Abstract
Both on the cover blurb and in the introduction to this book, reference is repeatedly made to the ‘long nineteenth century’, a historical concept that was most famously articulated by the great British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm. His trilogy (The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire) covers ‘the long century’ from 1789 to 1914. Gavin Murray-Miller indulges in some chronological elasticity, making the century even longer by stretching it from 1775 to 1922, just shy of one and a half centuries. That is fine. What is not so fine is that nowhere in the text or the bibliography is there a single mention of Hobsbawm’s seminal work. The author then explains that his book ‘seeks to examine how European radicalism attempted to imagine and implement new communitarian visions linked through print and ideological affiliations, political networks built upon real social relations, and identities rooted in specific social discourses such as gender, class and nationality’ (p. 4). If that were not clear enough, he also informs us that: ‘These factors contributed to the creation of “interpretive communities” – networks facilitated through print culture and correspondence that incorporated participants into both real and imagined communities built upon ideology, political affiliation and perceived common values’ (p. 4).
Having so pellucidly set out his objectives, the author then launches into the daunting task of describing and analysing the causes and course of not only European, but also trans-continental left-wing radical and revolutionary movements, from the American and French revolts of the late eighteenth century to the climacteric upheavals in Russia from 1917 to 1922. His geo-political span encompasses America, France, Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, North Africa, Spanish America, the Caribbean, China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, the Hapsburg Empire, the Balkans, the Russian Empire and almost all points north, south, east and west. He also introduces the reader to a rebels’ gallery of left-wing luminaries, both theorists and activists, including Paine, Jefferson, Washington, Sieyès, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Marat, Saint-Simon, Blanc, Blanqui, Louverture, Proudhon, Mazzini, Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Plekhanov, Martov and Lenin, to mention only the most prominent. The Introduction also demonstrates how the European revolutionary tradition had its roots firmly in the years of the Enlightenment, in the ideas and ideals of the philosophes such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot, those who challenged royal absolutism, the tyranny of the religious establishment and all the trappings of the despotism of crown and altar across Europe. How the secular, anti-imperial, anti-monarchical, anti-colonial movements developed, differed and defined such concepts as the state, the people, sovereignty, community, equality, nationalism, class and – indeed – revolution itself in its different national and popular contexts is really the major leitmotif of Murray-Miller’s book.
The first two chapters provide a narrative analysis of the American and French revolutions, including a particularly interesting section on the proliferation of radical newspapers and popular clubs that were hot-beds of intense discussion, argument and debate on current social and political issues. Of these the most notorious was the Jacobin club, the most vociferous and influential member of which was Maximilien Robespierre, later to become the victim of his own terroristic, revolutionary quasi-dictatorship (chapters 3 and 4). Chapter 4 also contains a fascinating account of the exploits of the ‘black Jacobin’, Toussaint Louverture, leader of a slave revolt on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue, paving the way for the establishment of the independent Republic of Haiti. Not far off the American mainland, the existence of a sovereign state of self-emancipated black slaves created a problem for the revolutionary – but still slave-owning – USA. One of the major problems tackled by the author in the following chapter, which deals with radical movements in Spain, Italy and Greece, is that of the constantly reoccurring conundrum of how revolutionaries are to reconcile the nationalist (i.e. anti-imperialist) and patriotic aims of individual peoples with that of revolutionary internationalism. (This dilemma, transcending the chronological parameters of this book, was to continue in the USSR during the ideological struggle in the1920s between Stalin’s doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ and Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’.) Surprisingly, this chapter, which also examines the growth of subversive, radical groups, unions and societies in the post-Napoleonic period, contains no mention of the Decembrist uprising in Russia in 1825, an abortive military revolt against Tsarist autocracy, which – despite its failure – is traditionally deemed to be the spark that ignited the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary movement.
The rest of the book covers the major turning points in the history of revolutionary Europe, including, of course, the failed revolts and uprisings of 1848, a cursory survey of Russian revolutionary populism, and a more detailed discussion of the establishment of the first workers’ International, which highlighted the fateful differences, feuds and divisions on theory and practice between Communism and Anarchism. The final chapters, the bulk of which are concerned with the background and build-up to the Russian revolutions of 1917 and their aftermath are rather limited in analytical depth.
Overall this book is an ambitious enterprise, but spanning too many themes and topics and not without a number of flaws and errors. For example, we are told on page 205 that: ‘Between 1894 and 1916, six heads of states . . . would fall victim to the propaganda of the deed, among them . . . Tsar Alexander II.’ In fact Alexander was assassinated by populist terrorists in 1881. On page 223 Lenin is said to have hailed from Samara, whereas he was actually born and educated in Simbirsk, before enrolling in the universities of Kazan and later St Petersburg. Trivial errors maybe, but nevertheless these and others spoil an otherwise wide-ranging and informative treatment of one of the most important epochs of modern European – and world – history.