Marie de Flavigny, Comtesse d'Agoult, writing as "Daniel Stern," _Histoire de la Revolution de 1848_

I HAVE BEEN reading, at a very leisurely pace, Jonathan Beecher's Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848. Excellent book--chapters on a variety of people who were on hand in Paris for the tumultuous events of that year and who went on to write about it: Marx, Hugo, Flaubert, Tocqueville, George Sand, Alexander Herzen. The poet Alphonse Lamartine not only wrote about it but was a leading figure, at least for half a year or so.

Among the book's virtues is its whetting my appetite to read (or re-read, in a couple of cases) what these people wrote about 1848. I had never even heard of Marie d'Agoult before reading Beecher's chapter on  her, but she's a compelling writer, and her history of the revolution, published under a pseudonym, may turn out to be my best find of 2025.

The Comtesse d'Agoult left her aristocratic husband to live with pianist and composer Franz Liszt in the 1830s; she and Liszt lived together for ten years and had three children (one daughter, Cosima, later married Richard Wagner). When they broke up, d'Agoult became a writer and led a noted literary salon. She was well acquainted with Lamartine, among others, and obviously had some all-the-way inside sources for her history, which appeared in three volumes published during the span 1850-53. 

I did not read the whole thing, which runs roughly a thousand pages, but I did read a chapter or two from each volume, a total of about 140 pages.

D'Agoult sketches personalities vividly, even the people she is not much in political sympathy with. She seems to be of Lamartine's party, seeking a liberal democratic republic that stops short of socialism, but she emphasizes the courage and resourcefulness of the workers. She does seem to have a distaste for Louis Napoleon, whose election as president in the late fall of 1848 was the dismal anticlimax to the year of revolution, but who can blame her?

She has a novelist's touch in rendering the revolution's most dramatic moments, which is what I zeroed in on for my reading: Chapter 16, on February 25th, when Lamartine talked a crowd out of substituting the red socialist flag for the Republic's tricolor; Chapters 22 about some of the leaders of opinion; Chapter 23 about the 17th of March, when a crowd of tens of thousands of workers showed up at a meeting of the provisional government at the Hotel de Ville (city hall) to present their demands; and Chapter 33, about the "June days," when the barricades went up and armed conflict broke out between the national guard and the workers of Paris.

Marie d'Agoult is the Hilary Mantel of 1848. I hope this isn't trivializing, but I couldn't stop thinking about what an amazing miniseries this could make.