Prologue -- Lamartine, the Girondins and 1848 -- George Sand: "The People" found and lost -- Marie d'Agoult, a liberal republican -- Victor Hugo: the Republic as a learning experience -- Tocqueville: "a vile tragedy performed by provincial actors" -- Proudhon: "a revolution without an idea" -- Alexander Herzen: a tragedy both collective and personal -- Marx: the meaning of a farce -- Flaubert: lost hopes and empty words -- Aftermath, themes and conclusion.
Summary:
"This book is a study of nine writers who lived through the French revolution of 1848 and wrote about it. Each produced at least one significant work on the revolution and the republic to which it gave rise. The book has two aims: First, to convey a sense of the experience of 1848 as these writers lived it. Above all, to recover the sense of possibility felt at a time when it was not yet clear that the Second Republic had no future. Secondly, I look closely at the texts in which each writer attempted to understand, judge, criticize, or intervene in the revolution. Some of these texts are famous: Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Tocqueville's Recollections, Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Others include the formal histories by Lamartine and Marie d'Agoult, Herzen's autobiography, Hugo's speeches, Proudhon's "Confessions," and George Sand's correspondence. They all explore suggestively the failure of the democratic republic in 1848-1852. Most raise the question posed explicitly by Tocqueville: How was it that within the space of two generations democratic revolutions in France had twice culminated in the dictatorship of a Napoleon? "-- Provided by publisher.
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