Confronting Defeat
Perry Anderson: Hobsbawm’s Histories, 17 October 2002
“... If the bourgeoisie were already the rulers of Western Europe in the time of Lola Montes and King Bomba, what need for the upheavals of 1848? Why indeed conclude, at the end of an admirable survey of these, that it was now that ‘the bourgeoisie ceased to be a revolutionary force’? For that matter, in the half-century after 1830, universal male ... ”