Christopher Clark

Christopher Clark is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. Revolutionary Spring, about 1848, is out now.

In their combination​ of intensity and geographical extent, the 1848 Revolutions were unique – at least in European history. Neither the French Revolution of 1789, nor the July Revolution of 1830, nor the Paris Commune of 1870, nor the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 sparked a comparable transcontinental cascade. While 1989 looks like a better comparator, there is still...

God bless Italy: Rome, Vienna, 1848

Christopher Clark, 10 May 2018

On the evening​ of 24 November 1848, Pope Pius IX fled from the city of Rome. At 5 p.m., he took off his Moroccan silk slippers with crosses embroidered on their uppers, put aside the red velvet papal cap and dressed himself in the black cassock and broad-brimmed hat of a country priest. Half an hour later, in a state of great agitation, he left the papal audience chamber in the Quirinale...

How powerful was the Kaiser? Wilhelm II

Christopher Clark, 23 April 2015

In January 1904, King Leopold II of Belgium was invited to Berlin to attend a birthday dinner for Kaiser Wilhelm II. The two monarchs were seated next to each other and everything was going nicely until the Kaiser suddenly brought up the question of a possible future French attack on Germany. In the event of a war between Germany and France, Wilhelm explained, he would expect the Belgians to side with Germany. So long as they agreed, he would see to it personally that Belgium was rewarded after the conclusion of hostilities with territories annexed from northern France.

Not Just a Phase: Rewriting Hungary’s Past

Nora Berend and Christopher Clark, 20 November 2014

This summer​, a new monument appeared in Budapest’s Liberty Square. Amid a copse of truncated white marble pillars stands the metal figure of a slender young man. Wrapped from hips to feet in windswept drapery, he opens his arms to the sky. In his right hand he bears the orb of political authority surmounted by the Hungarian double-barred cross. Wings sprout from his shoulder blades....

Letter

Who started it?

29 August 2013

Christopher Clark writes: I thank Norman Frink for his insightful and generous comments about the review and about my book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. But I don’t accept that there is anything ‘sly’ about my handling of the evidence for German war guilt. The book engages the case for German war guilt head-on, proposing in place of the primary culprit model a polycentric...

Kings Grew Pale: Rethinking 1848

Neal Ascherson, 1 June 2023

The revolution was significantly different in each country it visited. The fearsome events unfolding in Vienna can’t be understood without taking into account the simultaneous eruptions in Hungary....

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Some saw the collapse of the German Empire as a decisive and traumatic break in the historical continuity of the state. Nothing, in Christopher Clark’s view, more profoundly exemplified this revolt against...

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The weakness and unreliability of the alliances, and the lack of certainty about who would be on whose side, exacerbated the crisis of summer 1914.

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Black Legends: Prussia

David Blackbourn, 16 November 2006

Too much history can be bad for you. ‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ – that was Marx’s famous comment on...

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