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Beginning with a discussion of Babeuf's Communist variant on the (failed) French Revolution, the chapter analyzes Marx as a “rooster” (a secular Joachite) whose prophecies of a world revolution in 1848 proved wrong (compared with Meyerbeer's response), but who spent the rest of his life trying to explain—as roosters so often do—how he was right about the scenario, but wrong about the timing. The chapter addresses the issue of Marx's denial of any millennial component to his thinking, his adoption of the politique du pire, and the broader problem of “secular millennialism,” including the problem of “envy” in the appeal of Communist promises.

The election of Pius IX in 1846 aroused great enthusiasm among liberals and nationalists in Italy, and the evidence indicates that for the first two years of his papacy, until the Roman Revolution of 1848, Pius's liberalism was genuine. But his refusal to join the war against Austria in 1848 highlighted the contradiction between his role as an Italian political leader and his office as an international spiritual leader who had to retain the support of conservative Catholics throughout Europe, including Austria. When revolution broke out in Rome and a republic was declared, the pope had to flee to Neapolitan territory, and he was only restored to the papal states by French and Austrian arms. The experience changed Pius's outlook to that of a resolute conservatism as he lost any belief that papal authority could be reconciled with constitutional government. Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli emerged as the dominant figure in papal government.

Examining the writings of Frederick Douglass, Michael Boyden’s coda traces how the former slave’s political vision developed as he observed and came into contact with other revolutionary projects and events such as the fight for Irish liberation and the Revolutions of 1848, which echoed the antislavery struggle in the United States. The essay also points to future directions for research underscoring the importance of embodied practices in disseminating revolutionary ideas as, for example, in the reenactments performed in the “die-in” protests that have spread across the world in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

This chapter examines the significance of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, and of European constructions of his life and works, to New England Transcendentalism. In so doing, it shows the development and transformation of rhetorical theories of music, with the emergence in the nineteenth century of the idea of a musical work as an organic identity. The chapter focuses on the reception of Beethoven's symphonies in New England; on the impact of transatlantic ideas of the hero and the heroic on the musical discourse of Margaret Fuller (with particular reference to her letters, journals and contributions to The Dial [1840-44]); and on Fuller's dispatches from Europe for the New-York Tribune (1846-50), especially her engagement with theories of the utopian instrumentality of music, such as those of Madame de StaËl and Giuseppe Mazzini. The chapter also analyses Nathaniel Hawthorne's sceptical relation to the musical discourse of de StaËl and the New England Transcendentalists in his novel The Marble Faun (1860).