This is a very welcome book about the European exiles after the revolutions of 1848, based on new and meticulous research on the comparison of German and Hungarian exiles up to 1871.

Heléna Tóth is careful to point out that her book does not provide “a classic comparison between two monolithic exile groups. There existed neither a unified ‘German’ nor a unified ‘Hungarian’ exile” (13). Tóth, however, is of Hungarian origin and teaches at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität in Bamberg, Germany (one of the oldest universities of Bavaria). She has thus been equipped with all the necessary tools for such a comparison. Not only does she have the linguistic skills for such a venture, she also has a deep understanding of the refugee existence and what it entails. For this study, most of her archival research was done in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna, the Hauptstaatsarchiv in Stuttgart, the Generallandesarchiv in Karlsruhe, and in the Országos Levéltár and Országos Széchényi Könyvtár in Budapest.

Tóth is right in assuming that “the prevailing assumptions about the character of political exile” changed in the aftermath of the revolutions. She asserts that asylum in mid-nineteenth-century Europe was not designed for very large groups; rather, it was geared toward “small, politically and socially homogeneous groups that could be relatively easily absorbed by the politically sympathetic states that granted them asylum” (1).

The introductory chapter gives a lucid survey of the revolutions of 1848 and their aftermath, which the author describes as “a pan-European phenomenon with a global dimension that made an impact on a large section of the population” (5). I could not agree more. Tóth's undertaking significantly adds to the usual homage to the “shadow of great émigrés” by including “the experience of women and the ‘little men’ in exile” (5–6). She chose a particular approach to describe the nature of postrevolutionary migrations by identifying “specific social settings” and “a range of biographies through their lenses” (7). What is really new in this book is the analysis of dynamics of exile in three social settings: the family, the professions, and social networks. These settings are shown in various forms of migration focusing upon two case studies: the German southwest and the Kingdom of Hungary. The book demonstrates that German political émigrés after 1848 often confronted and lived together with emigrants from previous decades, and it presents a delicate interplay of the various emigrant groups that left Germany earlier as a result of rural overpopulation, fluctuating agricultural prices, poor harvests, and the fear of downward social mobility. These accounted for the very reasons of the 1848 revolutions at home as well as the ensuing emigration in the 1830s and 1840s, often transatlantic in nature.

The present reviewer values two particular chapters most highly. “Exile as a Profession, Professions in Exile” (114–66) shows Central European émigrés as harbingers of the modern professions of the nineteenth century. Tóth quotes Ludwig Simon's Aus dem Exil (Giessen, 1855) asking “Who would have thought … that philology, medicine, the natural sciences or some other cosmopolitan science would be better suited to the times to come?” (114). She presents Lajos Kossuth, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Giuseppe Garibaldi as forerunners to twentieth-century “professional revolutionaries” who “relentlessly pursued their political goals even after a failed revolution” (120). Several of these leaders turned their revolutionary heritage into a livelihood, more in England and in the United States, and less in Switzerland, France, Belgium, or the Ottoman Empire. Tóth examines the revolutions of 1848 as “marketable asset[s]” (120), sold in the many books by their former leaders to easily excitable audiences. The extent to capitalize on being an émigré varied over time and in each of the host countries. To present the political past as a financial asset, however, was an excellent idea for the émigré politicians as well as for the author of this remarkable book.

The other very welcome chapter, on “The Roots of the Uprooted: Émigré Networks,” is a novel approach to emigrant political society (167–213). Tóth quotes the American Anna Lowell's letter to Theresa Pulszky (wife of the Hungarian revolutionary exile Ferenc Pulszky, diplomat, scholar, and MP) of 16 January 1859 saying, “The Hungarian seems like an uprooted tree that can find no soil. When I imagine my Hungarian friends here are beginning to feel a little at home, I find out that they are viewing themselves only as ‘pilgrims and strangers' pining for their distant land.” Tóth adds, “of course, German émigrés also ‘pined for their distant land’” (169). She applies to forty-eighters the dictum of Charles Tilly who, in his “Transplanted Networks” (in Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered, New York, 1990, 84), called networks the “effective units of migration” (171).

A few tables, maps, musical scores, and other illustrations are useful additions to the text. Cambridge University Press did a very good job publishing this book.

The revolutions of 1848 and their emigrant crowds and émigré leaders often seem like an exhausted topic in European historiography. Heléna Tóth's new book demonstrates that a novel approach, newly found and well-researched international archival material, and the implementation of the concepts of contemporary social sciences can always make an old field seem inexhaustable and alive.