8 - Alexander Herzen

Summary

The Russian radical émigré Alexander Herzen left three works that focus on 1848: two volumes of essays, and his great autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, in which his life story pivots around 1848. Herzen, who emigrated in 1847, describes himself as arriving in Paris as pilgrims once arrived at Jerusalem. By his own account, he rapidly discovered the fundamentally bourgeois character of French civilization and then witnessed the crushing of the June insurrection. The political debacle was compounded by personal tragedy – the deaths of his mother and son and his wife Natalie. In all his writings we find Herzen seeking a perspective from which the collapse of his pre-revolutionary ideals would make sense. His most powerful essays are jeremiads lamenting his broken dreams, replaying the June insurrection, and reflecting on the powerlessness of historical actors to change the world. Attempting to explain what went wrong in 1848, Herzen insists on the inability of European radicals to get beyond models drawn from the first French Revolution or Christianity or both. For Herzen, as for Proudhon (whom he admired) and Marx (whom he did not admire) the fatal weakness of the left lay in its inability to emancipate itself from memories that served to justify and cloak the return of repressive centralized government.