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

by Adam Zamoyski

Sardinia, henceforth referred to more often as Piedmont, was the most organised and efficient state on the peninsula. It felt both threatened by and resentful of Austria, and quickly came to see in her a rival for influence in the rest of Italy. These feelings were ably exploited by Alexander, whose diplomatic and secret agents in Turin and other Italian courts did everything to counter Austrian influence and represented the Tsar as their natural protector.

Although this alarmed Metternich, what really filled him with dread was what he would call ‘la prétention italienne’. He had always brushed aside any idea that the Italians might be allowed their own state, on the grounds that they were incapable. ‘No country is less fit than Italy to be given over to government by its people,’ he would write as late as 1833, ‘as the Italians lack the first precondition for the existence of such a government; they have neither the character, nor the gravity nor the conduct necessary for it; in a word, they are not a people.’ He and Francis would, over the next decades, contribute powerfully to making them one.

Illyria and northern Italy were by 1813 weary of French rule, which was characterised by high taxation, punishing levels of conscription and a galling arrogance on the part of every official. The inhabitants were consequently well-disposed to liberation by the Austrians. While many did aspire...

this changed within months of the clumsy, centralised Austrian administration taking control. Taxation remained as high as it had been under the French, and levels of conscription were not reduced. And if the F...

While Napoleon had encouraged Italians to play a part in the administration of the kingdom of I...

From the moment of his return from Paris in 1815, Castlereagh’s policy had been the object of criticism, even from members of his own cabinet; some felt that he had committed Britain too deeply in European affairs, others that the Quadruple Alliance was a repressive measure that threatened the liberties of Europe. The treaties were ratified in the Commons, by 240 votes to seventy-seven, but Castlereagh knew that even if he had wanted to, he would not be able to involve Britain in the affairs of the Continent very far in the future.

In September 1818 a full-blown congress assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen). Alexander was present in person, flanked by Nesselrode and Capodistrias; Francis came with Metternich; and Frederick William was accompanied by Hardenberg and Count Bernstorff. Castlereagh and Wellington represented Britain, and Richelieu was allowed to attend as the representative of France.

The congress had a whiff of its predecessor at Vienna, as a number of minor princes turned up, accompanied and joined, almost inevitably, by various grandes dames.

The principal business of the congress, which was to consider the necessity of keeping allied troops in France, had been discussed and settled beforehand, and was despatched quickly. The allies had already withdrawn 30,000 men of the occupation force in the previous year, and they now agreed to withdraw the rest; the last allied troops left French soil on 30 November 1818. In the same spirit, the unpaid balance of the indemnity which had been demanded of France was written off. But Richelieu’s request that she be admitted to the Alliance met with stiff opposition.

After some discussion, however, Castlereagh and then Metternich came round to the view that it would be safer to include France than to leave her out, and she was admitted.

Alexander had for some time been suggesting that the Alliance should form the basis of a comprehensive ‘system’, and in a memorandum dated 8 November he proposed that the allies should bind themselves into a closer union, and pledge themselves to defend the system they had brought into being. He suggested the creation of a common European armed force, and offered the services of the Russian army.

Castlereagh opposed the idea.

Alexander’s evident interest in southward expansion into the Balkans and Turkey, his diplomatic machinations in Spain and his surreptitious involvement in the Ionian islands worried Castlereagh; his repeated suggestions that the allies conduct a grand campaign against the Barbary pirates suggested yet another ploy to secure a naval base for Russia in the western Mediterranean.

On 15 November 1818 the plenipotentiaries assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle signed a declaration setting out what they had decided during the congress and expressing their satisfaction that tranquillity had returned to Europe. They reaffirmed the need for the continuation of the Alliance, but ruled out changing its character.

In January 1820 a military mutiny or pronunciamiento in Spain obliged King Ferdinand to accept the constitution of 1812 which he had abolished. The news had the effect of a whiplash on Alexander: more than one Tsar had been toppled and/or murdered by army mutinies. The news which arrived a couple of weeks later, that on 13 February the heir to the French throne, the duc de Berry, had been assassinated only deepened his sense of horror.

Alexander saw an opportunity to push through his idea of a ‘general system’, and called for a new congress to deal with the Spanish and Neapolitan questions. Metternich suggested that they leave the matter to a conference of ministers in Vienna, but Alexander insisted on a full congress of monarchs, and Metternich was obliged to agree. He proposed they meet at Troppau (Opava) in Bohemia on 20 October in order to frame a set of rules governing when the allies should intervene in the affairs of other countries and when they should not.

Castlereagh could not accept the idea, and resolved to boycott the congress, to which he sent Stewart as an observer. Castlereagh’s opposition was not based on any liberal principles, and the government of which he was a member presided over an increasingly reactionary regime itself.

The three autocratic powers were acting in defiance of Britain and France, justifying their actions with self-serving proclamations. But just as it was beginning to look as though the gulf between them and the two constitutional powers was unbridgeable, two things occurred which completely changed the situation. One was the outbreak, in the spring of 1821, of an uprising in Greece against Turkish domination; the other was the fall, in December of the same year, of Richelieu’s government and its replacement by an ultra royalist administration.

Castlereagh, now Marquess of Londonderry, was intending to attend. But in the course of the summer he fell ill from the strain of defending his policies in Parliament. He went to his country home at Cray in Kent to rest, but his condition deteriorated rapidly, and he began to show signs of derangement. His doctor took the precaution of removing his razors, but on 12 August he found a penknife, cut his throat and bled to death.

Castlereagh’s successor as Foreign Secretary, his old rival George Canning, was not greatly interested in European affairs, did not share his European colleagues’ paranoia about revolution, and did not like the concept of a joint hegemony by the great powers, which he referred to as ‘the European police system’.

That the affairs of the world were being discussed and decided by a handful of men in the drawing room of the pushy, meddlesome and self-interested mistress of one of them, is highly apposite – the ‘congress system’ was not a system of any recognisable form, while the ‘Concert of Europe’ was no more than a series of arguments between individuals, whose convictions were entirely personal.

Alexander was only prepared to curb his desire to intervene on behalf of the Greek rising on condition that the Alliance would intervene in Spain. Neither France nor Austria wished to see Russian troops marching across Europe, while Britain feared the repercussions an allied invasion of Spain might have in the Spanish colonies and therefore on trade. They therefore stood firm against him, and he was obliged to join in a declaration condemning the Greek rising without getting his way on Spain. By default, France was allowed to intervene in Spain on her own, while Britain delivered itself of pious protests. That was, to all intents and purposes, the end of the experimental ‘congress system’, and the end of British involvement in the affairs of Europe for decades.

Back in the summer of 1815, as he was relaxing in his villa outside Vienna a couple of weeks after the signature of the Final Act, Gentz had noted down some of his reflections on the events of the past nine months. ‘Never have the expectations of the general public been as excited as they were before the opening of this solemn assembly,’ he wrote. ‘People were confident of a general reform of the political system of Europe, of a guarantee of eternal peace, even of the return of the golden age. Yet it produced only restitutions decided beforehand by force of arms, arrangements between the great powers unfavourable to the future balance and the maintenance of peace in Europe, and some quite arbitrary rearrangements in the possessions of the lesser states, but not one act of a more elevated character, not one great measure of public order or security which might compensate humanity for any part of its long sufferings or reassure it as to the future.’

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he blamed the failure to agree proper rules. ‘As the congress was never defined, and the powers of its members were never determined according to any fixed and recognised principle, it drifted to the very last moment on a sea of uncertainties and contradictions,’ he explained. This drift favoured the great powers.

Stein’s verdict was hardly less withering: the congress was not only a missed opportunity, it had ended in ‘a farce’. He blamed ‘the distractedness and shallowness’ of Alexander, the ‘obtuseness and coldness’ of Hardenberg, Nesselrode’s ‘feeble-mindedness, meanness and dependence on Metternich’, and ‘the frivolity of all’ for the failure to achieve anything for Germany.

A century later, on 28 January 1919, as he prepared his team of negotiators for the Paris Peace Conference which was to forge a new settlement following the First World War, the US President Woodrow Wilson expressed the hope that ‘no odour of Vienna’ would be brought into the proceedings.

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It was only some time later, towards the middle of the twentieth century, that the settlement reached at Vienna began to be viewed in a more favourable light. One of its most enthusiastic apologists was Henry Kissinger, whose doctoral thesis, published in 1957, some years before he became Secretary of State to President Richard Nixon, provides the most vigorous defence. He argues that in international affairs there is an inescapable priority to pursue order and stability over justice or any other consideration.

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Diplomacy can only operate within a system that all parties accept and therefore regard as legitimate, since only such a universally recognised framework can provide the terms of reference for negotiation and the sense of security that give it credibility.

He goes on to state that the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had destroyed the old legitimacy and failed to create a new one, with the result that all parties, including Napoleon, felt continuously threatened and insecure. According to him, the Congress of Vienna succeeded in forging a new ‘legitimacy’, which lasted a hundred years and was therefore of great benefit to humanity. ‘Not for a century was Europe to know a ma...

More recently, in his magisterial The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (1994), Paul W. Schroeder developed the theory that the congress saw the change from an old conflictual system to one of concert and political equilibrium, from a scramble for a nebulous balance of power to a system of negotiation based on the mutual acceptance of each other’s vital interests.

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There was, in fact, no ‘hundred-year peace’. There was certainly no general European war for four decades – but then there had not been one for the three decades before 1793. And even in the absence of a general war, there was plenty of fighting going on. The decade following the signature of the Final Act saw wars break out in Spain, Italy and Greece, involving the intervention of France, Austria and Russia, and ultimately Britain and Turkey.

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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’.

The second problem with the Kissinger view is that the Vienna settlement itself was never entirely consummated, and that it broke down very quickly. The concert of the great powers, such as it was, did not survive the Congress of Verona in 1822. And the new status quo was over...

in 1849 a fatal blow was delivered to the heart of the settlement with the election of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the ogre’s nephew, as President of France, which he would follow up by becoming Emperor two years later. The very thing the Quadruple Alliance had been designed to prevent had occurred. Less than two decades later he was toppled by the Prussians, and a German empire came into being. By then the political map of Europe bore little relation to that so sententiously sanctified only half a century before.

These events point to the third flaw in Kissinger’s argument, namely that the Congress of Vienna did not in fact establish a new ‘legitimacy’ at all. The plenipotentiaries of the great powers had indeed tried ‘something new and different’. But it was not something that could be dignified with such a word. They had merely decided to reorganise and run Europe by accord between themselves, without reference to the minor powers, let alone public opinion. Perhaps the most significant document in this respect is the Troppau protocol.

the position of the Jews. They were, on the whole, very poorly treated by returning monarchs. Despite the valiant efforts of Humboldt and Hardenberg, the status of the Jews in Germany had been left to the Bundestag to decide, and this allowed local rulers to do largely as they pleased – which resulted for the most part in their disenfranchisement or even expulsion.

turning Napoleon into a hero.12 The news of his death, which occurred on 5 May 1821, was reported in London on 4 July, but it was overshadowed by the British public’s interest in what would happen at the forthcoming coronation, from which the new King, George IV, had banned his unruly Queen. It was said that when the messenger announced the fallen Emperor’s death with the words: ‘Sire! I have to tell you that your greatest enemy is dead!’ the King replied: ‘No! By God! Is she?’

on the Continent the news stirred deep emotions, some of which would grow into an almost religious cult, one whose demons were the architects of the Vienna settlement and the Holy Alliance.

One thing that had offended many, even among the more privileged observers at the congress, was the way in which ‘souls’ were counted, bundled into units and traded across the negotiating table like cattle. This was widely regarded as ‘a violation of the dignity of man and of the rights of nations’, in the words of Dominique de Pradt, one of the architects of the Bourbon restoration, writing in 1815, and it tainted the work of the congress as a whole in the eyes of many. It was also a great political mistake.

Agreed.

Such treatment of subjects cut through the bonds of loyalty that made them accept the rule of a sovereign without question. The shunting around of populations undermined traditional social networks of control and discipline. The result was not only a marked increase in discontent among the lower orders of society, but also a new spirit of mutinous resistance

‘The Congress of Vienna has demonstrated that it is easier to be awarded souls than to conquer hearts,’ wrote Pradt, ‘yet the former ...

the most obvious failure of the congress was its refusal to address the problem of stateless nations such as the Germans, the Poles and the Italians.

Apologists for the Vienna settlement have argued that the statesmen of 1815 should not be blamed for failing to take account of the force of nationalism, since they could not be expected to have known how powerful it would grow. Being men of their time, the argument goes, they were not aware of the phenomenon of modern nationalism, and could therefore not possibly foresee its potential force. This is absurd.

It is true that the numbers of those who embraced the nationalist gospel were very small. But their influence was nevertheless profound, as the statesmen of the time were well aware.

To pretend that Hardenberg, Alexander and Metternich could somehow have been unaware of its force is ridiculous.

Much the same goes for Italy, which many of those present at the congress actually wished to see united, and which Metternich himself considered to be the single greatest threat to the Habsburg monarchy. And as for the Poles, they were a byword for national feeling. Between 1797 and 1815 Revolutionary France and then Napoleon enlisted the enthusiastic support of more than 100,000 of them on the promise of furthering the resurrection of Poland.

There was doubt, frequently expressed, as to the ability of these nations to create a viable state

At a purely practical level, a striking aspect of the Congress of Vienna is how backward-looking some of the participants were when trying to forge a secure future. Castlereagh’s almost obsessive preoccupation with securing Belgium and the Scheldt estuary, which he shared with most of his cabinet, derived from a three-hundred-year-old fear of invasion which had grown entirely out of date.

his precious barrier in Belgium was blown away in 1830. Britain was obliged to recognise an independent Belgium, in defence of whose neutrality she would have to go to war twice in the twentieth century; Castlereagh’s attempts to create a barrier against French expansion into Germany ended up giving Germany a back door into France, which Britain had to try to close in 1914 and 1940, at immense cost in lives and resources.

Metternich’s similarly obsessive desire to dominate Italy in order to deny it to France was rooted in the sixteenth-century wars between Francis I and Charles V, and it was to be the greatest drain on resources for the Habsburg monarchy over the next half-century. He too, in building up the Sardinian kingdom as a barrier to French influence, created the power that would drive Austria out of Italy.