The most widespread rioting of the Restoration years, the ‘Hep-Hep’ disturbances of 1819, had, it is true, involved members of the educated classes as well as artisans and other members of the lower classes, but the antisemitic focus of these disturbances repelled many liberals, and the rioters’ attacks on property alarmed Metternich, who saw them as a serious threat to public order: wherever they broke out, he wrote in 1819, ‘no security exists, for the same thing could arise again at any moment over any other matter’. Middle-class liberals largely shared this view. Their fear of the unruly
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