In the first half of the nineteenth century, political exile was a small-scale affair in Europe. The number of persons moving across borders was generally limited, especially in comparison to the twentieth century, and those states willing to grant asylum to political émigrés did so selectively, based on constantly fluctuating diplomatic relations. In the eyes of many contemporaries, émigrés were individuals, often “men of letters,” who were forced out of states to towns and cities abroad, where they continued to write and criticize political affairs.

As Heléna Tóth shows, however, the people movements caused by the 1848 revolutions did not fit into this prevailing image of political exile. In An Exiled Generation, Tóth explains that the refugees of 1848 were a diverse group ranging from militia members to the families of so-called Forty-Eighters. Here Tóth builds on existing historiographical trends by showing that exile was a broader phenomenon than simply the extradition of “great émigrés” (5–6). The refugees of the 1848 Revolutions were no longer individuals but rather thousands of persons who, in one way or another, were forced to leave their hometowns. Moreover, Tóth adds to current research by exploring the multifarious social contexts in which such groups reflected upon their experiences, whether directly after crossing state borders or further abroad in England and the United States. This is a clear strength of her book, for it provides the reader with a compelling sense of the global dimensions of Central European exile. Particularly commendable is the way in which Tóth weaves longer histories of migration and exile into the story of the post-1848 period, as well as how she discusses the relationships among different types of migrants.

The book is organized beautifully, beginning and ending with reflections on the process of leaving and returning. In between, Tóth uses two case studies—the German Southwest and the Kingdom of Hungary—to analyze the dynamics of exile in three different social settings. The basic point of comparison is that these were “two important centers of the Revolutions of 1848 with different patterns of migration” (9). These are indeed welcome selections, especially as they provide an English-speaking audience with access to difficult Hungarian sources. Yet, the guiding ideas underlying the comparison are not entirely clear. Tóth neither gives a sense of the other centers of revolution from which she has extracted the German Southwest and the Kingdom of Hungary, nor does she offer an indication of the various patterns of migration from which she chose. This is a relatively minor point but it has larger implications for how the reader assesses the significance of these two centers in what Tóth tells us was a “Europe-wide phenomenon” (3) of political exile. In practice, the two case studies appear to be a means by which to expand discussion of the range of experiences of exile. This is, of course, completely valid, but further assistance in thinking through these extremely valuable case studies would have been welcome.

Tóth is ultimately arguing for a greater appreciation of nuance and diversity in the epoch of “great émigrés.” There are strengths and weaknesses to this approach. The obvious strength is that the book shifts our image of nineteenth-century exile away from its narrow focus on famous political refugees such as Karl Marx and Lajos Kossuth: sources are chosen with particular care to reveal the many “ordinary” men and women caught up in the process of political exile and, more than that, to uncover their collective experiences. But at times it feels as if there are too many faces in the analysis. In the biographies Tóth deploys, directly contrasting stories of exile are marshaled one after another. And although this is her point—that exile was a fundamentally heterogeneous affair after 1848—it can be a difficult way in which to develop more nuanced ways of thinking about the period in general. Tóth no doubt provides many sophisticated arguments, but in certain parts—for instance the discussion of how émigrés reformulated the legacy of the revolution—it can be hard to see the larger impact of the manifold experiences of exile.

These are, however, far from criticisms of the book. Rather, they indicate Tóth's rich line of historical thinking and her willingness to explore a challenging source base. This is, without question, a creative, thoroughly researched, and authoritatively argued book. It will be of great interest to historians of nineteenth-century Central Europe and to historians of exile more generally.