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May 18 - June 2, 2022
Wellington and Castlereagh were also of the opinion that Louis XVIII should show a degree of ruthlessness to those soldiers and officials who had betrayed him by going over to Napoleon even before he had left Paris. They lamented the French King’s apparent flabbiness, and insisted on the execution of Marshal Ney, General de Labedoyère and General de Lavalette. Ironically, it was thanks to a British officer that the latter was sprung from gaol and spirited away to safety. But the others were duly executed,
The congress had reconvened in Paris, and if there were no balls or carrousels to distract the sovereigns and their ministers from the work in hand, it was hardly an ideal place for sober reflection. The city was full of British, German and Russian soldiery, camped in gardens and squares as well as barracks. It also quickly filled up with the minor players of the congress, wives, mistresses and other camp followers, and with tourists, mostly British.
In a letter to Castlereagh, Talleyrand argued that since the war of 1813–14 had been fought against France, it had required a treaty to end it, but as the recent campaign had been declared pointedly against a single man, peace could be deemed to have returned once he had been defeated and apprehended.
The logic was faultless, but it had little currency in the prevailing mood. The seeming ease with which Napoleon had collected the reins of power and raised a formidable new army had frightened all those who had been merrily dancing on his grave at Vienna. Even the most reasonable sought some guarantee that it would not happen again, and within days of their arrival in Paris the principal allies began a debate amongst themselves on the subject.
they had declared that they were making war only on Napoleon, but were now proposing to penalise his enemy Louis XVIII, whom they had restored to his throne; they were proposing to make peace with France, with which, according to their own proclamations, they had not been at war; and to add insult to injury, they had forced the King of France to take notorious Jacobins and regicides into his government, after having spent the past quarter of a century waging war on everything they stood for.
the allies should do no more than restrict the military potential of France through the destruction of one or two of her fortresses and demand financial recompense for the costs they had been forced to bear in assisting Louis XVIII to regain his throne.5 Wellington was broadly of the same view. He was adamant that as they had not made war on France, only on Napoleon,
The Prussians were having none of it. Hardenberg and Humboldt were heard talking of partitioning and even ‘exterminating’ France, and on 4 August the former produced a note which began by stating that Europe had generously forgiven France and let her off lightly in the previous year, but that in view of the French people’s treachery another such show of leniency would be unpardonable.
he expounded a theory that every nation had its natural limits, within which it could defend itself but which did not threaten others. France had been in such a position at the accession of Louis XIV, but since then had expanded to engulf the natural defences of neighbouring states, and turned herself into a permanent threat. It would therefore be for the good of France as well as Europe to seize this chance of cutting her down to size. How this theory accorded with Prussia’s astonishing expansion over the same period he did not say.
The Prussian position was supported by the Dutch, who saw an opportunity of making territorial gains.
Holland would relinquish her claim to Luxembourg in favour of Prussia if Prussia backed Holland’s demand for areas of France bordering with Belgium such as Dunkirk and Lille.
Bavaria and Württemberg also saw an opportunity to round off their domains with French territory. Sar...
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Metternich was torn. He too had a vociferous public at home clamouring for reparations. And while he was determined that nobody, least of all Prussia and Bavaria, should gain anything, he did appreciate that if they were allowed to help themselves to areas of France this might free up some territory in Germany, which would facilitate a final settlement of competing claims there. But his main consideration was, as it always had been, that France should not be weakened further.
insisted that she should lose no territory. The allies should concentrate instead on building up sound institutions in France and preserve the peace through a temporary occupation of key points by 100–150,000 men, supplied by powers which did not border with her.
Castlereagh found himself in an awkward position. He took the same view as Wellington, Alexander and Metternich. But British public opinion, which had condemned the first Treaty of Paris as too lenient, now called for harsher measures, and the British press became as strident as the German in its demands for revenge and compensation. The Prince Regent caught the mood, and so did Liverpool. ‘The prevailing idea in this country is, that we are fairly entitled to avail ourselves of the present moment to take back from France the principal conquests of Louis XIV,’
He dismissed Alexander’s generous attitude as self-interested humbug, and favoured the Prussian proposals.
In response, Castlereagh pointed out that Louis XVIII was an ally and that they could not in all decency strip him of any part of his patrimony. ‘It is not our business to collect trophies, but to try if we can to bring back the world to peaceful habits,’ he argued.
He recommended long-term military occupation rather than territorial reduction, on the grounds that this would keep the allies united by the necessity to cooperate in the surveillance of France.
He accepted Metternich’s view that France should lose some of her ‘offensive points’, and believed public opinion at home could be placated by stripping her of some of the gains she had been left with in 1814.
Castlereagh was not greatly concerned over the museum, but he disagreed with Liverpool, as he did not wish to punish France unduly. He therefore wrote back making the case against the stripping of the Louvre, in which he was supported by Wellington.
On 10 September Castlereagh submitted a memorandum in which he made great play of the fact that, though sorely tempted, the Prince Regent had decided not to take or even buy anything under pressure, as that would be to emulate Napoleonic practices. But he went on to say that no just peace could leave the robber in possession of the property of the innocent or tolerate the survival of revolutionary spoliations.
On 20 September the allies agreed that plundered works of art should be returned, and that France be obliged to comply. Talleyrand countered by pointing out that the Treaty of Paris had left the Louvre intact and therefore recognised its contents as the property of the French nation, and that there were no grounds to question this.
It was ironic that, while being the only one of the occupying powers to take nothing, Britain was seen as the chief vandal.
Talleyrand was in a black mood. All that he had achieved over the past eighteen months had been destroyed: the bloodless and amiable return of the Bourbons in 1814 was being travestied by the vindictive and mean-minded second restoration; the favourable conditions obtained for France by the Treaty of Paris were to be revised; and the equal status he had worked so hard to attain for her in Vienna was no more.
On 19 September they nominated their plenipotentiaries for the negotiations with France. Wellington and Castlereagh were to represent Britain, Razumovsky and Capodistrias Russia, Metternich and Schwarzenberg Austria, and Hardenberg and Humboldt Prussia. They invited Talleyrand, Dalberg and baron Louis, the three plenipotentiaries of France, to a conference on the following day. But there would be no negotiations.
France was going to be offered humiliating terms, in the form of a non-negotiable ultimatum.
the terms agreed by the allies. In their final form, these involved France giving up about two-thirds of the territory acquired between 1790 and 1792 which had been left to her by the Treaty of Paris. Along with all the territory in Savoy and along the lake of Geneva, it included the area around the fortresses of Condé, Philippeville, Mariembourg, Givet and Charlemont, which were to go to the Netherlands; the enclave of Sarrelouis which was to go to Prussia; and the wedge of land around Landau and the two forts of l’Écluse and Joux, which was placed at the disposal of Austria. The fort of
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‘I felt profound indignation as I received this communication, which was perhaps even more insolent in its form than in the iniquitous demands it contained,’ wrote Talleyrand.
he delivered his reply.2 Since there had been no war between France and the other powers, there could be no question of conquest, he argued, and since Louis XVIII was their ally, they could not extort money from him. By their declaration of 13 March they had recognised him as an ally and branded Napoleon as an outlaw. If they were to decide that he was not their ally after all, it followed that they recognised Napoleon as the ruler of France during the Hundred Days. Since his allies had incurred considerable expense in helping Louis recover his throne, it was only right that they should be
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In conclusion, he stated that the King would nevertheless be prepared to cede some of the territory left to France under the Treaty of Paris and to pay some measure of indemnity. He was even prepared to allow the allies to occupy a few fortresses, though certainly not for as long as seven years. The precise terms would have to be negotiated, and the form of an ultimatum was unacceptable.
The response, delivered the following day, curtly restated the terms laid out in the ultimatum of 20 September. It was accompanied by a declaration to the effect that the allies had never meant to conquer, and that their territorial demands were based entirely on considerations of their own security.
Having read this, Talleyrand went to see Louis XVIII and laid before him a last-ditch plan of defence. He suggested that the King issue a personal appeal to the allies, as a monarch to his brother monarchs, stating that giving in to such terms would rob him of all credibility with his own people, and that if they insisted on them he would refuse to continue on the throne.
Louis refused to go along with the plan. He suggested accepting the allied demands in principle and trying to negotiate a few concessions. Talleyrand could not agree to this.
He stated that if the King did not issue the appeal, he would be obliged to hand in his resignation. Louis held firm, and on the following day, 23 September, Talleyrand duly tendered his resignation, followed by his entire cabinet. Louis accepted it with, according to Talleyrand, ‘the air of a man much relieved’.
Louis’s refusal to issue the appeal had a motive, and that motive could be traced back to Alexander.
he would put his own man in Talleyrand’s place. That man was Armand Émmanuel du Plessis, duc de Richelieu.
Richelieu had left Paris with Louis XVIII at Napoleon’s approach. Talleyrand had offered him a post in his government following Waterloo, but he had declined, on the grounds that he had been away so long that he knew hardly anyone in and very little about modern France. He was similarly reluctant to assume office now, but when he realised that his doing so would earn France the firm support of Russia, he agreed.
On 23 September he wrote the appeal Talleyrand had asked him to issue the day before, with the difference that it was addressed only to Alexander. On 26 September the duc de Richelieu was installed as head of the government of France, while Talleyrand was put out to grass, with the title of Grand Chamberlain.
‘I left power without great regret,’ Talleyrand noted in his memoirs. In fact, he was furious. He also left it with a sense of foreboding, judging by a monologue which he delivered himself one evening to Madame de Rémusat. ‘There is no government, there is only the will of the Emperor of Russia,’ he lamented. ‘I was obliged to take the part of France against him, and I lost. But what madness! To take up the cause of France when one has only the Duke of Wellington on one’s side, and not even the support of France itself, which understands nothing. France is no longer, that is what I should have
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Having reviewed the situation under pressure from Alexander, the allied ministers decided, at a conference on 2 October, to soften their terms by leaving Givet, Charlemont, Condé and the forts of Joux and l’Écluse to France, knocking 100 million francs off the indemnity and limiting the occupation to a period of five years, with the possibility of reducing it after the first three. The new French ministry of the duc de Richelieu accepted these terms in principle, but there followed weeks of discussion over details, particularly on the indemnity and on certain demands put forward by Alexander,
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Wellington later admitted that they had overdone it. ‘I think one of our great mistakes was to demand too much money from these people,’ he confessed to Gentz at the end of November. ‘If we had been content with 400 million, we would have got them without much difficulty; while now we will ruin France without gaining anything from it, for I am afraid that things are going to go very badly.’
The second Treaty of Paris, signed on the evening of 20 November, made reference to the first treaty and to the Final Act, with the deliberate intention of linking all the agreements reached over the past eighteen months into an interdependent package. It was also accompanied by the signature of a fresh treaty that went far beyond the matter in hand, and one particularly close to Castlereagh’s heart.
on 20 November the plenipotentiaries of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Britain signed the Quadruple Alliance, which was remarkably similar to the Treaty of Chaumont.22 It bound the four allies to act jointly in the preservation of the arrangements they had made, and to prevent any member of the Bonaparte family ever coming to power in France again.
It stood in stark contradiction to the treaty they had signed at Vienna on 25 March, by which all the European powers, including France, undertook to act jointly against the Napoleonic threat; the Quadruple Alliance was directed primarily against France herself, which it singled out as a dangerous delinquent.
Russia’s economy had been in a parlous condition since the start of the century. This was made worse by heavy military expenditure since 1807; the ruinous effects of the Continental System from 1807 to 1812; the French invasion, which led to the devastation of the west of the country and the destruction of Moscow; and finally the vast expense of carrying the war into Europe and all the way to Paris. The very structure of the Russian state was in poor shape, as Alexander had first brought in reforms aimed at creating and empowering ministries to deal with various areas of governance, and then
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The colonies were regarded by the soldiers as penal camps, and the enterprise ended in fiasco.
Alexander himself drifted away from his earlier liberalism into increasingly morose reaction. He grew more and more moody, often treating those around him, even senior officers, like miscreant children. Censorship was tightened, and the secret police kept a close watch on any who could be described as freethinkers or liberals. It was not long before he began to grow irritated at the Poles’ enjoyment of the freedoms he had granted them, and started curtailing them.
In 1816 Alexander’s friend the historian Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin published the first part of his twelve-volume History of the Russian State, which projected a vision of a divinely ordained people whose duty it was to reject corrupting outside influences.
Much to the dismay of people such as Stein and Humboldt, Frederick William quickly set about abolishing some of the reforms they had brought in after 1807 and muzzling dissent. Most of his subjects were content enough to go back to sleep, as the poet Heinrich Heine put it, and Prussia slipped into reaction.
Other German monarchs took the same attitude, in the hope that tranquillity would restore a kind of ancien régime normality.
The Vienna settlement had given Austria unquestioned hegemony over Italy. Not only did she now rule the whole of Lombardy-Venetia and Illyria directly: she controlled or dominated all the minor states to the south; she had a convention in place with Naples which prevented anything from changing in that kingdom without Austrian approval; and she had created a barrier against French influence by building up Sardinia, which should reciprocate by maintaining a friendly attitude to Austria. But the settlement had a fundamental weakness. While it gave Austria a huge stake in Italy, it did not give
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