ABSTRACT
In the connotation of common speech and in the images that it awakens, this date, 1848, marks in the first place the complex of liberal-national revolutions that at this time burst out in Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary: revolutions that certainly received a strong impulse and new material from the Paris revolution of February—by which the Orléans monarchy was overthrown and the republic was proclaimed. To begin with Italy, the standard under which the revolutionary process had been undertaken was the neo-Guelph idea of the independence and liberty of Italy protected by the wings of the Papacy, which, from an internal hindrance to her unification such as Machiavelli had defined once and for all, and from a natural opponent of the liberal concept, would turn into, and did already seem to have turned into, the author of and co-operator with both. Charles Albert saw himself reduced to a solitary alliance with the national sentiment, without any religious chrism.
