Jonathan Strauss

Eighteen Forty-Eight, or the History of Death

This article offers a metahistorical examination of the concept of history through readings of contemporary and subsequent accounts of the 1848 Revolution in France. The year 1848 has persistently thrown the category of history into question – not historical events, but the very notion of history itself. I would argue, however, that the Revolution’s historical significance lies, paradoxically, in the very possibility that it was not a historical event, or, more precisely, in the ambiguity of its historical status. Through readings of contemporary accounts of the February 1848 events in Paris and theoretical texts by Kant, Michelet, Marx and Derrida, this article argues that the possibility of historical meaning is conceptually rooted in the finitude of human mortality. This finitude – and its attendant meanings – are, however, troubled by the notion of ghosts and the troubling materiality of corpses, both of which played important psychological roles in reactions to the 1848 Revolution in Paris.