Conservative political ideologies had important practical consequences. In September 1815 Austria, Prussia, and Russia formed the Holy Alliance. First proposed by Russia’s Alexander I, the alliance worked to repress reformist and revolutionary movements and stifle desires for national independence across Europe.

The conservative restoration first brought its collective power to bear on southern Europe. In 1820, revolutionaries successfully forced the monarchs of Spain and the southern Italian Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to establish constitutional monarchies. Calling a conference at Troppau in Austria, Metternich and Alexander I proclaimed the principle of active intervention to maintain all autocratic regimes whenever they were threatened. Austrian forces then marched into Naples in 1821 and restored the autocratic power of Ferdinand I in the Two Sicilies. A French invasion of Spain in 1823 likewise returned power to the king there.

The conservative policies of Metternich and the Holy Alliance crushed reform not only in Austria and the Italian peninsula but also in the newly established German Confederation. The new confederation, a loose association of German-speaking states, replaced the roughly three hundred principalities, free cities, and dynastic states of the Holy Roman Empire with just thirty-eight German states, dominated by Prussia and Austria (see Map 21.1). Ambassadors from each state met in a Confederation Diet, or assembly. When liberal reformers and university students began to protest for the national unification of the German states, the Austrian and Prussian leadership used the diet to issue and enforce the infamous Karlsbad Decrees in 1819. These decrees required the German states to outlaw liberal political organizations, police their universities and newspapers, and establish a permanent committee with spies and informers to clamp down on liberal or radical reformers.