Let’s talk about a revolution.
In 2023, Christopher Clark put out an incredible survey of the revolutions that gripped Europe in 1848. This has always been a bit of a blind spot for me, slotted right in the middle of the two pillars of modern European history: the French Revolution and the World Wars. And while a sprawling history of the social and political upheavals that rocked villages and metropoles from Dublin to Bucharest over the span of two years has a lot of opportunities to be a disorienting snooze-fest, Clark manages to wrangle together the disparate strands of this international moment and create an immersive look at how 1848 played out.
