Description
The wave of revolution which swept across Europe in February 1848 spared none of the existing monarchies, except those in Spain and Portugal. It was an overwhelming wave, which rose and spread spontaneously all over the continent, its trajectory in space merging with its trajectory in time, since it lasted long enough to reach one capital after another. From Paris to Vienna, from Vienna to Berlin and Milan, from Milan to Rome, it could be seen leaping from one city to another, its speed dictated at times by the electric telegraph or the splendid new railways, at others by a post-chaise trundling along bumpy roads. As always, it was in Paris that the tide rose highest, and there that its ebb was most horrific: from February to June, the Second Republic presented a scale model of the European revolution. Elsewhere, this springtime of the people did not survive the winter, but in Paris it lived to die bloodily in June. In his summing up of those few months there, Marx was summing up the whole of 1848.ISBN:0140551204