The Defense of the Old Regime, 1815–48 469Notre Dame,Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe,and Alexandre
Dumas’s The Three Musketeers;its most lasting effect on
Western literature, however, was probably the inven-
tion of the Gothic horror story, a style made famous by
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Many of these themes made romanticism compati-
ble with conservative political philosophy. The focus
upon nature turned high culture toward the rural world,
home of aristocratic power and the bastion of conserva-
tive sentiments. The focus upon the Middle Ages re-
stored cultural emphasis upon a world of unchallenged
monarchy and universal Christianity, instead of the re-
publicanism, constitutionalism, and liberalism. The de-
thronement of rationalism and the recovery of emotion
encouraged the revival of religions of faith, mystery,
and miracle.
But another side of romanticism found a powerful
voice in the liberal and national revolutions of the early
nineteenth century. The revolutionary sympathies of
some romantics can be seen in Eugène Delacroix’s
painting “Liberty at the Barricades”; the radical poems
of Percy Bysshe Shelley; the angry novels of Victor
Hugo, such as Les Misérables; and even Giuseppe Verdi’s
powerful opera Rigoletto(which depicts the scandalous
behavior of a monarch). The link between romanticism
and nationalism was especially strong because many na-
tionalists built their philosophy upon the nation’s
shared culture. Many peoples found identity in folk
tales, and their compilation (such as the work of the
brothers Grimm in Germany) became a form of roman-
tic nationalism. So did the recovery of the history of
national minorities (as distinct from the history of their
foreign government), as Frantisˇek Palack ́y did for the
Czechs in his multivolume History of Bohemia.The
strongest expression of romantic nationalism, however,
was in music. All across Europe, nationalist composers
drew inspiration from patriotic themes and folk music:
Frédéric Chopin’s Polonaises(Polish pieces), Bedrich
Smetana’s tone poems about Czech scenes (Ma Vlast—
My Country), or Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies.
Challenging the Old Order: Revolutions, 1815–25
Despite their precautions, the conservative forces in
power after 1815 could not prevent revolutions. More
than a dozen revolutions, from Portugal to Russia, took
place in the decade following the Congress of Vienna,
plus historic rebellions in the British and Spanish em-
pires. Historians normally describe these upheavals as
liberal-national revolutions because most rebellions
sought national independence (in Serbia, Ireland,Greece, and Spanish America) or constitutional govern-
ment (in Spain) or both (several Italian states).
Conservatives believed that these revolutions were
nurtured and led by radical secret societies and used
this to justify restricting civil rights. Such societies did
exist, the most famous being an Italian society known
as the Carbonari (“the charcoal burners”). Carbonari
swore an oath to fight despotism and seek governments
based on popular sovereignty, to oppose clericalism and
seek secular institutions, and to challenge the foreign
domination of the Italian states; in 1820 the Neapolitan
chapter claimed 100,000 members. Similar societies ex-
isted in most countries—in the circles of Greek busi-
nessmen (the Hetaires), in Polish universities (Adam
Mickiewicz founded his nationalist society at the Uni-
versity of Vilna in 1817), in the officer corps of the
Russian army (the Society of the South in Ukraine and
the Society of the North at St. Petersburg), in Masonic
lodges in Spain, and among Napoleonic war veterans
attending German universities who founded the
Burschenschaften.
With or without the encouragement of such soci-
eties, political uprisings were frequent occurrences in
the age of Metternich. While the Congress of Vienna
met, a Serbian uprising against Ottoman Turkish rule
began, the first in a series of Balkan revolts against the
government in Constantinople. In 1816 Britain faced
a slave rebellion in the Caribbean. A year later, a
Carbonari-led liberal revolution was suppressed in the
papal states. These uprisings provoked the conservative
powers to adopt the Troppau Protocol in 1818, but
barely two years later came the successful Spanish revo-
lution (stimulated by King Ferdinand VII’s abolition of
the constitution of 1812 and by the impact of wars of
independence in Spanish America), which was a nag-
ging problem for the congress system in 1820–23. In
1820 revolutions also broke out in Portugal and Naples
(both seeking constitutions), then at Palermo, in Sicily.
Congresses of 1821 and 1822 sent Austrian armies to
fight liberals in Italy, and French troops into Spain. By
1823 the conservative alliance had defeated the Spanish
and Italians, treating the defeated rebels with savage
cruelty; in Italy, captured rebels had their right hands
cut off before being sent to Austrian dungeons. The
British opposed the application of the Troppau Protocol
elsewhere. The British navy supported the Monroe
Doctrine (proclaimed by the United States to block al-
lied intervention in America), so most of Latin America
won its independence from Spain. As the British foreign
secretary bragged to Parliament, “I have called the New
World into existence to redress the balance of the old.”