Christopher Clark has a new book. As I have read and enjoyed two of his previous works ( Iron Kingdom on the rise and fall of the Prussians, and The Sleepwalkers which offers a new perspective of how World War One was sought of stumbled into), I will certainly be reading Clark’s newest tome, Revolutionary Spring. The things that were going down in 1848! And at 876 pages, a tome it is! Not alone for that reason, also owing to an extreme backlog of reading material, I fear I will not be getting to it for a while. But Clark’s stuff, however wonderfully written, is dense in subject matter so it is best to be prepared. To this end, here are a pair of links that will encourage.
Firstly, the best primer is probably Christopher Clark’s LRB Winter Lecture in February 2019 – embedded below; and transcribed in the magazine a couple of weeks later as “Why should we think about the Revolutions of 1848 now?” perhaps not verbatim but close to in Vol. 41 No. 5 · 7 March 2019. (I certainly am going to have another look at this!)
Then, a couple of excellent reviews: Neal Ascherson’s piece in the LRB (Vol. 45 No. 11 · 1 June 2023) and that from Harold James in Project Syndicate which is titled “The First Polycrisis”; taking up Clark’s terminology and argument of the parallels between that year of crises and our own time.