Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONcrisis in the development of the new society which conclude with thedefeat of the 1848 revolutions and the gigantic economic leap forwardafter 1851.The third and biggest of the revolutionary waves, that of 1848, wasthe product of this crisis. Almost simultaneously revolution broke outand (temporarily) won in France, the whole of Italy, the Germanstates, most of the Habsburg Empire and Switzerland (1847). In a lessacute form the unrest also affected Spain, Denmark and Rumania, ina sporadic form Ireland, Greece and Britain. There has never beenanything closer to the world-revolution of which the insurrectionaries ofthe period dreamed than this spontaneous and general conflagration,which concludes the era discussed in this volume. What had been in1789 the rising of a single nation was now, it seemed, 'the springtimeof peoples' of an entire continent.IIUnlike the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, those of the post-Napoleonic period were intended or even planned. For the mostformidable legacy of the French Revolution itself was the set of modelsand patterns of political upheaval which it established for the generaluse of rebels anywhere. This is not to say that the revolutions of 1815-48were the mere work of a few disaffected agitators, as the spies andpolicemen of the period—a very fully employed species—purported totell their superiors. They occurred because the political systems reimposedon Europe were profoundly, and in a period of rapid socialchange increasingly inadequate for the political conditions of thecontinent, and because economic and social discontents were so acuteas to make a series of outbreaks virtually inevitable. But the politicalmodels created by. the Revolution of 1789 served to give discontenta specific object, to turn unrest into revolution, and above all to linkall Europe in a single movement—or perhaps it would be better to saycurrent—of subversion.There were several such models, though all stemmed from theexperience of France between 1789 and 1797. They corresponded tothe three main trends of post-1815 opposition: the moderate liberal(or, in social terms, that of the upper middle classes and liberal aristocracy),the radical-democratic (or, in social terms, that of the lowermiddle class, part of the new manufacturers, the intellectuals and thediscontented gentry) and the socialist (or, in social terms, the 'labouringpoor' or the new industrial working classes). Etymologically, by the112