IT IS 170 years since the French people overthrew King Louis Philippe and started a chain of events that led to 1848 being known as the “year of revolutions.”

One country that did not have a revolution was Britain and we should expect that point to be echoed again during 2018 by such media as bother to pay attention to history. 

The general drift is that the British are sensible, moderate people not given to sudden outbursts that remove rulers and overthrow governments.

In fact Britain did come close to revolution in 1848 and had already had one in 1688, which however doesn’t fit the template that the historically lazy use to decide what is and is not a revolution as it didn’t involve any barricades.

Only four days before the French events, Marx and Engels had published the first edition of the Communist Manifesto. It was produced in London in German only.

The opening statement that a spectre was haunting Europe (or “hobgoblin” in the first 1850 English translation by female Chartist Helen Macfarlane), that of communism, was right. 

However it could be at this stage only a statement. It had no influence on the events in France.

The Chartist movement in Britain had been at a relatively low ebb as 1848 opened. 

After the earlier failure of petitions for the vote and the 1842 general strike, the leadership had turned its focus to the land plan. 

This was an idea, put into practice in a few places, to build cottages with smallholdings and instead of trying to reform capitalism or get rid of it, to opt out of it. 

Events in Paris on February 25 1848 changed all that. Within weeks, the Chartists were to organise one of the best-known demonstrations of the 19th century, that on Monday April 10 at Kennington Common. 

In the context of a revolutionary Europe, the royal family fled to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Here we must pause for a moment. This sequence of events makes perfect sense in terms of 2018. However, 170 years ago, the world in some respects was rather different.

The news of the overthrow of the king in Paris was received in London very shortly after it happened. It appeared in newspapers and was applauded by London theatre crowds and indeed by Chartists in that final weekend of February 1848.

Yet this was an age with no internet, no TV or radio, nor even any telephone. How did the news get to London so quickly?

The answer was by telegraph. It is normally thought that what is sometimes called the “Victorian internet” did not come into use until the 1860s. 

In reality railway companies introduced the telegraph for signalling purposes during the 1840s. By 1848 some had begun to adapt the system used so that text messages could be sent.

The London and South Eastern Railway had a telegraph network covering the area from the south coast to London. 

On February 25 a special messenger was despatched by train from Paris to Boulogne. From there a cross-channel ferry took the report of the revolution to Dover. There the news was transmitted by the railway’s telegraph to the London authorities and the press.

News of the events of the revolutionary year of 1848 on mainland Europe regularly reached London by this route, well ahead of other European capitals where the telegraph was not yet in use.

The interesting thing is that the start of the revolutions of 170 years ago was spread by a means which itself was revolutionary.