1848: The Romantic and Democratic Revolutions in Europe

by Jean Sigmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 30, 1973

This is an ambitious and disappointing attempt to find coherence and unity in the revolutions of 1848. Sigmann, a French historian, leapfrogs the map of Europe touching on Chartism, the Swiss Sonderbund, peasant jacqueries in Posnania, the inchoate socialist doctrines of Parisian artisans, German nationalism and the dispute over proprietary rights to Schleswig-Holstein, and the Austrian dilemma in Italy. At best this rendering of the many political and economic grievances which boiled in the years 1846-48 will help the novice reader get a sense of the divergent and conflicting aims of the constitution-making liberals, the embryonic industrial proletariat and the peasantry -- the three groups whose failure to coalesce ultimately insured the triumph of reaction. Sigmann evidently sees 1848 as part and parcel of the tumults of the two previous decades since fully half the book is given over to a country-by-country survey of European internal development from 1830 (a far more successful effort to deal with the period is William Langer's Political and Social Upheaval: Eighteen Thirty-two to Eighteen Fifty-two, 1969) with the broad outlines sometimes lost in the barrage of particulars. Sigmann's ultimate judgment of the men of '48 seems occasionally strange and contradictory. Why, for example, are the Italian democrats said to be indulging in ""disheveled romanticism"" while the Frankfurt parliamentarians -- whom most historians have seen as both hypocritical and impotent -- are deemed to have struggled valiantly for constitutionalism and national unity in impossible circumstances? And surely the peasants were not ""the spoilt children of the revolution""! Some of the problems here evidently come from the translation but Sigmann's presentation goes in too many directions at once at too frenzied a pace.

Pub Date: May 30, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION