In the long history of the British left, no collapse has been more spectacular than that experienced by Gladstone's government between 1870 and 1874. Only once since 1832 had the Conservative party won a general election, and that was before the Liberal cause was so greatly strengthened by the events of 1846 and 1848. A similar Conservative victory, so soon after the 1867 Reform Act, was widely regarded as almost inconceivable. Yet it happened, in February 1874 – after an unprecedented twenty-four by-election defeats for the government in England (out of fifty-one Liberal seats vacated between 1870 and 1873). Historians of this government, myself included, have failed to consider that the events of 1870–1 in Europe, mostly flowing from the Franco-Prussian War, which began in July 1870, could have had much to do with the Liberals' loss of direction. This chapter argues that they had an enormous amount to do with it. Indeed it is scarcely credible that Britain would be untouched by the swift Prussian victory in the war, the fall of Napoleon III, the unification of Germany, the Russian démarche in the Black Sea, the Paris Commune, the Vatican Council, the destruction of the Pope's temporal power, and the sense of an all-out ideological conflict between the forces of clericalism and their opponents in every country in western Europe.

These events had such an effect on Liberalism because of the party's reliance on the themes traced in chapter 5.