Month: February 2012

I decided to try something a bit different with my Modern Europe course this semester by assigning three different surveys (Charles Breunig and Matthew Levinger’s The Revolutionary Era, Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Capital, and Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent), rather than a single textbook like I did when I taught Early Modern Europe.  These three texts only overlap at certain points, but the idea was to see if we could draw out how these broad overviews of European history are shaped by the particular viewpoints and arguments of their authors.  The survey — including the one I present in lecture — needs to be seen as one possible interpretation of history that deserves to be questioned.

This week we’re studying the 1848 Revolutions and our two textbook readings provide a really great moment of conflict that will open our discussion on Friday.  Both Breunig and Levinger and Hobsbawm open their examination of 1848 with the same speech Alexis de Tocqueville delivered to the Chamber of Deputies on January 29, 1848.

Hobsbawm quotes a small bit of the speech:  “We are sleeping on a volcano…Do you not see that the earth trembles anew?  A wind blows, the storm is on the horizon.”  Hobsbawm takes Tocqueville’s warning as representative of the thoughts of his compatriots.  Tocqueville, he argues, “rose in the Chamber of Deputies to express sentiments which most Europeans shared.”  European society realized that its foundation was readying to explode.

Even in that brief statement, however, Tocqueville’s question (“Do you not see…”) implies an exhortation to open the eyes.  “You do not see,” Tocqueville indicates, “so let me show you.”  The longer quote provided by Breunig and Levinger provide us with greater context and highlights the fact that Tocqueville spoke to convince others to his point of view, not to simply represent the common wisdom of the day:

I am told that there is no danger because there are no riots; I am told that, because there is no visible disorder on the surface of society, there is no revolution at hand.  Gentlemen, permit me to say that I believe you are mistaken.  True, there is no actual disorder; but it has entered deeply into men’s minds.  See what is preparing itself amongst the working classes, who, I grant are at present quiet.  No doubt they are not disturbed by political passions, properly so called, to the same extent that they have been — but can you not see that their passions, instead of political, have become social?  Do you not see that they are gradually forming opinions and ideas which are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself, until it totters upon the foundations on which it rests today?…This, gentlemen, is my profound conviction: I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano.  I am profoundly convinced of it… (Breunig and Levinger 270).

Although the rest of the Chamber may not believe it, the social order of the mid- nineteenth century stood on the precipice of disaster.  “Tocqueville’s speech,” Breunig and Levinger explain, “was greeted with ironical cheers from the majority; no one took seriously his prophecy of catastrophe.”  Early in 1848, Tocqueville’s warning went unheeded.

So either “everyone” was aware that Europe stood on the brink, or people were so unaware that they laughed when someone broached the issue.  On Friday, we’ll try to figure out who’s argument is, in the end, more convincing.