Untimely Meditations on the Revolution of 1848 in France

Abstract

1 This essay builds upon earlier reflections I have made on the same topic in my introduction, co-authored with Hervé Touboul . See Edward Castleton – Hervé Touboul, Retour sur 1848: peut-on en finir?, in: idem (edd .), Regards sur 1848, Besançon 2015, p . 7–31 . Ascribing National and International Meaning to 1848 Today There is something about the events of the European Revolutions of 1848 such that whenever those events are discussed, they can be endowed with a special immediacy capable of speaking to the present .1 2018 marked the 170th anniversary of those revolutions . In France, where I live, this commemoration was largely overshadowed by the 50th anniversary of the events of May-June 1968, deemed by the mainstream media and most major cultural institutions to be more relevant . Yet when I lectured to non-academic audiences in provincial France about 1848 for the 2018 commemoration, audiences invariably seemed to discover something in that year as equally important to understanding their own times as whatever happened in the summer of 1968 . In particular, I was repeatedly confronted by spontaneous comments and questions revolving around issues of political representation . These can be summarized more or less as follows . The problems France faces today are identical to those that arose when it first experimented with universal manhood suffrage subsequent to the declaration of the Second Republic . The elected elites care little for the people who elect them, whether they be authoritarian demagogic ,,outsiders“, members of a semi-professional political class of ,,insiders“, or ,,technocrats“ whose political actions focus singularly on reducing governmental balance sheets . In an era of resurgent anti-establishment populism on a global scale, stoked by widespread dissatisfaction with the democratic political process, this sort of interpretation is perhaps natural enough . Despite the fact that the electoral franchise is fully unrestricted in most countries, unlike in the France of 1848 when only men could participate in the political process, we live in an era wherein simply being able to vote does not seem like a panacea sufficient to solve increasingly polarizing social inequalities . In France currently, there is a general opinion that the public has had the wool pulled over its eyes for too long by its politicians . This feeling has been exacerbated by the fact that citizens recently elected a consummate ,,insider“ and previously unelected ,,technocrat“ to be president in 2017 who ran for chief executive as an ,,outsider“ representing change from the unpopular previous administration of which he was