Introduction

Germans are not renowned as natural revolutionaries. Lenin is sometimes said to have joked that German revolutionaries would not storm a railway station without first buying a platform ticket. The stereotype of the German national character is that of the law-abiding, authority-fearing, deferential Michel, portrayed in cartoons with a nightcap and big wide eyes as if just awoken from his slumber by the harsh realities of the world. The French, by contrast, enjoy a reputation as perennial revolutionaries, ready to build barricades at the drop of a liberty cap. Such stereotypes, of course, owe everything to the nineteenth century when France was repeatedly in the vanguard of the overthrow of the ancien regime in Europe while Germany, the half-hearted attempt in 1848 (A.J.P. Taylor's “turning point where Germany failed to turn’) apart, seemed content to amble along at the rear. To that extent, the stereotype gives expression to an actual reality as all stereotypes do. But the twentieth century has been remarkably different: the – in historical-comparative terms. – mild unrest of the Front populaire period in 1935–36 and of course les évènements of May 1968 apart, France has had a quiet century, disturbed only by the neighbour from the other bank of the Rhine who, in sharp contrast to his previous somnolence, erupted into regular frenzies of tearing down and rebuilding his political order. The image of a revolutionary tide comes to mind, sloshing across Europe over the centuries: beginning with the English civil wars of the seventeenth century, continuing eastwards across France at the end of the eighteenth, passing over Germany and Austria in the nineteenth to reach Russia in the early twentieth, only to eddy back into Germany in 1918. History does not work like that, of course, although the mental image is striking and a more sophisticated analysis might suggest an explanation of the pattern in terms of the spatial unevenness of European capitalist development.