1848 Revolution France
Oct0
Rethinking the 1905 Revolution means to look afresh at the various dimensions of the crisis: what do we have to say about rural and urban revolutions and different forms of social unrest? What is there to be learned from the role of the nationalities, the pogroms, and the revolution at the periphery of the empire? What kind of cultural patterns are employed to communicate political aims? What does the crisis tell us about different strategies of modernisation employed in Tsarist Russia? What is it that we still don’t know: where are the blanks which need to be filled in?
Rethinking the 1905 Revolution means to place it firmly into an international and transcultural context: what did events in Russia mean in other countries in Europe or Asia? What do we know about coverage in the media, not least the relatively young cinema? Did this Revolution inspire writers and artists elsewhere? What did it do to the Western or Eastern image of Russia abroad? How did the Balkan states, the Ottoman Empire or Asian societies like China and Japan react? Was it, in terms of media coverage, a ‘world revolution’, a global event? What does the revolution tell us about the dynamics of civil society (from the left and from the right), about public spaces and innovations in Russian monarchy?
Rethinking the 1905 Revolution means to compare the shifting grounds of political legitimacy in a revolutionary situation, the patterns of social mobilisation and social control, constitutional experiences, new interpretations of traditional national and social images. Are there parallels, differences, contradictions or confirmations in other revolutionary experiences in Europe?
The presentations of this international and interdisciplinary conference which is dedicated to Prof. Dr. Heinz-Dietrich Löwe (University of Heidelberg) focus on the following research fields:
- the situation of the Jews in the Revolution of 1905 and their role in the revolutionary movement
- the Revolution of 1905 and its impact on civil society
- the Russian Empire and its peripheries during the Revolution of 1905
- the 1905 Revolution and the economy
- the 1905 Revolution in media and culture
- the inter- and transnational dimension & transcultural aspects of the 1905 Revolution
"RETHINKING THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1905: CRISIS, CONTEXT, COMPARISONS"
Conference for Heinz-Dietrich Löwe
Internationales Wissenschaftsforum Heidelberg
23rd – 25th October, 2009
Program:
Friday, 23rd October, 2009
Section I “1905 and the Jews”
Chair: Frank Grüner, Heidelberg
9:00 Gerald Surh, Raleigh:
“Jewish Self Defence and Pogrom Violence in 1905”
9:30 François Guesnet, London:
“1905 and the Changing Landscape of Polish-Russian Jewry”
10:00 Coffee Break
10:30 Brian Horowitz, New Orleans:
“The Social Sources for the Gegenwartsarbeit Program in Russian Zionism”
11:00 Felix Heinert, Köln
“Locating Jewishness and Representing Local Jewry in the Urban Space of Riga before and after 1905”
11:30 Discussion
Section II “Revolution and Civil Society”
Chair: Ralph Tuchtenhagen, Berlin
14:00 Susanne Hohler, Heidelberg:
“The Emergence of a Radical Right Civil Society in the 1905 Revolution”
14:30 Gregory L. Freeze, Brandeis:
“The Parish Clergy in the Revolution of 1905 – 1907”
15:00 Coffee Break
15:30 Angela Rustemeyer, Wien:
“Revolution and classes dangereuses: Concepts of Crime in France and Russia, 1848-1907”
16:00 Lutz Häfner, Bielefeld/ Göttingen:
“Terrorism as a Political Means in a ‘premodern’ State? Societal Legitimization and Delegitimization of Terrorism in Tsarist Russia, 1902-1914”
16:30 Discussion
18:00 Festvortrag at Alte Aula, Old University
Norman Davies, Oxford:
„The Russian Revolution of 1905 – What Revolution?“
20:00 Reception at Bel Etage, Old University
Saturday, 24th October, 2009
Section III “Empire and Peripheries”
Chair: Raphael Utz, Jena
9:00 Jan Kusber, Mainz:
“The 1905 Revolution and its Impact on Imperial Identities”
9:30 Lothar Maier, Heidelberg:
„1905 in the North Caucasus: Revolution with Delay“
10:00 Malte Rolf, Hannover:
“In the Long Shadow of the Revolution: The Continuum of Crisis in the Kingdom of Poland (1905-1914)”
10:30 Coffee Break
11:00 Frank Grüner, Heidelberg:
“The Russian Revolution of 1905 at the Periphery: The Case of the Manchurian City of Harbin “
11:30 Ralph Tuchtenhagen, Berlin:
“A Stepping Stone to Sovereignty? The Grand Duchy of Finland and the Revolution of 1905”
12:00 Katja Wezel, Heidelberg:
“Loyalty, Minority, Monarchy: The Baltic German Press and 1905”
12:30 Discussion
Section IV “Revolution and the Economy”
Chair: Susanne Hohler, Heidelberg
14:00 Peter Waldron, Norwich:
“1905 and the Economy”
14:30 Dittmar Dahlmann, Bonn:
“The Krähnholm Manufactory in Times of Revolution”
15:00 Franziska Schedewie, Heidelberg/ Jena:
“1905 and the Peasant Economy”
15:30 Discussion
16:30 – 17:00 Coffee Break
Section V “The Revolution in Media and Culture”
Chair: Katja Wezel, Heidelberg
17:00 Brigitte Flickinger, Heidelberg:
“Pictured Protest: Satires from 1905 to 1907”
17:30 Christoph Garstka, Heidelberg:
“The Revolution of 1905 in Polish Literature: Henryk Sienkiewicz and Andrzej Strug”
18:00 Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal, Heidelberg:
„1905 in Russian and Early Soviet Art and Propaganda“
18:30 Discussion
Sunday, 25th October, 2009
Section VI “The International Dimension”
Chair: Franziska Schedewie, Heidelberg/ Jena
09:30 Gotelind Müller-Saini, Heidelberg:
“China and the Russian Revolution of 1905”
10:00 Maik Hendrik Sprotte, Halle-Wittenberg:
„The Russian Revolution as an Inspiration: The Japanese Socialists“
10:30 Raphael Utz, Jena:
“Revolution, Diplomacy, and the Media: Russian and British Liberals in 1906”
11:00 Coffee Break
11:30 Stefan Plaggenborg, Bochum:
“The Russian Roots of Pan-Turkism”
12:00 Norman Stone, Ankara:
“Russia and the Ottoman Empire”
12:30 Discussion
End of Conference
Although the French revolution of 1848 was incessantly put in terms of the French revolution of 1789 by its participants, it was, in that very act, necessarily different than 1789. It is to that self-consciousness Marx alludes with the famous bon mot about farce; it was also the reason a Whig historian of the 20th century, Lewis Namier, could say that 1848 was the revolution of the intellectuals. Of course, this view is considered much too idealistic by more sociologically inclined historians. What seems true, however, is that in 1848, for reasons that remain unclear, that floating sector of intellectuals and the more easily identified sector of the working class interpenetrated for one startling moment. A wall fell, a sort of pentacost of tongues broke out in the streets. Most observers claim that, in France at least, the revolution came as a stunning surprise. Mark Traugott, who has studied the worker’s movement of 1848, wrote that “although in retrospect it was easy to appreciate how the ground had been prepared by the calamitous economic crisis that began in 1845-1846 and by the political reform movement launched in 1847, the February Revolution appeared to stun even those best apprised of the French situation” – and here he references Tocqueville. Traugott writes, further: ‘It is, in part, this contrast between the apparent unanimity of the population’s response and the failure of contemporary observers to anticipate the insurrection’s outbreak that accounts for the fascination of the February Days to students of revolutionary movements.” (1988)Herzen’s analysis of the revolution and its failure is not couched on the level of class interest, as Marx’s analysis is. Rather, Herzen surveys the revolutionary “spirit” – the community mood – of those activists who propagandized and organized for the revolution. Herzen, who watches the revolution in both France and Italy from the standpoint of a Russian exile, correctly divines that one cannot dismiss the link between the intellectual and the people and successfully understand the events that unfolded in 1848 and 1849. The revolution of 1848 was one of those rare moment in which history as the philosopher views it and history as it is made by the people overlapped.
For this reason, I think his choice of his “spokesman” in From the Other shore is important. As I’ve mentioned, there is some controversy over what Herzen is doing in the dialogues that alternate with reports and reflections in the book. Aileen Kelly, who surely knows Herzen better than anyone writing in English, claims that we can easily see through the character of the doctor in Consolatio to the author – here Herzen is saying what he thinks. And if we identify the doctor with the radical sceptic in all the dialogues, we have this fictional character playing the traditional role, in a philosophical dialogue, of the one who expresses the author’s opinion. Morson, who is one of the American champions of Bakhtin, disagrees, and thinks that the dialogue form is evidence for the dialogic thought.
Herzen had a curious way of expressing his thoughts not in treatises or lectures – although he gave some of them – but, more commonly, in memoirs and reports on the news, in letters, in stories, and in the phantasmagoria of From the Other Shore. I think there is a reason that he chose to write in such a way as to mark the occasion of the writing – which is what a letter, a report, a conversation does. He wanted to keep a close hold on the ephemeral, to use it as a guard against the power of conceptual rapture.
If this is his point, then it is appropriate that the man who, in From the Other Shore, ‘represents’ Herzen is a doctor. There’s something teasing about that doctor, after all. Many of his traits – his radical skepticism, his disengagement from the forms of revolutionary politics and sympathies with it - fit like a glove one of the great radicals of 1848 – Francois-Vincent Raspail. Raspail was a figure after Herzen’s own liberty seeking heart. For instance, he refused to get a medical degree, even though he was generally known as a great doctor; hauled into court for practicing without a license, he still refused to get one because he refused to grant authority to the medical institutions of Louis-Philippe’s France. Norma Weiner, his biographer, points out that he became extremely wealthy by writing and printing one the Manuel annuaire de la sante. It was translated into Spanish, English, German and Italian and sold at an astonishing clip, becoming one of the century’s best sellers. (Weiner, 1959: 156) Becoming independently wealthy, he could indulge in his penchant for radical politics. Madame Agoult, who must have known him, pens a good portrait of him in her history of the 1848 revolution:
“Although his doctrines, strongly bound up in a system of pantheistic philosophy, tended to a radical communism and he considered the right of property as an illusion of amour-propre, he lifted his voice on all occasions against the thought of an immediate and violent reform: he fought against the agrarian law, that he called a chimera of restitution, an absurd idea. “Those who dream of social reform by suddenly upsetting property,” he said, “would not only be guilty; they would be insane; they would be savages who take revenge on their enemies by burning their own harvests, and who crown with their own death the success of a stupid vengeance. The equality of rights is an immoveable law, the equality of goods will not last for more than two hours.”
What he had of absolute in the expression of even his more wise ideas, his shadowy character, his austerity isolated Raspail from parties and factions. He excercized a personal ascendancy over the population of the quarters. His medical knowledge put him in the position of effectively helping, at every time of day, the injuries and sufferings that the rhetoricians of the clubs contented themselves with painting and that the ambitious were trying to exploit; but it was a moral isolated action, secretly envied and wrong footed by the chiefs of the party, and which never took the initiative in the revolutionary movement. One… never saw M. Raspail accompanied but by obscure soldiers of democracy.” The radicals of the government, MM. Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, judged him dangerous. M. Caussidiere, to whom he went on the day he was installed to see the registers of the police and find out the names of those who had betrayed him in the secret societies, refused him. A few days afterwards, M. Raspail’s paper, L’ami du people, was taken out of the hands of its paper boys and torn up by a troupe of students to whom they had made Raspail’s name suspect. The rumor floated, nobody knew how, that Raspail preached the extermination of the rich, like Marat.” (V.2, 9-10 – my translation)
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