who could only play at revolution, mimicking the roles and gestures of 1789-’94.
But what I find most compelling is Tocqueville’s preoccupation with questions that are central to our understanding of the failures of democratic politics, then and now. How is it that in the space of two generations, democratic revolutions twice culminated in Napoleonic dictatorship? Why do so many democratic governments, including ours, appear to be moving in the same direction now?
Alexis de Tocqueville's Souvenirs was his extraordinarily lucid and trenchant analysis of the 1848 revolution in France. Despite its bravura passages and stylistic flourishes, however, it was not intended for publication. Written just before Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's 1851 coup prompted the great theorist of democracy to retire from political life, it was initially conceived simply as an exercise in candid personal reflection. In Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, renowned historian Olivier Zunz and award-winning translator Arthur Goldhammer offer an entirely new translation of Tocqueville's compelling book.
The book has an interesting publishing history. Yielding to pressure from…
This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year search…
This novel is both the story of an unconsummated love affair and an account of the experience and imaginative life of the generation of young people who came to maturity around 1840 and whose lives were either broken or redirected by the revolution of 1848.
Flaubert takes great care to establish a counterpoint between the collapse of political ideals in 1848 and the collapse of the dreams of the individual characters. But Sentimental Education can also be considered as a work of history that brings the past to life and, in the end, offers a deep and, in some ways, sympathetic picture of the inability of individuals to shape history or their own lives, in a world ruled by elemental forces that elude understanding.
A fresh and vivid translation of Flaubert's influential bildungsroman
Gustave Flaubert conceived Sentimental Education, his final complete novel, as the history of his own generation, one that failed to fulfill the promise of the Revolution of 1848. Published a few months before the start of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, it offers both a sweeping panorama of French society over three decades and an intimate bildungsroman of a young man from a small town who arrives in Paris when protests against the monarchy are increasing.
The novel's protagonist, Frederic Moreau, alternates between aimlessness and ambition as he searches for a meaningful…
The Revolution of 1848 galvanized the energies of major romantic writers. This book follows nine writers through 1848 and its aftermath: Hugo, Lamartine, Flaubert, George Sand, Marie d’Agoult, Alexander Herzen, Tocqueville, Proudhon, and Marx. Describing the experience of 1848 as each of these writers lived it, this study captures the sense of possibility at a time when it was not yet clear that the Second French Republic had no future.
By looking closely at key texts in which each writer attempted to understand, judge, criticize, or intervene in the revolution, Beecher shows how each attempted to answer the question posed explicitly by Tocqueville: Why, within the space of two generations, did democratic revolutions twice culminate in the dictatorship of a Napoleon?
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