Europe in the 1840s was sleeping on a volcano.

In this episode, we trace the long buildup to the Revolutions of 1848 through hunger, repression, and the slow accumulation of social pressure beneath the surface of liberal order.

We begin not in Paris, but in the silk workshops of Lyon, where workers first rose as a class against industrial capitalism. From there, we follow the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830, when a popular uprising brought down a king—only to deliver power into the hands of bourgeois liberals like Adolphe Thiers. As working-class revolt was crushed again and again, a new kind of revolutionary politics took shape in the shadows.

Enter Auguste Blanqui: professional conspirator, indefatigable insurrectionist, and prophet of a disciplined revolutionary vanguard. Through secret societies, failed uprisings, and years of prison, Blanqui embodied a growing rift within the French left between reformers in parliament and revolutionaries in the streets.

As famine spread across Europe and the “Hungry Forties” set in, that rift widened into something far more dangerous. When revolution finally erupted in Paris in February 1848, it did so not as a planned conspiracy, but as a spontaneous explosion—three days that toppled the “Bourgeois King” and opened the door to a new republic.

But what kind of republic would it be?

This is Season One—The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: Paris 1848: The Red Flag in Spring pt. II—The Fire

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

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