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The triumph of reaction in Germany was embodied in the constitution of the Confederation, which was revised in July 1820 to provide for any member state to intervene in the affairs of another to preserve order.
German states were run bureaucratically, not autocratically, and a rule-bound system of administration was widely regarded as a more effective limitation on the arbitrary power of the sovereign than representative assemblies were ever likely to be.
In Spain, King Fernando VII (1784–1833), restored by Napoleon to the throne after the defeat of the French armies in the Peninsular War, rejected the liberal constitution passed in 1812 and brought back the previous absolutist regime. He readmitted the previously banned Jesuits, imposed strict censorship, and restored to the aristocracy and the Church the land seized during the Napoleonic occupation.
The War Minister General Francisco de Eguia (1750–1827) signalled his adherence to the ancien régime by wearing an eighteenth-century wig. The king regressed even further by banning the Freemasons and reintroducing the Inquisition, which immediately began hunting down heretics.
By 1820 the Spanish state was effectively bankrupt, unable even to pay the army it was mustering for another expedition to Latin America.
From the point of view of the Holy Alliance, the growing chaos and the revolutionary threat in Spain could not be tolerated.
Successive governors of the Kingdom warned Metternich not to repeat the mistake of the reforming eighteenth-century Habsburg monarch Joseph II (1741–90), who had tried to impose uniformity and central control over the entire empire. ‘The Lombards,’ one of them declared, ‘have been and always will be unable to get used to the Germanic forms imprinted on the government of their country.’
In Sicily news of the uprising in Naples had sparked a popular revolt with riots in the streets, crowds storming the prisons in Palermo, and bands of artisans beheading two of the leading constitutional liberals.
They met with no serious resistance either from the Spanish people or from the Spanish army, whose generals quickly made their peace with the monarch.
In Russia, a younger generation of army officers had imbibed French Revolutionary ideas during the wars and the occupation of France in 1815.
As in other countries, too, secret societies derived from, or inspired by, Freemasonry were the preferred means of discussing and preparing a revolt.
Of all the regimes established or re-established in the post-1815 Restoration, the most conservative was undoubtedly that of Tsar Nicholas I in Russia.
The aim of education was, he said, to provide a ‘deep conviction and warm faith in the truly Russian saving principles of Autocracy, Orthodoxy and the National Principle, which constitute the sheet-anchor of our salvation and the most faithful pledge of the strength and greatness of our country’.
Nicholas I, as Queen Victoria remarked, was ‘sincere even in his most despotic acts, from a sense that is the only way to govern’. It would not be until his death in 1855 that the permafrost of Russian politics would begin to thaw.
In his zeal to prevent revolution, Nicholas soon became known as the ‘gendarme of Europe’.
‘Congress Poland’ had a constitution of its own with its Diet and administration, its own taxes, and even its own army.
‘Order a search to be made in Warsaw,’ commanded Tsar Nicholas, ‘for all the flags and standards of our former Polish Army and send them to me . . . Remove everything that has historical or national value, and deliver it here.’
Nicholas abolished the Polish constitution, along with the Diet and the army, brought Russians in to run the administration, and ruled henceforth by military decree.
Nicholas eventually contented himself with abolishing the provincial administrative structure of the Kingdom. He replaced the Polish złoty with the Russian rouble, and, in 1849, causing enormous confusion, he introduced Russian weights and measures in place of Polish ones.
The peasants remained quiescent, and the uprising a purely urban phenomenon.
It was, he declared, a quarrel between Slavs.
That was not the way it was seen in the rest of Europe, where anything up to 7,000 Poles fled during or after the uprising. One of them was the composer Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49), who had left Warsaw just before the rebellion and was never to return. From Stuttgart he wrote helplessly to his father after the fall of Warsaw: ‘The enemy must have reached our home. The suburbs must have been stormed and burned . . . Oh, why could I not kill a single Muscovite!’
Looking around for allies, the pasha established contact with the secret ‘Society of Friends’ founded in 1814 by Greek merchants and seeking ‘the liberation of the Motherland’. Its President, Alexander Ypsilantis (1792–1828), an officer in the Russian army, invaded the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia with a small force raised by the society, with the ultimate aim of provoking a war between Russia and Turkey that would liberate Greeks everywhere by destroying the Ottoman Empire.
By April 1821 some 15,000 out of 40,000 Turkish inhabitants of the Peloponnese had been killed.
The Ottoman reaction was scarcely less brutal. The sultan had the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople hanged from his cathedral gate, despite the fact that he had tried to calm the situation by excommunicating the rebels.
Often they were shocked by what they found. ‘All came expecting to find the Peloponnesus filled with Plutarch’s men,’ noted one of them, ‘and all returned thinking the inhabitants of Newgate [the main London prison] more moral.’
The most prominent of the philhellenes who sailed to the assistance of the Greek rebels was the English Romantic poet Lord Byron.
His death from fever, possibly sepsis, at Missolonghi in April 1824 transformed him into a martyr for the cause and led to still more volunteers making their way to Greece from many different European countries.
A hundred volunteers sailed from the island to help the Greeks, but were captured by pirates on the way and, tragically, returned to the slavery from which they had formerly escaped.
None of this, however, helped very much. The different factions of the uprising, based on shifting alliances of pirates, brigands, educated indigenous nationalists and returning expatriates – there were Greek communities all over the Mediterranean and south-eastern Europe – began to fight among themselves.
In 1826 the sultan, recognizing that they had become largely useless for military purposes, ordered that the Janissaries be disbanded.
These disturbances provided the opportunity for the Russians in 1826 to impose on the sultan the Convention of Ackerman, which forced the Turks to evacuate the Romanian Principalities.
But when the sultan refused to accept the Treaty of London, Codrington, encouraged by the British consul in Istanbul, the philhellene Stratford Canning (1786–1880), ordered his ships in October 1827 to open fire on the Turkish fleet lying at anchor in the sheltered bay of Navarino in the south-western corner of the Peloponnese.
The Ottoman Sultan saw Wellington’s statement as an encouragement to repudiate the Ackerman Convention and continue with his efforts to suppress the Greeks; the tsar responded by declaring war on the Ottoman Empire.
by August 1829 a Russian army was threatening Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire seemed on the verge of collapse.
A conference held in London between November 1829 and February 1830 decided to establish by European agreement a small independent Greek state under a constitutional monarchy, assigned the Romanian Principalities to Russia’s sphere of influence, and committed the participants, including Russia, to abandoning any further claims on Ottoman territory in the Balkans.
(a move made possible by the currency of French as the language of international diplomacy and of the Russian court).
Among other things, he also introduced the potato into Greece in an effort to improve people’s diet. At first, this met with deep scepticism among the peasantry, who refused to take up his offer of free distribution of seed potatoes to anyone who would plant them. Trying a new tactic, Kapodistrias had the potatoes piled up on the waterfront at Nafplio and surrounded by armed guards. This convinced local people and visitors from the countryside that these new vegetables were precious objects, and thus worth stealing.
When Karadjordje returned in secret as an agent of the Greek rebels, charged with the task of destabilizing Ottoman rule in Serbia, Obrenović, fearful of his influence, had him hacked to death in his sleep, inaugurating more than a century of murderous rivalry between the two families.
Skilfully building up close relations with Orthodox Russia, Obrenović exploited the difficulties of the Ottomans caused by the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–9 to take full control.
In September an all-Bosnian assembly in Sarajevo effectively declared Bosnian autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. Supported by at least some Christian subjects in the area, this can be seen effectively as the first real declaration of Bosnian national identity.
The first really serious crack in the European edifice constructed at Vienna occurred in 1830, when the reactionary regime of Charles X in France crumbled virtually overnight.
So agitated was he that in waving his arms about to lend emphasis to his words, the king accidentally knocked off his own hat, which rolled across the floor and ended at the feet of his cousin Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans (1773–1850). Over the years Louis-Philippe had acquired a reputation as a liberal, following in the footsteps of his father, whose sympathy with the Revolution in 1789 had earned him the sobriquet of ‘Philippe-Égalité’. The symbolism was not lost on those present.
In the meantime, Charles sought to bolster his prestige by declaring war on Algeria, nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire, where the governor had caused a diplomatic incident by hitting the French ambassador with a fly-whisk in a fit of pique.
In three weeks, an expeditionary force succeeded in occupying Algiers and laying the foundations there for a new French colonial empire.
‘This is no longer a riot,’ Marmont wrote to the king, echoing, perhaps deliberately, the words addressed to Louis XVI on the fall of the Bastille: ‘this is a revolution.’
As more of his troops deserted, Charles threw in the towel, wrote out his formal abdication, and departed for England and subsequently Austria.
Louis-Philippe and his advisers made a conscious effort to include Bonapartists and Republicans in the post-revolutionary settlement. Four of Napoleon’s marshals officiated at his swearing-in ceremony (there was no formal coronation) and the royal palace was thrown open to the public, whom the new monarch greeted in person, joining in their singing of the hymn of the French Revolution, the Marseillaise.
Louis-Philippe adopted the tricolor as the official flag of France, declared that ‘the will of the nation has called me’, and styled himself King Louis-Philippe rather than Louis XIX or Philippe VII.
The 1830 Revolution in France seemed to have settled little, as Republicans, Bonapartists, Orléanists and Legitimists continued to fight each other for the right to rule.
