“Revolutionary Spring” brings to life the drama and daring of 1848

At the outset of this magnificent chronicle of the events leading up to and beyond 1848—the year revolutions spread to almost every country in Europe—Christopher Clark confesses that when he first learnt about them at school, he was not enthused. Thanks to squabbling within the loose-knit coalitions of revolutionaries, and the delayed but brutally effective response of the reactionary establishment, the story of the upheavals lacked “a moment of redemptive closure”. Picturing what happened clearly is hard, both because of the continental scale of the turmoil and because the discontents that triggered the revolutions varied. “Complexity and failure are an unattractive combination,” Professor Clark, a historian at Cambridge, wryly admits.