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REACTION AND REVOLUTION ON THE CONTINENT
WHEN 188 the great war which Napoleon waged against Europe came to an end by his defeat and ruin, France was once more handed over to the Bourbons, and Europe, as we have already seen, fell into the arms of reaction and sheer absolutism. The Holy Alliance, or union of reactionary monarchs, undertook the enterprise of crushing out all popular feeling, or even anything that could be supposed to represent it in the person of the bourgeois.
But the French Revolution had shaken absolutism too sorely for this enterprise to have more than a very partial success 189 even on the surface. The power of absolutism was undermined by various revolutionary societies, mostly (so-called) secret, which attracted to them a great body of sympathy, and in consequence seemed far more numerous and immediately dangerous than they really were. Still there was a great mass of discontent, mostly political in character, and by no means confined to the poorer classes.
This discontent went on gathering head, till in 1830, and again in 1848, it exploded into open revolt against autocracy all over Europe. This revolt, we must repeat, was in the main a mere counter-stroke to the reaction that was diligently striving to restore the aristocratic privilege which the French Revolution had abolished, and to maintain what of it had escaped its attack. In 1830 the revolt was purely bourgeois in character, and was in no sense social, but, as above said, political. In 1848