A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Liberalism 579

religious society.” Conservatives insisted that states emerged through grad­
ual growth and that monarchical legitimacy stemmed from royal birthright,
confirmed by the sanction of religion. Catholic and Protestant conservatives
insisted that the established churches provided a moral authority that com­
plemented that of traditional monarchical institutions of government, which
alone could maintain order. In Russia, the mystical Tsar Alexander I believed
fervently that the Orthodox Church had an important role in keeping his
people subservient. In the German states, Pietism broke with Protestant
orthodoxy to teach that mankind was essentially sinful and required a repres­
sive state to keep in line. Europe’s conservative monarchies, depending on
noble support, therefore sought to reestablish the privileges that the French
Revolution and Napoleon had swept away.
A French writer, Joseph de Maistre (c. 1754-1821), emerged as a theorist
of the alliance of throne and altar. Rejecting the concept of “natural rights”
associated with Enlightenment thought, de Maistre argued that a king’s
power could never be limited by his subjects, because that power came only
from God. De Maistre blamed the Revolution on the philosophes who had
shaken the faith that underlay the absolutism of hereditary monarchy. To de
Maistre, “the first servant of the crown should be the executioner.” Most con­
servatives saw no difference between reform and revolution, believing that
reform would inevitably lead to revolution and radical change. They stood
adamantly opposed to political claims stemming from any notion of individ­
ual freedom, popular sovereignty, or membership in any particular national
group.
Yet conservatives confronted the problem that their support was limited to
a very narrow social and political base in a Europe that was slowly being
transformed by the Industrial Revolution. It was testimony to the influence of
the revolutionary era that the restored monarchy in France under Louis XVIII
granted a Charter to the French people promising essential liberties. More­
over, the French monarchy, as well as that of Piedmont-Sardinia and even
Metternich’s Austria, utilized the bureaucratized state apparatus inherited
from Napoleon to repress liberals, instead of restoring the less-centralized
ruling structure that had typified Old Regime Europe.

Liberalism

Nineteenth-century liberalism was more than an economic and political the­

ory: it was a way of viewing the world. Liberals—the term became current in

the late 1830s—shared a confidence that human progress was inevitable,

though gradual. From the Enlightenment, the bourgeoisie inherited a faith in

science, which they held to be a motor of progress. Liberalism reflected

middle-class confidence and economic aspirations.