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Rites of Peace
The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna
By Adam Zamoyski
Early in the Versailles Convention in 1919, someone was tactless enough to make reference to the Congress of Vienna, held just over a hundred years earlier. President Wilson evinced distaste and expressed the hope that the “odor of Vienna” would not enter the deliberations at Versailles again. He seems to have gotten his wish. Indeed, Adam Zamoyski, the author of this delightful history, found only half-a-dozen general treatments in English of the Congress of Vienna. No one, it seems, has ever wanted to talk about the Congress of Vienna. The author has little reason to share this reluctance, however. As a noted historian of 19th century nationalism and a descendant of the highest level of Polish nobility (born in New York; Oxford educated), his books tend to take every opportunity to point out how modern European history has been influenced by the Polish Question, which was the puzzle of how the national aspirations of the Polish people could gratified when they ran counter to the international stability of Europe after the dismemberment of the Polish kingdom in the 18th century. Well, the Congress of Vienna actually was in large part about the Polish Question; and when it wasn't about it actually it was about it metaphorically, since similar tensions occasioned by the imperfect coincidence of nation and state were also becoming the key themes of German and Italian politics. The Congress of Vienna got its bad reputation because it was the basis of a system in Europe under which, for a generation, the major conservative powers stood athwart the train tracks of history and cried “halt!” The last chapter in this book is entitled “The Arrest of Europe,” so the author is not really of different mind on the matter. He does emphasize, however, that the sour aftertaste of Vienna was in part the result of the high, even millennial expectations with which the Congress began. Strictly speaking, the Congress met just once, on June 9 1815, for the ratification of the Final Act by all the contracting parties. However, the sovereigns and ministers of the European powers, great and small, had been meeting in Vienna in committee and in summit conferences since the fall of the year before. Moreover, the Congress at Vienna cannot be strongly differentiated from the string of agreements that the four principal allies in the anti-Napoleonic coalition (Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia) began to make after Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812. “The Congress,” in this sense, was also an extension of the Treaty of Paris of 1814 (which had eight signatories), a remarkably non-vindictive agreement that made peace between France and the rest of Europe. That was perhaps the greatest single difference between Vienna and Versailles. Versailles was a peace conference, but peace had already been made before the Powers assembled at Vienna, where they anticipated spending a few weeks establishing a permanent system of international order. In any case, the author notes that “The Congress” should also be understood to include the multilateral meetings that followed it and were intended to implement it, through the Congress of Verona in 1822. This twilight of the Congress is usually called the “Concert of Europe” and no less a person than Henry Kissinger has characterized it as the government of Europe. The author, no fan of Kissinger, tells us that the Concert was short both on concerted action and in duration. Rites of Peace is old-fashioned history in the best sense: heavy on research into the diplomatic archives, and enlivened with memoirs and personal correspondence, much of it unobtrusively copied and compiled by Chancellor Metternich's ingenious secret police. Metternich was the first minister of the Emperor Francis I of Austria, who had been Francis II of the Holy Roman Empire until that venerable institution was closed down eight years before the Congress started (more or less) in 1814. Francis was quite capable of summit-level diplomacy, but the author characterizes him as a timid and pious man whose chief hope was that Metternich would make all this unpleasantness go away. Metternich himself is a byword for duplicity and intrigue, but here we meet him bragging about his diplomatic exploits to a somewhat bewildering string of mistresses (plus his wife, whom he loved dearly and to whom he was faithful in the sense of taking care to spare her embarrassment). We also understand that he practiced his rococo craft because he was scared. Austria was vulnerable and, as recent events seemed to prove, not very formidable. It needed stability more than any other power, in part because the patchwork of territories that Francis ruled was so diverse and artificial. Prussia, by and by, was becoming more German as it lost territory to the east and gained territory in the west and north. In principle, this was a trend toward more stability. However, Prussia's King Frederick William had a lively sense that the territories Prussia had acquired over the past century were strategically fragile. They also suffered the current embarrassment of hosting the armies of his overwhelming Russian ally, an ally whose presence was becoming hourly more unpopular. Perhaps more than any other representatives of the major powers at the Congress, Prussia's Baron Hardenberg and Wilhelm von Humboldt (the brother of the naturalist) found themselves forced to bargain for “souls,” as population was called at the Congress; the chief counter for military and economic potential. The belle of the ball was Czar (“Tsar” in this book) Alexander. His armies had evaded destruction until logistics and the Russian climate destroyed Napoleon's army. Alexander's generals appreciated this point, but it is not clear that czar did. At any rate, after Napoleon had been seen off Russian territory, Alexander pursued the war for another year all the way to Paris, collecting the Prussians and Austrians as coalition partners along the way. Alexander was a genuine political mystic. He would adjourn conferences so he could experience ecstasies in private. He was counseled by various holy people. The names Jung Stilling and Baroness Krüdener come up, as do the Moravian Brethren, but we are not given a complete account of his political theology. At least at Vienna, the effect of these illuminations was to make him sound like the most genial of enlightened liberals; like “a Quaker in a lodge of Masons,” in Tallyrand's phrase. He certainly saw himself as on a mission from God, and was the most interested of all the Congress participants in turning the Congress into a permanent system of European governance. The fact was, though, he was not the ambassador of some German free city whose chief interest was the strengthening of the law of nations, but the Czar of All the Russias, and moreover a czar who had kept the war going for much longer than he strictly had to. Public opinion did not count for much in Russia, but the opinion of the bureaucracy and the officer corps did. He had to show some advantage to Russia more concrete than the friendship of God. To get that he more than once pushed the negotiations to the point where Vienna almost became the place where a new war broke out. The most disinterested of all the participants were the British. The war had cost Britain more than money, but the coalition again Napoleon had run on British subsidies, and so would the postwar settlement. (Also, their influence rose perceptibly in the course of the Congress when Britain's war with the United States was settled; the settlement meant that Britain would be able to field another army in Europe if the need arose.) The author devotes a chapter to one of the preliminaries of the Congress, the series of meetings and celebrations that the sovereigns attended at London after the first Treaty of Paris in 1814. The great ones tired of British paparazzism, and in any case little was accomplished. Robert Castlereagh was the British representative until the very end of the Congress at Vienna, when he was replaced by the Duke of Wellington. (The Prince Regent was judged too silly to go to Vienna, just as Louis XVIII was too fat.) Castlereagh had one demand: to keep the Channel ports out of French hands. Beyond that, everything was negotiable. The British wanted, sincerely if not urgently, to end the Atlantic slave trade. The British wanted some territorial compensation for the German branch of the House of Hanover. There were also limits to the degree of Russian hegemony that the British were willing to tolerate in eastern Europe, though whether the Liverpool ministry could have persuaded Parliament to fund a further war to prevent that remains doubtful. (Castlereagh had already signed a secret provisional alliance with the other coalition partners, just in case.) The British were not interested in a share in the government of Europe. If anything, perhaps, they were most keen to make their commitments in Europe as small as their interest in it. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, inevitably the representative of France, had orchestrated the overthrow of Napoleon and actually played host to the czar in Paris during the negotiation of the first peace treaty. The coalition had already been predisposed not to cripple France as a great power. Talleyrand ensured that France would from the first be counted an equal in the negotiation of a postwar settlement. He arrived in Vienna distributing bon mots like bad checks and immediately gummed up the works with procedural objections designed to ensure that as many as possible of the lesser powers in attendance played some part, for the excellent reason that many of them would look to France as protector against Prussia and Austria. As is the case with other episodes in Talleyrand's diplomatic career, it is strangely difficult to determine whether he was representing the Kingdom of France or the Kleptocracy of Talleyrand; by the end of the proceedings, for instance, he had somehow contrived to sell Metternich the French diplomatic archives. Nonetheless, his interventions did have the effect of ensuring that the Congress created special committees that got quite a lot of work done before the politicians had even discovered the substantive points on which they really disagreed. The Committee on Credentials drew up the rules of diplomatic precedence that govern international relations to this day. Most famously, however, it was Talleyrand who urged on his colleagues the policy that the settlement of Europe should be governed by the principal of “legitimacy,” by the traditional Public Law of Europe. The suggestion was jaw-dropping not so much for its content as for the source. As we will see, it worked both good and ill. We must digress from the serious issues discussed at the Congress of Vienna to note what makes this book so much fun to read. The Congress considered as a social event was something of a cross between a particularly lively Edwardian house party and Spring Break at Cancun, but with Beethoven providing the live music. Here is the author's account of a relatively slow evening:
That evening they all met at a ball given by Metternich in honour of the visiting sovereigns. This had been laboriously prepared and minutely choreographed by the chancellor himself. He had constructed a number of buildings around his residence, including a grand entrance with covered staircase leading into a series of chambers, each of which represented a military encampment of one of the allied armies. As the sovereigns passed through these they were greeted by martial music and cheered by troops waving their shakos and bearskins on the ends of their bayonets. From here they passed into the magically illuminated garden, at the end of which they could see a huge buffet prepared 'for the people of lesser distinction.' Turning off the main avenue, the sovereigns found in a small copse arranged as an amphitheatre, where they watched a short play. Going on, they entered a Russian village, complete with dancing and cheering moujiks welcoming their victorious Tsar. Further on they paused to watch some dancers execute a ballet on a lawn garnished with bunches of flowers which, as a finale, they gathered up and laid at the feet of the sovereigns… One of the drawbacks of the monarchical condition is that its incumbents often don't get out much. In Vienna, semi-sacred rulers got the opportunity to socialize with high society as a whole. Even at the time, people commented that this fraternization was doing the idea of monarchy irreparable harm. Two kings meeting on a field of cloth of gold are a spectacle of sovereignty; a dozen at a ball are just another class of conventioneer. The irony, or course, is that a conference that would do so much to create the police hardware to keep monarchs on their thrones would appreciably undermine the cultural software that made their positions natural or even tolerable. Strictly speaking, all of these bloody meetings were held to decide what to do about the commotion left by Napoleon, about whose legacy the participants in the Congress were surprisingly ambivalent. There was quite a bit of sentiment for replacing Napoleon with a regency for his infant son, the King of Rome, based in part on the well-founded belief that almost anyone would be better than the surviving Bourbons. There was little doubt about Napoleon himself, however, though there were mutterings during rough spots in the negotiations at Vienna that maybe his return from Elba would break the logjam. Even after the failure of the Russian campaign, even after his defeat by coalition forces at Leipzig, he was still capable of pulling a military rabbit out of a hat. His own uncanny brilliance defeated him. The coalition held together long enough to overwhelm him because, each of its members having experimented with alliance with him, all recognized that they could no longer trust him. The “what-if” questions about Napoleon are unfruitful after 1812. Napoleon actually managed to do a bit of alternative history when he escaped from Elba and ruled France again for a hundred days. The result of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 was a near thing, but the success of the final campaign against Napoleon was not. The chief effect of the Hundred Days was to saddle France with a second, somewhat less favorable peace treaty; that, too, should be part of what we understand by “The Congress,” though the actual Congress at Vienna was just wrapping up when Napoleon made his brief final nuisance. More important than Napoleon himself, however, was Europe's legitimacy deficit. The Napoleonic episode revealed the deficit rather than caused it. Particularly in German and Italy, political geography had shifted during the 18th century in such a way that even before Napoleon people were often being ruled by governments that had only recently acquired their territories, and so by rulers to whom the population had no traditional attachment. One might almost say that nationality replaced dynastic loyalty as the organizing principle of the European state because the dynasts created the modern state structure and then neglected to identify with a state. The dynasties that opposed Napoleon were usually of venerable antiquity, but the states they governed were not ancient. The Czar had claimed an imperial title only since 1721, and the ruler of Prussia had held the title of king only since 1701. The Habsburg Dynasty that allied with, fought against, and married Napoleon had figured in European history for half a millennium, principally as the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, but their state that hosted the Congress of Vienna was a new concoction, pieced together after dissolution of the Empire. Neo-Bourbon France, of course, was like anything neo. It was a commemoration that threatened to turn into a parody. For England the issue was less acute, but even the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with its single omnipotent parliament in London, was a creature of the beginning of the 19th century. Beyond the question of loyalty was issue of whether legitimacy rested on something that could not be altered, such as the will of God or historical continuity, or whether it arose from the people. If the latter, then the people might, after due deliberation, change any regime they found unsatisfactory. Even the imperfectly perceptive Louis XVIII understood this: he was willing issue a constitution in the form of a charter based on the royal grace, but he refused to be king by popular acclamation, even during the brief period when the populace of France (or at least its responsible representatives) were willing to acclaim him. Metternich understood the point too, of course, and was understandably horrified when Frederick William and Alexander undertook the liberation of Germany in 1813 in the name of German nationalism. Nor was that enough: Alexander was promising to restore the Kingdom of Poland as a self-governing state with himself as king. (The author has frequent occasion to mention Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, the Polish magnate, sometime minister to Alexander and occasional lover of the czarina, who was largely responsible for keeping the resolution of the Polish Question on the czar's agenda.) Indeed Alexander, and perforce his coalition partners, overcame Napoleon partly on the strength of promises to right every national wrong in Europe, to restore small kingdoms and republics that had been annexed by the Great Powers and to create new Powers along national lines. Vienna was necessary to resolve the contradiction, or at least to paper it over. The most papering was required over the issue of Saxony, which was directly related to the Polish Question. The czar was promising to create the new Kingdom of Poland out of the old Grand Duchy of Warsaw, including a great deal of territory that had been part of the partition of Poland that went to Prussia but which now was occupied by Russia. Prussia would tolerate this only if it were compensated with territory elsewhere. The designated elsewhere was the Kingdom of Saxony. Just about every European state but Britain had been an ally of Napoleon at one time or another. Saxony's problem was that, when the music stopped, it was still an ally, and an ally occupied by Alexander's army. Russia and Prussia proposed to right the old wrong of the destruction of the Polish kingdom by abolishing the Saxon kingdom for Prussia's benefit. This was unsatisfactory on several grounds. Talleyrand became so keen on legitimacy in part to save Saxony, which would have the not incidental effect of fixing a precedent that would stabilize other German states closer to France's border. Britain and Austria opposed the proposal because it would strengthen Prussia and because the new Polish kingdom would be too far west. Britain expressed support for the creation of an independent Poland, but the kingdom Alexander proposed would still be part of the Russian Empire, and in a commanding position toward Germany. The failure to resolve this issue blocked the resolution of almost every other question. The author says that the situation in Germany was so complicated at this time that one would need to be an expert in the subject not just to explain it but to understand the explanation. There were two major sets of problems, both arising out of the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. One that was Napoleon's rearrangement of the German states had dispossessed many small traditional rulers but strengthened several middling powers. The result was not very just, but few people wanted the map redrawn from scratch. The other was that Empire had really been indispensable. It was not an empire, but a confederal system. Something like it was needed again to regulate commerce and make some effort toward domestic peace and foreign defense. Any new Bund would be under the bipolar leadership of Austria and Prussia, but it was by no means clear how this was to be organized, and how the new entity would relate to the growing sense of German national identity. Smaller but equally intractable problems were everywhere. Napoleon's “Mediatorship” over Switzerland had actually been a great success, and the Swiss were slow to work out a substitute on their own. In the Baltic there was a surreally complicated standoff involving Sweden and Denmark that involved the fate of Norway and the final disposition of the German coast. In Italy there were residual Napoleonic dynasties that had to be wound up, preferably but not necessarily by negotiation. All these things had to be settled at Vienna, or at least mechanisms for resolution had to be constructed. In the end, the obvious happened: the king of Saxony kept his throne but lost the least populated region of his kingdom to Prussia, which got part of its eastern territories back but was chiefly compensated with more souls in the west. Alexander created his Kingdom of Poland (as was widely foreseen, Russia abolished it again a few years later). The resolution might have come months earlier, but negotiations were impeded by the presence of the principals. Personal diplomacy between heads of government is a good idea only if their diplomats have worked out all the substantive issues beforehand. Diplomats are paid to absorb insult and suffer fools gladly. Emperors are not necessarily skilled in these things, even emperors as mild as Francis I. The Final Act of the Congress of Vienna was not a particularly edifying outcome, but it does not explain why the reputation of the Congress darkened in later years. The escape and recapture of Napoleon did not change matters much, except perhaps to remind the rulers of Europe that anything could happen. The following year, 1816, was the Year without a Summer, probably caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora. Harvests failed all over the world, and there was popular unrest throughout Europe. In any case, the czar's religiosity began to darken, too. He became very interested in penance, particularly for other people. His gesture toward world government was the multilateral treaty called the Holy Alliance, to which Prussia and Austria acceded. It was a very general promise to cooperate to maintain good order through Europe. It might have meant anything. In much of Europe the Congress meant that reactionary governments disestablished a lot of the obvious good that Napoleon had done, from new legal codes down to streetlighting and vaccination programs. In Italy, the Congress often meant the replacement of the French by the Austrians; not invariably an improvement. In Germany, the Congress meant the Karlsbad Decrees of 1819, in which Metternich used the new German confederation to close down dissident politics in the German universities and tightly restrict the press throughout the German-speaking world. Austria and Prussia also saw to it that the confederation was a toothless organization that satisfied no one's desire for nationhood. Metternich came to believe that the existing order of things was under attack by mysticism. He was no doubt thinking of Masons and Carbonari and such folk, who were by no means imaginary. Still, we can only imagine how he expressed this thought to the mystical czar. The Congress came to mean the police measures that the Holy Allies doubled and redoubled to undercover the nests of this mysticism and extirpate it. It also came to mean the threat of military intervention, eagerly endorsed by Russia, into states where a regime had been overthrown or even substantively modified by action from below. (We may note that this policy is remarkably similar to the Cold War Brezhnev Doctrine; the closest American analog was to deploy assistance to existing regimes to prevent revolution.) There were some actual interventions. There was even some talk among members of the Holy Alliance about invading France when the conservatives did poorly in national elections one year. In effect, the system of the Congress of Vienna came to mean opposition to any political change that did not originate with the ruler. This was a corruption of what Talleyrand meant by the principle of legitimacy. The notion, especially in Tallyrand's usage, was not coherent, but it was a useful label for the practice of not disturbing the facts on the ground more than was really necessary. By the time the full implications of Vienna had been drawn by the early 1820s, legitimacy had come to mean freezing political evolution. Moreover, the freezing was not to be done in the service of an idealized past; the brilliant reactionary ideologues who began to appear at this time were not pleased with the Congress. Rather, it was to be done to preserve a shabby present that lacked the sanction of genuine tradition. The author argues that the apologists for the Congress (again, chiefly Henry Kissinger) are mistaken when they say it brought a century of peace. The Congress did begin a century without a general war in Europe, though any century that includes the Revolutions of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War cannot be regarded as wholly pacific. Moreover, the author tells us:
[I]t did bring into being a simulacrum of stability, a kind of pax Europaea, identified with law and order, fine public institutions, scientific progress, prosperity for the expanding middle class, railways, electric lighting, and many of the components of civilized life. But this was bought at immense cost, levied both in Europe and overseas, particularly in Africa, and it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. I don't think we can quarrel with this assessment. Indeed, the author may be too kind. To endorse the Congress as a model of international governance is to reveal a great despair. Metternich feared the Masons because he thought that history was not on his side. Kissinger's Cold War policies, though often defensible in detail, were based on the premise that the history really did favor the Soviets (or perhaps the Russians: Kissinger is a Spenglerian for some purposes). The Congress of Vienna came to mean tyranny for losers. Still, we may note that every age sows the seeds of its own destruction, and that a simulacrum of stability may be the best the world affords.
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