CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTION

Summary

An age so full of dramatic reversals of fortune and so big with consequences as that of 1793 to 1830 may seem to defy any attempt to compose in one volume a survey of Europe and some of its links with distant regions. Yet the very effort to survey the field in perspective, astride the ‘natural frontier’ of 1815, presents a challenge and provokes questions sometimes obscured. This volume is intended to offer a portrait or survey rather than a compressed record. Stirring episodes, locally decisive battles, commanding personalities may receive no more than passing mention or may even be sought in vain in the index. But the problem of compression is not the only or the most interesting one. More surprising is the uncertainty about some of the foundations. There is still plenty of room for debate. The printed records are bulkier than for the eighteenth century, but many of them relate to kaleidoscopic changes, blurred for us by political scene-shifting and by the fog of war. Moreover, the voices of articulate contemporaries were more strident, more at cross-purposes with each other, than in the apparently calm and confident age before 1789, more even than in the short period when the Revolution in its first stages seemed, not only in French eyes, to signify clearly a few universal principles applicable to all Europe and perhaps to all mankind. On the other hand, in the following period after 1830, aptly described as the zenith of European power (Vol. X), the records, though even bulkier, were becoming more systematic, and the basic social data were either more regularly collected or at least collected in ways more capable of statistical analysis.