Episode 17: Europe in Concert

This is The Siècle, Episode 17: Europe in Concert.

Welcome back. For the past year I’ve been talking about France in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Today we’re going to zoom out a bit and look at the situation in Europe more broadly.

Now, of course, we’ve been talking about Europe a fair bit — but only insofar as it directly impacted France, and primarily as concerned the occupation of France, war indemnity, and other consequences of the peace imposed in 1815. But that 1815 peace did a lot more than just punish France. There were a whole flurry of treaties, alliances, secret understandings and more enacted at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

The most famous of these was the Congress of Vienna, a multinational summit held in the Austrian capital in 1814 and 1815, which dealt with everything from river navigation to the slave trade to far-flung colonies in addition to settling the affairs of Europe. On top of that you had a whole host of other treaties about the same time period to settle particular issues arising from the wars; the most notable of these were two Treaties of Paris, one in May 1814 and the other in November 1815, which dealt directly with the French situation. In this episode, we’re going to cover the entire postwar diplomatic settlement of which the Congress of Vienna was merely the centerpiece.

In 1814, after Napoleon’s surrender that spring, the Treaty of Paris in May called for a “general congress” in Vienna. And so countries from across the continent sent representatives to Austria for a highly-anticipated meeting that would sort out the messy aftermath of a generation of war. The Congress continued to meet for months, even after Napoleon’s return in March 1815, and finally signed its Final Act right before Waterloo.

The most important attendees in Vienna were the representatives of the great powers of Europe. That included several heads of state in personal attendance, such as the Russian Tsar Alexander I, the Austrian Emperor Francis I, and the Prussian King Frederick William III. Britain sent its foreign minister, Viscount Castlereagh, as well as its ambassador to France, the celebrated general Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington. King Louis XVIII sent the famed diplomat Talleyrand to represent France’s interests, though Louis, who didn’t trust Talleyrand also engaged in direct negotiations via letter.¹ Also present and playing a central role was the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich. But the entire rest of Europe showed up, too: anyone who wanted something from the Congress needed to be there, and nearly everyone wanted something from the Congress.

“Congress of Vienna.” After Jean-Baptiste Isabey CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See list of personages in this drawing here.

Still, the host of minor diplomats, nobles and interest groups at the Congress were largely frustrated. There was never any general meeting of the “Congress of Vienna.” Instead, most of the decisions were made in direct negotiations between the representatives of the great powers. If you were there on behalf of some minor principality who wanted your case heard, your best bet was to get one of the great powers to advocate on your behalf. Everyone else was left to simply enjoy the huge array of hunts, balls, festivals and other social activities that sprung up to entertain the delegates, whether or not they had any power to make decisions.²

Carving up Europe like a piece of cheese

The people who did have power to make decisions at the Congress of Vienna made a lot of them. The most notable? A drastic redrawing of the map of Europe, and the establishment of a new geopolitical order. So let’s look at that new map and new order, starting with the continent’s great powers.

If you visit this episode online, at thesiecle.com/episode17 — that’s t-h-e-s-i-e-c-l-e — you can see maps illustrating the various borders I’m about to discuss.

Thomas Lawrence, “Portrait of Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich,” 1815. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

During the Congress of Vienna, Count Metternich once wrote a letter describing how he was passing his time: “I spent the day carving up Europe like a piece of cheese,” Metternich wrote.³ Part of this was aimed directly at France: the great powers of Europe tried to strengthen France’s immediate neighbors, to contain any future possible aggressiveness. So, for example, the Kingdom of the Netherlands was created, with not only the culturally Protestant lands of the modern-day Netherlands, but also the mostly Catholic population of what is today Belgium. This more robust country, it was felt, would be better able to defend itself — and given how French nationalists considered Belgium to be inside the “natural boundaries” of France, it might very well need to. All of this rather ignored the fact that neither the Belgians nor the Dutch were particularly keen on being in the same country.⁴ Along France’s border with Italy, the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia was bolstered with the land of the now-extinguished Republic of Genoa.⁵

Alexander Altenhof, “Europe 1815. Political situation after the Congress of Vienna in June 1815.” July 20, 2016. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The other big motivation behind map changes at the Congress of Vienna was to reward victorious powers with new territory, usually at the expense of rulers who had stayed allied to Napoleon for too long.⁶ Often this territorial acquisition was also justified with the aim of containing France. For example, Prussia was given a big chunk of territory in western Germany, bordering France along the Rhine, as was the mid-sized German state of Bavaria. The idea was that if France sent soldiers over the Rhine in the future, it would be invading a kingdom with the power to defend itself, rather than some minor princeling of the sort that lined the Rhine in 1789.⁷ But of course, this kind of ostensibly anti-French maneuver also had the effect of adding hundreds of thousands of new, prosperous citizens to Prussia. Prussia’s new lands along the Rhine had the awkward drawback of not being contiguous with her existing possessions in eastern Germany, but the Prussians weren’t overly concerned. As one diplomat wrote in a letter to his wife, “With the first war that comes, Prussia will fill in the gaps.”⁸

Similarly, Austria was enlarged with a huge chunk of territory in northern Italy, taken from the now-extinguished Venetian Republic. This again put a great power along one of the routes for possible French invasion — but also happened to reinforce Austria’s centuries-old grand strategy of seeking hegemony in Italy.

Robert Alfers and kgberger, “Map of the Holy Roman Empire, 1789,” June 8, 2008. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

My mention of the now-former republics of Genoa and Venice raises an important point. Technically it wasn’t the Congress of Vienna that wiped these countries off the map. Both had been eliminated during the course of the Napoleonic Wars; the Congress just declined to restore them. And that was the case for many of its map changes, most notably in Germany. Before the French Revolution, the old Holy Roman Empire still existed, with — depending on how you measure it — anywhere from 300 to more than 1,000 independent states of varying sizes in a complex web of dukes and electors, bishoprics and free cities and far more. These had already been pared down significantly by Napoleon, who imposed on Germany a series of what were called “mediatisations,” where formerly independent countries were now reduced to subservient members of larger countries. The Congress of Vienna largely confirmed these mediatisations, leaving just 39 independent German states.⁹

These 39 German states were lumped together into a new “German Confederation,” a collection of German states whose leaders agreed to meet together to coordinate their economies and defend themselves against outside enemies, especially France. Of course, most of these 39 countries were fairly small, making Prussia and Austria the confederation’s dominant members.¹⁰

ziegelbrenner, “Map of German Confederation 1815–1866,” July 17, 2006. CC-BY SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Italy, too, had its map redrawn, as we’ve already discussed. In addition to the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in northwest Italy and Austria’s holdings in the northeast, the southern half of the peninsula went to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, also referred to as the Kingdom of Naples. When the Congress first wrapped up, this territory was ruled by Napoleon’s general and brother-in-law Joachim Murat, but after Murat made the terrible blunder of declaring for Napoleon during the Hundred Days, he was expelled and replaced by the kingdom’s traditional rulers, a branch of the House of Bourbon.

The pope directly ruled the so-called “Papal States” in central Italy, from his base in Rome. There were also a host of smaller Italian states, but many of them were ruled by members of the Habsburg family that led Austria — meaning that Austria exercised a hegemonic domination over most of Italy, now that its traditional rival for dominance in the peninsula, France, had been contained.

A final aspect of the map-redrawing that the Congress of Vienna did was based on the idea of compensation. If a country lost territory as part of one decision by the Congress, they often tried to find new territory for it somewhere else.

In Scandinavia, for example, the Napoleonic Wars had seen Sweden lose Finland to Russia and her Pommeranian territories in northern Germany to Prussia. But Sweden had been part of the victorious anti-Napoleonic alliance along with Russia and Prussia, and if she couldn’t have her old territories back, she demanded compensation: Norway, which had previously been ruled by Denmark. Denmark having had the poor judgment to remain loyal to Napoleon to the end, she found no defenders when Sweden marched an army in to seize Norway.¹¹ Prussia got land in the Rhineland not just to hem in France but to compensate her for land in Poland that now went to Russia.

I’ve condensed and summarized these sweeping changes to Europe’s map as much as I can. One could probably do an entire podcast series on the Congress of Vienna, and we need to stay focused on France. If you’d like to learn more, one of my principal sources for this section is a book by Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, about the extended peace process at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. At thesiecle.com/episode17, you can find a link to purchase it, in addition to a range of maps that will help you make sense of what I’ve described here.

A new order

Napoleon’s defeat had been brought about by a multinational coalition whose members worked closely together, coordinating strategy and diplomacy alike. Now that he was gone, all these nations faced the big question of what to do next.

The answer was very nearly more war. In the months after Napoleon’s first abdication, negotiations at the Congress of Vienna turned south over competing claims by the victorious powers. The cause was Prussia’s demand to annex the formerly independent German kingdom of Saxony; the broader issue was the balance of power in Europe. Prussia, the weakest of the four victorious great powers, was demanding territory from formerly independent German states to bolster its strategic situation, and in particular wanted the territory of Saxony, whose king had had the poor judgment of sticking with Napoleon too long.

Russia was fine with this annexation, in part because Prussia agreed to let the tsar have his way with Poland. But Austria saw Prussia as a dangerous rival who couldn’t be allowed to grow too strong. Britain agreed. With neither side being willing to back down, rumors began to flow that it might be settled with war among the victors: Prussia and Russia versus Austria and Britain. If that sounds far-fetched, remember that the victorious Allies in World War II almost immediately fell to dissenting among themselves. Matters were serious enough that Britain hastily wrapped up its sideshow war with the United States, the War of 1812, so it could redeploy forces back to Europe.¹²

The resolution, it turned out, involved France, the defeated power whose future everyone else was supposedly negotiating. King Louis XVIII was opposed on principle to the annexation of Saxony, not least because the king of Saxony was Louis’s first cousin;¹³ his government also objected to letting Prussia get too strong. With the victorious allies poised for a brutal war, Louis’s representative in Vienna, Talleyrand, proposed that France back Britain and Austria with an army. Remarkably given the past 25 years of war, fear of Prussia and Russia eclipsed fear of France, and the alliance was signed. With the French-Austrian-British side now preeminent, Russia and Prussia backed down and a compromise was found.¹⁴

But if war between the Allies wasn’t the future, the peaceful dissolution of the wartime alliance was a definite possibility. Indeed, the alliance had already nearly splintered several times even before Napoleon’s defeat. For example, during the advance through Europe in 1813, Russia’s generals and ministers both argued that since Russia had avenged itself for Napoleon’s invasion the year before, and broken French power over the rest of Europe, they should declare victory and go home instead of proceeding to invade France. But Tsar Alexander rejected this counsel and kept his army in the war, as all the other powers did whenever their commitments wavered.¹⁵ The prevailing mood was that France was too powerful for any one nation to control, and that some sort of system of alliances was necessary to prevent future French aggression.¹⁶

Into this void stepped Alexander, the mercurial Russian tsar. Increasingly devoted to mystical ideas, Alexander believed that the victory over Napoleon had not merely been a secular triumph, but a cosmological one — the vanquishing of “devils conjured by the Revolution and Napoleon.”¹⁷ To prevent these Satanic forces from recurring, Alexander drafted up what he called a “Holy Alliance” to which he invited the other crowned heads of Europe. The document drawn up by Alexander declared that it was “necessary to base the direction of policy adopted by the Powers in their mutual relations on the sublime truths taught by the eternal religion of God the redeemer.”¹⁸

The other European leaders thought the whole thing absurd. Emperor Francis of Austria was skeptical; King Frederick William of Prussia thought it ridiculous. The British leaders in Vienna, Castlereagh and Wellington, had difficulty restraining laughter when Alexander earnestly pitched them on the Holy Alliance; Castlereagh told his own government that it was a “piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense” and warned them that “frankly, [Alexander’s] mind is not completely sound.” Nonetheless, not wanting to upset Alexander on something he cared so passionately about, almost every monarch in Europe eventually signed on.¹⁹

The Holy Alliance is often dismissed as little more than a “statement of principles”²⁰ with no concrete impact, though there is no denying that it had symbolic power — power enough that three decades later, one Karl Marx would reference it in the opening lines of his Communist Manifesto, which declared that “All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance…”

Of more practical significance, at least in the short run, was a second alliance signed in the aftermath of Waterloo. This purely secular alliance was between the four great powers of Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia, and is accordingly dubbed the “Quadruple Alliance.” This military alliance committed the four allies to collectively uphold the terms of the Congress of Vienna, and to prevent any member of the Bonaparte family from holding power in France. It also, significantly, committed the four powers to hold regular congresses to discuss “what measures might be judged most salutary for the tranquility and prosperity of peoples and for the preservation of peace in Europe.” This was, historian Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny notes, “the first seed of international organizations which recur, alas, after every great war.”²¹

To the signing of the Quadruple Alliance in 1815 we must add a coda: in 1818, at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, France successfully negotiated an end to the “occupation of guarantee” in her northern departments, as I discussed in Episode 6 and Episode 14. But in addition to ending the occupation, that same meeting saw another agreement: satisfied that Louis XVIII’s regime was now firmly established, the powers of the Quadruple Alliance agreed to let Restoration France join them, in what now became the Quintuple Alliance — though the original four powers renewed the anti-French Quadruple Alliance in a secret treaty as well.²²

As formal arrangements, none of these alliances will last terribly long. But the general system set up in Vienna, and at follow-up congresses over the next few years, will endure. Historians dub it the “Congress System,” or more broadly the “Concert of Europe” — a diplomatic environment in which the major powers of Europe would hash out their differences diplomatically, rather than on the battlefield. That’s not to say that this period was peaceful; there was plenty of violence, including both civil wars and inter-state conflict. But by and large, until this system eventually breaks down, what you didn’t see were massive wars between great powers.²³ Still, as we’ll soon see, Europe’s great powers working together peacefully is only a good thing if you like what they’re working toward — which many people very much did not.

Colonial revolts

Spain and Portugal didn’t see their European borders redrawn at the Congress of Vienna²⁴, but the lingering effects of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s wars had profound impacts on both countries’ vast South American colonial empires — which in turn will have significant impacts on Europe.

Spanish and Portuguese empires, c. 1790, by Wikimedia user Nagihuin. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

At the outset of the French Revolution, Spain had at least nominal control of a massive swath of North and South America: all of the present-day United States west of the Mississippi plus Florida and the Gulf Coast, Mexico and Central America, and all of South America except for Brazil.

However, the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars combined with the spread of liberal ideas sparked a series of revolts across Spanish America. The details of these revolts are so far beyond the scope of this podcast, but suffice to say that by the start of 1820, the Spanish-American revolutions had had some considerable successes but were still facing an uncertain future. If you’d like to learn more, I highly recommend Season 5 of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, which spends 27 episodes covering what I’ve just disposed of in two paragraphs.

Spain’s smaller Iberian neighbor, Portugal, didn’t face bottom-up revolts in its American colony like Spain did. But they ended up in about the same place.

In 1807, France invaded Portugal, and forced the Portuguese royal family to flee to Portugal’s colony of Brazil, which they proceeded to rule directly. Even after Napoleon’s defeat, the Portuguese monarchs remained in Brazil, governing it like a sovereign country. Unfortunately for Portugal, the Brazilians quite liked this degree of independence, and when the mainland tried to reassert dominance after 1820, they’ll resist and ultimately rebel in 1822, setting up an independent Empire of Brazil ruled by a member of the Portuguese royal family who sided with the colony over the mother country.²⁵

Liberalism vs. absolutism

The years after Waterloo featured a few things in common across much of Europe. One was the experience of harvest failures in 1816, the “Year Without A Summer.” I talked about France’s experience around that year in Episode 11, and discussed the British experience with Chris Fernandez-Packham in Supplemental 6. Areas all across Europe experienced unrest due to this disruption of the economy’s agricultural base.

But the thing that gets the most attention, at least in hindsight, is the rising tide of liberal ideas sweeping the continent in the years after Waterloo — and the attempts of Europe’s powers to suppress them.

In recent episodes we’ve already talked about the growing strength of liberal politicians in France, culminating in a backlash after the 1820 assassination of the Duc de Berry, as I discussed in Episode 15. Something I didn’t mention was that the rising tide of French liberalism was a matter of international concern, too — the 1819 election of Henri Grégoire, featured in Episode 14, had in particular prompted suggestions by Austria and Russia that the Quadruple Alliance should intervene militarily to suppress French liberals. These proposals didn’t go anywhere, in part because Britain protested vociferously that France’s “internal eccentricities” didn’t concern the Alliance.²⁶

But France was not alone in seeing a rise in liberal sentiment in 1815-1820. Both the ideas unleashed by the French Revolution, and the imposition of the Napoleonic Law Code in countries France conquered, had led to massive changes: secularization of church land, professionalization of government bureaucracy, standardization of weights and measures, and the abolition of centuries-old traditions. Much as some might have liked, in 1815 “it was clear that much of it could not be reversed.”²⁷ Not that this stopped many traditionalist monarchs from undoing what they could. From Prussia down to minor powers, many — though certainly not all — Napoleonic reforms were rolled back.

In Germany, the response to this repression was a wave of student activism, backing both liberal principles and the nationalist idea of creating a unified Germany out of the scattered independent German states. When one student radical assassinated a conservative author in 1819, the Austrian foreign minister Metternich successfully called for a crackdown. In a series of decrees enacted at the spa town of Karlsbad,²⁸ the states of the German Confederation agreed to ban students and teachers who endorsed “harmful doctrines” and to impose press censorship. A year later, the Confederation’s constitution was amended to enable member states to intervene in the internal affairs of each other to “preserve order”; the same round of amendments also dropped earlier guarantees of religious toleration.²⁹

The most significant liberal movement, however, was in Spain. Like many countries in Europe, Spain in the 1810s saw a rise in liberal sentiments and absolutist crackdowns in response. The focal point for Spain was the country’s 1812 constitution, which had been adopted by Spanish legislators meeting in Cadiz, during a dark time when much of Spain was occupied by French forces and Spain’s King Ferdinand VII a prisoner of Napoleon. The 1812 constitution set up a constitutional monarchy with freedom of the press and the abolition of feudalism. Because Spain was occupied and at war, however few of its provisions took practical effect before Ferdinand was released from French captivity in December 1813. Within six months of his release, Ferdinand had abolished the 1812 constitution, reimposing absolutist rule and restoring censorship. He also restored land and power to the aristocracy and church, and passed over many of the politicians and army officers who had taken the lead in resisting the French.³⁰

Throughout this whole time, however, you’ll remember that Spain’s American colonies were in open revolt. Though the country’s foreign occupation had understandably distracted the Spanish government, by 1819 it had finally mustered the resources to send a large military expedition to the Americas. Or rather, it had mustered some of the resources. Rather critically, the government was considerably behind on the little matter of paying these soldiers who were about to be sent half a world away. Unsurprisingly, these soldiers — many of whom had been passed over for promotion under Ferdinand’s reactionary regime — were most unhappy. And so in January 1820, when a band of junior officers held a “pronunciamiento” or “pronouncement” in favor of the 1812 constitution, the unpaid rank and file soldiers waiting in Cadiz to deploy to the New World largely backed them. The “Mutiny of Cadiz” picked up steam, soon seizing Ferdinand and forcing him to restore the 1812 constitution.³¹

This context should make events in France about this time make more sense. The Mutiny of Cadiz happened a month before the assassination of the Duc de Berry, which partly explains the fervor of the anti-liberal backlash. It wasn’t just affairs in France that seemed to be spiraling in a sharply liberal direction — Europe as a whole seemed to be going that way, and more traditionalist rulers were struggling to contain it. (Ferdinand VII, I might also remind you, was a member of the Bourbon family.)

These fears seemed to be confirmed in July 1820, when disgruntled soldiers in Naples³² launched their own mutiny, inspired by the Spanish version. They even forced their king, confusingly also a Bourbon named Ferdinand, to adopt the Spanish constitution of 1812.³³

The success of these military coups in Spain and Italy also explains why French liberals turned so quickly to coups after the Exceptional Laws were passed in the summer of 1820. The attempted coup of Aug. 19, 1820, which I discussed in Episode 15, wasn’t just a random conspiracy — it was explicitly modeled on multiple successful coups that had also happened that same year. Of course, the French coup was not successful; for all the problems faced by the French state at this time, it was much more capable than the Spanish or Neapolitan governments. France also already had a constitution, with an elected assembly and guaranteed rights. The Charter didn’t go as far as liberals wanted, but Spain and Naples didn’t have any constitutions at all until the 1820 mutinies. It’s possible this helped make Louis’s regime more resilient than those of his Spanish and Neapolitan cousins.

One final note on the Cadiz Mutiny: in addition to establishing a liberal government in Spain, it had a huge impact on the ongoing revolts in Spanish America. Remember that the soldiers who mutinied had been about to sail to America to put down the revolts. That expedition would now never leave, and Spain became preoccupied by domestic concerns, so the Cadiz Mutiny effectively shifted the Spanish-American revolts into their final stage, at which point independence seemed inevitable. It’s all more complicated than that, of course, but this is a podcast about French history.

The diplomacy continues

We’re going to leave Europe right here for now, but don’t worry: the next episode will be sticking to foreign policy, as we resume our narrative in the fall of 1820. Now politically secure, Louis’s government is going to have to decide what role it wants to play in a Europe rent between liberalism and absolutism. Meanwhile, every decision made on the world stage is going to have deep repercussions back in Paris.

Join me next time for Episode 18: The Road to Trocadero.