ABSTRACT
The revolutionary ferment at the end of the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the nineteenth, reflected the tremendous range of problems that emerged in a period of dramatic change - problems generated by the convergence of rapidly accumulating scientific and technological knowledge, the quickening tempo of industrial development and its consequent mass urbanization, and the inevitable impact these made upon traditional social and political institutions and procedures. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored the French Bourbon regime and reinforced the Hohenzollerns of Prussia and the Habsburgs of Austria. It also permitted the Hanoverian house of George III (r. 1760–1820) in England to feel somewhat more secure from the earlier dread of an insurrection on the Paris model; but agitation remained and reached flashpoint at Manchester in August 1819 when a mass meeting of workers in St Peter’s Fields was fired on by watching soldiers who killed eleven and injured many more. A nervous government removed the people’s few civil liberties after this ‘massacre of Peterloo’ in a series of six repressive Acts of 1819, and the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, summed up the current bourgeois dilemma as he surveyed London anxiously from his window: ‘What can 283be stable with these enormous cities? One insurrection in London and all is lost’. 1 And this was the nineteenth-century bourgeois attitude, which approved Metternich’s repressive Carlsbad Decrees of September the same year, especially in education: how little could be conceded to the working classes to keep them assuaged, yet quiescent in the condition of servitude to which providence had properly ordained them?
