'Moderate opposition of the 1840s..were much more worried by the danger from their left than by the old regimes. From the moment the barricades went up in Paris, all moderate liberals(and, as Cavour observed, a fair proportion of radicals) were potential conservatives'
Eric Hobsbawm, p. 17
'If the social order were to be genuinely menaced, if the great principles on which rests were to be at serious risk, then many of the most determined oppositionists, the most enthusiastic republicans would be, we are convinced, the first to join the ranks of the conservative party'
- Count Cavour of Piedmont(1846), practically anticipating the universal failure of 1848 revolutions in Europe.
'Poland..its Russian and Austrian rulers succeeded in mobilizing the peasantry against the revolutionary gentry'
- Hobsbawm, p. 11
'By this time(1848) rules of the advanced states of Erope were beginning to recognize not only that democracy was inevitable, but also that it would probably be a nuisance but politically harmless. This discovery hd long since been made by the rules of the United States'
- Eric Hobsbawm, 'The Age of Capital; 1848-1875', p. 3
