The dominant intellectual currents of nineteenth-century Europe such as liberalism or socialism emerged less from the linear development of traditions stretching far back to their putative origins in antiquity or the Middle Ages than from the shockwaves of the French Revolution. Thus in the nineteenth century the dividing lines between political positions were drawn according to a variety of assessments of the political and social experiments of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. This means that the lines were drawn in response to what were perceived to be the necessary transition mechanisms to progressively reach a future of liberty and welfare without a re-run of the preceding century’s revolutionary upheavals and wars. This prospect is unfolded in this paper through the examination of various nineteenth-century intellectuals including Cuoco, Maréchal, Saint-Simon, Comte, Guizot, Tocqueville, Mill and Constant.