Extensive political and social changes took place in Europe after Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. In the months following the Congress of Vienna, various international alliances were created that largely determined the history of Europe for most of the nineteenth century. The Quadruple Alliance of Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia—and later, as the Quintuple Alliance, which included France—established the balance of power that maintained peace for many decades. At the same time, the Holy Alliance of Prussia, Austria, and Russia was instituted to preserve traditional Christian values and to uphold the sacred power of the monarchies. (The more liberal Britain, with its constitutional monarchy, declined to join.) Meanwhile, the German Confederation was established at the urging of Prince von Metternich to decentralize national power and return authority to the various smaller political entities, including the Free Cities. Coincidentally, it is widely assumed that the year 1818 also witnessed the first use of the term “conservativism” in a political sense when François-René Chateaubriand founded his ultra-royalist journal Le Conservateur in order to further the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

After 1815 resistance soon arose in protest against the reactionary policies and practices of many European governments and against the failure to create constitutions or to constitute national states of the sort that Fichte had advocated. This opposition, which eventually led to the revolutions of 1848, was initially centered primarily at universities and in student circles. In Germany, on October 18, 1817—to celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of Luther's launching of the Reformation with his ninety-five theses on October 31, 1517—a group of some five hundred students along with some professors from several German Protestant universities met on the Wartburg to draw up a list of proposals and demands for more liberal policies. One of those students was Karl Sand (1795–1820), who conceived a particular hatred for the dramatist and journalist August von Kotzebue (1761–1819), who had spent the years after Jena-Auerstedt in Russia and then returned to Germany as a political informant for Tsar Alexander I. Sand's murder of Kotzebue in March 1819 triggered the so-called Karlsbad Decrees drawn up by Metternich to prevent the spread of revolution and, in particular, to restrict the freedom of students and professors as well as the press.