ABSTRACT
Generally in the 1870s, although in some countries in the subsequent decade, liberal politics reached its nineteenth-century high point. Liberalism itself, as a result of post-1850 developments, had become increasingly broad and diverse. Probably the single biggest political story of the 1870s and 1880s in central Europe Germany, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands was the creation and success of a Catholic political party. An important background to this development was the rise of ultramontane Catholicism during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The development of anti-Semitism in radical movements of the 1880s moving from the left to the right was part of a broader feature of politics. In this period: the rise of more intransigent and frequently racist forms of nationalism and the reorientation of hostility towards the Jews into a new form, dubbed with a name coined during this time, anti-Semitism.
