The mid-century crisis and the 1848 revolutions

Abstract

In the last two decades, the pan-European crisis of 1846-8 and the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 itself have been a chosen testing ground for the theoretical approaches of some eminent American sociologists and political scientists. The embroilment of France and central Europe in a revolutionary process and, conversely, the absence of any comparable revolutionary challenge in England has been interpreted in the light of large scale evolutionist theories of modernization and stages of economic development. Older emphases on the political origins of revolution or its absence have been downplayed in favor of comparative social typologies, and the propensity to a politics of confrontation and direct action have been placed within a framework of developmental sociology. In general, what seems to have been involved is an inversion of the classical Marxist model of proletarian revolution. Despite the considerable differences of object and emphasis in the work of Barrington Moore, Charles Tilly, and Eric Wolf, one common theme at least emerges. It is that the bearers of anticapitalist revolution were not the new factory proletariat, but those groups most threatened by industrialization "preindustrial" artisans and peasants.' Eric Wolf, in his book Peasant Wars of the 20th Century, emphasizes the revolutionary role of middle peasants, the most vigorous carriers of peasant traditions and a social stratum both willing and still able to organize collective resistance to the incursions of capitalist agriculture and the world market. Barrington Moore in his latest work, Injustice, treats 1848 in Germany as a revolt of guild-masters and preindustrial journeymen. The new proletariat, so far as they existed, he considers to have possessed no coherent political perspective and to have remained quiescent. Charles Tilly and the many historians of nineteenth-century France inspired by his work have again stressed the role of tight-knit communities of artisans and peasants and correlate their capacity to organize resistance with the traditionalism of their values and goals. Once