Rites of Peace Quotes

“By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any constraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.”
― Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

“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.”
― Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

“By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any restraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.”
― Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

“How wrong they are, these Potentates, to go out like this without dignity, without anything to distinguish them,’ wrote Anna Eynard in her diary, ‘for it is then that one sees them as men just like any others, and even as less, for they have been placed in the position of being able to achieve more.”
― Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna