Content area
Full Text
In the modern world, political protest and regime change have often advanced in waves (Hale 2013; Kurzman 1998). Progress toward liberty in one country inspires citizens in other countries to push for similar changes. As cases ranging from the "Springtime of Peoples" in 1848 to the "Arab Spring" of 2011 show, these tsunamis of protest were propelled by the demonstration and contagion effects emanating from the overthrow of French Citizen King Louis Philippe in February 1848 and of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, respectively. But despite their amazing advance, many of these rebellions ended up bringing little lasting progress and soon fell to elite efforts to turn the clock back; established rulers and their supporters frequently managed to squash protest or restore the status quo once mass demonstrations died down. Therefore, advances tended to be followed by reversals, which spread in waves as well (Gunitsky 2014; Huntington 1991, 15-21).
Do these reactionary riptides mirror the initial upsurge of contention or do their features diverge, given the different protagonists? Because social science has traditionally neglected counterrevolution (Mayer 1971, 35-6), these questions have remained unanswered, especially for historical cases. The recent outpouring of writings on authoritarian rule has begun to fill this gap (e.g., Ambrosio 2009; Brownlee, Masoud, and Reynolds 2015, chaps. 4, 5; Koesel and Bunce 2013), but has focused on contemporary events, especially the "color revolutions" in the post-Communist world during the early 2000s and the Arab Spring (wider coverage: Gunitsky 2014, 16-25). Through an in-depth analysis of counterrevolution after the March uprising of 1848, especially in Prussia, this article tries to broaden this emerging line of research and thus uncover more generalizable findings.
Interestingly, in 1848 as on other occasions, counterrevolution advanced differently than revolution. Whereas contention swept across a whole continent like a raging torrent,1the rollback occurred through a long trickle of suppression, taking hold first here, then there (Sperber 1994, chap. 5). Rather than squashing protest in a dramatic counterwave, reactionaries restored "order" in specific countries at different times, as Table 1 shows. Similarly divergent patterns unfolded in 1830, when a quick sequence of contentious advances triggered by the July revolution in Paris was followed by more staggered, differentiated repression and rollback (Church 1983). And...