the sleepwalkers christopher clark review

The first revolt, in Palermo, Sicily, was inspired by the island’s history of “romantic nationalism”. But it provided the fuel, in the form of a desperate urban working class. Penury was not, in the end, the spark that ignited the revolution. Writers and analysts documented and publicised this “social question”, among them Ange Guépin and Eugène Bonamy, two French doctors Bettina von Arnim, a German author and activist and Friedrich Engels. Artisans who had been relatively comfortable, such as weavers, found their wages driven down by trade and industrialisation. Children were put to work in dangerous factories.

Rising populations and a devastating potato blight drove hungry peasants into towns, where itinerant labourers and their families lived in squalor. Professor Clark opens with a harrowing chapter on the immiseration of the poor over the previous decade or so. One of the challenges of 1848 is identifying what caused the conflagration that leapt from city to city in February and March. Even conservative regimes (such as Prussia’s) or authoritarian ones (such as Napoleon III’s in France) embraced technological and administrative methods to improve living standards for workers and the bourgeoisie. After 1848 Europe rapidly became a very different place. The movements and ideas tested in this chamber included liberalism, democratic radicalism, socialism, nationalism, conservative monarchism and even corporatism. People, groups and ideas flew into it, crashed together, fused or fragmented.” The tumult, he writes, was “the particle-collision chamber at the centre of the European 19th century. As for failure, Professor Clark is adamant that in many countries the revolutions were the precursor of “swift and lasting constitutional change”. He tackles the complexity by giving sufficient space to the often thrilling stories of every uprising, and by basing his tale on a compelling cast of idealists, thinkers, propagandists, cynics, adventurers, opportunists and (often doomed) heroes.

The sleepwalkers christopher clark review