More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In stark, simple prose, Walter recorded the terrible sufferings he had experienced during the army’s retreat in the last months of 1812.
The washing of my hands and face proceeded very slowly because the crusts on my hands, ears, and nose had grown like fir-bark, with cracks and coal-black scales. My face resembled that of a heavily bearded Russian peasant; and, when I looked into the mirror, I was astonished myself at the strange appearance of my face. I washed, then, for an hour with hot water and soap.
He had been conscripted by the authorities in the French puppet state of Württemberg in 1806, and recalled to arms in 1809 and 1812.
Five of them survived to 1856, when Jakob, now a relatively prosperous building contractor and overseer, wrote a letter with news about the family to his son, who had emigrated to America and was living in Kansas.
On the way back from Moscow, Jakob Walter had at one point caught a glimpse of Napoleon himself, sitting down for an al fresco meal near the Berezina river.
Finally, in 1814, the Allies had occupied Paris, forcing Napoleon into exile on the Mediterranean Isle of Elba.
Moscow had been burned to the ground by the Russians to deny its resources to the enemy for overwintering.
In the chaos, French soldiers had looted everything they could lay their hands on, joined in the pillaging by peasants who descended upon the city from the surrounding countryside.
Only 2 per cent of the population had remained, and a large proportion of these, including many soldiers, did not survive.
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.
Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) captured the realities of the conflict in eighty-two engravings known by the title The Disasters of War. Unpublished until the 1860s, they showed horrific scenes of rape, pillage, mutilation and butchery. In one of the engravings, a corpse is depicted rising from a coffin holding a sheet of paper inscribed with the word Nada, ‘Nothing’, the word that the painter chose to summarize the end result of the bitter years of conflict.
Returning from the area in 1792, a French agent had reported that ‘not even the most vital means of subsistence – nothing for the animals or the seed – have been left behind, and other objects in the villages have also been stolen’.
After the Battle of Waterloo, some 900,000 foreign troops occupied France, causing widespread economic hardship by their exactions.
more than 9,000 impoverished inhabitants of Württemberg made the long trek eastwards to the Russian Empire in 1817, in response to promises of support from Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825).
Beginning in 1816, Europe experienced the most widespread and violent series of grain riots since the French Revolution.
The proclamation of a militant Catholicism as the state religion alienated many educated Frenchmen.
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.
Had Napoleon won, things would have been very different. ‘Waterloo was not a battle but a change in the direction of the world.’
What was striking about the intervention of 1815 was its wholly preventive nature. It set the scene for further actions of this kind in the following years. 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.
Everywhere that Napoleon ruled he had replaced encrusted custom and privilege with rationality and uniformity. While the emperor’s armies rampaged across Europe, his bureaucrats had moved in silently behind, reorganizing, systematizing, standardizing.
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.
Everywhere Napoleon had brought change, and as he departed for his final exile on St Helena in 1815, it was clear that much of it could not be reversed.
Between 1811 and 1824 the Spanish Empire in the Americas was destroyed.
But 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.
The British had no serious rival by 1815.
The ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity propagated by the French Revolution and claimed retrospectively by Napoleon had no immediate purchase here.
On 1 November 1814, following a lengthy series of preparatory meetings, the heads of state and representatives of the major European powers met in Vienna to decide how to put Europe back together again.
On 6 December 1814 a ball thrown by Tsar Alexander in the Razumovsky Palace was accompanied by a thirty-six-course dinner served on twenty large tables. Shortly afterwards, the whole palace was burned to the ground in a fire caused by a malfunction in the recently installed heating system, destroying Prince Razumovsky’s entire library along with his art collection, furniture, and much else besides. Many of the participants in the Congress, including the tsar, turned up to watch the spectacle as the blaze reached the roof and brought it crashing down on what was left of the contents.
With France shattered and defeated, the Austrian Empire was the most powerful state in Europe.
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 deal.
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, a vision gaudily symbolized in the revival of pre-Revolutionary aristocratic sociability in the balls and banquets that went on at the margins of the Congress of Vienna.
and had only just, in 1813, seized the Caucasus from the Qajar dynasty of Persia.
Tsar Alexander I, who had come to the throne in 1801 when his father, Pavel I (1754–1801), was murdered by Guards officers who resented his Prussian military style, was an enigmatic figure, dubbed by Napoleon ‘the Northern Sphinx’.
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.
After Napoleon’s ‘Hundred Days’, however, sentiment in the chancelleries of Europe turned against the French, who were now forced to restore looted artworks, pay an indemnity, and put up with the presence of nearly a million Allied soldiers, many of them German, and all of them living off the land, for a period of several months.
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.
For its part, Russia gained huge swathes of territory, not only in Poland but also in Finland and Bessarabia.
The British war on the United States of America, which had led to the burning down of the White House by a British expeditionary force in 1812, had been finally brought to an end in 1814, with disputes over the border with Canada, over fishing rights, and other relatively minor matters, settled or silently shelved.
The sheer destructiveness of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was a lesson that the leaders of all the powers, including ultimately France itself, were determined to learn.
Altogether, the death rate of men in battle between 1815 and 1914 was seven times less than that of the previous century.
summed up in the idea of the ‘Concert of Europe’, whose main purpose was the maintenance of peace.
Ever since the time of Louis XIV, the main contender for European domination had been France, in wealth and population and military organization by far the greatest of the European powers. But the prospect of French hegemony was destroyed forever by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
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 – the War of the Spanish Succession, for example, or the War of the Austrian Succession. 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.
On his restoration to the throne, Louis XVIII’s allegiance to the ancien régime was symbolized by his replacement of the tricolor with the royal fleur de lys as the official flag of France, his refusal to recognize the Legion of Honour instituted by Napoleon, and his official announcement that 1814 was the nineteenth year of his reign.
Yet for all his deep-rooted belief in the legitimacy of the ancien régime, Louis recognized, especially after the alarms of the ‘Hundred Days’, that he could not entirely turn the clock of history back to 1788. He agreed not to initiate any restoration of land confiscated during the Revolution to the Church, the nobility or the Crown.
the educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who had founded Berlin University in 1810,
gifted publicist, Arndt called in 1814 for the unification of Germany under a constitutional monarchy with its capital in Berlin (Vienna was too multinational for him), and stressed the underlying unity of the German people, which he wanted to see expressed in a common language, common rituals and symbols, and even a common style of dress; the mobilization of patriotic volunteers against Napoleon in 1812–13 had shown the way.
Such ideas inspired the students of the Burschenschaft, who wore the black, red and gold colours of the volunteers. In October 1817 they celebrated the anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation at the Wartburg castle, where Luther had translated the Bible into vernacular German, by listening to fiery speeches extolling their Germanness.
The event was condemned by the young poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) as ignorant and medieval.
Visiting the playwright in his home on 23 March 1819, Sand stabbed him repeatedly before rushing out into the street and stabbing himself in the chest, crying out ‘Long live the German Fatherland!’ He survived, to be tried and publicly beheaded the following year.