Conclusion

Abstract

This study has been organized around a number of different themes related to the revolution of 1848–49 and dealt with in the literature of the 1850’s, but by way of summary let us review some distinctions among groups of men which were developed toward the outset. The political liberals still adhered to the ideal of national unity under constitutitional government, even though they occasionally admitted that their tactics might have to be modified in light of the defeat which the centrist elements of the Frankfurt Parliament had suffered at the hands of their enemies on the right and the left. These men retained great faith in a moderate program of reform — a program, it should be noted, which had never entailed any support for democracy or much support for social reform. They similarly believed in their own power to help realize this program through scholarly writing, particularly in the field of history. The liberals opposed and were opposed by smaller groups of men who were located at the political extremes. On the one side stood the democratic radicals. Persecuted, isolated, and frequently despondent about their immediate propects, they consoled themselves nevertheless with the belief that the achievement of political democracy had been thwarted primarily by liberal unwillingness to take the decisive step of revolution and that their cause was bound to triumph in the end. On the other side stood the conservatives. They offered the recent agitation by revolutionary democrats as proof that their own instinctive rejection not only of radicalism but also of liberalism was fundamentally sound, arguing that radical insurrection was the inevitable consequence of more limited attacks against the political status quo.