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

by Adam Zamoyski

the Marchese de Brignole, published a pamphlet in which he pointed out that far from creating a barrier against France, Austria had set Sardinia on a course of expansion, which she would pursue by playing France and Austria off against each other. ‘Encouraged by an increase of such importance [the acquisition of Genoa], this power will pursue a policy of trading its alliance, as it always has in the past, in order to gradually, with the help of France, take over the whole of Italy,’ he wrote.

Similar blind spots resulting from historic or atavistic obsessions affected most of the negotiators, and produced some equally damaging effects. Poland would become a terrible liability to Russia and sap its strength throughout the next century; the Rhineland was to goad Prussia into expansion and ultimately war with France; Sweden would not profit by Norway, which it eventually had to give up,

The first to go had been Castlereagh, in 1822. The next was Hardenberg, who exerted himself with a new mistress during the Congress of Verona and succumbed to pneumonia shortly after. Alexander ended his days in Taganrog in 1825. Capodistrias, who had become President of the newly independent Greece, was assassinated in 1831. Gentz died in 1832, in the middle of a last fling with a ballerina. Francis I followed him three years later, Frederick William in 1840. Nesselrode outlived Metternich by three years, living until 1862, but he too never varied from the attitude of vigilant policeman. The only one of them who did develop and go on to a new life, in tune with the times, was Talleyrand.

Talleyrand had been galled by his dismissal in 1815, and while he affected to withdraw from politics he could not resist making trouble for Louis XVIII and his new government, even resorting to opportunistic alliances with ultra royalists to do so. His witty jibes earned him disgrace at court, but he was triumphant. He had done well financially out of the congress, and in 1817 he sold a sizeable batch of the French Foreign Ministry’s archives, which he had somehow managed to remove, to Metternich for 500,000 francs and the promise that he would be given asylum in Austria should the situation in France prove dangerous for him.

He seized the opportunity provided by the revolution of 1830, and was sent to London by the new King, Louis-Philippe, to procure British acceptance of the new status quo in France and later the formation of an independent Belgium. He enjoyed a last period of glory as French ambassador in London,

before retiring to his country seat of Valençay, where he died in 1838.

If there is much to criticise in the work of the peacemakers of 1815, it has to be admitted that they did face a formidable task, one that defied any ideal solution. Just because certain arrangements they made turned out to have evil consequences, it does not follow that the opposite course would have yielded more benign results.

The congress does stand as a watershed in the affairs of the world, if only by virtue of what was said and discussed.

it initiated a series of processes which were to become part of the furniture of world affairs.

Despite the collapse of the congress system after Verona in 1822, the idea and practice of consulting and cooperation survived. Some form of conference or congress would henceforth be held to deal with every major crisis, and conferences of ministers and ambassadors were called to deal with specific problems, suggesting a growing sense of solidarity between the powers.

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Britain had emerged vastly stronger and virtually invulnerable, except perhaps through Russian attempts to subvert her rule in India.

Russia had gained a protective buffer in the west, leaving her free to pursue dreams of conquest in the Balkans and in Asia.

Austria on the other hand had come out of the peacemaking process as a highly vulnerable state, entirely dependent on...

Prussia, while gaining in size and power, had also exposed herself to ...

So while Britain and Russia were free to indulge their appetites outside Europe without fear of attack from it, Austria could only hope for the continuance of the status quo, while Prussia could only wish for war, which was the one way she would be able to ‘fill in the gaps’, as Humboldt had put it.

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The Vienna settlement, and the Quadruple Alliance, placed France in a position which her people could only consider humiliating. The perceived necessity of righting this wrong led inexorably to the sabre-rattling of 1840, the war of 1870, to 1914 and beyond.

The way in which the Congress of Vienna excluded all the second-rank states and concentrated power in the hands of the great powers led to the decline of formerly powerful states such as Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Naples, with a consequent narrowing of the range of possible alliances, further reducing the possibility of an equilibrium of forces.

The Congress of Vienna was also a watershed in that the rights of people

the fate of the Jews, hitherto regarded as pariahs not worthy of the same consideration as other men, had actually made it onto the agenda. Even more astonishingly, the predicament of black slaves had been the subject of lengthy discussion and legislation.

Yet neither the Jews nor the slaves, any more than the nations without states, saw much immediate improvement in their condition

While the Congress of Vienna failed to guarantee a century of peace, it did bring into being a simulacrum of stability, a kind of pax Europaea, identified with law and order, fine public institutions, scientific progress, prosperity for an expanding middle class, railways, electric lighting, opera and many of the components of civilised life.

But this was bought at immense cost, levied both in Europe and overseas, particularly in Africa, and it sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

this system nurtured envy and resentment, which flourished into socialism and aggressive nationalism.

It would be idle to propose that the arrangements made in 1815 caused the terrible cataclysms of the twentieth century. But anyone who attempted to argue that what happened in Russia after 1917, in Italy and Germany in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and in many other parts of central and southern Europe at various other moments of the last century had no connection with them would be exposing themselves to ridicule.

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