"The 1848 uprisings were a dissonant orchestra of ambitions and intentions"

CHRISTOPHER CLARK tells Matt Elton about the revolutions that swept Europe in the 19th century, revealing how their speed and synchronicity alarmed authorities across the continent

- Matt Elton

Matt Elton: Before we explore the causes of the revolutions of 1848, could you sketch out where and when they took place?

Christopher Clark: In January 1848, revolution broke out in Palermo and Naples, two major cities of what was then called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This happened against a backdrop of demonstrations and protests that had been building across Europe. And then came the really big news: the revolution in Paris in the last week of February, which led to the flight of the king from the city and the collapse of the French monarchy. After that, the revolutions enter a kind of fusion phase in which there are chain reactions of uprisings: in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Bucharest. It just went on and on, cascading across the continent.

Rewinding to explore some of the causes, then, how important was poverty as a factor in the lead-up to these revolutions?

Poverty was the primary issue, and there was a degree of moral panic around it – although people at the time used the term “pauperisation” rather than poverty. The reason for that distinction was that, although commentators believed poverty had always existed in human societies, they thought that what was happening in the 1830s and 1840s was something new – a kind of systematic impoverishment of large sectors of society which had previously been able to make a living. Those people were now having to work all the hours god sent, but were still unable to make ends meet or feed their children. One of the chief sources of anxiety in cities was that the poor were getting poorer, and it wasn’t clear how far that process could go before it began to eat away at the bonds holding society together.