In this volume I have endeavoured to write a history of Europe during an important period of transition. I have reduced military details to the smallest possible limits, and have preferred to mention rather than to describe battles and campaigns, in order to have more space to devote to such questions as the Belgian revolution of 1789, the reorganisation of Prussia in 1806–12, and the Congress of Vienna. I have throughout tried to describe the French Revolution in its influence on Europe, and Napoleon’s career as a great reformer rather than as a great conqueror. The inner meaning of the period and its general results I have sketched in a short introductory chapter, on which the rest of the volume is really a detailed historical commentary.

The maps which accompany the volume are intended to show the changes in the boundaries of States, and not to give the position of places mentioned in the text. Every one who reads such a volume as the present must use an atlas as his constant companion, for no book of this size could possibly contain a sufficient number of maps adequate to the illustration of the events narrated.

In conclusion, I must express my thanks to Mr. W. R. Morfill, Reader in Slavonic to the University of Oxford, for giving me a canon for the spelling of Russian proper names, and to the Editor, Mr. Arthur Hassall, for willing assistance and friendly encouragement.

Cambridge, 1893.