As Christopher Clark, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, explains in this epic work on a crucial and often misunderstood period, this was the only truly European revolution there has ever been. Neither the French revolutions of 1789 or 1830, nor the Russian revolutions of 1905 or 1917, nor the fall of the Soviet regimes in 1989-91 sparked similar crises on a transcontinental scale and at such speed. This happened even in an age when the main means of transport in most of Europe was the horse-drawn carriage and information was provided by newspapers before the development of telegraph wires. Ideas can spread fast even without the internet and social media -- a thought that's difficult to comprehend in the age of 24-hour news. 

Clark's Sleepwalkers showed in a compelling narrative how Europe blundered into war in 1914. Here he vividly captures the drama of the revolutionary moment half a century earlier, over the spring and summer of 1848 amongst insurrectionists on the streets, monarchs and officials in the chancelleries, and cloth weavers in provincial towns. 

It is a complex story, brought alive with a cast of extraordinary characters from "the Dolce and Gabbana extravagance of Giuseppe Garibaldi", to the novelist George Sand (who composed revolutionary bulletins for the short-lived provisional government in Paris), to Alexis de Tocqueville and the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth. 

Later he describes with equal brio the fightback that autumn as counter-revolutions unfolded in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Berlin and elsewhere. People longed for "order" to be restored. Rebellions were snuffed out, parliaments were shut down, insurgents were arrested, troops returned en masse to city streets, radicals were removed from positions of influence and monarchs restored to their thrones. 

Napoleon III, who mounted a coup in France in 1849 to save the Republic but subsequently declared himself Emperor, said afterwards that order was restored "and this is the end of politics" -- much as some declared that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the "end of history". Politics and history appear to have survived.

Clark fills in some gaps that might shake British complacency

One significant country avoided revolution in 1848. Here we boast how the stability of Britain's parliamentary institutions and ability to adapt to peaceful change saved us from the European tumult. [...]

Clark argues persuasively that in many countries the revolutions were not a failure. Not all parliaments were closed down after the "restoration"; constitutional monarchies were established in places such as Denmark. Real republican democracies were instituted, as in Switzerland. Twenty years after the Hungarian revolution was crushed, a compromise was reached that gave Hungary an autonomous role in an invigorated Habsburg Empire.