The Survival of the Habsburg Empire: Radetzky, the Imperial
Army, and the Class War, 1848 by Alan Sked Longman, 289 pp.,
$33.00 The nineteenth century was an age of kings, more so than
the preceding century when there had been many republics and
city-states, and much more so than our century. And yet, during
the spring of 1848, the whole monarchical edifice in Europe
threatened to collapse or, at the least, change radically. The
king of the French was driven from his throne; other kings and
princes were attacked, abused, or, the supreme humiliation, were
forced—like Louis XVI of France half a century before—to embrace
the revolution. That most of these monarchs, except for Louis
Philippe of France, managed to get through the crisis was not
owing to any special skill on their part nor was the French king
particularly inept. As a matter of fact, Louis Philippe, himself
an ex-revolutionary, was one, of the more able monarchs in
Europe. By contrast, the king of Prussia was going mad, and the
Habsburg emperor was