Reflections on Studying Revolutions: Venice 1848 from the Perspective of 1968

This chapter takes as its starting point Paul Ginsborg’s time in Venice, around 1968 when he was researching the Venetian revolution of 1848. It narrates the liberation of two political prisoners in Venice on 17 March 1848—Daniele Manin and Niccolò Tommaseo—in a climate of general surprise following the arrival of news of the revolution in Vienna. The event is examined from different points of view, in an attempt to reintroduce a sense of spontaneity to those events, as well as draw out the networks and the different meanings that emerged from that one event. The second part of the chapter analyses how the events of 17 March 1848 and the five days that followed in Venice can be explained by social and cultural processes from before that movement, all within the context of the fact that people act without knowing what the consequences of their actions will be—in this case, a war which quickly crushed the climate of hope for a new future marked by brotherhood between peoples, and led to a desire to find an ‘enemy’ among the ‘outsiders’. The impact of 1968 on the way these processes are studied is a central theme.