1848 was a pivotal moment not only in Europe but in much of the rest of the world too. Marx's scornful dismissal of the revolutions created a historiography for 1848 that has persisted for more than 150 years. Serial Revolutions 1848 shows how, far from being the failure that Karl Marx claimed them to be, the revolutions of 1848 were a powerful response to the political failure of governments across Europe to care for their people. Crucially, this revolutionary response was the result of new forms of representation and mediation: until the ragged and the angry could see themselves represented, and represented as a serial phenomenon, such a political consciousness was impossible. By the 1840s, the developments in printing, transport, and distribution discussed in Clare Pettitt's Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2020) had made the social visible in an unprecedented way. This print revolution led to a series of real and bloody
revolutions in the streets of European cities. The revolutionaries of 1848 had the temerity to imagine universal human rights and a world in which everyone could live without fear, hunger, or humiliation. If looked at like this, the events of 1848 do not seem such 'poor incidents', as Marx described them, nor such an embarrassing failure after all.
Returning to 1848, we can choose to look back on that 'springtime of the peoples' as a moment of tragi-comic failure, 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, international co-operation, and a shared and common humanity which have not yet been fully understood or realised.
Author(s): Clare Pettitt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 476
City: Oxford
Cover
Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Why 1848 Matters
What Actually Happened?
What Did It All Mean? The Historiography of 1848
Nationalisms in 1848
Citizenship in 1848
Seriality in 1848
The Argument of Serial Revolutions
1: Revolutionary Tourists
Sightseeing in Paris in 1848
The Political Clubs
La Fête de la Fraternité and an émeute (15 May 1848)
The Labour Question: Visiting Louis Blanc’s ateliers
La Marseillaise
Revolution and Performance in 1848
The End of the République?
2: Moving Pictures
Telegraphic Connections
‘Portable’ Paris in 1848
Illustrated News
Pictures on the Move
‘Telegraphic’ Synchronicity
3: The Ragged of Europe
Introduction: The Spectacle of the Ragged
Ragged Performance: Chiffonniers and Rag-Pickers
Politics: The Ragged, the Poor, the Labourers
Ragged England
Literature: G. W. M. Reynolds, Eugène Sue, and Serial Rags
4: The Inter-National Novel
Manzoni and the ‘National Novel’
Manchester Rags
Gaskell’s Mary Barton and the Ragged Series
The Right to Work
After Mary Barton
5: Under Siege
Clough: ‘Le Citoyen malgré lui’
Margaret Fuller Broadcasts from Rome
Serial Dispatches
Diaries, Letters, Poems: The Serial-Epistolary Form
Clough’s Frightening Hexameters
America and a Liberal Isopolity
Conclusion
6: Serially Speaking
The Lecture in the 1840s as a Serial Form
Douglass and Emerson in Europe
Ralph Waldo Emerson Gives a Lecture
Frederic Douglass Gives a Lecture
Conclusion
7: Slavery and Citizenship
Fugitive Forms
Serial Constitutionalism as Social Form
‘The Heart at the Center of the Universe’: Universalism and Scale in Emerson’s ‘Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century’
Douglass’s 1848
8: O bella libertà
Casa Guidi: Permeable Privacy
Accelerated Print in Florence 1847–8
Casa Guidi Windows: Part One
Physical Spaces and Public Screenings
9: Forms of the Future
Maternity and Serial Revolution
Generation and Revolution
The Macchiaoli Painters in Florence
Macchiaioli Windows
Interrupted Serials
Poems Before Congress: Denationalized Nationhood
10: The Grammar of Revolution
Dickens’s Historic Present
Dickens in the Old World and the New: American Notes and Pictures from Italy
The Chimes: The Making of a Historical Present
Breaking News and the Present Tense
Arriving in the Present with Dombey and Son
A Tale of Two Cities: History Just About to Happen
Conclusion: A Tale of Three Cities
Flaubert’s Afterword
Bibliography
Index
