New States and Old Problems
A Milestone Documents E-text
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Abstract

With Napoléon's final downfall in 1815, the Congress of Vienna, under the conservative leadership of Prince Klemens von Metternich, worked to restore the old political order throughout Europe. Unfortunately for the conservatives, Napoléon's armies had planted the seeds of liberalism and had awakened nationalist aspirations in the German and Italian states. As a result, the Europe of the midnineteenth century resembled a pressure cooker, with liberal nationalist revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the conservative political order that had been firmly clamped back in place by the concert system—the balance of power that existed from the end of the Napoleonic wars until World War I.

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