THE FOUR HORSEMEN

In a series of revolts starting in 1820 four military officers rode forth on horseback from obscure European towns to bring political freedom and a constitution to Spain Naples and Russia and national independence to the Greeks The men who launched these exploits from Andalusia to the snowy fields of Ukraine Colonel Rafael del Riego General Guglielmo Pepe General Alexandros Ypsilanti and Colonel Sergei Muraviev Apostol all hoped to overturn the old order Over the next six years their revolutions ended in failure The men who led them became martyrs In The Four Horsemen the late eminent historian Richard Stites offers a compelling narrative history of these four revolutions Stites sets the stories side by side allowing him to compare events and movements and so illuminate such topics as the transfer of ideas and peoples across frontiers the formation of an international community of revolutionaries and the appropriation of Christian symbols and language for secular purposes He shows how expressive behavior and artifacts of all kinds art popular festivities propaganda and religion worked their way to various degrees into all the revolutionary movements and regimes And he documents as well the corruption abandonment of liberal values and outrigh