Lola Montez Starts A Revolution

Lola Montez, on an outrageous dare, seduces King Ludwig I of Bavaria. The aging royal cannot resist her moves as a Spanish dancer, nor the exciting wardrobe malfunction which ensues. Meanwhile, Europe seethes with unrest. In 1848, Lola is the target of a terrifying witch hunt, and must save herself and also foment a remarkable revolution.

Lola Montez runs from the haunting memories of Spain. She meets Franz Liszt; performs her racy Spider Dance at the Paris Opéra; then meets the man of her dreams, a friend of Alexandre Dumas. Shadowy figures try to stop another venture: writing a novel about a feisty female character. In the heady atmosphere of the left bank, will Lola survive?

The 19th century femme fatale was an adventuress who reshaped her history by blending fact and fiction. Ahead of her time, she believed in total equality and independence for women and used her influence to start a revolution.

In 1848 the continent of Europe was rocked by revolutions: only Great Britain and Russia remained relatively immune to the upheaval. Most spectacularly, the Revolutions swept across the German-speaking lands of central Europe, with the newly-released forces of nationalism and mass popular protest smashing the reactionary Metternich regimes which had held sway since the defeat of Napoleon. The Metternich system was dead: nationalism and national self-determination asserted themselves as the dominant dynamic forces of continental Europe in the later nineteenth century. This impressive history examines the political and social implications of the 1848 Revolutions for the future destiny and shape of Europe as a whole, and explores the wider forces at play in the German lands of nineteenth-century Europe.

Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861 makes an interdisciplinary contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of the long nineteenth century. It argues that the cultural dimensions of the political and social upheavals in Europe and the Americas were fundamentally transnational.

Lewald (1811-1889), the best-selling German woman writer in the nineteenth century, proved akeen and perceptive observer of the social, artistic, and political life of her times, of which these Recollections offer an excellent example. Written from a woman's perspective, this first-hand account of the revolutions in both Germany and France must be considered a unique document. It is further enhanced by her detailed description of the Frankfurt Parliament and her relationships with many of the prominent politicians and thinkers of that eventful period.

The story of Joseph Gorres's life is in many ways the story of German political culture in the revolutionary epoch. Indeed, his dates, 1776-1848, frame the "Age of Revolution" and, like the age in which he lived, Gorres's life was marked by great upheavals. One of the most prominent German journalists of his age, Gorres pioneered political journalism, or what was called Publizistik in Germany. He was a founder of political Catholicism, and was in no small part responsible for the fact that Germany eventually developed a party based on the Catholic confession. Gorres was also an extraordinarily prolific scholar with an almost dizzying range of interests. His life provides a window into an incredibly prolific era in European history, into the political implications of the Enlightenment, the wide-reaching intellectual movement of German romanticism, the roots of German nationalism, and the origins of German political party formation.Gorres traversed the entire political spectrum of his age: his youth, formed in the shadow of the French Revolution, was characterized by enlightened, cosmopolitan republicanism -- what some have dubbed "German Jacobinism"; his middle years included a romantic phase, in which he helped foster a nascent German cultural nationalism, before he became a fiery nationalist writer and publisher of the Rheinischer Merkur, the most important political newspaper in Germany up to that time. In the sunset of his life he was primarily a Catholic political polemicist.Gorres helped shape the immensely creative and pivotal years in which he lived, years that saw the development of the modern state system and the origin of the political spectrum in Germany, as well as thevery concepts "liberal" and "conservative", which are so much a part of our political discourse today.

In 1848 revolutions broke out all over Europe - in France, the Habsburg and German lands and the Italian peninsular. This Seminar Study considers why the revolutions occurred and why they were so widespread. The book offers a broad ranging investigation of the social, economic and political circumstances which led to the revolutions of 1848 as well as an account of the revolutions themselves. First published in 1981, and fully revised in 1991, the study has long established itself as one of the most accessible and valuable introductions to this complex subject.