Everything Old is New Again
From "The History of Germany Since 1789" by Golo Mann, translated from the German by Marian Jackson, 1958
In July 1830 workers and students in Paris rose against the Bourbon King, Charles X, who was about to overthrow the constitution. Fighting on the barricades was followed by the flight of that incorrigible old gentleman. Clever citizens for whom the revolt seemed to be going too far raised Louis Philippe of Orleans, a relative of the royal house, to the throne.
These events made a deep impression in Europe. The expulsion of the Bourbons was the end of the 'restoration', a blow against the work of the Congress of Vienna. If the rulers of Europe allowed it to happen, a precedent would be created, of which the consequences could not be foreseen. They did allow it to happen; after fifteen years they could not make war to put the Bourbons back on their throne. Britain had no such intention, and neither had Austria or Prussia; perhaps the Tsar had, but he was soon involved elsewhere.
The conflagration spread from one centre to another. In August there was a revolution in Brussels and the Belgians rose against the alien bureaucracy of the King of the Netherlands; in November the Poles rose against Russian rule, in February the Romans against their old-fashioned sovereign, the Pope. In Britain in the course of 1831 there was growing, often violent, agitation for parliamentary reform.
The old order seemed to be collapsing everywhere. However, it was not international liberalism that was destined to be victorious in Europe but other forces more difficult to describe. In Belgium some clever political maneuvering prevented a catastrophe; the Great Powers decided to create an independent, permanently neutral kingdom of the Belgians. The new state soon became a model of central and local self-administration. Here the constitution made the king, not a gracious king the constitution.
The Poles were left to their fate, the guns and gallows of Tsar Nicholas; Prussia actively helped the Tsar by mobilizing on its eastern frontiers to prevent the rising from spreading to its Polish province of Posen (Poznan) and to drive Polish refugees back into the Russian fire. In Rome there was the Austrian army and good advice to the Pope to experiment with a few modern ideas. In 1833 Europe was back to 'normal'. Soon the legality of the new French government was doubted only by a few pedants.
I was reading this last night and it sounded eerily familiar . . .
