ABSTRACT
Any period of fifty years or less must inevitably have been shaped by men who had grown up in a very different age and had themselves been influenced by events and ideas which were already remote. The period of European history covered by this book was, for example, considerably affected by the lives of Metternich – until his resignation in 1848, of Palmerston – until his death in 1865, and of Thiers – until his resignation from the presidency in 1873. Yet Metternich had grown up when Frederick the Great was king of Prussia, and the future Austrian chancellor was already a university student in 1789. Palmerston was a boy of nine when Pitt went to war with revolutionary France, and a member of parliament when the Treaty of Tilsit was signed. Thiers, whose policies made so firm a mark on the history of France throughout the period, could clearly remember the last years of the First Empire, and had himself published his History of the French Revolution before 1830. Metternich had grown to maturity while the ideas of the Enlightenment were still fresh, and both Palmerston and Thiers, in their different ways, had spent their most impressionable years under the shadow of the great Napoleon. In the same way the Europe of 1880 was the product of the ideas and developments of many decades.
