In the spring of 1848 something like an electric current ran through Europe. From Paris to Vienna, from Berlin to Milan and Budapest, barricades rose — and on them a new idol of the age crystallized: the nation. Not as a warm love of one's own, but as a supreme value to which all things are permitted — a banner under which a people first felt itself to be the source of power. The old order was built otherwise: for the monarchies of the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns, for the dozens of German and Italian courts, the peoples were merely subjects, a voiceless mass obliged to pay and to serve. The demand for a voice sounded to that world like sacrilege.
The catastrophe came swiftly. The first surge of spring gave way to the autumn of reaction. The revolutionary governments, divided and torn by inner contradictions — between liberals and radicals, between the different nations within a single empire — did not hold. This is seen most vividly in the fate of Hungary: having proclaimed reforms and all but broken away from Vienna, the Hungarian revolution was crushed in the summer of 1849 — the emperor Franz Joseph called upon the Russian tsar for aid, and the combined armies shattered the revolutionary force. Across Europe the thrones returned to their places, and the leaders of the uprisings fled or mounted the scaffold.
Captivity set in — an almost universal restoration and years of political reaction. It seemed that the "Spring of Nations" had passed without a trace, leaving only a list of defeats. The old order triumphed, censorship and police returned, and hope was declared a crime. But the defeat of a revolution is almost never complete — something of it always grows up through the stone of restoration.
The return came without fanfare, but it was real. In the Austrian Empire itself serfdom was abolished in 1848 — and that abolition was never undone. The ideas of constitutional government and national self-determination went into the soil and ripened: two decades later they yielded a united Italy and a united Germany. But the new idol turned out to have two faces. The nation that brought liberation from a foreign yoke carried within it the seed of future wars — the same nationalism that raised peoples to dignity would turn, in the twentieth century, into mutual hatred and slaughter. The liberating force and the destroying force proved to be one and the same force — and in this lies the bitter duality of the law.