THEY TRIED TO ASSURE THE WORLD AN ERA OF UNDISTURBED PEACE BY
SUPPRESSING ALL NEW IDEAS. THEY MADE THE POLICE-SPY THE HIGHEST
FUNCTIONARY IN THE STATE AND SOON THE PRISONS OF ALL COUNTRIES WERE
FILLED WITH THOSE WHO CLAIMED THAT PEOPLE HAVE THE RIGHT TO GOVERN
THEMSELVES AS THEY SEE FIT
To undo the damage done by the great Napoleonic flood was almost
impossible. Age-old fences had been washed away. The palaces of two
score dynasties had been damaged to such an extent that they had to
be condemned as uninhabitable. Other royal residences had been greatly
enlarged at the expense of less fortunate neighbours. Strange odds and
ends of revolutionary doctrine had been left behind by the receding
waters and could not be dislodged without danger to the entire
community. But the political engineers of the Congress did the best they
could and this is what they accomplished.
France had disturbed the peace of the world for so many years that
people had come to fear that country almost instinctively. The Bourbons,
through the mouth of Talleyrand, had promised to be good, but the
Hundred Days had taught Europe what to expect should Napoleon manage
to escape for a second time. The Dutch Republic, therefore, was changed
into a Kingdom, and Belgium (which had not joined the Dutch struggle for
independence in the sixteenth century and since then had been part of
the Habsburg domains, firs t under Spanish rule and thereafter under
Austrian rule) was made part of this new kingdom of the Netherlands.
Nobody wanted this union either in the Protestant North or in the
Catholic South, but no questions were asked. It seemed good for the
peace of Europe and that was the main consideration.
Poland had hoped for great things because a Pole, Prince Adam
Czartoryski, was one of the most intimate friends of Tsar Alexander
and had been his constant advisor during the war and at the Congress
of Vienna. But Poland was made a semi-independent part of Russia with
Alexander as her king. This solution pleased no one and caused much
bitter feeling and three revolutions.
Denmark, which had remained a faithful ally of Napoleon until the end,
was severely punished. Seven years before, an English fleet had sailed
down the Kattegat and without a declaration of war or any warning had
bombarded Copenhagen and had taken away the Danish fleet, lest it be of
value to Napoleon. The Congress of Vienna went one step further. It took
Norway (which since the union of Calmar of the year 1397 had been united
with Denmark) away from Denmark and gave it to Charles XIV of Sweden as
a reward for his betrayal of Napoleon, who had set him up in the king
business. This Swedish king, curiously enough, was a former French
general by the name of Bernadotte, who had come to Sweden as one of
Napolean's{sic} adjutants, and had been invited to the throne of
that good country when the last of the rulers of the house of
Hollstein-Gottorp had died without leaving either son or daughter. From
1815 until 1844 he ruled his adopted country (the language of which he
never learned) width great ability. He was a clever man and enjoyed the
respect of both his Swedish and his Norwegian subjects, but he did
not succeed in joining two countries which nature and history had put
asunder. The dual Scandinavian state was never a success and in 1905,
Norway, in a most peaceful and orderly manner, set up as an independent
kingdom and the Swedes bade her "good speed" and very wisely let her go
her own way.
The Italians, who since the days of the Renaissance had been at the
mercy of a long series of invaders, also had put great hopes in General
Bonaparte. The Emperor Napoleon, however, had grievously disappointed
them. Instead of the United Italy which the people wanted, they had been
divided into a number of little principalities, duchies, republics and
the Papal State, which (next to Naples) was the worst governed and
most miserable region of the entire peninsula. The Congress of
Vienna abolished a few of the Napoleonic republics and in their place
resurrected several old principalities which were given to deserving
members, both male and female, of the Habsburg family.
The poor Spaniards, who had started the great nationalistic revolt
against Napoleon, and who had sacrificed the best blood of the country
for their king, were punished severely when the Congress allowed His
Majesty to return to his domains. This vicious creature, known as
Ferdinand VII, had spent the last four years of his life as a prisoner
of Napoleon. He had improved his days by knitting garments for the
statues of his favourite patron saints. He celebrated his return by
re-introducing the Inquisition and the torture-chamber, both of which
had been abolished by the Revolution. He was a disgusting person,
despised as much by his subjects as by his four wives, but the Holy
Alliance maintained him upon his legitimate throne and all efforts
of the decent Spaniards to get rid of this curse and make Spain a
constitutional kingdom ended in bloodshed and executions.
Portugal had been without a king since the year 1807 when the royal
family had fled to the colonies in Brazil. The country had been used as
a base of supply for the armies of Wellington during the Peninsula war,
which lasted from 1808 until 1814. After 1815 Portugal continued to be
a sort of British province until the house of Braganza returned to the
throne, leaving one of its members behind in Rio de Janeiro as Emperor
of Brazil, the only American Empire which lasted for more than a few
years, and which came to an end in 1889 when the country became a
republic.
In the east, nothing was done to improve the terrible conditions of both
the Slavs and the Greeks who were still subjects of the Sultan. In
the year 1804 Black George, a Servian swineherd, (the founder of the
Karageorgevich dynasty) had started a revolt against the Turks, but he
had been defeated by his enemies and had been murdered by one of his
supposed friends, the rival Servian leader, called Milosh Obrenovich,
(who became the founder of the Obrenovich dynasty) and the Turks had
continued to be the undisputed masters of the Balkans.
The Greeks, who since the loss of their independence, two thousand years
before, had been subjects of the Macedonians, the Romans, the Venetians
and the Turks, had hoped that their countryman, Capo d'Istria, a native
of Corfu and together with Czartoryski, the most intimate personal
friends of Alexander, would do something for them. But the Congress of
Vienna was not interested in Greeks, but was very much interested in
keeping all "legitimate" monarchs, Christian, Moslem and otherwise, upon
their respective thrones. Therefore nothing was done.
The last, but perhaps the greatest blunder of the Congress was the
treatment of Germany. The Reformation and the Thirty Years War had not
only destroyed the prosperity of the country, but had turned it into a
hopeless political rubbish heap, consisting of a couple of kingdoms,
a few grand-duchies, a large number of duchies and hundreds of
margravates, principalities, baronies, electorates, free cities and free
villages, ruled by the strangest assortment of potentates that was ever
seen off the comic opera stage. Frederick the Great had changed this
when he created a strong Prussia, but this state had not survived him by
many years.
Napoleon had blue-penciled the demand for independence of most of these
little countries, and only fifty-two out of a total of more than three
hundred had survived the year 1806. During the years of the great
struggle for independence, many a young soldier had dreamed of a new
Fatherland that should be strong and united. But there can be no union
without a strong leadership, and who was to be this leader?
There were five kingdoms in the German speaking lands. The rulers of
two of these, Austria and Prussia, were kings by the Grace of God. The
rulers of three others, Bavaria, Saxony and Wurtemberg, were kings by
the Grace of Napoleon, and as they had been the faithful henchmen of the
Emperor, their patriotic credit with the other Germans was therefore not
very good.
The Congress had established a new German Confederation, a league of
thirty-eight sovereign states, under the chairmanship of the King of
Austria, who was now known as the Emperor of Austria. It was the sort of
make-shift arrangement which satisfied no one. It is true that a German
Diet, which met in the old coronation city of Frankfort, had been
created to discuss matters of "common policy and importance." But in
this Diet, thirty-eight delegates represented thirty-eight different
interests and as no decision could be taken without a unanimous vote
(a parliamentary rule which had in previous centuries ruined the mighty
kingdom of Poland), the famous German Confederation became very soon
the laughing stock of Europe and the politics of the old Empire began to
resemble those of our Central American neighbours in the forties and the
fifties of the last century.
It was terribly humiliating to the people who had sacrificed everything
for a national ideal. But the Congress was not interested in the private
feelings of "subjects," and the debate was closed.
Did anybody object? Most assuredly. As soon as the first feeling of
hatred against Napoleon had quieted down--as soon as the enthusiasm
of the great war had subsided--as soon as the people came to a full
realisation of the crime that had been committed in the name of "peace
and stability" they began to murmur. They even made threats of open
revolt. But what could they do? They were powerless. They were at the
mercy of the most pitiless and efficient police system the world had
ever seen.
The members of the Congress of Vienna honestly and sincerely believed
that "the Revolutionary Principle had led to the criminal usurpation
of the throne by the former emperor Napoleon." They felt that they were
called upon to eradicate the adherents of the so-called "French ideas"
just as Philip II had only followed the voice of his conscience when he
burned Protestants or hanged Moors. In the beginning of the sixteenth
century a man who did not believe in the divine right of the Pope to
rule his subjects as he saw fit was a "heretic" and it was the duty
of all loyal citizens to kill him. In the beginning of the nineteenth
century, on the continent of Europe, a man who did not believe in the
divine right of his king to rule him as he or his Prime Minister saw
fit, was a "heretic," and it was the duty of all loyal citizens to
denounce him to the nearest policeman and see that he got punished.
But the rulers of the year 1815 had learned efficiency in the school of
Napoleon and they performed their task much better than it had been done
in the year 1517. The period between the year 1815 and the year 1860 was
the great era of the political spy. Spies were everywhere. They lived in
palaces and they were to be found in the lowest gin-shops. They peeped
through the key-holes of the ministerial cabinet and they listened to
the conversations of the people who were taking the air on the benches
of the Municipal Park. They guarded the frontier so that no one might
leave without a duly viseed passport and they inspected all packages,
that no books with dangerous "French ideas" should enter the realm of
their Royal masters. They sat among the students in the lecture hall and
woe to the Professor who uttered a word against the existing order of
things. They followed the little boys and girls on their way to church
lest they play hookey.
In many of these tasks they were assisted by the clergy. The church had
suffered greatly during the days of the revolution. The church property
had been confiscated. Several priests had been killed and the generation
that had learned its cathechism from Voltaire and Rousseau and the
other French philosophers had danced around the Altar of Reason when the
Committee of Public Safety had abolished the worship of God in October
of the year 1793. The priests had followed the "emigres" into their long
exile. Now they returned in the wake of the allied armies and they set
to work with a vengeance.
Even the Jesuits came back in 1814 and resumed their former labours of
educating the young. Their order had been a little too successful in its
fight against the enemies of the church. It had established "provinces"
in every part of the world, to teach the natives the blessings of
Christianity, but soon it had developed into a regular trading company
which was for ever interfering with the civil authorities. During
the reign of the Marquis de Pombal, the great reforming minister of
Portugal, they had been driven out of the Portuguese lands and in the
year 1773 at the request of most of the Catholic powers of Europe, the
order had been suppressed by Pope Clement XIV. Now they were back on
the job, and preached the principles of "obedience" and "love for the
legitimate dynasty" to children whose parents had hired shopwindows that
they might laugh at Marie Antoinette driving to the scaffold which was
to end her misery.
But in the Protestant countries like Prussia, things were not a whit
better. The great patriotic leaders of the year 1812, the poets and the
writers who had preached a holy war upon the usurper, were now branded
as dangerous "demagogues." Their houses were searched. Their letters
were read. They were obliged to report to the police at regular
intervals and give an account of themselves. The Prussian drill master
was let loose in all his fury upon the younger generation. When a party
of students celebrated the tercentenary of the Reformation with noisy
but harmless festivities on the old Wartburg, the Prussian bureaucrats
had visions of an imminent revolution. When a theological student,
more honest than intelligent, killed a Russian government spy who
was operating in Germany, the universities were placed under
police-supervision and professors were jailed or dismissed without any
form of trial.
Russia, of course, was even more absurd in these anti-revolutionary
activities. Alexander had recovered from his attack of piety. He was
gradually drifting toward melancholia. He well knew his own limited
abilities and understood how at Vienna he had been the victim both of
Metternich and the Krudener woman. More and more he turned his back
upon the west and became a truly Russian ruler whose interests lay in
Constantinople, the old holy city that had been the first teacher of the
Slavs. The older he grew, the harder he worked and the less he was able
to accomplish. And while he sat in his study, his ministers turned the
whole of Russia into a land of military barracks.
It is not a pretty picture. Perhaps I might have shortened this
description of the Great Reaction. But it is just as well that you
should have a thorough knowledge of this era. It was not the first time
that an attempt had been made to set the clock of history back. The
result was the usual one.