had learned to
identify their doctrine with the cause of France. The Holland House
Whigs in England, the Afrancesados in Spain, the Muratists in Italy, and
the partisans of the Confederation of the Rhine, merging patriotism in
their revolutionary affections, regretted the fall of the French power,
and looked with alarm at those new and unknown forces which the War of
Deliverance had evoked, and which were as menacing to French liberalism
as to French supremacy.

But the new aspirations for national and popular rights were crushed at
the restoration. The liberals of those days cared for freedom, not in
the shape of national independence, but of French institutions; and they
combined against the nations with the ambition of the governments. They
were as ready to sacrifice nationality to their ideal as the Holy
Alliance was to the interests of absolutism. Talleyrand indeed declared
at Vienna that the Polish question ought to have precedence over all
other questions, because the partition of Poland had been one of the
first and greatest causes of the evils which Europe had suffered; but
dynastic interests prevailed. All the sovereigns represented at Vienna
recovered their dominions, except the King of Saxony, who was punished
for his fidelity to Napoleon; but the States that were unrepresented in
the reigning families--Poland, Venice, and Genoa--were not revived, and
even the Pope had great difficulty in recovering the Legations from the
grasp of Austria. Nationality, which the old _regime_ had ignored, which
had been outraged by the revolution and the empire, received, after its
first open demonstration, the hardest blow at the Congress of Vienna.
The principle which the first partition had generated, to which the
revolution had given a basis of theory, which had been lashed by the
empire into a momentary convulsive effort, was matured by the long error
of the restoration into a consistent doctrine, nourished and justified
by the situation of Europe.

The governments of the Holy Alliance devoted themselves to suppress with
equal care the revolutionary spirit by which they had been threatened,
and the national spirit by which they had been restored. Austria, which
owed nothing to the national movement, and had prevented its revival
after 1809, naturally took the lead in repressing it. Every disturbance
of the final settlements of 1815, every aspiration for changes or
reforms, was condemned as sedition. This system represse