The Russian radical émigré Alexander Herzen left three works that focus on 1848: two volumes of essays, and his great autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, in which his life story pivots around 1848. Herzen, who emigrated in 1847, describes himself as arriving in Paris as pilgrims once arrived at Jerusalem. By his own account, he rapidly discovered the fundamentally bourgeois character of French civilization and then witnessed the crushing of the June insurrection. The political debacle was compounded by personal tragedy – the deaths of his mother and son and his wife Natalie. In all his writings we find Herzen seeking a perspective from which the collapse of his pre-revolutionary ideals would make sense. His most powerful essays are jeremiads lamenting his broken dreams, replaying the June insurrection, and reflecting on the powerlessness of historical actors to change the world. Attempting to explain what went wrong in 1848, Herzen insists on the inability of European radicals to get beyond models drawn from the first French Revolution or Christianity or both. For Herzen, as for Proudhon (whom he admired) and Marx (whom he did not admire) the fatal weakness of the left lay in its inability to emancipate itself from memories that served to justify and cloak the return of repressive centralized government.

George Sand’s novels did much to shape the sensibilities of the young people who welcomed the February Revolution. During March and April, she helped prepare the election of a Constituent Assembly by writing “Bulletins” published by the Interior Minister Ledru-Rollin. Her voluminous correspondence illustrates vividly the enthusiasm of many romantic writers during the first weeks of the revolution. Her rejection of the proposal by feminist journalists that she stand for election opens a window on divisions among feminists in 1848. But for our purposes, Sand’s primary importance lies in the way her correspondence illustrates both the flowering of the cult of “the people” in the spring of 1848 and the causes of the disillusionment that set in early. After May 15 Sand ceased to believe that the people were capable of governing themselves. Her relations with the worker-poet Charles Poncy are considered at length because they can stand as an epitome of both the success and the failure of Sand’s attempts to get close to “the people.” While much of the scholarly literature stresses Sand’s lifelong adherence to “the principles of 1848,” I argue that there was little left after 1848 of the ideals that she had brought to the February Revolution.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Hegelian background to Marx’s thought and then attempts to situate him in the radical German emigration in Paris, Brussels and London, between 1843 and 1850. Until the summer of 1850, Marx continued to believe that a working-class uprising in France would provoke a revolutionary upheaval that would engulf Europe. In Class Struggles and The 18th Brumaire, Marx draws lessons for the German working class from the defeats of the French proletariat between 1848 and 1851. He does so by systematically contrasting the world of historical reality, the class struggle, and the realm of shadow and illusion in which historical actors fancy that their speeches and parliamentary manoeuvres make a difference. He explains brilliantly how Louis-Napoleon could have appeared as a saviour to the impoverished small peasantry. What is most striking about these essays is their rhetorical power – the literary skill with which Marx evokes the ghosts and shadows, the dreams, riddles and masquerades that constitute the realm of ideology and illusion. Marx’s essays on 1848–1851 give substance to his theories of ideology and false consciousness and do so in a way that fuses the spellbinding power of the imagery with the spell-banishing power of the historian.

The great problem in writing about Proudhon and his Confessions of a Revolutionary is to find a “bottom line” – an interpretation that does justice to the changing views of this contrarian thinker without losing all coherence. Hyperbole and exaggeration are constants in Proudhon’s writing, but his message is generally moderate. The focus in this chapter is, first of all, on the contrast between Proudhon’s verbal violence and his skeptical and ironic attitude with regard to the views of self-proclaimed radicals. A constant is his rejection of the top-down radicalism epitomized by the “Jacobin socialist” Louis Blanc. In terms of Proudhon’s experience, the important point is that the revolution of 1848 drew him into a new life. It made him a representative of the people and an influential journalist. It made him the butt of attacks but also gave him a wider audience than he had ever previously enjoyed. He became the scapegoat of the right. But after the June Days, he also became the spokesman for “the people” betrayed by the revolution. His Confessions of a Revolutionary is both an account of his own making as a revolutionary and of the unmaking of the democratic revolution.

Unlike most of his contemporaries who turned away from radical politics after the June Days, Victor Hugo was both energized and radicalized by his experience of politics during the Second Republic. This chapter traces the process by which this consummate establishment figure became a living symbol of fidelity to the republican ideal in France. It tracks the developing radicalism of Hugo’s speeches in the National Assembly and focuses especially on Hugo’s experience of the June Days – he was the only one of our nine writers who took up arms against the workers’ revolt in June – and it considers Hugo’s reassessment of 1848 in his later writings, especially Les Misérables. By 1850 Hugo had emerged as the leader of the republican resistance to the Party of Order and to Louis-Napoleon. After December 2, 1851, Hugo went into exile and spent the next 19 years hurling verbal bombs at ”Napoleon the Little.” Taking pride in his exile as if it were not simply a circumstance of his life but an identity, Hugo came to symbolize in his own person republican opposition to imperial rule. How to explain Hugo’s remarkable transformation? Unlike Lamartine, Sand and others, Hugo did not at the outset expect much of anything from the Republic.

This chapter argues that Lamartine’s role in 1848 is best understood with reference not to his shallow and hastily written History of 1848 but to his earlier History of the Girondins. Lamartine’s goal was the creation of a moderate republic. His History of the Girondins was not a celebration but a critique of the Girondins whom he saw as revolutionary rhetoricians for whom politics was a matter of public gesture and private intrigue. By contrast with the Girondins’ failures, Lamartine indicated the steps to be taken by the leader of a future moderate revolution. What is remarkable is that for three months Lamartine did play the role for which he had prepared himself. His apotheosis came on April 23 when he received 1.3 million votes in the elections for the National Assembly. But he failed to understand that he owed his success to the fears of conservatives who regarded him as a restraining influence on radicals. These fears were greatly reduced by the overall conservative victory. After April 23 conservatives no longer needed Lamartine, whose fall was as rapid as his rise had been. While he tried to present himself as a conservative in his History of 1848, he was attacked by the right as “the man who taught revolution to France.”

After an introductory discussion of Flaubert’s development as a writer and his direct experience (with Maxime Du Camp) of the February Revolution, this chapter focuses on his great novel, Sentimental Education. This novel is both the story of an unconsummated love affair and an account of the experience and imaginative life of the generation of young people who came to maturity around 1840 and whose lives were either broken or redirected by the revolution of 1848. Our analysis emphasizes the care taken by Flaubert to establish a counterpoint between the collapse of political ideals in 1848 and the collapse of the dreams of the individual characters. The novel is considered as a work of history and compared to the work of historians like Georges Duveau and Maurice Agulhon. A number of specific scenes and vignettes are discussed in an attempt to show how Flaubert brings the past to life. We conclude with a discussion of Bouvard and Pecuchet, which includes a chapter on the revolution of 1848 as it affected a village in Normandy. Though written in an overtly comic vein, this chapter reinforces the picture offered by Sentimental Education of history as ruled by elemental forces that overwhelm the plans of individuals.

After a general discussion of the experience of proscription, exile, and “internal exile,” we follow each of our nine writers into exile, retirement, or a new life. We then compare their assessments of particular events and individuals: notably the prison massacres during the June Days and the portraits of Auguste Blanqui and Adolphe Thiers. We turn to three themes: 1) the religiosity that pervaded the language of the ‘forty-eighters; 2) the repeated recourse to theatrical language and imagery to describe both the course of events and the tendency of revolutionaries to mimic the words, deeds and gestures of the first French revolutionaries; 3)the cult of “the people” elaborated as a source of democratic legitimacy by some of our writers and criticized by others. In conclusion, I maintain that in their effort to explain the failure of the democratic republic in 1848–1852, our writers raise questions that continue to concern us. Their central concern was the problem of democracy. When, and how, would the people be able to govern themselves? How was it that in the space of two generations democratic revolutions had twice culminated in Napoleonic dictatorship? There are worse questions to ask if we are to begin to understand the failures of democratic politics in our own time.

As a member of the National Assembly and (for five months) Foreign Minister, Tocqueville played an important role in the history of the French Second Republic. His Recollections offer a fascinating picture of the major actors, the revolutionary journées, and his unhappy experience as minister. One remarkable feature of the Recollections is the brutal clarity of Tocqueville’s judgments. By his own account, it was not a work of history but a memoir written “for myself alone.” In prose marked by a somewhat archaic elegance, Tocqueville vividly conveys a sense of the hopes and fears of the propertied classes. He takes a dark view of both the July Monarchy and the republicans and socialists who brought it down. He argues that by limiting politics to a narrow stratum, the July Monarchy had fatally impoverished the notion of public interest and that the radicals who had a chance at power in 1848 were so lacking in political experience that they could only play at revolution, mimicking the roles and gestures of the revolutionaries of 1789–1794. The chapter includes a substantial discussion of Tocqueville’s tenure as Foreign Minister and his role in the French overthrow of the Roman Republic and the restoration of papal power in Rome.

The Prologue begins with brief accounts of the revolutions of 1848, first in France, then in Europe. This is followed by a substantial overview of the book, emphasizing its dual focus on the experience of nine writers from 1848 to 1852 and analysis of the texts in which each writer attempted to take the measure of the revolution and its aftermath. The rest of the Prologue provides comment on features of French political culture (1815–1848) that are important for an understanding of 1848. Themes include: the continuing weight of the memory of the first French Revolution; the emergence of political groups defined by their relation to conflicts and factions of 1789–1794; the development of working-class organization and protest; the emergence of republican and socialist movements; the influence of the press; the economic and social roots of the February Revolution. A substantial discussion of French rural society in the 1830s and 1840s emphasizes the plight of the peasant smallholder, which was poorly understood by the republicans who took power in February. We conclude with a discussion of the agricultural, then financial, crisis of 1846/47 which resulted in a loss of confidence in the July Monarchy on the part of the elites.

Marie d’Agoult was famous in her own time as the lover of Franz Liszt and the mother of his children, one of whom, Cosima, married Richard Wagner. After her separation from Liszt, she made a career for herself as a femme de lettres and wrote a three-volume History of 1848 which was greatly admired by contemporaries including Flaubert who used it as a key source in the writing of Sentimental Education. Carefully researched, elegantly structured, and impressive for its nuanced judgments, her History communicates brilliantly the perspective of the democratic republicans who led the revolution at the outset. These were people who had devoted themselves for twenty years to the emancipation of the “proletariat” but found themselves supporting the crushing of the June insurrection on the ground that, however justified it may have been, it was an attack on the republic. After December 2 d’Agoult’s salon became for a decade a meeting place for liberals opposed to Napoleon III. Finally, she was willing to settle for a conservative republic, not unlike that imagined by Lamartine and briefly led by Cavaignac.