Revolutions swept Europe after Napoleon’s defeat as conservative regimes tried to hold the line against what appeared to be the march of history. In his final book before his death, Georgetown University’s Richard Stites explores 1820s-era revolutions in Spain, Russia, Italy and Greece. Although the topic may seem obscure to the general public, Stites writes with an engaging wit sadly lacking in much academic writing, delivering his judgments with nuanced emotional as well as intellectual understanding for the chief actors and the issues of free expression, national liberation and constitutional governance they grappled with. Many of the problems faced by the revolutionaries of the 1820s are still with us 200 years later.
