After 1848: The European Revolution in Government

ABSTRACT This paper revisits the question of the impact of the 1848 revolutions on governance and administration across the European states. Few historians would contend that the immediate post-revolutionary years saw a ‘return’ to pre-1848 conditions, but the transitions of the 1850s are usually presented as episodes within a narrative that is deemed to be specific to the respective nation-state. This paper argues that the 1850s saw a profound transformation in political and administrative practices across the continent, encompassing the emergence of new centrist political coalitions with a distinctively post-revolutionary mode of politics characterised by a technocratic vision of progress, the absorption into government of civil-society-based bodies of expertise, and changes in public information management. In short, it proposes that we need to move beyond the restrictive interpretation implied by the tenacious rubric ‘decade of reaction’ towards recognising that the 1850s were – after the Napoleonic period – the second high-water-mark in nineteenth-century political and administrative innovation across the continent. The paper argues, moreover, that these transitions took place on an authentically European basis and that they only come fully into focus when we survey the spectrum of governmental experiences across the European states. The paper closes with some reflections on the broader implications of this reappraisal for our understanding of European history in the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century.