Nineteenth century Europe was a boiling cauldron of ideas for the direction societies and governments should turn following Napoleon's conquests. Conservatism became the front-runner of the ideologies early on out of necessity. Conservatism in the nineteenth century was mainly concerned with maintaining the status quo, or in other words, ensuring that the "Old Regime" remained the dominant one. The land holding aristocracy of each nation had nothing to gain by maintaining this viewpoint but certainly had everything to loose. By contrast, Nationalism grew out of the desire to focus one's primary loyalty to the good of the community- "nation"- and its common institutions, languages, customs and traditions. While these two viewpoints, diametrically opposed to one another, competed for dominance another gained considerable power among the peasantry, nouvo-bourgeois, and some of the bourgeois/aristocracy. Liberalism, an ideology based on the belief that...