ABSTRACT
The contemporary Italian fight for liberty reminded men of the spirit of antiquity and brought back to mind the Rome of Scaevola who suffered torture for the sake of the freedom of his country, and the Gracchi, who laid down their lives for the liberty of the common people. Political liberty proved to be, not a segregated, self-centred, self-justifying structure, but the expression of human dignity and freedom in general, of real humanity as such. The order for which Clemens v. Metternich himself stood up against liberty was not just order in the usual sense of the word, but order as an injunction, legitimacy as willed by God. When in March 1848 Metternich fell, it was at the end of a period of more than thirty years in which he had succeeded in keeping down the German people's desire for national unity and political liberty.
