Although historians, almost without exception, have maintained that the rapidly expanding insurrectionary convulsions of 1848 emanated from Paris, it is possible to single out a handful of dissenting opinions. Louis Garnier-Pagès, for example, contended that unrest in certain communes of the Abruzzi region, the province of Salerno, the city of Messina, and some parts of Calabria had been set in motion by events in Palermo.1 Marx makes the somewhat vaguer claim in The Class Struggles in France that “the bloody uprising of the people in Palermo worked like an electric shock on the paralyzed masses of the people and awoke their great revolutionary memories and passions.”2 Among twentieth-century commentators, Paul Ginsborg similarly writes of Palermo’s “electrifying effect on the rest of the peninsula.”3 Jacques Godechot has argued even more forcefully for the significance of the Sicilian events.4 He not only adds Genoa to the list of sites incited to rebel by the news of the uprising in Palermo but goes so far as to suggest that, even had the February revolution in Paris not taken place, the uprising in Sicily might have initiated a chain reaction that would have ended by engulfing the rest of Europe, albeit at a slower pace. More recently, Reinhart Koselleck has boldly claimed: “Not surprisingly, then, the revolution of 1848 first broke out in southern Italy, in Palermo and Naples, where constitutions were forced onto the ruling monarchy. From there it spread to France.”5
My inability to uncover evidence that Parisians active during the February Days made reference to or had in mind the previous month’s events in Palermo has convinced me that the Sicilian insurrection’s direct influence was largely confined to the Italian-speaking world. Still to be addressed is the intriguing fact that the kingdom of Naples and Sicily remained at the forefront of the 1848 events not just during the expansive revolutionary phase in the spring of that year but also as the political tide turned toward reaction as the summer months approached. Specifically, a follow-up insurrection occurred in Naples in mid-May. It was put down with the help of the lazzaroni (a term used to refer to the street people of that city, whom Marx categorized as lumpenproletarians) more than a month before the June insurrection in Paris was repressed thanks to the spirited participation of the Garde mobile (on whom Marx heaped even greater scorn.) In this case too, the Paris events were seen as pivotal in reversing the momentum of political developments on the Continent, while the role of the conflict in Naples went all but unnoticed.
One difficulty in positing the Palermo insurrection as the starting point for the cataclysmic sequence of 1848 revolutions is that, while it may have preceded the February Days in Paris, it was itself anticipated by several other, significant insurrectionary episodes. For example, the so-called potato revolution of April 1847, which brought unrest (accompanied by a handful of barricades) to Berlin and other German towns, might just as readily be viewed as the point of departure for the spurt of mid-century unrest. Another candidate might be the renewal of the civil war in Switzerland, which had already produced two minor barricade events in Geneva as early as 1843 and 1846. However, in November 1847, the threat to Swiss national unity was dispelled when liberal forces supporting increased centralization of government defeated the Sonderbund, a coalition of breakaway Catholic cantons. Though Peter Stearns considers this episode to have been “independent of developments elsewhere,” its influence on Baden was clear, thus justifying its having occasionally been cited as the direct antecedent of the revolutionary wave of 1848.6 Agitation in Tuscany, which had prompted the grand duke to grant a charter by mid-February, could also be seen as a legitimate precursor, even though the provisions of the new charter had yet to be implemented at the time Louis-Philippe was forced to relinquish his throne.7
Certain participants in the 1848 uprisings pointed to yet more distant origins for the tumult of that year. Among them was the composer Richard Wagner, whose autobiography traces his personal awakening to the siren song of political rebellion back to the July revolution of 1830, even if the lesson he drew from that episode of his youth was that revolutionary change remained a remote prospect at best. He also cited the Sonderbund war in Switzerland and the Sicilian “revolution” at the start of 1848 as the events that turned the eyes of the expectant (though not his own) “in great excitement to Paris to discern the effect of these revolts.”8 These harbingers notwithstanding, Wagner was firm in his conviction that the Paris insurrection of February had ushered in the new revolutionary era in Europe.
As a general rule, historians have given little credence to the notion that these earlier antecedents—whether considered individually or collectively—could have triggered so great an outpouring of insurrectionary activity, absent a revolution in Paris. The contrary view, directly attributing the sharp increase in revolutionary mobilization to the impact of renewed unrest in France, has been commonplace.9
The point is not that Paris was immune to the influence of rebellions originating elsewhere. The 1834 insurrection in Lyon, which precipitated a smaller rising in the capital city, disproves that proposition handily enough. Still, asymmetries in the way that people process and communicate their understanding of the world around them consign an incident in a single small and peripheral location to oblivion, whereas another event—even when comparably limited in scope—in a populous, centrally placed, and closely watched venue tends to be perceived as full of portent.
Paris, of course, was often treated as a special case because of its unique history of revolutionary upheaval. The least sign of insurrectionary activity there tended to cast events in less conspicuous locations into the shadows. Thus, Palermo in January 1848, much like Brussels in September 1787 or Geneva in January 1789, have remained all but overlooked as the opening acts of the great revolutionary dramas that followed. Preliminary events in Switzerland, Prussia, Wurttemberg, Sicily, and elsewhere in 1846 and 1847 have attracted even less attention. What they do indicate, through their use of barricades, is that familiarity with the French insurrectionary repertoire had already penetrated people’s thinking and spread widely across the Continent by the 1840s. This helps explain why a triggering event like the February revolution in France could have such an immediate and far-reaching impact.