"The distinguishing characteristic of the post-Vienna era was not the zeal, rigour, and united will with which conservative governments stamped out popular risings. It was instead the lax, inefficient nature of many regimes and the inhibitions almost all monarchs of this era felt about using force against their own citizens or other conntries, which constantly permitted risings and conspiracies, often derived from a slender base both in power and popular support, to occur and sometimes let them succeed. This was true of all risings in the 1820s and 1830s and the initial stages of 1848.
"In other words one of the distinguishing features of the Vienna era, compared to the earlier and later ones, was that it was relatively easy and safe to promote revolution. In Europe from 1848 to 1914, the kind of popular rising so common from 1815 to 1848 remained possible only where regimes remained old-fashioned and inefficient, like the Ottoman Empire, or fell into crisis because of a lost, unpopular war, like Russia in 1905. One can say that many regimes in the Vienna era were unprogressive, illiberal, repressive, inefficient, old-fashioned, and so on--but not that they prevented or crushed popular revolts efficiently and ruthlessly. It took the French Revolution and Napoleon to do this before 1815, and the forces of nationalist revolution, liberalism, industrialism, and the strong bourgeois state to do so after 1848, to produce the June Days, the American Civil War, or the Paris Commune." Schroeder, p 673.
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