The victory at Waterloo of the British and their allies thus marked not just Napoleon's final defeat, but also a victory against the destructive energies unleashed throughout Europe by the French Revolution. In the ensuing decades, Europe's best minds and statesmen restored and renovated traditional political structures and practices. They turned away from revolutionary agitation and pursued practical reforms and innovations. The result was almost a century of peace and prosperity, coupled with increasing freedom and dramatic advances in science, technology, and the arts.
Waterloo thus marked the beginning for Europe of a long Burkean era of peace and conservative reform and progress. So celebrate Waterloo as being a conservative victory, just as, in the long sweep of history, the American and Allied landing at D-Day was the beginning of the recovery and restoration of European peace and freedom.
Hmm. That's one way of putting it. Another way would be that the reactionary forces of the old aristocracy reestablished themselves, then created a fairly repressive regime to stamp out the ideas of "liberty, fraternity, equality," even as a middle class began to emerge who wanted some voice in their government, leading to the Revolutions of 1848.
I listed to a BBC History Podcast a while back interviewing the author of "The Phantom Terror" a book about that period. Here's a Wall Street Journal review of the book.
One of the things he talked about was that in Austria censorship was so severe--with all foreign mail opened and read by government agents--along with banning of foreign books and travel restrictions, along with a massive network of spies and informers and secret police, that a part of Europe that had been among the most enlightened and advanced became a backwater, a status it more or less retains to this day.