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Serial Revolutions 1848 Clare Pettitt
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Serial Revolutions 1848

Serial Revolutions 1848

Writing, Politics, Form
CLARE PET TIT T
1
1
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For Kitty and Marina

I nostri gioielli
Acknowledgements
In 1848 Europe became newly conscious of itself. But in Britain, 1848 revealed a
schism between ‘Europeans’ and ‘Little Englanders’. A schism which is still with
us: I was researching and writing Serial Revolutions:1848 across the Brexit refer-
endum and up to the final throes of Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiations. I finished
this book during the first lockdown caused by the COVID-19 crisis, an epidemic
which pushed Brexit out of the news headlines to reveal instead the fragility and
futility of national boundaries in an irreversibly globalized world. Just as I was
finishing the first draft of the book, the Black Lives Matter protests started their
own serial global movement. In the US they moved from state to state, in Europe
from country to country, city to city. Unlike the revolutions of 1848, they were
largely peaceful and bloodless. But the call to think politically again about the
social was like a déja vue. For nearly two centuries since Frederick Douglass
called out ‘the gross injustice and cruelty to which [the black woman and man] is
the constant victim’, that cruelty and injustice has shown little sign of abating.1 As
historians, literary critics, academics, and citizens, we need to know our history
better. We need to better understand how European our ‘British’ identity truly is,
and how the violence of empire and the catastrophe of slavery are still determin-
ing our modern world. The nationalisms of 1848 which had briefly seemed to
belong to ‘the people’ were quickly co-opted and they developed into something
much darker in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now nationalism
seems to have taken deep root. We live with and in history, and it is not inevitable
that the history of today will necessarily be any less appalling than that of yester-
day. But 1848 also generated ideas of universalism, pacifism, feminism, and dif-
ferent versions of socialism and communism. Returning to 1848, we can choose
to look back on that ‘springtime of the peoples’ as a moment of tragi-comic fail-
ure, obliterated by the brutalities that followed, or we can look again, and see it as
a proleptic moment of stored potential, an extraordinary series of events that
generated long-distance and sustainable ideas about global citizenship, inter
national cooperation and a shared and common humanity which have not yet
been fully understood or realized. The springtime of 1848 has been long delayed,
1 Frederick Douglass, ‘“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”: Oration delivered in
Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, by Frederick Douglass, 5 July 1852’, Frederick Douglass:
Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Chicago Review Press,
2000), pp. 188–206, p. 196.
viii Acknowledgements
but, with some effort, and more understanding, we can bring its forgotten meanings
back to life so they can blossom and flourish in the present.
I gave very full acknowledgements in the first volume of this series, Serial
Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815–1848, and as this second volume
goes to press only eighteenth months later, I will not reiterate them all here.
I would however like to thank the people who helped me with this particular
book in very specific ways: Caroline Arscott; Mary Beard; Laurel Brake; Trev
Broughton; Christopher Clark; David Edgerton; Bernhard Fulda; Paul Gilroy;
Isobel Hofmeyr; Richard Kirkland; Julia Kuehn; David Laven; Claire Lawton;
Sharon Marcus; Roger Parker; John Stokes; Harriet Thompson; Mark Turner;
Adam Tooze; and Patrick Wright. My husband, Cristiano Ristuccia, was an
inspiration throughout, having been taught an entirely different version of the
history of the nineteenth century at his school in Rome to the British-imperial
history that was delivered at mine in Manchester. My elder daughter Kitty helped
me with page numbers and references. Of course, all the views expressed in this
work, and any mistakes in the chapters that follow, are entirely my own.
Part of the book was written while I was on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship
in 2019, and I am extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting my
work, but I am even more grateful for all that they do to sustain research in the
humanities more generally in this country. I wrote most of Chapters 1, 6, and 7 at
Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden and I thank the staff there for their welcome and
hospitality. I want to thank King’s College London once more for its commitment
to research in the humanities, and its generous contribution towards image repro-
duction and indexing costs for this book. And I again thank Johanna Ward and
Domniki Papadimitriou in the Cambridge University Library who welcomed me
back for this second deluge of digital image orders without flinching. The
Bibliothèque nationale de France was also exemplary in dealing with my many
image orders with great care and efficiency in the midst of a pandemic.
Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University Press has shown an ambition on my
behalf which has been immensely empowering. Thank you, Jacqueline. The
anonymous reader of this book manuscript for the Press was generous and atten-
tive to the whole argument, suggesting specific improvements that were spot-on,
and I thank them wholeheartedly for that. Aimee Wright once again guided the
book through the Press with consummate skill and attention to detail. Howard
Emmens copy-edited this book, as he did my last one, with great erudition and
precision and it is much better for his input. Vasuki Ravichandran and her team
at Straive were impeccably efficient and kept us all to production deadlines.
Hardly anything in this book has been previously published, but an earlier ver-
sion of Chapter 10 did appear as ‘Dickens and the Form of the Historical Present’,
in Daniel Tyler (ed.), Dickens’s Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), pp. 110–36, and it is repurposed and republished here with the permission
of Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgements ix
I started presenting material that would eventually find its way into this book
in June 2007, when I gave a conference paper on Dickens in the 1840s in Genoa,
Italy. Since then, I have given plenaries, papers, and seminars about aspects of
1848 at Hong Kong University and in Venice, at the Media History Seminar in
London, and in Birmingham, New York, Delhi, Exeter, Los Angeles, Nottingham,
Oxford, Surrey, Warwick, and York. In Cambridge, I have presented material
to the Cultural History Seminar, the Cambridge Italian Research Network
Symposium, the French Department Nineteenth- Century Seminar, and the
Cambridge University Gender Studies Seminar. My thanks to all these very vari-
ous audiences for helping me to discover that this was really a project about
Britain, Europe, and America in 1848, and also a project about Britain, Europe,
and America in 2021.
Contents
List of Illustrations xiii

List of Abbreviations xix
Introduction: Why 1848 Matters 1
1. Revolutionary Tourists 39
2. Moving Pictures 70
3. The Ragged of Europe 118
4. The Inter-National Novel 158
5. Under Siege 190
6. Serially Speaking 227
7. Slavery and Citizenship 259
8. O bella libertà 291
9. Forms of the Future 323
10. The Grammar of Revolution 355
Flaubert’s Afterword 391
Bibliography 403
Index 441
List of Illustrations
0.1. Julius Steinmetz, ‘Berlin am 18. und 19. März 1848’ (Meißen, 1848)
[Berlin 18–19, March 1848] [Credit: bpk/Deutsches Historisches
Museum, Berlin]. 3
0.2. ‘Alexandre Dumas Borne in Triumph by the People’, Illustrated London
News (11 March 1848): 162. [Reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]. 35
0.3. Alexandre Lacauchie, ‘Frédérick Lemaître, dans Toussaint-Louverture’,
lithograph (Paris: Martinet, 1850). The white French actor, Frédérick Lemaître
as Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian revolution in the play of
the same name by Alphonse de Lamartine at the Théâtre de la
Porte Saint-Martin. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 36
2.1. [Anonyme], ‘Le Trône Brulé’: ‘The People Burning the Throne at the Place
de la Bastille, 1848’, French lithograph. [Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée
Carnavalet, Paris, France © Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images]. 75
2.2. Nathaniel Currier, ‘The Burning of the Throne Paris 25th February 1848’.
Hand-coloured American lithograph (1848). This lithograph was produced
in France (see Fig. 2.1). It then travelled swiftly to America, where its
caption was offered in both French and English. [D’Amour Museum
of Fine Arts, Springfield, Mass. USA/Alamy]. 76
2.3. ‘View of the Conflagration of the City of Hamburg’, Illustrated London News
(14 May 1842): 1. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]. 84
2.4. ‘Revolution in Prussia: Conflict before the Royal Palace, At Berlin’, Illustrated
London News (1 April 1848): 214. [Reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]. 85
2.5. Masthead, Illustrated London News (London) (8 July 1848). [Reproduced by
kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]. 89
2.6. Masthead, L’Illustration (Paris) (26 juin 1847). [© Bibliothèque nationale de
France].89
2.7. Illusterad Tidning (Stockholm), (21 Maj 1859). [Credit: Royal
Danish Library]. 89
2.8. Masthead, Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) (1 Juli 1843). [© Bibliothèque
nationale de France].89
2.9. Illustreret Tidende (Copenhagen) (12 October 1862). [Credit:
Royal Danish Library]. 89
2.10. Masthead, Il Mondo Illustrato (Turin) (18 dicembre 1847). [© Bibliothèque
nationale de France]. 89
xiv List of Illustrations
2.11. Paul Gavarni, ‘Insurgent Prisoners in Paris Receiving Relief from their
Families’, Illustrated London News (22 July 1848): 33. [Reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library NPR.C.313]. 94
2.12. ‘Les femmes et les enfants des insurgés aux portes des prisones’, L’Illustration
(29 juillet 1848): 325. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 95
2.13. ‘Barricade in the rue St. Martin’, Illustrated London News (4 March 1848).
[Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library NPR.C.313]. 97
2.14. ‘Barricade in der Rue St. Martin in Paris am 23 Februar’, Illustrirte Zeitung
(11 März 1848): 177. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 98
2.15. ‘Death of Archbishop of Paris’, Illustrated London News (8 July 1848).
2.16. ‘Tod des Erzbischofs von Paris’, Illustrirte Zeitung (8 Juli 1848).
[© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 100
2.17. ‘The Great Sea Serpent of 1848’, Punch, or the London Charivari 15
(4 November 1848): 193. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library T992.b.1.8]. 101
2.18. ‘Apparition du serpent de mer’, Le Charivari (23 décembre 1848), n.p.
2.19. ‘Die Große Seeschlange von 1848’, Illustrirte Zeitung
(30 Dezember 1848): 436. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 102
2.20. ‘Newsvendor on the Boulevards’, Illustrated London News (1 April 1848): 211.
2.21. ‘Le marchand des Journaux ambulant’, L’Illustration (10 juin 1848): 229.
2.22. ‘Les grandes industries du jour, scènes de moeurs par Andrieux: ‘Les Crieurs
de journaux. – La onzième edition de la Presse; tirage de l’après-midi’,
L’Illustration (1 avril 1848): 68. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 105
2.23. ‘Das Reichsministerium’, Illustrirte Zeitung (16 Dezember 1848): 396.
2.24. ‘Vue intérieure de la salle de l’Assemblé nationale’, L’Illustration (13 mai 1848):
169. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 107
2.25. ‘The French Provisional Government: Louis Blanc, President of the
Operatives’ Commission; Garnier Pages, Minister of Finance; Armand
Marrast, Mayor of Paris’, Illustrated London News (18 March 1848):
181–2. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library NPR.C.313]. 108
2.26. ‘Portraits of the French Deputies’, Punch, or the London Charivari xiv
(13 May 1848): 203. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library T992.b.1.7]. 108
List of Illustrations xv
2.27. ‘Interior of a Chamber – a family of insurgents protecting a barricade

in the Rue St Antoine’, Illustrated London News (1 July 1848): 418.
2.28. ‘Inneres einer Abeiterstube bei Bertherdigung einer Barricade in der Rue de
Faubourg St. Antoine zu Paris am 23 Juni’. [‘Inside of a workers’ room while
a barricade is being built in the Rue de Faubourg St. Antoine in Paris on
June 23’] Illustrirte Zeitung (8 Juli 1848). [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 110
2.29. ‘Ruines de la maison rue du faubourg Saint-Antoine, no.29’, L’Illustration
(1–8 juillet 1848): 280. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 110
2.30. ‘There is no place like home’. Double-page spread. Punch, or the London
Charivari (20 January 1849): 28–9. [Reproduced by kind permission
of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library T992.b.1.8]. 111
2.31. ‘Où peut-on être mieux qu’au sein de sa Famille’, L’Illustration (10 février
1849): 373. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 112
2.32. ‘Horloge indiquant les heures dans les principals villes du globe par rapport
au méridien de Paris’, L’Illustration (14 octobre 1848): 112. [© Bibliothèque
2.33. ‘Die Straßburger-Münsteruhr’, Illustrirte Zeitung (30 Dezember 1848): 433.
2.34. Télégraphe electro-magnétique du professeur Morse’, L’Illustration (26 juin
1847): 260. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 116
2.35. Detail of the masthead of Il Mondo Illustrato (1847). [© Bibliothèque
3.1. Draner [Jules Renard], Robert Macaire. Ambigu, 1823 & 1880
(Frédéric Lemaître)’. This image, made after the actor’s death in 1876,
commemorates Lemaître in his most famous role at the Théâtre de
l’Ambigu. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 123
3.2. Honoré Daumier, ‘Caricaturana’ or ‘Robert Macaire’, Le Charivari
(20 août 1836): n.p. This was the first of a series of a hundred cartoons
published in Charles Philipon’s daily paper between 20 August 1836 and
25 November 1838. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 124
3.3. Henry Valentin, ‘Theatre de Porte-Saint-Martin. - Le Chiffonier de Paris,
1er tableau du 2e acte. - Frédérick Lemaître: le père Jean dans son bouge.’
(1847). [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 125
3.4. Honoré Daumier, ‘Le Chiffonier Philosophe. “Fume, fanfan, fume . . . n’y a
qu’ la pipe distingue . . .” (Tout Ce Qu’on Voudra)’ Le Charivari
(28 novembre 1847). [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 127
3.5. ‘Le Chiffon deviendra Papier’ from ‘Une planche encyclopédique’, publiée
avec texte par Le Journal de Mères et des Enfants à Paris (1850) (‘Rags
will become Paper’ from an educational poster showing the process of
paper-making). [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 128
xvi List of Illustrations
3.6. ‘The Effects of Our Own Revolution’, Punch, or the London Charivari
(25 March 1848): 130. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics
of Cambridge University Library T992.b.1.7]. 141
3.7. [Anon.] ‘Dips into the Diary of Barrabas Bolt, Esq.’, Man in the Moon 3:17
(1848): 243. G.W.M. Reynolds is shown here fraternizing with a French
socialist who resembles caricatures of the extreme French radical republican
Louis Auguste Blanqui. [Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library T900.e.6.3]. 147
3.8. Ackermann’s Print of Benjamin Haydon, ‘Waiting for The Times (after an
adjourned debate)’ (1831). [© The Trustees of the British Museum]. 149
3.9. Charles Joseph Traviès de Villers, ‘Caricatures du jour: la lecture des
Mystères de Paris: “Après vous, monsieur, s’il vous plait!” ’ Le Charivari
(7 novembre 1842): n.p. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 150
3.10. ‘Literature at a Stand’, Punch, or the London Charivari (13 March 1847): 113.
Library T992.b.1.6]. 151
3.11. Map of Castelcicala, G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London (II, CLXXIV).
Library 8700.b.161]. 155
5.1. Arthur Clough’s Rome Notebook, 1846–48. [Reproduced with the kind
permission of Balliol College Oxford archives]. 212
8.1. Giorgio Mignati, ‘Salon at Casa Guidi’ (1861), watercolour. [Special
Collections, F.W. Olin Library, Mills College]. 293
8.2. ‘Quelli che leggono i giornali con comodo. Attualità Caricature di Japhet’
[Those who read the newspapers in comfort], Il Mondo Illustrato
(18 dicembre 1847): 809. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 299
8.3. ‘Il Débats messo al Pileri, al caffè dell’Ussaro a Pisa. Attualità Caricature
di Japhet’ [The Débats newspaper put in the pillory, at the caffè dell’Ussaro
in Pisa], Il Mondo Illustrato (18 dicembre 1847): 809. The caffè dell’Ussaro
was a meeting place in Pisa for intellectuals and supporters of the Italian
national cause. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 300
8.4. Tiny sketch by Elizabeth Barrett Browning of Piazza San Felice during the
September procession on the first page of a letter to her sisters Arabella and
Henrietta Moulton-Barrett (Florence, 13 September 1847) The Brownings’
Correspondence 14, p. 307. The editors explain the locations in the sketch.
In the centre, above the crowd: ‘Piazza San Felice alive & filled with people’;
to the right: ‘viva P. IX’; to the left: ‘The procession ending up at Piazza Pitti’;
vertical in left margin: ‘our palazzo’ [i.e. Casa Guidi]; above in left margin:
‘via maggio’; top margin: ‘Palace of the Pitti—surrounded by balconies of
stone, most of them thronged’; below (starting at ‘balconies’): ‘Foreign
ladies being admitted to the top of the great tower’. [Image courtesy of
The Camellia Collections]. 307
List of Illustrations xvii
8.5. ‘Dove si dovrebbero mandare. Attualità Caricature di Japhet’

[Where they should be sent], Il Mondo Illustrato (18 dicembre 1847):
809. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]. 313
9.1. ‘The death of Anita Garibaldi at Guiccioli Farm in Mandriole, near Ravenna,
Italy’, The Heroic Life & Career of Garibaldi. A panel from a moving panorama
exhibited in Britain in 1861. [Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown
University Library]. 331
9.2. Odoardo Borrani, Il 26 aprile 1859 in Firenze (1861). [Alinari Archives,
Florence].342
9.3. Odoardo Borrani, Le cucitrici di camicie rosse (1863). [Alinari Archives,
Florence].343
9.4. Silvestro Lega, Canto di uno stornello (1867). [Alinari Archives, Florence]. 344
9.5. Odoardo Borrani, L’analfabeta (1869). [Alinari Archives, Florence]. 347
10.1. Giulio Romano, Frescoed Chamber of Giants: Side Wall, Palazzo Tè,
Mantua (1532–35). [Alinari Archives, Florence]. 368
10.2. Giovanni Battista Castello detto il Bergamasco, La caduta di Fetonte
(1560), Villa di Tobia Pallavicino detta delle Peschiere, Genova, Italy.
[Photograph credit: Carlo Dell’Orto]. 369
10.3. Richard Doyle, ‘Trotty Veck among the Bells’ (1844) Full-page wood
engraving for The Chimes: Third Quarter. [© Bodleian Libraries, Oxford]. 371
10.4. Richard Doyle, ‘Margaret and her Child’ (1844) Full-page wood engraving
for The Chimes: Fourth Quarter. [© Bodleian Libraries, Oxford]. 371
10.5. Daniel Maclise, ‘The Tower of the Chimes’ (1844) Full-page wood engraving
for The Chimes. [© Bodleian Library, Oxford]. 371
10.6. Antonio da Correggio, Assunzione della Vergine [The Assumption of the
Virgin] (c.1522–1530) Fresco decorating the dome of the Cathedral of
Parma, Italy. [Alinari Archives, Florence]. 374
List of Abbreviations
AHC Arthur Hugh Clough

AHC Corr. The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed.
Frederick L. Mulhauser, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957)
AHC Remains The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough: with a
selection from his letters and a memoir, edited by his wife
[Blanche Clough] (London: Macmillan & Co., 1888)
CD Letters 3 The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 3: 1843–1847, ed. Madeline

House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1974)
CD Letters 4 The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 4: 1844–1846, ed. Kathleen
Tillotson, pp. 645–7, p. 646 (hereafter)
EBB Elizabeth Barrett Browning

EBB Letters The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon
(London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1897) vol. 1
EBB/RB Recollections Martin Garrett (ed.), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert
Browning: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke:
Macmillan Press, 2000)
FD Life and Writings 1 Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Life and Writings of Frederick
Douglass, vol. 1: Early Years, 1817–1849 (New York:
International Publishers, 1950)
FDP1 The Frederick Douglass Papers 1841–1846, ed. John
W. Blassingame et al., Series One, vol. 1
FD Speeches and Writings Frederick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed.
Philip S. Foner, abridged and adapted by Yival Taylor (Chicago:
Lawrence Hill, 1999)
ILN Illustrated London News
JPH James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Years of Promise,

1809–1851 (London: Constable, 1949)
Later Lectures Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (eds), The Later Lectures of
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1843–1871, 2 vols (Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 2010)
MF Margaret Fuller
MF Letters 5 Robert N. Hudspeth (ed.), The Letters of Margaret Fuller,
vol. 5: 1848–1849 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988)
xx List of Abbreviations
RWE Ralph Waldo Emerson

RWE JMN 10 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
vol. 10: 1847–1848, ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 1973)
RWE Letters 3 The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1939)
RWE Letters 4 The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 4, ed. Ralph L. Rusk
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1939)
Sad but Glorious Margaret Fuller, ‘These Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe,
1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991)
Stanley 1 Rowland E. Prothero (ed.), The Life and Correspondence of Arthur

Penrhyn Stanley D.D., Late Dean of Westminster, vol. 1 (London: John
Murray, 1893)
WEF T. Wemyss Reid, Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Forster,
vol. 1 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1888)
Introduction
Why 1848 Matters
Stuttering, scattered, and various in their outcomes, a series of revolutions erupted

in the mid to late 1840s which spanned from the Atlantic to Ukraine, from the
Baltic to the Mediterranean, reaching Peru, Brazil, and Chile, catapulting millions
of people across the European continent into political life and breaking Europe
open once again in ways unseen since the Napoleonic period. By 1851 most of
these revolutions had ‘failed’. Karl Marx announced in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte’ that ‘[f]rom 1848 to 1851 only the ghost of the old revolution
wandered about . . . an entire people, which had imagined that by means of a revo-
lution it had imparted to itself an accelerated power of motion, suddenly finds
itself set back into a defunct epoch’.1 Since then the profound and lasting effects
of 1848 on the international construction of modern political and aesthetic
sensibilities have remained underacknowledged. Rather than just a brief period
of international volatility and rebellion which collapsed, failed, and capitulated
to the reactionary forces of the counter-revolution, 1848 was a game-changer.
The problem was that nobody was quite sure what the game had changed into.
My three-book series sets out a new historiography of the nineteenth century
by focusing on and establishing the centrality of the increasing purchase of serial
practices. The ‘novel’ in this period, for example, is not a closed volume, but a
series of time-released parts; the ‘newspaper’ is not a regular daily event, but
a variety of much messier unevenly distributed serial forms; and ‘politics’ is not an
elite conversation, but a fast-evolving popular understanding of constitutional
formats and possibilities.2 Seriality offered a century that was already on the move
a way of modelling movement. The form of the serial moves onwards through
calendar time: by its dynamic forward trajectory, it seems to unspool into the
empty future. Indeed, I argue that it is actively constructing that very model of
a future in a way that echoes Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the
1 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected
Works, vol. 11: Marx and Engels 1851–1853 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979), pp. 99–197, p. 105.
All further references are to this edition. ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’ was originally published in 1852 in
Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York City.
2 I am challenging Benedict Anderson’s version of the newspaper and the novel in his 1983
Imagined Communities here, but I agree with Anderson when he says, ‘how basic to the modern
imagining of collectivity seriality always is’: Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons:
Nationalism, South East Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), p. 40.
Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form. Clare Pettitt, Oxford University Press. © Clare Pettitt 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830412.003.0001
2 Serial Revolutions 1848
‘homogeneous, empty time’ of modernity.3 In my argument, the nineteenth-

century serial is not just a literary category, but a political, historical, and social
one. In a series, each linked element has something in common with every other
element of a series, but this does not mean they are identical: the series is a format
which allows for growth and development across time and space. Therefore, the
series can achieve commonality without erasing difference.4 Time-released, it is a
flexible and usefully unstable form that can respond quickly to a changing social
situation. My work starts with print and shows how the gathering strength of the
rhythm of serial print in the first half of the nineteenth century created a new
sense of shared social time and inaugurated a new politics of seriality too: a polit
ics of connections, of development, and of international equivalence.
Using seriality to think about history allows us to see how by the mid-
nineteenth century ideas about progressive historical time are interacting with a
live new universalism, and an international sense of commonality. Historians
have used contagion or circulation to think about the transnational spread of
political ideas but such models obscure historical agency and possibility. Seriality,
by contrast, can reorientate our historical understanding and allow us to see the
things that the traditional historiography has missed. In 1848 the serial conversa-
tion was not about ‘nation’, ‘class’, or ‘industrial labour’: it was about raggedness,
constitutional democracy, and the city-polis. In Serial Revolutions I track a self-
conscious pan-European seriality which helps us to rethink the historiography of
1848. This seriality generated tropes and forms at the time which have been
ignored by subsequent historians, who are often evaluating 1848 with the benefit
of hindsight or with a kind of catastrophic presentism, which perhaps amount to
the same thing. Thinking with seriality helps us to reopen the live debate of 1848.
Seriality, then, can help us to model the 1848 revolutions much more flexibly than
can such monolithic categories as ‘nation’, ‘class’, or ‘religion’: viewed through the
model of seriality these events manifest as a series of responses to a similar pres-
sure from very different places and political contexts. This helps to reconfigure
the 1848 revolutions not as identical copies emanating eastwards from Paris, but
rather as distributed parallel responses to similar (but not identical) provocations
and forms of oppression.5 And as they roll across Europe, the self-conscious sense
of their own seriality increases, until they become popularly understood as
3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, especially Thesis 13, in Illuminations,
trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana 1992), pp. 245–55, p. 252.
4 As I discuss in greater detail below, at pp. 26ff., I have found Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of social
seriality helpful here as articulated in Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans.
Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976), originally published as Critique de la raison
dialectique, précedé de questions de méthode (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
5 The 1848 revolutions did not start in Paris. On 12 January 1848, the people of Palermo and
Messina in Sicily rose in a full-scale revolt against Ferdinand II, Bourbon king of Naples and Sicily.
Other towns in Sicily followed and riots broke out on the mainland in Naples and in Austria as
Metternich threatened to intervene on the part of the Bourbon king. In February Ferdinand granted
Naples and Sicily a popular constitution and the people established a new provisional government.
Introduction 3
Fig. 0.1 Julius Steinmetz, ‘Berlin am 18. und 19. März 1848’ (Meißen, 1848) [Berlin
18–19, March 1848].
[Credit: bpk/Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin].
‘a series’. Serial forms emerged to meet the serial revolutions. Historian of comic
strips Andreas Platthaus has noted that one of the earliest ‘serialized’ printed
news images in Germany appeared in 1848. A news sheet produced in Meissen,
Saxony represented the Berlin revolution through a formal sequence of framed
vignettes6 [see Fig. 0.1].
6 Andreas Platthaus, an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, notes the opinion of Berlin
historian Margret Dorothea Minkels that Julius von Minutoli, the then Chief of Police of Berlin, might
In Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2020), I focused on Britain, and primarily on London, arguing that
a daily news culture developed alongside an emergent popular culture of historicism.
The rapid expansion of print in London after the Napoleonic Wars meant that the
historical past and the contemporary moment were emerging into public visibility
through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, shows, and new forms of
mediation. As a prequel to the extraordinary revolutionary event- sequence of
1848–9, Serial Forms argues that the rhythms of seriality in the early nineteenth
century did not create political subjects out of people overnight, but that they did
crucially start to create the feeling of being part of a daily politics for more and more
British people. Serial Revolutions traces the onward development of this new under-
standing of seriality. This means that seriality is both the subject of the book and its
method. Using seriality as a form to think with, I reinterpret the world of 1848 and
show how the distributive function of the serial worked to transmit ideas and
identities across a Europe which was already being recalibrated and reconstructed
into a newly imagined space by a shared historicism.
In early nineteenth- century Britain, under a brutal counter- revolutionary
regime of censorship, people were hungry for novelty. Novelty brought with it
new forms of knowledge and at least some pieces of the apparatus of citizenship.
Understanding nineteenth-century historicism as a series of material practices,
and not as a purely ‘intellectual history’, means that we can investigate what
equipment was newly put within people’s grasp, sometimes quite literally, and
how they chose to use it. What is vital for Serial Revolutions is how these linkages
coalesced through the 1830s and 1840s into new forms of collectivity. John Stuart
Mill observed in 1848 that in England the working classes would no longer accept
a ‘patriarchal or paternal system of government’ and had irrevocably ‘taken their
interests into their own hands’ once ‘they were taught to read, and allowed access
to newspapers and political tracts’, brought ‘together in numbers to work socially
under the same roof ’, and enabled by railways to ‘shift from place to place’.7 As
Serial Revolutions will show, all of these factors were important in the trans
national spread of the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1848: literacy, the press, visual
technologies, organized labour, social collectivity and mobility. It was only when
Europe began to read about itself, to imagine itself, and to see itself represented,
that its nationalisms became possible. Serial Revolutions will argue that the
revolutions of 1848, far from being the failure that Marx claimed them to be, were
the powerful response to a remarkable cross-class diagnosis of the political failure
of governments across Europe.
have produced this broadsheet. Minutoli’s moderate stance towards the March revolutionaries brought
him into disfavour with the King and when, three months later, the Berlin Arsenal was stormed by the
revolutionaries, he had to resign. Andreas Platthaus, lecture at the Deutsches Historisches Museum
(28 September 2017), https://www.dhm.de/blog/2018/01/25/the-power-of-the-picture/.
7 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy [1848], in Principles of Political Economy and Chapters on
Socialism, ed. Jonathan Riley, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 135.
Introduction 5
In its ‘Retrospect of 1848’ the Illustrated London News somewhat smugly

reflected that ‘[i]t is obvious to all that the revolutions and commotions of 1848
are not things of today merely, but that they took their rise in times far
remote . . . These commotions date, in fact, from the invention of printing. That
invention emancipated the mind of humanity.’8 But in reality, since the French
Revolution of 1789, ferocious censorship laws across the whole of Europe had
been deliberately hampering this emancipation. Under the Hapsburg Empire in
Austria and Italy the censorship regulation of 14 September 1810 was enforced by
a special department for Police, Censorship and the Press, answerable directly to
the Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich. King Ferdinand II of the
Kingdom of Naples and Sicily was draconian in controlling information. The
French Press Law of 1814, the Danish Law of Press Freedom of 1799, the Karlsbad
Decisions of 1819 in Germany, and the Six Acts of 1819 in Britain: all acted
together to ensure that it was exceedingly hard for ordinary working people in
Europe to follow the news and join in political debates. All the more extraordin
ary, then, that these revolutions, which were to be the ‘most dramatic, rapid, and
far-reaching spread of regime contention in history’ happened at a time ‘when
networks of communication and transportation were underdeveloped’.9 Serial
Revolutions suggests that it was a new imagination of social seriality promulgated
by serialized texts that created the European and global synchronization of the
events of 1848.
What Actually Happened?
There were warning tremors well before the full eruption in 1848. In 1846, the
Cracow revolt by the Polish Democratic Society against Austrian rule had been
put down so violently and effectively that there would be no hope of a revolution
in 1848, but even so the revolt provided inspiration to others, including Marx and
Engels. Similarly, the Chartist movement in 1840s England was brutally repressed
by the British secret police and prevented from organizing mass protests that
might have led to revolution. After the ‘Sonderbund War’ of 1846 and 1847, dele-
gates of the Swiss cantons drafted a new national constitution which was finalized
on 12 September 1848 and made Switzerland a federal state. This represented a
victory for the cantons run by socially minded Protestants over the more authori-
tarian Catholic-run cantons. Charles Dickens, who arrived in Geneva in autumn
1846, was deeply impressed, writing, ‘I believe there is no country on earth but
Switzerland in which a violent change could have been effected . . . in the same
8 [Anon.], ‘Retrospect of 1848’, Illustrated London News (30 December 1848): 417.
9 Kurt Weyland, ‘The Diffusion of Revolution: “1848” in Europe and Latin America’, International
Organization 63 (2009): 391–423, p. 396.
proud, independent, gallant style.’10 Meanwhile, calls for reform and national
unification were getting louder and louder in the German-speaking states; the
Hungarian opposition had overthrown the parliament in elections; and there was
a series of protests and riots in Lombardy.11
The year 1848 started as it meant to go on: on 12 January 1848, the people of
Palermo and Messina in Sicily rose in a full-scale revolt against Ferdinand II,
Bourbon king of Naples and Sicily. Ferdinand II had come to the throne in 1830,
the same year as Louis Philippe in France, and had developed a regime of harsh
repression and police surveillance. Tension was growing across Europe. That
January, American journalist, Margaret Fuller, wrote from Rome that ‘[e]very day
the cloud swells, and the next fortnight is likely to bring important tidings.’12 In
February the storm-cloud began to break when a rattled Ferdinand granted
Naples and Sicily a popular constitution and the people established a new provi-
sional government. Other towns in Sicily followed and riots broke out on the
mainland in Naples and in Austria as Metternich threatened to intervene on the
part of the Bourbon king.
1848 has long offered a specifically scalar challenge to historians. That spring,
more than fifty revolutions broke out across Europe within a period of a few
months. They ignited through the cities and towns of Austria, Prussia, Italy, and
the German states with further uprisings in Spain, Ireland, Denmark, and
Romania. The French 1848 revolution began on 22 February, with a demonstra-
tion organized by the radical press in Paris. A huge phalanx of unemployed and
poor people, many of them women, along with hundreds of students, marched
through the streets in heavy rain loudly singing the ‘Marseillaise’. From 22 to
24 February the barricades went up in Paris, King Louis Philippe escaped
to England, and the poet Alphonse de Lamartine was declared leader of the
Provisional Government. That February, too, the citizens of Rome began to organize
a revolt. and by November a full-scale popular revolution had led to the flight of
Pope Pius IX and the establishment of the second Roman Republic. On 13 March,
Metternich was forced to resign as Austrian Chancellor and also fled to England.
Two days later, on the morning of 15 March 1848, Hungarian lawyer and celebrity-
revolutionary Lajos Kossuth started a revolution in the Pilvax coffee palace in
Pest. Revolutionaries marched peacefully around the city declaring an end to all
forms of censorship. Then they marched directly to the print shops and printed
10 CD to Macready (24 October 1846), The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 4: 1844–1846, ed.
Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 646. All subsequent references to Dickens’s let-
ters are to the Clarendon edition.
11 See Hans Joachim Hahn, The 1848 Revolutions in German-Speaking Europe [2001] (London:
Routledge, 2013).
12 [Margaret Fuller [MF]], ‘No. XXII’, New-York Daily Tribune (13 March 1848): 1; repr. in ‘These
Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco
Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 199–208, p. 208. Fuller started writing this
dispatch in Rome in January. All subsequent references to Fuller’s dispatches for the New York Tribune
from Europe are to this edition, abbreviated as Sad but Glorious.
Introduction 7
the poet Sándor Petőfi’s banned nationalist poem together with their constitu-
tional demands. On 18 March in Milan, a street brawl between Austrian soldiers
and local civilians escalated into the cinque giornate, a furious five-day battle
which temporarily expelled the Austrians from the whole of north-eastern Italy.
And on the same day, 18 March, the chain of revolutions which had been spread-
ing northward from Munich to Frankfurt, Nassau, Cologne, and Solingen finally
reached Berlin. After eight hours of street-fighting, King Frederick William IV of
Prussia withdrew his troops from the city and agreed to the election of a constitu-
ent assembly. Four days later, on 22 March 1848, the city of Venice proclaimed the
rebirth of the ‘Venetian Republic’ and established a provisional government with
Daniele Manin, freed from prison by the revolutionaries, as its President. Large
crowds of Venetians gathered in front of the American Consulate shouting ‘Long
live the United States! Long live our sister republic!’ In London, the Chartist
‘monster’ demonstration of 10 April was overrun with special constables and
dampened by pouring rain. In truth, the Chartist Movement had already been
eviscerated and many of its leaders and members had been imprisoned or trans-
ported during the 1840s.13
In 1848 American poet Walt Whitman was working in New Orleans where
there were large French and German populations in exile from despotic regimes.
Whitman was the editor of a newspaper, the Crescent. ‘One’s blood rushes and
grows hot within him’, he wrote in the paper on 31 March, ‘the more he learns or
thinks of this news from the continent of Europe! Is it not glorious? This time, the
advent of Human Rights, though amid unavoidable agitation, is also amid com-
parative peace.’14 Violent revolutionary agitation was ramping up though. When
the dissolution of the National Workshops in Paris was announced on 22 June,
workers took to the barricades to defend the right to labour and the notorious
and bloody June Days (22 to 26 June 1848) followed as the fragile alliances
between the socialists and the liberals collapsed and divisions appeared between
Paris and the taxpayers of the rest of France.15 In Vienna on 6 October 1848,
13 More than a hundred men were transported to Tasmania for crimes associated with Chartism:
ten in 1839–40 after the Newport Rising, at least eighty-five in 1842–3, sixteen in 1848. Many more
were imprisoned and intimidated. Figures calculated from George Rudé, Protest and Punishment
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 131–44, quoted in Robert Fyson, ‘The Transported Chartist: The
Case of William Ellis’, in Robert Fyson, Owen R. Ashton, and Stephen Roberts (eds), The Chartist
Legacy (Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1999), pp. 80–101, p. 98.
14 [Anon.] [?Walt Whitman], ‘Editorial’, New Orleans Crescent (31 March 1848), p. 2, quoted in
Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1988), p. 14. The piece is unsigned, but Whitman scholars have attributed it to him.
15 Jonathan Israel explains the June Days thus: ‘But the cause of the ferocious strife setting the poorest
against the rest, and leading to the breakdown of the republic, in the process overthrowing the new
freedom of the press and expression, was not a property loving provincial bourgeoisie fighting the
Parisian proletariat but a socialist revolt against a weak republican regime refusing to act unconstitu-
tionally in the face of a conservative election victory’: Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the
American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017),
pp. 564–5.
troops of the Austrian Empire were preparing to leave the city to suppress the
Hungarian revolution when crowds sympathetic to the Hungarian cause rioted
and attacked the soldiers, and the Austrian Minister of War was lynched by the
crowd. Vienna’s October Days resembled the June Days in Paris in the severity of
punishments meted out to protestors. On 26 October, Austrian and Croatian
troops retook the city and the leaders of the insurgency, many of them writers and
journalists, were executed. Meanwhile, Russian troops were called in to help put
down the Hungarian revolution, and writers and artists were targeted and killed
there too. In Russia, Czar Nicholas prevented revolution from starting by extreme
and violent repression, ordering, for example, the torture and imprisonment of
the writer Dostoyevski and others in the Petraskevski circle who had been
inspired by the French Revolution.
After the Paris June Days, 4,000 insurgents were deported to Algeria, which
had been a French colony since 1830.16 England also used its colonial possessions
to dispose of revolutionary elements. And not only did the imperial and monar-
chical powers of Europe use their colonies as a punitive dumping ground, they
also brought repressive military practices from the colonies to the cities of Europe
to use in counter-insurgency operations.17 It was a two-way traffic, as surveillance
methods designed to keep track of radicals in the capitals of Europe were subse-
quently adapted and exported to control and coerce colonial peoples. One colo-
nial strategy of control was to set a country against itself, so the Austro-Hungarian
imperial command encouraged the Croats against the Magyars in Hungary and
the Czechs against the Germans in Prague; and England stoked the resentments
between the nationalists and unionists in Ireland.18 A Young Irelander uprising
(sometimes called the ‘Famine Rebellion’) in County Tipperary on 29 July 1848
was put down, after some bitter fighting, by the British-controlled Royal Irish
Constabulary. Resistance was occasionally successful. Abolitionist Victor Schoelcher,
who had just returned from a French posting in Haiti, headed a commission for
the French Provisional Government of 1848. Schoelcher reported a ‘trickledown’
effect of revolutionary ideas in Haiti: ‘[t]he slaves, despite the profound degrad
ation into which they had been plunged, could not long remain strangers to the
16 Jennifer Sessions has argued that ‘[t]he Revolution of 1848 was critical to the history of the
French colonies, including Algeria, but it is equally impossible to comprehend the Revolution of 1848
without consideration of France’s North African colony. In 1848, revolutionary politics was colonial
politics, and vice versa.’ Jennifer E. Sessions, ‘Colonizing Revolutionary Politics: Algeria and the French
Revolution of 1848’, French Politics, Culture and Society 33:1 (Spring 2015): 75–100, p. 95.
17 Frederick Cooper agrees that ‘[t]he Haitian Revolution in the French empire, the combination of
slave revolts and antislavery mobilization in the British empire, and the tensions between creole elites
and peasants and slaves in the era of revolution in Spanish America all point to the possibility that
politics in metropoles could not be neatly segregated from colonies’: Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in
Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 28–9.
18 Kay Boardman and Christine Kinealy agree that 1848 was ‘a watershed in the polarisation
between nationalists and unionists that dominated Irish politics in the following century’: Kay
Boardman and Christine Kinealy,‘Introduction’, in Kay Boardman and Christine Kinealy (eds), 1848:
The Year the World Turned? (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 1–20, p. 10.
Introduction 9
movements that were happening above their heads. The colonists spoke of inde-
pendence, the petits blancs of equality, the mulattos of political rights, the negroes
in their turn talked of liberty.’19 In fact, the slaves had already worked it out for
themselves, and when the Emancipation Decree of 27 April arrived in the
Caribbean on 3 June, the enslaved Haitians, through a series of ‘revolts’ or revolu-
tions, had already established their own freedom.20
Colonies were milked for resources and capital to mitigate the economic disas-
ter of the 1840s in Europe, as Miles Taylor has demonstrated for the British case.21
The British Government had been squeezing all its colonies hard in the 1840s and
consequently there were rebellions in Ceylon, the Ionian Islands, British India,
and the West Indies. Barricades were erected in Montreal and the Canadian
Parliament building was burnt down. In Cape Colony and Australia there were
anti-transportation societies protesting about their use as dumping grounds
for radicals and criminals. There were fifty-eight deaths during one protest in
Cape Colony.22 The events of 1848 were also felt in Chile and Brazil. In Brazil,
the Praiera revolt (1848–52) was an attempt by liberals to oust conservatives
from power. It was eventually defeated by government forces. Also inspired by
European events was the Young Argentina movement, and movements in
Columbia, Peru, and Bolivia. The Chilean revolution commenced on 20 April
1851, again inspired by France, but by the end of the year it had been brutally put
down by the conservative government.
1848, then, was not so much a ‘European Revolution’ as a global event. Or, more
accurately, a global series of events.23 In 1849, the Brazilian Insurgents issued a
19 Victor Schoelcher, Colonies étrangères et Haïti, vol. 2 (Paris: Pagnerre, 1843), p. 98. Jonathan
Dusenbury notes that free man of colour Cyrille Bissette contested Schoelcher’s view, claiming that
‘history is disfigured beneath his pen’ and protesting that the slaves of Haiti exercised much greater
political agency than Schoelcher admits: Cyrille Bissette, Réfutation du livre de M. V. Schoelcher sur
Haïti (Paris: Ébrard, 1844), p. 100. Translations from Jonathan Dusenbury, ‘Slavery and the Revolution
Histories of 1848’, Age of Revolutions (10 October 2016), https://ageofrevolutions.com/2016/10/10/
slavery-and-the-revolutionary-histories-of-1848/.
20 On the Haitian revolution, see David Brion Davis, ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture and the
Phenomenology of Mind’, in The Problem of Slavery in an Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 557–64; Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry 26:4
(2000): 821–65; Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009). For the effects of Haiti on America, see Edward Rugemer, The Problem of
Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State
University Press, 2008); and Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early
Republic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New
World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Laurent
Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Susan Buck- Morss suggests that
G. W. F. Hegel’s master–slave dialectic depended on Hegel’s reading of accounts of the Haitian upris-
ing. See also Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Universal History Upside Down’, Journal of Contemporary African Art
46 (May 2020): 28–39.
21 Miles Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire’, Past and Present 166 (2000): 146–80.
22 See Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions’, p. 150.
23 See Chapter 10, ‘Revolutions: From Philadelphia via Nanjing to Saint Petersburg’, in Jürgen
Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans.
Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 514–71.
‘Manifesto to the World’ which demanded universal voting rights, the freedom of
the press, guaranteed work for Brazilian citizens, and the establishment of a feder-
alist government.24 Both within Europe and outside Europe, the demands of 1848
were remarkably similar: they were the demands of colonized and oppressed
people everywhere. As if in one voice, they all asked for political representation,
civil liberties, self-determination, self-governance, work, and freedom of information.
The 1848 revolutions, jeered at by Marx as a failure, did deliver constitutions to
most countries in Europe and by 1870 Germany and Italy were both united and
independent.25 (Ireland, however, did not achieve this until 1921, and even then,
the country was partitioned.) With the exception of Russia, the feudal system was
swept away in Europe after 1848 and counter-revolutionary governments were
forced to deliver social reforms if they were to hold on to power. The balance had
shifted and the social contract was under revision. It is true that the December
1848 parliamentary elections in France severely damaged radical republicanism,
but they boosted some new forms of socialism, such as Marxism, non-Marxist
communism, and militant anarcho-socialism as well as the libertarian socialism
of Charles Fourier.
Exiled radicals continued to build international alliances and associations in
the wake of 1848. After the 1830 revolution in France, Giuseppe Mazzini had
sought shelter in London, where he planned the next stage of his Italian national-
ist campaign.26 American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson, on his European travels,
noticed the self-sufficiency of the German community in Whitechapel and the
French in Spitalfields.27 London hosted large communities of exiles and also
migrant communities of workers, such as young German workmen on their
apprenticeship tours. ‘Why’, The Times asked, ‘are they here?’ Lady Charlotte
Guest thought that the answer was clear: these foreigners were here ‘to promote
anarchy’.28 But on the whole, the exiles educated their hosts about the horrors of
European tyrannies and fundraised peaceably for their nationalist campaigns.
The 1848 revolutions in their turn created wave after wave of exiles to London
24 Antônio Borges da Fonseca, ‘Manifesto au Mundo’ (‘Manifesto to the World’) (1 January 1849),
trans. Molly Quinn, in James N. Green, Victoria Langland, and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (eds), The Brazil
Reader: History, Culture, Politics, 2nd edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 197–8.
25 Linda Colley argues for the importance of constitutions in her recent book The Gun, The Ship
and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World (London: Profile, 2021).
26 See Lucy Riall, ‘The Politics of Italian Romanticism and the Making of Nationalist Culture’ in
Christopher A. Bayly and Eugenio Biagini (eds), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic
Nationalism, 1830–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 167–86 and Christopher
Duggan, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini in Britain and Italy: Divergent Legacies, 1837–1915’ in the same volume,
pp. 187–210.
27 Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
vol. 10: 1847–1848, ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press), (1973), p. 237. Hereafter
abbreviated to RWE JMN 10.
28 The Times (12 April 1848); see also The Times (6 April 1848) and Diary of Lady Charlotte Guest
(8 April 1848), in Lord Bessborough, The Diaries of Lady Charlotte Guest (London: John Murray,
1950), p. 209, both cited in Leslie Mitchell, ‘Britain’s Reactions to the Revolutions’, in R. J. W. Evans
and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds), The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to
Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 83–98, p. 95.
Introduction 11
and Paris, some of whom then travelled onwards to America. A flurry of repub
lican nationalist publishing started up in New York City, and links developed
there between Giovane Italia, Joven Cuba, and Young America.29 After the putting
down of the Young Irelander Famine Rebellion of July 1848 the organizers, James
Stephens and John O’Mahony, escaped to Paris where they supported themselves
by teaching. In 1856, O’Mahony left Paris for America where he founded the
Fenian Brotherhood in 1858, the same year in which Stephens, who had returned
to Ireland, founded the Irish counterpart of the American Fenians, the Irish
Republican Brotherhood. The ongoing effects of 1848 would be felt long into the
twentieth century and beyond.
These are the bare facts, or some of them.30 They offer some valuable clues as to
what was at stake in this extraordinary year. Walt Whitman’s use in 1848 of the
term ‘human rights’ is important. More than anything, 1848 was about what it
meant to be human, and, as a direct result, 1848 was a much more important
moment for the global politics of race than has been generally recognized. The
spectacle of the poor and unemployed, the misery and poverty and neglect of the
people in every city in Europe, forced the social into political visibility in an
unprecedented way through a newly pervasive media. The means of this visibility
was important. A free press and the end of censorship was high up on every revo
lutionary’s agenda.
What Did It All Mean? The Historiography of 1848
Historians still do not agree about the significance of the 1848 revolutions. There
is a general feeling that they must have been important. Sir Lewis Namier wrote in
1946 that the revolution of 1848 ‘was super-national as none before or after; it ran
through, and enveloped, the core of Europe’.31 Eugene Kamenka agreed that ‘[i]t
was in 1848, rather than in 1789 or in 1917, that revolutions spread like wildfire
and with remarkable family resemblance in trends and response throughout the
whole of Europe’.32 These revolutions, or, perhaps more accurately, this serial
revolution, had extended much further than the local or national revolutionary
events which had preceded it, and reached well beyond Europe. Eric Hobsbawm
wrote in 1962 that ‘[t]here has never been anything closer to the world-revolution’
than 1848.33 Despite an influential Essex Conference on the Sociology of
29 See Michael Paul Rogin, ‘Moby-Dick and the American 1848’, in Subversive Genealogy: The
Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983).
30 Serial Revolutions is not attempting an exhaustive history of the 1848 revolutions.
31 Lewis Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1946), p. 3.
32 Eugene Kamenka, ‘Introduction’, in Eugene Kamenka and F. B. Smith (eds), Intellectuals and
Revolution: Socialism and the Experience of 1848 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), pp. vii–xiii, p. xii.
33 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789 to 1848 [1962] (New York: Vintage Books,
1996), p. 112.
Literature on the subject of 1848 which took place in July 1977, literary studies
has never organized itself around this ‘hot year’ in history.34 The results and
consequences of this remarkable serial conflagration of 1848 have even now
not been fully examined.
There are complex reasons for this. One is, of course, Marxism. Marx and
Engels published The Manifesto of the Communist Party in February 1848, but it
was not taken up as a manual by the revolutionaries of that year.35 The Manifesto
was only to become the go-to text for revolutionaries during the Paris Commune
of 1871, and then for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and beyond, after both its
authors were dead. Marx was in Paris in 1848 for five weeks, arriving on 4 March,
and he managed even in this short time to set up a revolutionary club for German
workers and to speak at others of the Parisian clubs.36 Paul Lafargue later remem-
bered that ‘Engels told me that it was in Paris in 1848, at the Café de la Régence
(one of the earliest centers of the Revolution of 1789) that Marx first laid out for
him the economic determinism of his materialist theory of history’.37 But Marx’s
ideas had not yet coalesced into the ‘‑ism’ they were later so powerfully to become.
While ‘Marxism’ was not a motive force during the events of 1848, it was to have
a lasting and profound effect on the twentieth-century historiography of 1848.
After acknowledging the remarkable reach of the revolutionary moment of
1848, Eugene Kamenka is typical in concluding that the revolution ‘proved, within
one year, to be a momentous failure’.38 Axel Körner, writing in 2000, agreed that
‘the revolution is almost always described as a failure’, pointing out that even such
different political commentators as de Tocqueville and Marx had agreed on this at
the time.39 That 1848 was a failure remained the consensus view throughout the
twentieth century, and to some extent it still persists. In 1984, Paul de Man, cogi-
tating on revolution, reminded us that ‘[t]he future is present in history only as
34 The phrase ‘hot year’ is James Chandler’s: James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of
Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
p. 77. 1848 was one of the years chosen as a significant single year by the ‘Essex Conference’, men-
tioned by Chandler. See Francis Barker et al. (eds), 1848: The Sociology of Literature: Proceedings of
the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1977 ([Colchester]: University of
Essex, 1978).
35 In 1847, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were asked by the newly formed League of Communists
to write a manifesto. The Manifesto of the Communist Party was published in the German language in
London in 1848. It would be called The Communist Manifesto only after 1871. Before the Paris
Commune of 1871 and the publication of a new German edition, there were only two limited editions
available in Swedish and English, and the manifesto was not much read.
36 Marx was in Paris from 4 March to 11 April 1848. See Samuel Bernstein, ‘Marx in Paris, 1848:
A Neglected Chapter’, Science and Society 3:3 (Summer 1939): 323–55; and Gareth Stedman Jones,
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Allen Lane, 2016), pp. 249ff.
37 Paul Lafargue, ‘Persönliche Erinnerungen an Friedrich Engels’, Die neue Zeit 23:2 (Stuttgart,
1905), p. 558, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 108.
38 Eugene Kamenka, ‘Europe in Upheaval’, in Kamenka and Smith (eds), Intellectuals and
Revolution, pp. 1–13, p. 1.
39 Axel Körner, ‘The European Dimension in the Ideas of 1848 and the Nationalization of its
Memories’, in Axel Körner (ed.), 1848—A European Revolution? International Ideas and National
Memories of 1848 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), pp. 3–28, p. 9.
Introduction 13
the remembering of a failed project that has become a menace’.40 In 1994, Jonathan
Sperber neatly summed up the three available historiographies of 1848. The first
was the ‘romantic idea’, the gestural performance of revolution with no political
traction: this is the version that belongs to the hero-revolutionaries such as the
Hungarian Kossuth or the Venetian Daniele Manin. The second, following Marx
in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’, is ‘the farce’, in which the revolutionaries are all
professors, dilettantes, and pedants. Sperber tells the story of the French poet-
revolutionary drinking in a café who sees through the window a crowd of work-
ers go by and springs up and cries: ‘ “I am their leader; I must follow them!” ’41 And
the third version of 1848, which Sperber says is the most pervasive interpretation
of all, is ‘the failure’ which rests on the evidence that ‘after a shorter or longer—
and usually shorter—interval, the authorities overthrown at the onset of the revo-
lution returned to power’.42 Nothing happened, and the revolutions achieved
nothing. A. J. P. Taylor’s famous judgement that in 1848 ‘German history reached
its turning point and failed to turn’ still has currency today.43
All history is, of course, the history of the present. Taylor claimed that in
Germany, ‘[t]he success of the revolution discredited conservative ideas, the fail-
ure of the revolution discredited liberal ideas. After it, nothing remained but the
idea of Force.’44 But he was writing in the post-war devastation of 1945, with
Europe lying in ruins about him. In 1952, Priscilla Robertson wrote that ‘[t]oday
millions of classless, stateless people crowd the continent in hatred and despair—and
in a way they are the end product of the futility and ruthlessness of the 1848
revolutions’.45 Bitterness about the fruits of nationalism is understandable, but to
blame the revolutionaries of 1848 for the growth of totalitarianism is surely unfair,
and suggests much too straight a path from Romantic nationalism, through
popular politics, to Nazi and fascist ideologies. Instead, it might be closer to the
truth that the so-called ‘failure’ of the revolutions in 1848 helped to create both
liberalism and socialism, albeit by complex and indirect means, setting radicals
40 Paul de Man, ‘Wordsworth and Höderlin’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), pp. 47–65, pp. 58–9.
41 The poet-revolutionary is identified as republican Ledru-Rollin in Anthony Wood, Europe
1815–1945 (London: Longman, 1964), p. 133.
42 Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions: 1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), p. 2. Sperber goes on to suggest a fourth version of 1848 which emerges particularly
after 1989, influenced by social history: ‘The meetings of a political club of a small provincial town
can be no less fascinating than the impassioned debates of national parliamentarians; the aspira-
tions and struggles of impoverished and illiterate peasants no less moving than those of romantic
poets’, p. 3.
43 A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History
Since 1815 [1945] (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 71. Taylor was borrowing from G. M. Trevelyan,
‘From Waterloo to Marne’, Quarterly Review 229 (1918): 73–90, p. 76. Some recent scholarship has
taken this on: for example, see Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds), The 1848
Revolutions and European Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
44 A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History, p. 71.
45 Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1952), p. 419.
against the bourgeoisie and decoupling them from their formerly united struggle
against aristocratic absolutism. It was certainly not true that the authorities who
were returned to power were identical to those who had been ousted at the start
of the revolution, and Marx was wrong to describe the ‘restoration’ as ‘a return to
a dead epoch’. Although his disappointment at the failure of the social revolution
is understandable, a new kind of politics was genuinely to emerge in the wake of
1848. Marxist readings, powerful though they have been in both diagnosing and
constructing class consciousness for several generations, have nevertheless con-
tinued to distort a full understanding of this important mid-century moment.
Other, quieter voices have been drowned out, voices that suggested that the real
gain of 1848 was exactly that liberalism excoriated by Marx in ‘The Eighteenth
Brumaire’.46 And even after the apparent collapse of the revolution, these same
revolutionary liberals continued to exert enormous influence over constitution-
making both in the German States and elsewhere. In many cases, the very same
men who had taken part in revolutionary activities became members of the post-
revolutionary administrations. Marx understood the revolutions of 1848 as being
closely connected, but the idea that only the socialist tradition kept the inter
nationalism of the revolutions alive is not the whole truth.47 One thing 1848 did
undoubtedly deliver was an internationally minded polylingual technocracy of
educated professionals and administrators across Europe, for good or for bad.
Serial Revolutions is not attempting to ‘recuperate’ liberalism, but it challenges the
traditional historiography which describes the revolutions of 1848 as a series of
failures that were barely registered in Britain and were rapidly extinguished by a
counter-revolution abroad. Instead, it argues that the changing cultural condi-
tions which produced the revolutions also enabled forms of internationalism and
a ‘serial’ model of citizenship to embed themselves in British, Continental
European, and American culture after 1848. For radical American democrat Walt
Whitman, writing in Leaves of Grass (1855), 1848 was a seminal and generative
event that would continue to change the landscape long into the future:
Not a grave of the murdered for freedom, but grows seed for
freedom . . . . in its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the
snows nourish.48
46 G. A. Kertesz suggested that ‘in 1848 the radical or socialist left was, even in France, a fairly small
minority . . . it was the liberals who emerged at the head of the revolutionary movement, particularly in
Germany’: G. A. Kertesz, ‘The View from the Middle Class: The German Moderate Liberals and
Socialism’, in Kamenka and Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution, pp. 61–75, p. 61.
47 See Körner, ‘The European Dimension’, p. 7.
48 Walt Whitman, ‘Resurgemus’. This poem was first published in the New York Tribune (21 June
1850); revised and published (in this version) in Leaves of Grass in 1855: Walt Whitman, Leaves of
Grass, The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1959), p. 134 (ellipses in origi-
nal). In 1856, Whitman began to date his poems in relation to the formation of the American republic
and ‘Resurgemus’ became ‘Poem of the Dead Young Men of Europe, the 72nd and 73rd Years of These
States’.
Introduction 15
Far from the damp squib that Marx claimed them to be, the 1848 revolutions
represent an unprecedented moment of urgent European synchronicity and they
have important consequences for political discourse. Historian of Germany
Christopher Clark sees that ‘[t]he new political synthesis achieved in these years
set a pattern for politics whose imprint can still be discerned in the political cul-
tures of our own day’.49 He wants to move away from ‘what Hans Ulrich Wehler
once called “counter-revolutionary innoculation” ’ and to think about the restoration
period of the early 1850s as representing a profoundly significant reordering of
priorities that led to the economic liberalization of Europe.50 Clark is surely right,
but perhaps the even bigger historiographical challenge is to change how we think
about revolutions in the first place.
The historical focus usually squarely remains on the revolutionary moment
and the barricades and battles on the street. Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann
concedes that ‘[t]he long-term failure of the European revolutions does not imply
that their effects were not of tremendous importance’. Such a statement reveals a
structural and conceptual problem.51 Too much of the focus is on the revolution-
ary moment, oddly separated from its ‘effects’.52 This is the problem meticulously
explored by Hannah Arendt in her On Revolution, in which she criticizes Marx
and Engels for their fixation on the revolutionary coup. Arendt warns against ‘the
historian who tends to place his emphasis upon the first and violent stage of
rebellion and liberation, on the uprising against tyranny, to the detriment of the
quieter second stage of revolution and constitution’, thus perpetrating the ‘harm-
ful theory that the constitutions and the fever of constitution-making, far from
expressing truly the revolutionary spirit of the country, were in fact due to forces
of reaction and either defeated the revolution or prevented its full development’.53
Arendt makes a fierce and uncompromising argument against Marxism’s seduc-
tion by what she calls the ‘social’, and his neglect of what she calls the ‘political’.54
49 Christopher Clark, ‘1848: The European Revolution in Government’, Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society (Sixth Series) 22 (2012):171–97, p. 174. Clark also argues that ‘[t]he 1848 revolutions
were European revolutions in a sense that does not apply to the great upheavals of 1789–99, 1830–31,
1871 or 1917’, p. 195.
50 Clark, ‘1848: The European Revolution’, pp. 187–8. Clark suggests that economic liberalization is
presented after 1848 as ‘the remedy for all social ills and thus, ultimately, for all political conflict’, p. 188.
51 Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘1848–1849: A European Revolution?’, in Evans and von
Strandmann, The Revolutions in Europe 1848–1849, pp. 1–8, pp. 7–8.
52 Eugene Kamenka says of Marx and Engels, ‘Revolution, not constitution-making, was their con-
cern’. Eugene Kamenka, ‘ “The Party of the Proletariat”: Marx and Engels in the Revolution of 1848’, in
Kamenka and Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution, pp. 76–93, p. 79.
53 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 140.
54 Jacques Rancière has pointed to Marx’s separation of the social and political as one of the weak-
nesses of his philosophy, suggesting that Marx sees ‘emancipation’ as happening in a realm of the
social which is never contiguous with the realm of the political. Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement:
Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),
originally published in French, 1995. See particularly pp. 82ff. Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer
Peeples have suggested that, for our contemporary moment, ‘[c]ertainly, the public sphere evokes
echoes of ancient Greece. In so many ways, the small city-state of Athens has stunted the Western
imagination, especially with respect to what constitutes political activity and citizenship.’ Kevin
Marx and Engels, she claims, are not interested in forms of government as the
American revolutionists originally were, and the early French revolutionists were.
Overawed and overwhelmed by the spectacle of the vast influx of the rural poor
into Paris, the revolutionaries were distracted from the reconstruction of the polis.
The aim of revolution shifted, from ‘freedom for all’ to ‘abundance for all’. And,
Arendt argues, abundance does not necessarily lead to freedom; indeed, it can
lead in the other direction. But Arendt totally separates the political from the
social because she is invested in a classical model of the polis, a model that ultim
ately proves overly severe, and allows her to sidestep issues of social exclusion.
Crucially, her model misses the connections between race, poverty, and social
exclusion: it effectively eliminates the structural enmeshment of racism in polit
ical systems.55 Ralph Ellison was right to see a problematic ‘Olympian authority’
in her work.56
1848 redefined what ‘politics’ was. Jacques Rancière has complained that any
denomination of ‘the political’ suggests that there is somewhere else which is
‘not-politics’. ‘The political’ can then be used to invent and defend boundaries
around what qualifies as ‘political’ and what does not, and thereby can operate to
obstruct democracy.57 1848 tore down these boundaries around the ‘political’
sphere. The ‘reform’ debate about the parliamentary relationship between the rep-
resentative and the represented was transformed into a global debate about the
contested spaces of representability.58 And in 1848, it was the city that became the
primary site of representation in popular literary, artistic, graphic, and political
terms in a way which powerfully exposed the interconnectedness of urban
Europe. The events of that spring showed that cities were more closely intercon-
nected across state borders to each other than to their own rural populations. In
the new media age of the 1840s, ‘representation’ shifted from being the subject of
discussion about electoral mechanisms and the extension of the franchise in
polite periodicals and broadsheet newspapers, to a bitter and violent struggle over
Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, ‘From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism,
and the “Violence” of Seattle’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 19:2 (2002): 125–51, p. 129.
55 Most notoriously, Arendt displayed what Charles Mills has called ‘white ignorance’ in her 1959
article ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, in which she defends racial segregation in schools in the American
South: Charles Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan (eds), Race and
Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 13–38.
Focusing on ‘political’ rights as opposed to the ‘social’ allows Arendt to dismiss the struggle for racial
integration as ‘social climbing’, while focusing her attention on the anti-miscegenation laws. She does
not see any connection between the two. See Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, Dissent 6:1
(1959): 45–56. Michael D. Burroughs has called this ‘a pervasive epistemic error in Arendt’s work’:
Michael D. Burroughs, ‘Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” and White Ignorance’, Critical
Philosophy of Race 3:1 (2015): 52–78, p. 70. See also Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro
Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014).
56 Ralph Ellison, ‘The World and the Jug’, in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 108.
57 See Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the subject of the Rights of Man?’ in Dissensus: On Politics and
Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 70–83.
58 Matthias Lievens, ‘Contesting Representation: Rancière on Democracy and Representative
Government’, Thesis Eleven 122:1 (2014): 3–17.
Introduction 17
visibility, over who gets to be seen at all. As we shall see, commentators in 1848
were interested in precisely this meeting of the social and the political: Margaret
Fuller remarked of the situation in France in 1848 that ‘it would appear that the
political is being merged in the social struggle’ and, she added emphatically, ‘it is
well’.59 The German writer Fanny Lewald, who was in Paris in February and
March 1848 before hurrying back to her native Berlin to catch the March revolu-
tion there, felt that ‘[i]t will not only be a matter of political change; a social revo-
lution will inevitably follow on its heels’.60 In many ways, making the social
political was the supreme achievement of the 1848 revolution and it was the seri-
ality of the revolutions, rather than the revolutions themselves, that brought a
new global social form into visibility and made it impossible ever again to imagine
the world as it had appeared before 1848.
Nationalisms in 1848
Perhaps the greatest irony of the historiography of 1848 is that it tells us that many
colonized peoples, and peoples living under foreign rule, considered nationhood
to be their best hope of emancipation. The international consensus after 1848 that
national struggles were emancipatory for the people would result in a hardening
of national boundaries, an embedding of monolingual cultures, a consolidation of
ethnic and racial ‘theory’, and a competitive colonialism between European national
powers, which would eventually and inexorably lead to the First World War.61
I argue that the 1848 revolutions were remarkably successful in establishing a new
‘universal’ script for the rights of the people, but their unfortunate and parallel
investment in a seemingly emancipatory nationalism did develop in unintended
ways towards xenophobic nation-states and the invention of the lie of ‘scientific’
racism in the second half of the century. It is important to remember the success
of the universalism of 1848, though, even as we acknowledge the slow sinking of
the universalist agenda under the growing weight of competition between
increasingly militarized nation-states later in the nineteenth century.62 The chain
of European events in 1848 cannot be satisfactorily explained as a nationalist
59 ‘Rome, 29th March, 1848’, New-York Daily Tribune (4 May 1848): 1.

60 Fanny Lewald, A Year of Revolutions: Fanny Lewald’s Recollections of 1848, trans. Hannah Bailin
Lewis (New York: Berghahn Books, 1997), p. 81.
61 Lynn Hunt has argued that ‘[i]nterethnic competition doomed the 1848 revolutions and with
them the link between rights and national self-determination’: Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), p. 184. Hunt overemphasizes the ‘doom’ of the revolutions of 1848,
and thereby misses their importance in the history of declarative ‘rights-talk’.
62 Terry Eagleton, ‘Foreword’, in Boardman and Kinealy (eds), 1848, pp. xvii–xxi, p. xx. Eagleton
adds that ‘[1848] signals . . . a number of national or nationalist insurgencies; yet, it also indicates in its
European sweep that these occurred on an international scale. To this extent, it helps to dismantle any
too-easy opposition between the national and the global.’ p. xx.
revolution.63 The revolutions were ‘nationalized’ only in retrospect: they were

experienced at the time as European. The revolutions happened across many
states with many varieties of governance and many diverse forms of social and
collective identity.64 By 1848, after all, the French had absolutely no need to fight
for national identity, and the British Chartists were after something other than
‘nationhood’ too. Independent national statehood was not the only, or even the
main, driver of these upheavals.
Again, it is partly a legacy of Marx and Engels that we now think of the
‘Springtime of the Peoples’ as the springtime of ‘nationalism’. In truth, in 1848,
many revolutionaries were demanding more federal power within imperial
territories.65 Czechs and Germans in Bohemia, for example, were advocating a
federal solution that could maintain their linguistic diversity.66 1848 was driven
by many factors, and not just the idea of the nation.67 If anything, it might be
more accurate to say that it was less about nationhood and more about the role
and function of the state. Rather than the nation-state, what 1848 actually gave
birth to was a brief but grand universal series, a truly global ‘world history’, but the
anti-federalist reaction this provoked resulted quite quickly in its fracture into
individual nations, each one a small-scale series of its own. The forces of ‘reaction’
and ‘counter- revolution’, for all their brutality, were much weaker and less
63 Axel Körner has warned against ‘the reduction of 1848 to the issue of national revolutions’: Axel
Körner, ‘National Movements against Nation States: Bohemia and Lombardy between the Habsburg
Monarchy, the German Confederation, and Piedmont–Sardinia’, in Moggach and Stedman Jones
(eds), The 1848 Revolutions, pp. 345–82, p. 370.
64 Christopher Bayly has helpfully reminded us that ‘[b]efore 1850, large parts of the globe were
not dominated by nations so much as by empires, city-states, diasporas’: C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert,
Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, ‘AHR Conversation: On
Transnational History’, American Historical Review 111:5 (December 2006): 1441–64, p. 1442. He
adds, ‘[w]e should not fall back again into a wider world history constituted simply by “nations and
nationalism” and the forces that transcended them, though Hobsbawm’s books remain among the few
works that students can read and understand’ (p. 1449). See also C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern
World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Jürgen
Osterhammel claims that ‘[t]he revolutions of 1848 were not a global event’: Osterhammel,
Transformation of the World, p. 546. I disagree. Osterhammel (p. 544) quotes Dieter Langewiesche,
who says that Europe in 1848 becomes a ‘communications space’. Dieter Langewiesche,
‘Kommunikationsraum Europa: Revolution und Gegenrevolution’, in Dieter Langewiesche (ed.),
Demokratiebewegung und Revolution 1847 bis 1849: Internationale Aspecte und Europäische
Verbindungen (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1998), pp. 11–35, p. 32.
65 Körner, ‘National Movements against Nation States’, p. 348.
66 Axel Körner takes the case of Italy, usually cited as a ‘nationalist’ cause in 1848, as an example of
the variety of thinking that was available at the time: ‘there was a distinct and widespread feeling in
Lombardy, most prominently expressed by the political theorist and protagonist of 1848 Carlo
Cattaneo, that the region’s submission under Piedmont would destroy a historically rooted notion of
civic identity that had been largely compatible with Habsburg rule, but was doomed to vanish under
the autocratic centralism of the Piedmontese monarchy and an emerging Italian nation state’: Körner,
‘National Movements against Nation States’, p. 352.
67 As Chris Bayly writes, ‘I have tried to think of these issues in terms of different “drivers” of
change (ideologies, economic change, the role of the state) at different periods and in different parts of
the world. The interaction of these “drivers” produced “chaotic” changes (such as transnational revolu
tions) which cannot be traced back to any one of these “drivers” or domains alone.’ Bayly, ‘AHR
Conversation’, p. 1450.
Introduction 19
sustainable than we tend to remember. The 1848 revolutions succeeded remarkably

easily; the governments that were restored after them were, in their turn, easily
defeated, and subsequent governments were fragile. It was this fragility, and the
need to shore up wavering power, that spawned ever-hardening nationalisms. States
became nations, ‘politics’ became national politics, ‘literature’ became national lit-
erature, and the grand universal world series sank from view. The post-1848 nation
became a singular entity but crucially it had first come into being as part of an inter-
national series. It was internationalism that had created the modern nation state,
and conservative British historiography has tended to ignore this fact.
Another reason for the downplaying of this crucial episode in European and
world history in accounts of British history is, of course, the much-vaunted the-
ory of British exceptionalism. In the autumn of 1848, the conservative Edinburgh
Review felt it could maintain a haughty distance from the ‘revolutions, which have
threatened to subvert the constitution and the relations of almost every state,
except our own’.68 That Britain famously did not produce a revolution in 1789,
1830, or 1848, makes the most important event in British nineteenth-century his-
tory the one that did not happen.69 The very frequency and the brazen inaccuracy
with which the British conservative press gloats over this glorious British excep-
tionalism is itself revealing of a deep fear of domestic revolution. In March 1848,
The Times reminds its readers yet again that:
We possess those things which other nations are everywhere demanding at the
gates of the Palace or the door of the Legislature!—free press, legislature,
etc. . . . The State becomes a society for the common good, giving to all its mem-
bers a rateable share in the common benefit and stock. . . . The British Empire is a
great friendly society.70
The Times is countering the fear verbalized by Matthew Arnold, who wrote to his
sister in the same month that ‘if the new state of things succeeds in France, social
changes are inevitable here and elsewhere . . . but, without waiting for the result,
the spectacle of France is likely to breed great agitation here, and such is the state
68 [Anon.],‘State of Europe’, Edinburgh Review 178 (October 1848): 514–58, p. 514.

69 The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9 was often cited in the nineteenth century, however, and
British nationalism existed well before 1848, of course. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation
1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Colley charts the emergence of British iden-
tity from the 1707 Act of Union uniting Scotland with England and Wales to Victoria’s accession to
the throne in 1837. G. K. Chesterton wrote that ‘it is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end
of the eighteenth century the most important event in English history happened in France. It would
seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise, to say that the most important event in
English history was the event that never happened at all—the English revolution on the lines of the
French Revolution.’ He argued that the English were nevertheless ‘rebels in arts’ while the French were
‘rebels in arms’. G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (New York: Henry Holt, 1913),
pp. 17–18.
70 The Times (21 March 1848).
of our masses that their movements now can only be brutal plundering and
destroying’.71 Arnold understands the serial possibilities of the French revolution,
and doubts whether the so-called ‘free press’ and the ‘legislature’ (along with that
glib ‘etcetera’), will prove sufficient to restrain a miserable and desperate British
people. In the event, a revolution did not transpire in Britain, but the surviving
public record is partial and misleading as to the levels of state violence and insur-
gent anger in play during the 1840s.
Opinion about Britain’s relationship with Europe and the importance of
European politics to British domestic affairs was hotly divided then, as it is now.
F. B. Smith is right that ‘[t]he debate on 1848 forms a vivid moment in that con-
tinuing schism in British life between “Europeans” and “Little Englanders” ’.72
A representative of the latter, the pro-Reform politician Henry Brougham, an old
man by 1848, complained that the French revolution of 1848 was entirely inex
plicable, ‘without pretext, without one circumstance to justify or even to account
for it’, and he warned darkly that as a result, ‘all sense of security in any existing
government’ is gone.73 J. S. Mill reviewed Brougham’s pamphlet in the Westminster
Review, ‘vindicating the Revolution, and the Provisional Government, from as
unjust aspersions as ever clouded the reputation of great actions and eminent
characters’.74 Mill saw the revolution differently, as the logical outcome of a set of
legible causes, and his deep knowledge of French politics exposes Brougham’s
ignorance and anti-French prejudice. The Provisional Government had taken
over from ‘a government [which] found itself, in 1848, so feeble that it fell at the
first onset’.75 Mill was right about the French case. But what about all that did
happen in Britain after 1848, some of it as a direct result of events in Continental
Europe? Matthew Arnold felt that social changes in Britain were inevitable after
1848, and they certainly arrived. Margot Finn has launched an energetic attack on
nationalist history-making, claiming that ‘[t]he common but false antithesis in
historical writing between nationalism and internationalism acts to obscure the
two concepts’ fundamental interrelation . . . [and] masks their mutual contribu-
tion to both class formation and liberal popular politics in the industrial era’.76
71 Matthew Arnold to Jane Arnold (10 March 1848), Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848–1888, ed.
George W. E. Russell (London: Macmillan and Co., 1895), vol. 1, p. 6.
72 F. B. Smith, ‘Great Britain and the Revolutions of 1848’, Labour History 33 (November 1977):
65–85, p. 71.
73 Lord [Henry] Brougham, Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, K.G., Lord President of the
Council, on the Late Revolution in France (London: James Ridgway, 1848), p. 22 and p. 31.
74 J. S. Mill, Review, Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, K.G., Lord President of the Council, on the
Late Revolution in France (London: James Ridgway, 1848), Westminster Review 51 (April 1849):
1–47, p. 47.
75 J. S. Mill, Review, Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, p. 6.
76 Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 12. For the persistence of such exceptionalist
historiography into the twentieth century, see David Edgerton, ‘The Nationalization of British
History: Historians, Nationalism, and the Myths of 1940’, English Historical Review, 2021; https://doi.
org/10.1093/ehr/ceab166.
Introduction 21
Quarantining Britain from the rest of European history in the nineteenth century
under the guise of British exceptionalism is patently absurd, but remains a
remarkably entrenched approach.
Citizenship in 1848
The revolutions were not exclusively urban, but they were mainly so. They took
place in city squares and city streets. This made them much easier and faster for
the urban press to report than military engagements on remote battlefields, so
that their unprecedented representation in ‘real time’ inaugurated an urgent con-
versation about the politics of the city which would have long-running conse-
quences. Where did politics belong in the space of the city? In palaces,
parliaments, or on the streets? What should be the fiscal relationship between
countryside and city, which was often hotly contested?77 How was the (often reac-
tionary) peasantry to be folded into the idea of citizenship? And finally, and per-
haps most importantly, what did citizenship now mean? The urban sequence of
the revolutions meant that the concept of citizenship was arguably more import
ant in 1848 than that of nation. But citizenship was a highly unstable concept.
Both the French and American revolutionary versions of citizenship were ener-
getically entangled and disentangled and hotly debated. The 1789 French
Revolution had been underpinned by an Enlightenment language of natural
rights, through Rousseau, which meant that the governed had the right to with-
draw their consent to be governed if the government was felt to have exceeded its
limits or to have failed. In Britain, a similar Enlightenment view was authorized
by Locke’s argument that legitimate government rested upon the consent of the
governed and went back to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9. This was the lan-
guage of Chartism and the radical constitutionalism that was used by the
Northern Star in 1839: ‘Every member of a political state is entitled to certain
privileges, which are either the residue of natural rights, whose surrender was not
required for the public good, or those civil liberties, which society provides and
guarantees in lieu of the natural rights so given up.’78 The American constitutional
system, modelled on ancient classical models of the polis, meant that the state
granted freedom to the people. Men in ancient Greece, explains Hannah Arendt,
‘received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth. Neither
77 Jonathan Sperber points out that peasants stealing wood from the forest and urban revolutionar-
ies organizing protest banquets do not have an immediate cause in common: Sperber, European
Revolutions, p. 62. I argue that their sense of shared grievance against aristocratic absolutism was
enough to unite them.
78 Northern Star (14 September 1839) cited in Josh Gibson, ‘Natural Right and the Intellectual
Context of Early Chartist Thought’, History Workshop Journal 84 (2017): 194–213, and requoted in
Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Elusive Signifiers: 1848 and the Language of “Class Struggle”’, in Moggach and
Stedman Jones (eds), The 1848 Revolutions, pp. 429–51, p. 435.
equality nor freedom was understood as a quality inherent in human nature.’79

She goes on to limn the difference between the French and the American theories
of civic liberty, explaining that under the American Constitution:
all men should live under constitutional, ‘limited’ government. The proclam
ation of human rights through the French Revolution, on the contrary, meant
quite literally that every man by virtue of being born had become the owner of
certain rights. The consequences of the shifted emphasis are enormous, in prac-
tice no less than in theory. The American version actually proclaims no more
than the necessity of civilized government for all mankind; the French version,
however, proclaims the existence of rights independent of and outside the body
politic, and then goes on to equate these so-called rights, namely the rights of
man qua man, with the rights of citizens.80
In Europe in 1848, ‘democracy’ was a term under extreme pressure. A radical

constitutionalism emerged as philosophically distinct from the liberal-moderates’
concept of representative government. Republicanism was different again.
Nevertheless, Thomas Cooper lectured on ‘the magnificent themes of the
Athenian democracy’ at the City Chartist Hall in London.81 During the ‘Mexican
War’ of 1846–8, Margaret Fuller turned classical republican models against her
native America: ‘[a]t present she has scarce achieved a Roman nobleness, a
Roman liberty.’82 Whether power was given by or to the people, and if given to the
people, to which people in particular, was a matter for fierce debate. Ideas of pos-
sessive individualism proved difficult to reconcile with those of republican citi-
zenship. And republican citizenship, as we have seen, meant different things in
America and France: Alexis de Tocqueville misunderstood American democracy,
for example, by reading it with French eyes. The conflict between a version of
personhood that depends on the freedom to own property, and a version that
depends on being subject to the common good, is precisely the conflict that is
played out in 1848, particularly in France, but also in European cities elsewhere.
America had already had its revolution, but throughout the 1840s Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Frederick Douglass were both continuing to wrestle with an inher-
ent conflict between subjection and emancipation in their appeals to a universal-
ism that is socially flexible whilst not exclusionary.83 Arendt considers the
79 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 23. 80 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 147.

81 Thomas Cooper, Speech reported in Northern Star (23 August 1845), p. 8. 1848 was also the year
in which Bohn’s Classical Library was established, offering ‘faithful’ translations of the classics:
79 titles, 116 volumes, sold for between 3 and 5 shillings each. See Chapter 13, ‘Seditious Classicists’, in
Edith Hall and Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain
and Ireland, 1689–1939 (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 271–92.
82 [MF], ‘1st January, 1846’, New-York Daily Tribune (1 January 1846): 1.
83 More recently, Étienne Balibar has explored this problem in Citizen Subject: Foundations
for Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017)
Introduction 23
American Revolution to have been ‘triumphantly successful’, and she wonders

why it had so little influence in the world as a model of revolution.84 But then fif-
teen pages later into her discussion, she appears to remember that ‘abject and
degrading misery was present everywhere [in post-revolutionary America] in the
form of slavery and negro labor’, and she concedes that we are forced to ask our-
selves ‘if the goodness of the poor white man’s country did not depend to a con-
siderable degree upon black labour and black misery’.85 What was for Arendt an
afterthought about ‘black labour and black misery’ shaped the American response
to 1848. Frederick Douglass eloquently contended that the American Revolution,
far from being ‘triumphantly successful’, was in reality far from complete, and
America stood in urgent need of re-constitution. The form and the limits of the
state and the relationship of the people to that state were the fundamental ques-
tions of 1848 across a vastly diverse range of places. If the revolutions did not
immediately produce modern democratic states, they cleared the way for the
renegotiation of the social contract.
Another deeply-rooted Marxist myth about 1848 is that the revolutions were
about class. When William Forster, visiting Paris in 1848 says that ‘all Paris is now
absorbed in this contest between the bourgeoisie, the property men and friends of
peace and order, with the ouvriers, or rather, with the demagogues, communists,
and other ultras, who strive to excite them’, he offers a caricatured and crude class
version of the complex political drama that is being played out in front of him.86
This version persisted in the histories: Priscilla Robertson, for example, judges
that ‘the 1848 revolutions turned into class struggles, and failed because they
did’.87 But the contest was less between the bourgeoisie and the ouvriers than
between different versions of socialism. In Marx’s native Germany, between 1847
and 1849 Mainz, Speyer, Mannheim, and other south-western German towns,
including Marx’s birthplace, Trier, were ‘hotbeds of furious ideological strife that
were typically undifferentiated and socially indistinct in the sense that shop
keepers, off-duty soldiers, students, peasants, and members of societies randomly
abounded on both sides, rendering social difference no guide to the factional
splits’.88 Class offered no definitive guide to revolutionary allegiances, and despite
his best efforts even Marx himself failed to create a coherent class narrative
(originally published in French in 2011). Emily Apter in her foreword to this volume explains the
contradiction as one of ‘the subject as transindividual subjectus at once collective and singular, where
the “I” (as Rousseau would have it), has “become a property that belongs to each and everyone, or to
whatever citizen-subject . . . on the condition that he or she is ‘indivisibly’ part of the ‘common’” . . . [so
that] ‘the conflict of conflicts that Balibar deduces from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit: the “con-
flict of universalities” [is] replicated in the “conflict of communitarian principles”’: Emily Apter,
‘Foreword’, in Balibar, Citizen Subject, p. xiii.
84 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 50. 85 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 65.
86 T. Wemyss Reid, Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Forster, 2 vols (London: Chapman
& Hall, 1888), vol. 1, p. 231. Hereafter all references are to this volume and edition, abbrevi-
ated to WEF.
87 Robertson, Revolutions of 1848, p. 412. 88 Israel, Expanding Blaze, p. 557.
around 1848. He abandoned the chapter on class he had originally intended to

include in Das Kapital. Nor does anti-clericism explain the wave of connected
upheavals, although it was undoubtedly a common feature of many of the upris-
ings. Christopher Clark has resisted the ‘secularisation thesis’, arguing that ‘the
religious conflicts of mid and late nineteenth-century Europe cannot be explained
solely in terms of the tension between secular and clerical interests’.89 But if the
1848 revolutions were not non-events and failures, and if they cannot be entirely
explained by nationalism, class, or religion, what were they about?
Seriality in 1848
‘[T]he French have begun a new revolution’, wrote the English poet Arthur Hugh
Clough at the end of February 1848.90 But was this a new revolution or just a
continuation of the series? Both Marx and de Tocqueville saw 1848 as part of one
revolutionary process that had begun in 1789, and neither expected it to stop in
1848 either.91 The German poet Heinrich Heine, who was living in Paris in
February 1848, wondered:
Is the great author repeating himself? Are his creative powers failing? Wasn’t the
play, presented to us last February with such pride, the same as he produced
eighteen years ago in Paris under the title of ‘The July Revolution’? But one can
always see a good piece twice. At any rate, it has been improved and expanded
and the conclusion in particular is new and was received with thunderous
applause.92
The pattern of repetition, reprise, return, the possibility of difference, and the
conceit of the ‘play’ return again and again in contemporary accounts of the évé-
nements of 1848. Hannah Arendt reminds us that ‘the term “permanent revolu
tion,” or révolution en permanence’ was coined by Proudhon in the middle of the
nineteenth century.93 It has since become part of the Marxist credo ‘that there is
only one revolution, selfsame and perpetual’.94 But as Arendt points out, this way
of thinking leaves us with very few tools to understand the ‘times of quiet and
restoration’ which in this model recede into merely ‘the pauses in which the
89 Christopher Clark, ‘From 1848 to Christian Democracy’, in Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman
Jones (eds), Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 90–213, p. 193. Clark points out that far from being defeated in 1848, ‘European political
Catholicism had more future locked up inside it’: p. 201.
90 Anthony Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet’s Life (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 125.
91 Eric Hobsbawm agrees, describing this as ‘[t]he great revolution of 1789–1848’: Hobsbawm,
‘Introduction’, Age of Revolution, p. 1.
92 Heinrich Heine, Article for the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung (1 March 1848), republished as
‘Die Februarrevolution’ Werke, VII, pp. 377–85, p. 377.
93 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 44. 94 Ibid.
Another random document with
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— Oh, e, minä en naura enkä ollenkaan luule teidän valehdelleen
minulle. Siinäpä se onkin, että minä en sitä luule, se on, paha kyllä,
totinen tosi! No, sanokaa, oletteko te lukenut Puškinia, Oneginin…Te
puhuitte äsken juuri Tatjanasta?
— En, en ole vielä lukenut, mutta aion lukea. Minulla ei ole

ennakkoluuloja, Karamazov. Minä tahdon kuulla kummankin puolen
kannan. Minkätähden te kysyitte?
— Muuten vain.
— Sanokaa, Karamazov, halveksitteko te minua kauheasti? —

tokaisi äkkiä Kolja ja ojentautui suoraksi Aljošan edessä aivan kuin
asettuen asentoon. — Olkaa hyvä, aivan kiertelemättä.
— Halveksinko teitä? — sanoi Aljoša katsellen häntä ihmeissään.

— Mistä syystä? Minusta on vain surullista, että niin oivallista
luonnetta kuin teidän, joka ei vielä ole päässyt aloittamaan elämää,
on jo turmellut kaikki tuo karkea ja jonninjoutava.
— Älkää olko huolissanne minun luonteestani, — keskeytti Kolja

jossakin määrin itserakkaasti, — mutta että minä olen epäluuloinen,
se on kyllä totta. Tyhmän epäluuloinen, karkeasti epäluuloinen. Te
naurahditte äsken, ja minusta tuntui heti, että te ikäänkuin…
— Ah, minä naurahdin aivan muulle. Tiedättekö, mille minä

naurahdin: luin äskettäin erään Venäjällä asuneen Saksanmaan
saksalaisen lausunnon nykyisestä opiskelevasta nuorisostamme.
»Näyttäkää», kirjoittaa hän, »venäläiselle koulupojalle tähtimaailman
kartta, josta hänellä tähän saakka ei ole ollut minkäänlaista käsitystä,
niin hän palauttaa teille huomenna tuon kartan korjattuna.» Ei mitään
tietoja ja äärettömän suuret luulot itsestään — sitä tahtoi saksalainen
sanoa venäläisestä koululaisesta.
— Ah, sehän on aivan oikein! — alkoi Kolja yhtäkkiä nauraa

hohottaa, — ihan superlatiivissa oikein, aivan prikulleen! Bravo,
saksalainen! Ei huomannut kuitenkaan kollo myös hyvää puolta, vai
mitä arvelette? Suuret luulot itsestään — olkoon menneeksi, se
johtuu nuoruudesta, se korjautuu, jos vain sen korjautuminen on
välttämätöntä, mutta sen sijaan on myös itsenäistä henkeä miltei
lapsuudesta asti, sen sijaan on ajatuksen ja vakaumuksen rohkeutta
eikä tuota heidän makkaroilla kasvatettua orjailuaan auktoriteettien
edessä… Mutta joka tapauksessa saksalainen sanoi hyvin! Bravo,
saksalainen! Vaikka saksalaiset pitää sittenkin kuristaa. Olkoonpa,
että he ovat vahvoja tieteissä, heidät pitää sittenkin kuristaa…
— Miksi sitten kuristaa? — hymyili Aljoša.
— No, minä lörpöttelin kenties, myönnän sen. Minä olen toisinaan

hirveän lapsellinen, ja kun joskus pääsen alkuun, en jaksa hillitä
itseäni ja olen valmis lörpöttelemään kaikenlaista roskaa. Mutta
kuulkaahan, me täällä lavertelemme joutavia, mutta tuo lääkäri
näkyy takertuneen sinne omituisen pitkäksi aikaa. Hän saattaa
muuten tarkastaa siellä myös »äitikultaa» ja kipeäjalkaista
Ninotškaa. Tiedättekö, tuo Ninotška miellytti minua. Hän kuiskasi
minulle sisään tullessani: »Miksi ette ole tullut aikaisemmin?» Ja
semmoisella äänellä, moittivasti! Minusta hän näyttää hyvin
hyväntahtoiselta ja säälittävältä.
— Niin, niin! Kunhan rupeatte käymään talossa niin näette,

millainen olento hän on. Teille on hyvin hyödyllistä tutustua tuollaisiin
olentoihin, jotta oppisitte pitämään arvossa vielä paljon muutakin,
minkä opitte tietämään juuri tutustuessanne tämmöisiin olentoihin, —
huomautti Aljoša lämpimästi. — Se kaikkein parhaiten tekee teistä
toisenlaisen.
— Oi, kuinka olen pahoillani ja soimaan itseäni siitä, etten tullut

aikaisemmin! — huudahti Kolja katkerin mielin.
— Niin, se on hyvin ikävää. Te näitte itse, kuinka suuresti te

ilahdutitte onnetonta pienokaista! Ja miten pahoillaan hän olikaan
teitä odotellessaan!
— Älkää puhuko minulle siitä! Te raatelette sydäntäni. Muuten se

on minulle aivan oikein: minä en tullut tänne itserakkauteni takia,
itsekkään itserakkauden ja alhaisen vallanhimon takia, josta en koko
elämäni aikana pääse vapautumaan, vaikka ponnistelen koko
elämäni ajan. Minä näen sen nyt, minä olen monessa suhteessa
konna, Karamazov.
— Ei, te olette oivallinen luonne, vaikka pilattu, ja minä ymmärrän

erinomaisen hyvin, miksi teillä oli vaikutusvaltaa tuohon
sairaalloisesta vaikutuksille alttiiseen kelpo poikaan! — vastasi
Aljoša tulisesti.
— Ja tätä sanotte minulle te! — huudahti Kolja. — Ja minä kun

luulin, ajatelkaahan, jo usean kerran nyt täällä ollessani, että te
halveksitte minua! Jospa vain tietäisitte, kuinka suuressa arvossa
pidän teidän mielipidettänne!
— Mutta oletteko te todellakin noin epäluuloinen? Tuossa iässä!

No, ajatelkaahan, minä juuri ajattelinkin tuolla huoneessa
katsellessani teitä teidän kertoessanne, että te mahdatte olla hyvin
epäluuloinen.
— Joko ajattelittekin? Kylläpä teillä on silmä, te näette, näette!
Lyön vetoa, että se tapahtui siinä paikassa, kun minä kerroin
hanhesta. Juuri siinä paikassa minusta tuntui, että te halveksitte
minua syvästi sen takia, että minulla on kiire esiintuomaan uljuuttani,
ja aloinpa yhtäkkiä vihatakin teitä siitä ja rupesin puhumaan puuta
heinää. Sitten minusta tuntui (se oli äsken juuri täällä) siinä paikassa,
kun minä sanoin: »Jos Jumalaa ei olisi, niin hänet pitäisi keksiä»,
että minä olen kovin kärkäs esiintuomaan sivistystäni, etenkin kun
olin tuon fraasin lukenut kirjasta. Mutta minä vannon teille, että minä
en pyrkinyt loistamaan kerskuakseni, vaan muuten vain, en tiedä
miksi, ilosta, totta totisesti, se oli ikäänkuin ilosta… vaikka se on
syvästi häpeällinen piirre, että ihminen tuppautuu kaikkia
vaivaamaan ilosta. Minä tiedän sen. Mutta sen sijaan minä olen nyt
vakuutettu siitä, että te ette halveksi minua, vaan että minä olin
kaiken tuon ottanut vain omasta päästäni. Oi, Karamazov, minä olen
hyvin onneton. Minä kuvittelen toisinaan Herra ties mitä, että kaikki
nauravat minulle, koko maailma, ja silloin minä, silloin olen valmis
tuhoamaan koko olevaisuuden.
— Ja kiusaatte ympärillänne olevia, — hymyili Aljoša.
— Ja kiusaan ympärilläni olevia, varsinkin äitiäni. Karamazov,

sanokaa, olenko minä nyt hyvin naurettava?
— Älkää ajatelko sitä, älkää ollenkaan ajatelko sitä! — huudahti

Aljoša. — Ja mitä on naurettava? Vähänkö on tapauksia, joissa
ihminen on naurettava tai näyttää siltä? Mutta nykyjään melkein
kaikki lahjakkaat ihmiset hirveästi pelkäävät olevansa naurettavia, ja
se on heidän onnettomuutensa. Minua vain ihmetyttää, että te olette
niin varhain alkanut sitä tuntea, vaikka minä muuten kyllä jo kauan
olen huomannut tämmöistä muissakin. Nykyjään melkein jo lapsetkin
ovat alkaneet potea tätä. Se on melkein hulluutta. Tähän
itserakkauden haamuun on pukeutunut itse piru ja tunkeutunut koko
sukupolveen, — piru juuri, — lisäsi Aljoša ollenkaan naurahtamatta,
niinkuin häneen kiinteästi katsova Kolja oli luullut hänen tekevän. —
Te olette niinkuin kaikki muutkin, — lopetti Aljoša, — se on niinkuin
monet, mutta ei pidä olla sellainen kuin kaikki ovat, siinä se on.
— Siitäkin huolimatta, että kaikki ovat sellaisia?
— Niin, siitä huolimatta, että kaikki ovat sellaisia. Olkaa te yksin

toisenlainen. Te olette todellakin toisenlainen kuin kaikki muut: tehän
ette nyt hävennyt tunnustaa sitä, mikä on huonoa ja naurettavaakin.
Mutta kuka nykyjään sen tunnustaa? Ei kukaan, on lakattu
tuntemasta itsensä tuomitsemisen tarvettakin. Olkaa toisenlainen
kuin kaikki; vaikka te yksinänne jäisitte semmoiseksi, niin olkaa
kuitenkin sellainen.
— Suurenmoista! — Minä en ole erehtynyt teihin nähden. Te

kykenette lohduttamaan. Oi, kuinka minä olenkaan pyrkinyt
läheisyyteenne, Karamazov, kuinka kauan olenkaan etsinyt
tilaisuutta kohdata teidät! Oletteko todella tekin ajatellut minusta
samaa? Äsken te sanoitte ajatelleenne minusta samaa.
— Niin, minä olen kuullut teistä ja ajatellut samoin teistä… ja jos

osaksi itserakkauskin pani teidät nyt tätä kysymään, niin ei se tee
mitään.
— Tiedättekö, Karamazov, meidän selityksemme muistuttaa

rakkaudentunnustusta, — lausui Kolja omituisen raukealla ja
häpeilevällä äänellä. — Eikö se ole naurettavaa, eikö se ole
naurettavaa?
— Ei ole ollenkaan naurettavaa, ja vaikka olisikin naurettavaa, niin
ei se mitään tee, sillä se on hyvää, — hymyili Aljoša valoisaa hymyä.
— Mutta tiedättekö, Karamazov, myöntäkää, että teitä itseännekin

nyt hiukan hävettää minun kanssani… Minä näen sen silmistä, —
naurahti Kolja hieman viekkaasti, mutta samalla miltei onnellisena.
— Mikä hävettäisi?
— Miksi te sitten punastuitte?
— Tehän sen niin teitte, että minä punastuin! — alkoi Aljoša

nauraa ja tuli tosiaankin aivan punaiseksi. — No niin, hiukan
hävettää, Jumala ties miksi, en tiedä miksi… — mutisi hän miltei
hämillään.
— Oi, kuinka minä teitä rakastan ja kunnioitan tällä hetkellä, siitä

juuri, että teitäkin jokin hävettää minun kanssani! Sillä tekin olette
aivan niinkuin minä! — huudahti Kolja aivan riemuissaan. Hänen
poskensa hehkuivat, hänen silmänsä loistivat.
— Kuulkaahan, Kolja, teistä tulee muun muassa myöskin hyvin

onneton ihminen elämässä, — sanoi Aljoša äkkiä jostakin syystä.
— Minä tiedän sen, tiedän sen. Kuinka te tiedätte kaikki noin

edeltäpäin! — vahvisti heti Kolja.
— Mutta kokonaisuudessaan te kuitenkin siunaatte elämää.
— Aivan niin! Hurraa! Te olette profeetta! Oi, meistä tulee ystävät,

Karamazov. Tiedättekö, minua ihastuttaa kaikkein enimmän se, että
te kohtelette minua aivan niinkuin vertaistanne. Mutta me emme ole
vertaisia, ei emme ole vertaisia, te olette korkeammalla! Mutta
meistä tulee ystävät. Tiedättekö minä olen koko viime kuukauden
ajan sanonut itselleni: »Joko meistä hänen kanssaan tulee heti
ikuiset ystävät tai me jo ensikerrasta asti olemme vihamiehiä
hautaan saakka!»
— Ja näin puhuessanne te tietysti jo rakastitte minua! — nauroi

Aljoša iloisesti.
— Rakastin, hirveästi rakastin, rakastin ja haaveilin teistä! Kuinka

te tiedättekin tuon kaiken edeltäpäin? Kas, tuossa on tohtorikin.
Herra Jumala, hän sanoo jotakin, katsokaa, millaiset hänen
kasvonsa ovat!
7.
Iljuša
Tohtori tuli ulos tuvasta taas turkkiinsa kääriytyneenä ja lakki

päässä. Hänen kasvonsa osoittivat miltei suuttumusta ja inhoa,
ikäänkuin hän yhä olisi pelännyt tahrautuvansa jostakin. Hän silmäsi
sivumennen ympäri eteisen ja katsahti tällöin ankarasti Aljošaan ja
Koljaan. Aljoša viittasi ovesta ajomiehelle, ja vaunut, joissa tohtori oli
tullut, ajoivat ulko-oven luo. Alikapteeni riensi kiireesti tohtorin
jäljessä ja taivuttautuen melkein vempeleeksi hänen edessään
pysähdytti hänet saadakseen kuulla viimeisen sanan. Mies-raukan
kasvot ilmaisivat masennusta, katse oli pelästynyt.
— Teidän ylhäisyytenne, teidän ylhäisyytenne… ihanko todella?…

— alkoi hän, mutta ei puhunut loppuun, vaan löi vain kämmeniään
yhteen epätoivoissaan, katsellen kuitenkin yhä vieläkin rukoilevasti
tohtoriin, aivan kuin tohtorin sana nyt tosiaankin voisi muuttaa poika-
paran saaman tuomion.
— Minkäpä sille voi! Minä en ole Jumala, — vastasi tohtori

huolettomalla, vaikkakin tavan mukaan vakuuttavalla äänellä.
— Tohtori… Teidän ylhäisyytenne… Ja tuleeko se pian, joko pian?
— Val-mis-tau-tu-kaa kaikkeen, — sanoi tohtori pannen painoa

joka tavulle, ja luoden silmänsä alas hän valmistautui harppaamaan
kynnyksen yli vaunujen luo.
— Teidän ylhäisyytenne, Kristuksen tähden! — pysähdytti hänet

alikapteeni vielä kerran pelästyneenä. — Teidän ylhäisyytenne!…
Eikö siis mikään, eikö mikään, kerrassaan mikään nyt pelasta?…
— Se ei nyt rii-pu minusta, — lausui tohtori kärsimättömästi, —

mutta kuitenkin, hm, — pysähtyi hän äkkiä, — jos te esimerkiksi
voisitte… lä-het-tää… potilaanne… heti ja vähääkään viivyttelemättä
(sanat »heti ja vähääkään viivyttelemättä» tohtori lausui ei vain
ankarasti, vaan melkein vihaisesti, niin että alikapteeni ihan vavahti)
Sy-ra-kuu-saan, niin… uusien suotui-si-en il-mas-tol-lis-ten
olosuhteitten johdosta… voisi kenties ta-pah-tu-a…
— Syrakuusaan! — huudahti alikapteeni aivan kuin ei vielä

ymmärtäisi mitään.
— Syrakuusa — se on Sisiliassa, — tokaisi äkkiä kuuluvasti Kolja

selitykseksi. Tohtori katsoi häneen.
— Sisiliaan! Herranen aika, teidän ylhäisyytenne, — joutui

alikapteeni aivan ymmälle, — tehän näitte! — Hän levitti molemmat
kätensä osoittaen ympärillä olevaa sisustusta. — Entä äitikulta, entä
perhe?
— Ei-ei, ei perhettä Sisiliaan, vaan perheenne on vietävä

Kaukaasiaan, varhain keväällä… tyttärenne Kaukaasiaan ja
vaimonne… sen jälkeen kuin hänkin on ollut Kau-kaa-si-as-sa
jäsenkolotustensa takia… on heti sen jälkeen lä-he-tet-tä-vä
Pariisiin, psy-ki-at-ri, tohtori Le-pel-le-tier'n parantolaan, minä voisin
antaa teille hänelle osoitetun kirjelipun, ja silloin… voisi kenties
tapahtua…
— Tohtori, tohtori! Tehän näette! — levitti taas alikapteeni käsiään

osoittaen epätoivoissaan eteisen paljaita hirsiseiniä.
— Se ei enää ole minun asiani, — naurahti tohtori, — minä sanoin

vain sen, mitä tie-de saattaa sanoa teidän kysyessänne viimeisiä
keinoja, mutta kaikki muu… valitan…
— Älkää olko huolissanne, lääkäri, minun koirani ei pure teitä, —

tokaisi Kolja kovalla äänellä huomattuaan tohtorin hieman
levottomana katsovan kynnykselle asettunutta Perezvonia. Koljan
äänessä oli vihainen sointu. Sanan »lääkäri» tohtorin asemesta hän
oli sanonut tahallaan ja, kuten hän itse myöhemmin ilmoitti,
»loukatakseen».
— Mitä tä-mä on? — tohtori nakkasi päätään katsoen ihmeissään

Koljaan. — Mi-kä tämä on? — kääntyi hän äkkiä Aljošan puoleen
ikäänkuin tahtoen tältä selitystä.
— Tämä on Perezvonin isäntä, lääkäri, älkää huolehtiko minun

persoonastani, — tokaisi Kolja taas.
— Zvonin? — toisti lääkäri tajuamatta, mitä Perezvon oli.
— Hän ei tiedä missä on. Hyvästi, lääkäri, me tapaamme

toisemme
Syrakuusassa.
— Kuka t-tä-mä on? Kuka, kuka? — kysyi tohtori aivan

vimmastuneena.
— Hän on täkäläisiä koulupoikia, tohtori, hän on kujeilija, älkää

välittäkö hänestä, — sanoi Aljoša kiireesti ja rypistäen kulmiaan. —
Kolja, olkaa vaiti! — huudahti hän Krasotkinille. — Ei pidä välittää
hänestä, tohtori, — toisti hän jo hiukan kärsimättömämmin.
— Sel-kään, sel-kään pitää sille antaa, selkään! — polki jalkaansa

tohtori, joka oli hirveän raivostunut.
— Mutta tiedättekö, lääkäri, minun Perezvonini voi ehkä purrakin!

— lausui Kolja värisevällä äänellä, hän kalpeni ja hänen silmänsä
leimahtivat. — Ici, Perezvon!
— Kolja, jos sanotte vain sanankin vielä, niin minä katkaisen

välimme ainaiseksi, — huudahti Aljoša mahtavasti.
— Lääkäri, on ainoastaan yksi olento koko maailmassa, joka voi

käskeä Nikolai Krasotkinia, ja se on tämä mies (Kolja osoitti Aljošaa);
häntä minä tottelen, hyvästi!
Hän syöksähti paikaltaan, avasi oven ja meni kiireesti

huoneeseen. Perezvon syöksyi hänen jälkeensä. Tohtori seisoi vielä
viitisen sekuntia kuin jähmettyneenä ja katseli Aljošaa, sitten hän
sylkäisi ja lähti nopeasti vaunuja kohti toistellen kuuluvasti: »Tämä,
tämä, en tiedä, mitä tämä on!» Alikapteeni kiiruhti auttamaan häntä
vaunuihin. Aljoša meni huoneeseen Koljan jäljessä. Tämä seisoi jo
Iljušan vuoteen ääressä. Iljuša piti kiinni hänen kädestään ja kutsui
isäänsä. Hetkisen kuluttua tuli alikapteenikin takaisin.
— Isä, isä, tule tänne… me… — alkoi Iljuša lepertää hyvin

kiihtyneenä, mutta ei nähtävästi jaksanut jatkaa, vaan ojensi äkkiä
molemmat laihtuneet kätensä eteenpäin ja syleili niin kovasti kuin
jaksoi yhtaikaa heitä kumpaakin, sekä Koljaa että isäänsä, yhdistäen
heidät syleilyynsä ja painautuen itse heitä vastaan. Alikapteeni alkoi
yhtäkkiä nytkähdellä kuulumattomista nyyhkytyksistä, Koljan huulet
ja leuka alkoivat vavahdella.
— Isä, isä! Miten sääli minun onkaan sinua, isä! -— voihki Iljuša
katkerasti.
— Iljušetška… kullanmuruni… tohtori sanoi… sinä tulet

terveeksi… tulemme onnellisiksi… tohtori… — alkoi alikapteeni
puhua.
— Ah, isä! Tiedänhän minä, mitä uusi tohtori sinulle sanoi

minusta… Näinhän minä! — huudahti Iljuša ja puristi taas lujasti,
kaikin voimin, heitä kumpaakin vastaansa painaen kasvonsa isänsä
olkapäähän.
— Isä, älä itke… ja kun minä kuolen, niin ota sinä hyvä poika,
toinen… valitse itse heistä kaikista, ota hyvä, pane sen nimeksi Iljuša
ja rakasta häntä minun sijastani…
— Ole vaiti, ukko, sinä tulet terveeksi! — huudahti äkkiä Krasotkin

aivan kuin vihastuneena.
— Äläkä sinä, isä, unhota minua koskaan, — jatkoi Iljuša, — käy
haudallani… ja tiedätkö mitä, isä, hautaa minut sen meidän ison
kivemme luo, jonka luokse me yhdessä kävelimme, ja käy siellä
luonani Krasotkinin kanssa iltaisin… Ja Perezvon… Minä odotan
teitä… Isä, isä!
Hänen äänensä katkesi, kaikki kolme seisoivat syleillen toisiaan

eivätkä enää puhuneet mitään. Ninotškakin nojatuolissaan itki hiljaa,
ja yhtäkkiä, nähdessään kaikkien itkevän, äitikin alkoi kyynelehtiä.
— Iljušetška! Iljušetška! — huudahteli hän.
Krasotkin irtautui viimein Iljušan syleilystä.
— Hyvästi, ukko, minua odottaa äiti päivälliselle, — lausui hän

kiireesti. — Kuinka ikävää, että en ilmoittanut hänelle aikaisemmin!
Hän on varmaan hyvin levoton… Mutta heti päivällisen jälkeen tulen
luoksesi koko päiväksi, koko illaksi, ja kerron sinulle niin paljon, niin
paljon! Perezvonin tuon myös mukanani, mutta nyt vien sen
mennessäni, sillä se alkaa poissaollessani ulvoa ja häiritsee sinua;
näkemiin!
Ja hän juoksi ulos eteiseen. Hän ei tahtonut itkeä, mutta eteisessä

hän kuitenkin rupesi itkemään. Tässä tilassa hänet tapasi Aljoša.
— Kolja, teidän on ehdottomasti pidettävä sananne ja tultava,

muuten hänelle tulee hirveä suru, — lausui Aljoša tiukasti.
— Ehdottomasti! Oi, kuinka kiroan itseäni, että en ole käynyt

aikaisemmin, — mutisi Kolja itkien ja häpeämättä itkemistään.
Samassa alikapteeni aivan kuin hyppäsi yhtäkkiä ulos huoneesta ja
sulki heti oven jälkeensä. Hänen kasvonsa olivat raivostuneet, huulet
värisivät. Hän asettui molempien nuorukaisten eteen ja ojensi
molemmat kätensä ylös.
— Minä en tahdo hyvää poikaa! Minä en tahdo toista poikaa! —

kuiskasi hän rajusti, hampaitaan kiristellen. — Jos unhotan sinut,
Jerusalem, niin tarttukoon kieleni…
Hän ei puhunut loppuun, vaan oli kuin läkähtymäisillään, ja vaipui

voimattomana polvilleen puisen penkin eteen. Painaen molemmat
nyrkkinsä päätään vastaan hän alkoi nyyhkyttää oudosti vikisten,
ponnistaen samalla kaikki voimansa, ettei hänen vikinänsä kuuluisi
tupaan. Kolja riensi kadulle.
— Hyvästi, Karamazov! Tuletteko itse? — huudahti hän jyrkästi ja

vihaisesti Aljošalle.
— Illalla tulen ehdottomasti.
— Mitä hän puhui Jerusalemista… Mitä se oli olevinaan?
— Se on raamatusta: »Jos unhotan sinut, Jerusalem», — toisin

sanoen minä unhotan kaikki, mikä minulle on kalleinta, jos vaihdan
semmoiseen, joka viehättää…
— Ymmärrän, riittää! Tulkaa vain itse! Ici, Perezvon! — huusi hän

hyvin tuimasti koiralleen ja lähti pitkin, nopein askelin harppaamaan
kotiinsa.
Yhdestoista kirja Veli Ivan Fjodorovitš

1.
Grušenjkan luona
Aljoša suuntasi kulkunsa Kirkkotorille, kauppiaanleski Morozovin

taloon, Grušenjkan luo. Tämä oli jo aikaisin aamulla lähettänyt hänen
luokseen Fenjan tuomaan hartaan pyynnön, että hän pistäytyisi
Grušenjkan luona. Kyseltyään Fenjalta Aljoša sai tietää, että rouva
oli ollut jonkin suuren ja erikoisen levottomuuden vallassa jo eilisestä
lähtien. Koko tuon kahden kuukauden aikana, joka oli kulunut Mitjan
vangitsemisesta, Aljoša oli useasti käynyt rouva Morozovin talossa
sekä omasta aloitteestaan että Mitjan asioilla. Noin kolmen päivän
kuluttua Mitjan vangitsemisesta oli Grušenjka ankarasti sairastunut
ja oli nyt ollut lähes viisi viikkoa sairaana. Yhden viikon noista
viidestä hän oli maannut tiedottomana. Hänen kasvonsa olivat
suuresti muuttuneet, ne olivat laihtuneet ja kellastuneet, vaikka hän
oli jo melkein kaksi viikkoa saanut olla ulkosalla. Mutta Aljošan
mielestä hänen kasvonsa olivat tulleet tavallaan vielä
puoleensavetävämmiksi, ja hänestä oli mieluisaa Grušenjkan luo
astuessaan kohdata tämän katse. Siinä katseessa oli ikäänkuin
vahvistuneena jotakin lujaa ja järkevää. Se ilmaisi jotakin henkistä
murrosta, siinä ilmeni jokin muuttumaton, nöyrä, mutta jalo ja
peruuttamaton päättäväisyys. Kulmakarvojen väliin otsaan oli
ilmestynyt pieni pystysuora ryppy, joka antoi hänen kauniille
kasvoilleen keskitetyn miettiväisyyden leiman, mikä ensi silmäyksellä
näytti melkeinpä ankaralta. Entisestä kevytmielisyydestä ei ollut
jälkeäkään näkyvissä. Omituista oli Aljošasta myöskin se, että
kaikesta onnettomuudesta huolimatta, mikä oli kohdannut
naisparkaa, morsianta, jonka sulhanen oli vangittu kauheasta
rikoksesta miltei samalla hetkellä, kun hänestä oli tullut tämän
morsian, huolimatta senjälkeen seuranneesta sairaudesta ja
uhkaavasta oikeuden tuomiosta, joka tuskin oli vältettävissä,
Grušenjka ei kuitenkaan ollut menettänyt entistä iloisuuttaan. Hänen
ennen ylpeistä silmistään loisti nyt jonkinlainen hiljaisuus, vaikka…
vaikka muuten nämä silmät vieläkin toisinaan liekehtivät pahaa
ennustavasta, kun hänen sydäntään ahdisti eräs entinen huoli, joka
ei ensinkään ollut tukahtunut, vaan vieläpä kasvanutkin. Tämän
huolen esine oli yhä sama: Katerina Ivanovna, jota Grušenjka
sairastaessaan oli muistellut houreissaankin. Aljoša ymmärsi, että
hän oli tälle hirveän mustasukkainen Mitjan tähden, vangin tähden,
siitä huolimatta, että Katerina Ivanovna ei ollut kertaakaan käynyt
tätä tervehtimässä vankilassa, vaikka olisi voinut tehdä sen milloin
hyvänsä. Kaikesta tästä muodostui Aljošalle eräänlainen vaikea
tehtävä, sillä Grušenjka uskoi vain hänelle sydämensä salaisuudet ja
pyysi alati häneltä neuvoja; hän puolestaan ei toisinaan kyennyt
sanomaan Grušenjkalle kerrassaan mitään.
Huolestuneena hän saapui Grušenjkan asuntoon. Tämä oli jo

kotona; noin puoli tuntia sitten hän oli palannut Mitjan luota, ja jo siitä
nopeasta liikkeestä, jolla Grušenjka hypähti nojatuolista pöydän
äärestä häntä vastaan, hän päätti, että tämä oli odottanut häntä
hyvin kärsimättömästi. Pöydällä oli levällään kortteja, ja ne oli jaettu
niinkuin turakkapeliä varten. Nahkasohvalle toiselle puolelle oli
laitettu vuode, ja siinä loikoi puoleksi istuen viitta yllään ja
pumpulikankainen yölakki päässä Maksimov, joka ilmeisesti oli
sairas ja heikko, vaikka hymyilikin imelästi. Tämä koditon ukko oli
silloin, jo kaksi kuukautta sitten, palannut Mokrojesta yhdessä
Grušenjkan kanssa ja siitä lähtien jäänytkin hänen luokseen
olemaan. Tultuaan silloin Grušenjkan kanssa räntäsateessa hän oli
läpimärkä ja pelästyneenä istuutunut sohvaan ja luonut ääneti
silmänsä häneen hymyillen arasti, ja rukoilevasti. Grušenjka, joka oli
hyvin murheissaan ja jo alkavan kuumeen vallassa ja oli miltei
unohtanut hänet ensimmäisen puolen tunnin aikana puuhaillessaan
kaikenlaista tulonsa jälkeen, — oli äkkiä luonut häneen kiinteän
katseen: Maksimov oli surkeasti ja hämillään silloin nauraa hihittänyt
katsoen häntä silmiin. Grušenjka oli kutsunut Fenjan ja käskenyt tätä
antamaan Maksimoville ruokaa. Koko sen päivän oli ukko istunut
paikallaan melkein liikahtamatta; kun sitten ilta pimeni ja
ikkunaluukut pantiin kiinni, oli Fenja kysynyt rouvalta:
— Miten on, rouva, jääkö hän sitten tänne yöksi?
— Niin, laita hänelle vuode sohvalle, oli Grušenjka vastannut.
Tarkemmin kyseltyään oli Grušenjka saanut selville, että

Maksimovilla nyt todellakaan ei ollut mitään paikkaa, mihin menisi, ja
että »herra Kalganov, hyväntekijäni, ilmoittivat minulle suoraan,
etteivät enää huoli minua luokseen, ja lahjoittivat viisi ruplaa». —
»No, Jumala kanssasi, jää sitten tänne», päätti Grušenjka
suruissaan ja hymähti hänelle osaaottavasti. Ukkoa liikutti hänen
hymynsä, ja mies-paran huulet alkoivat väristä hellämielisestä
itkusta. Siitä saakka oli sitten kuljeskeleva elätti ollutkin Grušenjkan
luona. Tämän sairastaessakaan hän ei ollut lähtenyt talosta. Fenja ja
tämän äiti, Grušenjkan keittäjätär, eivät ajaneet häntä pois, vaan
syöttivät häntä edelleen ja laittoivat hänelle vuoteen sohvalle.
Myöhemmin Grušenjka tottui häneen niin, että tullessaan Mitjan
luota (jota hän tuskin tervehdyttyään oli heti alkanut käydä
katsomassa) hän suruaan haihduttaakseen istuutui ja alkoi puhella
»Maksimuškan» kanssa kaikenlaisista joutavista asioista, ettei vain
ajattelisi suruaan. Osoittautui, että ukko osasi toisinaan kertoakin
yhtä ja toista, niin että hän lopulta oli suorastaan välttämätön
Grušenjkalle. Paitsi Aljošaa, joka ei kuitenkaan käynyt joka päivä ja
aina viipyi vain lyhyen ajan, ei Grušenjka ottanut vastaan juuri
ketään. Hänen ukkonsa taasen, kauppias, oli tähän aikaan hyvin
sairas, »teki lähtöä», kuten kaupungilla sanottiin, ja kuolikin vain
viikko sen jälkeen kuin Mitja oli tuomittu. Kolme viikkoa ennen
kuolemaansa, tuntien lopun lähenevän, hän vihdoin kutsui luokseen
ylös poikansa vaimoineen ja lapsineen ja käski näitä pysymään
luonaan. Palvelijoitaan hän tästä hetkestä lähtien kielsi ankarasti
ensinkään vastaanottamasta Grušenjkaa, ja jos tämä tulisi,
sanomaan hänelle: »Käskee teitä elämään kauan iloisesti ja
kokonaan unohtamaan heidät.» Grušenjka lähetti kuitenkin melkein
joka päivä tiedustelemaan hänen terveydentilaansa.
— Viimeinkin tulit! — huudahti hän heittäen pois kortit ja tervehtien

iloisesti Aljošaa. — Maksimuška jo kovin peloitteli, että sinä kukaties
et tulekaan. Ah, kuinka sinua tarvitaan! Istuudu pöydän ääreen; no,
saako olla kahvia?
— Ehkäpä, — sanoi Aljoša istuutuen pöydän luo, — olen hyvin

nälissäni.
— Siinäpä se; Fenja, Fenja, kahvia! — huudahti Grušenjka. — Se

on jo kauan ollut kiehumassa, odottaa sinua, ja tuo piirakoltakin,
mutta kuumia. Ei, odotahan, Aljoša, näitten piirakoitten johdosta
syntyi tänään myrsky. Minä vein niitä hänelle vankilaan, mutta hän,
uskotko, heitti ne minulle takaisin eikä syönyt. Yhden piirakan hän
suorastaan paiskasi lattiaan ja polki sitä jaloillaan. Minä sanoin:
»Jätän ne vartijalle; jos et syö niitä iltaan mennessä, niin silloin sinua
tietysti elättää ilkeämielinen viha!» ja niin lähdin matkaani. Taaskin
siis riitaannuimme, uskotko sitä. Joka kerta, kun menen sinne, me
riitaannumme.
Grušenjka sanoi tämän kaiken henkeään vetämättä, kiihdyksissä.
Maksimov hätääntyi heti, hymyili ja painoi silmänsä alas.
— Mistä te tällä kertaa riitaannuitte? — kysyi Aljoša.
— Minulle aivan odottamattomasta asiasta! Ajattelehan, hän on

alkanut olla mustasukkainen »entiselle»: »Miksi, mukamas, sinä
ylläpidät häntä? Sinä olet siis alkanut ylläpitää häntä?» On kaiken
aikaa mustasukkainen, aina vain mustasukkainen puolestani! Hän
on sekä nukkuessaan että syödessään mustasukkainen. Kerran
viime viikolla oli jo mustasukkainen Kuzjmallekin.
— Hänhän tiesi, miten ovat »entisen» asiat?
— Siinäpä se onkin. Aivan alusta asti ihan tähän päivään saakka

hän on tietänyt, mutta tänään yhtäkkiä nousi ja alkoi torua. Ihan
hävettää sanoakin, mitä hän puhui. Senkin hölmö! Rakitka tuli hänen
luokseen, kun minä lähdin pois. Kenties Rakitka häntä yllyttää, vai
mitä? Mitä luulet? — lisäsi hän hajamielisesti.
— Hän rakastaa sinua, siinäpä se juuri onkin, rakastaa suuresti.

Mutta nyt hän on samalla kiihdyksissä.
— Kuinka ei olisi kiihdyksissä, huomenna tuomitaan. Minä menin

sanoakseni hänelle sanani huomisen johdosta, sillä minun on,
Aljoša, kauheata ajatellakin, mitä huomenna tulee! Sinä sanot, että
hän on kiihdyksissä, mutta miten kiihdyksissä olenkaan minä. Ja hän
alkaa puhua puolalaisesta! Senkin hölmö! Pian aikaan hän tulee
vielä mustasukkaiseksi Maksimuškalle.
— Minun vaimoni on myös hyvin mustasukkainen minun tähteni,

— pisti sanasensa väliin Maksimov.
— No, sinun tähtesi, — alkoi Grušenjka tahtomattaan nauraa, —
kenelle voisi olla sinun takiasi mustasukkainen?
— Palvelustytöille.
— Ah, ole vaiti, Maksimuška, ei minua nyt naurata, ihan vihaksi

pistää. Älä vilkuile piirakkoihin, minä en anna niitä, ne ovat sinulle
epäterveelliset, enkä anna myöskään palsamia. Tuonkin kanssa
tässä pitää rehkiä; aivan kuin minulla täällä olisi jonkinmoinen
vaivaistalo, totta tosiaan, — alkoi hän nauraa.
— Minä en ole teidän hyvien töittenne arvoinen, minä olen

mitätön, — lausui itkunsekaisella äänellä Maksimov. — Kohdistaisitte
hyväntekeväisyytenne mieluummin niihin, jotka ovat tarpeellisempia
kuin minä.
— Oh, jokainen on tarpeellinen, Maksimuška, ja mistä sen tietää,

kuka on tarpeellisempi kuin toinen. Kunpa ei tuota puolalaista olisi
ollutkaan. Aljoša, hänkin on tänään sairastunut. Olin hänenkin
luonaan. Nyt lähetän hänelle aivan tahallani piirakoita, minä en
lähettänyt, mutta Mitja syytti minua siitä, että muka lähetän, niinpä
nyt uhallakin lähetän, ihan uhalla! Ah, tuossahan on Fenjakin ja tuo
kirjeen! No, niin onkin, taas puolalaisilta, taas pyytävät rahaa!
Herra Mussjalovitš oli todellakin lähettänyt sangen pitkän ja

tapansa mukaan kaunosanaisen kirjeen, jossa pyysi saada lainaksi
kolme ruplaa. Kirjeeseen oli liitetty kuitti, jossa tunnustettiin
rahamäärä saaduksi ja sitouduttiin maksamaan se takaisin kolmen
kuukauden kuluessa; kuitin alle oli kirjoittanut nimensä myös herra
Vrublevski. Tämmöisiä kirjeitä ja tämmöisiä kuitteja oli Grušenjka
saanut »entiseltään» jo monta. Niitten tulo oli alkanut silloin, kun
Grušenjka pari viikkoa sitten oli tullut terveeksi. Hän tiesi myös, että
molemmat herrat olivat hänen sairautensakin aikana käyneet
tiedustamassa hänen vointiaan. Ensimmäinen kirje, jonka Grušenjka
sai, oli pitkä ja isokokoiselle kirjepaperille kirjoitettu, suurella perheen
sinetillä suljettu ja hirveän hämärä ja korusanainen, niin että
Grušenjka luki sen vain puoliväliin ja jätti siihen, koska ei ymmärtänyt
siitä mitään. Eikä hänellä silloin ollut aikaa ajatella kirjeitä. Tätä
ensimmäistä kirjettä seurasi seuraavana päivänä toinen, jossa herra
Mussjalovitš pyysi häneltä lainaksi kaksituhatta ruplaa hyvin lyhyeksi
ajaksi. Grušenjka jätti tämänkin kirjeen vastaamatta. Sen jälkeen
seurasi kokonainen sarja kirjeitä, kirje päivässä, kaikki yhtä juhlallisia
ja kaunopuheisia, mutta lainaksi pyydetty summa niissä yhä pieneni,
aleni sataan ruplaan, kahteenkymmeneenviiteen, kymmeneen
ruplaan, ja lopulta Grušenjka yhtäkkiä sai kirjeen, jossa molemmat
herrat pyysivät häneltä ainoastaan yhden ruplan ja liittivät mukaan
kuitin, jonka molemmat olivat allekirjoittaneet. Silloin oli Grušenjkaa
yhtäkkiä alkanut säälittää, ja hän pistäytyi hämärissä itse herrain
luona. Hän tapasi molemmat puolalaiset hirveässä köyhyydessä,
melkein kurjuudessa, ilman ruokaa, ilman puita, ilman savukkeita,
velassa emännälle. Mitjalta Mokrojessa voitetut kaksisataa ruplaa
olivat nopeasti hävinneet jonnekin. Grušenjkaa hämmästytti
kuitenkin, että molemmat herrat ottivat hänet vastaan ylpeän
arvokkaasti ja niinkuin riippumattomat miehet, kaikkia muotoja
noudattaen ja komein puhein. Grušenjka vain nauroi ja antoi
»entiselleen» kymmenen ruplaa. Silloin hän nauraen kertoi tästä
Mitjalle, eikä tämä ensinkään ollut mustasukkainen. Mutta tästä
lähtien herrat takertuivat Grušenjkaan ja pommittivat häntä joka
päivä kirjeillä, joissa pyysivät rahaa, ja tämä lähetti joka kerta
pikkuisen, mutta nytpä tänään Mitja yhtäkkiä sai päähänsä tulla
hirveän mustasukkaiseksi.

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Serial Revolutions 1848

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CLARE PET TIT T

For Kitty and Marina

List of Illustrations xiii

2.27. ‘Interior of a Chamber – a family of insurgents protecting a barricade

List of Illustrations xvii

8.5. ‘Dove si dovrebbero mandare. Attualità Caricature di Japhet’

AHC Arthur Hugh Clough

CD Letters 3 The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 3: 1843–1847, ed. Madeline

EBB Elizabeth Barrett Browning

ILN Illustrated London News

JPH James Pope-­Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Years of Promise,

RWE Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stanley 1 Rowland E. Prothero (ed.), The Life and Correspondence of Arthur

Stuttering, scattered, and various in their outcomes, a series of revolutions erupted

2 Serial Revolutions 1848

‘homogeneous, empty time’ of modernity.3 In my argument, the nineteenth-­

4 Serial Revolutions 1848

In Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford

In its ‘Retrospect of 1848’ the Illustrated London News somewhat smugly

What Actually Happened?

6 Serial Revolutions 1848

8 Serial Revolutions 1848

10 Serial Revolutions 1848

What Did It All Mean? The Historiography of 1848

12 Serial Revolutions 1848

14 Serial Revolutions 1848

16 Serial Revolutions 1848

59 ‘Rome, 29th March, 1848’, New-York Daily Tribune (4 May 1848): 1.

18 Serial Revolutions 1848

revolution.63 The revolutions were ‘nationalized’ only in retrospect: they were

sustainable than we tend to remember. The 1848 revolutions succeeded remarkably

68 [Anon.],‘State of Europe’, Edinburgh Review 178 (October 1848): 514–58, p. 514.

20 Serial Revolutions 1848

22 Serial Revolutions 1848

equality nor freedom was understood as a quality inherent in human nature.’79

In Europe in 1848, ‘democracy’ was a term under extreme pressure. A radical

79 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 23. 80 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 147.

American Revolution to have been ‘triumphantly successful’, and she wonders

24 Serial Revolutions 1848

around 1848. He abandoned the chapter on class he had originally intended to

— En, en ole vielä lukenut, mutta aion lukea. Minulla ei ole

— Sanokaa, Karamazov, halveksitteko te minua kauheasti? —

— Halveksinko teitä? — sanoi Aljoša katsellen häntä ihmeissään.

— Älkää olko huolissanne minun luonteestani, — keskeytti Kolja

— Ah, minä naurahdin aivan muulle. Tiedättekö, mille minä

— Ah, sehän on aivan oikein! — alkoi Kolja yhtäkkiä nauraa

— Miksi sitten kuristaa? — hymyili Aljoša.

— No, minä lörpöttelin kenties, myönnän sen. Minä olen toisinaan

— Niin, niin! Kunhan rupeatte käymään talossa niin näette,

— Oi, kuinka olen pahoillani ja soimaan itseäni siitä, etten tullut

— Niin, se on hyvin ikävää. Te näitte itse, kuinka suuresti te

— Älkää puhuko minulle siitä! Te raatelette sydäntäni. Muuten se

— Ei, te olette oivallinen luonne, vaikka pilattu, ja minä ymmärrän

— Ja tätä sanotte minulle te! — huudahti Kolja. — Ja minä kun

— Mutta oletteko te todellakin noin epäluuloinen? Tuossa iässä!

— Ja kiusaatte ympärillänne olevia, — hymyili Aljoša.

— Ja kiusaan ympärilläni olevia, varsinkin äitiäni. Karamazov,

— Älkää ajatelko sitä, älkää ollenkaan ajatelko sitä! — huudahti

— Siitäkin huolimatta, että kaikki ovat sellaisia?

List of Illustrations xiii

JPH James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Years of Promise,

‘homogeneous, empty time’ of modernity.3 In my argument, the nineteenth-