Nationalism and Revolutions

The age of new ideas led to political and philosophical conflicts. Like the

English statesman Edmund Burke, the French thinker Joseph de Maistre was a conservative who went against the tide of Enlightenment thinking. In the view of conservative thinkers such as Burke and Maistre, revolutions were bloody, disruptive, and unlikely to yield positive results. However, try as conservatives might to quell revolutionary change, the desire of common people for constitutional government and democratic practices erupted in revolutions throughout the 19th century. And many nations did, indeed, get a new form of government that responded to the new wave of thinking with its key ideals: progress, reason, and natural law.