The spread of the new Zeitgeist

The barriers to spreading the new Zeitgeist were considerable in most of continental Europe because the ancien régime had survived the eighteenth century and remained in place during the first half of the nineteenth. With the defeat of Napoleon, the new Zeitgeist, too, had met its Waterloo. In countries adjacent to France, which Napoleon had occupied and reorganized/modernized, the new ideas and institutions were considered “French” and thus antithetical. Because modernization had been imposed with foreign bayonets, it was invariably met with resistance and began to be discarded by post-Napoleonic regimes. One particularly curious example was Italy's annulment of Napoleon's policy of compulsory universal vaccination after its liberation from France.

The Bourbon restoration rushed to destroy what remained of the Revolution and the Napoleonic era in France. Nevertheless, the period following the Congress of Vienna (1815), though it was dominated by the conservative, monarchist Holy Alliance, and though it had restored several major elements of the ancien régime, proved unable to erase the Revolution's impact. Strong administrative and institutional continuity was characteristic in many states in Italy. The Napoleonic tradition was retained in the duchy of Parma. In Piedmont, “French-inspired institutions” survived and, moreover, after the unification of Italy, were extended “to the whole country” (Cohen and Federico, 2001, 70). The Habsburgs preserved the administrative institutions in reoccupied Lombardy-Venetia, as did even the Papal State. Social and economic reforms introduced during the “French Decade” remained mostly intact in the Kingdom of Naples. Prussia also borrowed from Napoleon, especially from his Concordat with Rome that had introduced state control over the church and led to “major enduring changes…in the south and west of Germany” (John, 2000, 85).