A summary of two rival careers, including international travel and differing outlook in the 1848 Revolution.

In June 1853, Clara Schumann set to music six inset-poems from the novella Jucunde, hot off the press earlier that year, by the minor poet Hermann Rollett. Schumann and Rollett actually met in Vienna in July 1856, shortly after her husband’s death, and she gave him a presentation copy of her Op. 23 songs. The young Rollett was a political firebrand; he wrote differently after the revolution ended in failure, but he included some of his earlier poems in Jucunde, and covert hints of continued adherence to former doomed ideals are still apparent. So too with Robert and Clara Schumann: both harboured republican sympathies, and both would signal their disillusionment and unchanged political views in several of their songs from the 1850s. If these works seem harmless at first hearing, semi-hidden hints of underlying politics emerge on closer examination. From Robert Schumann’s ‘Des Sennen Abschied’, Op. 79 No. 22; ‘Heimliches Verschwinden’, Op. 89 No. 2; and ‘Warnung’, Op. 119 No. 2, we arrive at Clara Schumann’s ‘Geheimes Flüstern’, Op. 23 No. 3, whose harmonic, tonal and motivic elements hint to the cognoscenti of sadness over political failure and of unconquerable hope for the future.

This chapter traces Ibsen’s family background and childhood in Skien (1828–43), his youth as an apprentice to a pharmacist in Grimstad (1843–50) and his years in Kristiania and Bergen until he left Norway in 1864. Ibsen’s literary activity started before he left Grimstad and it continued in Kristiania. After failing the university’s entrance exam in 1850, Ibsen was offered a full-time position at the new Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. The theatre was dedicated to the training of Norwegian actors, the introduction of spoken Norwegian on the stage and the promotion of national dramatic writing. In 1857 Ibsen left Bergen to take up a position at the corresponding Norwegian theatre in Kristiania. The theatre experienced economic difficulties that also affected Ibsen’s finances, and more and more he came to experience the theatre as a restriction on his literary ambitions. These negative aspects have to be balanced, however, against the exceptional training these years offered the young playwright. Furthermore, Norwegian theatre by the middle of the nineteenth century was fully integrated in the European theatre business, and by the 1860s Ibsen had become acquainted with and had started to articulate his ambitions against the contemporary, French-dominated, repertoire.

This chapter calls into question a widely held historiographical perception that the failure of the Commune marked the end of a French revolutionary tradition inaugurated by the Revolution of 1789 and perpetuated by the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It reassesses the contexts in which the word ‘revolution’ was used and shows that this dominant interpretation conflicts with the actual writings of ex-Communards on the subject. Activists referred frequently to the events of the recent revolutionary past, but these references were not indicative of the desire to create a static and prescriptive ‘French revolutionary tradition’. Revolutionaries were preoccupied with placing events since 1789 within a longer and broader French genealogy in order to define revolution as a social movement rather than a political event. This was partly a response to moderate Republican efforts to claim and historicise the French Revolution after 1871, but was not solely a product of circumstances. Using the work of Louis Auguste Blanqui, I demonstrate that neutrality regarding the Revolution (1789 and the more radical 1793) had been an element of revolutionary thought since the 1850s. Consequently, I also suggest that the intellectual differences between revolutionaries and more moderate republicans during this period have been overstated.

This chapter demonstrates activists’ continued commitment to the concept of revolutionary action after the Commune, and locates it in discussions of religion and nature. The first part of the chapter examines revolutionary activists’ attempts and ultimate failure to expand their appeal outwards from Paris and regional cities to the French countryside by characterising revolution as a religious experience. The willingness of increasingly atheistic revolutionaries to resurrect religious rhetoric both demonstrated their commitment to acquiring new support and also exposed fatal limitations. The second part discusses a new definition of revolution as resulting from natural evolution rather than subjective will, focusing primarily on the work of Elisée Reclus. By presenting revolution in these terms, activists minimised the importance of their own recent failures and redefined revolution as the practice of everyday life. In the changed circumstances of the Third Republic, this broader revolution was more accessible and appealing than traditional forms of action; however, it also stripped revolution of specific meaning. The chapter also links these two definitions of revolution and rhetoric around the 1848 Revolution. The chapter ultimately argues that revolution was and always had been a process of constant adaptation rather than a tradition.