In the spring of 1848, a generation of Germans did something their princes had spent thirty years preventing: they took the streets, built the barricades, and demanded the right to govern themselves. From the handloom weavers of Silesia burning the ledgers of their oppressors, to the thirty thousand who climbed Hambach hill behind a forbidden flag, to the exhausted deputies who wrote a democratic constitution in the oval nave of a Frankfurt church - Fire on the Barricades tells the full story of one of history's most extraordinary revolutionary years.

Drawing on the lives of journalists, poets, factory workers, professional soldiers, Jewish emancipationists, feminist pioneers, and radical philosophers, William Ua Cellaig reconstructs the German revolutions of 1848 and 1849 as a lived human experience rather than a constitutional footnote. This is the story of Karl Marx writing his first revolutionary journalism, of Richard Wagner manning a barricade in Dresden, of a young man named Carl Schurz escaping through a drainage tunnel at Rastatt to become a United States senator. It is the story of what was won, what was lost, and what proved - across a century of suppression, dictatorship, and catastrophe - impossible to extinguish.

The revolution failed. It also built the world we inhabit. Both things are true, and this book holds them together.