Gambling on the loyalty and conservatism of the rural masses, bold and imaginative statesmen like Napoleon III, Bismarck and Disraeli had sought to outflank the liberals and deliver mass support to their new conservative ideology. Reaction, rampant almost everywhere in 1850, had failed by the end of the decade, even in Russia, despite its attempts to adapt to the new circumstances of the post-revolutionary era. The Vienna Settlement had been torn up, Metternich’s immobile conservatism brushed aside, and a new political order born.
