One popular idea in the 1830s, first developed by a French economist, was that Britain’s late-eighteenth-century “industrial revolution” paralleled the political events in France during the French Revolution. One revolution was economic, while the other was political; one was ongoing and successful, while the other had failed and come to a definite end in 1815, when Europe’s conservative monarchs defeated Napoleon and restored the French kings of the Old Regime.

In fact, in 1815, the French Revolution, like the Industrial Revolution, was an unfinished revolution. Britain was in the midst of its economic transformation and the states of northwestern Europe had only begun industrialization, and after 1815, the political conflicts and ideologies of revolutionary France were still very much alive. Moreover, in 1815, the unfinished French Revolution carried the very real possibility of renewed political upheaval. This possibility, which conservatives feared and radicals longed for, would become dramatic reality in 1848, when political revolutions swept across Europe like a whirlwind.