London Review of Books 45 (2023), 11

On​ a Berlin street corner, just off Friedrichstrasse, there is a faded bronze plaque set into the wall. ‘Here on 18 March 1848, barricade fighters defended themselves against the troops of the Second Royal Regiment of Prussia who, hours later, refused orders to resume the attack.’ Then come three lines of verse: ‘Es kommt dazu trotz alledem/Dass rings der Mensch die Bruderhand/dem Menschen reicht trotz alledem.’ It’s Robert Burns. ‘It’s coming yet, for a’ that,/That Man to Man the warld o’er/Shall brothers be for a’ that.’ The poet who translated it, Ferdinand Freiligrath, was soon driven out of Germany into exile. He was one of countless thousands across Europe and beyond who believed that the uprisings of 1848 would inaugurate a new liberty throughout the world: ‘It’s coming yet for a’ that.’ The dream of a universal, international shattering of tyranny’s chains is one of the few accurately remembered fragments from the year of revolution. A second well-grounded memory is of the staggering speed with which the flame spread from country to country, in an age before phone or radio, as if the masses had only been waiting for a signal to pour into the streets and head for the palaces. Christopher Clark uses a metaphor from nuclear physics for the way the revolution accelerated:

From the beginning of March 1848, it becomes impossible to trace the revolutions as a linear sequence from one theatre of turbulence to the next. We enter the fission phase, in which almost simultaneous detonations create complex feedback loops. Reports of political upheaval from Cologne, Mannheim, Darmstadt, Nassau, Munich, Dresden, Vienna, Pest, Berlin, Milan and Venice and elsewhere fuse into an all-engulfing crisis. The narrative bursts its banks, the historian despairs and ‘meanwhile’ becomes the adverb of first resort.