A Bumper Year

STORY OF A YEAR: 1848 (206 pp.]--Raymond Pos/ga/e--Oxford ($4.50).

Any year has its census of disaster and misery, but 1848 was a bumper year. The great social fissions of industrial society were beginning, and poverty was the nuclear reactor of a Europe suddenly grown unstable to the point of explosion. Raymond Postgate, a London journalist and historian, has assembled into a single pattern the scattered events of "The Year of Revolution," from Constantinople, where the palaces of the pashas burned down, to the Bosporus, to Sacramento, where the discovery of gold set a human course to the West. The result is one of those occasional history books that are more exciting than most novels.

Postgate's sharp eye peers beneath the curling foam of the tidal wave--more than 50 attempted revolutions, more than 15 crowns toppled--to examine the ideas, customs and the men caught up in it. There was the Duke of Wellington, who had introduced from India the strange custom of taking a daily bath; that bad guesser Jefferson Davis, who said he would as soon fear an insurrection from his cows as from his slaves; and the Frenchman Blanqui, "the first formulator of what was afterwards called 'the dicta torship of the proletariat,'" and who "looked as if he had passed his life in a sewer."

These, and a hundred more historical personages, march through Postgate's story, but the principal characters are power and poverty.

A Straight Line to the Sea. In 1848 poverty had a quality unknown outside the East today: "The floors of the miners' lodging houses in Durham and Northumberland . . . were six inches deep in dirt, mostly potato peelings. The filth flowing from the drains of the royal borough of Windsor was so strong and revolting that it killed the crops when the farmers tried to use it as manure . . .

Paupers were employed in crushing horse-bones for glue-making, and were so underfed that they fought each other for the green and decaying meat still adhering." Yet Ralph Waldo Emerson, on a visit to England, marveled that the "Marquis of Breadalbane rides out from his house a hundred miles in a straight line to the sea, on his own property."

There was some outlet in England for the built-up grievances, because power had passed to the middle class in the franchise reform of 1832. There were, however, visionary lunatics in Queen Victoria's realm called Young Irelanders (who distilled their political poteen from the potato famine) and, at home, workingmen called Chartists who had arms and thought they had an army. But their insurrection (the last attempted in Britain, with "a curiosity value like a rare stamp," Postgate observes), led by a braggart and poltroon called Feargus O'Connor, fizzled out in a farce. Toynbee, Spengler, Engels and the rest may explain, in their differing ways, why a revolution in England at that time could not have succeeded. Postgate offers a very simple explanation of why the big mobs the Chartists raised in London did not even strike the spark--on the appointed day, April 10, 1848, it rained.

A Lady's Dress. With its democracy, the U.S. seemed to have exempted itself from the torments that beset Europe. Yet the U.S. had its problems. And they were intensified by the extremisms of a new kind of American, typified by John Jacob Astor, who was so coarse a man that he would wipe his fingers on the dress of a lady at a dinner party. He died in 1848 richer than any archduke, and left behind $20 million from his tenement rents. Yet the poor of the U.S. had two ways of relief from the early nightmares of industrialism: they could pack up and go west, and they had the vote.

In Europe most of 1848's uprisings and revolutions failed, but their spirit survived. From one of the failures Postgate offers a moral. France bloodily suppressed its 1848 insurrection and left unhealed wounds. Never since, says Postgate, have the workers and bourgeoisie felt as one nation. The year 1848--a preview of the Paris Commune 23 years later--brought France to defeat in the year 1940. "When the Nazi threat drove all British classes together into one unit, the French nation fell apart; the Army held back forces to deal with the 'reds' at home, Stalinists fawned round the German headquarters; to this day the two classes do not speak the same language."

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