In 1800, city-dwellers made up a quarter of the population of France and Germany and two-fifths of the British population; by 1914, four-fifths of Britons and three-fifths of Germans lived in cities, along with nearly half of Frenchmen. Only a tenth of Eastern Europeans were city-dwellers in 1800, compared to three-tenths on the eve of the First World War. By the outbreak of that war, the triangle of farm, family, and church was broken. Napoleon had already trampled down the old aristocratic order on the European continent; by 1870 the unification of Italy and Germany under secular governments
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