1848: The Springtime of Nations

Descripción

"Do you not feel, through a kind of instinctive intuition that cannot be analyzed but that is certain, that the ground is shaking once again in Europe? Do you not feel—how shall I call it?—that a revolutionary wind is blowing?" – Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenir (January, 1848) 33 years after the Congress of Vienna, Continental Europe still lives under the reactionary system designed by the Austrian Prince Metternich, the dominant figure of the age. Outside of England and France, absolute monarchy is the norm - and even in the latter, Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois king”, is busy rolling back the people’s hard-fought liberties. In the east, the empires of…