ABSTRACT
Two forces shaped the course of the nineteenth century: the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The three watchwords became respectively symbols of the movements that issued from the Revolution: liberalism, democracy-radicalism, and nationalism. Liberalism as a term will be used here less in the sense of tolerance, broadmindedness, and humanitarian inclinations, and more as a political ideology. The age of liberalism witnessed a series of emancipation reforms, from the early Josephine legislation through the Napoleonic Code and subsequent measures in the Habsburg monarchy and Prussia. Liberalism was to a large extent the creed of the Western bourgeoisie which gradually stamped the nineteenth-century society with its outlook and values. In the Polish case, romanticism, as A. Walicki observed, could neither be bourgeois-liberal nor conservative in a stateless nation. In 1848 a revolutionary tide swept across Europe. It was a veritable Spring of Nations that saw first a culmination of liberal nationalism and then its collapse amidst internal contradictions.
