ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book considers for a moment some of the arguments against the idea of a sharp break between the Old Regime and post-Napoleonic Europe. People in the mid-nineteenth century, dazzled by new wealth and by industrial and commercial ingenuity, honoured especially the rich, regardless of birth, far more willingly than had Europeans in the eighteenth. The break between 1780 and 1830 - the true basis for speaking of a Revolutionary-Napoleonic watershed - was, in any case, more complex than any mechanical displacement of orders by classes or parties. As members of a society thus conceived and a political order so constructed, preoccupied with such issues as national unification, constitutional democracy, the division of industrial production and its profits, Europeans in 1830 already stood a long way from the world of their eighteenth-century forebears.
