1848

“We are sleeping on a volcano....Don you not see the earth trembles anew? A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon” Alexis de Tocqueville to the French Chamber of Deputies, 1848

Yer’right

Another year, another revolt. A year ago last summer, Iranians in their millions protested against a fraudulent election and resisted bitterly against the state’s repression and brutality. The “Green revolution“, has so far, failed. The Revolutionary Guard – Ulema fix up remains unchanged and unmoved. Its vindictive punishment and public humiliation of protesters continues.

This year, the “secular” dictatorships of Tunisia and Egypt are the target of mass protest and demands of reform. Active disquiet in Algeria and Yemen, rumblings in Syria, “Hamastan” and Jordan provide a wider background for the fall of long term dictatorships in Tunisia and potentially, Egypt. “The Springtime of Peoples” or just another dank February day? I’m not the first to suggest the analogy to 1848 and I do so not out of any teleological expectation but rather to examine the possibilities, the dangers and the consequences of this particular set of circumstances. A brief look at 1848 highlights all of these current concerns.

Preceded by an unsuccessful revolt in Austrian Poland and a victory of the democrats in a civil war in Switzerland, one might well consider whereabouts de Tocqueville was coming from. The first uprising of note came in Sicily, against the systemically corrupt House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies on 12 January 1848. These were, in part, encouraged by the election of a “liberal” pontiff, Pius IX and a series of moderate reforms in Rome and the Papal states. The demands were grouped around a return of the liberal constitution of 1812, drawn up as a preventative of French revolutionary ideological contagion and quickly withdrawn after the peace of Vienna. Whilst the conspirators behind the revolt were mostly liberally inclined notables, the revolt relied on the urban masses of Palermo.

By the 24th of February, a French republic had been declared, ousting the good bourgeois king of Louis Philippe after a long term campaign of republican agitation via (in good French gourmand taste) a series of mass banquets. By March 2nd, i.e. 7 days later (1848 was a leap year), the governments of Baden and Württemberg has fallen, by the 11th, Bavaria, by the 13th, Vienna and Buda were at the barricades, by the 18th Milan had fallen, on the 22nd, Daniele Marin had broken in to the Venice Arsenal, on the 23rd, the newly “constitutional” monarch of Piedmont-Savoy, Charles Albert declared war on the Austrian Empire to liberate Venetia. By the summer, every government, with the exception of the Belgium and Dutch, between the Pyrenees to the Oder and the Black Sea had fallen; even Brazil would feel the breath of popular revolt. Even in areas unaffected per se, either increased agitation, Blanquist coup d’état or invasion by newly “freed” forces would spread its memory, in Ireland, in Belgium, in Britain, in Prussian Poland. This whirlwind spread of revolt would become archetype pattern of the Socialist dream and the Conservative nightmare for the next 150 years. Ironically the only continent wide revolution to come close would be 1989 where governments proudly socialist would collapse en masse.

In 1917, the revolution in Russia would over the next few years inspired other attempts at the “subjective mastering the objective”. Yet 1848 stands out. Firstly it was near universal, affecting constitutional monarchy, enlightened depots, the backwards of Kingdoms, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox flocks, industrializing nations, peasant nations, comic operetta princelings and continental superpowers. Secondly was its breakneck speed. While there was a “counter culture” against Metternich-ian Europe, cosmopolitan, Franch-phile, united to a certain degree behind revolutionary heritage past, these revolutionaries in the main were taken by surprise by the revolts and, certainly, their immediate (albeit temporary) and total success. This was no Europe wide conspiracy but rather a conjoining of disaffection and anger about each nation’s particular circumstance. Yet in a matter of weeks, a Europe drawn up after the defeat of Bonaparte was smashed and its future was thrown into the air.

Just as important is the revolutions’ almost universal failure. In France, various flavors of Bourbon monarchy were rejected for good and a constitutional order put in place. Yet the first President of this new republic would be its grave digger, a somewhat vain but forward thinking ex-Carbonari called Louis Napoleon. Thousands of those who had risked life and limb in February to found a republic were shot down by a new “Party of Order” in charge of same Republic in July. In Berlin, Vienna, Rome and Prague, new governments of public confidence were thrown out by troops and absolutism restored. Savoy was defeated and its King exiled. In Hungary, independence would last till vast Russian reinforcements crossed the Carpathians in 1849 and crushed a spirited, and at times, brilliantly led campaign. Marin and the Republic of San Marco were amongst the last hold outs, having lasted 17 months.

Eagle or sparrow eyed readers might well detect a variety of analogous points with the current revolts. Egypt as France, Tunisia as Sicily, Iran as Poland, the US as the Russian bear. It has enough correlations to suit many a taste. The ones that seem the most important to me are as follows

• The price of Bacon (or Lamb) – The triggers have been a steady rise in food prices, not just regionally, but globally. Food price rises not only means hunger, it means lack of income for other goods thus knock on under-employment in societies already cursed with high levels of joblessness or partial employment in grey areas of the economy. It means a reliance on state or party largesse and thus further and political loaded scrutiny of corruption and high living amongst the “Peoples’ servants”. It also means queues, that dangerous and yet unavoidable social gathering where the faults of the current regime are not only publically demonstrated but where too there is an arena to share this insight. In 1848, like in March 1917 and throughout the French revolution, food prices rises and scarcity provided a ready made example of government wrong and a forum for collective discussion and action. It provided an uncontrolled civic space away from the normative watch of the state. It is no surprise that Algeria has increased grain supplies and subsidies after the Tunisian food riots that prefaced the toppling of Ben Ali. Eric Hobsbawm noted that 1848 coincided an economic downturn of the traditional type i.e. an agricultural dearth with that of the new type, industrial downturn. Are we seeing a return of the ancient famine cycle to combine with the paucity of international credit or, more likely, a new(ish) form of food instability linked to an increasingly unbalanced global economy?

• So far, the protests have mainly drawn on a tradition of thought labelled by the western media Liberal but probably more precisely anti-authoritarian. This is grounded in indigenous criticisms of the establishment of nationalist dictatorships after independence. The motif of Nasser or Sadat or Mubarak as Pharaoh is a trope not of Qutb or the Islamists (though they were to adopt it with relish) rather it was a label born of secular and democratic opponents around the ailing Wafd Party and anti-fascist socialists of the Free Officer regime. Such critics do not fit easily into western boxes, yet they are part of a nationalist tradition in Egypt than has spurned both the supra-nationalism and theocracy of the Muslim Brotherhood and the authoritarianism of Nasserism. Similarly, the “outs” in Algeria, Tunisia, Syria and Jordan, Nationalists critical of the existing regimes and their arbitrariness and corruption but of a shared heritage of the dominant nation parties have keep a continuity of democratic or at least anti-authoritarian opposition alive. These may not be at the stage of mass movements or even beyond drawing room conspiracy, they have, until recently, had little room to organise publically. However, their common root with that of the “Ins” means they do have a ready made legitimacy, a betrayal to renounce and rectify. This counter-point to the otherness of the revolutionaries (outside of France) in 1848 may well provide a way around the end point of 1849. In 1848, the new regimes were either unable or unwilling to mobilise the required mass effort to fend off counter-revolution. Their legitimacy was too shallow. A new nationalist and democratic revolt for the people of North Africa and the Middle East has a ready made tradition of loyalty, parable and action. It even has a (oddly not oxymoronic) nationalist internationalism to call on, of the UAF and other schemes, one seen in the Green movements embrace of the Jasmine revolution and the intifada in Egypt being celebrated by the self-styled Youth of Gaza,

• Having said that, with governments falling, international relations in the area become (to put it politely) fluid. In 1848, this spilt into war, Piedmont against Savoy, Croatia, Serbia and Romania against a centralising Hungary, German radicals against Danish liberals. At best it engendered boorish chauvinism, for instance, that between Germans and Czechs and Engels comments on the reactionary nature of Croats. At the moment, with only Tunisia and Egypt affected, the Camp David accords are the main focus of international contention. Is a democratic Egypt good/bad for Israel? What of Gaza? What can America do? Beyond this is the wider picture of a period of international relations founded on Authoritarian governments agreeing things between each national elite, backed up and funded by various outside powers. This may well be at an end and the Peoples’, those experiencing spring, will want their opinions and their nationalism heard. The intertwined nature of the ethnic geography of 1848 Europe and the bombastic pretentions and assertions of old medieval borders made strife virtually inevitable. These are far less in evidence currently within the Middle East and North Africa, neither is the model of French style unitary power so dominant. Democratic co-association may well provide a solution to the Coptic Christian community and the Berbers. Re-centralisation, even with a democratic mandate, may well usher a troubled autumn of Peoples