3 From Ricardo to Mill . Ricardo and Malthus . Thirty years of crisis The thirty-year period from the Congress of Vienna (1815) to the 1848 revolutions was of crucial importance for the history of Europe. It is known as the ‘Age of Restoration’. In reality, it was a period of deep economic | 3 From Ricardo to Mill . Ricardo and Malthus . Thirty years of crisis The thirty-year period from the Congress of Vienna 1815 to the 1848 revolutions was of crucial importance for the history of Europe. It is known as the Age of Restoration . In reality it was a period of deep economic and social changes and sharp political crises a period full of conflicts marked as it was by the attempt of the aristocratic powers to restore the traditional absolutist order just when the Industrial Revolution was definitively undermining the economic foundations of that order. It is not surprising that by comparison with the almost total peace in European international relations there were almost permanent civil wars in the countries affected by most intense conflicts and social change. Despite this the Holy Alliance managed to maintain internal order in all the countries it dominated practically all the nations of Central and Eastern Europe including Italy and Germany. In some of these countries political uprisings led by democratic forces occurred repeatedly and with increasing intensity during the thirty-year period until the great revolutionary upheaval in 1848 but they were always defeated. The reason for this can perhaps be traced to the small mass base that the existing social structures offered the democratic movements and underlying this situation was undoubtedly the slow process of capitalist accumulation and the relative backwardness of the economic structures of these countries. The evolution of the political conflict assumed special characteristics in the two most advanced European countries France and England. Their political systems were based on three great parties reactionary liberal and democratic. These obviously assumed different names programmes and political structures in the two countries over time but the tripartite structure remained constant throughout the period. Well-defined social forces underpinning this structure gave the parties stability .
