摘要：After Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 a wave of conservatism swept across Europe. Under the leadership of Prince Klemens von Metternich the great powers worked together to re-establish the continent’s pre-1789 borders, and to put down any liberal or nationalist uprisings. In a word, to maintain the status quo . The integrity of this loose association of reactionary states, however, would be challenged in less than a decade; in 1821, the same year Napoleon died, a war erupted that would involve most of the major powers and would signal the beginning of the disintegration of the ‘Concert of Europe’. Not coincidentally, another movement was sweeping across Europe. Romanticism was akin to conservatism in that it rejected the Enlightenment call for rationality as the basis for human expression. Unlike the conservatives, however, romantics supported the various nationalistic causes across the continent. For them, human emotion was paramount and therefore the human culture of ethnic groups was more significant than traditional borders. And no ethnic group’s culture had more significance, at least in the opinion of Western Europe, than the Greeks’.
Loading...
