Introduction

This introductory chapter suggests that 1848 was a pivotal moment in the history of modernity not only in Europe but in much of the rest of the world too. Marx’s scornful dismissal of the 1848 revolutions in his ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ created a historiography for 1848 that has persisted for more than 150 years. Now it is time to rethink this pan-European serial revolution. This introduction outlines the extraordinary series of political events in 1848 and suggests that by using the concept of seriality, rather than, for example ‘nation’, ‘class’, or ‘industrial labour’, we can better understand the scale and spread of the revolutions across territories with vastly different political regimes. In 1848 the whole of Europe began to see itself represented in print and entered into a conversation with itself. Despite the counter-revolution, the effect of this sudden international connectivity was to be game-changing.