to be a nation. The nationalist sentiments and claims by Greeks, Slovaks,
Czechs, Brazilians, Mexicans, Hungarians, and a myriad of would-be nations,
illustrate the growth of the widespread notion of nationhood that reached to
other people with distinctive pasts and cultures. Liberals also had to confront,
or negotiate with, the reactionary forces that brought down Napoleon in 1815.
They were mainly made up of the nobility, and also supported by conservative
intellectuals. For several decades they were to impose themselves through
international accords, starting with the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15.
Some of the agreements attempted to reinstate the pre-1789 status quo.
Others, such as the German Zollverein, or customs union, were inspired by
economic and political ambitions. It was, for example, agreed that a German
Confederation of thirty-nine states should be established under the presidency
of Austria while Prussia enlarged its territories. Furthermore Britain obtained
overseas colonies (Malta, Heligoland in the North Sea, and the Cape of Good
Hope in South Africa); the Papal States were returned to the Pope; Sweden
gained Norway and Russia absorbed Finland and,Wnally, Switzerland became
independent. Furthermore Russia, Austria, and Prussia, the three most
powerful reactionary regimes, would form the Holy Alliance, keeping Central
and Eastern Europe under surveillance.
After Napoleon’s downfall, the allies initially formed in Vienna managed to
crush three liberal revolutions in the 1820s and 1830s and in 1848. Inter-
national forces rapidly suppressed the revolutions in the early 1820s in coun-
tries such as Spain, Portugal, and Naples, Tuscany and other parts of Italy. In
1825 a group of liberal military oYcers rebelled against Tsar Nicholas I in the
Decembrist revolt. After their defeat new regulations were implemented to
stop any further spread of progressive liberal movements in that country.
Apart from France, the only uprisings to be successful were those which took
oVin Greece and the Latin American countries, where after the initial reluc-
tance of the Powers to get involved, especially in the case of Greece, the geo-
political advantages of the dismemberment of the Ottoman and Spanish
empires convinced them to help rather than impede the revolutions. In both
cases the past had an important symbolic role to play in the revolutions, as
liberals made claims to it to argue for their right to independence (Chapter 4).
A second wave of revolutions occurred in the 1830s. There was aWrst attempt
to unite Italy under the Risorgimento (meaning Resurrection), but after initial
failure, the ‘Young Italy’movement was founded by Mazzini in 1831. A rebellion
in Belgium resulted in its independence (1831), but the Polish uprising against
Russia (in 1830 and again in 1846) did not succeed. In France political turbu-
lence brought down the absolute monarch Charles X and ushered in the reign of
Louis Philippe. Disorder was prevented in Britain when the British Parliament
passed the Reform Bill of 1832, an electoral reform that changed the basis of
Liberal Revolutions (c. 1820–1860) 339