ABSTRACT
This chapter is shorter than those that have preceded it, for two reasons. First, we are now looking backward; and while the present volume may serve to introduce its readers to midnineteenth-century conditions, it cannot pretend to give a comprehensive overview of things to come. Second, our journey from 1780 to 1830 had best end with attention paid to a quite specific question, namely, to what extent and in what ways had European society and culture changed between those two dates? Was our particular half-century just an arbitrary slice of time cut from an ongoing chronicle? Or can it also claim to have witnessed a transformation in forms and values so crucial as to make the revolutionary-Napoleonic era a true turning point in the history of the peoples of Europe? Several different kinds of analysis may help to answer that question.
