what changes took place in attitude of conservatives after 1848?
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The 19th century was in many ways antithetical to conservatism, both as a political philosophy and as a program of particular parties identified with conservative interests. The Enlightenment had engendered widespread belief in the possibility of improving the human condition—a belief, that is, in the idea of progress—and a rationalist disposition to tamper with or discard existing institutions or practices in pursuit of that goal. The French Revolution gave powerful expression to this belief, and the early Industrial Revolution and advances in science reinforced it. The resulting rationalist politics embraced a broad segment of the political spectrum, including liberal reformism, trade-union socialism (or social democracy), and ultimately Marxism. In the face of this constant rationalist innovation, conservatives often found themselves forced to adopt a merely defensive role, so that the political initiative lay always in the other camp.
Metternich and the Concert of Europe
The massive social upheavals of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods provoked a reaction of more immediate and far-reaching consequence than the writings of conservative theorists. During the period 1815–48, the Austrian statesman Prince Metternich, a major influence in Austria and in Europe generally, devoted his energies to erecting an antirevolutionary chain of international alliances throughout Europe.
Metternich, black and white chalk drawing by Anton Graff, c. 1803–05; in the Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden, Ger.
Metternich, black and white chalk drawing by Anton Graff, c. 1803–05; in the Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden, Ger.
Courtesy of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Ger.
Metternich was a dominating figure at the Congress of Vienna, the international peace conference convened in 1814 near the close of the Napoleonic wars. The peace settlement, reached at Vienna in 1815, was based on conservative principles shared by the Austrian delegate, Metternich; the British delegate, Viscount Castlereagh; the French delegate, Talleyrand; and the formerly liberal Russian tsar Alexander I. These principles were traditionalism, in reaction to 25 years of rapid change; legitimism (hereditary monarchy as the only lawful rule); and restoration of monarchs ousted after 1789.
The European great powers also attempted to enforce peace through periodic conferences between governments that gave rise to a period of international cooperation known as the Concert of Europe. The Concert system, which amounted to a rudimentary form of international governance, was used to arbitrate peacefully several international disputes and to suppress liberal uprisings within the borders of the member states.
According to Metternich, the liberal revolutions of the 1820s and ’30s in Spain and parts of Italy and Germany were “unhistorical” and unrealistic. Liberals were engaged in a futile attempt to impose the English institutions of parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy in places where they had no