Revolutions of 1848

The Revolutions of 1848 enter The Interpretation of Dreams through Freud’s retrospective analysis of a dream from early August 1898. What first appears to be a fantasy of revolutionary politics is, he argues, a layered construction: anniversary memories of 1848 and an excursion through the Wachau provide its historical façade, while scenes from his adolescence, contemporary Viennese conflict, and bodily anxieties press through it. The remembered revolution thus matters both as political history and as a structure through which Freud’s dream stages rebellion against authority.

Historical Setting

The revolutions of 1848 included an uprising in Paris that was suppressed during the June days. In Vienna, Adolf Fischhof was among the revolution’s leaders; later he became a respected figure in Austrian Liberalism. Freud’s account does not reconstruct the revolutions as a continuous campaign. Instead, the revolutionary year reaches the dream through memory and association, where its political meaning intersects with events and identities from later decades.

By the 1890s, Freud’s political surroundings had become markedly less hopeful. Austrian Jews had identified with the central Imperial government as it extended civil liberties, including emancipation in the 1867 constitutional compromise between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the Empire. But the Liberals had fallen from power, anti-Semitic politics had gained force, and nationalist movements were challenging the German-speaking culture to which Freud’s family was loyal. These circumstances help explain why an older revolutionary year could return in a dream as more than a detached historical reference: it offered a language of resistance amid present-day political retreat and tension.

The 1898 Dream and Its Historical Frame

Freud says that his revolutionary dream of early August 1898 was prompted in part by seeing Count Thun set off to consult the Emperor at Bad Ischl. The dream’s apparent journey into 1848 was renewed by the anniversary celebrations of that year and by Freud’s excursion to the Wachau. At Emmersdorf, he had encountered the memory of Fischhof, the student leader who had retired there. The past was not simply recalled intact: it was assembled into a dream framework that Freud compares to a church façade with gaps and interior elements protruding through it.

The dream’s political charge also draws on Freud’s immediate mood. He describes himself as exuberant and aggressive during the evening, needling waiters and cab-drivers, while revolutionary thoughts prompted by the words of Figaro ran through his mind. The aristocratic Count Thun, the Emperor, and the language of privilege give those thoughts a contemporary target. The old revolutionary year and the present political scene therefore meet in the dream without becoming identical: 1848 supplies a remembered pattern of revolt, while late-century Vienna supplies the pressure that makes revolt feel newly relevant.

School Rebellion and the Dream’s Images

Freud traces the dream’s opening scene to a conspiracy against an unpopular, ignorant teacher during his fifteenth year at the Gymnasium. A fellow student directed the group, and Freud was assigned to lead the principal assault. A dispute about the Danube’s importance to Austria became the occasion for open rebellion. In the dream, a tall aristocratic classmate—nicknamed the giraffe—reappears in the posture of the Count. The imagined political assembly is therefore joined to a remembered schoolroom confrontation with authority.

The dream’s flower imagery further complicates its political associations. The Count derides the Germans’ supposed favourite flower, coltsfoot, and puts a crumpled leaf in his buttonhole. Freud links this to orchids he had given a woman friend that day and to a rose of Jericho; the buttonhole flower then leads to Shakespeare’s scene associated with the Wars of the Roses. Roses become carnations, whose white and red colors carried contemporary Viennese political associations: the white carnation was an emblem of anti-Semites, while the red was associated with Socialists. Through these changes, a small, derisive gesture in the dream gathers personal recollection, literary allusion, and current political division into one unstable image.

Rebellion’s Comic and Bodily Turn

Freud’s analysis finally gives the dream a less elevated character than the label revolutionary might suggest. His associations connect the defeat of the Spanish Armada to wind, and connect the French word pissenlit, meaning dandelion, to bed-wetting and to holding a glass for an old, half-blind man to urinate into. The dream’s revolt thus moves from parliamentary and aristocratic authority into bodily functions. Freud relates this material to his wish to demonstrate to his father that he had achieved something, and to the childhood megalomania represented by Rabelais’s Gargantua, who floods Paris with urine.

This grotesque transformation does not cancel the dream’s political content; it changes its register. A revolutionary fantasy that draws upon the upheavals of 1848, late-century nationalism, and adolescent resistance ends up imagining defiance through exaggerated bodily power. The episode makes the historical revolution a resource for Freud’s dream-work, while exposing how public rebellion, private ambition, childhood memory, and comic degradation can occupy the same dream structure.