LLOUIS NAPOLEON’S TRIUMPH IN 1848 and his authoritarian rule in the 1850s provided Europe’s victorious forces of order with a new political model. To what extent might the expanding urban middle classes and even portions of the working classes rally to a strong and essentially conservative national state that also promised change? In central Europe a resounding answer came with the national unification of Italy and Germany.

The Russian empire also experienced profound political crises in this period, but they were unlike those in Italy or Germany because Russia was already a vast multinational state. It became clear to Russian leaders that they had to embrace the process of modernization, defined narrowly as the changes that enable a country to compete effectively with the leading countries at a given time.