Revolutionary Tourists

Abstract

Chapter 1 plunges into the Paris of the second republic with a group of writer-tourists: Arthur Stanley; Arthur Hugh Clough; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Geraldine Jewsbury; Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) Paulet; Richard Monckton Milnes; Fanny Lewald; Benjamin Jowett; William Forster; Francis Palgrave; and Arthur Stanley. The chapter shows how they felt and wrote about the 1848 revolution, suspended uncomfortably as they were between witnessing and participation. Their reliance on second-hand information and contradictory press accounts of the incomprehensible events that were happening just outside their windows created a stark awareness of the mediatedness of all revolutionary experience for everyone. Try as they might, they never felt quite there, at the centre of it. The British poet Arthur Clough and the American writers Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, all of whom we first meet in Paris, reappear in subsequent chapters, in Rome, in Florence, and in America.