Rethinking 1848: actors, practices, networks

• Department of History

This workshop on 9 and 10 June 2025, explores the possibility of bringing together historical approaches to revolutionary '1848’ that focus on actors, practices, and networks instead of nations and states.

What different version of 1848 might emerge by studying actors and networks rather than states? This workshop challenges traditional spatial, temporal, and thematic borders of the revolutionary transformations around the middle of the 19th century. It explores contemporaries’ diverse and competing imaginings of revolution, and the ways in which these moved across borders. This allows us to rethink both the when and where ‘1848’ happened, who created it, and the political issues they filled it with.

Please register to get a seat.

Image: ‘L’abolition de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises (27 avril 1848),’ by François Auguste Biard (1849, oil on canvas, 260 x 392 cm, © RMN-GP (Château de Versailles) / © Franck Raux)