The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

inspired by ideals of liberty and national sovereignty, had taken the lead in movements of national liberation and liberal reform, refusing to accept the conservative and restorationist aspects of the 1815 settlement. They managed to win enough support to shake the edifice constructed at the Congress of Vienna to its very foundations in almost every part of Europe. On the other hand, it was clear that these men represented only a minority of the educated classes and lacked real popular support. Where ordinary people in town and country did rise up against established authority, it was usually in their own interests, and they seldom shared the ideals of national freedom and liberal reform proclaimed by the educated revolutionaries. The Napoleonic inspiration that lay behind the conspiracies of the revolutionaries involved a strong belief in a rational, centralized state administration that sometimes sat uneasily with their campaign for representative government. Moreover, the nervousness their activities caused in the chancelleries of Europe was a significant factor in keeping the Concert of Europe together, for all the rivalries and differences between its leading powers. By the end of the 1820s, the settlement reached in Vienna in 1815 had been dented in a number of places, but fundamentally it was still intact.