“It was precisely the stigma of failure that put me off the 1848 revolutions when I first encountered them at school,” Clark himself reflects. “Complexity and failure are an unattractive combination.” It’s true that no utopian democracies flowered from the bloodied earth of Galicia and the cobblestone hailstorms of Paris, but how likely was such an outcome, then or now?

“We have in our heads a mythical ideal of revolution as the generative moment when actors in the pursuit of a new order of things smash the world and make it anew in the image of their vision,” Clark writes. “But have any actual revolutions met this exacting standard? The revolutions of 1848 certainly did not.“

Nor, on reflection, did the first and more famous French Revolution, nor the Russian, and indeed the American, under which all men were deemed to have been created equal, while millions of Southern slaves languished picking cotton for another 90 years.

What Clark does brilliantly in his massive work (873 pages) is to contextualise literally dozens of uprisings, coups, and mindless anarchic riots, leaving a Europe unrecognisable from the post-Napoleonic architecture of the 1815 Congress of Vienna.

In 1848, the monarchies and landed aristocrats were all still there (France having seen an emperor and two royal dynasties since 1789), but so too was rising literacy, an exploding population, and an accelerating industrial revolution underlying and propelling expectations.

Throw in some catastrophic crop failures and deepening uncertainty over the rights of the peasantry to their holdings, and several fuses began to burn at once, for different specific and localised reasons, but very suddenly, and all over the continent.

Clark has no choice but to leap from uprising to uprising, as riots in Palermo overthrow the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples’ suzerainty over Sicily, and Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, flees Vienna in fear of his life.

In Spain uprisings were suppressed with merciless brutality, with the government being forewarned of plans for a rebellion in Madrid on March 26. Hundreds were killed at the barricades, there were executions, and almost 2000 radicals were deported to the Philippines.

It is said that years later, when the man who enforced the crackdown, Prime Minister Ramon Maria Narvaez, was asked on his deathbed to forgive his enemies, he replied “My enemies? I have none. I have had them all shot.”

Clark’s book is peppered with such revealing, and often amusing, recollections and commentary, including from Marx and Engels, who at different times made contradictory assertions about the revolutions; some triumphalist, others disdainful and despairing.

Above all, the reader is astonished at the sheer magnitude of what Clark has taken on here. I doubt that there have ever been more complex and disparate upheavals and scattered demands for social change in modern times, and I was left in awe of the mountains of research he had clearly put into it.

His is a titanic piece of work by any measure, but one made digestible by Clark’s facility of language and at times playful vocabulary. Why write “uncertainty and poverty” when you can use “precarity and dearth”? Revolutionary Spring brings to life the people who dreamed of a new world order, and those determined to stop the clock of history. A time when anything seemed possible.

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