The floating revolution : radical mobilities, organisation and practices in the western Mediterranean, 1850-1874

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to show how a heterogeneous and transnational revolutionary political culture had a profound impact on the evolution of states and polities in the western Mediterranean in the quarter-century following the 1848 revolutions. It focuses on events in the Italian Peninsula, southern France, Spain, and Algeria to argue that political radicals acting in these areas saw themselves as part of a transnational community, that the interconnected maritime world of the Mediterranean influenced the trajectory of their political projects, and that they had a significant impact on the political evolution of the areas they operated in. To bring out the significance of the radicals’ actions, the dissertation follows them across the sea to examine specific moments and processes in which they sought to shape new worlds for themselves. These include attempts to foment a large-scale insurrection in the Italian Peninsula in 1857, the logistics that underpinned Giuseppe Garibaldi’s campaign in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 1860, the preparation and fallout from the so-called “Glorious” Revolution in Cadiz in 1868, the aftermath of the collapse of the French Second Empire in Marseille and Algiers in 1870- 1871, and political life in Barcelona in the early days of the Spanish First Republic. I connect these moments to each other, to their transnational Mediterranean context, and to the wider consequences they had for the radicals themselves and for the political structures they impacted. The multifaceted experiences of political radicalism in the western Mediterranean offer further proof that the Age of Revolutions continued here well beyond its traditional cut-off point in 1848-49. Ultimately, my thesis brings together into a common narrative the heavily nationalised histories of these nineteenth-century radicalisms, while also stressing their significance for processes of state-building, colonialism, and economic globalisation.