The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

Ripped from their domestic lives by the insatiable engine of the French Empire’s military recruiting machine, 685,000 troops from Germany, Poland, Italy and France – the last named supplying fewer than half the total – had marched on Russia; fewer than 70,000 had returned, leaving 400,000 dead and more than 100,000 prisoners of the Russians,

It used to be thought that the damage inflicted by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was relatively light compared to the devastation wrought by later conflicts. Yet altogether, in twenty-three years of more or less continuous warfare that had swept back and forth across Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, an estimated five million people had died; compared to Europe’s population as a whole, this was proportionately as many as, if not more than, those who died during the First World War. One in five Frenchmen born between 1790 and 1795 had perished during the conflicts. Napoleon’s armies had lost anything up to one and a half million men in all.

When the Russians had eventually reoccupied Moscow, they had been forced to pile up 12,000 corpses on huge pyres and burn them. The reconstruction of the city only began properly in 1814, with parks and gardens springing up where once there had been a jumble of narrow streets, and a grand new palace for the tsar. For more than a generation Moscow remained a building site; the commission established to oversee the city’s reconstruction was only wound up in 1842, and even then, Moscow still had far to go before it could regain its former splendour.

After the Battle of Waterloo, some 900,000 foreign troops occupied France, causing widespread economic hardship by their exactions.

For Croatia, 1816 and above all 1817 was the time of the ‘great famine’. Grain prices were between two and three times higher than they were five years later. War had disrupted communications, so relief was hard to organize. This global climatic calamity thus resulted in the worst harvests to be seen in Europe for more than a century; and it happened when Europe was struggling to recover its trade and industry after the disruptions of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The British blockade and the Napoleonic counter-blockade known as the Continental System had ruined commerce on the Continent and in the United Kingdom too, cutting off markets and throwing thousands out of work. By the end of 1816 there were said to be between 20,000 and 30,000 unemployed weavers in the London district of Spitalfields, and similar conditions were observed in textile towns in Saxony, Switzerland and the Low Countries.

At the same time as people were suffering a severe loss of income, the catastrophically bad harvest of 1816 caused grain prices to rise precipitously. Bread was the staple of most people’s diet, and in Paris it cost more than twice as much in 1817 as it had done a year before.

In the uplands of Habsburg-ruled Lombardy, the poor were living off roots and herbs. In Transylvania and the eastern provinces of Hungary, deaths from starvation were estimated at more than 20,000.

Deaths from smallpox nearly quadrupled in Paris between 1816 and 1818, with a major epidemic breaking out in the Low Countries as well.

The Ottoman administration, which still ruled over the greater part of the Balkans, was incapable of dealing with these calamities. This was the last major outbreak of the plague in Europe, and it was a severe one. One historical study of the epidemic has concluded that ‘the sanitary and demographic catastrophe which befell Bosnia in the years 1815–18 had no parallel in other European countries since the Black Death in the years 1347–1351’.

The post-Napoleonic crisis and the accompanying Europe-wide unrest, unevenly distributed though they both were in their incidence and impact, impelled governments to adopt welfare and relief measures, creating a general acceptance of the state’s obligation to take steps to alleviate the distress of the most impoverished sectors of the population.

As a result, the post-Napoleonic settlement paid as much attention to preventing revolution, and repressing it where it seemed to be taking place, as it did to curbing whatever the military and political ambitions of France might threaten to be in the future.

The restored French monarchy under Louis XVIII (1755–1824), brother of the executed Louis XVI (1754–93), had run into trouble almost immediately, overwhelmed by the need to pay for the legacy of the war. It retained the unpopular taxes imposed by Napoleon, imposed cutbacks in expenditure on the army, and reimposed censorship after decades of impassioned debate. The proclamation of a militant Catholicism as the state religion alienated many educated Frenchmen. There were widespread fears that the king would try to restore lands confiscated by the Revolution to their original clerical and aristocratic owners. Napoleon’s return thus triggered an outburst of popular sentiment in favour of preserving the legacy of the Revolution.

Napoleon left behind a political legend that quickly developed into a potent myth among liberal writers, politicians, army officers and students, who were encouraged by his own turn (whether genuine or not) to liberal ideas during the ‘Hundred Days’ before Waterloo in an attempt to broaden his support. Very much aware of the weakness of his situation, Napoleon had gone to some lengths to reassure the world that his dreams of conquest were over, and the French that he would respect the rights and liberties of the citizen and no longer behave like an imperial dictator.

In subsequent decades the legend of the ‘liberal Emperor’ gained still further in potency.

In France, ‘Bonapartism’ came to stand for patriotism, universal manhood suffrage, the sovereignty of the nation, the institutions of an efficient, centralized, bureaucratic administration that dealt equally with all citizens, the periodic consultation of the people by its government through plebiscites and referendums, and an implicit contract between Frenchmen and the state that provided social order and political stability, national pride, and military glory.

For many people outside France, too, the cult of Napoleon stood for the achievements of the Revolution, translated into purposeful reform after the excesses of the Terror in the early 1790s. Irish republicans and Polish nationalists looked to Napoleon for inspiration in their political struggles. The Venezuelan liberator of large swathes of South America from Spanish rule, Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), admired Napoleon so much that he had made the journey to Milan to see his hero crowned King of Italy. In China and Madagascar, Napoleon was worshipped by some as a god.

In reality, the ultimate defeat of Napoleon had never been in doubt; even if Wellington, as seemed not unlikely at more than one point, had been driven from the battlefield before Blücher and his Prussians arrived, Napoleon would have been vanquished in the end by sheer weight of Allied numbers. A large army led by the Austrians was encamped on the eastern bank of the Rhine further south, and a huge Russian force was marching westward, having already reached Germany

Wherever the threat of revolution seemed imminent, the great powers of Europe were now clearly prepared to join forces to quash it before it became a reality.

but Napoleon had shown that borders were not immutable. There were other changes too. The power of the Church had been reduced, with vast swathes of land secularized and ecclesiastical states swept off the map. The registration of births, marriages and deaths had been assigned to secular authorities. Monasteries had been dissolved, and the power of the Church had been further reduced in many areas by the introduction of freedom of religion, civil marriage and divorce, secular education and the state appointment of clergy. The Church had also been pressured into introducing freedom of worship and a measure of equal rights for non-Christians, notably Jews. Everywhere that Napoleon ruled he had replaced encrusted custom and privilege with rationality and uniformity.

Local and regional jurisdictions, such as those exercised by hundreds of imperial knights in the Holy Roman Empire, and by Church and seigneurial courts, had been supplanted by a system of centralized uniformity administered by a judicial bureaucracy. In all these areas, the Napoleonic Law Code had disposed of existing, often tradition-bound laws and ordinances, introducing a key element of equality before the law, even if in some respects this central principle of the French Revolution had been modified by Napoleon’s more conservative outlook on issues such as the rights and duties of women.

Weights and measures had been at least to some extent standardized, internal customs tolls abolished, guilds and other restrictions on the free movement of labour swept away, serfs freed (including in Poland). Everywhere Napoleon had brought change,

Napoleon’s legacy was even more far-reaching than this. The wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century had been not merely European but global in scale. They had shattered existing global empires and paved the way for a new relationship between Europe and the rest of the world. British rule in much of North America had already been destroyed in the American War of Independence. In their turn, however, the British had broken what remained of French power in Canada and India, and had taken over Dutch and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean as well as annexing Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope, Singapore and Ceylon. Republican movements, inspired by the French Revolution and backed by the British, sprang up all over Latin America.

The British government, while remaining ostensibly neutral, turned a blind eye to men like Cochrane and their securing of supplies from Britain. It was very much in its interest to open up Latin America to free trade, and when Britain recognized the new states in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed by the US government, which opposed any European intervention in the Americas, put an end to any further action.

When the French conquered Portugal in 1807, the regent Dom Joâo (1767–1826), acting for Queen Maria the Mad (1734–1816), sailed to Rio de Janeiro and set up court there, proclaiming Brazil a full sovereign state with all the rights and privileges that went with it. This reduced Portugal to the status of a province of Brazil, especially when Dom Joâo, becoming king after Maria’s death in 1816, decided to stay on in Rio. In 1820, Dom Joâo was forced by political upheavals in Portugal to return to Lisbon as king. He was also obliged to accept the policy of reimposing mercantilist restrictions on trade with Brazil. This in turn led his son Dom Pedro (1798–1834), now regent in Rio, to bow to Brazilian mercantile pressure and become king of an independent constitutional monarchy in Brazil in 1822.

At the same time, events in the Americas also had a profound effect on Europe. For European liberals, radicals and revolutionaries, Latin America (with the exception of Brazil, where slavery continued virtually unchanged through the following decades) became a classic example of the success of movements of emancipation and liberation. Bolívar’s wars of liberation provided a new model of heroism that in due course was to find further embodiment in the charismatic figure of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), who was to return from exile in Uruguay and Brazil to lead the popular struggle for Italian unification.

The events of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era changed the balance of forces between the different parts of the globe. This was not the outcome of some long-term process whereby Europe was becoming superior to other parts of the world in terms of competitiveness, religious dedication, or culture. Far-flung, pre-industrial empires were nothing unusual in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century world. The Chinese Empire in particular still dwarfed European empires in size. The Ottoman Empire, though it had reached its apogee by around 1700, following the failure of its siege of Vienna in 1683, still covered a huge swathe of territory from south-eastern Europe through north-west Africa to the Indian Ocean and the Middle East. Until the 1750s Islamic states still ruled India and most of south-east Asia. In Africa large states such as Oyo or Benin controlled a diverse range of territories and peoples.

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt had undermined the hold of the Ottoman Empire on the region and threatened the empire’s leadership of the Muslim world with its seizure of the teaching centre of the Al Azhar mosque in Cairo. A series of fundamentalist movements had posed an additional challenge to Ottoman legitimacy. The

British had arrested the Mughal Emperor in India, and invaded royal palaces in Java. In China the expedition led by Lord George, Earl Macartney (1737–1806) to Beijing in 1793 had inaugurated a long and increasingly problematic relationship with the European states, while the death of the Qian Long e...

Other states across the globe had managed to increase economic production and prosperity through much of the eighteenth century, largely keeping pace with European economic development; but by 1815 they had fallen behind, under the impact of European competition. China was preoccupied with its own internal affairs, as were Russia and the United States; none of these looked for a global role in the nineteenth century, though all of them would have been capable of exercising it. France was exhausted by continuous war while the French economy, on the road to industrialization in the eighteenth century, was shattered by 1815. Along with Spain and Portugal, France had lost most of its overseas empire. The British had no serious rival by 1815.

The Kingdom of Prussia, for instance, had been compelled to free the country’s serfs from the most onerous dues and obligations to which they had been subjected, to modernize its army, and to reform bureaucratic administration of the state to make it more effective. Tsar Alexander I’s reforming minister, Mikhail Speransky (1772–1839), a brilliant administrator of humble origin, had led the centralization of Russia’s ramshackle state apparatus, drastically reducing the power of the aristocracy over the direction of the country’s affairs and rationalizing administration through a system of functional Ministries headed by a Council of State charged with scrutinizing imperial legislation. However, his wider plans for reform, including the introduction of representative institutions, were frustrated and led to his dismissal in 1812. By this time, nevertheless, Speransky had pushed through a major reform of education, with a new system of secondary schools and new universities founded in a number of major towns. In many parts of Europe, the influence of Napoleon had created greater efficiency in administration and the vital arts of troop recruitment and tax-gathering that went hand in hand with measures to stimulate economic production, allowing entrepreneurs to accumulate wealth for themselves and their families so long as they paid their dues to the state. Military efficiency was thus linked productively to economic growth in ways that the restrictive and rapacious state econo...

perhaps, it was European, and as a result of the wars, overwhelmingly British command of the seas that provided the basis for the new, dominant relationship of Europe with the rest of the world after 1815. It allowed Europeans to colonize further parts of the globe, like Australia or much of Africa, where the state was weak, non-existent or less well equipped with military technology. It provided Europeans with the means to throttle rival manufacturing centres through their control of seaborne trade.

And crucially, in the longer term, the assault on the hereditary principle, beginning in America and spreading from France throughout Europe, fatally undermined the legitimacy of institutions such as monarchy, aristocracy, slavery and serfdom. The consequences of this assault were to become ever more momentous as the century progressed.

The Congress quickly became legendary for its many parties, entertainments and balls. Many of these were astonishingly extravagant. Estimates of the number of candles at the opening ball in this pre-electrical age varied from 12,000 to 16,000, amplified by mirrors that had one participant ‘blinded and almost dizzy’ as she paused at the top of the stairs.

Metternich gained much of his influence from the power of the state he represented. The Congress was not held in Vienna simply for its geographical convenience, located at the centre of Europe. It was held there above all because Austria had taken the lead in putting together one coalition of European powers after another to fight the French Emperor.

With France shattered and defeated, the Austrian Empire was the most powerful state in Europe. Numbering around 23 million inhabitants at the beginning of the century, it was a force to be reckoned with, easily standing comparison with France (28 million) and Russia (around 30 million), while dwarfing Britain (11 million), Spain (11 million), and Prussia (16 million in 1815). Population strength did not automatically translate into political influence, but in an age still dominated by mass, infantry-based armies, it certainly counted for a very great

Unlike many other states, Austria had not reformed itself root and branch during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, and many leading Austrian politicians regarded the final victory as a vindication of traditional structures and methods. As much as any other of the major powers, therefore, Austria looked for a restoration of the state of affairs as it had been before 1789,

Victory in 1815 seemed to confirm the viability of tsarist institutions, of autocracy and serfdom, underpinned by modest administrative and military reforms. It set Alexander’s face against any further change.

Thus it was Alexander who took the lead in 1815 in forming, with Austria and Prussia, a Holy Alliance, committing the three powers to mutual assistance if religion, peace or justice was threatened at any future point.

The British Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822) dismissed the Holy Alliance privately as ‘a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’. But he was convinced enough of its utility in practice to get the Prince Regent (1762–1830, from 1820 King George IV) to subscribe to the Holy Alliance while at the same time avoiding any formal commitment on the part of the British government itself.

With a remarkable lack of national hatred or recrimination, the Austrians, Prussians, British and Russians included a representative of the French in the negotiations – Prince Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), who had been Napoleon’s Foreign Minister but had switched sides at the right moment and now served the restored French monarchy. The wars, in the end, were seen as being fought not between nations but between regimes, even, in a way, between ideologies, which led a separate existence from nations and peoples.

The Austrians lost their part of the Netherlands, which went to the Dutch, but regained all their other territories, and established control over Lombardy and Venetia in northern Italy, as well as a large swathe of the Dalmatian coast.

industrial resources of the Ruhr were to provide a major boost for Prussian economic and military power. Prussian strength was augmented by the acquisition of the former Swedish Pomerania, northern Saxony, Posen and Danzig, to counterbalance Russian control of ‘Congress Poland’. All of this made Prussia one of the major winners.

Underlining the moral principles that the powers claimed had infused the Vienna Settlement, the Congress formally outlawed the slave trade. In general, however, it excluded consideration of extra-European affairs;

The exclusion of global political issues from the Vienna Settlement implicitly allowed imperial rivalries, such as they were, to proceed without affecting intra-European politics. This was a startling change from the wars and conflicts of the previous century.

Altogether, the death rate of men in battle between 1815 and 1914 was seven times less than that of the previous century.

When the Great Powers collaborated, therefore, from the 1820s to the 1840s, it was as often as not in order to put down liberal revolutions of one kind or another.

France’s population growth was beginning to stagnate, and the country was unable to make good the loss of nearly one and a half million men on the battlefield. France’s share of the European population became steadily smaller. For the rest of the nineteenth century, there was more or less an equilibrium of power between the major continental European states, and on a larger scale, European colonial rivalries, so disruptive in the previous century, were now settled by international agreement, building on the experience of the Congress system and the Concert of Europe.

But in fact, the French Revolution had among other things fundamentally changed the nature of sovereignty in Europe. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a major, perhaps the major cause of European wars had been dynastic disputes arising on the death of a sovereign

This was no longer the case after 1815. For all the insistence of monarchs like Louis XVIII or Alexander I on their Divine Right to rule, the basis of sovereignty had shifted perceptibly from individuals and families to nations and states.

He agreed not to initiate any restoration of land confiscated during the Revolution to the Church, the nobility or the Crown. Half a million people had purchased this property, and it was politically impracticable to force them, or the people to whom they had sold it on, to disgorge it. The Napoleonic Law Code was retained. The rights of hereditary nobles to posts in the military and the civil administration, abolished by the introduction of the ‘career open to the talents’ during the Revolution, were not restored. Freedom of religious practice remained in force despite the regime’s proclamation of Catholicism as the state religion. The Revolution’s division of the country into départements was left intact, as was its organization of Paris into arrondissements, both originally introduced in 1790.