Prelude to Revolution

Liberty, in the eyes of nineteenth-century liberals bred in the tradition of the French Revolution, meant liberty not only for the individual but for the nation. Nations, like individuals, had the “right” not to be governed against their will by absolute monarchs or foreigners. In the age of Metternich, the principle of nationalism was everywhere regarded, both by its advocates and by its adversaries, as the natural corollary of democracy; and though, as the century wore on, both Karl Marx and Bismarck (the one in theory, the other in practice) clearly demonstrated that there was no necessary connexion between them, the conception of democracy and nationalism as allied forces making for political righteousness dominated the world far into the twentieth century, to be finally dissolved only in our own day by Mussolini and Hitler.