Three Against One: How the Ideologies Fought and Who Won by 1852

The idea

The exam's seventh band asks what conservatism, liberalism, nationalism and socialism were and what happened in eighteen thirty and forty-eight, and the anchor's answer is one contest with a surprising result. After Napoleon the elites rebuilt the old order and gave it a doctrine: conservatism, peace, tradition and stability against the rapid change that had bred the Terror, de Maistre's original sin, Burke's inheritance, and, later, Gobineau's race. Against it stood three creeds that agreed only on the enemy. Liberals, the educated middle class, wanted equality before the law, universal rights, a constitution, and a vote restricted to property. Nationalists, born of Romanticism's folk collecting and of the Revolution's example, wanted the state to match a people, though no one could say who the people were. Socialists, answering Manchester with a word coined in eighteen thirty-four, wanted goods in common, and before forty-eight expected everyone to agree: Owen's mill, Fourier's phalanxes. The contest ran in rounds. The Holy Alliance won the first, crushing Spain's liberals in twenty-three and the Decembrists in twenty-five, and lost only Greece, where cultural sympathy beat principle. July eighteen thirty won the second for liberals in France and Belgium, and Britain reformed in thirty-two rather than fight. Eighteen forty-eight was the third: a republic with manhood suffrage in Paris, Metternich fleeing Vienna, Prague and Budapest demanding nations, eight hundred delegates at Frankfurt writing a smaller Germany. It failed. The June Days set liberals against workers, kings kept their armies, Russia crushed Hungary, Frederick William IV refused a crown from the gutter, and France elected a Napoleon who made himself emperor by fifty-two. Two things changed anyway. Feudal dues ended and constitutions became normal, so the liberals won in slow motion; and nationalism's power was so plain that conservatives took it up themselves, which is unit 11. Socialism alone got nothing, and Marx's Manifesto, written that year, turned it from persuasion to class war. Three fought one; the one absorbed two and left the third to militancy.