The European revolutions of 1848–49 occupy a curiously marginal place in the collective historical memory of socialists today. The “Springtime of the Peoples” saw mass democratic upheavals burst out across the capitals and provinces of Europe, chasing emperors, kings, and popes from their palaces in terror of armed popular power.

Many on today’s left may recall that a wave of revolutions followed swiftly on the heels of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, or they may be familiar with Karl Marx’s sardonic eulogization of the short-lived French Second Republic, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Yet compared with the stormings of the Bastille and the Winter Palace, or even with the Paris Commune of 1871, the actual events of 1848 generally receive little discussion among modern celebrants of the canon of European revolutions.

This may owe in part to what Christopher Clark, author of a monumental new history of these uprisings, Revolutionary Spring, describes as their potentially unattractive apparent combination of “complexity and failure.” Nowhere in 1848 was a durable revolutionary regime comparable with those born in 1917 or 1949 established: all of the newborn insurgent governments succumbed relatively soon to internal or international counterrevolution.