Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

by Adam Zamoyski

Two major wars broke out in 1830, one in Belgium, between France and Holland, one between Poland and Russia. The 1830s witnessed two protracted and vicious civil wars in Spain and Portugal, as well as a wave of popular risings in Switzerland which nearly turned into civil war in 1847. Between 1846 and 1848 there were full-scale wars involving Russia, Prussia, Sardinia and Austria, fought in Poland, Hungary, parts of Germany and Italy. In 1854 Britain, France and Sardinia went to war on Russia in the Crimea. In 1859–60 there was war between France, Sardinia and Austria which was so bloody that it inspired the foundation of the Red Cross, and in 1866 one between Prussia, Austria and Denmark. Nor should one ignore the wars fought by Britain and Russia over central Asia, in Afghanistan, Georgia, Chechnya and elsewhere, just a fraction of the seventy-two separate British campaigns fought during the reign of Queen Victoria. Nor the bitter conflicts that engulfed Spain’s former American colonies. Nor indeed the dozens of revolts and insurrections that took place across Europe between 1820 and the Polish Insurrection of 1863–64. They were all put down with military force and they all cost lives. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 caused carnage on a scale hitherto unknown, and led to the internecine bloodbath of the Paris Commune. And that covers just the first half of the ‘century of peace’.