ABSTRACT
From 1789 to 1848, revolutions threatened the monarchical and aristocratic fabric of Europe and strained its traditional modes of diplomacy and warfare. A powerful bourgeoisie, a numerous proletariat, new technologies, democratic ideas, and nationalistic aspirations disturbed that balance of power diplomacy which ambitious monarchs and wily ministers had long practiced with varying degrees of rationality and craft. Mass armies, fighting with improved cannons, rifles, and tactics, and whole peoples inspired by liberty, equality, and patriotism, now convulsed Europe. Yet the old diplomacy, like the old monarchies of central Europe, hung on tenaciously. Even revolutionary France, for all of its egalitarian ideals, proposed no new system of diplomacy. The formation of alliances and the deployment of military power still lay at the heart of international relations. The task confronting British statesmen from 1789 to 1856 was thus not to create a new system of international relations, but rather to employ old diplomatic traditions to contain and control new revolutionary forces. The first and most dramatic chapter in that effort began with the fall of the French monarchy.
