Brad’s Reviews > The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 > Status Update

Obviously Blanqui should've just voted harder!

The complex of economic, administrative, ideological and power-considerations which tended to impose a minimum size of territory and population on the modern unit of government, and make us vaguely uneasy at the thought of, say, UN membership for Liechtenstein, did not yet apply to any extent.

Then, the Napoleonic Wars brought "general rationalization of the European political map."

Enjoying it more than "The Age of Extremes". Solid work, considering how many books have covered this time in Europe before and since.

But for the solid middle class Frenchman who stood behind The Terror, it was neither pathological nor apocalyptic, but first and foremost the only effective method of preserving their country.

In most subsequent bourgeois revolutions [after the French] the moderate liberals were to pull back, or transfer into the conservative camp, at a very early stage. Indeed in the nineteenth century we increasingly find (most notably in Germany) that they became unwilling to begin revolution at all, for fear of its incalculable consequences, preferring a compromise with king and aristocracy.

No doubt the French nation, and its subsequent imitators, did not initially conceive of its interests clashing with those of other peoples...But in fact national rivalry...and national subordination...were implicit in the nationalism to which the bourgeois of 1789 gave its first official expression.

"The middle and educated classes and those committed to progress often looked to the powerful central apparatus of an 'enlightened' monarchy to realize their hopes. A prince needed a middle class and its ideas to modernize his state; a weak middle class needed a prince to batter down the resistance of entrenched aristocratic and clerical interests to progress."

Sounds very much like Ellen Meiksins Wood!