Focusing on the efforts of nine European intellectuals, including Tocqueville, Flaubert and Marx, to make sense of 1848, Jonathan Beecher casts a fresh and engaging perspective on the experience and impact of the Revolution, and on why, within two generations, a democratic revolution had twice culminated in the dictatorship of a Napoleon.

Explores the experience and impact of the 1848 French Revolution through the writings of nine European intellectuals, including Marx and Flaubert.

'Jonathan Beecher's book is a brilliant summation of many years' thinking about the meaning of a revolution, which has remained enigmatic both for contemporaries and for us. The experience of 1848 is recounted through the reactions of nine of the most powerful writers of that time, from George Sand to Flaubert.' Gareth Stedman Jones, University of Cambridge