282
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
and abhorred revolution, and sought to restore, to develop, and to reform the decayed national institutions. The men who proclaimed these ideas, Stein and Görres, Hum- boldt, Müller, and De Maistre,l were as hostile to Bona- partism as to the absolutism of the old governments, and insisted on the national rights, which had been invaded equally by both, and which they hoped to restore by the destruction of the French supremacy. \\lith the cause that triumphed at Waterloo the friends of the Revolution had no sympathy, for they had learned to identify their doctrine with the cause of France. The Holland House Whigs in England, the Afrancesados in Spain, the M uratists 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 inde- pendence, 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
1 There are some remarkable thougbts on nationality in the State Papers of the Count de Maistre: .. En premier lieu les nations sont quelque chose dans Ie monde, il n'est pas permis de les compter pour rien, de les affliger dans leurs con- venances, dans leurs affections, dans leurs intérêts les plus chers, . . . Or Ie traité du 30 mai anéantit complétement la Savoie; il divise l'indivisible; il partage en trois portions une malheureuse nation de 400,000 hommes, une par la langue, une par la religion, une par Ie caractère, une par l'habitude invétérée, une enfin par les limites naturelles. . . . L'union des nations ne souffre pas de difficultés sur la carte géographique; mais dans la réalité, c'est autre chose; il y a des nations immiscibles. . , . J e lui parlai par occasion de l' esprit italien qui s'agite dans ce moment; il (Count Nesselrode) me répondit: · Oui, Monsieur; mais cet esprit est un grand mal, car il peut gêner les arrangements de l'Italie ,,' (Correspondance Diplomatique de J, de IVlaistre, ii. 7, B, 21, 2S), In tbe same year, IBIS, Görres wrote: .. In Italien wie allerwarts ist das Volk . gewecht; es will etwas grossartiges, es will Ideen haben, die, wenn es sie auch nicht ganz begreift, doch einen freien unendlichen Gesichtskreis seiner Einbildung eröffnen, . , . Es ist reiner Naturtrieb, dass ein Volk, also scharf und deutlich in seine natürlichen Gränzen eingeschlossen. aus der Zerstreuung in die Einbeit sich zu sammeln sucbt " (Werke, ii. 20).
