Any student of twentieth-century Europe must ponder issues of social and political stability. Why did it break down in the first decades of the century? How was it reconstituted in the second half? Does it mean anything more than order? Metternich certainly thought in terms of European stability, though most often he used the eighteenth-century term équilibre. But through the nineteenth century, as social conflict became more preoccupying, the contrast between order and disorder became more prevalent. “Order” was originally a concept linked to the ancien régime: a quasi-legal status ascription related to “estate.” By midcentury it was reinfused with the authority of a dubiously scientific sociology: order, for Comte, rested on primal social groups. The Party of Order was Marx's scathing catchall description of the French bourgeois conservatives who rallied after the June Days of 1848 and engineered the Bonapartist reaction; L'Ordre appeared as a rightist newspaper title throughout the Third Republic and “l'Ordre Moral” provided a watchword for the conservative coalition of 1876– 7. “Disorder,” in contrast, implied purposeless and frightening insurrection; it evoked the lurid flames of the burning Tuilleries and the hostages shot by the Communards of 1870–1. The term “disorder,” of course, did not give any credit to the often coherent schemes for workshops and welfare, nationalized banks, cooperatives, and manhood suffrage that protesters advanced. “Count on us,” Thiers had told Bismarck in May 1871, “and the social order will be revenged in the course of the week.” Conservatives were in a position to impose the lexicon.